Perspective

August 10, 2021

Perspective (noun): the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance

The human body interfaces with the outside through our five senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. This information from the outside world then filters through the body into the brain where it is processed. With regards to how someone sees the world, their perspective, variation can come in three different ways.

The first, and less complex one, is variation in our actual mechanics of gathering information from the outside world; these are the five senses stated before. People have different abilities to see, different levels of sensitivity in all of the senses. This variation, however, doesn’t cause a large perspective change from person to person. Someone with better eye-sight won’t have greater insights into the world. The raw information coming into a human many vary, but these variations are small compared to the amount of data that is actually coming in.

The final two variations come from how an individual’s brain develops. Commonly stated in psychology as Nature vs. Nurture. Your brain, how you think and react, your whole conscience, are developed and formed by both the environment around you and your genetics. The factor each one plays in your overall development is the question of the problem, but I believe nurture has a stronger effect on the average human. As the above variation considered one’s ability to collect this outside data, the nurture aspect of the problem deals with the type of outside data being collected. And this is where I believe humans develop the greatest variation in their perspectives of the world.

With this starting place, it is hard to fault people for having poor perspectives and how these perspectives develop into opinions. Of course, people do have some room to maneuver through their environmental inputs and conclude as they wish, with a higher maneuvering room being a sought after trait maybe leading into intelligence, but a lot of the time it is hard to change someone’s perspective on a topic if they have been exposed to only one idea for most of their life. Not only that, but different groups of humans often get different types of outside data.

Somewhere within this website, maybe on the Empathy page, there is the idea of trust. Trusting someone’s opinion on a certain topic or a plan of action for a certain problem because you do not have all the relevant data to make an informed opinion. Now empathy describes the idea of understanding someone on the basis of a shared experience, but I do not have, nor can ever experience, the raw data from the outside that a girl grows up with or a woman lives with. I do not know the lived experiences that females face in America, nor the experience of being Black in America. Different groups of humans will have different perspectives on life, and will therefore develop different opinions about ideas within our world. Humans of two different groups may read the same news article and form very different opinions about the topics presented in that article. Now I doubt one human had better eye-sight than the other and therefore could see deeper into the words of the article and develop a differing opinion from the other with the comparatively poor eye-sight. People develop different perspectives because they live different lives.

This is where the trust comes in. I am not a female and therefore have do not know what the world feels, looks, sounds, smells, or tastes like to a female. Following that, I do not know what it feels like to birth a child, to carry that child in me for nine months, no maybe not even want that child in the first place, or to have the power sucked from me if there is no other choice but to carry through with having that child. But women do; they know the perspective of being a woman. So I trust them in their opinions about a topic only a woman can know. I can only sympathize if that. So if I trust these people to take actions that are for the betterment of our world, then I should adopt their opinion in an attempt to complete and data-driven.