What is a Worldview?

Each species has its own way of experiencing its world – of gathering information from its environment in such a way that it can act on that information in order to survive. Even the simplest microbe must distinguish between what is beneficial and what is harmful to it. What it experiences has meaning for it in terms of its survival.

As species evolved, so did their system of interacting with their environment. Because bugs are the focus of their world, frogs evolved a system designed to detect and catch small dark moving objects. Bees, on the other hand, for whom flowers are of critical importance, evolved the ability to distinguish a much wider range of colours than we humans can see. A bird’s eye view of the world includes patterns of magnetic fields to which we are oblivious. And your pet dog lives in a world of sounds and smells beyond our ability to detect. Each species has evolved its own way of constructing its world in order to survive and play its part. Each, in other words, has its own worldview. And no one is any more true or accurate than any other. 

Considering our proclivity to assume that the world we experience is the way the world really is, we do well to remember that other creatures experience the world very differently. I am repeatedly grateful for the incredible world of experience that is given to me as a human being. But who knows! The seagull playing in the updrafts above the cliffs may not be blown away, as I am, by the unspeakable beauty of a sunrise over the Pacific – but I suspect that its seagull-world, which I can’t begin to imagine, is every bit as wonderful. 

So what can we say of our human worldview? Like all creatures, it is shaped by the sensory apparatus and perceptual system with which we are equipped. But unlike them, our oversize brains can store an enormous (and perhaps limitless) number of abstract perceptual categories into which we have learned to sort our sensory data. And these categories are nested, like Russian dolls, one inside the other in an infinitely extensible way. So we can say: This is a child, who belongs to these parents, who belong to this family, which is part of this community, all the way up to this species, which is an expression of this planet’s life, which is born of this solar system, and so on, as far as our category system extends. In other words, we see and find meaning in everything in the context of a set of high-level, integrated categories. 

Like other creatures too, we must extract meaning from our sensory data in terms of what is relevant to our survival, reproduction, and any other purposes that may comprise our life. But for us, the meanings we extract go far beyond any simple evaluation of what is beneficial or noxious to us. Our meaning-system is not limited to identifying what something is. We also want to know what’s happening and why it’s happening – which can only be constructed as a narrative, which becomes possible and inevitable once we have developed language with some kind of subject-verb- object syntax. 

So we see our world in terms of the enormous repertoire of perceptual categories lodged in our brain, and we make sense of it in terms of the story we tell ourselves about what’s happening, the role we play in the narrative, and the causes / intentions that are driving the story. This, for us, is what constitutes a worldview. It is passed on to each of us by our culture, with the narrative usually being expressed in myth, enshrined in religion, and enacted in the culture’s rituals and festivals. A culture is, in fact, a vast system of shared interpretations of the raw data delivered to us by our senses. It is a shared meaning-system which those in the culture believe to be true. 

In summary, a worldview is a comprehensive and largely unconscious set of beliefs and values, held by an individual, group, or society, about the nature of the universe and our place within it. It exists within us as a governing mental construct, a conceptual window that frames our understanding of the world, or spectacles that shape and colour everything we see, acting as a perceptual and interpretive filter that both shapes our experience and enables us to make sense of it.

Specifically it answers three questions. The first asks: What’s happening at the macro level? What game, if any, is the universe playing? The second asks: Who am I in relation to this larger whole? Where do I fit in the overall scheme of things? And the third question asks: How then should I live my life? 

For the most part our worldview functions automatically. We aren’t aware of it. We just assume that how we see things is the way things really are, until circumstances conspire to give us a very different set of spectacles. Then we find ourselves in a whole new world. We may have some choice as to what spectacles we wear, but we cannot choose not to wear spectacles at all. We must look at life through some conceptual window. But we see it always and only as we have constructed it.