It’s all about perception
Spoiler Alert: I must admit that the first week of this semester was a tough start for me, having as a consequence me being unfocused and uninterested in the subjects we encountered, nevertheless I’ll do my best to connect everything I’ve learned during this short period of time.
These first two weeks of the second semester were a great approach of perception. How we see things, through what theories we build our knowledge, how we understand things and believe some of them as true or false, and how we attach meaning and concepts to things are all of great importance in our life.
The first day we talked with Gabriel Zanotti, and in our dialogue he mentioned the importance of the problem in the verification of the so-called natural sciences. What he meant to explain was that, contrary to common understanding, we cannot prove that a given theory is true, but we can only non-disconfirm it (i.e. we can only say that it’s not false). This changes the paradigm of how we see social and natural sciences and knowledge in general, because we tend to question more often the validity of the conjectures around us. The most common example of this is physics, because we take those theories (e.g. gravity) as truths, absolute truths you may say, when we can only say that it’s a conjecture that has not yet being dismissed. Also, we don’t question why things are the way they are, or how did Newton arrived to the law of universal gravitation, or why is the acceleration of gravity 9.8 m/s2.
Following the science of physics, we had our first approach to Kitty Ferguson’s book, Fire in the Equations. In the beginning of the book, Ferguson explains the difference between how a “normal” person and a physicist would only see an object, in this example a chair. Whether we see only an object or a thing made up of atoms moving fuzzily and leaving a lot of emptiness is not what we are interested per se, but how different perceptions can change the meaning of what appears to be the exact same thing. When we realize this, we can only imagine an infinite number of approaches to everything in this world. Another interesting fact regarding physics was related to the building of a camera obscura and how light travels. It’s very entertaining to figure out how nature works and in this particular case, why we see the image reversed when it’s projected through the pinhole of a camera obscura. What’s even more interesting is how our eyes and brain work. They see all things as you see them in the camera obscura (reversed), but our brain reverses the images as an adaptation that helps us see things in a more useful way.
When we talk about useful things and how our eyes perceive things we can’t leave out the beauty of them. But, what is beauty? Can it be “measured” objectively? Is any kind of beauty objective? Well, there are in fact some things we perceive more beautiful, esthetic, or pleasing than others. The Golden Ratio (≈1.618) has been found in nature and since Pythagoras and Euclid we have managed to build things with this proportion or ratio. So, when things are built using this ratio, they would tend to be perceived more pleasantly by others. This introduces us to the notion of drawing and more particularly, knowing how to draw. Drawing, as Kassandra quoted Betty Edwards in her book, Drawing with the right side of the brain, is not a muscular activity but a mental one, in which we draw with our brain by having the clear images we acquire through the exercise of observation. So, knowing how to draw is knowing how to see, observing every little detail and making a mental image of it. This way we would be able to leave behind the concepts of things we have formed throughout all of our life. Going back to the example of the chair, when we are asked to draw a chair, the most probable thing we would draw is a traditional chair, a predetermined concept of a chair. The same happens with everything, but when we leave behind all of that, we gain the ability of observing the things as they are. Drawing is not about a hand and a pencil; it’s about the brain and the eyes.
But concepts are not that bad. Concepts allow us to represent a sense of reality into our mind. Why a “sense of reality”? Well, let’s not go deeper into this subject because we would have to try to solve the questions, what is reality and is there only one? For now, let’s just say that the context in which we are is of great influence in how we see the so-called conception of reality. We found out the importance of this during our dialogue on classical studies when we read Plato’s Crito. We can see here how Crito and Socrates have different meanings to the same words, for example good, evil, and virtue. The difference in the meanings of words is what Douglas Hofstadter would call active meaning. Hofstadter explains how we attach meaning to things and how these meanings are constructed from previous interpretations and meanings.
A final characteristic of how perception affects our reality is history. We can see in the documentary of the Atacama Desert, were some women have an endless search of their relatives lost during the Pinochet regime. By only seeing this part of the story, it becomes easy to judge something or someone, and blame these or that people of the terrors of that war. Nevertheless, when you see the other part of the story as it happened to us with the visit of Francisco Sánchez, a historian and economist focused on the history of Chile, you start to doubt what is the real reality, if we can say that. This was one of the most interesting things I’ve learned these first two weeks. It came to my mind how we usually take sides when we play with some history and data, and have different interpretations to what appear “objective” according to the theories and previous knowledge we have. Getting back with our conversation we Zanotti, for now I can only say that what would be the closest to truth is that there is not one.