8 November

Here’s a mind bender I think, courtesy of psychology and philosophy. If you see a rainbow, that rainbow isn’t something sitting ‘out there’ whether you see it or not. Your act of seeing is part of what produces the rainbow. Take away you, and there is no rainbow. This also extends to everything you see or perceive. The world as you see it, is not the world as it is. Perception is about action, what you perceive is your possible action in the world. A tree looks ‘far away’ to you if your possible action on it is small. To a bee or horse it wouldn’t look like a tree that we see. There are all sorts of other aspects to a tree (or anything else) that we don’t even perceive, because we can’t act on those aspects. We only perceive what we can act upon.