Do we perceive it because it is meaningful? Yes!

[coberst]

Do we perceive it because it is meaningful? Yes!

 

How does the man with agnosia (loss of ability to perceive the familiar due to brain damage) manage on the street? Quoting such an individual “On the sidewalk all things are slim—those are people; in the middle of the street, everything is very noisy, bulky, tall—that can be buses, cars.”

 

Rudolf Arnheim says, regarding agnosia, that “Many people use their unimpaired sense of sight to no better advantage during much of the day.” How can this be true? I suspect it is true because many of us have such a very narrow range of familiar objects that have any meaning to us. Our narrow intellectual interests leave us with a very narrow world of reality because we perceive only what is meaningful.

 

Our emotions are one source of meaning. Occasionally, while walking in the woods, some movement in the underbrush will cause my blood to “run cold”. Was that a source of danger? I suspect that to most animals without the ability to create abstract concepts all perceptions are those induced by emotions (we also call them instincts). I can be alerted by a mouse darting across the floor well on the peripheral fringes of my vision while I am busy concentrating on something else because animals survive based upon their response to movement.

 

Humans, however, can create an abstract concept, which means that we can create a virtual world on top of the world directly created by Mother Nature. Mother Nature has prepared us through emotion to be very aware of movement pattern but Mother Nature has not prepared us for dealing with the world of abstract concepts.

 

We have placed into the hands of ordinary people the extraordinary power of technology; it is this virtual world, where technology is dominating and grave danger lurks, for which Mother Nature has not prepared us.

 

Quotes from Art and Visual Perception: A psychology of the Creative Eye Rudolf Arnheim

[Rade]

....Mother Nature has not prepared us for dealing with the world of abstract concepts....

 

Well no, this is not true. We are human because we have the ability to form abstract concepts, it is what makes us different from other species. Forming abstract concepts is natural for humans, a result of Mother Nature in action as you say (i.e., the process of organic evolution). Technology is nothing more than humans making use of this mental ability, using our minds to shape the environment to maximize our genetic potential. Over time, humans have shown a great ability to understand the good and bad aspects of technology (fire, the wheel, stone then iron tools, stream engine, coal, etc. etc) and we have adapted our use of it to better the good of the individual. Thus, humans are well prepared to rationalize how to use technology to maximum happiness.

[coberst]

I would say that natural selection, i.e. evolution, has taken a dramatic turn since the birth of human consciousness. Natural selection produced the human species and the human species has derailed natural selection. World wide the species that survive, including the human species, depends upon human created meaning and no longer upon natural selection.

 

We have become meaning creating creatures and have developed a high tech society that overwhelms the process of natural selection. The selection of what species will survive in the future no longer depends upon the process of natural selection but depends upon the process of human meaning creation.

 

Who am I? Of what value is my life? The child, when asking these questions, is saying that s/he wants to be recognized as an object of value. S/he wants to know how well s/he measures up as a hero.

 

Freud saw that the underlying foundation for these feelings and ambitions was the “utter self-centeredness and self-preoccupation, each person’s feeling that he is the one in creation, that his life represents all life” he tallied all this up and labeled it narcissism. Nietzsche saw this healthy expression as one of the “Will to Power” and glory.

 

This represents the “inevitable drive to cosmic heroism by the animal who had become man.”

 

Culture provides the vehicle for heroic action directed toward strengthening self-esteem. The task of the ego is to navigate through the culture in such a way as to diminish anxiety, and the ego does this by learning “to chose actions that are satisfying and bring praise rather than blame…Therefore, if the function of self-esteem is to give the ego a steady buffer against anxiety, wherever and whenever it might be imagined, one crucial function of culture is to make continued self-esteem possible.

 

Culture’s task is “to provide the individual with the conviction that he is an object of primary value in a world of meaningful action.”

 

The cultural hero system whether religious, primitive, or scientific is “still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations.”

 

How does the American culture perform its task?

 

I claim that the maximization of production and consumption is the principal means for the satisfaction of self-esteem for its citizens. It is through the active participation as a member of a community that strives constantly to maximize the production and consumption of goods that the American citizen best satisfies his or her drive for “cosmic action”.

 

We are all captives of our cultural systems. Whether the cultural system dictates the stoning of one’s sister for destroying family honor or a system that finds cosmic heroism through a process that maximizes the rate at which we consume our planet.

 

Our culture is constructed from the meaning that we create. The future of our species and of all life is dependent upon our comprehension of our self and how we use that comprehension in developing a better meaning structure than we have done so far.

 

Quotes from The Birth and Death of Meaning Ernest Becker