💢 Phenomenology: The World in Brackets

📍 One of the most important foundations for knowing the world lies in the conception we hold of the world's reality and truth. A traditional view, here associated with Aristotelian philosophy, defines truth as correspondence with reality and holds that reality can be apprehended through the human senses and rational faculties. But to what extent can reality actually be received and understood through human sensation and consciousness, and how much information from the surrounding environment is the human brain capable of receiving and processing?

📍 Understanding sensory input—what from the surrounding world affects our five senses—and the way and extent to which this information is processed in human consciousness can challenge the older philosophical picture of our access to reality.

📍 According to the neurological claims cited here, the volume of sensory information reaching a human being in each second is approximately 400 million bits of data, while the conscious part of the human brain processes only around 200,000 bits. In this account, only about one twenty-five-thousandth of what enters the brain through sensory input is processed. The human brain therefore reduces the external world's reality by a factor of around twenty-five thousand in order to construct each moment of perception. Contrary to a common assumption, the brain can thus be regarded as an information-reducing rather than information-increasing instrument.

This reduction is described as occurring through sensory gating: everything entering through sensory channels must pass through a gate, and much of the information is filtered in the passage. The source further claims that this filter functions differently in schizophrenia and autism, affecting how much of the surrounding world is processed.

Beyond this information-reducing role of the human brain, the nervous system of every living being also apprehends the outside world in a species-specific way. Dogs, for example, see a more limited colour range than humans. They therefore do not see the world as we do.

Given these scientific claims and our limited human access to the reality of the outside world, the question of how we know reality and truth deserves reflection.

📍 In modern philosophy, phenomenology, founded by Husserl, makes this problem central. It studies the structures of human experience and consciousness. One important phenomenological term is bracketing: suspending judgement and presuppositions about the world. Because the human perceptual system does not possess complete access to the world's reality, we place the world “in brackets” (epoché), refusing to treat any one apprehension of reality as finished or complete and allowing the phenomenon to continue speaking.

Phenomenological inquiry thus emphasises the limitations of human perception and the possibility that many aspects of a phenomenon are reduced or excluded. It seeks to expand the mind's possibilities for understanding the external world and therefore insists:
let the phenomenon speak for itself

Allow each phenomenon to speak for itself.

Heidegger, a major contemporary phenomenological philosopher, used the term aletheia for truth, understood as unconcealment, disclosure or the removal of covering from beings. In this reading, attention to any phenomenon illuminates one aspect while leaving others unseen, like a room in which a torch can illuminate only one corner at a time. When one side of the room is lit, the rest remains in darkness. The reality of the room must therefore remain “bracketed” so that other aspects can continue to be examined and our awareness of surrounding realities can be expanded.

🖊 Drawn from discussions by Dr Aydin Areta

@darichehaa