Random rant about whats on my mind....

For many years I have been apt to say "its all relative" or "its all in how you perceive it". This has been one of my day-to-day mottos.

As I become more entrenched in academia, I am feeling that this is more than a wry motto. Its really how I see the world, approach problems, and attack my research. At heart I have come to believe that I am a constructivist. While I do believe that there is an objective reality out there in the universe, I do not think that humans will ever be able to grasp it. We make our own realities from the perspective of our own thoughts, life history, genetics, and our unreliable human senses. EVERYTHING is in how we perceive the world. As a species, we make sense of the world around us thought our senses, senses that we all generally share with varying degrees of clarity. And the world we perceive through these sense is interpreted by our personal histories and experiences. Reality is what we construct of it. For example, I am partially colorblind. When tested for the condition I am presented with a number of colored dots, within which there are supposed to be numbers that one can make out. I usually cannot see anything but similar colored dots. My reality is that of just these benign dots, while others see the numbers as their "reality". This is a limitation of my vision, however, I know from experience and my own history that I am not seeing what others do, that reality is distorted in this sense for me. Yet to take this even one more ridiculous step further, the only reason these numbers have meaning to those who can see them is their own personal histories. They have learned the quantity of which the number "7" represents. They perceive two lines joining at a particular angle to form a "7", and then attach meaning to it. Turn it upside down, and it is an "L", an entirely different alphanumeric symbol with an entirely different meaning.

How can any of us trust "reality" when its all in how we perceive it. Humans cannot hear as well as cats. We cannot smell as well as dogs. Our senses are limited, and hell, even the senses of other species of animals is limited as well, but we can see by comparison some of our more obvious limitations. Our very genetics, our human-make up places constraints on what we can observe and even the conclusions we can therefore draw. As such, reality, our reality, is at best our perception of it. We can reach common, agreed upon understandings of a reality, based on our common sensory organs and common cognitive processes. But the beauty of humanity is that we are imperfect. We have different life histories. We have had different experiences. We have different opinions and thoughts and interpretations of that which make up our being. Social interaction would be boring (but perhaps easier) and unrewarding if we didn't gain vicarious rewards from others which we do not ourselves possess. So yes, I stand by my stance that its all about perception. Its all relative.

And I stand by that for now, at least until I perceive otherwise...