III. A Disclaimer of Sorts

The point of this paper is not to present a concrete, or exhaustive, model of perception. I have no authority or desire to even attempt such a project. My goal is simply to elaborate my personal interpretation of how perception, language and culture are inherently interlinked and codependent. I consider ‘culture’ to be a set of interpretations which is usually similar within a group of people but is ultimately uniquely personal. Every individual should be considered to have a unique cultural composition. What I find most important in my discussion of this topic is the inherently personal aspect of perception itself. If our perceptions (and thus our interpretations and understandings) of the world are culturally-determined then we basically only experience ‘reality’ as it has been shaped by our lived experience. Our unique life experiences, both cultural and linguistic (but also bodily and emotional), are involved in a constant feedback loop with our brain that reinforces the “reducing valve” spoken of by Huxley. It’s from my own personal ‘reality,’ the only one from which I can speak, that I hope to present a few ideas and speculations which I find useful in my often awkward attempts to understand the world of which I am a part.

IV. A Few Implications

Clifford Geertz referred to culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life.” Culture, it seems, can be seen as a collective system of symbolic interpretation. What I am arguing here is that this “interpretation” is taking place as part of the process of “sensory gating,” pre-consciously, and impacts what sensory data actually reaches conscious awareness in the first place. I notice the details of a scene which I am culturally conditioned to notice, and I understand the meaning of an event in the same way. Even more concretely, I suspect that we may only see, hear or otherwise perceive those aspects of our immediate environment which our unique cultural-linguistic condition is able to understand. This is largely a matter of value judgments and symbolic meaning in most cases, I see ‘destruction,’ for example, where others see ‘progress.’ But when discussing the so-called ‘paranormal’ the subject matter changes dramatically. A person with a cultural make-up that involves a belief in angels may very well see them in favorable conditions, and many certainly have made that claim. The thousands of UFO sightings that take place in societies with no firm belief in angels may be a different interpretation of the same phenomenon. And while such subjects are avoided in most ‘Western’ academic situations, they are certainly part of the collective cultural knowledge in many parts of the world and across most of recorded time.

This brings us back to that ‘storage heap’ of raw sensory data discussed earlier. According to my model of perception (we must heed the warnings of many theorists from Korzybski to McLuhan, namely, ‘The Map is not the Territory,’ or, my model, my mental scheme of something, is only a model, is never complete and is always in need of continuous revision), while conscious awareness is limited in the process of “sensory gating,” mental processing and memory may very well not be. Put more simply, just because I don’t think something, or notice something, doesn’t mean that it didn’t register somewhere in my brain. “Mind at Large” continues to impress us. And it is this ‘un-perceived’ (yet sensed) world of information that can be useful to help understand much of the ‘paranormal’ phenomenon reported in the claims and stories of people from nearly all times and places.