Why we'll never agree about what is real, and what isn't

Ooh. That's an ambitious title for a blog post.

But since it came to mind, and it fits with some thoughts that have been rambling through my mind today, might as well stick with it -- even if what I write here doesn't really fulfill the ambitious promise of the title.

I'll start with a brief letter to the editor in the April 10 issue of New Scientist magazine. 

From Wolf Kirchmeir
Blind River, Ontario, Canada
If we accept that our experience of reality is a simulation created by our brains, then the "self" must be part of the simulation. To ask whether we live "in" a simulation is a category error. We live as a simulation, not in one. 

This fits with both modern neuroscience and a lot of philosophy. Reality isn't something that is channeled directly into the human mind through our senses. Reality is fashioned by us through complex mental mechanisms that are almost entirely outside of our conscious awareness. 

A key part of this is prediction. The brain is constantly making predictions about what is expected to be experienced based on present sensory input and past experiences. So while it goes too far to say that we create our own reality, in some ways we certainly do. 

Eric Schwitzgebel speaks of this in his book, The Weirdness of the World. I'd put it aside for a while, but picked it up again this morning, reading more of the "Kant meets cyberpunk" chapter. This excerpt gives a feel for the rather sophisticated philosophy Schwitzgebel engages in. (Not surprising, since he's a philosophy professor.)

He refers to The Matrix. That movie featured people whose "bodies are stored in warehouses, and they are fed sensory input by high-tech computers." They can do things as they would in the ordinary world, including dancing.

Taking our cue from Kant, let's call the objects laid out around you in your immersive spatial environment empirical objects. In Neuromancer, the computer programs that the hackers see are the empirical objects.

In The Matrix, the dance floor that the people experience is an empirical object -- and the body-storage warehouse is not an empirical object, assuming that it's not accessible to them in their immersive environment.

For you, the reader, empirical objects are just the ordinary objects around you: your coffee mug, your desk, your computer. Our bodies as experienced in immersive spatial environments are also empirical objects.

In The Matrix, there's a crucial difference between one's empirical body and one's biological body. If you are experiencing yourself on a dance floor, your empirical body is dancing, while your biological body is resting motionless in the warehouse.

Only if you red-pill out of the Matrix will your empirical and biological bodies be doing the same things. Note that empirical is a relational concept. What counts as an empirical object will be different for different people. 

What is empirical for you depends on what environment you are spatially immersed in.

Guess I should share how immersive spatial environment is defined in the book:

Following David Chalmers, but adding "spatial" for explicitness, an immersive spatial environment is any environment (whether virtual or "real," interactive or static) "that generates perceptual experience of the environment from a perspective within it, giving the user the sense of 'being there.' "

As described in my previous blog post, a few days ago I ingested a gram of psilocybin (magic mushrooms) at The Psilocybin Center here in Oregon, where it is legal to use magic mushrooms in a regulated environment.

That fairly small dose modified my consciousness to some extent, but not by enough for me to have a full-blown psychedelic experience. Or even a partially-blown one. But regardless, a person under the influence of psilocybin is going to have a different experience of empirical reality than someone who isn't tripping on magic mushrooms.

As Schwitzgebel said above, "What is empirical for you depends on what environment you are spatially immersed in." I was reclining, listening to psychedelic music with my eyes closed, while the facilitator who had to be with me during the two-hour experience mostly sat across from me doing stuff on his laptop.

We were in the same room, but we were experiencing the room in different ways. Again, if I'd been having a full-blown psychedelic experience, my empirical reality would have been much more different from that of the facilitator. 

So even if we don't assume that there's a deeper reality producing the one we're experiencing now, as in the Matrix, it's still the case that the mind of every human being is simulating reality in a different fashion, as the New Scientist letter to the editor correctly noted.

Then there's the implications of a comment left by Ron E. today on my psilocybin post. I liked the comment for several reasons, including how it relates to the theme of this post.

Have been away – on and off – for a few weeks so just catching up with some of the latest blogs and comments. One of my trips was to London where I visited my one-time favourite bookshops specialising in philosophy, occult literature and a whole gamut of books featuring Advaita, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, Sufism, Judaism etc.

All the usual suspects were featured there – Alan Watts, J. and U.G. Krishnamurti, Nisargadata, Ouspensky (and many more); writers who featured prominently in my early days of enquiry – and apparently, are still popular with today’s seekers. Also, in a curtained section of the shop was an Asian looking chap – long beard, eastern clothes etc., who was giving readings of some sort.

I only stayed for a few minutes, leaving with some nostalgia and realising that a huge part of my life and identity was well and truly over. The same goes for the various spiritual groups I was in and out of years ago.

I’d say that this ‘seeking’ activity is okay and perhaps inevitable when one is younger; it all seems to be mixed in with looking for meaning and identity – perhaps lingering on for many of us into middle and old age. Some settle for some kind of secure base, perhaps an established religious or spiritual organisation, others gravitate toward gratifying projects or perhaps charity work.

It seems to be a type of personal evolution, and one that doesn’t have a final conclusion, a final revelation. Except that is, if one can live with the knowledge that there probably is no conclusion apart from our everyday reality – whatever you are doing, whatever that may be.

I agree with Ron. In large part, the sorts of books and writers spoken of above deal with a supposed hidden reality that underlies or produces the ordinary empirical reality each of us experiences in everyday life. 

Meaning, they posit something akin to the Matrix: a dimension of reality that is separate from what we habitually perceive. Schwitzgebel writes:

We can think of a spatial manifold as an immersive spatial environment in which every part is spatially related to every other part. The dance floor of the ordinary people trapped in the Matrix is not part of the same spatial manifold as the body-storage warehouse.

Suppose you are dancing in the Matrix and someone tells you that you have a biological body in a warehouse. You might ask in which direction the warehouse lies -- north, south, east, west, up, down? You might point in various possible directions from the dance floor.

Your conversation partner ought to deny the presupposition of your question. The warehouse is not in any of those directions relative to the dance floor. 

You can't travel toward it or away from it using your empirical body. You can't shoot an empirical arrow toward it. In vain would you try to find the warehouse with your empirical body and kick down its doors. It's not part of the same spatial manifold.

Thus in addition to the difficulty of people agreeing about the nature of the empirical reality of the ordinary physical world where we all bodily live, there's the added complexity of billions of people, most of humanity, believing in a religious, mystical, or spiritual supernatural place akin to that in the Matrix: a realm spatially distinct from this world, so impossible to discern with ordinary perception.

Call it God, heaven, astral plane, or whatever, debates about the nature of a supposed realm outside of, well, nature, are a big part of what many commenters on this blog like to discuss, as well as the basis for the myriads of different religions, mystical paths, and such.

So the way I see it, to me the mystery isn't why people disagree about what reality consists of, but how it is that we're able to agree to such an extent about reality. (Perhaps the answer is that if we didn't, as a species we wouldn't survive for very long.)

Comments

[sant64]

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. "Reality" is far too broad a term.

[Brian Hines]

sant64, as I noted in this post, reality isn't something that is beamed directly into our mind/brain. It is a simulation of one sort or another, because the mind/brain is locked inside the dark confines of our head with no direct connection to the outside world that constitutes our shared reality.

Without our senses -- sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell -- there's no knowledge of the world for us, so no reality.

The Matrix provides an extreme thought experiment along this line. People's bodies are in a warehouse, while powerful computers manufacture reality for them that seems real, except it is a virtual simulation. So this is an example of living in an immersive spatial reality where experienced reality is disconnected from a separate aspect of reality that produces a simulated reality.

That disconnect, as noted in the post, makes it impossible to determine where that separate aspect of reality, in this case a warehouse with stored bodies, exists, or even if it exists. The reason is that reality isn't connected between all of its parts. The creators of the Matrix have the full picture, but the people experiencing the virtual reality don't, because the simulation doesn't contain knowledge of how the simulation is being produced.

Maybe I could have been clearer about this, but I tried to relate Ron's comment about not being attracted to the offerings in metaphysical sections of bookstores, where he said that the "final conclusion" about reality probably is simply our ordinary life -- that which we're experiencing now via our senses.

This is different from how most religions view reality, which supposedly has an extra unperceived dimension akin to the Matrix having a secret: experienced reality is being produced by a un-experienced reality that only a red pill can divulge.

Religions, mystical practices, spiritual paths... they all claim, pretty much, that they possess a red pill that, if taken through a certain discipline, will reveal the hidden truth about reality: God, heaven, spirit, soul, enlightenment, whatever. But they all differ in what the discipline consists of, and what supposedly will be revealed.

So since most people believe in some sort of hidden reality separate from what is perceived by the bodily senses, this creates a situation where humans are assuming different realities that can't be proven to be real, because part of the assumption is that the hidden reality can only be known by those who take the "red pill."

For example, abortion would be much easier to discuss and form policies about if everybody focused on the physical characteristics of an embryo or fetus. When does it have a nervous system that can feel pain? What sorts of congenital abnormalities make it impossible for the unborn child to survive after birth? Among other questions.

But assuming that a soul is part of the embryo at the moment of conception complicates matters. This introduces an unprovable assumption about reality, as does the assumption that God opposes abortion because only He/She can decide whether an embryo grows to maturity and is born alive.

Basically I tried to argue that it would be better if we all agreed that reality is what can be known via the senses (which naturally includes scientific observations that amplify what our senses can perceive), because then we'd just have to deal with the thorny, but more resolvable, problem of how different people "simulate" physical reality through their unique mind/brain.

Hope this further explanation helps to get across my point.

[sant64]

@BrianHines

I get where you're coming from in your explanation, but again, the term "reality" seems too broad to me. I guess technically "reality" is philosophically appropriate, but to me it seems a reaching for a zero-sum conclusion that simply doesn't exist. To take your abortion example, whether the embryo has a soul or not isn't the sole reason why people object to abortion. Even most atheists are not for abortion:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/views-about-abortion/legal-in-allmost-cases/religious-family/atheist/

We can assume that these ardent secularists are logical positivists, and have no truck with metaphysics. They don't buy the idea that an embryo is given a soul. And yet, they're not fully on board with abortion. Why then do they kowtow at this unprovable assumption about "reality"? I would say it's because the value of human life isn't merely a trick of our senses or wholly a blue pill idea that religion has foisted upon us. Some would argue that respect for life is a transcendent idea.

Of course, the argument against that inexplicable respect for life is manifold throughout history, including current events which send a shiver down my spine, from the callousness of the perpetrators, and even more so by their armchair fellow travelers who subscribe to the WSJ and blithely excuse obvious genocide as merely "fog of war." But I digress.

Perhaps the key issue is whether metaphysics can be fully dismissed as "unreal." There's no argument from me that the march of science hasn't conclusively proven that metaphysical assumptions about the universe were all incorrect. However, scientists such as Stephen Meyer make what I think is an intriguing case that discoveries in cosmology, physics, and biology indicate a designing intelligence behind life and the universe. I suspect that intelligence imbues our natural consciousness, and gives us a doorway into a dimension that's not apart from the natural world and our senses, and yet can connect us to something at least humanly greater.

[Ron E.]

These days I tend to read certain authors just to see how they are expressing ‘this’, and by ‘this’ I mean simple, everyday reality, that which is presented to us each moment - and is absorbed into the next moment. In fact, it all seems to be only, ever this moment. What attempts to link one moment with another seems to be down to the way the mind and thought operates – a survival thing as thoughts’ job is to label, judge, plan and categorize etc.

My simplistic approach to viewing reality is that as life situations occur thought is performing an amazing job of initiating an action or resolution – and sometimes (quite often) from its repertoire of information, thought can overlay the reality before us with various concepts of beliefs, opinions, de-sires and wishes and feelings along with a ton of cultural ways of assessing what we perceive. In this way, everyday reality is effectively hidden beneath a cavalcade of unwittingly produced mental concepts.

J. Toliffson expresses her non-dual take on realty here: -

“We can’t stand apart from and SEE reality; we can only BE reality—and we can’t ever NOT be reality. Reality is all there is; and all there is, is reality. And actually, EVERYTHING we see (the apparent forms that appear in everyday life, as well as what we see in dreams or on 5-MeO-DMT, LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA or Ayahuasca, or anything we think or imagine) is ALL reality.

The notion of finding The True Reality, as if it were some particular “thing” that could be found and grasped at last, or the notion of stabilizing in some apparent state of consciousness that we think is “It,” is all a dream. All such fantasies presume we are some-thing apart from this imagined IDEA of reality.”

[Appreciative Reader]

Occam's Razor. And burden of proof.

----------

(Slightly) longer version:

What are our specific mechanics of apprehending reality, and how we evolved to it, is fascinating in and of itself. But that does not speak to the nature of reality itself, other than incidentally.

The brain in a vat idea predates by far, predates by actual millennia, this movie, The Matrix, and philosophers philosophizing over that pop phenomenon. That reasoning is infantile if it seeks to address the nature of reality. Because, like I said: One, Occam's Razor; and two, burden of proof. Solipsism, and variations thereon, fail both those tests.

[777]

There is no real

There are levels of consciousness
which , - the Purer They are , . . .
the more exalting are the 'material" constructs
done. by those who have that frequency

The "Holy Ghost" permeates it all at the 432Hz Scale
which is also the Golden Rule ScaleAkk humans
can hear those tones when compassionate
and are able to stop hysterically crying about themselves
for 10 seconds , . . better more
But for jumping into the 7th Region
you have to high hike with somebody already there
S/HE will clean the Souls willing

Sat Gurus are good with hiding's
A God that would be scientifically analysed IS NO GOD

WHO SAYS THERE IS NO PATH
SHOULD NOT HINDER THOSE WAKKING ON IT

777