Topics Perception

Question Appearances can be deceiving. I feel that humans are hindered by what they perceive, visually. Perhaps almost all forms of major prejudice come from visual representation of ideas that we believe we do not like. I feel that sight is an anchor to the physical realm and without it, perhaps humans could transcend into higher states of being, perhaps becoming super-human, evolutionarily speaking. So my question is: Philosophically, do you feel that humans are hindered from becoming a complete being due to some of our inherent senses, etc. and do you feel it is possible to overcome these physical limitations to attain a higher state of being?

Accepted:
October 30, 2006

Comments

I agree that sight and indeed the senses are our anchor to the physical realm, but I think that is a good thing, since the physical realm is what we need to understand. At the same time, our senses give us only very limited contact with the physical world, much of which is unobservable. Creatures with different senses might have a cognitive advantage over us in this respect. But any sort of physical sense we can imagine (such as echolocation in bats, or exotic sensory sensitivity to chemicals) would still require massive inference from the limited effects of the world the experiencer to the complex worldly causes of those effects. At the same time, science has done an impressive job of reducing the limitations stemming from the peculiarities of the human sensory endowment through the construction of instruments that enable us to detect things we cannot directly observe.