Subjective Reality

Every day, every minute, your interests shape your perception of the world. The world is viewed through a filter, the filter of your mind. Things which catch our interest, stand out. Things which don't, fade away. That seems so obvious, yet it has wide-ranging effects on how we live our lives. How we see our world.

Take architecture, for example. It's all around us, all the time. Most people don't even register it. But to someone who has studied architecture, every street, every city block, is full of architecture. Good architecture or bad, it's everywhere. In a way, it's like architects are in on a big secret, a big conspiracy: they see something which is "hidden" from everyone else, even though it's not really hidden at all, it's really just filtered out.

When I studied German, I started to become much more aware of the German influence on the English language. I'd say a certain construction in English, and realize this construction had a special German origin and name. The construction would be impressed on my mind: I'd "see" it; it would be one of the things that "happened" to me during the day. But to people who hadn't studied German, the construction would pass unnoticed. Even though it was the same words and the same grammar. Viewed through different filters, we experience wholly different versions of reality.

It's not something you can "turn off". A friend once pointed out to me, that the price of learning to read, is that once you get good enough at reading, you can never look at writing in your language and NOT read it. Go ahead, give it a try: try browsing through the next paragraph, just admiring the shapes of the letters, without reading them. It's impossible.

Thus, when you take a walk downtown, you see a very different world than a young child taking the same walk. To the child, there are letters everywhere, signs and posters, but they're just meaningless symbols. To you, they're meaningful words with significance wholly removed from symbols that make them up. Imagine a provocative neon sign outside a nightclub. It gives you a much different experience than it would give to, say, a tourist from Europe who couldn't read it.

When children watch "Baywatch", it's just a show about a bunch of people at a beach. Rather unremarkable. They don't "see" all the almost-nude supermodels walking around. If a grownup watches "Baywatch" with a kid, the two parties see utterly different shows!

Scientists of various shapes and sizes, are particularly prone to see the world through their own filters. To a physicist, everything is physics. To a chemist, it's all chemistry. I'm a mathematician myself, and I can't help but see math everywhere. If I'm walking side by side with a non-mathematician on the street, my reality has math in it, and his does not. It doesn't even have to make sense: to a devoted professor of obscure animal mating rituals, everything is obscure animal mating rituals.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

These "models of reality" are very useful, and we use them all the time. Whatever you're interested in, your mind will incorporate into your "filters", the result is you'll see that thing everywhere. This in turn makes your life more joyful and at the same time makes you more competent at those things you specialize in.

Take language acquisition, for example. I never used to notice foreign script in my world very often. Then I started studying languages. Suddenly, I see Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Greek everywhere. Is it because, just by coincidence, people suddenly started using those scripts around me? Or is it because, when they did so, I sat up and took note of the fact? The other day I saw some Chinese characters on a girl's backpack and used that as an excuse to chat her up. Before I studied languages, those characters would've looked like totally random jumble-- as a matter of fact, the girl herself didn't know she had Chinese characters on her backpack! Anyway, the encounter gave me a (tiny) review of Chinese just while walking around a North American university campus. My mind was actively applying filters to fill my reality with things I wanted to see.

Biased political pundits use our filters on us all the time. If a conservative-leaning writer writes about a liberal politician's scandal, they'll be sure to throw in "(D)" all over the place, and their conservative-leaning readers will just automatically see the subject in a different, more sinister light. When a liberal-leaning writer covers the exact same story, the political affiliation is ignored. Some news stations have even been known to brand a scandal-ridden politician with the wrong party affiliation, conveniently saving a political party from guilt-by-association!


-----> MAKE YOUR LIFE MORE INTERESTING AND EXCITING

If you want to apply the filter concept to make your life more interesting and exciting. Then, the answer is to read about lots and lots of interesting things. Read about history, read about music theory, read about architecture and car mechanics and sabermetrics (that's the study of baseball statistics), read about psychology and sociology, anatomy and Russian politics. For every new subject you read about, your mind will bend to let you acknowledge those things in your world.

Not only will this make your own life more interesting and enriched, it'll make you more interesting to other people. Part of social interaction is finding a bridge between your reality and the reality of that hot date.

PERFECT COLOR BLINDNESS

Write this next bit down, it's great for starting conversations with hot girls. Imagine if you were born with "perfect color blindness": you see every color as its exact opposite. Black as white, blue as red, and so on. The question is, could you ever detect that you saw colors differently from anyone else? How could you deduce, just from talking to someone, whether you saw colors differently than them? It would be impossible! You might ask, "is this shirt green?", and they'd say "yes", but you'd both have different notions of what "green" is!

BAD SUBJECTIVE REALITIES: THE SIX REALMS OF BUDDHISM

In Tibetan Buddhism, unenlightened subjective reality is divided into six "realms". They have nothing to do with physical reality, but rather with how we view our world:

* The Hell Realm: The Hell Realm is the subjective reality in which everything is against me. Whether or not you're in The Hell Realm has nothing to do with whether or not anything's actually "against" you-- in fact, almost always, things aren't "against" you at all. The Hell Realm is just the paranoid perception of such.

* The Hungry Ghost Realm: The Hungry Ghost Realm is the subjective reality in which there just isn't enough. Enough food, enough money, enough love, etc., it doesn't matter, nor is it usually actually objectively true. Billionaires and world leaders wander into the Hungry Ghost Realm just as easily as the most impoverished slaveworker.

* The Animal Realm: The Animal Realm is the subjective reality that you have to follow a certain script like a mindless animal. People viewing the world through this lens have a dull predictable life where they just go through the same motions day in and day out. If something goes awry, then "like a fish out of water", the Animal Realmer just doesn't have any idea how to cope!

* The Human Realm: The Human Realm is the subjective reality that the only important things in life are securing wealth, securing status, securing friends and love like these are just consumable assets. It's the "Keeping Up with the Jones" reality, and people in this reality always have some idea that they're "alllllllllmost there", that if they make just one more dollar, one more friend, one more promotion, they'll "win". They never will, of course.

* The Titan Realm: The Titan Realm is the subjective reality that you're competing with the "gods", ie, with entities you can never hope to beat. Unlike the lower realms, Titan Realm inhabitants perceive luxury and plentitude all through their lives, but it's not as MUCH luxury or power as "the gods" have.

* The God Realm: The God Realm is the subjective reality that you're somehow better than everyone else around you. Infinitely better, like everyone around you is on a whole lower level. This is a terrible lens to view reality through, leading to loneliness and extreme fear-of-change.

(Hattip Ken McLeod's "Wake Up To Your Life" for the list of the Realms)

-----> ESCAPE FROM THE BAD SUBJECTIVE REALITIES

To escape from any of the Six Realms I just listed, just become aware of it.

You must become aware that you're viewing reality through one of the lenses. This doesn't have to be a self-condemning or guilty awareness, just a simple realization: "Hey wait a second, I'm projecting the Hell Realm right now". "Man, I'm never gonna get a girlfriend... wait... hold on a second... I'm projecting the Hungry Ghost realm, aren't I!" In the awareness stage, don't even try to actively change your lens (that's too hard). Instead just be aware. "Heh, isn't it interesting how I feel like I have to compete so much... this Titan Realm sure is weird!"

Awareness naturally breaks down the bad filters. (Incidentally, I think the six "Bad Realms" of Tibetan Buddhism are just an artifact of our brains not evolving as fast as the technology around us. To a caveman, there would be lots of times when one or another of the Six Realms would be a very useful filter to apply. Like, the hell realm when you're being chased by a predator!)

CONCLUSION

We see a slightly different world than everyone around us. Our mind creates good filters, which make life more enriched and interesting, and bad filters, artifacts perhaps of more primitive times. We can amp up the good filters just by studying things that naturally interest us. And weaken the bad filters just by being aware of them and their silliness.

For a moment, may our views of reality be bridged. Then you too will have your face glow with excitement at the everyday beauties all over the world!!!!

Here are some things you can read to expand your awareness of the beauties of the world:
The Mirror Model of Social Interaction
Short Story: The Mirror
Models Of Reality
The Sound of your Native Tongue