Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Propensity towards Conspiracy Theories

Unable to contemplate beyond binaries, the limited mind, when confronted with the greater possibilities of the world, found a useful and convenient tool in the conspiracy theory. If something is not with us, the limited mind thought, then it must surely be a conspiracy against us.

Fun exercise: Observe a person, an organization or a political group that is predisposed towards conspiracy theories. More than an even chance that they also have an essentially limited and rigid world view.
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Monday, December 9, 2013

Perspectives

So, I had this epiphany which seems rather straightforward now but let me still share it.

It started with reading how our 3D vision works - the basic stuff. How each of our eyes only provides just a 2D image to our mind; with no depth information. It is the mind that then synthesizes these two ever so slightly different 2D images to construct a field of vision that has a third dimension -- depth -- in it.

I think it's a very useful analogy to also think about how we construct much of our conception of the reality around us. The more different types of perspectives we can bring to bear on this reality -- social, political, economical, cultural, historical -- the more "depth", in some relevant and useful sense, we can perceive in the synthesized view.

A corollary to this is that the more you align or identify closely with a particular ideology or a way of looking at things, the more "depth" you may be giving up.

Of course, nothing earth-shatteringly original about this line of thought, but yeah it caught my fancy.
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