Reality
What is reality?
Imagine if you can perceive the world as a snake, which registers infrared radiation emitted up to a meter away via holes in its head. This is another slice of reality that humans don’t tap into. The truth is that the real material world is a vast jungle of information in which our brain selectively picks out a small segment, according to how it’s been shaped by evolution, and conditioned by our experience. It’s easy to confuse our constructed image of the world with reality.
For the sake of discussion, let’s say that reality is all the information that exists in the universe. This information presents itself in many forms: electromagnetic fields, ultraviolet waves, and other types of energy, of which humans have evolved to perceive through the 5 senses a small segment that will help us survive and pass our genes to the next generation.
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With the use of scientific instruments, like an infrared thermometer, we can detect other subtle energies that we didn’t evolve to sense as part of our natural subjective reality. Furthermore, of the slither of reality that humans have evolved to perceive, most of it never reaches our conscious awareness. Psychologists posit that 99% of the mind’s activity is subconscious, while the remaining tiny amount comes into our conscious awareness and determines what we think of as reality. The illusion is that our thin slice of attention is the whole of reality, yet we remain completely unaware of the subconscious program that’s actually running our lives.
The brain receives an absurd amount of data at each instant. If we look at sensory information in terms of bits or 1s and 0s, the way that computers measure data, our taste buds receive about 1000 bits per second. Our ears receive 100,000 bits per second. Our nose receives about the same. Our skin receives about 1 million bits per second. And our eyes receive about 10 million bits per second.
Yet of all this data, we can only consciously process about 50 bits per second. In other words, the system that’s driving our actions remains a mystery for our entire lives, as only a small subset of inputs become available to conscious perception. Then as if that didn’t dilute our picture of reality enough, our brain is a prediction making machine that forms all types of stories and mental models about how the world works.
To give an example, imagine someone is walking along a mountain path and comes across a large snake, jolting backward in fear, but laughing at themselves they realize that they had just mistaken a stick for the deadly predator. Good job for the primal brain for not risking it though, better safe than sorry.
In the same way we often mistaken sticks for snakes throughout our lives, but in far less useful ways. If your crush fails to text you back immediately, your mind might begin playing out the worst case ‘snake’ scenarios. We often don’t see the world clearly at all, constructing these scenarios all the time, and it takes a lot of work to reprogram our snake-centered view of the world.
So what we think of as reality is based on a narrow set of fabricated stories, based on a narrow set of conscious awareness, based on a narrow set of information. And so it would be a mistake to assume, as we often do, that this represents reality in the slightest. Recognizing this, we can become more in-tuned with reality by observing our actual experience closely, and determining where we are layering on our own judgement. Then we can hope to see the sticks clearly as sticks, and not snakes. And by training our minds through meditation to pay close attention and applying logic, we can get more in touch with reality, and live less of our lives deluded by a fantasy world.
