What psychological evidence I’ve seen suggests that we’re in some way wired to see categories as real.
What would it be, to not see categories as real?
All of our perceptions, from low-level physical sensation up to the highest abstractions, are experienced as real things existing outside of ourselves. This is an illusion in every case.
Look around you and it will seem to you that you see objects “out there”. Listen, and you seem to hear things far off. Touch something and the sensation appears to be at your skin. Smells seem to be in the air around you, and tastes seem to belong to what you are eating. Watch someone in action and it will seem as if you can see their purposes, right out there in the other person. Think about abstractions like “justice” or “democracy”, and these too will seem to be externally existing things.
But all of that experience is literally in your head. We are all of us shut up inside three pounds of porridge in a bone box, but it never feels like that. There is something outside you that gives rise to these sensations, but it takes a lot of work to get anywhere close to the real story.
We are wired to perceive categories—and sensations, and sequences, and patterns, and various other sorts of perception. The perceptual illusion affects all of them.
I expect it would be noticing that I treat X as though it were importantly similar to Y, even though X is (it seems to me) nothing at all like Y.
This happened to me a lot while I was dealing with post-stroke PTSD… I would react to things in ways that made no sense to me at all, think about it for a while, and eventually conclude that I was treating those things as importantly equivalent to aspects of stroke-related trauma, even though they didn’t seem to me to be importantly equivalent at all.
Our minds are not internally consistent.
Agreed about the rest of this, though. “Aaaa! I’m stuck inside this dark, damp skull!” just isn’t the sort of thing brains are wired to experience.
What would it be, to not see categories as real?
All of our perceptions, from low-level physical sensation up to the highest abstractions, are experienced as real things existing outside of ourselves. This is an illusion in every case.
Look around you and it will seem to you that you see objects “out there”. Listen, and you seem to hear things far off. Touch something and the sensation appears to be at your skin. Smells seem to be in the air around you, and tastes seem to belong to what you are eating. Watch someone in action and it will seem as if you can see their purposes, right out there in the other person. Think about abstractions like “justice” or “democracy”, and these too will seem to be externally existing things.
But all of that experience is literally in your head. We are all of us shut up inside three pounds of porridge in a bone box, but it never feels like that. There is something outside you that gives rise to these sensations, but it takes a lot of work to get anywhere close to the real story.
We are wired to perceive categories—and sensations, and sequences, and patterns, and various other sorts of perception. The perceptual illusion affects all of them.
I expect it would be noticing that I treat X as though it were importantly similar to Y, even though X is (it seems to me) nothing at all like Y.
This happened to me a lot while I was dealing with post-stroke PTSD… I would react to things in ways that made no sense to me at all, think about it for a while, and eventually conclude that I was treating those things as importantly equivalent to aspects of stroke-related trauma, even though they didn’t seem to me to be importantly equivalent at all.
Our minds are not internally consistent.
Agreed about the rest of this, though. “Aaaa! I’m stuck inside this dark, damp skull!” just isn’t the sort of thing brains are wired to experience.