The other morning I found myself in a conversation concerning the nature of reality – a nice tidy topic over a morning cup of coffee!
I took the position that we have no way of understanding the nature of reality because we have no direct access to it. My thoughts on this are that our only contacts with “what is” are through our senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing and perhaps some others such as acceleration, detection of motion, etc. Basically all of these begin with the activation of a nerve sensor of some sort. Once the nerve has been activated it sends a signal along one or more nerves to the brain. Once these electo-chemical signals reach our brain, they are “decoded” into something that we interpret as “realty”. We don’t actually “perceive” an image of a tree; we “perceive” our brain’s creation of an experience. Perhaps our reconstruction is accurate, perhaps it is not – we have no way of knowing. I am color blind, therefore I am pretty sure that I perceive the colors differently than others.
I think of this process as providing the input for our brain to construct a “dream” of the world, and that dream is what we interpret as “reality.” We literally dream the universe into existence. Of course that doesn’t imply that there isn’t a “real” reality – it just means that we don’t have a way to access it directly.
One of my friends in this conversation took a bit of offense at my point of view, apparently it didn’t sit so well that I perhaps think that I am not only the center of the universe, but that I somehow “create” it. He insisted that he was positive that I was not “creating” him because he knew who he was and he is real and separate from me. He is himself and not a creation of my imagination.
His assertion made me chuckle because it reminded me of a number of “lucid” dreams that I have had over the years. There was a period of time a few years ago where I had extremely “real” lucid dreams on a regular basis. These dreams were always located in the same house, with the same group of people, being taught by a lady that professed to be a shaman. I knew the people in the group in my waking life, but have no idea who the leader might have been – she was just a dream to me. These dreams were indistinguishable from real “reality” – almost. I found early on that if I looked at my hands I could easily determine that they were dreams, not a real “reality.” The distinguishing features of my hands in dreams are that I have five fingers, and a thumb! If I get confused, I can always look at my hands and determine if I am dreaming or awake. Other than that, the room was full of normal things, normal colors, normal smells and normal sounds. Things were solid, stable, and didn’t change into weird things that would give it away. The meetings would go on for hours.
One of the common points of discussion during these dreams was exactly the same as my friend made the other morning. The people in my dream would argue that I must be mistaken, it couldn’t be a dream because they were feeling things, they had their own point of view. They insisted that they had their own “personal reality.” Of course, from my point of view they did not have a separate existence. I had no means of experiencing what they were experiencing from their point of view, just as I can’t experience my friend’s experiences except from my point of view as an outsider. So yes, he was certain that he was real and I wasn’t creating him, but that actually didn’t explain much – my dream friends expressed the exact same arguments.
My understanding of how we come to know reality leaves a bit to be desired. What makes it much worse is that not only is this a rather untenable point of view, but I (and all of us) have many experiences indicating that it isn’t just a philosophical point of view, it is how things work. One humorous example that I recall was one day driving over some nearby mountains to visit my parents. I was driving in a stretch of highway that allowed me to just kind of sit back and enjoy the ride. At one point I was driving past a large billboard that had some kind of bold message (I don’t recall the words) that were big, bold and clear. I didn’t pay much attention, but quickly realized that the words made absolutely no sense in the context of the graphics – so I looked again, but upon a second look the words had changed to different words that did make sense. I didn’t misread the words, I SAW different words the first time. Another example of a similar, and frustrating, experience was when I accompanied a good friend on a bird census expedition into the depths of the Australian “outback.” We spent weeks traveling around the center of Australia while he identified and counted birds. We would often be in a wooded area where he would see and count hundreds of birds. I never was able to see any of them – I just didn’t know how to spot them, or perhaps the internal filters in my brain weren’t tuned to picking out what were clearly obvious parts of reality to him, but were missing from my observations. I usually couldn’t find them even when he attempted to point them out to me.
We all have experiences of “seeing” things that aren’t there, or not seeing things that are. So which is it? Are those things actually there or not? Is there any way of knowing for certain one way or the other? I think not.
However, that doesn’t mean that I discount the reality of reality – I think it is there, I think things are there, I think the universe exists – I just am not certain about what I think I know. Obviously other animals experience things that I can’t experience, and I am pretty sure that we experience things that they can’t experience (such as the meaning of words).
Because of the existence of “brain filters” I am pretty sure that my experience of reality is not the same as your experience of it, even if we are standing side-by-side apparently exposed to the same things. Not only do we “notice” different things, we actually see different things. More importantly we assign different meanings and emotions to them. We imbue the things within our experience with meanings and emotions that were created long ago in our upbringing, or possibly without our genetics. I cannot know your world, and you can’t know mine in more fundamental and important ways than we usually accept. It is not only difficult to walk in another person’s shoes – it is impossible to do so. We all experience a different and unique existence. In many ways we are fundamentally alone.
The understanding of the aloneness that we live in can be rather spooky and distressing, or it can be liberating. We no longer have to worry that we are different (of course we are, there is no other possibility), or don’t have to judge others and ourselves nearly so harshly. After all, how can we really judge something that we can’t know or understand? We can observe, we can try to give them (and ourselves) some slack, we can even know that some behaviors just plain don’t work in Society, but we might be a little more lenient about judging others based upon what we would do if we were in their shoes. We have no idea about the shoes they are wearing, and it is very likely that we would do the same. Our realities are just different, that is all.
The bottom line is that it doesn’t seem like we have a way to know what the “real” reality is, we just have to work with what we get and make the most of it. I personally like to assume that what I experience is “real”, that I am not missing anything too important, and go on about my business as if I know better. I don’t know what else to do, but I do know that maybe I shouldn’t be quite so certain that I know all that is important to know and do not be so quite to come to judgement, either for myself or others. It is all an assumption, and assumptions can be wrong – they are just tentative working hypotheses that all me to move along.
And this inability to know what is real extends beyond merely our inability to match our vision with what it in front of us. My education is in physics. Talk about a fundamental mismatch between what is seemingly possible and what IS – and not just at the teeny tiny realm of fundamental particles. The inability to know what is “real” extends to all levels of the universe, from the worlds of zero dimensions and zero mass to the entire universe (and beyond, if there is a beyond) and everything in between. We just don’t know, but we have to make working assumptions. I think it is important to realize that they are just assumptions, not anything real.