
“nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility”
"Understanding and Imagination in the Light of Nature"
Variant: The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world...
Context: Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see. We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it's the notion to be maximized), is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture — the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not — because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you see. For Western Civilization that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature.
“nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility”
The New Divinity (1964)
Context: Human potentialities constitute the world's greatest resource, but at the moment only a tiny fraction of them is being realized. The possibility of tapping and directing these vast resources of human possibility provide the religion of the future with a powerful long-term motive. An equally powerful short-term motive is to ensure the fullest possible development and flowering of individual personalities. In developing a full, deep and rich personality the individual ceases to be a mere cog or cipher, and makes his own particular contribution to evolutionary fulfilment.
“The world, as we perceive it, is our own invention.”
Heinz von Foerster (1988) The Invented Reality p.45–46
1980s
Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 2
“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.”
This actually first appears in Recent Experiments in Psychology (1950) by Leland Whitney Crafts, Théodore Christian Schneirla, and Elsa Elizabeth Robinson, where it is expressed:
: If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
Randy Allen Harris, in Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), p. 35, and an endnote on p. 138 indicates the misattribution seems to have originated in a misreading of quotes in Patterns Of Discovery: An Inquiry Into The Conceptual Foundations of Science (1958) by Norwood Russell Hanson, where an actual quotation of WIttgenstein on p. 184 is followed by one from the book on psychology.
Misattributed
“The world is as neutral as a mirror. We perceive in it only what we put before it.”
“The world you perceive is drastically simplified model of the real world.”
Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. xxvi.
Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 12