In Plain Sight?
I have been thinking, during this time of seemingly endless Covid psychosis, how is it that people lose their ability to apprehend things rationally? How is it that we are so wrong so many times in our perceptions as individuals ? How is it that in courts people stand as eye-witnesses with exact opposite versions of the same events? Why is it that judges in general understand two things about people. First, humans lie, and they often believe their own lies. Second, people see what they want to see, regardless of what may be actually in plain sight.
Three examples come to mind that might illustrate this odd human foible and point to its possible cause. I won’t delve into the minutiae of various conclusive experiments showing just how blind people can be with something right in front of their nose to see. Do one yourself in the link below.
http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html
In a more abstract sense, the same human propensity to not see plays out in even the most brilliant and perceptive people. Three examples come to mind, albeit varying in their details.
Isaac Newton, arguably one of the great and transformative minds in human history ( certainly Darwin is at the top of my list in that respect ), accomplished a complete revolution in the way humans would see mathematics, astronomy and physics. He literally dragged us out of the dark ages and brought clarity to so many aspects of human perception that it is mind boggling.
Yet, look what happened to this great mind when he turned to the big question such as ‘how old is the earth?
The grip that theology had on most minds was extraordinary. This can be seen by the fact that from the time of the inception of the Bible, the unquestioned belief regarding the birth of the Earth placed its age at about 6,000 years old. The various Biblical writings were used as the source of how this age was calculated, beginning with Genesis. incredibly, despite the fact that Newton had himself provided the tools by which it could clearly be seen that the Earth was far far older, he just could not see it himself. Interestingly, he worked on it a great deal. Finally, he updated Kepler’s date of the origin of the Earth ( 3,993 BC ) to a very specific 3,998 BC.
How could such a mind as Isaac Newton miss what the Scottish geologist James Hutton saw clearly just a century later? Hutton was a mere geologist looking at rocks. Yet he intuitively saw that the Earth was ancient and that the forces at work must move slowly over time, partially due to Newton’s own laws of physics!
The answer may lie in his belief rather than his scepticism. It takes a sceptic to question orthodoxy and while he was a scientific sceptic, Newton clearly was not a religious sceptic. He believed. Anything that did not conform to that belief could not be perceived. Even though it must have caused some cognitive dissonance, he did not even knock on that door.
Albert Einstein, one of the other great transformative geniuses, is another classic example of this odd human predilection for blind spots in perception. A scientist who, like Newton, fundamentally altered the way in which humans view the workings of the cosmos, was tripped up in the end by something that today even a 5 year old sees clearly.
Around the time when Einstein was formulating his revolutionary Relativity theories, Alfred Wegener was formulating his theory of Continental Drift. He released a paper in 1912 that showed ( albeit with larger predictions of rate of movement than we know now to be true) exactly how continental drift worked. Interestingly, near the end of his life, Einstein wrote an introduction to a book in which he ridiculed Wegener’s theory and the entire concept of plate tectonics. This was just a few years before the ‘theory’ began to be taught in public schools.
To my perspective, we are all caught up in our own reality, with limitations imposed not by rationality but rather by our insistence on belief at all cost. Call it the Belief Instinct. Einstein and Newton were unable to see simple truth, regardless of the fact that they both had revolutionized science. Imagine how this type of vision block can work in the minds of merely mortal humans.
A third and more general example is playing out before our very eyes these days. Affected as they are by their personalities and the onslaught of media, we see in these Covid times a rampant suspension of rational thought. Masks outside and in cars, lockdowns and restrictions that make no sense, destruction of livelihoods, negation of human intimacy and collateral deaths make it obvious that the Covid hysterics are both in control of governments and also sadly mistaken. Nobody has thought to do a simple cost/benefit analysis.
At least we can say that humans of all stripes share one thing - an ability to use self delusion to keep themselves in an odd balance with what they do not want to believe. The second thing they share is an insistence that other people delude themselves as well in order to keep them company.