Matthew Shipp Quotes

The system of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society…They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things.

The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.

We were raised to believe that our way of seeing the world was the only way.

Human beings can only make sense of the world through the lens they were socialized to make sense of it through.

Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

I was stuck as a Boomer type in a lot of people's minds.

We see the world through the lens of all our experiences; that is a fundamental part of the human condition.

I became a sceptic of one way of seeing the world. And I think it is what started me in my awareness that any worldview is superstitious.

The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.

My point is that perceptual bias can affect nut jobs and scientists alike. If we hold too rigidly to what we think we know, we ignore or avoid evidence of anything that might change our mind.

We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective.

Every generation tries to put its doctrine on a high shelf where the children can not reach it.

Perception is created and twisted so quickly.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

A high openness score means you're open-minded - you see the world for what it is - whereas a low openness score means you're incredibly closed-minded, and you see the world the way you want to see it, regardless of what is actually going on.

There's nothing you can't prove if your outlook is only sufficiently limited.

Change will come slowly, across generations, because old beliefs die hard even when demonstrably false.

There's a reason why young people think what they think. They are taught it. In many cases when they learn at home is erased or countered or overcome.

Remember, we see the world not as it is but as we are. Most of us see through the eyes of our fears and our limiting beliefs and our false assumptions.

Because we're brought into the world or educated in a certain way, we're trained to accept the world in a certain way.

You know, sometimes there's a difference between what is actually the truth and what you perceive to be the truth through your social conditioning.

What we believe, we see.

Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.

It is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the intellectual that he judges new ideas not by their specific merits but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced.