The Mind’s Eye 👁

To the extent that our views are coloured by our expectations and upbringings, they have a strong tendency to be personalized or relativized, thus routinely deviating from and becoming at odds with the realities of life and the true nature of things. After all, our perspectives (particular slants, views, prospects or outlooks on things), orientations (basic attitudes, beliefs or feelings regarding certain subjects or issues), frames of reference (how issues or matters are structured and contextualized via a set of criteria or stated values in relation to which measurements or judgements can be made), and points of view (specific attitudes or ways of considering issues or matters) characteristically entail limitations, imperfections, biases, value judgements, opinions, interpretations, assumptions and even speculations. Whether or not we are aware of and willing to acknowledge the ongoing sociocultural mediations and intrapersonal cognitive distortions separating our subjective reckoning from the objective reality, there is no escaping that we are individually conditioned and compelled to project our views and expectations onto matters through the lenses and filters of our minds and perceptions, often occasioning assorted pitfalls, prejudices and fallacies, as elucidated in the subsequent sections of The Quotation Fallacy “💬”. The anonymous author at Philosophical Epiphany, a “blog [that] revolves around Philosophy, Mind, and Art”, has even gone as far as declaring that “Life is Mostly Imagined”:

Most of the time we are so fanatical with our thinking (in such a ubiquitous manner) that we fail to realize our relentless thinking. Nearly all of our perceptions are contaminated by our beliefs, expectations, inclinations, and biases. At times, this perceptual contamination prevents us from interacting with the world as it is in itself. More often than not, we struggle to perceive our environment without infecting the objective reality with our naive attributions.

Evolutionary theories suggest that we rely on inherent biases and stereotypes to interact more efficiently with our daily encounters. Piaget’s assimilation model as well as Le Châtelier’s principle in chemistry may be stretched to encompass this philosophical dimension: When met by a novel experience, our mind will endeavor to alleviate the stress via ‘experience-integration’ under pre-existing categories. In addition, Piaget suggests that when impressions do not fit into an ideological meadow, we begin to accommodate the data by fostering a new cognitive faction. However, note that accommodation will evidently stem from our concealed prejudice, beliefs, upbringing, desire, and inclinations of the world.

[E]xorbitant over-analysis of the world causes objectivity to suffocate in a sea of biased subjectivity; successively, tainting the authenticity of the world as it presents itself to us. Furthermore, overlaying the manifestations of the world with ‘biased’ attributions contributes to an aberrant imagination.

We ought to change the ideas in our mind to unveil the true realities of the world