Your perception of what’s real is ultimately just the biochemical reactions and electrical impulses inputted into, churned over, and processed by that brain thingy of yours. That perception may have bugger-all to do with what’s really real, assuming there is anything that’s really real in the first place.
There’s an interface between whatever is a really real reality outside of your body, and inside your body – well inside your brain (or mind if you will) where such outside reality as might be the case manifests itself. However, reality passing through that interface might not be the same reality either side of that boundary. One might think of fun-house mirrors as a parallel where reality as reflected light of whatever is real, hitting the distorted mirror then reflected back to you, well you see quite a different reality.
Sight: Your mind does not actually see or process the photons that enter your eye. The photons are all processed and converted into electrical signals hence transmitted to, and processed (via biochemical processes) within the brain or mind.
Sound: Your mind does not actually hear the vibrating air that hit your ear. The air vibrations are all processed and converted to electrical signals and transmitted to the brain or mind and hence processed (via biochemical processes) within that brain or mind.
Taste and Smell: Your mind does not actually experience directly the various chemicals that interact with your nose and tongue (smell and taste) receptors. Those chemicals are all processed and their taste or smell properties converted to electrical signals and transmitted to the brain or mind and hence processed (via biochemical processes) within that brain or mind.
Touch: Your mind does not actually experience directly the various bits and pieces that come into contact and interact with your external, even internal nervous system receptors. Those bits and pieces are all processed and converted to nerve impulses, ultimately reaching the brain or mind and further processed via other electrical signals and biochemistry, within that brain or mind. If you prick your finger on a needle, it’s not the needle touching your brain or mind although that’s what’s ‘telling’ you that you’ve pricked something, in this case your finger. And it’s been documented that extreme cold can feel like extreme heat.
Further, much of external reality falls outside the range of your ordinary senses. You can’t see radio ‘light’ or hear very high (or low) sound frequencies, or visually have vision acuity sufficient to magnify objects enough to see microbes, far less molecules and electrons. There’s a threshold to detecting smells and tastes and experiencing touch. Your reality is, of necessity, incomplete.
Your senses, your reality, tell you that the chair you are sitting in is solid, but your reality and senses are wrong because most of that chair is empty space. What chair-stuff there is, is held together by powerful electromagnetic forces, so you don’t fall through when you sit down. Your senses, your reality, tell you that the surface of your bathroom mirror is perfectly flat and smooth. Your senses and reality are wrong – at least at the atomic level where the ‘surface’ is anything but smooth.
Even something you ordinarily can’t detect with your five senses, time, can be variable in your reality. I mean sitting on a hot stove for one minute seems like an hour; an hour in bed with your favorite lover might seem just like a minute’s duration!
Consider too that your version of what you see, hear, taste, touch and smell might be just a dream. You may think you’re wide awake going through the normal day-to-day routine of life, but, can you be absolutely certain that you’re not dreaming, or that perhaps someone (something) else isn’t doing the hard yards on your behalf? Can you be absolutely certain that half-way through tomorrow’s lunch, you (or someone else) might not wake up? Consider that song made famous by that boldly going trio in “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier”: “Row, row, row your boat; gently down the stream; merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily; life is but a dream”. Whoever thought up those lyrics might have been closer to the mark than they realized. Of course if reality is ‘but a dream’ and you wake up, you might find yourself more akin to an alien ‘purple people eater’ than a people!
For all you know, your version of what you see, hear, taste, touch and smell might be just impulses that you receive but manipulated by a little imp inside your brain. You’re looking at and eating a red apple, but the imp is manipulating things and tricking you into experiencing via sight and taste a rd apple, but in actual fact you’re seeing and tasting a yellow lemon or an orange colored orange or a purple grape! How could you prove that’s not the case?
That imp can actually be very real, albeit not inside your mind so much as outside it, but having the ability to get inside your mind nevertheless. That imp could actually be, say, a hypnotist. There are many imps out there called brainwashers who, with their bag of psychological, maybe pharmacological tricks, can make you believe many of those before breakfast impossible things. ‘Big Brother’ proved that you too can really believe that 2 + 2 = 5 with the right persuasion
You can be your own imp. You can visualize a sunset or the night sky in broad daylight or with your eyes shut. You can ‘hear’ a song in your mind even though no actual song is playing. You can taste an imaginary apple. You can imagine being caressed by your lover even if she’s far away at the time. You can even imagine with probability some degree of accuracy experiences you haven’t actually experienced before, like being behind the wheel of a car heading downhill with no brakes or what it might feel like to be shot.
Your perception of reality could be altered, not because of an actual imp, but because of various neurophysiologic deviations from the norm. For example, you might have color blindness. As you and your mind/brain age, that causes alterations in your perceptions of reality. As your physical body ages and wears out; ditto your brain. Disease, lack of sleep, and a whole host of chemicals (drugs) can easily alter those otherwise normal brain/mind biochemical reactions essential to getting a ‘true’ perception of the outside world.
Even if your mind/brain system is operating perfectly, you still can’t trust all your senses all the time. There are all sorts of optical illusions for example. One of the more common ones we’ve all experienced is the Moon illusion. The full Moon appearing over the horizon looks huge. That same full Moon, when overhead, looks way smaller. If experiencing that for the first time, without prior knowledge that it is an illusion, you’d probably be willing to bet the family farm that the Moon has shrunk as it climbs higher up in the sky, and swells again when it sinks below the western horizon. Psychology textbooks are full of examples of optical illusions where your senses trick you to the point that you can have two equally but opposite visions of reality.
Speaking of illusions, say you are sitting in a room ten feet long by ten feet wide and its ten feet tall. That’s 1000 cubic feet of volume you’re sitting within. Clearly you are inside the room. But, the entirety of the room and contents that you experience, the reality of those 1000 cubic feet resides entirely in your brain or mind – the transition or interface between that outside reality and your internal perception of that reality. Now your brain isn’t big enough to house a 1000 cubic foot room inside it, so there’s some serious miniaturization going on inside that brain thingy of yours. You’re inside the room, but the room is equally inside you.
Another possibility of an illusionary reality you might want to consider revolves around knowledge we’ve gained from experiments in mapping the brain that the brain can be artificially stimulated into exp
eriencing or perceiving an apparent, but actually false sensation or reality. The stimulation is coming from various pokes and prods, often electrical in nature, applied directly to the exposed brain by the medical experimenters. Stimulate location X, you taste apple. That leads to an interesting scenario where by all your sensory input is of such a nature. That is, all input is fed directly into your brain from some sort of machine or computer or mad scientist! That’s you reality in total and what you experience is an actual falsehood. It’s the old fashion brain-in-a-vat sci-fi plot, but does it have to be sci-fi?
Given all of the above, can you really trust your senses to be giving you a really real version of reality? I mean, if a dozen people give a dozen different interpretations of an inkblot, which one of the dozen is correct? Clearly there’s only the one inkblot on display. Perhaps none are correct! Now extrapolate that inkblot to the wider ‘out there’ and perhaps a dozen people experience a dozen different versions of what’s at surface value, the same reality. Is there the one reality or a dozen realities or more, or perhaps there’s no really real reality at all. The bottom line, as with the inkblots, is that no two people can or will experience the exact same reality, even being at the same time and place. No single individual will experience identical realities from one moment to the next since your brain/mind isn’t static from one moment to the next but always in a state of constant activity and flux.
The fact that you really can not trust your senses to give you an accurate picture of reality has been well demonstrated by experiment, and is well emphasized and exploited by trial lawyers in discrediting eyewitness testimony.
Further reading:
Baggott, Jim; A Beginner’s Guide to Reality; Penguin Books, London; 2005:
