Stoned Korea and the doors of perception

Courtesy of Jr Korpa

By David Tizzard

Consciousness and the act of being human are very difficult things to understand. It's generally for the best that we don't think about it too much. With ignorance, we can simply skip through life believing that we are rational individuals, composed of single selves, making choices according to our own free will, perceiving an objective world outside of us. If we do that, our understanding of the world is generally always correct and people that disagree with us are mostly wrong.

This situation is never more evident than in the huge divergence of opinions as to what South Korea actually is. Some people describe Korea as an economic behemoth driven by multinational corporations and cutting-edge technocapitalism. Others see it as a vibe shift challenging the white west: from hip-hop to fashion, dramas and vlogs.

For another group of people, the country is beset by gender inequality, hostility to sexual minorities, violent, racist and gripped in culture wars. Or, for others at the same time, it is continuing its upward trajectory of kindness and peace after 5,000 years of a proud and triumphant history. To some others, it is characterized by indescribable and unique patterns of human behavior: "han," "jeong" and "nunchi." For a final group, Korea and its people are the same as everyone else, just more so.

All of these views are easily found online, in books and throughout the print media. The people who champion each view normally do at every opportunity, further reinforcing their own perspectives. But with such contrasting and largely mutually exclusive positions, which one is correct? International (and Korean) students enter my lectures with wildly varying views of the country, each no doubt influenced by their own identity, background and (importantly) the media they consume.

We assume that we experience a world and a Korea that is really out there. And that we do so as the main actor in our own feature film. But the idea of a human as a rational decision maker, with a single continuous self, has been long challenged by the scientific community. Descartes gave way to Freud long ago and since then, further advances have continued to unravel and disprove common understandings of what it means to be. Ultimately, we are no longer cognitive computers but rather feeling machines ― alive, desiring and conscious.

The French-born erotic novelist and writer Anais?Nin said, "We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are." As beautiful as this sounds, neuroscience is slowly demonstrating that this somewhat counter-intuitive position might actually be correct. In his marvelous book "Being You", Anil Seth uses the latest scientific research to make a very persuasive and well-written case for the fact that perception is not outside-in. We do not see an objective world outside of us and transmit it into our heads through the eyes. Rather, as every stoner and student of Albert Hoffman has once realized, our eyes are projectors. We don't take things in. Instead, we push things out. Perception is outside-in.

The next part is tricky. Science always is. We make Bayesian predictions (best-case scenarios)?about the causes of our sensory signals rather than passively registering an objective external reality. What we see of the world is a continuous and ongoing process of prediction error minimization: our own personal hypothesis. We are not seeing things as they are in reality but rather existing in a "controlled hallucination" of our own making. Consciousness has evolved not for accuracy but rather for utility. And it applies to things outside us and inside us.

Seth suggests, "All of our perceptions and experiences, whether of the self or the world, all are inside-out controlled and controlling hallucinations that are rooted in the flesh-and-blood predictive machinery that evolved, develops and operates from moment to moment always in light of a fundamental biological drive to stay alive. We are conscious beast machines, through and through."

If that's true, and the neuroscience data and research are correct, we are perceiving Korea as we think it should be rather than as it is. We are predicting, hypothesizing and hallucinating in our own personal way. Just as Anais?Nin suggested. As a result, we are often blind to many other things. If you haven't heard of the Selective Attention Test explored by Chabris and Simons in "The Invisible Gorilla," prepare to be shocked. I've actually run this test on hundreds of undergrads over the years and the data stands up to experiences here in the Korean lecture halls. We can easily overlook, ignore or simply completely miss something as obvious as a gorilla right in front of us if we are not looking for it. If it's not in our hallucination, we don't see it.

This column obviously sounds like the ramblings of a sixth-form stoner. One of the most famous and oft-repeated refutations to those that claim the construction of reality is to try jumping out of a window and then see how much of the world is what you perceive and how much is actual concrete and gravity. But this is where we encounter what John Locke called primary qualities and secondary qualities. Primary qualities exist independent of us as observers (space, solidity, motion, etc.). Secondary qualities depend on perception. These might include color, beauty, justice and other things. Much of what we read and write about Korea involves such secondary qualities. Things inside us rather than outside there in Korea.

What does this all mean? To paraphrase the post-impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne, Korea is the place where our brain and the country meet. We are all hallucinating, projecting and ascribing various qualities to something out there. It is only when these hallucinations form some sense of common agreement that we find reality. But it is our task to understand that we are (possibly) hallucinating much of what is out there and to act accordingly when declaring with any authority or confidence what we think Korea might be.

Dr. David A. Tizzard (datizzard@swu.ac.kr) has a Ph.D. in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He is a social/cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He is also the host of the Korea Deconstructed podcast, which can be found online. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.