Perceptual Overlap

Here's an attempt at an academic style paper on some concepts I've been working on.

Title: Perceptual Overlap: Toward a Shared Salience Landscape through Perspectival Knowing

Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of perceptual overlap, a process by which individuals with differing internal representations of reality achieve a shared orientation toward the world through perspectival knowing. Drawing on the cognitive frameworks of John Vervaeke and Iain McGilchrist, this paper articulates how rational dialogue, when guided by right-hemispheric integration and non-egoic reasoning, can realign salience landscapes and enable genuine mutual understanding. Perceptual overlap is proposed as a potential response to the cultural fragmentation brought about by propositional polarization.

1. Introduction

Contemporary Western culture is increasingly polarized. Discourse across political, ideological, and social lines has become less about understanding and more about asserting fixed propositional positions. This crisis of communication is not merely ideological but cognitive. Our collective failure lies in over-reliance on propositional knowing and the neglect of other, deeper modes of knowing that allow for shared experience and transformation. In this context, the concept of perceptual overlap offers a novel framework for repairing mutual understanding by leveraging perspectival knowing.

To fully explore this idea, we must first introduce two key theoretical frameworks. The first is John Vervaeke’s cognitive science of meaning, which includes the concepts of ratio and religio. Ratio refers to the faculty of reason—our capacity for analysis, logic, and symbolic thought. Religio, by contrast, refers to the pre-conceptual, participatory connectedness between agent and arena. It is our sense of being in contact with the world, of being grounded in a meaningful context. A healthy mind uses ratio in service of religio, aligning reasoning with lived reality, compassion, and insight.

The second framework is Iain McGilchrist’s theory of hemispheric specialization, most thoroughly explored in The Master and His Emissary (2010). McGilchrist argues that the brain’s two hemispheres are not symmetrical processors but embody distinct modes of attention and understanding. The right hemisphere (RH) is the “Master”—it is holistic, contextual, relational, and open to new experience. It engages with the world as a living whole. The left hemisphere (LH), the “Emissary,” is narrow-focused, categorical, abstracting, and instrumental. It re-presents the world in static terms to serve specific ends. A healthy cognitive system is one in which the RH governs and contextualizes the operations of the LH. Pathology emerges when the LH attempts to usurp the RH, ignoring context and reducing the world to manipulable abstractions.

This dynamic is mirrored in the relationship between the Ego and the You. The Ego is the self-representational structure that uses ratio to preserve its internal coherence and social identity. It maintains LH representations that, when looped back into the RH, omit ambiguity, discomfort, or emotionally threatening context. In this way, the Ego resists reintegration with the broader reality apprehended by the RH. The You, by contrast, is the relational self—it uses ratio in service of religio. It seeks contact with reality and care for others. It builds representations that, when returned to the RH, retain their depth, nuance, and humility, even when such truth is uncomfortable. The Ego does what it can to deny the existence of the You, while the You leaves room for the Ego to have autonomy within the self. This is similar to how the LH rejects the world of the RH, but the RH understands the importance of including the perspective of the LH.

To further understand how the Ego preserves itself, we must introduce Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a functional framework. Abraham Maslow proposed a tiered model of human motivation, beginning with basic physiological needs (food, water), followed by safety, belonging, esteem, and finally self-actualization. Both the Ego and the You are embedded within the self and are attuned to these needs. However, the Ego treats the higher-order needs—especially esteem and belonging—as non-negotiable. It uses ratio to maintain representations of the self that secure these needs, even if doing so distorts reality.

When an individual’s self-esteem is threatened—for example, during a disagreement where they are shown to be mistaken—the Ego perceives this as a potential drop in social value. This triggers a cascade of emotionally charged mental representations known as somatic markers, as outlined by Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis. According to Damasio, emotions are unconscious physiological responses to stimuli, while feelings are the conscious experience of those bodily responses. When emotionally charged experiences are encoded into memory, they become associated with mental images—representations that may be visual (representations of external stimuli such as sights, sounds, etc.), conceptual (abstract self-models or ideas with emotional salience such as propositional statements like ‘I am stupid’), social/emotional (representation of an emotional episode or interpersonal situation such as being yelled at) or somatic (representations of internal bodily states such as tension in your chest, tightness in your throat etc.).

These somatic markers color future cognitive events with emotional significance. For example, recalling a time one was publicly corrected may evoke an image of shame, accompanied by a tight chest or sinking stomach. These somatic feelings act as heuristics that steer attention, decision-making, and behavior. The Ego exploits this mechanism: when an internal representation threatens esteem or belonging, it floods the system with negatively marked images—of being wrong, excluded, or devalued.

Thus, the healthy relationship between Master and Emissary occurs when the You uses ratio in service of religio, allowing the RH to govern how the LH construes the world. In contrast, the pathological reversal—when the Ego uses ratio to serve its own defensive purposes—marks the LH's attempted usurpation of the RH, fragmenting the individual’s connection to reality and others.

In what follows, we will explore how perspectival knowing enables the realignment of these hemispheric and existential dynamics, allowing individuals in conflict to revise their internal models and arrive at perceptual overlap—a shared, co-constructed orientation toward the world rooted in truth, humility, and relationality.

2. Defining the Modes of Knowing

Following John Vervaeke (2019), we distinguish four interrelated kinds of knowing:

• Propositional Knowing refers to knowledge-that: factual and semantic content expressed in statements (e.g., "The capital of France is Paris").

• Procedural Knowing is knowledge-how: the skill-based capacity to do something (e.g., knowing how to ride a bike).

• Perspectival Knowing involves one's situational awareness, salience landscape, and embodied readiness for action. It represents the agent's ability to frame experience meaningfully from a particular point of view.

• Participatory Knowing concerns the agent-arena relationship itself: the process by which one comes into being through interaction with the environment and others.

Perspectival knowing, in particular, is essential for understanding how two people can see the same world differently and yet come to a shared understanding not by imposing their propositions on each other, but by realigning their perspectives.

3. Theoretical Foundations: Vervaeke and McGilchrist

John Vervaeke's framework of relevance realization suggests that cognition is not primarily about representing objective facts, but about making sense of the world through attention, affordances, and salience. The brain, operating as a predictive processing system, constantly filters and prioritizes what is relevant. Perspectival knowing is the mode of knowing through which an agent "gets a grip" on a situation by aligning attention with what matters most (Vervaeke, 2019). Iain McGilchrist complements this by arguing that the brain's two hemispheres engage the world in fundamentally different ways. The left hemisphere (LH) abstracts, categorizes, and re-presents; the right hemisphere (RH) contextualizes, relates, and grasps the whole. When representations constructed by the LH are not properly informed by RH insight, the result is rigid ideology. True understanding emerges only when RH integration allows LH representations to remain fluid, corrigible, and context-sensitive (McGilchrist, 2010).

4. Perceptual Overlap: A Cognitive-Dialogical Process

Perceptual overlap is defined as the mutual transformation of two agents' internal world-representations through rational, perspectival dialogue. Each begins with a distinct LH schema informed by personal history, cultural context, and propositional beliefs.

Through dialogue that is:

• Oriented toward truth rather than victory,

• Governed by ratio (reason in alignment with reality),

• Guided by the 'You' (a relational self open to transformation rather than Egoic defensiveness),

Each participant surrenders rigid aspects of their model and incorporates insights from the shared encounter. This results in a partial or full convergence of their salience landscapes—the implicit field of affordances (real relations between an agent and the environment that makes certain actions possible), relevance (what an agent deems to be worth paying attention to), and concern through which the world shows up for them. Perceptual overlap allows for the healthy integration of LH representations back into the embodied reality of the RH. The resulting alignment in the LH representations and their subsequent integration back into the RH produce a shared reality in which two agents who at first did not understand each other on a perspectival and participatory level now suddenly do, altering their dispositions towards the world and allowing more autonomy to their respective You’s. 

5. Distinguishing Overlap from Agreement

It is critical to differentiate perceptual overlap from mere intellectual agreement. Agreement can occur without transformation—individuals may assent to the same proposition for entirely different reasons. Perceptual overlap, by contrast, involves a restructuring of the cognitive frame itself. It is not that two people now believe the same thing, but that they now perceive and orient toward the world through a shared lens shaped by mutual insight. This process can be understood as a form of ego death—not annihilation of the self, but the relinquishing of defensive mental models that distort reality in favor of those that disclose it more accurately.

6. Cultural Implications: Healing Propositional Polarization

The modern West suffers from an overvaluation of propositional knowing and a devaluation of perspectival and participatory modes. This has produced a public sphere dominated by ideological entrenchment, where debate replaces dialogue and understanding becomes secondary to identity performance. Perceptual overlap offers an epistemic and ethical alternative. By inviting interlocutors into a process of mutual perspectival alignment, perceptual overlap allows for genuine co-discovery. It reorients individuals not just toward each other, but toward a more accurate shared reality. This has implications for education, political discourse, conflict resolution, and even psychotherapy.

7. Conclusion

Perceptual overlap represents a vital epistemic process through which fragmented worldviews can be brought into relationship—not by coercion or conformity, but by dialogical transformation. When perspectival knowing is cultivated and left-hemisphere representations are revised in light of participatory contact, individuals gain not only insight but intimacy: a shared grip on the world that transcends mere belief. If Western culture is to heal its cognitive and moral fragmentation, it must shift from propositional domination to perspectival integration. In doing so, it may recover not just truth, but the conditions for truth to be recognized together.

References

McGilchrist, I. (2010). The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

Vervaeke, J. (2019). Awakening from the Meaning Crisis [Lecture series]. University of Toronto. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f3k4G8AeJdt3cQMl2JY-