Rockfish

I once asked a Roman Catholic and deeply religious relative what the meaning of this verse from the Bible was. “In the begining was the word, and the word was God: – John 1:1. She told me that the ‘word’ was ‘Jesus’.

Our world and everything we perceive is a result of our ability to define it, and the ability to define our world is a direct result of our understanding of both external phenomena as well as noumena. To understand a thing we have to first find out more about it. Not just the thing in itself, but also it’s effect on other elements that interact with it.

Without enquiry all we have is the periscope sticking out of the ocean and for all we know it could very well be a rusty old pipe.So very often we assume that our definition of a thing is the actual knowing of it, and I can see this in my observations everyday.

Does the Sun rise in the east and set in the west? Nope, it’s stationary. Yet the way we define our world around us makes us believe that this is the way it works. Another gem is “My mind is restless” (Nope you are restless.) Because one makes the distinction he automatically assumes that the mind can be made to rest while the individual stands by. This is not true because the individual IS THE mind.

We create our own unique vision of the world everytime we speak. And everytime we speak we form new definitions. New definitions means new neural pathways in the brain. Newer pathways eventually become old habits and before you know it you world view is set in concrete.

One can argue that this is the way it has to be and one cannot pick a nebulous answer because it could be termed schizophrenic. When you’re at a Horror movie, you’d call it sucky if it didn’t scare you. If it did scare you, you still don’t run out of the theatre clinging on to life. You kow that it’s make believe. The mind is doing a pretty good job of sitting on the fence here, dont you think?

People automatically assume that the mind is set in concrete, This is just not true. I believe that the mind is actually a name for a framework that shifts every instant depending on various factors. My nature which is a combination of my environment as well as my encoded traits determine my responses.

The linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf once suggested that Language is not just a way of expressing our view of the world, but that language itself determines this view. Whorf supported his theories by claiming that different cultures view the world differently based on their own linguistic systems. This is known as the ‘Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis’.

The theory was apparently disproved by Eleanor Rosch who claimed the opposite. That language follows perception and that our language evolves based on new perceptions. She tried to prove this through her experiments with the Dani tribe of New Guinea who have no words for individual colours. Just terms roughly coresponding to ‘light’ and ‘dark’. Her experiment showed that the Dani tribe had no problem remembering a range of colours though they had no linguistic tags for it.(See her Prototype theory.)

Whorf has not been proven wrong because to even categorise based on a prototype, one still needs the first benchmark objet, which has to be defined. I think Rosch can prove the manifestations of a decision but ultimately the process by which the decision was arrived at is subjective noumenon and cannot actually be known.