I was having a fun, only semi-serious discussion with a friend the other day about ghosts (and their existence/lack thereof). One of my arguments/discussion points was about how the human brain and sensory organs are subjective and sometimes unreliable filters of truth. Things like:
[ul]
[li]How we interpret stimuli is often based on expectation, context, and imagination (“there I was in the haunted mansion, and I felt an icy hand grip my arm.” [/li][li]Memory of experiences/events, even moments after they happen, vary from what actually happened, due to lack of complete information/awareness about the experience; our environmental and self awareness is inherently limited. The more time passes, the more the “true” memory can change, even as we don’t realize that we are now remembering it differently today than we did yesterday.[/li][/ul]
Are there any good non-fiction books out there that explore these kinds of ideas? I am fascinated by the fact that my perception of things can be wildly different than the person sitting next to me, yet enough things are close enough that we all manage to live together without much confusion (debatable, I guess). What is a true interpretation of experience? How do our stories shape our reality? You know, heady philosophical stuff like that.
This is, indeed, largely what philosophy has been about from Plato onwards. (Technically it the branch of philosophy called epistemology, but none of the branches of philosophy are independent of one another, and epistemology has always been one of the dominating ones.) It is a very large, very complex subject, and one that is rarely if ever handled in a remotely even-handed, adequate, or satisfactory way by popularizers, amateurs or dilettantes.
