Who Do We Choose to Be? by Margaret J. Wheatley

Author:Margaret J. Wheatley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2017-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

5. PERCEPTION

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What You See Is All You Get

Organisms do not experience environments. They create them.

— Richard Lewontin, geneticist

What Science Teaches

Perception makes the world go ’round. At least this is how we perceive it. Truly, we do not know what the real world might be. We can only see it through our sense-making capacities, which include our physical senses, scientific equipment, and experiments. None of these gives us the ability to know what might be going on outside of our very limited perceptual means. Yet as humans, perceptions are all we have to answer our biggest questions: What is life’s meaning? What is the Universe? Who are we as a species? The ultimate question for Western science was first asked in the early 1700s by Leibniz: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Even with our very limited means, understanding how we perceive has become a critical element in theories of biology, psychology, epistemology, and cosmology. If we understand both the capacities and limitations of our perceptual abilities, we might be able to learn how life came to be, how it works. And we might develop physics that can better explain the workings of the cosmos. We might even understand ourselves better and stop driving one another crazy.

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