Reality - Much More as We Are Than it is!

I have been turning something over for a few weeks since a conversation I had with a friend about the limitations of language affecting our experience of reality. My friend disagreed but I do think that there are so many ways to see and think about this in a way that supports my point – ways that sit at the core of much of Tintra’s work also.

A, maybe silly, example is that the Greek’s never had a word for blue. If you read the Iliad and the Odyssey the fact that it isn’t there when we all think of Greece ancient or otherwise in whites and blues is quite striking. The sea is described as ‘wine-dark’. Honey described as green. Sheep, most surprisingly of all, are violet. But bronze is a colour used frequently. But the sky - has no colour at all in his work. I think that isn’t because they couldn’t figure out a word for it, it was just assumed as a thing that ‘just is’ – something that exists so deeply that doesn’t need a name. To my mind this is telling of the culture and their human experience as much as it is the language – this was a time when the Greek culture was inventing pretty much everything we think of today as western thought.

When William Gladstone noticed this in 1858, he reached a conclusion that is telling in turn of Victorian culture. The Greeks must have been partially colourblind. The human eye he reasoned, must have been evolving in real time, and Homer simply lived too early to see what was available to the obviously very evolved eye of a Victorian gentlemen.

He was spectacularly wrong of course. Our genes for colour vision are millions of years old. Homer's eyes were the same as our eyes. What was missing was not a retina cone but a word. Greek did not yet have a category called blue so without the category, the sky was simply something you looked through and by extension experience differently.

The rabbit hole I fell down thinking about this revealed the same pattern appears in language after language across time The Vedic hymns, the Hebrew Bible, old Icelandic, early Chinese - blue is almost always the last basic colour to be named, arriving only after dark, light, red, green and yellow have been settled by each culture. Some of this may be the just the fact that blue is rare in nature not many blue plants or animals. And maybe because blue pigments are hard to make meaning there was little day to day use for the word without a thing in your hand to point at, you don’t need a word.

In Namibia, the Himba people use five basic colour terms with no word for what English calls blue, but they have a single word that covers shades English speakers would split into green and blue. If you were to show a Himba elder a ring of green squares with one slightly different shade hidden among them, and they will spot it almost immediately, much faster than an English speaker as our language is more attuned to difference, not nuance. Show them the same ring with a blue square sitting in the middle of the greens, and they will sometimes pause, where an English first mind would see it as glaringly obvious. Their visual system is the same as ours. Their category system isn’t and that alters their experience, as our alter it in the other direction.

It is not that the Himba are missing something it’s that they are noticing things our vocabulary makes invisible to us. Their language has carved up the world along axes our culture decided not to bother with. Whatever they spend a lifetime distinguishing, we walk past.

This is what I’ve been thinking about – what does that mean about the reality of the world around us. We think, particularly in western cultures of perception as a window onto reality. The eye sees and the brain registers what is actually there, but that isn’t really how it works – our brains are seeing an interpretation of what is there (whether it’s there or not is another thing I ponder often, but I’ll get to that another time) – The thing being - Reality is as we are as much as it is how it is.

Basically, as I understand it visible light is a tiny strip of the electromagnetic spectrum, super narrow really — bees see ultraviolet, snakes see infrared, mantis shrimp have sixteen kinds of receptor we have just three. What we call colour is not really there in the world it’s just what the brain produces when wavelengths of a certain ratio hit the back of the eye. Magenta does not exist as a single wavelength of light at all. It is something the brain invents to make sense of seeing red and blue at the same time. A useful fiction to allow us to make sense of the world around us through the cultural lens of the experience and need of our society. Language carves the rendering of each colour into nameable shades and then the culture decides which of those shapes matter and indexes on the ones that help that society adapt and thrive.

By the time you’re looking at the sky and calling it blue, you’re three layers deep into an interpretation. What I keep coming back to is the gap between how constructed all of this is physically but then how absolutely certain we are that when we use these phrases we are ‘right’ and they are ‘factual’

I use colour as an example to make a broader point most of what we treat as obvious is the result of editing that is encoded by our cultural experience which in turn impacts the categories we think in, the words we have available, the colours we name, the behaviours we read as polite or rude, what constitutes a good person or a successful life, the features of a serious idea. Literally none of these things are ‘real’ none of them arrive as raw data, they arrive with the framing not of reality but of our background that is invisible because we have been looking through it for so long it becomes reality.

And yet we move through the world absolutely convinced of our own position in it and how right we are vs the person or culture next to us – who is clearly mad for seeing it differently.

I have been fortunate to spend much of my life in places where the framing is different from the one I grew up inside. In Papua New Guinea, in the Amazon, in the South Pacific, in the deserts of southern Africa, spending time with people whose languages encode time, ownership, family and obligation along lines my own culture does not bother with. Each experience has slightly recalibrated my own. Not so much because they are right and we are wrong, or indeed the reverse, but experience of being inside someone else's category system does a great job of making you briefly aware that one has their own category system and reality is a subjective experience and the things that we hold on to so dearly as a global culture - mostly to our collective detriment – are just evolutionary constructs to help us make sense of the world around us.

Most of us don’t really get that so we start to confuse rendering for truth and once we do that it is in our nature to defend that truth – usually at the expense of understanding.

This, I think, is the real potential cost of the rise of Artificial Intelligence - not that we lose this or that bit of vocabulary or way of learning or communicating but that we lose the ability to notice these nuances at an industrial scale and the right/wrong protocol dominant in Socratic minded western technology becomes the global lingua franca to the point of homogenisation.  A language disappearing is a travesty, but the deeper truth is that a way of understanding the world disappears with it. As we as a culture homogenise the dissenting framings stop being available the conversation gets both louder and narrower at the same time.

It is this that concerns me the most, the drift to dogmatics - look at any feed, any debate, any boardroom, any political speech - the level of certainty is extraordinary. Everyone is so absolutely sure of things they have not examined (and often could not defend), so sure of categories they didn’t invent and so sure that the other guy is wrong.

It seems to me that a much more helpful response to all this — to the narrowness of our spectrum, the fictions of our perception, the contingency of our categories, the locality of our culture — should not be with the current increasing nihilism but humility. A base working assumption that the rendering you are looking at is just one possible rendering of innumerable options and not the actual thing itself. That the certainty that is felt that creates a tribal desire in people to defend and double down is simply just information parsed through your own cultural and social editing system, and not about some inalienable truth that must be defended and any attack on it being an attack on self.

I suspect a useful question we can ask, in almost any situation, is some version of: Am I actually seeing this situation as it is — or am I just so sure of the colour of my sky that anyone seeing it differently must be the idiot?

It’s a trivial way to look at a growing global issue, but it does feel like a better place to start than where most of us currently are.