How do our perceptions get filtered?
Jun. 21st, 2010 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerIt's one of those things people say, isn't it? It's taken for granted that we only perceive a fraction of what's truly happening, that we do it to ourselves, and that we like it that way. "If we actually saw unfiltered reality we'd go insane from the sheer wonder and complexity of it all." So much so that you can toss a "perception filter" into any given television series once every two weeks for an entire season and nobody bats an eyelid. Even though, going on current received wisdom, if our perceptions were any more filtered we'd spend the whole time walking into cars and lampposts. (Whereas apparently that's just me.)
It gives readers of Terry Pratchett books a comforting frisson of smugness (because of course knowing this "fact" makes them superior to all the other people who think they see reality square-on and complete). They can either sneer at the rest of humanity for their stupidity, or go "aaawwww" at how sweet it is that they go on trying despite this self-imposed handicap. Nothing succeeds like making human beings think they're above the rest of humanity, if only for a moment.
So, let's go with it and speculate a bit. How do we learn to block out ninety per cent of reality?
Let's assume we start in the ideal position, face to face and eye to eye with the universe, seeing it all, like a baby, and learning to make sense of it bit by bit. And at some point in our development, we come across a bit of the universe we really, really don't like. ("We," of course, consist at this point of a solid core of reason surrounded by a dense cloud of emotion. The emotion comes first. This is important. Reason is what we learn to do after emotion works out that it can't get everything it wants by yelling. Doesn't matter if you're male or female, white or non-white, religious or atheist, it's the same for everybody. Emotion comes first and emotion rules. Reason serves emotion. Always. If you think you are ruled by reason, it's because your cloud of emotion has got really good at looking transparent. To you, at least.)
Where was I? Oh yes. So we encounter a part of the universe that our emotion doesn't like. It isn't going away. We can't get rid of it by yelling, or hitting, or threatening to hold our breath. So emotion feverishly ransacks reason's stores and comes up with an idea about the thing which it can look through which makes the thing look better. Like a coloured lens of solidified emotion, blocking out whatever is that colour. It may be a really stupid idea, but emotion doesn't care about that, it just wants not to feel bad any more.
There's another problem. Reason can see around the lens. It might catch a glimpse of the thing, and then it would want to know why the lens was there, and that would be bad. So emotion has to build a wall around the lens, build the lens right into the wall, and the wall is fear and hate. In the process of doing this, it squishes the lens to make it like one of those peephole things you get in doors, so that reason can still see the whole universe. There's a bit of distortion, sure, and it means we're looking at the whole universe through our stupid idea about the thing, but at least emotion hasn't had to feel bad about it.
Wait a minute, though. Any second, reason is going to pull its eye back from the lens, look around and wonder what this wall is doing here. This is where emotion gets sneaky. It asks first. "Say, I wonder what this wall is for?" And reason, being a good servant, goes to find out. Robert Anton Wilson said it; the purpose of the mind (at which it has become expert) is finding evidence to support whatever idiotic thing we want to believe. In short order, the wall of hate and fear is shored up with mountains of "evidence," diligently and meticulously researched and collated by reason, who can now only view the wonders of the universe through one, tiny, distorting, coloured lens. Does sound kind of heroic when you put it that way, doesn't it?
But enough of speculation. Let's take a case history. Patient S, a highly successful writer and artist, after a series of unsuccessful relationships and (possibly) some kind of unacknowledged breakdown, conceives an irrational dislike of women. Since women aren't going anywhere any time soon, this makes the universe a very uncomfortable place for him, till his emotion evolves an idea to make it more comfortable. Basically put, this idea consists of "girls are stupid and have girl cooties (germs for my fellow Brits: something contagious and unpleasant about simply being female)." A concept familiar to most eight-year-old boys in my youth. I can't speak for them now, of course. But it makes Patient S feel better.
The next step is to prevent himself seeing past this infantile idea and encountering the self-evident fact that it's rubbish, so Patient S's emotion busily builds its wall of hate and fear around its lens, and pretty soon he can only see the universe through the lens of "girls are stupid and have girl cooties." Which, in the end, means that anything Patient S sees that's wrong with the universe becomes part of that idea; girls--women--become the root of all evil.
The next step is to prevent himself from having to examine and confront his hate and fear and discover its irrationality, so Patient S goes looking for evidence to support the stupid idea, and inevitably finds it. (The fact that in doing so he finds himself abandoning secular humanism in favour of a suitably misogynistic adaptation of Judeo-Christianity, and reinterpreting the entire Torah in order to make it a struggle between a good, true, male God ("God") and a bad, fake, female God ("YHWH") just shows the extent to which this process can warp our perceptions if we let it.) But Patient S, at last, is happy. He sees nothing that contradicts his "improved" vision of the universe, his reason and his emotion are in perfect accord, and his conviction of his own immutable "rightness" makes him feel comfortably superior to the rest of us. The fact that, to the rest of us, he appears as a paranoid, obsessive lunatic, bothers him not at all. After all, through the lens of his idea, we're all infected with girl cooties.
Patient S is an extreme case. But if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. And if you happen to be reading this and thinking "ah, yes, other people may be like that, but not me"--think again. Is that a wall behind all those books and papers?
It gives readers of Terry Pratchett books a comforting frisson of smugness (because of course knowing this "fact" makes them superior to all the other people who think they see reality square-on and complete). They can either sneer at the rest of humanity for their stupidity, or go "aaawwww" at how sweet it is that they go on trying despite this self-imposed handicap. Nothing succeeds like making human beings think they're above the rest of humanity, if only for a moment.
So, let's go with it and speculate a bit. How do we learn to block out ninety per cent of reality?
Let's assume we start in the ideal position, face to face and eye to eye with the universe, seeing it all, like a baby, and learning to make sense of it bit by bit. And at some point in our development, we come across a bit of the universe we really, really don't like. ("We," of course, consist at this point of a solid core of reason surrounded by a dense cloud of emotion. The emotion comes first. This is important. Reason is what we learn to do after emotion works out that it can't get everything it wants by yelling. Doesn't matter if you're male or female, white or non-white, religious or atheist, it's the same for everybody. Emotion comes first and emotion rules. Reason serves emotion. Always. If you think you are ruled by reason, it's because your cloud of emotion has got really good at looking transparent. To you, at least.)
Where was I? Oh yes. So we encounter a part of the universe that our emotion doesn't like. It isn't going away. We can't get rid of it by yelling, or hitting, or threatening to hold our breath. So emotion feverishly ransacks reason's stores and comes up with an idea about the thing which it can look through which makes the thing look better. Like a coloured lens of solidified emotion, blocking out whatever is that colour. It may be a really stupid idea, but emotion doesn't care about that, it just wants not to feel bad any more.
There's another problem. Reason can see around the lens. It might catch a glimpse of the thing, and then it would want to know why the lens was there, and that would be bad. So emotion has to build a wall around the lens, build the lens right into the wall, and the wall is fear and hate. In the process of doing this, it squishes the lens to make it like one of those peephole things you get in doors, so that reason can still see the whole universe. There's a bit of distortion, sure, and it means we're looking at the whole universe through our stupid idea about the thing, but at least emotion hasn't had to feel bad about it.
Wait a minute, though. Any second, reason is going to pull its eye back from the lens, look around and wonder what this wall is doing here. This is where emotion gets sneaky. It asks first. "Say, I wonder what this wall is for?" And reason, being a good servant, goes to find out. Robert Anton Wilson said it; the purpose of the mind (at which it has become expert) is finding evidence to support whatever idiotic thing we want to believe. In short order, the wall of hate and fear is shored up with mountains of "evidence," diligently and meticulously researched and collated by reason, who can now only view the wonders of the universe through one, tiny, distorting, coloured lens. Does sound kind of heroic when you put it that way, doesn't it?
But enough of speculation. Let's take a case history. Patient S, a highly successful writer and artist, after a series of unsuccessful relationships and (possibly) some kind of unacknowledged breakdown, conceives an irrational dislike of women. Since women aren't going anywhere any time soon, this makes the universe a very uncomfortable place for him, till his emotion evolves an idea to make it more comfortable. Basically put, this idea consists of "girls are stupid and have girl cooties (germs for my fellow Brits: something contagious and unpleasant about simply being female)." A concept familiar to most eight-year-old boys in my youth. I can't speak for them now, of course. But it makes Patient S feel better.
The next step is to prevent himself seeing past this infantile idea and encountering the self-evident fact that it's rubbish, so Patient S's emotion busily builds its wall of hate and fear around its lens, and pretty soon he can only see the universe through the lens of "girls are stupid and have girl cooties." Which, in the end, means that anything Patient S sees that's wrong with the universe becomes part of that idea; girls--women--become the root of all evil.
The next step is to prevent himself from having to examine and confront his hate and fear and discover its irrationality, so Patient S goes looking for evidence to support the stupid idea, and inevitably finds it. (The fact that in doing so he finds himself abandoning secular humanism in favour of a suitably misogynistic adaptation of Judeo-Christianity, and reinterpreting the entire Torah in order to make it a struggle between a good, true, male God ("God") and a bad, fake, female God ("YHWH") just shows the extent to which this process can warp our perceptions if we let it.) But Patient S, at last, is happy. He sees nothing that contradicts his "improved" vision of the universe, his reason and his emotion are in perfect accord, and his conviction of his own immutable "rightness" makes him feel comfortably superior to the rest of us. The fact that, to the rest of us, he appears as a paranoid, obsessive lunatic, bothers him not at all. After all, through the lens of his idea, we're all infected with girl cooties.
Patient S is an extreme case. But if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone. And if you happen to be reading this and thinking "ah, yes, other people may be like that, but not me"--think again. Is that a wall behind all those books and papers?
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 10:26 am (UTC)- Aside from these emotionally-charged self-built perception filters, there are also other perception issues which I believe are not emotionally connected, e.g. this sort of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_vase
no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 10:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 03:37 pm (UTC)This is possibly the most fabulous paragraph you have ever written. (But then I say that after a bottle of Bishop's Finger and 2.3 bottles of Hobgoblin... HIc! =:o} )
And now you've got me wondering who the heck Patient S. is.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-22 10:25 am (UTC)Although I might argue that emotional blackmail comes somewhere in between these two, and that some never get past it to reason. =:o\
no subject
Date: 2010-06-22 11:13 am (UTC)Patient S is Dave Sim, the creator of Cerebus, who towards the end of his mammoth self-imposed task went quietly strange and decided that feminism was Evil and bad, that Reason was male and Emotion was female, and that he was a man (actually, I think he knew that already) and therefore a person not ruled by Emotion. He read the Torah obsessively and finally came up with this bizarre form of Abrahamic dualism which the last few volumes of the collected Cerebus devote a chunk of space to explicating. As far as I can see it's hooey, but then I've been contaminated with feminism, so my judgment is faulty.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-22 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 04:31 pm (UTC)Some of us might mutter "not again,
no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 08:54 pm (UTC)It was amazing. I was trying to be somewhere else while the Countess watched it and I had to come in for a moment and what did I hear? "Perception filter."