A deeply moving and wise piece. Just what I needed to start the year.
"The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation."
As someone who grew up and continues to live between a Western European country and a developing country in the so-called "third world", I have been intensely thinking lately about how "relative" our sensations and experiences are. In one of the countries, people get really mad and their days get spoiled because a train arrives 5 minutes too late, on the other side of the globe, people have never experienced such a good train service and they wouldn't mind arriving 5 minutes too late, they would be intensely grateful for being able to get such a cheap, safe and comfortable transport service. To name one of too many such examples.
I find it so difficult to relate to such "first world problems" lately...
I think peoole seem happy but just like to complain. My theory isnit is some evolutionary thing to help the tribe spread news of potential survival problems so they can be delt with. Our brains have not caught up with modern life is all.
Nobody really cares if a train is on-time. They care about the consequences of being late wherever it is they have to go. If transportation is generally unreliable across an entire country, then appointment times will be lax, nobody will be fired for being a few minutes late, your date won't decide they don't like you, etc. It's all about the surrounding expectations and how other people will treat you because of them. If Western European countries also had a culture of no hard timelines and schedules only being suggestions, then people who lived there wouldn't get stressed over a late train.
You are entirely missing the point. Yes, sure, there are examples in which there might be consequences if the train is not on-time. But a lot of the time I see people literally stressing out about a train being late for no reason whatsoever, because they don't have any stakes on that train arriving on-time. Lots of my colleagues don't really have to be at work at a particular time, our working ours are completely flexible every day. But they will always complain extensively if their trains get minimally delayed.
So what are they getting so mad about? Because they are "losing" 5 minutes of their precious time being idle in a train station? I guess those 5 minutes would have been quite remarkable if they could have been replying to emails at their desk. As I said, there were no negative consequences whatsoever for those guys if the train arrives late. They have just lost all sense of rationality and want to be mad for the sake of being mad about something "not working as expected or intended".
But getting used to the comfort is very quick. Introduce that train service in the "3rd world" country and it will probably take few days to see the complaints over a "later than normal" train.
As a person who moved abroad from a 3rd world country, I can relate. I sometimes think about how it would be like to move some of this 1st world people to the other side of the globe to show them how people are living their lives, without all those comfort. I wonder if their life would change afterwards.
I think that depth has been more widely recognized in neuro-biology before, but has fallen from grace in favor of a naive mechanistic enthusiasm at the beginning of that early neuroimagining euphoria.
You may look into constructivism, especially the biological foundation (e.g. the work of Maturana and Valera). It offers the (somewhat forgotten) hard science link to modern philosophy and psychology, like post-structualism/-modernism and systems theory.
As far as I know, it's not very popular, because it presents a little crisis and is "not very fun"... or at least that's what the criticism comes down to IMO. (I suspect, it's kinda similar to Gödel's assault, but much easier to dismiss.)
Put so bluntly, it is self-refuting: if we cannot know the truth, we cannot know that statement to itself be true-if a statement is self-refuting, how can it be rational to believe it? The “except for” may save the statement from being self-refuting, but only at the cost of becoming an instance of special pleading, which is equally irrational.
I can easily comprehend truth. 2 + 2 = 4, there ya go. "We don't have direct access to external reality, but instead it's mediated through our senses and cognition" is closer to what people are getting at.
It's much the same way a Unix process can 'perceive reality' via serial ports and processors managed in kernelspace.
Perhaps we’re unable to see absolute truth, but we are able to see bits of the truth as it were. Nor is sensory experience our only or even primary way to see truth. Professor Linden has wandered into Epistemic Philosophy but he’s not qualified to give the lecture.
We can keep inventing and looking for new lenses to apply to our mind's eye, but for some reason, we find that every lens we try is slightly warped in different ways.
There are people who tire of the search, settle on one lens, and then think the world is fisheye-shaped.
"The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation."