Our knowledge of reality
The range of our knowledge of reality is limited by our preexisting beliefs and expectations
Came across this article somewhere. Thought, oh how true…
THE fact that most times we only perceive what we can conceive is dramatically borne out by what happened to Captain Cook when his ship reached the island of Tahiti in 1769. The Tahitians couldn’t see the vessel even though it was moored directly in front of them. The reason a big sea-going craft like that was invisible to them was because they couldn’t visualize such a structure, having had no previous exposure to something like it in all their experience, history, myths or imagination. As a result there was no modeling system available which could reconstruct its image with any meaningful correspondence to reality.
Even up to 70 years later, by which time a lot of missionary and other European ships had come into contact with the islanders, they still could only manage to describe ships as floating islands inhabited by beings of a superior nature, upon whose orders lightning flashed and thunder rumbled (the muskets and cannons on board). Today, a local Tahitian tourist guide can tell the engine difference between two brands of water scooters.
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead also drew attention to this by saying that our conditioned mode of thinking and use of language affects our view of reality to such a great extent that it becomes virtually impossible for us to fully appreciate its magnitude. There are some fundamental assumptions, he said, which we unconsciously presuppose and these appear so obvious that people don’t know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. In other words,
we can’t really contemplate what we have no comprehension of, even if it is right in front of us. Therefore, the range of our knowledge of reality is limited by our preexisting beliefs and expectations.
Of course, having a consensus world view is a convenience since it’s practical and has survival value. Nevertheless, it can be dangerous to forget that it’s also a convenient fiction because when there’s no new expectation, nothing new gets to happen and the “out there” becomes falsely fixed. At the same time, the world that a bat or a shark sees is not the same as what we do and we blithely regard their interpretation of it as seriously flawed even though they survive by means of it just like we do with ours. Who’s correct? As the physicist James Jeans put it: “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”
All credit to the author 