The real issue is that my Grandfather now perceives certain aspects of his current situation in a different light then the majority of people around him.
Now there are many things that people perceive differently every day, from words spoken, to the precise hue of a color. So what is the "problem" with my grandfather?
As I see it the problem is that his view is just different enough to cause problems with the rest of society, and has far ranging effects on those around him.
The idea of perception influencing reality has been around for a long time and has its own brach of philosophy called metaphysics which studies the nature of reality.
Doctors know about the phenomena and refer to it as the placebo effect.
This difference in perception is also one of the ways you can tell that a person is very well encultureated, because they can not perceive the world in anyway other then how they have been taught.
That being said, it seems that reality is really consensus driven; as long as the majority of people perceive things in mostly similar ways then there is no problem. However, when the is a perception that falls outside of the culturally appropriate boundaries the person is called crazy and in our society often institutionalized.
This may seems as unfair, because who is to say that one perception is more valid than another? But if there was no unifying thread the only reality I can see would be chaos, but that is just my own perception.
1 comment:
The problem with the examination of reality is that all we know about it is perception driven. Faced with this blockage, we fall back to the rule of the majority. We have societal mores and if you follow them, society rewards you. If you break them, you face resistance from society. To a point this resistance is good. Society can't allow itself to swing violently back and forth with every new whim or idea of a single individual. On the other hand, good ideas should be accepted into society. This happens naturally when more and more individuals accept the idea and it becomes the new norm. The economic reality is that individuals accept ideas that are profitable to them. That is, they accept ideas that seem to have greater benefits than costs. If an item has greater benefits than costs, we say it has value. Thus when people accept an idea, it becomes a value to them.
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