"you percieve with your mind"

Nicking a line out of the gorillaz song. "You don't see with your eyes , you perceive with your mind" and a later line "its all in your head " . Tim Leary and others used hallucinogenics to widen their perception . Shamen have been using various vegetable products to do the same thing for years . My question is, that If as I believe perception is very individual , How do we work as a society ? Even communication is in doubt . This can be seen very clearly in one type of dysphasia where the words you speak are perceived by the patient as being different words. The brain is interpreting the physical signals in a different way . We achieve a consensus agreement in society through social leaning , conditioning . and constructivist learning about the meanings of stimuli that are necessary for the functioning of a particular society . They are almost agreed metaphors rather than meanings.As Susan Sontag(Illness as a Metaphor (1978) explains some illnesses are perceived , i:e have metaphors that are stronger and have more impact on the individual, and society than their physical symptoms : are perceived as being more or less important than the physical symptoms would suggest . So is this true about many other aspects of our lives , of course it is ask an arachnophobic about the importance of the spider metaphors to them . Perhaps what Leary and the shamen are doing is removing the brain from this agreed consensus . Some mental health issues have been described as socially constructed , perhaps this is another example of a mind that refuses to join the consensus club . I believe that Einstein was criticised as a poor student probably because he did not perceive things in a consensus way . This raises problems for traditional type education if the consensus parameters are set , then anyone moving out of those parameters is mad , bad , or confused . We don't value challenges to the group consensus as they will affect the structures that support our own perception and make us challenge our social and individual learning which contribute to our perceptions . Perhaps the only way foreward for society is the constructivist pathway ?

thunder

did anyone hear the thunder and lightening last night , It reminded me of when i was about 10-11 I used to go fishing on the great Ouse river and several times have sat on one bank in the dry and watched a raging thunderstorm going on on the other bank . The storms used to follow the river as if there was an invisible barrier .On the same note there was a programme on television earlier in the week which was exploring the east cost floods in 53 or 4 I remember being taken by my father down to the inland bank of the river and seeing nothing but an expanse of water on the other side ,where there should have been fields . Later that year we went to Hunstanton by train ,( pre Beeching days when we still had an effective rail system ) and all the caravans which should have been on the seaward side of the line were piled up as wreckage an the landward side .
Its My blog, so I can expand my theories, which I am about to do , Being a fenman I believe that the answer to flooding lies in the creation of more salt marsh wetlands , From my own observation as a child and since; reed beds and shallow water breaks up the power of the waves, and rather than eroding areas, the waves deposit particles in suspension . Look a at Castle Rising in Norfolk , Once close enough to a salt marsh to have a water gate, now some 5 miles from the sea. wildlife breed in wetlands and I'm sure if it was investigated reed beds could be harvested and turned into a renewable energy resource , fish farming is a possibility although the provision of shallow estuary type spawning beds could increase our own fish stocks , and reed beds mussel beds and sunlight are quite good at dealing with pollution. This is quite apart from the pleasure this environment gives to sailors ,fishermen,and others . Quite of the top of my head , and I don't know the answer , or even if it is a silly comment , but wouldn't more wetlands act as a heat sink and help compensate for global warming and the biomass of the reeds and the wetland trees would certainly process some of the CO2 . We need to learn to cope with climate change in a way that is not just coping but looking at what we need to do to maintain a standard of life that is acceptable . Rant over!!!