The Bane of our Current Method of Perception

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Ok, while my class slogs (really :-)) at the quiz, I have nothing to do...why not complete the article...

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The Bane of our Current Method of Perception
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Humans have been conditioned, right since birth, to perceive in patterns. That is, an immediate movement in our thinking faculty, when in contact with a new reality, from the specific to the general. In other words, an immediate classification of the new reality into an already established and previously well-known genus. For instance, on perceiving a moving four-legged object, we would immediately, almost involuntarily, classify it an animal. This has been the method of learning we have been conditioned to over generations, so much so that it is now an instinct in most of us. And instincts are rarely analysed, they are assumed to be the inviolable premises of thought.

What then are the consequences of this instinct we have cultivated over generations, this tendency to think of and classify the new in terms of the old, established, general and known. The most important consequence is obvious...we have lost the ability to recognize anything new. The four-legged object in the previous instance could have been a robot from another galaxy, yet to us it would be an animal. The power to perceive something original as such is lost; the original is original relative or compared to a copy. This is our current thought and this is the result of centuries of science and philosophy.

The movement of evolution, on the other hand, occurs through the perception of the new. The better we evolve into the new and suitable, the better our chances for success. The contradiction, in this principle of evolution and our system of learning as detailed above, is apparent. In fact, evolution as we have come to recognise it, through small mutations, arises due to this deficiency in human perception.

"Since we recognize new reality only in small steps, we evolve in miniscule steps. Evolution through minor mutations is thus a result of our deficiency of perception, our tendency to classify specific new in terms of the perceived general."

An example will be apt for the conclusion. Let us take the case of evolution of the monkey into the human at its current stage of evolution (i.e. the human being in 2005). According to the above theory, the monkey cannot evolve directly into "the human being of 2005" because it cannot in one step perceive this new reality. The monkey can perceive only in stages. It will probably first classify the human being into an animal, then recognize a few superiorities of humans over animals, say our physiological superiority like the erect spine; the next step would be to recognize another set of evolutionary superiorities ...and so on, each such recognition would take thousands of years. Thus, this slow movement of evolution is a result of this wrong method of perception of the monkey, this incapability to perceive the new reality immediately.

And the great irony in life is that we exert our entire lifetime in perfecting within ourselves, this imperfect mode of learning, so that in the next generation, it becomes an even stronger instinct.