Let’s take a closer look at our “Subjective World”.
There are of course experiences that are common to us all. We breathe, we sleep, we eat, we defecate and we micturate. We all do these things, but even then, we do these differently. Take any grou…
Let’s take a closer look at our “Subjective World”.
There are of course experiences that are common to us all. We breathe, we sleep, we eat, we defecate and we micturate. We all do these things, but even then, we do these differently. Take any group of people, even a small group, and you would discover differences. Sometimes these differences are only slight, sometimes great. But they are all nonetheless different. And this is just in terms of the short list of basic necessities of life – the physical things all of us are required as humans to do every day to survive.
As regards mental activities, this is possibly where our subjective realities diverge the most. Indeed, mental activities can be diverse as the number of people on the planet.
Broadly speaking, we each live in our own little, separate, subjective worlds. We are each going to approach the world from our own particular point of view. No one sees the world in quite the same way as anyone else. Seeing is perceiving. Even if two people are looking at the same thing, one person sees it from one particular perspective and the other person sees it from another particular perspective, a different perspective. And again, although these two perspectives might be similar, they will never ever be exactly the same.
Let’s return to our sense of sight to help explain this situation a little better.
Imagine you had a circle of say 30 people and in the middle was placed a vase of flowers. And then they were asked to paint this. Irrespective of their ability as artists, they would all paint the vase from a different angle.
The artistic movement of Cubism was based on this principle. Picasso painted pictures of objects like vases or people, but painted them as though they were seen from different points of view. However, rather than paint a series of different painting of the same object, the different perspectives were put onto a single canvas. Such paintings might strike us as strange perhaps, but people like Picasso were trying to show that things can be seen from different perspectives. We all see things differently. Even if this difference is only marginal, the reality we see is different for each and every one of us. It is subjective.
What is more, we live in an interpreted world.
Our brains interpret the world in a particular way. Our brains act as mediators between us and the Objective World out there. The raw stimuli of the Objective World gets interpreted by our brains. The act of perceiving occurs by our brains interpreting what is experienced.
If it helps you to conceive of this concept, you can use the analogy of an interpreter of a language. The interpreter tells you what the other person is saying. If you didn’t have an interpreter, all the words that you hear, would be just a mass of unknown words - mere sounds. And these sounds would make no sense to you. Likewise, with perception, our brain tells us what we are seeing. Our understanding, or appreciation of the world is the
