No matter what complexity and subtle differences are present in the environment, the frog’s eye is “wired-up” to send only a very few different messages. The frog’s eye presumably evolved to discard the remainder of the information available. – The Psychology of Consciousness, Robert E. Ornstein, 1975
What if our sensory systems – tongues and eyes and ears and noses and skin, all – were actually filters, not sensors? what if their primary purposes were not to perceive but to block?
This has some interesting implications, it does. One is how we might perceive many metaphors for enlightenment, or at least its desirability, especially those built on individuals’ interpreted hallucinations. Another is what it says about the convergent sense of perception across a species.
This will go in odd directions.
Like it’s doing already.
Much contemporary self-improvement industry is about making us think the range of our perceptions actually accommodates billions of wildly divergent individual realities, but Ornstein’s passage above would seem to doubt it. Part of “reality” is aligning with a consensus, which rules out most of our individuality as humans and explains why we can’t converse with mountain lions.
Do the means by which information gets processed still reduce to the same conclusions, then?
Well, that’s an interesting thing. We get how an organism might’ve used a prediction/feedback loop to narrow its range of affecting stimuli. But how does it achieve consensus with the rest of its species? That sort of clustering is, wow – especially when things like the color blue become universally perceived across a species covering sundry continents. Could be, achieving that sort of reliable consensus must happen before a species breaks away from its predecessor branches. Like: Look up at the sky, and everyone who sees blue, come with me.
And then it gets locked-in for the life of that species, whatever its duration be. That idea children have like “How do I know your blue looks like my blue?” Maybe it’s the same way you know I walk upright and use tools; if my ancestors’ blue looked like your red, 100 million years ago, today I’d be a sea lion instead of a human. How do I know my son’s green is the same as my green? Because he’s my son; he could no more perceive my green as his orange than he could fly south for the winter or maul a bobcat with his claws.
It’s a fun diversion from the usual asking “How does the central nervous system (CNS) choose which stimuli to use?” Instead, by this model, the CNS is a common set of narrow filters shared across a species; a large part of being human, then, is not having access to unique stimuli. Maybe what we call “madness” becomes an ineffective filtration process that lets just a few more stimuli in and breaks the individual’s alignment with his brothers’ consensus?
What does this have to do with metaphors about enlightenment and interpreted hallucinations?
Well, seen through the prism above, think of the greed inherent in “expanding awareness” or “being more open minded” – after Nature spent 100 million years refining hardware to set filters that make narrow-mindedness even possible 😊
For that matter, I suppose: Challenge your perception of reality at every single moment if you wish; Nature has restricted your tools of perception so dramatically you’re never going to get very far off the beaten path anyway (or at least not one-thought-at-a-time).
Give us a loopy conclusion to conclude this loopy loop!
Happily.
The mind is a maelstrom of associations and unfiltered stimuli. The sensory receptors are hardware filters through which we perceive what is outside the mind. Inward looking = anxiety (the maelstrom); outward looking = focus (a perception sharpened by hardware millions of years in the making). Time in Nature temporarily eliminates anxiety by effectively docking our hardware with its very creator – it is when we are most focused – so, ah, do more forest bathing!