July 27, 2023
There's the popular illusion of Rabbit-Duck. A rabbit or a duck? Up to you to decide.
A hallmark illusion for anyone who wants to drive home the idea of perceptual relativity.
Attempting to dig conceptually deeper, Wittgenstein - an Austrian philosopher - argues that the illusion represents the distinction between perception and interpretation. When you understand that there are two potential ways to see the image: your response to what you think it is, goes from stating a fact to an opinion.
It relates to our ability to understand our perceptual shortfalls, recognizing that we accept the illusion as reality even if objectivity is a virtue. We recognize the choice in stating our own reality while recognizing we keep this fictitious agency. Map and Territory. To be Straussian. The Invisible and Visible Curriculum. Phenomenal consciousness. We're all grappling with the fact that our senses don't tell the full story.
The book "Nudge" written by Thaler and Sunstein, delves into the cognitive biases that impact our judgement. If only we knew that hindsight bias is mere cope.
Knowing about scope insensitivity means I can't internalize the differences between orders of magnitude - and as such, even when I make mistakes, my recognition of the fault saves me? We have cool words to label our mistakes: all reprehended if we can accurately label them afterwards. Reading a New Yorker piece, it was brought up that we're quite bad and notice the faults in ourselves but can notice them in others.
You learn all this new jargon, and now you can go off on your friend who is making bad financial decisions at the grocery store.
My rationalizations are my own, and yours...hidden. The Elephant in the Brain looks into this more deeply. All of our actions are extensions of our desire for social assimilation. It's perhaps useful that we aren't always aware of our true motivations, that we tell ourselves different once we've already done.
There's more nuance to our motivations, at least abstractions above this fundamental desire that are worth noting. Unique to us, we get virtue information symmetry. I don't know what you really want. Your definition of what it means to do right is within your frame of view, so a relationship, my acceptance of your actions is most likely when these internals align. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't.
I think more about this idea about ibbing and flowing through different ways of self expression in different environments, when you're with different people. What does it mean to lose yourself? What does it mean to not lose yourself? Is it recognizing that you're an invariant being, regardless if you're percieved as the rabbit or the duck. The interpretation of what is presented as a responsibility exclusively up to the perceptor.
You didn't choose to be this complex, but maybe you did. In striving for authenticity, perhaps that looks like clinging on this one form of self, because variance is disingenuous. Working hard to come up with a palatable form for all the environments, so you can remain constant.