These posts make more sense when read in order.
Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.
 |
| © John Richard Stephens, 2024. |
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
—Philip K. Dick
Okay. So everything you have ever experienced of the external world has passed through your senses, been converted into electrochemical signals, and fed into your brain, but your brain isn’t perfect and has some flaws. It messes with your perception and memories, it’s not good at keeping track of how much you had to eat, it makes you think you have more time to do things than you actually do, and it’s very good at seeing faces where there are none and conspiracies where there aren’t any. You have two blindspots about the size of bullfrogs held at arm’s length that it fills in, your retina is inside out, blocking parts of your view, your peripheral vision is blurry and lacks color, and your blinking blacks everything out, yet you’d never know it because your brain fills it all in with guesstimates. When the brain’s predictions stray too far, we call them hallucinations.
Our perceptions of the world are influenced by the variations in our senses, neuroanatomy, and experiences, so that no two people see things in quite the same way. Our perceptions are also colored by false beliefs, we believe impossible and contradictory things, and we have trouble distinguishing purpose from random chance. In addition, we make decisions and form opinions without getting the facts, preferring to rely on educated guesses, while ignoring evidence we don’t like. We create rationalizations and justifications without knowing why.
Our brains also deceive us by pumping up or deflating our self-esteem, they distort our memories, create false ones, and bury some we’d rather not be reminded of, and they subconsciously allow our biases, beliefs, and ideas to influence our decisions, even those we know to be false. Scientists call all of these, non-sensory illusions, illusions of logic, and/or cognitive illusions.
What we think of as reality is our brains’ interpretation of our world, as can be seen in optical illusions, politics, and insanity.
As theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli put it, “It takes only a few grams of mushrooms for the whole of reality to dissolve before our eyes, before reorganizing itself into a surprisingly different form. It only takes the experience of spending time with a friend who has suffered a serious schizophrenic episode, a few weeks with her struggling to communicate, to realize that delirium is a vast theatrical equipment with the capacity to stage the world, and that it is difficult to find arguments to distinguish it from those great collective deliriums of ours that are the foundations of our social and spiritual life, and of our understanding of the world.”[1]
At the beginning of my posts I mentioned that cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman believes that what we perceive is not even close to reality because reality is just too complicated—an idea that you may have dismissed out of hand when you read it, although you might see that a bit differently now. Other estimates of how much of our vision is altered or created vary depending on who you talk to, with ranges from 20% to 90% of our vision being an illusion. Perhaps it varies depending on the person, situation, and circumstances.
So what’s real? We may never know since we’re a prisoner of our senses. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus asks Neo, “What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
Neuroscientist Beau Lotto explains, “The photons entering our eyes, the vibrations through the air that enter our ears, the breaking of the bonds of molecules that creates friction across our skin, the chemicals that land on our tongues, and the compounds that enter our noses—all are just electrochemical energy of one kind or another. These are the elements that emanate from our physical world—real reality, as it were. Yet we don’t have direct access to those sources of energy, only to the waves of energy and gradients of chemicals that they produce. We sense the changes in stuff, not the stuff itself. It would be useless to have direct access to the ‘stuff’’ because in isolation it would mean absolutely nothing...much in the same way that a single water molecule doesn’t tell us about whirlpools.”[2]
Still, underneath it all there seems to be something we can call reality. We’re able to send spaceships to other planets with great precision, we can take pictures of individual atoms, we can alter our genes—the instructions for life—and some people can hit an erratic knuckleball flying at them at 55 miles per hour. In spite of our flaws, we can do some amazing things.
It’s probably fair to say that most scientists are scientific realists, believing, as physicist Roger Penrose put it, that reality consists of all the objects we perceive—buildings, cars, furniture, food, animals, plants, bacteria, molecules, stars, nebula; things that are physically made out of matter—in addition to some more abstract concepts such as spacetime and mathematics; that it essentially includes everything in the universe;[3] that this reality is independent of our beliefs and knowledge; and that it can be explored using the scientific method. Scientists devote their lives to exploring reality.
This is different from social reality, which makes up much of our lives. Social reality has been constructed by humans over thousands of years and is the result of consensus—it’s aspects of society that people agree on. This is somewhat flexible and varies from culture to culture. These are things in human culture that animals don’t encounter, unless they have their own social constructions. They are things like myths, money, gods, politics, laws, mortgages, personal relationships, and much of social media. Categorizations—like species, races, and stereotypes—are created. They are all products of human minds. Even your country is a social construct, no matter how patriotic you are. Nations exist because of people’s belief in them and the police and military forces that ensure their survival.
Occasionally someone comes along who insists they don’t believe in one or more of these things. They might insist that certain laws don’t apply to them, but law enforcement usually catches up with them in the end. Where I live, one business owner got away with not paying taxes for about eight years before the IRS shutdown his restaurant and took everything away from him. You don’t have to believe in social reality, but you can still suffer the consequences. This is particularly true when social reality becomes untethered from physical reality, such as with the anti-vaxxers who endanger their own children, as well as those of others.
But let’s take a quick look at some of the philosophies related to reality.
Realism is the idea that there is something that’s independent of us and it remains there when we’re not looking. It’s a world that existed before we were born and will continue after we’re dead. It continues on its merry way when we’re asleep or in a coma, and it doesn’t go all weird when we’re tripping out on hallucinogens, even though it seems like it to does.
Just as there are several type of realism—scientific realism being one of them—there are also several types of antirealism. Metaphysical anti-realism, for example, argues that nothing exists outside our minds, or that if something is there, we have no way of knowing about it. Since everything is an illusion, when you take psychedelic drugs, you are just replacing one illusion with another.
This brings us back to the question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there’s no one around to hear it. According to the subjectivist view, since everything we know and experience comes through our senses, reality is a construct of our brains, therefore everything outside of our awareness either doesn’t exist or is well beyond our comprehension, which means sound depends on our awareness of it. This is the philosophy subscribed to by Deepak Chopra and others in the New Age Movement. Carrying this a bit further, some believe that everything is actually created from our thoughts.
Then there’s the social constructionists who believe truth and reality are created by society’s collective beliefs. There are those who believe that if we believe in something hard enough, it will become true, as in using imagination and visualization to alter reality and achieve your goals. This was the basis of the self-help book The Secret. And there are solipsists who feel they are the only ones who actually exist. I imagine this is how some psychopaths feel, perhaps because they lack empathy and see others as automatons for them to play with.
In between realism and antirealism is instrumentalism, which is common among physicists. They feel that it doesn’t really matter whether there’s a reality or not. That’s a matter for philosophers. As long as science can predict the results of experiments, everything is good and we can get on with our work. This is the shut-up-and-calculate school of thought.
While most scientists side with scientific realism, there’s no complete agreement yet. Scientists are still hashing it out, sometimes coming at the problem from different directions. Science writer Amanda Gefter points out that “while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality.”[4]
Even though no two people see the world the same way, humans do perceive the world in a generally similar way because we all evolved to perceive what is important to our survival. Other animals see things differently, according to what’s vital to them. As Michael Shermer put it, “Yes, a dolphin’s icon for ‘shark’ no doubt looks different than a human’s [especially since dolphins can see inside sharks], but there really are sharks, and they really do have powerful tails on one end and a mouthful of teeth on the other end, and that is true no matter how your sensory system works.”[5]
There are many different ways of seeing the world, but there appears to be an underlying reality...that is, at the level of our experience, but this becomes questionable at subatomic levels. That is our next area of exploration and it will take us further down the rabbit hole.
[1] Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.
[2] Beau Lotto, Deviate, New York: Hachette Book Group, 2017.
[3] Roger Penrose, “The Big Questions: What is reality?”, New Scientist, no. 2578, November 18, 2006, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225780-069-the-big-questions-what-is-reality/.
[4] Amanda Gefter, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality” (interview with Donald Hoffman), Quanta Magazine, April 21, 2016, https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/.
[5] Michael Shermer, “Perception Deception”, Scientific American, vol. 313, no. 5, November 2015, p. 75, and as “Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?”, November 1, 2015, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-humans-evolve-to-see-things-as-they-really-are/.
Posts
