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We know that our
perceptions capture only a
small part of what there is to know about our environment, and that we
only
become conscious of even a much smaller part of that small part. Our
brain,
nervous system, hormones, our whole physical presence, have been honed
by
evolution to perform optimally with respect to increasing our chances
of
survival and procreation. So it is clear
that the real world is likely to be quite different from the world we
perceive.
The world we perceive
is a construct, based
on what we perceive and on what we think, and on what our body thinks
our needs
are. What is the relationship with the
real world? We usually consider the
world we experience to be embedded in the real world, as a smaller part
in a
whole, as a small dish in a set of nested dishes. We
know that we cannot see objects far away,
that we cannot see very well in the dark, and so on, so we presume, as
a
simplest model, that what we are aware of is just a subset of what
there is.
But science already
tells us
otherwise. The colors we see are not
there, in the world that science holds for real. There
are only electromagnetic waves, and
different wavelengths give us the impression of different colors. In fact, the translation from wavelength to
color is quite complicated, and whole volumes have been written by
cognitive
psychologists about the relations between the phenomenological color
circle and
the linear degree of freedom of electromagnetic wavelength. But the fact is, according to science: all
the colors we see in the world around us are painted by our mind, as
part of
the process in which we construct a picture of the world around us,
including
ourselves.
The solidity of the
world, an
interpretation that helps us to function efficiently in our daily
lives, does
not correspond to reality either, as science sees it.
A stone, in all its apparent solidity, is
mostly empty space, with more than 99.9% of its mass concentrated in a
millionth of a billionth of the space available within a rock, in the
nuclei of
the atoms that make up the rock. What
makes it seem so solid to us is the fact that light cannot penetrate
it, nor
can our hand penetrate a rock. But
science has discovered that X rays have no trouble at all, passing
through a
rock. And if you take some particles of
matter, that constitute our hand, and accelerate them to high energies,
they
could pass through a rock as well.
So the notion of our
seeing only part of
the world is not correct. Yes, we see
`a' world, but that world of ours is not just a little local cut-out of
`the'
world, according to science.
In a very literal
sense, we hallucinate
both the world and our presence in it -- not in a random way, of
course, but in
a very precise way, one that is functioning in an almost optimal way
with
respect to our needs as biological organisms.
But there is no reason to believe that this very efficient
outcome of a
long process of evolution has much of anything to do with what the
world really
is like.
What does the world
really look like? It depends.
It depends not only on how you look at the world, which would be
a
rather misleading way of speaking, as if you could just see the world
and then
choose an angle from which you look at it.
No, it depends on how you look at the construction you make of
the
world, and then on how you look at the process of construction and your
interpretation of that process.
In short, our sense of
presence in the
world, according to science, is really quite far removed from the world
as it
really is. Two of WoK's main goals are:
1) to acquire a gut feeling of this discrepancy; and 2) to explore ways
to find
stepping stones, at least, and perhaps even a bridge, in order to cross
the
gulf that this discrepancy presents us with.
Piet, 4/8/06.