An ancient Indian story: It tells the story of several blind people who never knew what an elephant was. They touched the elephant together and finally reached a tit-for-tat conclusion: some people said that the elephant was like a wall, some people said it was like a pillar, and some people said it was like a thick rope. . . Everyone around him thought it was ridiculous for the simple reason that he opened the "eye of God" and saw the whole elephant.

Buddhism uses this story to show that we lack a comprehensive understanding of the world, and individuals will have disputes because they regard one-sided cognition as a comprehensive cognition. The process of our cognition of the world is the same as that of the blind, and the world we see is actually only a fragment of the objective world. If we regard the process of understanding the world as an open-loop system, this system consists of three basic parts: input signal, sensor and processor.

1. Signal transmission distortion

This input signal is not the signal from the so-called objective entity. Objective entities send out many signals, such as sound waves and various radiations. But our sensors can only receive signals of hearing, sight, smell, touch and taste at most.

Beyond these signals, we have no perceptual ability, which is the first distortion. Secondly, the received signals need to be converted into electrical signals to spread between neurons, and electrical signals need to be converted into neurotransmitters to spread between neurons. Anyone who has studied signal and system knows that the signal will be distorted in the process of transformation, and there is a secondary distortion here. So the signal received by our processor is already a seriously distorted signal.

2. The reality of dependency model

It is generally believed that all our knowledge about the world can be obtained directly through observation, and the fact should be the expression of the signals transmitted to our processor, just like what our senses perceive. But even if we don't consider the signal distortion of our speech, our cognition of the world is still not the real world. The reason for this phenomenon is called model-dependent realism by Hawking in his book The Grand Design.

From the perspective of brain science, model-dependent realism conforms to the way we feel the object. When we look at an object, the brain receives a series of signals. Unfortunately, the brain reads two-dimensional data, while the world we see is three-dimensional. Why? Because the brain sorts out these two-dimensional data, it automatically supplements the missing dimensions and creates the impression of three-dimensional space. In other words, the brain constructs a three-dimensional model from two-dimensional data. At present, in artificial intelligence, the practice of supplementing dimensions to build models because of missing dimensions of data is very similar to that of the brain.

So the so-called objective entity we see is not a real objective entity, but a model established by the brain on the basis of a series of distorted signals.

3. Enlightenment of "Golden Hand"

The story of the golden hand: a king who likes gold very much hopes that everything around him is made of gold. Later, he got his wish. God gave him a pair of hands to make gold, and anything he touched will become gold. When the king's world becomes a golden world, he can't live.

Our perception is similar to the "golden hand": as long as we see, hear, smell, smell and touch, these things are stained with our traces, but we don't know it, and we still think it is the original. What we think of as an "objective entity" is actually an object distorted by the perceptual system, and it is called an "object", not the entity itself. We can only see objects, but not objects.

4. Cognition is a tool

Any species in nature follows a principle when forming their own perception ability-seeking survival advantage, and we humans are no exception. On the premise of forming survival advantages, it is good that we have enough cognition.

Professor Shanyou said that light is a kind of energy. When we perceive light, our human eyes retain their color attributes, but filter out other features. From an evolutionary point of view, when humans are apes, whoever can keenly find fruits with different colors will gain a competitive advantage, while those apes with poor color perception will have a much lower chance of survival and will eventually be eliminated. As for the other perceptual abilities of light, because we can't use it when gathering food, having this ability will consume a lot of energy, but it will become a burden of survival and will naturally be eliminated. These apes eventually evolved into what we are now.

The essence of cognition is not to know the world, but to make our species survive better. Under natural selection, we know the world for survival, not for truth.

Today's commercial society is based on modern western Zhe Ke's thinking, and the demand for truth-seeking is getting higher and higher, which is contradictory to our brain that has evolved for more than 100,000 years. Maybe we will never perceive this objective world, but we need to realize that what you see is not necessarily true and remain a little skeptical about the world we perceive. Business society is also a competitive society. You don't have to reach the point of truth. You just need to test your cognitive system all the time and get closer to the truth than others.