That’s happened to me, and it’s happened to other people I know frequently enough that I wonder about it. It’s like a last burst of radio waves. I’ve even had it happen where I’ve never been in the same room as the person, just know their faces and names and a few vague biographical facts.
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On the morning of September 23 2014 I had the novel thought “gee, on my mom’s side sixteen cousins, including my brother and me, span in age of 32 to 58. It’s amazing nobody’s dead yet.” Four of my grandmother’s eight children had died at ages 27, 45, 56, and 58. “I wonder who’ll be the first to go.”
Then one hour later. “No, really! I wonder who’ll be the first to go?”
One half-hour later from that, a phone call told me who was the first to go.
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Have you not yet trained him? Simple electric shock aversion therapy should do it. And if he gets it right while you’re around, don’t forget to toss a simple treat - for most CEOs a share option, a little bag of Colombian marching powder or a new Tesla will quickly help them get the idea.
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Our cognitive biases serve us in our daily lives, but it is always weird to me how much people really thing they can see the world out there as it really is. On the other hand, I so clearly remember the moment - probably 3 years into my studies of philosophy in college, not to mention a year of independent study in high school of all the enlightenment philosophers - where suddenly it clicked that “Oh, the world REALLY doesn’t exist as I perceive it.”
It was the moment we learned about the Muller-lyer illusion. It is so simple, yet impossible to see the lines as equal. That’s when I realized how my mind was bending everything all the time and I could never access the “original information” before my mind bent it.
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Of course! I suspected early on that people must go far out of their way not to come to this conclusion, since there are constant reminders everywhere. Where I think many go from “that’s too weird” to “panic!” is the corollary realization that “My mind/personality/identity doesn’t exist as I perceive it, either.” Which I think is at least as profound, interesting, and useful to know. There are lots of cracks where the “I” as I think I know myself simply does not exist. Growing up, I supposed that going along with these models, appearing more accurate, would result in more harmonious social interactions. But they haven’t been, it has been really disruptive.
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Surely it isn’t a philosophical issue but a simple matter of signal processing? The signal path from the eyes to the brain actually has very limited bandwidth and the eyes themselves do a fair bit of processing. By the time we construct an image of the world, the amount of pre-processing is enormous. Simple fact one is that the retina is roughly spherical, so we should not perceive any off axis straight line as straight. But we do.
Reality is being even more distorted by signal processing in cameras, so that we are getting used to pictures of an altered reality. Yet somehow people ignore unreal colours.
The philosophical aspect is that somehow we perceive straight lines as being straight, but it turns out that “straight” has an objective meaning external to our perception. So how does our perception enable us to grasp a concept that we can never directly perceive?
(edited to try to make sense)
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Yes, but the very strong illusion is that this (for lack of a better way of expressing it) highly processed information is the way the world actually exists. It’s like saying that the bad Photoshops are the “truth” of the world. We buy into this comforting illusion because otherwise as @Popo_Bawa says, it becomes totally disruptive to our lives.
To me, seeing it has been really illuminating, though it makes some conversations hard because so many people really think their emotions are stable, their perceptions of the world accurate or maybe just slightly off.
Another big mind-blowing truth-bending change in my perception was reading John Dewey’s book (I think this one: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40089/40089-h/40089-h.htm) where he talks about time as really being a function of the mind - basically, ordering time in a linear fashion is an inherent part of our cognitive process.
I imagine now that all the events of my life that I am experience as on a continuum actually all happened in one single flash, and now I am living through it. It explains a lot of that sense of deja vu, or being able to perceive the future in some abstract way. It’s all already happened, I just haven’t gotten to know about it yet.
Daniel Dennett talks about this remembered nature of time as well in some of his books.
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It could well be that “straight” exists as an ideal concept that seems common-sense enough in certain domains, like “up” and “down”, but not generally applicable in a 3D+ world of curved spacetime. What looks like a straight line might be an arc which happens to approximate zero degrees for you because it is pre-processed by the universe. My (admittedly uneducated) guess is that straight lines are far more likely to exist in a geometry textbook than in reality at large.
It seems to me to be a special form of analog computation - in that our “immediate” models of phenomena are actually analogies. One can try others, refine them, refute them, but they are still only analogies because that’s how nervous systems work. “This model relates indirectly to what I think I have observed.” There never is any direct perception - apart from one’s nervous system’s perception of itself, and then only IF the constant inputs, discursion, description, and analysis can be paused. Senses, instruments, language, concepts, etc will all only ever be quite mediated approximations.
In humans, anyway! I wonder if we can devise descendants with more varied kinds of perceptions/cognition.
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This issue of “straight” as there being some truth and the brain is somehow adjusting in order to show you that truth is really at the nugget of what is so hard for us to comprehend. Our brains have developed in order to help us operate in the world.
There’s a story in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat where a man became blind at an early age, lived most of his life as a blind person, then got an operation to see when he was in his 50’s. You would think, wow, that must have made his life so much better. But, he never REALLY learned to see the way a normal sighted person did. He still operated mostly like a blind person because his brain had “rewired” (I hate these terms that relate our super sophisticated neurology to lowly computer circuits, but I suppose it communicates) for the blind setting. He could not perceive spaces the way most sighted people do. What we think those spaces look like is not at all how they are; we just all have a common experience that we share.
Get together color blind people and discuss colors - we consider the color blind people as defective in some way, but they are as limited as “normal” sighted people, really, it’s just that our limitations are the common set. I mean, compared to mantis shrimp we are really limited, but we just can’t imagine those things they can perceive that we cannot.
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The Law of Truly Large Numbers is how people usually explain these, arguing that what’s less likely is that things like this wouldn’t happen from time to time. While I accept that reasoning intellectually, I had something happen recently that was hard to shrug off:
My sister-in-law recently left my brother. For reasons that don’t concern us here, this is a good thing and my Mom had arranged to help her relocate (while my brother was elsewhere) on a particular day. On that day, my friend who lives three hours away called to ask if my sister-in-law was okay. She had just had a really intense dream about my sister-in-law, hiding under her bed with my brother threatening to kill her. She had no knowledge of what was going down that day—this just came out of the blue.
That was uncanny enough that it actually factored into our decision making that day. It felt really weird to be weighing choices like that:—“Well, but on the other hand, there were the words of the soothsayer…”
It adds to the effect that my friend with the premonition is a Wiccan high priestess.
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You may already be aware of this, but there’s a really good You Are Not So Smart interview with cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman where he argues that false models of reality are actually adaptive:
[quote]
“I agree up to a point,” said Hoffman, “that different organisms are in effectively different perceptual worlds, but where I disagree is that these worlds are seeing different parts of the truth. I don’t think they are seeing the truth at all.”
Hoffman wondered if evolution truly favored veridical minds, so he and his graduate students created computer models of natural selection that included accurate perceptions of reality as a variable.
“We simulated hundreds of thousands of random worlds and put organisms in those worlds that could see all of the truth, part of the truth, or none of the truth,” explained Hoffman. “What we found in our simulations was that organisms that saw reality as-it-is could never outcompete organisms that saw none of reality and were just tuned to fitness, as long as they were of equal complexity.”
The implication, Hoffman said, is that an organism that can see the truth will never be favored by natural selection. This suggests that literally nothing we can conceive of can be said to represent objective reality, not even atoms, molecules, or physical laws. Physics and chemistry are still inside the umwelt. There’s no escape.
“If our perceptual systems evolved by natural selection, then the probability that we see reality as it actually is, in any way, is zero. Precisely zero,” said Hoffman.[/quote]
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Yes, that is the fundamental principle of Cognitive Studies and of Pragmatism, that the models of reality that we use are useful to our survival.
It also explains why it’s so hard to have that Aha moment where you really are aware in a visceral way that you are living in the Matrix and not the real world as it really is.
It’s crazy to me that after studying Locke, Hume, and then all the Cognitive Philosophers, not to mention Plato, that really the world, really it was not as I thought it was. At all.
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I love the Ouija. Growing up, I talked to so many people who had had scary experiences with it, and were totally spooked, so naturally I found it intriguing. In college, I got the idea to put an ad in the campus newsletter asking for people to “perform unholy experiments in cemetery with ouija board.” I got a few responses and one person who stopped me to issue a grave warning about tampering with powerful forces (Yeah!!!).
It worked and we had a good time, but the really exciting part for me consisted in working out how the ideomotor phenomenon was moving the planchette. I was surprised by how many of the responses we were getting were total gibberish—random letters. And I noticed that the closer you got to spelling a word, the more reliable the planchette became. Our hand tremors were initially causing the planchette to move, and then once we felt it going everyone tried to get out of its way—to not hold it down or block it. And that meant, in essence, that we were dragging it toward where we thought it was trying to go. The fact that everyone was being honest and trying not to move or influence the planchette was exactly the thing making it work!
I would have been happier with booming voices and vaporous spectres, but it was still really cool, and I’d do it again, if I had the people.
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so, some kind of online Ouiji event is going down here???
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I have never had it happen in those kinds of moments and I wonder if it isn’t a subconscious safety switch: knocking me out before I do something so I am rested enough to do it.
My lucid dreams have plenty of plot, which is how I know when it’s going off the rails and can rewrite to bring it back. They’re usually pretty vivid, too.
Oh, and I forgot the 911 thing. I have been in three workplaces now where unattended phones spontaneously and repeatedly dialed 911 when I have been stressed, leading to some annoyed and confused police officers when they find out that no one was anywhere near the particular phone that kept calling.
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This is partly why when people get into the whole Team Edison or Team Tesla thing, my response is often “Team Faraday”. One of the original ghostbusters, you could say.
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This idea exists in some Christian theologies too; that for God time does not exist and we perceive time due to our limitations, just as we are blocked by a sheet of glass while a ray of light is not.
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Interesting. I have not heard that.
There is even an Anglican hymn which references it:
“Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away…[]…A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone/short as the watch that ends the night before the rising sun.”
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The radius of spacetime near the Earth is in any case comparable to the radius of the Earth’s orbit. The cited article explains why from our perceptual point of view this is actually irrelevant.
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