+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Anthropology & Psychology (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-86.html)
+--- Thread: How culture hides itself in the given (/thread-19199.html)
How culture hides itself in the given - Magical Realist - Nov 16, 2025
Think of all the stuff you confidently claim to know and understand. Tons of facts and ideas and truths underlying your daily experience of reality. All the things your culture has taught you about science and history and psychology and philosophy and religion and ethics. In the welter of all this handy third hand knowledge, very little counts as anything you really know. How could it? You didn't think thru those ideas or values or truths on your own and form them as your conclusions. You didn't record all the scientific facts about the world for yourself. It was all just handed to you and taken by you as all given and true without any questions.
It's basically like the software that is installed in every child's brain that enables them to operate and function successfully in the world. We are thankfully spared the task as members of one species of having to learn all this information ourselves from scratch, literally inheriting the entire constructed worldview of the historical epoch of our time. Like bees secreting and storing precious honey in their hive we are the lucky beneficiaries of this collective project of stored information over thousands of years. Very little of the real world happens to us except as it is expected to and believed in by our culturally programmed minds.
And yet nothing about our experience is in fact given. It is all prepackaged and pre-interpreted for us in the template of our programming. Consciousness itself is less a direct grasp of the real as it is a way of integrating our reality thru the sense-making sieve of language and traditional values. Can we experience the world in any other way outside of how we are culturally predetermined to? That is perhaps the biggest question of our time. And how does one begin to start doing that when even our sense of what is true and right is itself likely just an artifact of the culture and time we are living in?
"Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. " ~E.E. Cummings