10 Nov 4702 - Ph.ool D.you!
The notion of perceptual filters comes up more often in classes I take than
I really expect. Who knew that these BUS and HUM electives could be so
jam-packed with griploads of the same dried-out thought. Perceptual filter my
aunt fanny. They preach the obvious like it is philosophy and I'm required to
take this because Clarkson can't send an engineer out into the world, or even
into their own graduate program without the bus and hum electives. The surprise
is that I like these courses.
Perceptual filters.
There is much more to the notion than is expressed to me in my classes. Much
more. In marketing, a perceptual filter is a force field around your consumers
head that you have to blast with anti-neutrino induced tachyon beams and
neutralize so that your advertisements will place your product in your
consumer's evoked set. And that's all. Something you know you have to fight, and
that's all. And they make doctors of the philosophy of this idea! Other times in
other classes the perceptual filter is a clue to understanding how language
helps us think together, and how it is inherently ambiguous. Think language
isn't ambiguous? Try this one: one of the tenets of the class is that linguistic
experts know for a fact that you can't know anything for a fact for reason XYZ.
Replace the words "tenets," "class," or "linguistic" with your favorite nouns.
And that's all, just a rhetorical tool. A means of understanding
misunderstanding. You have filters on right now that I have to understand so
that I can present a clear case so that you will understand how to make the
numbers stop flashing on your vcr.
Specific foreknowledge is impossible, I'm told, and so most abandon the idea of
foreknowledge at all. Why bother practicing something you cannot ever perfect?
True, but why abandon a reasonably powerful tool for its minor flaw? Example. No
one around me has a clue where they are going in life, or even moreso, what kind
of money they will be making. This is a perfect opportunity to discuss the kind
of perceptual filters I'm talking about, which are mere kin of the two I
mentioned. What are you going to do and what will you be making? Easy, every
engineering student is going to interview into a position that is just like the
study he's been doing in his favorite course for the last four years, only
easier, and he will make d%*1000 dollars a year, and on and on.
Fiction. The last person who had me as unconvinced of a line of reasoning was
telling me dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. I really want to slap
some of these students, peers, with the obvious truth of what their future
holds.
You will work at least one year of your life for no money.
You will have a relationship that goes nowhere, and leaves you with less of
every kind of capital you have.
You will hate your first job: it will be the exactly like that course you failed
the first time, or if you're an honors student, that course you got a B in.
You will have more debt than you thought was possible, and no one will break
down your door and then your legs. They will break your spirit instead, and the
funny about spirits and not about bones is that they have no cast, and you can
break them again and again.
You will not be rewarded for all your hard work.
You will not have a personable environment.
You will not be able to remember a worse time in your life.
You can avoid this future.
I exaggerate to a needed degree. The barrier is what prevents my fellow students
from seeing the obvious future. Why I seem mystical sometimes is not that I see
the future, which I do, but because I think of what it might hold, which anyone
can. So why not? Is it really that scary? Millions of people have done this same
thing. Is there a good reason to be scared of such a comfortably worn path? I
can think of a few, but none that make me want to deny my foresight.
The filter is what we use to make-believe. Most of the applications I see for
the filter are poor excuses for denial, like the scenario I elaborated. The more
potent examples I hardly ever see at all, and I don't know if I'm ready to chide
or pity anyone who is willing to filter out something profound to stay sane. Not
for any other reason: only a clinging to sanity, an ideal human state. We use
the filter because we don't have time to really sit down and patch the logical
gap with anything permanent. Every day my peers come across something that they
can't explain, or can't research, or can't can't can't. What do they do? What
would anyone do? Make something up. "I feel like there should be some sound to
this. Hey, there's a car. Nope, that's the sound of the aurora."
There are plenty of things I patch by filing them under "unexplained." How do I
receive visions? How can language accomplish anything if it is forever
inadequate? Why is reason irrational? Sometimes, probably a lot, I take the set
of things that I can't come up with an explanation for and say "file it," and in
the bin it goes along with the alien encounter, time, and that feeling I had in
ninth grade on the beach trip. My explanation becomes that I can't
explain it, and I'm satisfied with that. Satisfied! I should be outraged, except
that my outrage would show because of no apparent reason, and I would look like
an autistic spaz, and then a hundred other inhibitions kick in, and I sink back
in my seat and try my damnedest to forget that my professor just raised a
logical annihilator as proven fact. Every day I convince myself that I am alive.
I remember a triptych from a life science book in eighth grade. Part one was an
illustration of animals by a lake. Part two was the dirt, water, and clouds of
part one. Part three was the animals and plants of part one. And this is how
every child learns the difference between "dead" and "non-living." This is also
the kind of explanation that grade-school teachers love because they can whip
out transparencies and the overhead projector and pretend that their
demonstration is as sophisticated as an animator's bench. Overlapping systems.
Bah.
Lets make our own triptych, starting with putting a skeleton in part one. Does
it stay in part two or part three? Of course, the skeleton itself is not a
living organism, it merely once belonged to one, so now it goes into the set of
non-living things (we are putting the set of dead things in with the set of
living things for this distinction of systems). Part two. What if we included
more of the corpse, say a more freshly dead beast? Are its sinew and flesh
living, or are they also non-living things that the creature used to own, and
thus are really non-living? This also goes into part two, and now I see a
problematic difference with my splitting up of categories. If everything that
composes the creature's body is non-living, then how would I call a corpse
"dead," and put it into part three? Or for that matter, how can I keep a living
animal out of part two? It's made of the same stuff, deep down, that the rocks
are. Electrons, neutrons, protons, -ons that man hasn't seen yet and will never
discover. No one would call these things living, but somehow the thing they make
up is. Even on the medium scale the creature's body is nonliving, but no one
would say it is not alive. You can hide behind your scientific understanding of
cellular growth and proteins and electro-chemical synapses, but there is no
getting around living things being made of non-living things. Living things
being non-living things.
Earlier tonight, some friends of mine were talking about the spirit leaving the
body when the person dies. One could not imagine the spirit leaving the body
until death, almost a definition. The other quite agreed. They don't see as I
do, I think, because I know they have met some of the same people I have. I know
they have met people whose spirit left them long ago, who now walk from day to
day fulfilling obscure ideals, and posting grades, and comprising their state as
a non-living collection of parts.
People who paint their faces to hide what scares them, only to make
something even scarier.
Long entry today. I'll file this one under philosophy.
