Cain and Abel: How Perception and Value Templates Dictate Reality

As early back as 380 BC, in his Republic, Plato is interested in the role of perception on reality. In his famous allegory of the cave he illustrates the primacy of perception over unmediated reality with prisoners who perceive shadows on a wall as reality unaware of the true forms casting them. The metaphor underscores how sensory perception limits and distorts experience, with true knowledge requiring transcendence beyond perceptual illustrations.

I think it is fair to say it is commonplace knowledge that our experience of the world has something to do with the world outside of us and something to do with our minds, but this was not always the case. For much, even most, of literate history there has been a back and forth debate between idealists who believe that the world is merely a product of the human mind and materialists who believe the human mind is a blank slate, tabula rasa, and the experience of the world is largely passive. Ideas like Plato’s, whereby transcendent truth is mitigated by the limitations of the senses were understood, but never really took off.

The big shift comes in 1781 with Immanuel Kant’s publication of the Critique of Pure Reason where he advances the idea of perception’s importance to reality by distinguishing between the noumenon (the thing-in-itself) and the phenomenon (reality as perceived through human faculties). For Kant, space, time and causality (as well as a slew of categories) are not inherent to the world, but a priori structures imposed by the mind. Thus, experience is not a passive reflection of the external but an active synthesis by perceptiual categorization, rendering the world intelligible yet inherently subjective — even if universally subjective for subjects who think like human beings.

That we bring an a priori framework to the world which gives us objects of possible experience to be synthesized into coherence was a profound discovery by Kant which had a ripple effect of nearly inestimable magnitude.

I briefly want to go through some of the other fields that ran with this idea so I can give you a sense of the solidity of Kant’s idea through what Campbell and Fiske called the Multitrait-Multimethod (MTMM) approach to construct validity. In short, MTMM suggests that for each separate trait or method or field of study a theory is found to be valid in the odds of it being found valid in yet another are increased. In short, in the social sciences, validity is measured by cross method conformity.

With this in mind, before getting back to Cain and Able, I want to briefly mention how the idea of perception’s impact on reality plays itself out over multiple disciplines.

In cognitive psychology the idea is extended out through models of top-down processing, where prior knowledge, expectations and schemas shape perception. Tversky and Kahneman’s work on heuristics and biases (Judgement Under Uncertainty, 1974) reveals how confirmation bias filters perceptions to align with preconceptions, dictating emotional and behavioral experience. For instance, in attribution theory (Fritz Helder, 1958), individuals perceive events as internally or externally caused, profoundly affecting self-experience and interpersonal dynamics.

In Neuroscience we are provided with mechanistic underpinnings, revealing perception as a brain-constructed simulation. Predicitive coding theory, advanced by Karl Friston, models the brain as a Bayesian inference engine: rather than passively receiving sensory data, it generates top-down predictions based on internal models, updating them via bottom-up error signals. This active interference means experience emerges from perceptual predictions, not raw inputs — explaining phenomena like illusions (e.g., Muller-Lyer illusion) where contextual cues override veridical measurements.

Neuroplasticity, as demonstrated by Michael Merzenich’s research, shows that perceptual experiences reshape neural circuit: repeated exposures strengthen synaptic pathways altering how future stimuli are perceived and experienced. In affective neuroscience (a field I find particularly interesting) Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis (Descartes’ Error, 1994) links perception to embodied emotions; prefrontal cortex and amygdala interactions tag perceptions with valence, dictating experiential quaila (e.g., a neutral event perceived as threatening triggers anxiety).

Functional neuroimaging (fMRI) corroborates this: studies on attentional modulation (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002) show that directing focus alters neural activation in visual cortices, changing experiential content. Pathologies like agnosia or hallucinations further illustrate: damage to perceptual networks decouples sensation from meaningful experience, underscoring the brain’s role in dictating realtiy.

In Sociology we see examinations of how social structures and interactions shape perceptual frameworks, thereby dictating collective and individual experience. Emile Durkheim’s concept of “collective representations” in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) posits that perceptions are socially constructed symbols  that bind communities, transforming raw events into meaningful experiences aligned with group norms. For instance, societal perceptions of deviance (Howard Becker, Outsiders, 1963) recast behaviors as “criminal” or “normal,” profoundly altering the experiential reality for both actors and observers.

Symbolic interactionism, developed by Herbert Blumer (1969) based on George Herbert Mead’s ideas, emphasizes that perception arises from interpretive processes in social encounters: individuals perceive situations through “definitions of the situation” (Thomas theorem, 1928), where “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Thus, perceptual negotiations in everyday interactions—such as class, race, or gender lenses—dictate experiential outcomes, from empowerment to marginalization. In modern contexts, Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977) illustrates how embodied perceptual dispositions, internalized through socialization, reproduce social inequalities by framing experiences as “natural.”

Anthropology highlights cultural variability in perception, demonstrating how ethnographic contexts mold experiential worlds. Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology (The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973) views culture as a “web of significance” where perceptions are culturally scripted interpretations, not universal truths. For example, in Balinese cockfighting, participants perceive the event not merely as gambling but as a symbolic enactment of status and rivalry, dictating profound emotional and social experiences.

Linguistics explores how language structures perception, influencing cognitive categorization and experiential interpretation. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, proposed by Edward Sapir (1929) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1940), suggests linguistic relativity: language shapes thought and perception, such that speakers of different languages experience the world differently. For instance, languages with multiple color terms (e.g., Russian distinguishing light and dark blue) enhance perceptual discrimination, altering experiential vividness in visual domains.

In cognitive linguistics, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory (Metaphors We Live By, 1980) argues that metaphors—rooted in perceptual experiences—frame abstract concepts: perceiving “argument as war” (e.g., “defend a position”) dictates combative experiences, while reframing it as “dance” could foster collaborative ones. Pragmatics, via Paul Grice’s cooperative principle (1975), shows how perceptual inferences in conversation (implicatures) construct experiential meanings beyond literal words.

Neurolinguistics corroborates this: fMRI studies (e.g., Pulvermüller, 2005) link language processing to perceptual-motor areas, indicating that linguistic structures activate sensory simulations, dictating embodied experiences. Linguistically, perception dictates experience by channeling it through grammatical and semantic frameworks, where linguistic interventions (e.g., reframing therapy) can recalibrate experiential interpretations.

From the world of physics, particularly quantum mechanics, we are introduced to the observer’s role in shaping reality, blurring the line between perception and objective existence. The Copenhagen interpretation, led by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg (1920s–1930s), posits that quantum phenomena lack definite properties until measured (observed): the act of perception collapses the wave function, dictating experiential outcomes from probabilistic superpositions. For example, in the double-slit experiment, perceiving particles as waves or particles alters interference patterns, suggesting perception co-creates reality.

David Bohm’s implicate order (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980) extends this: perception unfolds an “explicate” experiential world from an underlying holistic reality, where observer consciousness influences manifestation. In quantum field theory, perceptual frames (e.g., reference frames in relativity) dictate experiential invariants, as per Einstein’s special relativity (1905), where time and space perceptions vary with velocity.

Philosophically infused physics, like John Wheeler’s “participatory universe” (1970s), claims that observers retroactively shape cosmic history through perception. Physically, perception dictates experience by rendering it observer-dependent, challenging classical objectivity and implying that perceptual choices (e.g., measurement apparatuses) construct empirical realities.

Evolutionary biology traces perception’s adaptive origins, explaining how it evolved to dictate survival-oriented experiences. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection (On the Origin of Species, 1859) implies perceptual systems are tuned for fitness, not veridicality: organisms perceive environments in ways that maximize reproduction, often via illusions (e.g., Donald Hoffman’s interface theory, The Case Against Reality, 2019), where perception acts as a “user interface” simplifying complex realities into actionable experiences.

In sensory ecology, Jakob von Uexküll’s umwelt concept (1934) describes species-specific perceptual worlds: a tick perceives only butyric acid, heat, and touch, dictating a vastly different experiential niche from humans. Evolutionary psychology (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992) posits modular perceptions, like fear responses to snakes, as innate adaptations shaping threat experiences.

Neuroethology reveals genetic bases: mutations in perceptual genes (e.g., opsins in color vision) alter experiential qualia across species. Evolutionarily, perception dictates experience by prioritizing pragmatic approximations over truth, with maladaptive perceptions (e.g., in modern mismatches like anxiety disorders) highlighting its contingent, fitness-driven construction.

We can continue on like this through economics (Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky Prospect Theory, 1979), The Richard Easterlin Paradox and Robert Lucas’s 1972 Rational Expectations. Or we can look at Art History  with Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, 1960 or the work of Hans Robert Jauss in the 1970s on reception aesthetics. This also plays out in literary theory with Stanly Fish or Wolfgang Iser and Gerald Ginette’s Narratology. We see it in educational models and political science as well.

This is not to say that these theories are complete and perfect but rather that the idea that the world you are experiencing is not merely something you are a passive observer to has, for thousands of years, permeated nearly ever field of study of man. Further, we see it from Soviet material atheists and French literary critics as well as German and American  physicists, nuclear scientists, psychologists, three millennia of philosophers, all of the major world religions both east and west as well as neuroscientists, astronomers and neuropsychological researchers.

What does this say? Well, it says that if you want to make the argument that the human mind has no impact on how the world appears to us then you will have to, piece by piece, pretty much dispute every dominant strain of every academic field, science and philosophy dating as far back as the ancient Mesopotamians and up to this very moment at Bell Labs as well as do it cross culturally in both the East and the West.

The idea that the human being is simply receiving and not actively participating in the world he lives in is simply not a sustainable one. A human being as a pure instrument of reception from an objective world would be like a video camera thrown out of an airplane, spinning around as it plummeted to the ground. Watch that video. That is experience unperturbed by an internal a priori structure which actively participates in experience as such.

People like John Locke and Sergeant Joe Friday were interested in “just the facts” or at least they said so, but this

isn’t true….not even a little bit.

Perception works on levels of analysis. For instance, you look at a coffee mug. What is it? Well it is a lot of things. For one, it is a collection of molecules. But that isn’t what we perceive, even if we know it is a collection of molecules. That we know a coffee mug is a collection of molecules has absolutely no bearing on how we experience it. We can say we know it, but we do not act like it is just a collection of molecules. The tools we use to perceive the world do not perceive at that level of analysis.

The same with a cat. You can look at a cat and say “four legged mammal” and that would be a fact. But you don’t do that. No one does that. It isn’t useful just because it is a true fact. Almost every fact in the world, like 99.9% of facts in the world, are simply not useful at all. You look at a cat and say “cat.” Both that and “collection of molecules” are correct. Some would like you to believe that the reason you say cat is because you have been culturally indoctrinated to do so, but this is not true. You say “cat” because that is the level of reality that a cat affords to the human. If we were the size of a planet, we might just call it a spec. How we experience the cat determines, to no small degree, what the cat is for us (and for beings which think like us).

This is a very fine line which takes some delicate thinking. This is not the subjective of the idealist or the postmodernist that says a cat is a cat because we perceive it as a cat or say it is a cat. Further, it is not the materialist concept that it is a cat because it is a cat and that is just what it is. There is an agreement between the thing itself (think of this as the thing in its totality, across space and time, on every level of analysis simultaneously) and the a priori schema we bring to the world.

When people say they only want to consider the facts they simply do not understand how thinking works. The truth of the matter is that there are an infinite number of facts in every 1 inch square section of the universe. If you were to attempt to judge something by the facts without bringing a structure to it you would be in absolute chaos.

Let’s say someone were to ask me what I am doing. I could say that I am moving my fine musculature on my hands to move my fingers across a keyboard. Fact. I could say I am sitting and facing west. Fact. I could say I am breathing. Fact. But that isn’t what you are asking. Why, if we just lived in a world of facts, would I automatically assume that the level of analysis you wanted from me was “writing an essay for my website.”  It could just as easily have been an infinite number of answers which are more precise and high resolution (breathing) or more general and low resolution (working on becoming a better person). It is because, as a human, I can understand your motivations with regard to your value structure when you ask the question.

The same goes when someone asks you what you did yesterday. Imagine there was a video tape, in high definition, showing what you did yesterday, every single detail, all twenty four hours slowed down to accommodate a running commentary that went something like “that blink involved involuntary motor reflexes etc etc etc” and upon being asked what you did yesterday you gave someone that video. Do you think that is what they are asking for? Well there are the facts. They are all there and accounted for. People say all they want is the facts. But that’s not the case. People want the relevant facts. But relevant to what? You start to get an idea of how this works out here I think.

People often say “oh I think very scientifically” and the only proper response is “no, no you don’t.” Even scientists do not think scientifically when they aren’t in a laboratory setting dealing with a minute subfield which they have spent years mastering. The scientific method is specifically a way to force yourself to look at small aspects of the world in a way totally foreign to humans, in a way that avoids confirmation bias and to have dozens of other people do the same thing independently of one another with a strict set of rules for how to do it and then discarding all deviations between their results specifically for the goal of disproving the theory you are trying to promote. Exactly zero people think scientifically.

A very interesting and cool experiment based on this was done by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris and the results are published  in their book Invisible Gorilla (also known as Gorillas in our Midst: Sustained Inattentional Blindness for Dynamic Events, 1999)

In the experiment, participants watched a short video of two teams of people passing a basketball back and forth. One team wore white shirts and the other team wore black shirts. The viewers’ task was to count the exact number of passes made by the team in the white shirts. This forced them to focus intently on tracking the ball and the relevant players.

About halfway through the one minute video a person in a full gorilla suit walked slowly into the middle of the scene. The gorilla stops, faces the camera, thumps its chest dramatically for two seconds and then walked off the other side. The total time that the gorilla is visible on screen is 9 seconds. The gorilla is not hidden, not flashing by quickly and right in the center of the action.

After the video ends, participants report their pass count. Then the key question is asked: “Did you see anything unusual while watching the video?” followed by a more specific prompt such as “Did you see a gorilla?”

To this question 46-50% of the people completely failed to notice the gorilla at all.

There were broader studies. In 2013, 83% of radiologists looking for lung nodules in CT scans missed a gorilla 48 times larger than a typical nodule inserted onto an image even when looking directly at it.

As it turns out, oddly enough, the world we live in is, in part, connected to our values. That’s a really difficult idea to get a hold on, but it is true across time, across culture, across discipline in all situations. The world you inhabit is a product of your value system. Every single act of perception presumes a value laden hierarchy and a moral value system. Crazy right?

Ok, so that serves as a very long introduction to get us to where we are going and with that I want to jump back into the ancient stories of Genesis.

Prior to Cain and Abel and prior to the fall, Adam and Eve lived in paradise.

Let’s briefly discuss paradise. The word “paradise” originates from the Old Persian (specifically Avestan). The word comes from pairidaēza. It is made up of two words. Pairi- whcih means “around (cognate with Greek peri- as in “perimeter,” Sanskrit “pari” and English “per-” and the word daēza “to make, form, build, heap up” (from the Proto-Indo-European root dheigh meaning to form, build or shape (related to the English word dough).

So, pairidaēza literally meant “walled enclosure” or “something built around” — essentially a garden or a park. In

ancient Persian (Achaemenid Empire) culture, these were often grand royal gardens, hunting parks or pleasure grounds maintained by kings and nobles — luxurious, enclosed spaces full of trees, water, channels and exotic pets. Zoroastrian traditions emphasized such gardens as symbols of order, fertility and harmony with nature. We might recognize this as Central Park.

In the 4th Century BC, Greek historian Xenophon, in his Anabasis, used parádeisos (παράδεισος) to describe these Persian royal parks/enclosures and in Hebrew/Aramaic a related form pardes (פַּרְדֵּס) appears in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Nehemiah 2:8, Ecclesiastes 2:5, Song of Songs 4:13), meaning “orchard,” “park,” or “forest” respectively.

In the 1st Century BC translation of the Hebrew bible into Greek (The Septuagint), translators used parádeisos for the Garden of Eden. This becomes Paradisus in Latin used for the 4th Century AD translation of the Bible by St. Jerome and is brought into the French as paradis (11th century AD) and eventually to English as paradise.

Walled garden? Why a walled garden? Well, walled gardens are where human beings live. The wall is the culture and the garden is the nature. Too much culture, too much wall, and you get a tyranny. Too much nature, too much garden, and you get absolute chaos. The balance is, both figuratively and linguistically, paradise.

The thing about the walled garden is that even God cannot get rid of the snakes in the garden so to speak.

The garden is a conceptual system in which people exist. A walled garden is where people live because it is enculturated nature. Human beings always live in a structure that is an amalgam of nature and culture. Always.

It is set up so it is paradise — as long as we are unconscious. But we can’t manage it because there is always something chaotic within the walls — there is always a serpent to wake us up. The thing about humans is, even when we find ourselves in paradise, if there is a serpent we are exactly the type of beings that will go and interact with it. This is because we are both prey and predator animals, we are set up for the known and the unknown, habituation, chaos and order. The reason we go to the serpent, even when we are in an unconscious paradise, is because for humans there is always treasure being gaurded by the serpent. Chaos is best conceived as pure potential (see the tohu va bohu that God creates habitable order out of at the beginning of time). It is the constantly repeating archetypical myth of St. George. It is what God does in the beginning of time and it is the low resolution underpinning of all human actions.

Well, we have our perfect paradise so long as we are unconscious but we interact with the serpent because that is who we are and that wakes us up, pulls the scales from our eyes — that is what makes us conscious. This is the

biblical hypothesis and, while it is in different words, it is the scientific one as well. Lynne Isbell does a spectacular job detailing this in her brilliant and very readable work The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well 2009 … a book I highly recommend reading.

So we interact with the serpent and we are aware of our mortality, we are aware of our limits in space and time, we become aware of good and evil, we are aware we are naked, we become ashamed and we are kicked out of our unconscious paradise.

And this is the world that Cain and Abel have been born into. A flawed world, a mortal, conscious, shame filled world. Our world.

Well, what is it that Cain and Abel have? Suffering. And what is it that Cain and Abel, and indeed all of us, want to do? Alleviate that suffering. We want to set being in order, bring about the city of God, heaven on earth, the conscious return to paradise…however you want to put it. And how is it we do this? Sacrifice.

And here is the thing, we still have not come up with a better idea than sacrifice. The alternative to sacrifice is bitter resentment, destruction and chaos. We are in a post fallen world and we are aware of the future and we begin to sacrifice.

Given the axiom that we must sacrifice, the question, as I mentioned in the last post, is what is the greatest possible sacrifice for the greatest possible good. The biblical hypothesis will eventually be that it is the sacrifice of the awake mother who knows full well that saying yes to life means sacrificing her child to be destroyed by the world, the sacrifice by the father of the son who he knows will have a life that comes to disaster and the sacrifice of the son to a transcendent ideal simultaneously, that is the ultimate sacrifice that redeems and renews the world.

That is one hell of a hypothesis. But we will get to more of that in the future.

At the moment we are here with Cain and Abel and they have brought their sacrifices to God. Abel’s sacrifice finds favor in God’s eyes and Cain’s does not. Cain broods on this, resents his brother, resents the world and the God who created it, resents his own ideals and in an act of violence kills Abel.

So, is it just Cain’s fault? I mean, there is kind of an ambiguousness behind why his sacrifice wasn’t accepted and the fact of the matter is that sometimes we are just arbitrarily handed a terrible card, trampled by fate and that is that.

A person wakes up in the morning with a pain in their side. It persists a few days. They go to the doctor and find out they have pancreatic cancer and six months to live and all of a sudden the thin ice of the normative world breaks and they are cast into the chaotic waters. You don’t just want to tell a person like that that it is their own fault for being an asshole. But that isn’t what this is, it is much more sophisticated.

It’s not just that Cain should realize it’s his fault that God does not look favorably on his offerings. Its is more like this: If life is not yet what it ought to be you have a responsibility to do something about it and the first place to look for problems to fix is to yourself and your own errors.

This is microanalysis. You don’t go from God hasn’t accepted my sacrifice to let me spite the creator of the universe because I didn’t get my way and let me kill my ideal, break my parent’s hearts and doom myself to a life in the wilderness while I am at it. This is not the proper mode of being. But this is what Cain does. Rather, he should have looked towards his own errors and asked for help. This is basically what God tells him when he asks, “if you do good will you not be accepted?”

In an early essay we spoke about JJ Gibson’s idea of affordances. It might be helpful to go back and refresh on that. In short, the patterns of the world present themselves to us with regard to their affordant value. When we really need to sit down and we see a large rock we don’t see a large rock we see a “sitting down place” but if that same rock was there when we didn’t want to sit, but rather wanted to walk to a point behind it, we would see it as a “getting in the way object.” Our desired outcome changes how we perceive physical objects and does so necessarily. It isn’t like we see a rock and infer either chair or thing in the way, we see a chair or a thing in the way first and then infer a rock. There is a very convincing argument to be made that if it didn’t work this way we would not have made it as a species. There is a reason we need to react instantly, even before processing all the details. One of those reasons is the speed at which a snake can strike.

Through a Gibsonian lens, the tragedy of Cain isn’t merely psychological jealousy or theological favoritism — it is a story about perceiving (or failing to perceive) affordances correctly in a meaningful, value-laden environment. Abel detects and acts on the richest, most life-affirming possibilities the situation offers (generous worship, care for life). Cain perceives narrower or distorted ones, eventually latching onto the affordance for violence when better paths (repentance, mastery of anger) were also available but not picked up on. Keep in mind, they are in identical situations, it is the affordances they perceive which makes them different.

Understanding the story this way maintains the theological heart of the story (faith, heart attitude, consequences of sin) while framing it ecologically: humans don’t just think abstractly about right and wrong — we directly perceive what the world invites/forbids us to do, and our character shows in which affordances we actualize.

Cain and Abel are avatars of two canonical patterns of reacting to the terrible burden of self-awareness and mortality.

Abel embodies the humble, upward-oriented, sacrificial path. He makes the proper offering — the best of his  flock — voluntarily aligning himself with the structure of reality (the logos). This proper sacrifice establishes balance between present effort and future benefit. Abel trusts (has faith in) existence, orients himself towards the highest good he can envision and flourishes as a result prefiguring the redemptive savior figure (Christ) and representing the heroic integration of order and chaos, known and unknown — thereby, even if only in the moment, recreating paradise.

Cain, on the other hand, embodies the resentful, arrogant, downward path. His offer is deemed, for one reason or another, substandard. He believes he can “game the system” and has no faith in the goodness of being. He doesn’t trust the sacrificial idea as a bargain with the universe where he gives something of great value away and it produces a transcendent value in the future. In short, he has no faith in God. When rejected he doesn’t examine himself or work to make better sacrifices, he withdraws into arrogance, resentment and bitterness. Nothing he wants ever happens because he doesn’t truly want the right things and he refuses to pay the ultimate price. That refusal to pay the ultimate price is just another way of saying he has an inferior sacrifice.  His countenance “falls” and he becomes homicidally murderous.

Life requires sacrifice. Life requires voluntarily giving up something valuable now for greater future gain. Abel gets this right. He sacrifices his best, aligns himself with meaning and reality.  Cain gets this wrong. He holds back, skimps and resents the demand for sacrifice altogether. When Cain’s half-hearted attempt fails, he doesn’t adapt but doubles down on pride and envy leading to the ultimate destructive act, the killing of Abel, rather than bettering himself.

Cain does not ask himself what everyone should ask themselves every morning: What sacrifices do I need to make in order to make things better?

When people feel inferior or cheated by life the temptation is always going to be to destroy the ideal rather than sacrifice and continue to strive towards it and, really, no wonder sometimes. This isn’t an easy task God is laying on us. Cain sees Abel’s success and God’s favor as an unbearable accusation of his own inadequacy and rather than mastering sin, as God suggests, he murders the standard of excellence embodied by his brother.