Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Mind-Spectrums Picture
Originally posted on July 15, 2013
The problem with mind-spectrums is that they involve different sorts of things, receptive sense organs, intuitive “organs,” temperamental sensitivities, interpretative biases (which follow worldviews), frames of reference, etc. There are tendencies to imagine as distinctly different things that which is the same thing (at least as resonating to one part of one kind of spectrum), even though according to different criteria these things might be perceived as quite different things.
What is truly bizarre is that humans have difficulty in recognizing this. For some, very physically “large” things tend to take on god-like status, while we ignore the incredibly pervasive but invisible micro-world—and of course these are just a matter of a score or less orders of magnitude of orders of ten (i.e., things that are 1 x 10(-5) cm to things that are 1 x 10(5) cm in diameter). Similarly, variations in mass, energy, brightness, etc.
Psychologically, degrees of brightness, sub-types of sensitivity, and other human temperamental and ability categories really seem rather different to different people or other sentient beings, as different as on the drawing above. Just sayin’.
Similarly, many things that are distinctly different appear to us as the same thing, such as metamerism in color theory: you can make a color that appears the same to us using lots of different “ingredients” (ink, light, etc.).
It’s almost as though humans are designed to be easily fooled. We tend to look for patterns and relative measures more than Truth. We can easily see the difference between cherry red and fire-engine red, if they’re placed next to each other; but standing on their own we would just call them both “really red.”
Plus, our environment has a profound affect on our perception. Once again, using color as an example: http://www.creativepro.com/article/simultaneous-contrast-how-your-environment-affects-color-perception