Perspective #

One way to think about perspective is as the narrative you tell yourself about the world. I think that perspective really strongly shapes more than anything else your experience and even your abilities, because the way you think about the world and the way you conceptualize it informs your behavior directly. The information we get from our senses is full of holes and is just generally imperfect. Our mind has to construct a coherent perspective out of that to act upon, so given the same inputs there are many many very valid perspectives to take from them.

Your Mind Makes It Real #

Your perspective directly shapes your behavior and is your worldview. This means it also shapes your reactions - even involuntary reactions - or even emotions or like things like pain. Even if you don’t actually have real nerve pain if your perspective of the world makes you think that you should be feeling it you probably will (see rubber hand experiments). This is kind of like in The Matrix when if people die in The Matrix they die in real life because their perspective is so holy fused with their Matrix selves. I’m not sure if that’s how it would work in real life but I think that’s closer than you might otherwise think to the real world.

Learning #

Learning about something - understanding some concept - is really just incorporating the perspective of it into your mental model. So for instance if you want to learn history or math or something like that all it takes is for you to shape your mind so that you see the problem or the historical event or whatever you see it directly from your perspective.

I think with things like math this is incredibly insightful. For me often math or logic problems are very hard to understand at first. Even memorization of the answer often doesn’t help with understanding and later reproduction. However at some point the problems just click into place and it becomes second nature to deploy that new logical rule or whatever in problem solving. I think that’s because at that point you see the problem from your perspective or it becomes a perspective that you have. Treating these problems in that way can help reduce the stress associated with trying to learn them and maybe help hasten the learning process.

Self Deception #

Because there are many valid perspectives given the same set of sensory inputs if you choose to even ignore some of those inputs or twist things it’s very easy to put yourself in a state where your model of the world is very different from that of most others. Some might say this means you are deluded or even being self deceptive if you consciously choose to ignore new inputs. I think being in this state of mind is very dangerous when making real decisions that impact people’s lives. Moreover, this state of mind can be very easy to fall into. However, if your goal is to explore new ideas or discover new things, adopting this mindset may be necessary to some extent in order to put yourself in a place that allows you to do that. So I do think there’s a perilous pro and con trade-off situation to be in this self deceiving state. I do think self deception can be very positively helpful when it comes to motivation. In Peter Thiel’s talk about luck (You Are Not a Lottery Ticket) he mentions that even if luck exists it may be valuable to ignore that fact, self-deceiving yourself, because if you do then the ways in which you act will produce better outcomes than if you just assume some things are not in your control.

Self deception is really tricky when it comes to being a scientist or doing some kind of scientific pursuit, because on the one hand putting yourself in a new perspective that is flawed or incorrect enables you to do the experiments and try to reason through whether the perspective is actually true or not. However by putting yourself there it can be dangerous because if you are too deep in your perspective then you can start to bias your experiments and otherwise just come up with erroneous results. I do think it’s important though that some people do put themselves in those dangerous position when it comes to innovation and I don’t think they should be like a vilified or thrown out as non-scientific or something like that. I think their perspectives are important it’s just important to realize that they are in a new place which is probably mostly incorrect without just writing them off completely because I think there’s a lot of value that can be gained from people in this periphery.

Inspirations #

I wrote down these ideas after listening to Peter Attia’s discussion on Esther Perel about like an hour or so into the podcast (1:20).

Categories: Mind

Backlinks: What To Believe,