"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." - Douglas Adams
I'm going to start things off with a humbling, and perhaps a bit embarrassing, personal anecdote: I flew on a plane for the first time over the weekend (April 7-8). And while I found most of the flying experience to be just as miserable and stressful and hectic and confusing and annoying as everyone says it is, I did find one bit kind of cool: the couple minutes immediately after takeoff.
More specifically, I mean the couple minutes immediately after takeoff if you happen to have a window seat. Because, in those few minutes, you can look out the window and really feel - as in gut-level reaction-type stuff, in addition to understand in an intellectual sense - just how small you are.
(If this strikes you as terribly quaint and na??ve and silly, keep in mind this was my first time flying, so sorry.)
Anyway, this got me thinking about perspective - specifically, how we all lack it and how we should all strive to get a little more.
In terms of the big picture, it's always dumbfounded me how narrow our perspective is, collectively, as a species. For one thing, the senses through which we experience the world are pitifully weak. We hear a fraction of all there is to hear; we see a sliver of all there is to see. And this is a shame, I think.
Can you imagine how much more beautiful and intricate and subtle music could be if humans could hear pitch beyond 20,000 hertz? Twenty thousand hertz is nothing. Dogs can hear up to 60,000; bats 120,000; dolphins and whales higher still. Or think about how much more interesting day-to-day life would be if we could perceive infrared or ultraviolet light, or the electromagnetic spectrum beyond even those.
Even the runt of our sensorium, smell, is just as comparatively pathetic. Dogs - these, by the way, being the animals that get thrown through a mental loop by a pump-faked tennis ball - can perceive the world with something like a hundred times the olfactory acuity you and I will ever know. Yeah, feel humble.
In even more broad terms, think about our bodies for a second. As pieces of biological hardware, they're really pretty subpar. We eat, communicate, and breathe through the same hole in our face. Our simian brains prevent us from intuitively understanding most math, including probability and really large numbers. Men have nipples.
Or - and here's kind of a fun, hands-on example - pinch yourself on the skin of your elbow. No, seriously, do it. Good. Now pinch yourself on the skin of your triceps. The lesson: The pain-receiving nerves in our skin aren't even evenly distributed.
And yet, so narrow is our perspective, that we actually hold our form in high regard. We worship anthropomorphized gods. Aliens in our science fiction, more often than not, look more or less like we do, i.e. vaguely humanoid. Think of how narrow-minded and biologically presumptuous this is of us for a second. I mean, if we were nine-foot-tall octopus monsters, the Star Trek on nine-foot-tall-octopus-monster earth would feature aliens that looked like nine-foot-tall octopus monsters with weird foreheads and shiny jumpsuits.
Anyway, the point of all this is that we all, inherently, have extremely, almost comically, limited points of view. And though we may never be able to, say, experience the world with the sensory acuity of a dog or understand, in a phenomenological sense, what it's like to be a nine-foot-tall octopus monster, what we can do is put ourselves in the positions of other humans whose perspectives are just as limited as our own, whether they're loved or hated or homeless or rich or crowding your armrest space on a budget Southwest flight to Chicago or the lonely white collar desk jockey driving into work completely unaware he's being watched from 12,000 feet in the sky.
Email: eabenoit@buffalo.edu
