Perception = Your Reality ≠ Reality Itself
Man in a forest — beasts attack — _ will he survive_ ?1
Covey2 recalls a confrontation between two VERY different men in a forest,
Man is walking through a forest. Comes upon another man chopping down a tree with a dull axe. Man says to the other man, “Have you ever thought about sharpening that axe? Might help you cut the tree down faster.” Other man replies, “Can’t. Too busy chopping down this tree.”
Garbage in, Garbage Out3 .
This is true, until you consider that
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure
Because risk cannot be destroyed;
Merely transformed4.
Permit an inversion, if you will.
Garbage Out, Garbage In.
Considering that humans are hopelessly mimetic
Your perceptions are influenced by the humans
You choose to dominantly perceive.
We live out the lives of our dominant childhood heroes; don’t shoot the messenger. Your enemies are comic book characters that you’ve constrained into 7 +/- 2 named phenomena due to your a priori theta-nested gamma oscillations5 which drive understanding. Unleash yourself from artificial constraints.
So don’t take your perceptions too seriously. Your life has been hopelessly constrained by your genetics and your environment. Bergstrom described the, ‘mechanical encrusted upon the living.’6 Hopelessly, that is, until you understand the levers and mechanics of your own arbitrary understanding.
The language you speak is arbitrary. The palette your prefer is arbitrary. Do you honour your ancestors by preferring their food? Or were your ancestors eating that which their geography determined? If your language is incapable of describing reality, perceive reality through silence.
Stillness. Sunyata. Emptiness.
Don’t trust language, most of all your own.
As Sir Portesi of Pablo recalled, language disguises thoughts7.
To complete your understanding of the limitations of perception - and what you can do about it -
Addendum
The true name of things is not the name they were arbitrarily given. Rather, The true name of things is the character in which they relate to other phenomena in the environment over a certain span of time.8
Therefore, it stands to reason that if you changed your relationship to phenomena you would thereby change your very name.
When you’re at the end of your studies, all that remains is perception, which is the process by which we experience consciousness. When you’re at the end of your studies, all that remains is the a priori cognitive structure that already has shape (see Kant) which determine your OODA Loops (see Boyd).
1
Oren Klaff, Pitch Anything
2
Sharpening The Saw, The Seven Habits, Stephen Covey
3
GIGO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out
4
Corey Hoffstein https://twitter.com/choffstein
5
The limitations of objects that can be held in working memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
6
The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler
7
Wittgenstein
8
Once items have been named in terms of their relationship with phenomena and other items in the system, one might be tempted to find similar groups with similar items with similar relationships. Now you’re getting into isomorphic groups where the nodes and edges in one group fit the nodes and edges in another group.