Source: “The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration Of The Spiritual Realm”, By John Hick*,* Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, 2013.
5. The Key to Understanding.mp4
5. Decoding Reality - How Your Mind Actively Shapes Everything You Experience.m4a.m4a.m4a
This material explores perception as an active process of interpretation, building on Immanuel Kant's idea that our cognitive equipment shapes what we can know. It argues that the mind is not a passive receptor but continuously organizes and imposes meaning on sensory data, a concept supported by cognitive psychology. The author distinguishes between different "levels of meaning"—physical, moral, and religious—positing that our cognitive freedom increases as we move from physical awareness to moral and religious understanding. While physical perception is largely programmed for survival, allowing little cognitive freedom, moral awareness introduces a greater degree of choice, often leading to self-deception. Ultimately, the text asserts that religious awareness offers the maximum cognitive freedom, as the divine must not be overwhelmingly evident, allowing for genuine, uncoerced spiritual response and relationship.
Here are 15 major topics from the material, each summarized individually and without references:
Topic 1 Perception is fundamentally an act of interpretation, not just a passive reception of information. This concept is central to epistemology, which questions how we acquire knowledge. As explored by Immanuel Kant in the "Critique of Pure Reason," what we can know, and the form in which we know it, is intrinsically shaped by the capabilities and functions of our own cognitive equipment. This suggests that our understanding of the universe, whether viewed religiously or naturalistically, depends on our own interpretive response to its inherent ambiguity.
Topic 2 The principle of critical realism, a concept Kant helped to establish, posits that awareness is not a simple process where the environment imprints itself directly onto consciousness. Instead, the mind's inherent structure plays a crucial role in determining what can be known. This foundational idea extends beyond mere sense perception, emphasizing that the mind is continuously active in perception, rather than being a passive receiver of data.
Topic 3 Cognitive psychology further supports the idea of the mind's active role in perception, detailing how it constantly performs complex, multi-layered operations. These operations include selecting, grouping, extrapolating, excluding, projecting, relating, and imposing its own interpretive categories. This intricate process occurs unconsciously, with only the final outcome appearing in our consciousness, demonstrating the mind's continuous and sophisticated engagement with incoming data.
Topic 4 The fundamental principle that the mind imposes order and meaning on received data applies across all levels of awareness: physical, moral, aesthetic, and religious. These are described as hierarchical levels of meaning, where ethical and aesthetic understandings presuppose and are mediated through the physical. Religious meaning, in turn, can presuppose and be mediated through any or all of the other levels, but the reverse is not true. This structure suggests a progressive layering of meaning, with physical awareness forming the base.
Topic 5 Our awareness of the material world relies on physical receptors, the five senses, which enable us to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. However, these senses reveal only selected aspects of our environment—those relevant to our need to act and react for survival. In selecting certain information, our senses exclude far more than they admit, functioning like selective filters. They have evolved to aid our survival within our specific evolutionary niche, allowing only a certain range of signals to pass through.
Topic 6 Human sensory perception is inherently limited. For instance, within the vast electromagnetic spectrum, human senses only respond to a tiny fraction of light waves. Similarly, we are deaf to a wide range of acoustic stimuli and insensitive to the majority of chemical differences. This means we inhabit a humanly selected and simplified version of our environment. These limitations are crucial for survival; if we perceived the full range of stimuli, we would be overwhelmed and unable to distinguish objects vital for our existence or react to necessary sounds. For example, perceiving water as a swirling cloud of particles rather than a continuous substance would make survival impossible.
Topic 7 Beyond initial sensory registration, the mind actively processes and organizes the minute selection of information it receives, shaping it into our familiar environment. For example, although light waves hitting the retina are nearly flat, the mind/brain immediately converts this information into three-dimensional experience. This involves complex, unconscious calculations based on clues like disparities between images from two eyes and the angle of convergence. Our ability to perceive depth and judge distances is an acquired skill, developed by correlating touch with movement in space, as evidenced by people from dense forests initially seeing distant objects as small rather than far away.
Topic 8 Cognitive freedom, defined as the ability to interpret and respond to aspects of reality, varies significantly across different levels of awareness. At the physical level, there is very little cognitive freedom. This is because the physical environment imposes itself upon our attention, and successful interpretation is crucial for survival. Species, including humans, have been programmed through evolution to correctly interpret physical signals that affect their particular life forms, with failure leading to elimination.