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Perception: Our useful inability to see reality: Nature: Nature Research
- hprotagonist 10y agoPeople have reality-dampers. It’s a popular fact that nine-tenth of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary grey goo if its only purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual. Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work. Terry Pratchett - “Small Gods”
- eli_gottlieb 10y agoThe interesting question is: given the information available to the organism in the moment and the organism's previous experience, what sort of reality can be perceived? This book sounds to me like Bad Philosophy of Mind if it can't answer more coherently than "not reality".