VERY SIMILAR TO EXPERIENCE-BASED DEFINITIONS
The brain, as far as helping a creature survive goes, simply recognizes patterns. Experience teaches us how to interpret these patterns; the patterns our brain learns end up becoming our perception of reality. The more we experience a pattern, the easier it is for our mind to comprehend. This is reflected by every creature’s development.
Homo Sapiens have an incredible capacity for pattern recognition. This is the SOLE reason humans have become what we are. All of our technology grows from this: languages, science, the structure of society….pattern recognition makes it possible. Our capacity for pattern recognition allows us to learn to a degree no other animal we’ve studied has been able to match.
Our brains do NOT understand how things as they exist; if they did, we would all understand the world identically. The fact that different people CAN believe different things makes this an irrefutable FACT. Our brains try to understand the best way they can based upon the previous established patterns it recognizes.
Language allows us to pass on personal knowledge, or individually learned patterns, to others. Overall, humanity does a decent job sorting out reality from fiction. There are very general understandings that make sense: breathing is important for our survival, water is important for our survival, eating is important for our survival. However, if you look closer than that, individual beliefs plague our understanding. People argue about how to breathe, what water is best, the best diet to adopt; most of this discourse is produced by individuals with poor or outright incorrect understandings of the subject matter.
People learn patterns; they often defend what they learned, even without proper evidence to justify their beliefs. Instead, they become indoctrinated to a system of belief that becomes incredibly hard to break. Once you recognize a pattern, it’s very hard to stop or change it without a conscious realization that the initial pattern might be false. An incredible amount of shared human knowledge has no basis in fact. They are simple traditions we inherit, accept, and pass on without thinking because those around us do the same.
There are many worldwide accepted concepts that I have understood to be untrue or greatly misunderstood by almost the entire population. Too many concepts that are sustained by us have not come under proper scrutiny. We have made it a long time without analyzing our collective understanding, but this can’t last forever. Eventually, society will become unsustainable due to the abundance of false patterns that are adopted. Our collective concepts MUST be analyzed under a lens of reality. Too much of humanity’s energy and the planet’s resources are wasted due to our collective poor understanding of the universe and ourselves. An incredible amount of oppression and suffering is caused by our illogical structuring of society. If we don’t update and amend our societal beliefs to reflect the reality of our environment and biology, we will (slowly) destroy ourselves.
Rich Mind 