I watched a fascinating program on PBS about dogs and how their sense of smell far outstrips ours. It got me thinking about how we interact with what we call reality. Let’s think about it. Would we love to hang our heads out of the car window to pick up the marvelous world of scents that are so enticing to our canine companions? Probably not, unless we had ingested some form of mind altering substance
What is real to a person who is color blind is different than that of someone who has complete human color vision. What about those creatures whose color perception is wider than that of humans? Their reality is then different from that of our species, color blind or not.
The world is full of sound. There are sounds that children and teens can hear that people older than 20 can’t and the other sounds that have gradually disappeared for those of us who are of an even more mature nature. My offspring will ask us to turn off the TV in the kitchen because of the high-pitched sound it makes. The spouse and I look at each other and ask, “What high pitched sound?” Then there are the sounds that spouses are incapable of hearing when uttered by their counterpart. Things like the faucet is leaking or the garbage needs taking out.
Just what is real? I can remember, painfully remember, taking a philosophy course at 3 p.m. on Fridays during my senior year at Syracuse Univerity. My advisor, and he must have had a good laugh, advised me to take this graduate level course to round out my last semester as an undergraduate. Talk about being lost. These students were throwing around ideas and questions that, for me, might as well have been written or spoken in ancient Sanskrit.
Determined or crazy, I persisted, and while I was looking up the meaning of the word syllogism the rest of the class was discussing Descartes and Plato and things like “multiple worlds” which, I have found is a link to physics theory. In any case, I just barely passed this course, but what I did learn was that, most of the time, the debate was about what was real. Now, this meant taking into consideration the differences in cultural and physical ability to come to grips with the stuff of reality … whatever that is. And Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. had its own grim reality.
The physicist talks about matter and states of matter that have no meaning for most of us in everyday life. Sub particle physics describes states of matter that are of little use when you are trying to figure out why the nob in the kitchen cabinet keeps falling off. The reality of their world is also ours, but less accessible because of education, experience and the use of obscure words like “charm.”
Dr. Fauci could lecture us about the ways in which our environment, our diets and our vaccine status affect our health while we contemplate the reality of the sweet seduction of a cream filled donut. Lunch to my daughter means a gigantic salad. To her sons, lunch means anything but salad.
And, on the same or barely-related topic, have you ever wondered why our pets learn to understand words while we have not a clue about what their utterances mean? The world of your pet is not the same as yours. Their receptors for sight, sound, touch and smell are much wider than ours. They don’t see what we see. While their color reception is often less, their depth of field is much greater, as is their ability to hear, smell and interpret touch. In that sense, they are living in a different world than we are. Which may explain why none of our cats respond to their names but will be right at my side when I ask who would like a yummy.
If I could apply all of this rumination to Congress, I might be less anxious and better able to sleep at night.
