Day of the Palisades, 14th of Spring 526 M.E. (Castor): I'm thoroughly enjoying my reading of Michael Pollan's A World Appears. I'm reading it very slowly, as every few pages I come across one statement or another that makes me want to put the book down and think for a while. Meditate on it a little, and then come back and re-read it again to make usure I got it right before moving on.

According to Pollan, in just one of many fascinating observations, there's a leading model of perception known as the Bayesian mind. "The Bayesian brain hypothesis," Pollan writes, "holds that perception is less a matter of taking the world in through our senses than a matter of generating a continuous stream of predictions about what's happening in the world based on our prior experiences and the laws of probability." 

"Our senses exist," Pollan writes, "mainly to refine, or error-correct, our minds' best guesses as to what we're experiencing." In other words, our minds don't exist to interpret our senses, our senses exist to interpret our minds. 

This is a most worthy addition to the set of ideas I've come to rely upon in my understanding of samskara, mental models, and subconscious thought. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm wrote, "Man needs a map of his natural and social world, without which he would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently. He would have no way of orienting himself and of finding for himself a fixed point that permits him to organize all the impressions that impinge upon him."

"Whether he believed in sorcery and magic as final explanations of all events, or in the spirit of his ancestors as guiding his life and fate, or in an omnipotent god who will reward or punish him, or in the power of science to give answers to all human problems - from the standpoint of his need for a frame of orientation, it does not make any difference. His world makes sense to him, and he feels certain about his ideas through the consensus with those around him. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. But the map was never entirely wrong - nor has it ever been entirely right, either. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living."

Fromm found it impressive that he could find no culture or individual in which there did not exist such a frame of orientation. "Often an individual may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that he responds to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as his judgment guides him. But it can be easily demonstrated that he takes his own philosophy for granted, because to him it is only common sense, and he is unaware that all his concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference."   

Fromm's description of our "mental maps" is strikingly similar to the Buddhist samskara (mental formation) and to Pollen's description of the Bayesian mind. A person develops mental models based on their prior experience, including what they've been taught and what was impressed upon them, and then can predict the likely events of the near future based on that model. In the Bayesian model, we don't perceive the object per se as much as a potential for a certain outcome, be it danger or pleasure.

For example, two different people might see the same dog at the same time. One person might perceive a chance of getting bit or at least aggressively barked at. The other person might perceive a "good boy," a loyal and nonjudgmental friend. The difference is based on prior experience and what they've been taught. Similar are the differences when two separate people see someone of a different gender, race, or religion, or an immigrant, or a homeless person. We're perceiving imagined potential, not the actual phenomenon. We're constantly sizing everything up, categorizing our surroundings and what we encounter as either "dangerous" or "pleasurable," and frequently ignoring the rest that don't fall firmly into either category.

The Bayesian model seems to exist in the sweet spot of the Venn diagram of samskara, potential, and subconscious thought.