The basis of realism and of so-called hard-nosed empiricism has traditionally been the ‘five senses’. ‘Don’t give me all the wishy-washy, airy-fairy nonsense. I trust what i can see, hear, and touch.’.
Yet, belief in the ostensible objectivity of the ‘five senses’ is its own form of superstitious, magical thinking. It made sense at a point in history when there was, as yet, no identification of the structure and function of the nervous system. At that time, sensed reality seemed to constitute the unquestionable foundation of reality itself. But that time has passed.
With the advent of neuroscience, it became possible to imagine objectifying subjective experience. We are still more or less unable to do that conclusively, and may well always be unable to do so. It’s an ouroboros-styled paradox. To somehow reduce subjective experience to objective terms would require that we somehow had experiential access to an objective realm; but the very fact that we have experiential access to such a realm renders it inherently subjective.
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So, the ‘five senses’ and the experiential products of the five senses are not objective. They simply seem objective, which for all intents and purposes has tended to be good enough.
Even though we are at a primitive stage of investigating consciousness, there are still some principles that we can identify about how it operates.
One principle by which sensate consciousness operates is Threshold. Phenomena below (or too far above, also) a specific threshold will simply not be registered as real.
This general principle of conscious experience relates back to our personal experiences and narratives around achieving goals in our lives.
You may feel that you just generally want to be happy. Or successful. Or attractive. Or whatever. But within that generic ideal of happiness or success, or what have you, there is actually a fairly specific (and sadly, somewhat arbitrary) threshold that you are seeking to pass. Only when that threshold is passed will you feel ‘yes, I am happy’.
While the first parts of this post may have been abstract; this last point is very, very practical.
It’s a really good idea to investigate where your own thresholds are for the various standards you are using to gauge goodness or rightness in your life.
It’s also a good idea to start to be a little skeptical of those thresholds. They are one of the main reasons that people often give up before (or just before) we are about to achieve a sense of completion.
We fall victim to the threshold fallacy. The threshold fallacy says that progress that occurs below the level of my thresholds to awareness does not exist.
This is not new-age talk. Think about the moments when you feel that a room is hot, warm, comfortable, cool, and cold. These are just various thresholds. What determines your thresholds? And what about the fact that they shift dynamically over time? Habituation or sensory adaptation is when the internal threshold of awareness shifts as a result of prolonged exposure to a stimulus or condition.
Shit. These ideas are in my head and I’m just typing them out right now.
I’m thinking about the fact that this same threshold principle influences the way I evaluate and experience my life and my progress towards goals on a daily basis. It seems problematic.
Anyway, I’ve gotten down the basics of it. I’m going to stop here.
Thresholds are natural like breathing. So, this so-called threshold dynamic is not a weakness to be corrected. It is an aspect of our nature that should be grasped and then navigated, or integrated into the way we understand experience and the way we approach and solve problems.
Yet another koan.