A perspective is the choice of a context or a reference, or the result of the choice, from which to sense, categorize, measure or codify experience, cohesively forming a coherent belief, typically for comparing with another. One may further recognize a number of subtly distinctive meanings, close to those of paradigm, point of view, reality tunnel, or worl view.

To choose a perspective is to choose a value system and, unavoidably, an associated belief system. When we look at a business perspective, we are looking at a monetary based value system and belief. When we look at a human perspective, it is a more social value system and its associated beliefs.

In social psychology one would talk in terms of the other person’s point of view when soliciting or motivating the other person to do something for you. Being able to see the other person’s point of view is one of Henry Ford’s advice towards being successful in business. “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”.

Perspection, a related concept, signifies the ability to inspect one’s own perception, or the perceive another individual’s inspection.

Phantom rings are the sensation and the false belief that one can hear his or her mobile phone ringing or feel it vibrating, when in fact the telephone is not doing so. Other terms for this concept include ringxiety and fauxcellarm. Some sound experts believe that because cellphones have become a fifth limb for many, people now live in a constant state of phone vigilance, and hearing sounds that seem like a telephone’s ring can send an expectant brain into action.

They may be experienced while taking a shower, watching television, or using a noisy device. Humans are particularly sensitive to auditory tones between 1,000 and 6,000 hertz, and basic mobile phone ringers often fall within this range. This frequency range can generally be more difficult to locate spatially, thus allowing for potential confusion when heard from a distance. False vibrations are less understood, however, and could have psychological or neurological sources.

In addition to cellular phones, other attention grabbing devices such as sirens, trucks backing up, horns or crying babies in a commercial message have been generically labeled as phantom ringing. Some doorbells or telephone ring sounds are modeled after pleasant sounds from nature. This backfires when such devices are used in rural areas containing the original sounds. The owner is faced with the constant task of determining if it is the device or the actual sound.

Ethical dilemma is a complex situation that will often involve an apparent mental conflict between moral imperatives, in which to obey one would result in transgressing another. This is also called an ethical paradox since in moral philosophy, paradox plays a central role in ethics debates. For instance, an ethical admonition to “love thy neighbor as thy self” is not always in contrast with, but sometimes in contradiction to an armed neighbor actively trying to harm you. If he or she succeeds, you will not be able to love him or her.

But to preemptively attack them or restrain them is not usually understood as loving. This is one of the classic examples of an ethical decision clashing or conflicting with an organismic decision, one that would be made only from the perspective of animal survival. An animal is thought to act only in its immediate perceived bodily self-interests when faced with bodily harm, and to have limited ability to perceive alternatives.

However, human beings have complex social relationships that can’t be ignored. If one has an ethical relationship with the neighbour trying to kill you, then, usually, their desire to kill you would likely be the result of mental illness on their part. Such conflicts might be settled by some other path that has strong social support. Societies formed criminal justice systems, ethical traditions and religions to defuse just such deep conflicts. Such systems always impose trained judges who are presumed to have an ethical relationship and also a clear obligation to all who come before them.

Ethical dilemmas are often cited in an attempt to refute an ethical system or moral code, as well as the world view that encompasses or grows from it. Where a structural conflict is involved, dilemmas will very often recur. A trivial example is working with a bad operating system whose error messages do not match the problems the user perceives. Each such error presents the user with a dilemma: reboot the machine and continue working, or spend time trying to reproduce the problem for the benefit of the developer of the operating system and everyone that experiences the same situation.

Trust is a mental state, which cannot be measured directly. Confidence in the results of trusting may be measured through behavior. Placement of trust allows actions that otherwise are not possible. If the person in whom trust is placed is trustworthy, then the trustor will be better off than if he or she had not trusted. Conversely, if the trustee is not trustworthy, then the trustor will be worse off than if he or she had not trusted.

Trust is a mental state, which cannot be measured directly. Confidence in the results of trusting may be measured through behavior, or alternatively, one can measure self-reported trust, with all the caveat surrounding that method. Trust may be considered a moral choice, as in the legend of Damon and Pythias, or at least a heuristic, allowing the human to deal with complexities that outgo rationalistic reasoning. In this case, machine-human trust is meaningless, because computers have no moral sense and rely on rational computations.

In the social sciences, the subtleties of trust are a subject of ongoing research. In sociology and psychology the degree to which one party trusts another is a measure of belief in the honesty, benevolence and competence of the other party. Based on the most recent research, a failure in trust may be forgiven more easily if it is interpreted as a failure of competence rather than a lack of benevolence or honesty.

The substantive conflict in the social sciences is whether trust is entirely internal, and only confidence is observable, or whether trust behaviors, and self reported levels of trust, can meaningfully measure trust in the absence of coercion. Note however that many languages (e.g. Dutch or German) do not distinguish between the words trust and confidence, which complicates the issue. The distinction between trust and confidence is an unsolved issue in current trust and confidence research.

Crop circles are patterns created by the flattening of crops such as wheat, barley, rye, or corn. Since appearing in the media in the 1970s, crop circles have become the subject of various paranormal and fringe beliefs, ranging from the hypothesis that they are created by freak meteorological phenomena to the belief that they represent messages from extraterrestrials.

Other hypotheses, insufficient to explain myriad circles with clearly discernable images and complex geometric patterns, attribute them to atmospheric phenomena, such as freak tornadoes or ball lightning.

The location of many crop circles near ancient sites such as Stonehenge has led to many New Age belief systems incorporating crop circles, including the beliefs that they are formed in relation to ley lines and that they give off energy that can be detected through dowsing.

UFOs and other lights in the sky have been reported in connection with many crop-circle sites, leading to their becoming associated with UFOs and aliens. Some people claim to have seen images of UFOs forming crop circles or overflying them, though photographs have been dismissed by experts as being indistinct or clear hoaxes.

In 1991, two men from Southampton, England, announced that they had conceived the idea as a prank at a pub near Winchester, Hampshire, during an evening in 1976. Inspired by the 1966 Tully Saucer Nests, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley made their crop circles using planks, rope, hats and wire as their only tools. Using a four-foot-long plank attached to a rope, they easily created circles eight feet in diameter. The two men were able to make a 40-foot circle in 15 minutes.

Bower’s wife had become suspicious of him, noticing high levels of mileage in their car. Eventually, fearing that his wife suspected him of adultery, Bower confessed to her, and subsequently, he and Chorley informed a British national newspaper. Chorley died in 1996, and Doug Bower has made crop circles as recently as 2004. Bower has said that, had it not been for his wife’s suspicions, he would have taken the secret to his deathbed, never revealing that it was a hoax.

Numinous is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity. The word was popularized in the early twentieth century by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book Das Heilige. According to Otto the numinous experience has two aspects: mysterium tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel.

The numinous experience also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a wholly other. The numinous experience can lead in different cases to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy, and the transcendent.

Mysterium tremendum is described in The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley in the following terms:
“The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.”

Nostalgia for paradise was a term used by Mircea Eliade to help bring understanding to the numinous. This idea was based on the theory that a person has a sort of longing for perfection or paradise, which creates a platform for experience of the numinous.

Carlos Castaneda deals with a related concept in his books dealing with a particular Native American tradition of sorcery. According to the teacher Don Juan, there is just such an inconceivable dimension of human existence whose presence may be sensed but neither grasped by the senses or any rational framework. He refers to this as the Nagual. This Nagual is a power that may be harnessed by a man of knowledge, the shaman or sorcerer who has undergone an arduous spiritual training.

It may be viewed as the intense feeling of unknowingly knowing that there is something which cannot be seen. This knowing can befall or overcome a person at any time and in any place – in a cathedral; next to a silent stream; on a lonely road; early in the morning or in the face of a beautiful sunset.

The Loch Ness Monster is alleged to be a creature inhabiting Loch Ness in Scotland. Popular interest and belief in the animal has fluctuated since it was brought to the world’s attention in 1933. Evidence of its existence is largely anecdotal, with minimal and much disputed photographic material and sonar readings. The scientific community regards the Loch Ness Monster as a modern day myth, and explains sightings as a mix of hoaxes and wishful thinking. Despite this, it remains one of the most famous examples of cryptozoology. The legendary monster has been affectionately referred to as Nessie since the 1950s.

One of the most iconic images of Nessie is known as the Surgeon’s Photograph, which many formerly considered to be good evidence of the monster. Its importance lies in the fact that it was the only photographic evidence of a head and neck, as all the other photographs are humps or disturbances. The image was revealed as a hoax in 1994.

In 1979 the image was claimed to be a picture of an elephant. Other sceptics in the 1980s argued the photo was that of an otter or a diving bird, but after the photographer’s confession most agree it was what he claimed: a toy submarine with a sculpted head attached. Essentially, it was a toy submarine with a head and neck made of plastic wood. One of the researchers who uncovered the hoax argues the Loch Ness Monster is real, and that the hoaxed Surgeon’s Photograph is not cause enough to dismiss eyewitness reports and other evidence.

On a recent expedition to find evidence of Nessie, U.S. research teams came across something quite unexpected, not a prehistoric creature of the deep but thousands of plastic covered golf balls. Mike O’Brien of SeaTrepid explains: “At first we thought they were mushrooms, there were so many. But when we lowered the camera, we were surprised to see that they were in fact, golf balls.” The smattering of balls were found roughly 300 yards from the beach and 100 yards from the shore where it is thought locals and visitors have been using the loch to practice their driving skills for quite some time.

The afterlife (also referred to as life after death or the hereafter) is the idea that the consciousness or mind of a being continues after physical death occurs. In many popular views, this continued existence often takes place in a spiritual or immaterial realm. Major views on the afterlife derive from religion, esotericism and metaphysics. Deceased persons are usually believed to go to a specific realm or plane of existence after death, typically believed to be determined by a god, based on their actions during life.

The afterlife played an important role in Ancient Egyptian religion, and its belief system is one of the earliest known. When the body died, parts of its soul known as ka (body double) and ba (personality) would go to the Kingdom of the Dead. While the soul dwelt in the Fields of Aaru (a heavenly paradise), Osiris demanded work as payback for the protection he provided. Statues were placed in the tombs to serve as substitutes for the deceased.

Arriving at one’s reward in afterlife was a demanding ordeal, requiring a sin-free heart and the ability to recite the spells, passwords, and formulae of the Book of the Dead. In the Hall of Two Truths, the deceased’s heart was weighed against the Shu feather of truth and justice taken from the headdress of the goddess Ma’at. If the heart was lighter than the feather, they could pass on, but if it were heavier they would be devoured by the demon Ammit (a female demon with a body part lion, hippopotamus and crocodile).

Egyptians also believed that being mummified was the only way to have an afterlife. Only if the corpse had been properly embalmed and entombed in a mastaba or burial chamber could the dead live again in the Fields of Yalu and accompany the Sun on its daily ride. Due to the dangers the afterlife posed, the Book of the Dead was placed in the tomb with the body as well as food, jewelry, and ‘curses’.