
Perception: Our useful inability to see reality: Nature: Nature Research - hownottowrite
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v544/n7650/full/544296a.html?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1704_FHBOOKSARTSPERCEPTION_PORTFOLIO
======
hprotagonist
People have reality-dampers.

It’s a popular fact that nine-tenth of the brain is not used and, like most
popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the
trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary
grey goo if its only purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for
certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.

It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary
and turn the unusual into the usual.

Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily
wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar
to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the
authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously
inspected. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work.

Terry Pratchett - “Small Gods”

------
eli_gottlieb
The interesting question is: given the information available to the organism
in the moment and the organism's previous experience, what sort of reality
_can_ be perceived? This book sounds to me like Bad Philosophy of Mind if it
can't answer more coherently than "not reality".

