Hello, Five O'Clockers!It’s been a couple of weeks—thanks for your patience. I imagine you’ve all missed me terribly. (Haha.) Life has thrown some weightier matters my way recently, including the passing of my mother. That kind of event rearranges your mental furniture, and I just ran into a chair.But I haven’t been idle.
I don’t see how anyone can argue that our perception is a window and not a filter. And I think the argument here is simple: there are many aspects of the physical world that we simply cannot sense. Pushing the edges of light and sound frequencies is one example — we can’t hear dog whistles, but dogs can. Our experience of reality is fundamentally constrained by the limits of our perception.
To me the interesting question is what sort of dynamism exists within those constraints. If both me and you were to focus our eyes on the Apple, it is a fact (assuming our vision works) that we will see an Apple. And there’s nothing we can do to change that. To me this is where the realm of “objective” reality sits. Something I like to call “shared perception”. We know for a fact that we all have a shared perception of the world. Language in some sense is the proof of this.
But while we have no choice but to see the apple upon looking at it, our own internal experience of our perceptions will no doubt drastically vary. If I come home after a 12 hour shift in a coal plant seeing an apple will no doubt remind me of my empty stomach. If you come after a 12 hour shift picking apples from an apple orchard all day you’d take it and toss it out the window.
We’ve seen the same Apple, but have we really seen the “same” apple?
We subjectively (actively) experience objective (passive) facts about the world.
Great comment, Richard. Interesting . . . you align the subjective with the active and the objective with the passive. I have to think about that. Can the subject have any passivity? Or is that where you draw the line between subject and object? Once the subject has some passivity it is objective. Do you see how the active/passive begins to dissolve into the free will/determinism debate? This question of determinism was a surprise turn in the dialogue for me.
I never formally studied philosophy, so I can’t quote the Greeks or anyone who came before or after. This I feel pretty clear on, though. From the time the sperm fertilized the egg, my being has collected exposures and experiences. Like a BB in a pinball machine, I have been bounced around my environment, with impressions of my world being formed by those impacts like silly putty (emphasis on ‘silly’). When I was finally able to hear, see and feel, I absorbed the ideas of others around me, and those ideas, too, helped shape me. Whether I agreed or disagreed, they moved me in some direction or other.
Bottom line, I fall out on the side of filtering. From the unique, life-long-acquired perspective of each individual, a concept of reality is formed. Thus, each of us lives in our own filter bubble. From within that bubble, we evaluate what we continue to hear, see and feel. The filter can sieve out what doesn’t line up with the worldview we have formed. It can distort and deflect incoming information. But, new information can also sometimes get through the filter and may reshape our worldview.
So, I think we experience the world through a filter, but that does not render invalid the conclusions we reach about the nature of what we have experienced.
We subjects don't need to "get out of our heads" to "get to the real apple", the object.
As I wrote in the piece: "There is no epistemic gap to be closed because the subject is already in the world, and the world already in the subject, through sensation."
I hope some of you have had a chance to read it. Commentary there would be appreciated.
I don’t see how anyone can argue that our perception is a window and not a filter. And I think the argument here is simple: there are many aspects of the physical world that we simply cannot sense. Pushing the edges of light and sound frequencies is one example — we can’t hear dog whistles, but dogs can. Our experience of reality is fundamentally constrained by the limits of our perception.
To me the interesting question is what sort of dynamism exists within those constraints. If both me and you were to focus our eyes on the Apple, it is a fact (assuming our vision works) that we will see an Apple. And there’s nothing we can do to change that. To me this is where the realm of “objective” reality sits. Something I like to call “shared perception”. We know for a fact that we all have a shared perception of the world. Language in some sense is the proof of this.
But while we have no choice but to see the apple upon looking at it, our own internal experience of our perceptions will no doubt drastically vary. If I come home after a 12 hour shift in a coal plant seeing an apple will no doubt remind me of my empty stomach. If you come after a 12 hour shift picking apples from an apple orchard all day you’d take it and toss it out the window.
We’ve seen the same Apple, but have we really seen the “same” apple?
We subjectively (actively) experience objective (passive) facts about the world.
Great comment, Richard. Interesting . . . you align the subjective with the active and the objective with the passive. I have to think about that. Can the subject have any passivity? Or is that where you draw the line between subject and object? Once the subject has some passivity it is objective. Do you see how the active/passive begins to dissolve into the free will/determinism debate? This question of determinism was a surprise turn in the dialogue for me.
I never formally studied philosophy, so I can’t quote the Greeks or anyone who came before or after. This I feel pretty clear on, though. From the time the sperm fertilized the egg, my being has collected exposures and experiences. Like a BB in a pinball machine, I have been bounced around my environment, with impressions of my world being formed by those impacts like silly putty (emphasis on ‘silly’). When I was finally able to hear, see and feel, I absorbed the ideas of others around me, and those ideas, too, helped shape me. Whether I agreed or disagreed, they moved me in some direction or other.
Bottom line, I fall out on the side of filtering. From the unique, life-long-acquired perspective of each individual, a concept of reality is formed. Thus, each of us lives in our own filter bubble. From within that bubble, we evaluate what we continue to hear, see and feel. The filter can sieve out what doesn’t line up with the worldview we have formed. It can distort and deflect incoming information. But, new information can also sometimes get through the filter and may reshape our worldview.
So, I think we experience the world through a filter, but that does not render invalid the conclusions we reach about the nature of what we have experienced.
Great thoughts Ellen. Did Rodrigo's comments about passive learning make sense? That if an apple is before us, we will see an apple.
We subjects don't need to "get out of our heads" to "get to the real apple", the object.
As I wrote in the piece: "There is no epistemic gap to be closed because the subject is already in the world, and the world already in the subject, through sensation."
I hope some of you have had a chance to read it. Commentary there would be appreciated.