Reality and perception

The human mind replicates. It reproduces virtual versions of “real” things - people, objects, locations… We conceptualize, we strategize and we act based on these models, not on the actual things themselves. And we shouldn’t forget that these replicas are biased because our perception of things is, and will always be partial and highly subjective. This is by design:

1. The more information we perceive, the more energy we need to process it.
2. Biases can increase our fitness. We perceive the world to “succeed” evolutionary, not to analyze it.

To mistake the virtual models in our mind for reality is to open ourselves to a lot of confusion and misjudgment. It leads us to miscalculate odds, dismiss important details, and mistake the people in our lives with the fake copy of them we made up in our minds.

There is no way to escape our incomplete perception, replicas are the only way we can navigate the world. We have to make peace with our condition. Real things are ungraspable to us. But we can choose to be moderately skeptical. We can replace some dots with question marks.