Imagine you and a friend are having an argument over dinner. The details don’t matter, but both of you are convinced that the other is misremembering a small fact.
Not that long ago, you’d agree to disagree. Nowadays, you can whip out your smartphone and look up the truth. Such are the wonders of the Information Age.
But does having all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips really help us? Not on its own, it doesn’t. Sure, you can access information for just about anything you want, but all that data is useless without your phone to process it into images and text.
The world is full of information. Every single day, we get bombarded by it in the form of photons, chemicals, and vibrations. But all this input is meaningless in its raw form. For it to have any value at all, it has to be divided and processed. Only then do the photons become colors, the chemicals become tastes, and the vibrations become sounds.
To help this interpretation process, our bodies and brains have evolved to filter out unnecessary information. As a result, we sense only the information we absolutely need. That’s why we only hear certain frequencies, smell certain chemicals, and see what we call “visible light,” which is a narrow slice of the full electromagnetic spectrum.
So our human view of reality is partial from the start. But even with this limited window onto the world, the information we take in isn’t always clear. In fact, it’s often mixed together in confusing bundles.
Just think of what happens when you look at a landscape at sunset. What exactly are you seeing? You may see a forest or a field, but those images are actually a complex interplay of three things – photons from the sun, the surfaces off which they reflect, and the air through which they move. All this information is tangled together in your sense of sight.
The work doesn’t stop once the light hits your retina. At this point, there’s still more required for you to create meaning from what you take in. But interpretation is no easy task, since even an ordinary sight like a smiling human face can take on an unlimited variety of meanings, depending on the context.
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