Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Cultures on most continents have folktales about large hairy humanoids that lurk in remote areas of wilderness. They're called Sasquatch, Bigfoot, Yeti, Abominable Snowman, etc., in different parts of the world, but all of these creatures have essentially the same basic characteristics.

The number and wide distribution of these folktales would seem to suggest that there might be something to them. However, the tendency of human perception to interpret limited information according to learned expectations suggests that what was actually seen might not be exactly what was reported.

Human perception tends to see what it expects to see - even if that expectation varies substantially from reality.

Consider the optical illusion of a sheet of plastic that has been formed over the shape of a human face. The result is a flat sheet with a convex (protruding) face on one side, and a concave (hollow) face on the other. As the sheet is rotated the human eye will "see" a convex face on both sides because it has learned to interpret human face shapes as convex 3-dimensional objects. The optical illusion works even when the viewer's intellectual mind is fully aware that it is being tricked. The mind is incapable of accurately interpreting what it is seeing because what it's seeing violates its learned expectations.

When we encounter something new by definition we lack the prior experience to accurately interpret what we are perceiving. In the absence of real world experience, our minds try to match to the closest similar available pattern.

This scheme likely worked well to leverage limited real world experience to accelerate reactions to a new potential threat. The later evolution of our uniquely human imaginations introduced a variety of unexpected complications. The problem is that our imaginations aren't constrained by reality. For most of human history they've tended to be full of the products of human imagination: folktales, myths, legends, campfire stories, etc. It isn't much of a surprise that for most of human history individuals have earnestly reported seeing mythical creatures and fantastical events. Individuals are far more likely to believe they are seeing a mythical creature or imaginary event if they've already "seen" such things in the virtual reality of their imaginations.

According to popular accounts, dragons, fairies, witches, and demons were plentiful during the Dark Ages. Those who hung, drown, or burned witches appear to have been convinced that the women they were so piously murdering were witches. The Medieval Catholic church established official procedures for exorcising demons. Fairies were blamed for all manner of mischief by the illiterate peasants.

Reports of dragons burning villages and devouring maidens tend to be pretty rare these days. The self-proclaimed witches of today bear little resemblance to the evil crones that terrorized 17th century villagers. Fairies enjoyed a brief resurgence during the early 1900s until the photographs were determined to be fakes.

These extraordinary species appear now be endangered if not already extinct, and our modern society is obviously to blame. Their populations were allowed to decline a bit during the Reformation, and a bit more during the Enlightenment. But their greatest rate of decline appears to have begun with the advent of the Industrial Revolution accompanied by the widespread adoption of the scientific method.

While sightings may be rare today, the current low point is statistically a relative aberration, being dwarfed by the orders of magnitude longer period when these species were believed to be common.

Science has not found any evidence that dragons or fairies have ever existed on Earth. Assuming that modern science is right, then the prevailing popular perception during nearly all of time man has lived on Earth must have been wrong. Not only wrong, but lacking any valid basis for ever believing it was right. And yet most of the humans that have lived on Earth have believed that some variation of these extraordinary creatures existed in their world.

How did the belief in these extraordinary creatures persist in the absence of any real supporting evidence? How did people continue to see what didn't exist?

To be technically accurate, the error wasn't in the initial sensory perceptions, but rather in the way those perceptions were interpreted. Interpretation can often have a greater influence on our perceptions than what our sensory organs actually detect.

Signal interpretation became such an important part of sensory perception because there is a major physiological problem - there is simply far too much information potentially available for biological processing. Neural synapses aren't fast enough to process all of the potentially available information in real time. As a result, our brains are obliged to make do with only a heavily filtered one-step removed connection with the real world outside our craniums.

In order to deal with the overload, the standard practice for biological systems is to restrict the amount of information their senses collect and transmit to their brains down to just that which provides the greatest survival value. The result is that the brain never actually "sees" anything in the real world - it gets only a very limited amount of the available information and must construct an understanding based on incomplete data. It performs this trick largely by relying on expectations based on its past understanding of the world. What we "see" today is what we expect to see based on what we think we saw in the past.

Once we've made an association there is a certain amount of resistance to abandoning it. Our brains tend to filter out perceptions that don't fit our established associations, making first impressions easy to make and hard to change. This limits arbitrary fluctuations and provides a measure of stability and consistency to human behavior. It also ensures that changes will require compelling motivation to overcome preexisting associations.

Learned associations arguably work quite well for conventional species. The scheme is used in one form or another by nearly all organisms complex enough to have a brain and nervous system. However, the evolution of the human imagination introduces an interesting wildcard into the recursive feedback loop between expectation and perception.

When our previous experiences fail to provide a suitable match for a new experience, our imaginations now step in to fill the void. I'm not sure what it was that flashed by in the shadows of the forest, but it could it have looked like the dragon that Igor described seeing just before the old village caught fire! Whatever I actually saw was obviously a dragon now that my imagination has helpfully filled in the missing details!

Our imaginations predispose us to see imaginary things that in turn seem to confirm what we imagined. Believing that we have seen in the real world what we've previously only imagined promotes that imaginary memory into the realm of real world experience. An imaginary memory that is functionally good enough to serve the immediate purpose will tend to persist until/unless the mind encounters a compelling reason to change it. It could have been a dragon lurking in the forest, or it could have been any number of other dangerous animals that should also be avoided. The result is effectively the same either way, and escaping a fearsome fire-breathing dragon makes a more impressive story.

Complex symbolic communication allows the abstract products of human imagination to be transmitted between individuals. This can function as both a mechanism for sharing acquired wisdom, and a vector for spreading contagious mental illness. Mythical creatures tend to appear most often to those whose imaginations have preconditioned their minds to expect to see mythical creatures. On the other hand, only those capable of imagining aspects of their world that were beyond their current knowledge and experience, could have achieved the advances in science that make our modern world possible.

Seeing dragons in the shadows works fine as long as dragons are something to be feared and avoided. Obvious problems intrude when someone decides to actually seek out the mythical creatures that "everyone" has been seeing for as long as anyone can remember.

Sometimes the revelations of dragon-slayers free former believers from unnecessary fears and constraints. On the other hand, some societies have historically decided it would be better if the figurative dragon-slayers quietly disappeared rather than allowing their disruptive revelations to raise other inconvenient questions in the minds of believers. If belief in dragons is the basis for your whole culture and socioeconomic system, do you simply abandon your whole way of life simply because someone now tells you that dragons don't exist? Does it really matter if dragons actually exist as long as your society based on that belief seems to be functioning and fulfilling your needs?

History has recorded the results of an assortment of imaginative misinterpretations of reality that clearly diminished the survival potentials of those who employed them. On the other hand, it has also recorded the long term survival of civilizations based on interpretations of the real world that could only be the products of human imagination.

A major factor in the rise of our modern high technology civilization has been the incremental substitution of artificial sensors for human senses. The analytical measurements of machines aren't influenced by human imagination - they see what is really there because they lack a complex mind capable of convincing itself that it's seeing something different. This transition to depending on technology has made it possible to do things that would be impossible otherwise.

There is some question whether we are currently progressing towards more accurate perceptions, or regressing back into the imagination dominated world that has been the norm for most of human history. We live in tumultuous times in large measure because people whose lives and thinking are still dominated by imaginary fears and demons have gained access to the products of technology-enhanced perceptions of reality without adopting the science based perspectives that created them. There are large numbers of people who want to use the tools of 21st century technology to suppress the scientific view of the world and restore the role of imagination as primary source of information about the real world.

While it can be argued that civilizations of the past have survived and even prospered to some extent in spite of their false foundations, that doesn't address their true cost. The greatest cost has been lost opportunity.

The popular view of history commonly regards ancient Egypt as one of humanity's "Great Civilizations". The Egyptians spent thousands of years piling rocks in the desert in the name of their imaginary gods. When they finally abandoned their ancient gods, all they had achieved was a lot of rock piling. In spite of impressive expenditures of labor and creativity, the Egyptians made little if any meaningful progress on improving the human condition. The quality of life of the average citizen was essentially unchanged after four thousand years of building temples and monuments to dead rulers and nonexistent gods.

Instead of imagining a better world, the Egyptians crippled themselves with an imaginary misinterpretation of their world that appeared to justify squandering their society's creative potential supporting dynasties of delusional despotic rulers, and legions of parasitic terrestrial representatives of imaginary gods. Imagine how much real progress the Egyptians could have made if they'd spent four thousand years developing science and technology instead of piling rocks in the desert.

Western Industrial Civilization has only partly relinquished its imaginary misconceptions of reality. But even that partial enlightenment has allowed it's participants to make far more progress in a little over two centuries than was achieved during thousands of years spent piling rocks and hiding from dragons.

Unfortunately, what should be a clear and resounding confirmation of the value of replacing imagination based interpretations with a scientific interpretation of reality, is increasingly under attack. Generations of unprecedented prosperity have allowed the current beneficiaries of our modern world to forget the hard lessons learned in the process. Their arrogant ignorance emboldens them to challenge what they see as the old worn out world-views of their parents, and to willfully indulge in whatever is perceived to be forbidden fruit.

Protected from the immediate consequences of their folly by a society they no longer understand or appreciate, many today have cavalierly discarded the wisdom of the ages in favor of imaginary world-views that better serve their desires and prejudices. Unwilling to learn from history themselves, they are determined to force the rest of us to repeat the mistakes of the past. Like the cartoon character sawing off the limb he's sitting on, they actively undermine the functions of the society that has so far made it possible for them to survive their delusions. They can imagine all sorts of intolerable annoyances in the world they have inherited, but are unwilling or unable to recognize the terrible flaws in their imagined alternative utopias.

History records how hard the neglected lessons of the past were to learn the last time. The cost humanity paid to acquire the wisdom of the ages was so great that we shouldn't be so eager to pay it again. Alas, there may already be too many imagining the return of the dragons and fairies to a restored primordial paradise - an imaginary paradise notably lacking in the blood and gore that dominated the lesson plan the last time humanity dragged itself up this learning curve.