perception

Our Own Little Worlds

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If I tell you that all apples sound the same, these days you might think I was talking about an overpriced consumer electronics device.

Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. If I were referring to the brand, if you’re a consumer of that brand you might feel attacked and want to defend your choices because I used the word ‘overpriced’. If you’re not a consumer of that brand you might smile quietly at the description.

If I instead said “All red apples sound the same”, you might lean toward fruit because the Apple brand is not particularly red. In fact, they market as silver.1

It’s a pretty silly statement otherwise, we might think. Different colors of apples do not have different sounds that we hear. Yet it’s also a very true statement for the same reason.

Color is something we agreed upon despite how many types of color receptors you have in your eyes. 2 We may not experience the color the same in our minds, yet we all agree that things that reflect certain parts of light are indeed ‘red’.

In fact I can say that apples aren’t red. We all agree that they look red to us, but what they look like isn’t what they are. They happen to look like that because we happen to have organs that interpret vibrations of light waves into our little reality in our heads that allows us to bounce our shins just enough to remember how painful it is to bounce your shins.

But sound? Vibration and frequency, except sound requires a medium to go through and light does not.

We are all just building our own little worlds. Language allows us to share our worlds.

  1. As silver as an Apple. Knowing Apple, there’s a specific shade of silver and they have a name for it. ↩︎
  2. There’s an online ‘test’ that has been popular recently where everyone thinks they’re a tetrochromate, but that test is questionable. ↩︎

The Identity Mirror.

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I have a shower mirror, for the days when I notice the stubble on my cheeks as I run my hands across my wet face. It’s a strange thing for me. I have not really enjoyed mirrors because they have a tendency to show me as I believe others see me instead of who I am.

This particular mirror was advertised as fog free, which is true when I’m not using it. It’s got water stains on it, a battle I gave up some time ago since the water I get is stored in an unsealed concrete tank with the lime leaching into the water on the hot days in Trinidad – and lately they have all been hot days.

I used to spray the shower with a weak vinegar solution daily to combat the buildup from the hard water, and give the mirror a quick wipe, a constant battle against something I could not win against for a prize I don’t care much about – a clear view of myself.

On days when I shave, I simply rub a soapy hand across the mirror. It appears more clear because of a scientific explanation I won’t bore you with, and I can look if I choose to. Mainly I don’t even use it to shave, instead simply going by feel. Yet it is there.

There are 4 mirrors in my home. One in each bathroom out of some reflex, the one in the shower, and the dressing mirror so that should I care how I look, it’s there. Generally, the dressing mirror has a towel over it since the air conditioner blows right on it, something that did not happen by conscious design.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I thought mirrors were much more important. There was a time when I worried more about how I was perceived. There was a time when the reflection was less branded by time.

I bring this up because of the last post where I touched on the tip of the iceberg.

How we see ourselves, who we see ourselves as, and even who we assume we are seen as is how we’re defined by others, not ourselves.

This is an important thing to understand for some other posts that are coming (and will link below).

Who Are We?

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 3 Comments

One of the key things I’m weaving through the stuff I’m writing offline is partly about how we’re all ‘trapped in our heads’.

We are, pretty much. Our senses relay stimuli to our brains that allow us an approximation of the world around us, as far as we have needed to survive so far.

We think the world is green because that just happens to be how we perceive light, and while we all agree that trees are green, the actual color isn’t necessarily what we all see. My version of green could look to you as I perceive purple, but we both call it green because it’s how we perceive the same thing. The same wavelengths of light may appear different to us individually, but consistently enough so that we can agree on words like ‘green’ to describe the color.

I’ve been thinking about stuff like that for quite a long time. We have these approximations of the world in our heads, and that world has the people in it, but the people we perceive are not necessarily the people as they are – something that keeps counselors and therapists in the black with their accountants.

How we perceive each other shifts as we ourselves change. We call it growth sometimes, but to be cover the conditions where change isn’t growth, I’ll call it change. It’s the difference between progress and change. Progress is implicitly a vector, it has a direction, whereas change can go either way.

I’d fiddled with this idea in the context of Schopenhauer’s “Hedgehog’s Dilemma” and even went as far as considering ourselves (simplified in my mind now) as matrices of attributes. It didn’t go anywhere, but it was an interesting exercise and kept me out of trouble for a while.

I write all this because I came back across, “You Are A Network” from 2021 that actually fills some of the problems I was having with some of the matrix stuff, conceptually – because your network also affects you and implicitly becomes a part of your own world, where the perceptions of those around you are also a part of your personal matrix.

I think it’s around here that some people might have a headache. Yet all of this is very, very important on many levels, especially now in technology with artificial intelligences.

Who are we? The more complex we become, the more complex the answer to that is, perhaps even exponentially.

Divides.

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DivisionIt was the first day of the flooding in parts of Trinidad and Tobago. I had been keeping up to date on things as best I could since I no longer have the 4×4 to roll in with. It was really bad in some areas, so I went out to handle some errands close to home and get back so I wouldn’t be unnecessarily on the road.

I stopped at the local Starbucks, walking in on a scene of some children at the register looking awkward.  Suddenly, a woman rushes in front of me, flustered, handing over some cash and complaining about her bank loudly. That her bank had sent out a notice earlier through social media that their network was out of service because of the flooding hadn’t made it into her busy life.

She was embarrassed and inconvenienced because her card didn’t work. She continued complaining about the bank to the point where it was interfering with me moving on with my life, so I gently made my presence known by waving my cash toward the register. She moved on with her children, awaiting their drinks.

Meanwhile, not far away, people had slept on the roofs of flooded homes. Not far away, people had lost the things that they had worked hard to get. Supplies were just beginning to get in from people not unlike her, though perhaps squawking less.

A snap judgement would have defined her as someone divorced of the reality of the flooding, but that would have dismissed the children in uniforms. I could question why schoolchildren needed Starbucks coffee, but I would be creating a prejudice from one data point – which is wrong. Maybe the woman had a hard morning. Maybe things weren’t going well, maybe the kids didn’t get breakfast. Maybe she was worried about something.

To many people there, that snap judgement would stick, perhaps unfairly, creating a division where there might not be one. Or maybe there is.

The moment sticks. We need to remember the power of moments.

The Expanding of the Canvas

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Framed WallI was standing with Tony, who I’d just bought a copy of his book from at the Presentation College Reunion. I mentioned I was battling existence in my mind.

He said we writers look at the world differently and see things differently.

That’s a true statement, I think. I also think that it’s not true enough.

Our world is framed, and when I say that, I mean that your world is framed, my world is framed, and everyone else’s world is framed. There is absolutely nothing in our world that we deal with that isn’t a derived construct of our brains. All of our senses are interpreted, processed and spat out to us as reality. We know what we like and we know what we don’t like.

That physiological limitation is the first frame. We cannot experience things like magnetic waves and radio waves directly; these are things that we have interpreted into motion and sound so that we know that they exist. And all of our frames are slightly different – someone may have better vision, someone else better hearing, and someone else may be more sensitive to touch, smell… the list goes on. And how we interpret these signals, the ratio of these signals, varies our framing.

Then, when we introduce more human beings, it gets more complicated. We have sounds we agree on for language, and around the world we agree on different languages. We agree on things like what the color blue is, even though each one of us might perceive it differently, some of us more sensitive to the visual spectrum than others, but we have this agreement on what we call blue – and if you get into the finer details, you find the disagreements.

We frame our own physiological experiences to each other in the context of what we agree on. We will say that the sky is blue, even though it actually only appears to be what we all agree on as ‘blue’. And that, too, we frame – within our physiological frame. The communication frame, the ability to share things with others and have them shared with us.

Then it gets even more framed with society, with cultures and subcultures, and suddenly we’re looking at the world through shared experiences rather than as we actually see it, the phrase, ‘typing at a keyboard’ only making sense to someone who knows what a keyboard actually is.

So I don’t know that just writers see the world differently. I think we writers simply communicate more differently than others in the written sense, some of us  to expand it because we see the world differently at some level of framing and feel the need to expand the canvas within the frame. Some could argue that artists only see things that way, but that argument is typically made by artists. Scientists also have that issue.

In fact, everyone has that issue. It’s how we expand our canvases… or try to… that allows others to define us so.