Believing is seeing

Ever wonder about images of other people? How you form them, how they change? Observing the way people interact is fascinating. What is less pleasant a pastime is examining how your own views are crafted. After all, the deceptions and facades everybody maintains are usually obvious to the onlooker, less so to those the deceit is designed for. The same must be true of yourself, mustn't it?

When I look at others, I only see what I want to see. Reality has little bearing on my view. This is not an admission of deliberate self-delusion, but a recognition of the way my mind operates in forming judgements and opinions. When I look upon a person, I see a caricature, a simplified outline of what the person really is. Every person can be described in a finite number of words or images, but the complexities of the human go far beyond this. In fact, a person can never be completely known to another. If that is the case, then all knowledge we possess of others is incomplete and misleading, for in that infinite set of knowledge we do not possess about any one person, there must be something that contradicts what is known. If so, nothing we know can be considered an absolute and undeniable truth. So we see others only in the light we cast ourselves. The shadows left cannot be erased or seen into, for any attempt would simply cast more shadows. The only light we have to see by is our own. When others provide theirs, it simply adds to our light before we are able to make use of it. Even then, the distortion is obvious in that this amalgam of light is necessarily incomplete, for this other is also unknowable. So the addition of a new light to your own expands somewhat your field of vision, but does not encompass all that is known by the individual light-bearers. In fact, there is liable to be some refraction involved, for the addition of knowledge is not a simple addition, but an alteration of the existing set of knowledge such that the relationship to the subject changes. Think of it as a mathematical function. Altering the set of the domain is accomplished by adjusting the function itself. This will usually result in an alteration of the set of the range. The problem is that in these particular functions, the range cannot encompass negative infinity to infinity without having a domain that is also infinite both ways. But we have already established that the latter is impossible, so the former is also impossible.

In other words, what we see of others is crafted entirely by two aspects. What we know of them and what we want of them. Take the former. Clearly the perspectives we have of others is dependent heavily on and bounded by the knowledge we possess. We take what is available to us, data, images, signs, and generate or arrange a picture, or a system of understanding the other. The various pieces are taken to compose a greater strucure that is our understanding of the other.

Consider now what we want of the other. When I look at a pretty girl, I want to believe that she is interested in me. So I look for signs of interest that may or may not be signs of interest. If I am actually seriously interested, I begin to actively seek out what may be called buying signals, signs that she is ready to be approached in a romantic sense. The same cannot be said of male friends or females I have no interest in. Then I would not be looking for such signals, and in fact may ignore or screen them out if they are present. So in the former case, I look for certain actions or words, and may in fact imagine them, or misconstrue innocent gestures. In the latter, I would ignore such signals if they were present. So the fact that there is or isn't a romantic interest influences my view of the other's actions. The structure I create of her image and her meaning to myself, and what I desire of her, conspire to generate an active search for certain parcels of knowledge, or I may imagine these parcels up from nothing, to feed back into the structure to support itself.

So what we see is what we believe. Or perhaps what we believe is what we see.