A Question of Human Perception, Section 1

          I recall a story I was once told about a teacher and her class- how two of the kids in the class would always be fighting one another about some stupid little thing.  So, she decided one day that she would help the two kids in their disputes.  She sat the two kids down on either side of a table, and then put a ball between them.  She then asked kid number one: “What color is the ball?”  He replied, “White.”  The second kid suddenly burst out: “No it’s not, the ball is black!”  And so they argued about the subject for some time, all along the teacher looking on icily and the rest of the class almost bursting into laughter.  At some point, kid number one asks why everyone’s laughing, and the teacher turns the ball around to show both of them that the ball is white on one side and black on the other.

          This was, in my childhood, the story that acquainted me with the problem of perception- an interesting condition.  Perception is what we base all of our ideas and ideals on, perception is the basis of everything that we know and everything that we believe.  Perception, then, is a condition of our experiences.  So then, anything that we see is a perception, anything that we hear is perception, anything that we experience is based around perception.

And once we perceive something, we usually try to formulate reasoning on why that event occurred, so to speak, we “jump to conclusions”, or formulate assumptions based on our perceptions, and make a best guess on why the event occurred.  That is to say, we think of the most probable outcome of what happened based on our beliefs, perceptions, and previous experiences to logically (or otherwise) come to a conclusion.  At this point, inclusive, conclusive, deductive, and inductive reasoning come into the picture.

To explain better, the best way I’ve ever heard anyone put it is: “Say someone closes a door because it’s too noisy, but you feel cold because of the breeze drifting in.  You see the person close the door, but don’t hear the noise because you’re farther away from the door.  You then assume that the person closed the door because it was too cold in the room, and ask no question about why they closed the door, but continue to go about your business without really caring.”

The question is, then, can you believe anything I just told you considering the content of what I just told you?  Isn’t it really just a paradox of information?  Kind of like how the best advice you’ll ever get is not to take advice?  If you perceived what I wrote, then isn’t what I wrote questionable?  And if the content is questionable, can you accept it as the truth?  A final point is this: People take the written word over perception.  Not just because it’s someone else’s perception which they can get out much easier than if they talked about it, not just because it lets people see the other viewpoint, but because when you read something, it gets reconstructed in your mind in a direct manner.

          So then, with that so well established, we have the question of why the hell I brought it up.  Mainly because people don’t care about perception these days.  They’re always so set in their viewpoints (even me) that they don’t really think about the way other people might see what they’re looking at.