For any perceptual entity A and his contextual reality B, there exists some relationship C which maps circumstances of reality B to qualia in entity A. There also exists a modality D by which entity A assimilates qualia into a coherent framework. Given that A is not omniscient, there must be some mapping between reality and his perceptions that affords him contextuality/limitation in perception. This same mapping must determine what reality “looks like” for A. It stands to reason that another being, perhaps a larger one, may see the “same” information that we see, from a not only expanded, but wholly different in modality, point of view.
Analogously, consider a human watching a caterpillar makes its way across the ground. The caterpillar has no overall sense of the landscape he’s traversing. He doesn’t even have a sense of what such a sense would “be like.” He doesn’t necessarily know the bladiness of blades of grass. At least he necessarily doesn’t know it in the same way we do. He doesn’t know the blackness of dirt or doesn’t in the way we do. The same for the greenness of grass or the blueness of the sky or the wetness of water. He doesn’t even know what he himself looks like, nor that he hatched from an egg. If we toss him through the air, we may synoptically understand, or at least recognize, the elliptical arc that he follows due to the principles of physics and gravity, but he has no such experience.
It stands to reason then, that if we were to sufficiently expand our own consciousness, we may experience the same events in a completely different manner. Our whole way of perceiving reality is therefore seemingly arbitrary. This is no surprise, of course, given a little bit of study into our own sense organs. Perhaps there is a punctuated equilibrium of subjective experience, whereby when your consciousness’ perception expands beyond a certain point, it completely changes modes. Or would it be gradual? Is it one way or another according to the type of subject? Maybe this “punctuated equilibrium” theory of perception is only really pertinent to the tree of biological evolution, being that it itself follows a pattern of punctuated equilibrium?
If you believe in If you believe in group consciousness, does a species itself have a point of view? Does graduating from one perspectival mode to another mean disbanding with one group consciousness and banding with another?
Is the mode of perception that a disembodied conscious observer–or a species–settles on determined by “lowest energy” (within the context of factors of natural selection), similarly to the end state of a folding protein or the direction of a river?
Does this all mean that in one way or another, Plato’s cave analogy always applies?
Additionally, if you believe in such things, perhaps this is the reason avatar Meher Baba worshipped the “masts” (pronounced “musts”), whom he said are like his eyes and his ears, and whom, by his own admission, he has lived for. Perhaps, all possible modalities of perception being on equal footing, without using individual consciousnesses as frames of reference, God really can’t experience “what’s going on in the universe.” Maybe we are all God’s eyes and ears.
