- Spencer Greenberg and Travis M.
- Aug 25
- 12 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/what-stands-between-you-and-reality
Short of time? Read the key takeaways.
🔗 Your perception of the world around you is shaped by many hidden steps. Even before you form a simple thought like “There’s a cat on the table,” your senses and brain have already selected, processed, organized, and interpreted information—creating several opportunities for details to be lost or errors to creep in.
👁️ Your senses capture only a thin sample of reality. Humans detect some features of the world but miss many others. Non-human animals detect things we don’t, and fundamental physics may impose additional limits on what can ever be observed or known.
🧠 Perception involves your brain constructing a model of the world from sensory information. Many philosophers describe conscious experience as involving a brain-generated representation—what this article loosely calls a “simulation”—rather than a passive recording of reality. Illusions show that this representation can sometimes mislead.
🗂️ We make the simulation manageable by carving it up with concepts that might not reflect reality. We compress the data by carving it up and categorizing it. We call this region of reality a “suit”, and that region a “tea set” (for example). But the reason we believe in suits and tea sets (rather than carving reality up some other way) is because those concepts serve our purposes, helping us navigate the world. Since purposes are only in our heads, at least some of the ways we carve up the world plausibly doesn’t reflect mind-independent reality.
🔦 We pay attention to only a tiny fraction of what we could notice. Our goals, expectations, interests, and training determine which parts of a scene reach awareness, while most of the available information is ignored.
📖 We turn what we notice into meaningful stories. Our memories, identities, motivations, worldviews, and social groups shape what events mean to us—which helps explain how people can interpret the same evidence in radically different ways.
🧘 Recognizing these layers should inspire epistemic humility. Since our experience is built up through multiple layers, each of which is susceptible to error, it is appropriate to:
- Treat our beliefs as slightly more uncertain than we otherwise would
- Adjust our confidence to fit the reliability of the processes that produce our beliefs
- Stay open to other people’s perspectives
