How do you really interpret your world? How do you interpret reality?*
In an Age of Reality TV, consider rethinking whether or not what you see and hear portrays something real outside yourself. Isn’t there some partial fiction in everything? Every encounter with another is a potential drama of either improvisation or scripted acting. Then there’s the accumulated biases that influence you to generalize to different degrees of fiction: “That’s one city I like to avoid; it’s dirty, crime-ridden, and downright dangerous.” Or: “We vacation there every year because the weather is always perfect, the beaches aren’t crowded, and the restaurants have great food.” You are not alone (or maybe you are) in this.
Reality. It’s that philosophical problem over and over. Is it outside our minds? Inside? And now we’ve been influenced by ever more versions of “Matrix” scenarios that push the “inside our minds” perspective. Reality TV gives us programs that supposedly follow a group of people with unobtrusive cameras capturing “every” moment from multiple angles without influencing the observed. We don’t know, of course, how many hours any director and producer decide to video and then to edit to capture the “entertaining” moments they eventually air to interested audiences. Reality. It’s that philosophical—Oh! I already wrote that. Am I caught in a loop of reruns expecting to see something different the second time around?
Ever look at a cumulus cloud and see a recognizable shape? Ever experience the same with rocks during a commercial cave tour (Guide: “We call these stalagmites ‘The Manhattan Skyline’”)? Sure, clouds and rocks can remind us of objects, animals, and people (There’s an isolated cumulus cloud that looks like Abe Lincoln out there in some blue sky). Of course, natural clouds and rocks aren’t exact representations, but they serve the mind’s fancy. Remember New Hampshire’s longstanding symbol, the Old Man of the Mountain? It was a natural rock formation that, when viewed from Franconia Notch, appeared to resemble a human face. It doesn’t look like that anymore because the head took a natural tumble in 2003 down more than 1,000 feet from the steep-sided cliff on which it perched and now would require the ultimate facelift for restoration. No worry. Other rocks around the world have been similarly interpreted. Not far from the Old Man’s former position there’s a rock that “looks like” Pemigewasset in full-feathered headdress. In South Africa there’s a rock that “looks like” the Virgin Mary whose image people have also found in window stains and on toast (Pay attention at breakfast tomorrow morning).
Our brains look for the familiar somewhat below the level of consciousness. We see a cloud, and Pow! We see a familiar figure. No planning required. The same goes for rocks—or actually, for any object. Pow! We get hit by familiarization. An unexpected connection occurs, though we could on a given day and in a given place try to see a “cloud Abe.” (The owners of caves go looking for analogs to their stalactite and stalagmite shapes, making a conscious effort to increase the entertainment value of their property, but even in consciousness, they probably stumble on the analog)
That’s that philosophical problem showing up for us personally. What we observe we sometimes see in the context of what we know. Some might argue that we always see in the context of experience and cultural learning. Thus, in the current climate of political pundits making their observations, we probably tend to see what we are inclined to see in political friends and foes. And the same seems to hold in our relationships. What we saw previously, we see “in the cloud and rock” presently.
In his book that attracted enough attention to warrant a 50th-anniversary edition, Thomas Kuhn writes, “…one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions.”** Kuhn had pointed out that if Aristotle and Galileo were to observe the same pendulum swinging, each would interpret the swing and draw conclusions based on the knowledge (the paradigm) of their times, Aristotle stressing the pendulum’s weight, for example, with Galileo stressing the swing through a partial circle over a given time.
Back to the cloud and the rock: You have your paradigms. You have your experiences and the “knowledge” they have provided. You see the sixteenth President or the Virgin Mary that someone from an un-encountered tribe in the deep rainforest might not see, regardless of your efforts to point out features. “There’s the nose over there; there’s a top hat—look now because the hat is dissipating.” (Apparently, and having visited Franconia Notch numerous times, I’m guilty here; everyone could “see” New Hampshire’s Old Man, so there might be some nearly universal rock and cloud representations of reality)
Obviously, physical representations of physical things seem to be one thing, and representations of human relationships are another. Somewhere in that over-arcing sky or in an exfoliating granite boulder there might be a depiction of a relationship you know. But then, that one might be harder to share, and that makes it more personal and “internal.” What are you going to say? “Honey, I was looking at an onion today, and I saw a perfect analog of our relationship on its exfoliating surface.”
At unexpected times and in unexpected places different physical objects will remind you of the realities you have come to know and accept. That your brain sees the analogs is probably an indication of what you think of as both real and significant. Just realize that what you see might be more internal than external. And that goes for interpretations of relationships not only between you and someone else, but also between and among other people you observe.
* This is not a blog on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
** Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, The university of Chicago Press, Fourth Ed., p. 37.
In an Age of Reality TV, consider rethinking whether or not what you see and hear portrays something real outside yourself. Isn’t there some partial fiction in everything? Every encounter with another is a potential drama of either improvisation or scripted acting. Then there’s the accumulated biases that influence you to generalize to different degrees of fiction: “That’s one city I like to avoid; it’s dirty, crime-ridden, and downright dangerous.” Or: “We vacation there every year because the weather is always perfect, the beaches aren’t crowded, and the restaurants have great food.” You are not alone (or maybe you are) in this.
Reality. It’s that philosophical problem over and over. Is it outside our minds? Inside? And now we’ve been influenced by ever more versions of “Matrix” scenarios that push the “inside our minds” perspective. Reality TV gives us programs that supposedly follow a group of people with unobtrusive cameras capturing “every” moment from multiple angles without influencing the observed. We don’t know, of course, how many hours any director and producer decide to video and then to edit to capture the “entertaining” moments they eventually air to interested audiences. Reality. It’s that philosophical—Oh! I already wrote that. Am I caught in a loop of reruns expecting to see something different the second time around?
Ever look at a cumulus cloud and see a recognizable shape? Ever experience the same with rocks during a commercial cave tour (Guide: “We call these stalagmites ‘The Manhattan Skyline’”)? Sure, clouds and rocks can remind us of objects, animals, and people (There’s an isolated cumulus cloud that looks like Abe Lincoln out there in some blue sky). Of course, natural clouds and rocks aren’t exact representations, but they serve the mind’s fancy. Remember New Hampshire’s longstanding symbol, the Old Man of the Mountain? It was a natural rock formation that, when viewed from Franconia Notch, appeared to resemble a human face. It doesn’t look like that anymore because the head took a natural tumble in 2003 down more than 1,000 feet from the steep-sided cliff on which it perched and now would require the ultimate facelift for restoration. No worry. Other rocks around the world have been similarly interpreted. Not far from the Old Man’s former position there’s a rock that “looks like” Pemigewasset in full-feathered headdress. In South Africa there’s a rock that “looks like” the Virgin Mary whose image people have also found in window stains and on toast (Pay attention at breakfast tomorrow morning).
Our brains look for the familiar somewhat below the level of consciousness. We see a cloud, and Pow! We see a familiar figure. No planning required. The same goes for rocks—or actually, for any object. Pow! We get hit by familiarization. An unexpected connection occurs, though we could on a given day and in a given place try to see a “cloud Abe.” (The owners of caves go looking for analogs to their stalactite and stalagmite shapes, making a conscious effort to increase the entertainment value of their property, but even in consciousness, they probably stumble on the analog)
That’s that philosophical problem showing up for us personally. What we observe we sometimes see in the context of what we know. Some might argue that we always see in the context of experience and cultural learning. Thus, in the current climate of political pundits making their observations, we probably tend to see what we are inclined to see in political friends and foes. And the same seems to hold in our relationships. What we saw previously, we see “in the cloud and rock” presently.
In his book that attracted enough attention to warrant a 50th-anniversary edition, Thomas Kuhn writes, “…one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions.”** Kuhn had pointed out that if Aristotle and Galileo were to observe the same pendulum swinging, each would interpret the swing and draw conclusions based on the knowledge (the paradigm) of their times, Aristotle stressing the pendulum’s weight, for example, with Galileo stressing the swing through a partial circle over a given time.
Back to the cloud and the rock: You have your paradigms. You have your experiences and the “knowledge” they have provided. You see the sixteenth President or the Virgin Mary that someone from an un-encountered tribe in the deep rainforest might not see, regardless of your efforts to point out features. “There’s the nose over there; there’s a top hat—look now because the hat is dissipating.” (Apparently, and having visited Franconia Notch numerous times, I’m guilty here; everyone could “see” New Hampshire’s Old Man, so there might be some nearly universal rock and cloud representations of reality)
Obviously, physical representations of physical things seem to be one thing, and representations of human relationships are another. Somewhere in that over-arcing sky or in an exfoliating granite boulder there might be a depiction of a relationship you know. But then, that one might be harder to share, and that makes it more personal and “internal.” What are you going to say? “Honey, I was looking at an onion today, and I saw a perfect analog of our relationship on its exfoliating surface.”
At unexpected times and in unexpected places different physical objects will remind you of the realities you have come to know and accept. That your brain sees the analogs is probably an indication of what you think of as both real and significant. Just realize that what you see might be more internal than external. And that goes for interpretations of relationships not only between you and someone else, but also between and among other people you observe.
* This is not a blog on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
** Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, The university of Chicago Press, Fourth Ed., p. 37.
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