Let go your mouse, get your hands away from the keyboard, lean back and take a moment for yourself. Contemplate. Look around and truly observe your surroundings with all your senses. Do it now, take your time.
For practical reasons, we learn to think of ourselves as immersed in a greater world, that surrounds us completely. From cradle to grave, we foster a very unique understanding of reality, a personal model to describe the laws and limitations of the world, but it takes some effort to realize that such model is not truly assembled from purely perceived data, but from cognitive interpretation of such sensory input.
The distinction between a perceived and an interpreted reality is very important: although one can argue that the perceived signals (information captured by our senses from reality, such as light and sound) might have aspects that do not depend in any way on the perceiving agent (us) and, thus, may be entirely determined by the nature of the observed entity (the object emitting the light, or the sound or whatever), the same could not be said about the interpretation of such information. That being said, it becomes clear that the world in which we “see” ourselves is NOT external to us, it is personal, it is intimate.
Natural selection made us very dependent on our vision, and the physiological structures related to both perceiving and interpreting light are very powerful in our species. We rely on sight to make a model of the world and when we think of something, we create a mental image of it, and I am not talking only about concrete objects, but about abstract concepts as well.
For instance, think of an angry person (or a happy family or, well, anything you want) and try to decompose the thought in facets created from each one of your senses. As I said before, thoughts transcend the sensitive boundaries by being the result of interpretation and cognition, but still it is easy to associate a certain aspect of the abstract model with the data that was used to create it. From this exercise you might realize that the visual contribution to our personal weltanschauung is greater than that of any other sense.
For an elaborate drawing, rich in details, it is natural to choose a delicate pen, however this visual dictatorship has had deep implications in the development of language, culture and art. In paying more attention to the remaining senses, new opportunities emerge and a richer life with interesting sensations and experiences is made available.
Also, aesthetic values are sustained by visual foundations, leaving sound and its counterparts as yet unexplored technological and artistic vehicles, despite the existence of music.
In which direction can these vehicles take us?
How far can they go?
Frank Lloyd Wright – “TV is chewing gum for the eyes.”
You’re google’s second hit for glide along.
Comment by Tuba — March 16, 2007 @ 12:22 am
precisa escrever em inglês aqui?
dois comentários:
não gostei dos posts serem em inglês, achei um pouco engasgado e me parece que você tentou ser formal, o que, na minha opinião, complicou um pouco a leitura.
não concordo que a contribuição visual pro nosso modelo de mundo seja maior que as outras. acho que isso é pessoal. no meu caso, a organização mental é principalmente feita por sons e palavras como se fosse uma conversa comigo mesmo.
será que a maioria pensa visualmente?
Comment by nano — March 20, 2007 @ 8:50 pm
I have no idea where to start, so I’ll just begin with some remarks about the text’s form (which are not of much relevance) so that, later, I can get to comment on the content itself.
The first thing that strikes me is that the text seems very conceited, the way you chose to express these ideas is extremely formal and somewhat complicated (maybe more than should have been). I don’t see a problem in this, but you have to be aware that this will drive people off and discourage them from reading and commenting. On the other hand, this can select the ‘audience’ that might be more equipped to discuss whatever you bring about. Personally, I enjoy taking discussions from ordinary shallowness to something a bit deeper/fuller and I always try (and find it hard) to do it clearly; so I understand that writing this kind of text is extremely complicated; especially because of these matters of form.
Either way, I still think that you introduced unnecessary complications. Some examples of these are: the third paragraph has one of the longest sentences I might have ever read and, believe me, it makes it hard to understand; then there is this word “weltanschauung”, which might not be really necessary; then there is the sixth paragraph’s first phrase (actually the entire paragraph!), which starts off from what seems an analogy, but never completes it, instead there is a whopping jump that just confuses the reader. Like I said, these things are not so important, but might become unnecessary impediments to people who try to comprehend this.
Another thing that struck me is that somehow it seems that there are some bits and pieces missing along the text, maybe even entire paragraphs. Again, this can be interesting because allows more freedom to interpret what you wanted to say. But if you wanted to say something very precisely, then you might have to consider keeping the text’s original integrity…
Now, here are some more objective things that I might have missed concerning the actual content:
This affirmation that we “learn to think of ourselves as immersed in a greater world” supposedly for practical reasons; I don’t see exactly why this is practical nor why some other form of thinking of ourselves would be less or more practical. I see this much more as a matter of, say, chance than of practicality, it simply happened this way.
On the next paragraph, despite the confusion brought by the intricateness of the text, there is, at least to me, a very important (and usually overlooked) questioning of ‘reality’, of whether or not it exists outside of us and all that jazz. Maybe clearing up the text a bit would improve this questioning considerably, since this idea is valuable to understand both the rest of the text and lots of things in our very lives. (This is, for example, a part where I feel you cut something out.)
Then, I’m not sure about how “we create mental images of abstract concepts” as you say on the 4th paragraph. I agree that we normally learn and teach abstract concepts using images, but I don’t think that we truly understand them *through* images. Take, for example, a number, can’t you think of this number without having to invoke an image of a quantity of objects representing them? Maybe you think of the way you write this number, but this does not help to *understand* what it means. Following this line of thought, I’d change your example from “an angry person” to “anger” to illustrate this distinction I want to make; probably bringing up concepts attached to adjectives is much more prone to leading us into evoking visualness. (Another remark on form here: In this particular part I felt there is also a great ambiguity in the way you use the word ‘image’ (and ‘mental image’), sometimes I’m not sure you meant the image as a visual entity or as a (group of) concept(s).)
On the next paragraph (the 5th) you lead us to decompose thoughts according to the senses that might have created them and then to associate the abstract model of these thoughts with these sensorial inputs. I don’t think this is as easy as you suggest: the sum of whatever is perceived by each of my senses is much more than what I perceive through them individually (not to mention synesthesia). So, when you conclude that most of what forms these models is visual, there is a sort of rhetorical trick: it is true that most of the raw product comes from sight, but this does not necessarily mean that what constitutes the resulting mental model is mostly visual.
Still, I completely agree that by “paying more attention to the remaining senses, new opportunities emerge”. And I find the possibilities of explorations in these fields very exciting.
Next, I don’t understand why you affirm that “aesthetic values are sustained by visual foundations”. For instance: which visual foundation sustains the aesthetics of music (you say that yourself!), or, say, perfumes, or even the ‘feel’ of the different textiles that humans have created, and so on?
Finally, I am convinced that we, humans, are capable of taking down this visual dictatorship that you mention, but (and this is a big “but”) this is going to take a long time, nonetheless I think that it will happen sooner or later and these explorations of our senses will go as far as we have come with our sight. I think of people becoming more aware of all the elements that create their surroundings and from the need to control them there will eventually emerge a valuable understanding; which will propel this cycle (awareness-control-understanding) even further.
Comment by rhwinter — March 21, 2007 @ 12:53 am