Our Awe-inspiring Ignorance
Exploring the limits of our perception.
We tend to define what we consider to be “real” based on our ability to experience it through our senses, especially our sight and touch. Our sense of smell and hearing we find less reliable, and we seem to use more for secondary confirmation, rather than depending heavily on them for input about our environment. Even as we consider the adage “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist,” we are mainly talking about comparing what we see against some standard unit of perception.
However, our sensory abilities aren’t exceptional. Our eyes, which we depend on most, can be bested by many in the animal kingdom, but the mantis shrimp puts ours to shame. The mantis shrimp’s eyes have three pupils on each eye, generating a full 3D image independently for each. We’ve added dimension to our sense of sight by inventing polarized lenses, but mantis shrimp experience six types of polarization naturally, which researchers suppose might combine to work a bit like a built-in navigation system.
Even this comparison shows our bias toward vision due to our dependency on it. What if our primary mode of perception was our nose? It may not have proven very important to our evolution, leaving us with underdeveloped faculties, but that’s not the case for other animals.
The average dog’s nose is about 100 times stronger than a human’s nose, and a bloodhound’s nose is three times stronger than that. However, a bear’s nose is seven times stronger than a bloodhound’s — a whopping 2,100 times stronger than the human sense of smell.
A former park ranger at Katmai National Park and resident naturalist for explore.org, Mike Fitz, had this to say when trying to imagine taking in reality in the same manner as a bear:
“Sound and sight are ephemeral. Scent lingers far longer. I could travel through an area and piece together stories of who was there prior to me without having to see or hear them.”
How much of our concept of reality is formed based on our dependence on sight? Even our view of time as a constant procession of moments may only be a byproduct of the fact that this is the dominant way we experience it. A bear might see time less like an unbroken procession of moments and more like an interwoven fabric of overlapping stories.
My favorite example of the limits of perception, though, comes from our study of the cosmos. Grade school taught me that black holes are black because no light can escape them, but it would be more accurate to say that we cannot perceive them — not by any natural sense of ours nor by any instrument we’ve created to extend those senses. We can perceive the effects of black holes and their impact on other celestial bodies around them, so we know they are there, but we cannot perceive them. We call dark energy and dark matter “dark” for the same reason we call black holes “black.” To some extent, we can study the attributes of their effects, but we can’t perceive them directly. And according to CERN, dark matter and dark energy account for about 95% of our universe. Wait. Read that again. 95% of our universe lies outside the bounds of our perception.
My last but most important example of the limits of our perception is love. I know that sounds kind of hokey, but hear me out. In Christopher Nolan’s movie Interstellar, his character Dr. Amelia Brand reveals to us that,
“Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends time and space.”
The impact of love on the human experience can’t be understated. It has puzzled history’s greatest thinkers, inspired our most magnificent works of art, and launched countless wars. Love stimulates our highest joys and yet is the source of our deepest sufferings. Many spend their entire life reaching for it or seek to simulate it through addictions. Like a black hole, we can see and sometimes measure the impacts of love in our lives, and often then mistake them for love itself. But I would posit that, like a black hole, love is so much more than its impact on the things it touches.
It’s humbling to take a moment to stand in the vastness of how much we don’t know. When we get caught in the trap of assuming that the extent of our reality fits neatly within the bounds of human perception, we regress to our ancestors’ mistakes, placing ourselves again at the center of the universe. The truth is that our reality is bigger than you and I, and as such, there’s so much more to it than we know or understand.
I once heard that when we are afraid, the first thing we do is make all the uncertain things certain, reverting to “black and white thinking.” When under threat, there is a lot of value in simplifying the vast field of grey that is our reality into its extremes. This shortcut makes it easier to process inputs and make quick decisions that could potentially save our lives. Today we face unprecedented existential threats — political threats, technological threats, and climate threats — all amplified by the media, making us more prone to black and white thinking than ever before.
While there may be comfort in our illusions of certainty, the price of that comfort is rigidity. When the game of life’s rules are stable and consistent, then rigidity provides a survival advantage. In times of rapid change, rigidity becomes our cause of death, and adaptability our only safe harbor.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
It takes humility to adopt the beginner’s mind. To stand in awesome wonder at the complexity that we’ve tried to simplify and the enormity we’ve tried to limit. But when we do the cold, closed, pessimism of certainty is transformed into excitement and zeal. Through this narrow gate, we are invited to the realization of a broader reality, full of possibility, in which we are freed from the shackles of our cynicism and able to greet life with the wide-eyed optimism of a child — seeing opportunities where once we saw challenges, collaborators where once we saw enemies, and hope where once we could only see a downward spiral — leaving us better prepared to adapt to and overcome all the challenges of our changing world.
This article was developed in collaboration with Barry Brown, as a part of a series on the formation of self. To learn more about our workshops, go to formationlabs.com
Barry Brown is a former community leader, nonprofit organizer and personal coach that works in identity and leadership development for startups and enterprise businesses around the world. He’s a cofounder of human(Ethos), on faculty at Singularity University, and runs Formation Labs, a part of Runway Innovation Hub in San Francisco.
Damien Foord is an Air Force veteran and creative entrepreneur that has advised hundreds of brands in Silicon Valley, including LinkedIn, Tesla, Adobe, and many more. He is a cofounder of Prismonde, applying cognitive science to business strategy and brand development and speaks on organizational identity and human-centered innovation.
