I mentioned in my opening blog that this will not just be about sports. So far though, that’s all it has been. Well not anymore. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about perception and reality. It’s something I’ve had been trying to define for a while. And having a background in philosophy, (I finished 3 credits shy for a minor in Cortland) I love discussions or talking about things like this and this gives me another forum to do so.

What I’ve been focusing on lately is where thoughts come from and why we perceive them as such. I happened to read this article, in a timely fashion. Alright the article is about an athlete and I said this was not a post about, but I’m using my own creative license to allow this. Besides, it only fueled my thought, it is not what the post/original idea is about. (I would like to thank my old friend Sean Brennan for posting this on his facebook, which allowed me to read it. So, thanks Sean).

How many of my current thoughts, of your current thoughts, feelings, beliefs, quips, intuitions, have been placed there without knowing it? There is an entire industry around this. People everyday come up with ways – slogans, pictures, videos, whatever to tell us what to think. Has it gotten so far that all of our thoughts need to be told to us? Will I be able to see something as good without having first been told to think that? I know there are people out there, hopefully reading this, saying, “No. You’re wrong, Joe. I come up with my thoughts all on my own. No one tells me what to think”. And maybe they’re right. But it is also a matter of why we think what we do. There are people trying to sell the idea that Justin Bieber is a good singer/artist. They aren’t telling you to think that. And even if you think the opposite, that he is not, you are still thinking about him. Someone forced the idea of Justin Bieber onto you and made you if only for a second, think about him. Now think about why you think he is good or bad. (Yes, now I am telling you what to think). Those thoughts about goodness or badness probably stem from somewhere where you were told what good or bad music is. We are all influenced by someone else and their ideas. Unless you never heard music before and were given every record, tape, CD, Gregorian Chant ever made and decided based on that what is good, it is nearly impossible to say that what you think is good music are your own thoughts. That is scary. Other people control my thoughts.

This lead me into thinking about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and his Metaphor of the Sun. How do we know what is good? I don’t think that there are many times in a person life where someone can say they recognized something good without that thought being influenced by something prior. Even love, which is indefinable I do not feel passes this test. First of all, I think the fact that it has a name, “love” means that it cannot be an unknown good. Even if we can’t define it, there is an idea of what it is and what it feels like and we search for it. Those thoughts come from somewhere else – parents, friends, television, Hallmark. We know that love is supposed to be good whether we have it or not. In the allegory, the prisoner did not know of the sun at all and still, upon his own finding knew it to be good.

So does this actually exist? Is there anything comparable to the allegory? I believe I experienced it once. Children of course are most likely too having not been exposed to the world so much. I was lucky enough to be old enough to remember, but not old enough to know what was happening until much later in life. And only recently have I been able to appreciate it for what it was. I can’t describe it much now because I don’t remember the exact feelings I had, but I knew I felt good and that I didn’t know why.

I hope I have at least one more of these, what I call, “organic thoughts” but I don’t know if I will. Perception has long been the defining case of reality and I hate that. I’ve challenged it as much as I can. If perception is reality then there is nothing that defines us as people. If an alien ever came down here and saw a man and woman, do you think he’d be able to recognize the differences? Chances are, in his perception, they would be the same just like two aliens would be the same to us. That is not reality though. There are many things that make us different. We all like to think that we come up with our own unique thoughts on things, but that is not always the case. Our own perception can actually alter our reality. Getting out of the cave and recognizing the good for ourselves is impossible if we never know that we are in it.