Another Metaphormorphic reading...

Today's passage, as is often true, comes from the book, "A God Within" by the famed (and Pulitzer winning) microbioligist René Dubos:

Responses to the environment involve in addition many factors that were almost universally ignored a few decades ago. Animals have been shown to receive information through many unfamiliar ways, such as ultrasound waves for bats, infrared waves for moths and pit vipers, and the substances known as pheromones (or exohormones) which many organisms excrete into the external environment. Recent discoveries indicate that human beings are sensitive to radio waves and magnetic fields and that their autonomous nervous system, blood-clotting mechanism, blood pressure, and other physiologic processes are affected by changes in the weather. It is legitimate to assume that human beings, like other organisms, also use exohormones for certain types of subconscious communications. Parapsychologists have indeed suggested that extrasensory perceptions should really be regarded as ‚“crypto-sensory responses.” Various channels of communication, so elusive that they were once dismissed as nonexistent and indeed thought to be impossible, thus enable us unconsciously to acquire valuable information from the physical and biological environment and from our fellow men.

Although we perceive ore of the external world than we realize, we ignore certain aspects of it which are obvious to our most immediate neighbors. The phrase, ‚“perceptual environment” thus has highly subjective overtones. The perception of racial or national characteristics differs from one social group to the other; the statement common among Caucasians that all Chinese look more or less alike certainly has its counterpart among Orientals with regard to Caucasians. The perception of social inequalities and inequities also differs from person to person and from time to time. Social justice may be a universal concept, but in practice the awareness and exercise of it are conditioned by highly personal experiences.

In addition to the aspects of the total environment that are outside of us, in the external world, there are others that exist only in the individual mind and therefore constitute a person‚’s private conceptual environment. The environment of a primitive population living on a Micronesian atoll includes of course the sea, the land, and the sky, but it also includes a host of spirits that lurk everywhere. Although the spirits of the Micronesian conceptual environment do not have concrete existence, they nevertheless affect profoundly the inhabitants of the atoll. They become malevolent when not properly treated and elicit behavioral responses that may be more dangerous than wounds inflicted by sharks or poisonous eels.

Nor is the conceptual environment of less importance in industrial societies. Whether sophisticated and learned, or primitive and ignorant, every human being lives in a conceptual environment of his own which conditions all his ethical and social attitudes, such as his opinions concerning the nature of progress, his view of man’s place in the cosmic order of things, the attributes that he associates with the word God. Both the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and the theologian Harvey Cox have made it clear that the concept of deity, and the names by which it is designated have evolved with man’s view of the cosmos. It is because the perceptual and conceptual environments are so highly personal that each one of us lives in a private world of his own. As civilization becomes more complex and exacting, moreover, the conceptual environment acquires greater and greater importance because it acts as a mediator in all aspects of the interplay between man and the rest of creation.

Good stuff. Remember, you do not perceive your environment directly, but rather "sample" it through "scoops" that bring data into your organism, said data being processed thereafter by systems guided by pre-existing "programs", which you may or may not have conscious awareness of. You do not "see", but light waves bounce off of objects, and reflect into your optic hardware (your eyes), which then translate (filling in gaps) and filter through your brain. The simplest way that this is shown, is that we know, your optic equipment actually "perceives" the world as "upside down" but that your filtering mechanism (your brain), turns that image into the one you consciously perceive. Even though it is not the one that "actually" exists within your apparatus. In many regards your "vision" is the same as the bat or the pit viper that he mentions (I would include the sonar of the dolphins). You sample, and interpet reflected light particles, you do not "see" reality.

To acknolwlege this is dangerous among your fellow humans, as Plato pointed out some time ago, once you give up shadow worship and seek higher ground, there is (as he pointed out in his cave analogy, and history has demonstrated again and again) an increasingly high likelihood that you may come under attack from your species for "deviant" responses to reality.

As an addendum to this, we metaphormorphicists believe, this threat does not come exclusively from "primitive" mindsets, but attack is as likely to come from Theists as it is Atheists. The common theme in the two groups is the belief that they have the correct perceptual/conceptual responses and any deviation from these are dangerous to the species.