Sense: Very far from Reality

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What is sense? What makes sense?



How to make sense of something one hardly understands?
The term “making” itself should orient the thinker into the process of manufacturing, creation. Sense does not appear, it is made, an intelligible and subjective arrangement of facts, occurrences, observations, knowledge and/or exposure which manage to create the precious and sought-after “sense”. Intelligible, at least, to the one confirming holding it.
How do we create an intelligible thread between mere facts, occurrences, happenings and the theoretical framework in which our minds has been conditioned?
Do we genuinely try and understand the what, the why and the so what of our daily encounters or do we, effortlessly, or with laziness, park each of them in the closest closet (or so de we assess) which will be given the arduous task of defining it?
What happens when we try to make sense of the senseless and random occurrences.

As Rolf Dobelli puts it, “the human brain seeks patterns and rules. It takes it a step further - if it finds no familiar patterns, it simply invents one. When it comes to pattern recognition, we are oversensitive.”[1]
When we think we have discovered a new reality and understand something new, chances are that we have only managed to place it in our thinking scheme. We have found a good enough arrangement that we can easily understand.
In our everyday life, individuals have subjective ways of experiencing reality, especially a new reality, the unknown. Unavailable to us in its objective form, we can only experience reality through our senses, as limited as they are. Our perception of reality could be our only way to apprehend what takes place around us.

Plato’s allegory of the cave is among the most remarkable early work on the difference between perception and reality. In Republic, he describes a group of people, condemned to face a blank wall where shadows of real objects are projected, becoming the sole reality of these lifelong prisoners. He pursues to explain how one of the prisoners was freed from the cave, and came to perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured one, that is the shadows seen inside of the cave. The freed prisoner is able to do so by removing the intermediary between the human condition and the reality: our senses producing our impressions, or in Plato’s example, the fire producing the shadows. The Light here may symbolize many things: Truth, God, Pure Knowledge, an objective access to reality. Some can be accessed easier than others, but all require that we make intentional efforts.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave attempts to open up our perception towards a world that holds multiple level and where perception, if essential inside of the cave, has to be put aside to gain sufficient independence and look for the Light.

Making sense of our reality. A strong impetus that imposes a posteriori meaning to the world we live in. As if one would decide to dip one bottle into the Ocean and define its beauty from what they see in the plastic bottle. Looking for bedtime stories for my children, I stumbled on one such tale narrating the journey of a young explorer from Saturn who was so amazed by the deep blue colour of the Oceans on planet Earth that he decided to take few drops in a tiny bottle to share this beauty with his King. Back on Saturn, , after praising the beautiful waters he encountered, he takes out the bottle and pours a colourless liquid, causing the audience to laugh at him, accusing him of lies. After few unsuccessful attempts, he understands that no one can witness the beauty of the Ocean by observing a few drops in a bottle. Beyond the poetry of the tale, I thought it was full of truth on how we approach life.

We usually attempt to define the Ocean by the few drops we are given to hold. And, to do so, we use multiple forms of bottles, or boxes. Indeed, how irresistible it is to be able to hold and shape the impetuous Ocean, symbolizing the complex reality that surrounds us. How exciting it is to be able to put it in a box, as complex as the box might be. Just as the young Saturn explorer, how attractive it is to be able to capture part of our own Ocean and give it a shape that is easier for our minds to comprehend and to share with others, with whom we interact.

But “perception is NOT reality”. The hardly earned “sense” that we sometimes brandish or hold on to, is usually only an imperfect interpretation of reality. As such, our efforts to understand our reality shouldn’t occult that it is and can only remain a perception of the vast Ocean that surround us.
Only when we understand that, refuse to remain in the cave and work towards integrating more objectivity in our thinking scheme can we develop a better sense of the sometimes senseless reality. And as such, conscious of our own limitations, we are more tolerant towards others, fight stereotyping, ready to embrace difference thus becoming better persons, for ourselves and for others.


[1] Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, 2013

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