Hi TOK List,

  The “thought of the day” is the question: To what extent do we perceive reality and to what extent is reality a construction, either at the level of perceptual consciousness or at the level of the social construction of reality?

Brent’s point below is to remind us that our experience of reality may well be likened to a virtual reality or information interface. Here is a clip from the article Brent shared, which argues our perceptual world is a virtual informational representation of the outside world. [It is worth noting that the basic question regarding the distinction between how things appear to us and the actual reality outside is, of course, a very old one in philosophy]. Here are some key quotes from the Wired article:

“Not only do perceptual systems not evolve to capture the details of the real world, he argues, there's no reason to believe that the objects that we see have any correspondence to things that exist outside our minds.”

 "When you click a square, blue icon to open a document, the file itself is not a blue, square thing," he says. In the same way the physical objects that we see are just symbols, and the space-time in which they seem to exist just on the desktop of our specific interface to some objective reality beyond. Like any interface, it must stand in causal relationships to an underlying structure, but it's all the more useful for not resembling it.

Let me add to this question perspectives on the linguistic-social-cultural construction of reality. This is related to Brent’s comments and the wired article, but it is also different in that the focus here is more on linguistic concepts and those kinds of meaning making structures (i.e., systems of justification), rather than sensory-perceptual phenomena (i.e., experiential consciousness) although, of course, there are relations between these domains. What follows are two articles that raise interesting reflections on the social construction of reality.

The first is on Mayan culture and their conception of “personhood”. This gives rise to the question of “To what extent is our construction of personhood constructed and how might it be constructed differently in different cultures”
https://aeon.co/ideas/a-rock-a-human-a-tree-all-were-persons-to-the-classic-maya

The second is about the cultural conceptions and constructions of fatness, gender and sex:
https://quillette.com/2019/04/26/the-sad-truth-about-fat-acceptance/

Best,
Gregg


From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Brent Allsop
Sent: Sunday, April 28, 2019 3:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: use ToK to understand subjective phenomenology and objective science


Hi Gergg,

That looks nice.  I’m obviously kind of biased, but it seems to me you are glossing over the qualitative nature of reality, like redness and greenness.  It seems to me everyone needs to understand that the qualities we think are qualities of stuff “out there” are really qualities of stuff in our brain.  We have no ability to perceive qualities of anything ‘out there”.  For example Donald Hofman really understands this very important stuff, as you can see in this wired article<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.wired.co.uk_article_the-2Dreality-2Dof-2Dsurvival&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=OjN5xOiTickcRLf-6DkJ56wcoEKyrYt1wkGyZVFMias&s=PqCFeHwcFLerbCAm8Nn5y7EmBna03vmBH-9G0PPV89s&e=>.

Anyway,  my very biased 2 cents worth.

Brent

On Sun, Apr 28, 2019 at 9:14 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Hi Lists,
  I am working on a blog or general document that attempts to explain how the ToK System provides a new way to understand both ourselves in the world and provides a scientific account of the world and our place in it. I don’t think there is a [synthetic natural scientific humanistic] philosophy that really does this in a successful way. Some, like Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory get close. But I think the ToK does this better than any other system. And that is one of the reasons it is valuable. It offers a much greater picture of consilience between humanistic and scientific modes of thought. Attached is a draft. I welcome thoughts if you have them.

Best,
Gregg
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