Two Worlds
Two Worlds
As a consequence of our abstracting-evaluating processes, you can say we live in two worlds — the world that exists out there beyond our skin, and the world in here within our skin. What each of us knows about the world out there is constructed by our in here nervous systems based on our individual sensory interactions with the world out there.
As early as the 1920s, Korzybski extended the mathematical and linguistic notions of abstraction to refer to the biological and neurological functions by which our senses-brains-nervous-systems abstract (or construct) our experience of the world "out there."
In this video (created using silent movie footage and separate audio recording), Korzybski emphasized the role of abstraction in how our internal nervous system makes sense of our external world.
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Although these recordings are from the1940s, Korzybski had worked through the premise and consequences of abstracting by 1923 (Korzybski, 1990, p. 33). In a series of lectures at Olivet College in 1937, Korzybski explained:
| I showed you that disc that was made up of rotating blades—it was really rotating blades, not a disc. That disc did not actually exist. Your nervous system manufactured it inside your heads. This applies to all 'matter.' All you see is a nervous construct that you have made up. It is a process. Anything you see is made up of rotating electrons. What you feel is not what you see. It turns out that anything we can see is only a stimulus to our nervous system and therefore the 'object' we see had 'reality' only within us, although the outside electronic image has independent reality (Korzybski, 2002, p. 122). |
And yet, the 'fact' that humans construct or abstract their experiences of the external world of 'reality' has still not been absorbed by most educated adults. As evidence, following are four attempts by 21st-century neuroscience authorites to educate the public about this specific distinction that Korzybski matter-of-factly recognized 90 years ago.
1) Christof Koch
Formerly the head of the Koch Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and currently the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science Links to an external site., Christof Koch is the author of The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Koch, 2004). In 2005, he delivered the the annual J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Lecture in Los Alamos, NM, where he presented several visual demonstrations.
In the 2:27 clip below (which I have edited for instructional purposes; the effect is shown twice, then the audio is repeated a third time with on-screen captions) he illustrated the visual effect known as afterimage. Following the demonstration, he summarized the significance of the effect:
| It belies the simple notion there's a one-to-one relationship between the outside world and my inner mental experiences. ... So clearly this naive, realistic view that there's a world, there's my head and this simple mapping, it can't be true. (J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee, 2005) |
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Koch later expands on this distinction between the "outer world" and our "inner mental experiences" and underscores the fact that our brains construct our perceptions:
| Conscious perception is, in a sense, a con job of the brain. It suggests there's a stable world out there and there's a very simple relationship between what's out there in the world and what's inside our head but in fact it's a very complicated relationship. It [conscious perception] is actively constructed by our brain. We're now beginning to understand that what I see in my head is actually constructed by my head, by my neurons (J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee, 2005). |
2) Jeff Hawkins
Jeff Hawkins invented the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA), co-founded Palm Computing, and later founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute which became the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience Links to an external site. (now associated with the University of California at Berkeley). In 2004, he co-authored with Sandra Blakeslee the best-selling book, On Intelligence (Hawkins & Blakeslee, 2004).
In 2009, he delivered the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Lecture to the affluent, well-educated audience of Los Alamos, NM. His address was titled, "Why can't a computer be more like a brain?" He ended his presentation with a question period. In response to the final question, Hawkins felt it necessary to reiterate this important, "hard to believe," out there | in here distinction.
| (referring to the continual firing of neurons in the cortex and the brain's recognition of patterns) That is the currency of the brain. That's it. That's what your brain works on. And believe it or not, I said this in the beginning and I'll say it again, your perception of the world is not ... it's really a fabrication of your model of the world. You don't really see light or sound. You perceive it because your model says this is how the world is, and those patterns invoke the model. It's hard to believe, but it really is true (J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee, 2009). |
Here's the video clip (1:48).
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In their book, Hawkins and Blakeslee expand on the point:
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All our knowledge of the world is a model based on patterns. ... This is not to say that the people or objects aren't really there. They are really there. But our certainty of the world's existence is based on the consistency of patterns and how we interpret them. There is no such thing as direct perception.
Can we trust that the world is as it seems? Yes. The world really does exist in an absolute form very close to how we perceive it. However, our brains can't know about the absolute world directly.
The brain knows about the world through a set of senses, which can only detect parts of the absolute world. The senses create patterns that are sent to the cortex, and processed by the same cortical algorithms to create a model of the world. ... Through these patterns the cortex constructs a model of the world that is close to the real thing, and then, remarkably, holds it in memory (Hawkins & Blakeslee, 2004, pp. 63-64). |
3) Eric Kandel
Dr. Eric Kandel won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his study of memory. Beginning in the fall of 2009, he co-hosted a special series of interviews with Charlie Rose on the brain. As of October 2013, more than 25 episodes have aired ranging from the anatomy of the brain to consciousness to emotions to diseases to creativity. Here is a linked listing of all the episodes with video excerpts and synopses for each episode Links to an external site..
In the second episode of the series (Da Cunha, 2009b) that focused on the human visual system, Dr. Kandel felt this notion that the brain "re-constructs" (Kandel's term) our sense of the world was worth emphasizing both at the beginning and end of the interview. Without using Korzybski's terminology, Kandel2009 provides a succinct, updated description of abstracting1923. Here's the 1:13 excerpt.
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4) Stephen Macknik and Susanna Martinez-Conde
Neuroscience researchers and co-authors of Sleights of Mind: What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our everyday deceptions, put it this way:
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The spooky truth is that your brain constructs reality, visual and otherwise. What you see, hear, feel, and think is based on what you expect to see, hear, feel, and think. In turn, your expectations are based on all your prior experiences and memories.
Magicians understand at a deeply intuitive level that you alone create your experiences of reality ... they exploit the fact that your brain does a staggering amount of outright confabulation in order to construct the mental stimulation of reality known as "consciousness." This is not to say that objective reality isn't "out there" in a very real sense. But all you get to experience is a simulation. The fact that consciousness feels like a solid, robust, fact-rich transcript of reality is just one of the illusions your brain creates for itself. Think about it. The same neural machinery that interprets actual sensory inputs is also responsible for your dreams, delusions, and failings of memory. The real and the imagined share a physical source in your brain (Macknik & Martinez-Conde, 2010, pp. 8-9). |
Catching up with Korzybski?
Even though Koch, Hawkins, Kandel, Macknik, and Martinez-Conde don't refer to abstracting or evaluating, their descriptions of the process by which we create or re-construct our sense of the outside world validate Korzybski's foundational premises. Amazingly, what Korzybski grasped almost instinctively or intuitively 90 years ago has been verified, confirmed, and now accepted by neuroscientists ... and yet they themselves still feel it necessary to use phrases like:
- "It's hard to believe but it really is true."
- "We're now beginning to understand that what I see in my head is actually constructed by my head, by my neurons."
- "It makes us realize how magical the brain is."
- "The spooky truth is that your brain constructs reality ..."
Summarizing
A. We need to acknowledge and take into account the characteristics of these two worlds.
B. We need to understand that even our most basic sense experiences of the out-there world are created by our brains.
C. We need to maintain awareness, and take responsibility, for the neurological fact of this foundational distinction — what we experience in here is not what's out there to be experienced.
In Korzybski's terminology, we need to maintain a consciousness of abstracting, beginning with the understanding that everything we experience represents an abstraction of something else. In a very real sense, all we can 'know' are abstractions and associated neurological constructions.
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... we used and still use a terminology of 'objective' and 'subjective', both extremely confusing, as the so-called 'objective' must be considered a construct made by our nervous system, and what we call 'subjective' may also be considered 'objective' for the same reasons (Korzybski, 1990c, p.650). |