True or Not - Quareness Series 218th "Lecture".
Annoyance, frustration, distress,
Chaos, disorder and mess,
Take from our happiness.
How come such things can arise
And catch us all out by surprise
And can they be cut down to size?
The cause of such problems may be
The way that we ourselves think
And the way that we ourselves see.
When we look at these matters this way
We examine ourselves and may say
Does our self image lead us astray?
It seems obvious that most (if not all) of us spend most of our everyday...thinking. I wonder, however, how many of us might be open to the notion that our thinking may not be capable of recognising reality itself...or to put it another way - reality may not be what we think it is.
In this regard could it be that the human brain can only perceive its best prediction of reality? It appears that predicting what is about to happen enables us to make quick and energy-efficient decisions under say conditions of uncertainty (which are unavoidable for us). In our everyday experience it can seem that our senses inform us of what's happening in the world around us but again the reality may be that we don't in fact perceive what our senses report so much as what our brain predicts they should report. And this raises an important question for us today about whether our expectations heavily influence (or even bias) our perceptions.
Being too long stuck in the wilderness of indecision
Amid postponement of concentrated consideration,
Is probably unwise.
Mostly when a decision finally made is revealed
What is expected is what tends to happen,
But why so?
If no potentiality can remain unfulfilled, as Epicurus said,
What we see in our heads seems, for practical reasons,
To accord with the world outside.
How could it be otherwise?
In any event we do need to quickly make some pragmatic decisions in order to survive in this uncertain world of ours. And it seems that fast responses in practice require simplified decisions...from which we may reasonably infer that prediction itself greatly simplifies decision-making. Indeed fast decisions enabled by prediction also seem to confer other evolutionary advantages for us e.g. decreased energy consumption (given the harder we think the more calories we burn in our high energy expending brain) as well as our ability to update our brain's predictions after we spot earlier errors.
Among the forces shaping our biological brains are...the imperative for speed in uncertain environments, the need to preserve energy and the need to adapt to circumstances (both expected and unexpected). And although perceiving predictive reality as opposed to actual reality may confer much advantage, we can (and do) make perceptual mistakes which can have major downside consequences. For example we may easily come to believe that those with whom we disagree are flawed in some way because they've drawn "wrong" conclusions from looking at the same information as ourselves. However, if this prediction model of the brain is correct, the actuality here is that different people may literally "see" different "facts". And being aware/conscious of this nuanced reality can help towards better understanding of each other.
Perhaps yer man Gustave Flaubert (French writer 1821-1880) was onto something of the human condition when he observed - "There is no truth. There is only perception."
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
March, 2025.