-Do you feel that your perceptions are accurate representations of reality? (Int
ID: 3496817 • Letter: #
Question
-Do you feel that your perceptions are accurate representations of reality? (Interactions with people, your environment, memories, etc.) Explain. -In what ways do you feel your perceptions are accurate representations of reality? In what ways do you feel your perceptions are not accurate representations of reality? -How much of our perception are we in control of? -According to the TED Talk, is it important to perceive reality accurately? Do you agree? Why or why not? -What are the benefits and drawbacks to perceiving reality accurately (or as close to it as we can get)? -What are the benefits and drawbacks to perceiving our own interpretation of reality?
Explanation / Answer
Answer.
When most people think of reality, one is likely consider the things that they can see, touch, smell, feel, or experience. In other words, reality is defined in terms of their perceptions. However, the paradox of reality is that we define our realities through subjective experiences such that we create internal maps or representations of the world around us based on our perceptions, and this renders an ‘objective’ quality to our sense of the world. As the information about external reality passes through a variety of neural circuits that serve as filters for further encoding the information, this filtering helps us to accurately interpret these signals.
However, such filteration occurs in terms of our beliefs and values that are learned and developed over the course of our lives, particularly in our formative years. Thus for instance, my own religious and moral beliefs and values about pro social behaviour, condoning the use of aggressive and abusive speech etc. can influence my perception of other people who are argumentative and use high pitch and volume to talk and I may perceive them as rude and aggressive due to the distortions in my own perceptual experience of them. In this way, my own perceptions may be open to false interpretations which make the information that was received “fit” into my reality map. The result is the confirmation bias wherein an Information that cannot be made to fit is either discarded entirely, or dismissed as irrelevant or untrue.
Thus, our minds can also lead us to see a 3D cube pop out of a flat two-dmensional screen due to our own construction of the external information using the cognitive principles of gestalt according to which we have a tendency to perceive incomplete, vague and boundless objects and figures as concrete, finite, bounded and whole and therefore meaningful. Thus evolutionarily speaking, we are adapted to perceive realities in ways which ensure greater adaptation and survival. Like Daniel Hoffman presents, “...so ( evolutionary) fitness does depend on reality as it is, yes, but also on the organism, its state and its action.” ( Hoffman, TED 2015)
So to conclude, we can see that our subjective experiences much like what is discussed in the TED talk by Hoffman, is a culmination of our life’s experience with the help of varied sensory-motor neural networks and it indeed plays a critical role in the varied constructions of reality.
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