Today's soundtrack is uneXpect: _wE, Invaders [sic].
This afternoon, I'm reading the first chapter of Brooke Gladstone's The Trouble With Reality, "In Here."
In the introduction to the chapter, Gladstone said that "[r]eality is personal" (p. 2), as it is filtered by our perceptions. Many people have searched for a definition of reality. Gladstone quotes Philip K. Dick, who defines it thus: "'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away'" (p. 3). But we have to be cautious: reality can be constructed by those in power, and they can change our perceptions, which changes our reality.
The ultimate source of false reality is, according to Gladstone, our "umwelt" (p. 6), which is our own personal reality - it is "[t]he small subset of the world that [we are] able to detect" (p. 6). The concept of umwelt "neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities" (p. 17). For example, sharks have a sense of smell that is much more sensitive than ours; mantis shrimp can see many more colours than can humans. Their reality - their umwelt - is different from ours. But unless we realize that others can sense more than we can, we will continue to be ignorant of the fact that we cannot see the whole picture of our world. Gladstone quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, who says that "'Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world'" (p. 8).
Our world is what we expect it to be, due to neural pathways carved by our own confirmation biases of the stereotypes we have about people and events. Even though we might not like the world we have created for ourselves, it is safe and comfortable because it is expected; thus, we do not leave it, and even consider contradictions to be attacks. Walter Lippmann says that "'we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between our universe and the universe'" (p. 10, italics mine).
Changing our perspective when confronted with a different reality is very difficult. Maintaining our reality by rationalizing or by making the minimum adjustments while still maintaining the foundations of our worldview gives us a "blast of dopamine" (p. 16), and our brain sees contradictions as dangerous. For us to perceive reality as it is, though, we must "choose violation over validation [and] strain, violently, against the natural, lifelong limitation of your umwelt" (p. 16).
