Your eyes and ears don’t tell you the truth. That’s not what they’re for. The senses evolved to enable us to survive in the world, not to represent it accurately. The reality that we experience each and every day is what we must use to survive in our environment. Our understanding of reality has changed over time. From the scholars of ancient Greece to the modern physicists of today, there have been changes and breakthroughs about the way we view the world. Beginning with Anaximander’s discovery of the Earth floating in the sky and Democritus’ discovery ot the atom. There is now a twentieth-century paradox in modern physics. We think of the atom as an organized group of electrons and protons zooming around a neutron, but this figure is completely wrong. The particles that make up the atoms have no structure or size, no weight Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work. Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease. Human beings we are conditioned to hold onto culture, beliefs, tradition and politics even at the expense of our well being. Without knowing it, we live and express these distorted ideas, practices and patterns that influence our perceptions of reality and in turn create our reality. Emotional reality, unlike physical reality, is created rather than observed. By and large, people create the emotional reality in which they live. Unfortunately the choice of which reality we create is usually made by default, a kind of habitual automatic pilot derived from temperament, metabolism, and experience. The human brain filters information within its default choices, processing that which conforms to them and excluding that which deviates from them. Beliefs inherited from family or tribe influence people's actions more strongly than those with weaker genetic bases. Indeed, highly heritable attitudes, such as political persuasions, may even steer our choices of the social "niches" we carve out for ourselves. If challenged we my not have reasons to justify inherited beliefs becuse to us it is a given that they are the truth. People simply believe that they are right in their own ideologies and cannot accept the ideologies of others which causes conflict. People's political beliefs actively demand of them that they ostracize those who do not fit with the party's agenda. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old but you really can't think of that because it's too it's too big so let's put it in terms of a calendar year
If we look at human evolution as a one year period of time:
If life on earth the 4.5 billion was scrunched into a calendar year then:
-- From interview about the noosphere with Dr. Jim Krag
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