Perception
"We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about."
— Robert M. Sapolsky
Framing is decisive. At every moment, we live and operate and relate to the world from inside our framing of it, our mental model of it. Relating to the world as made up of ecosystems will result in very different outcomes than relating to the world as made up of individuals, of discrete things that can be treated distinctly.
Medium • The Ecosystem Hypothesis
“Our filter inevitably reduces Source intelligence by interpreting the data that arrives instead of letting it pass freely … The more raw data we take in, and the less we shape it, the closer we get to nature.”
-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
I completely agree that we all have a filter through we which we perceive the world—it is what creates our singular experience (our “umwelt” as Jakob von Uexküll would call it). And I believe (at least I feel) we have some control over the shape and function of our filter.
However, I’m not sure I agree that we can decrease the degree to which we filter and shape raw data, as Rick Rubin says. We may be able to change how we shape the data around us but we can never shape it less. We can never escape the innumerable influences present in the Now, nor can we ignore the endless web of events that brought to the Now. We are a product of these infinite factors and we cannot be anything else. Nothing comes from nothing, as Robert Sapolsky would say.
“But whether we are distancing our self from the herd, or ingratiating our self as part of the herd, it is the existence of others that defines who we are.”
― Bruce M. Hood, The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity
“We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, p. 221
Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) believed that every living creature inhabits a world of its own. The structure of this world is largely determined by the species to which a creature belongs, by its physiology, its behaviour, and its environment, but this world discloses itself only through individual subjective experience. As such, these worlds are b
... See morethe part of the unconscious that, according to Carl Jung, is common to all humankind and contains the inherited accumulation of primitive human experiences in the form of ideas and images called archetypes and manifested in myths as well as other cultural phenomena (e.g., religion) and in dreams. It is the deepest and least ac
... See more"We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment."
— Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will