The Scope of Your Own Perception
You are trapped in your own mind.
Skeptical?
You only know the things you know because you experienced them through your own senses. How do you know the things you know? Did you read them? Did someone tell you? Did you come up with it yourself? Well you received everything you know through your eyes, ears, nose, skin, and tongue.
Something very interesting happened this past week. The world witnessed a debate between enormous public figures representing two ends of an age old debate. Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis, and Bill Nye the Science Guy were pitted against each other in a widely broadcasted debate about the origin of the universe.
If you have not seen this, here’s a link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI
Disclaimer: Although I do associate with one side of this debate, I am not writing here to argue it. There are more interesting ideas to discuss spawned by events resulting from the debate itself. Please do not argue directly about evolution/creationism stuff in response to this, focus on the idea at hand.
Of course this debate added fuel to an already raging fire. Social networks became filled with arrogant one liners made to sound like they have completely trumped the other side. Here are some examples
22 Messages From Creationists To People Who Believe In Evolution
22 Messages For Creationists From People Who Believe In Evolution
Several quotes from each side of the debate are quite poorly reasoned. I want to point out a few quotes that seem particularly relevant to the subject of limited mental scope.
“How do you explain a sunset if there is no God”
“Where do you derive objective meaning in life?
“If God did not create everything, how did the first single celled organism originate? By chance?”
Well the simple answer to the first question is too obvious. I will assume that the question is more sophisticated.
What is being asked is how can the beauty and glory of a sunset exist in nature, a universe created purely through chance? Nothing could have created something so beautiful and glorious but a divine being.
The concept of beauty and chance are all manifestations of ideas that only exist in the mind. They do not exist in reality. This will be the hardest idea to understand for some readers. Let me explain.
To begin with, what is the difference between your perception of reality and reality itself? Well our perception of reality is what we know. As individuals, it is the only form of existence that we currently and will ever understand. Our perception is a result of our conscious thoughts which interpret the inputs we get from our senses. From here, our minds create models which correlate with reality to the scale that is relevant to our human existence.
When I look at the water bottle sitting on my desk, what do I see and understand about its existence? It is a vessel which contains a fluid that I need to survive. I use my eyes to see it and therefore I know its there. I believe it is a water bottle. I believe it contains water. This is my perception, an interpretation of the reality in front of me.
What is the water bottle in reality? Is it a hunk of plastic in a particular shape? Is it nothing more than a series of polyethylene molecules? Is it the individual carbon and hydrogen atoms that make up that polyethylene? Perhaps it is the quarks and electrons which make up each of those atoms. No, it must be even smaller. Reality is the atomic units of the universe for which we have no name. The existence of reality is that and only that. Any higher level thing is just a name we assigned to some sort of organization of those things which for some reason look like a form of pattern to us. An atom is nothing more than the particles which make up the atom. The fact that we believe atoms, for example, to be something meaningful is because we model our universe in a manner which makes them useful. Organization does not exist in reality. Patterns do not exist in reality. These are all manifestations of ideas from the human mind. Without our minds, reality only exists in the form of its most atomic units. Without a subject to interpret reality, the things we understand to be do not actually exist. This philosophy is known as existentialism.
Armed with this understanding, how do I answer the question proposed above? The human perception of beauty only exists in the mind. Beauty is not real. Beauty is an amazing thing and we need it in our lives to be happy. However the mature thinker understands that outside of the human mind, beauty is not a thing in reality but a mere interpretation of our senses which received inputs from reality. Therefore it is easy for beauty to exist. It did not come about by chance (nor does the notion of chance exist in reality), it exists because for some reason our brain appreciates the colors of the sunset over other things.
Using what we have reasoned above, we can easily answer the other two questions regarding the meaning of life and chance. Both are concepts which are manifestations of our interpretation. Unfathomable probabilities occur in nature all of the time not because we get lucky but because we frame it in a way that makes it unfathomable. In reality, occurrences are not actually rare or common, they are just occurrences.
Ultimately, the only medium in which we can understand our interpretation is through our minds. We can never understand reality in absolute truth. Anything we do understand is a model of what reality really is. What we can do however is to accept that there is more to reality than what we currently understand. Our perceptions have a limited scope but we can always do our best to continue to expand this scope. The more we read and understand how ideas come about, the more we can accept and criticize them in an objective-like way. The reason why certain people who believe in evolution think creationism is ridiculous is the same as the reason certain people who believe in creationism think evolution is ridiculous. Each side’s scope is not wide enough to understand why the other thinks the way they do.
This type of thinking is the hardest. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development would place this as part of the Formal Operational Stage, which includes features such as metacognition (thinking about thinking, the most relevant feature to this post) and abstract thought. It does not develop until later adolescence and into adulthood. Some believe that a portion of the population never even reaches this stage of development.
What can we do to think with a bigger scope? Read a lot. Understand where every person’s ideas come from. Approach ideas with a positive mindset assuming that they could be right. Try to prove evolution right. Try to prove it wrong. Find the logical fallacy instead of passing judgement. Talk to everyone. These behaviors will always make us better people.
