关系实在论：重构现实的感知维度与认知谦逊

Since humans have been able to talk to each other, they've been debating the nature of reality. So traditionally, people believe that there is an objective reality out there, separate from us, and that we perceive reality with more or less accuracy. So if I'm in the therapist's office, and I'm telling the therapist, well, I am really, really mad. And the therapist looks at me and says, no, actually, you're really sad. Who's right? Well, there are some people who would say one of us is right or we're both wrong because there's some objective reality. But reality is not purely objective and it's not purely subjective. It is relational. There is one reality that is perspective dependent. I experience anger. My therapist is experiencing me as sad. And together, that's the reality of the situation. My name is Lisa Feldman Barrett. I am a university distinguished professor of psychology at Northeastern University in Boston, and I'm here to talk to you today about the nature of reality. You know, a small topic, the nature of reality. Is reality objective, out there, separate from you? Or is reality all in your head? Philosophers have been debating this question for millennia. And I think they're probably asking the wrong question.

In reality, everything you do, and every experience that you ever have, is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. That is the signals that are hitting your retina in each eye, the cochlea in each ear, the receptors in your skin. The idea is that reality is made up of stable patterns of signals. Our best available evidence for how the brain is using past experience to anticipate sensory signals from the world, it suggests that reality may not be out there in the world, separate from you, and it's definitely not only in your head. It's actually a combination of the two. Which means that reality exists, but it exists in relation to you. Perception box is another way of talking about the remembered past. It's a concept that captures the idea that there is a relationship between what is inside your head and what is outside in the world. What relational realism implies for perception box is that your box is the ingredients, the signals that you bring to creating the relational present. So there's an old parable that people often appeal to when they're talking about the nature of reality. And it it goes something like this: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? A falling tree will cause vibrations in the air. So a relational realist would say there needs to be a set of receptors that detect those vibrations. And in order for it to be a sound of a tree falling, an organism has to know that that's what those sounds mean. So a relational realist would say, if there's no organism there to detect the signals, then no, the tree does not make a sound. There are other signals that are required to translate those vibrations into a sound.

Animals have sensory surfaces that we don't have. Reality as it pertains to them, in relation to them, is different than it is for us. So an example would be, there's a lot of vibration-based noise in the ocean that we don't detect and is not really relevant to us. But it turns out that those signals are detected by whales. And those signals are because of the whale's sensory surfaces and the whale's brain are part of reality from their perspective. And we interfere with their ability to communicate with each other by our ignorance of their perspective. And it's not that hard to go from that kind of an idea to our interactions with each other. Often in an argument, you want to appeal to the authority of objective reality to say that you're right. And if reality is relational, you can't do that. In order to resolve the conflict, it means you have to admit the idea that somebody else's experience has equivalent authority to your own. The idea that somebody else's experience is part of reality as much as yours doesn't invalidate your experience. It means that your experience is a part of reality, but it's not the only part. There are parts of reality that we share, and there are parts of reality that each of us has access to that the other doesn't. If you spend time around people who are just like you, who have the same reactions as you, or the same experiences as you, you'll be reinforcing the remembered past that's easy for you to conjure. But if you are curious, if you're foraging for new sets of signals, new meanings, you are very likely to expand the aspects of reality that you have access to. The goal there is to be curious and be humble. As a person, I think it's incumbent upon us -- we really ought to experience as many aspects of reality as we can. Otherwise, we're ignorant, and ignorance is not helpful. It has nothing to do with objectivity. It has everything to do with being able to experience as much of reality as possible.