I’m
going to suggest to you that our perceptions by and large determine
our reality. Each of the five senses recieve information about their
sense objects. Our mind constructs a coherent view of reality based
on the information it receives. We have, in the course of human
history, created instruments which extend the reach of our senses,
but this has not fundamentally altered our idea of what is real. As
our understanding is refined by the most recent experimental
verifications of the nature of reality suggested by quantum
mechanics, that very idea of what is real may need to be
reinterpreted. More on that later.
19th
century American philosopher and psychologist William James said that
“for
the moment, what we attend to is reality.”
Where we place our attention determines the information we receive.
If we attend to the visual field, we will receive information about
visual objects. And so on for each of the other senses: hearing,
touch, smell, and taste. This directed attention determines the
reality we perceive.
We
assume that all humans with their sense functions intact experience
the world in the same way. We share a view of the world that is
consistent. Water is wet. The sky is blue. Objects fall to the
ground. Jet engines are loud. Strawberries are sweet, and kisses are
sweeter than wine!
But
what if it isn’t always so? Or if two people comparing their
experiences can’t agree on what their senses are telling them –
and they are both right. I can give you a few examples of this.
Allow
me to make an imperfect analogy with the world of computers and
software. We are predominantly visually-oriented information
processors. When that sense is deficient or suddenly lost, it has a
large impact on our ability to function in the world. However, even
when working optimally, we find that there is not unanimous agreement
on what is “out there.”
A
couple of years ago, an image was circulating on the internet that
caused people to wonder what was wrong with them or their friends.
Different people saw the image of a dress as either blue and black or
white and gold, and there was no possibility of agreement with the
other if you saw it one way.
It
turned out that the way our visual sense processes information and
the way our mind makes sense of it is dependent on a number of
factors. How we see (i.e., assign) color depends to a great extent on
how we interpret light, often with unconscious assumptions about the
lighting conditions we perceive the image to be seen within.
David Williams, Allyn Professor of Medical
Optics, one of the world’s leading experts on human vision and
director of the Center for Visual Science in Rochester, New York
tells us, "The brain always faces the problem of figuring out
how much of the light arriving at the eye from an object is due to
how brightly illuminated the object is and how much is due to how
highly reflective the object is. We are usually extremely good at
making this judgment, a perceptual skill known as lightness
constancy."
But
optical illusions mess with our ability to decide that what we are
seeing is “real.” Pilots face this problem when flying on a
moonless night or in the clouds at midday. There is simply no horizon
with which to orient the aircraft. Another illusion is a particularly
wide or narrow runway making it seem as if the pilot is either too
low or too high. How the pilot sorts out the actual reality can be a
matter of life and death for those inside the aircraft.
Aside
from lighting conditions, we often misinterpret common objects as
threats and vice versa. Is what we’re seeing a snake or a rope?
When my wife and I lived in Tucson, Arizona, I remember a day I was
cleaning up the yard. As I went to pick up what I thought was a
fallen tree branch, it suddenly started rattling its tail! Yes, this
tree branch was a rattlesnake. Fortunately, it was a rather warm day
and the snake was a bit sluggish, or I might not be telling this
story. I was able to call animal control which sent a team to take
the snake to an unpopulated area and send it on its way.
It’s
not only our eyes that deceive us. We have another internet
sensation, which some are calling “the dress file of 2018.” Some
people hear “Yanny” while others hear “Laurel” and it is
unlikely that someone can choose which name they will hear without
altering the sound spectrum being played. It turns out that some
people are more attuned to hearing high frequencies. These people
hear “Yanny.” Others who are more attuned to hearing low
frequencies hear “Laurel.” Now, keep in mind that this is the
same audio file that both are hearing. How each person hears, and
also what they expect to hear, plays a large part in how their mind
makes sense of the sound the ear conveys. It is a typical “listening
vs hearing” problem. Hearing is a function of the sense organ,
listening is a function of the mind.
How
about our nose? Anyone who has taken Critical Incident Stress
Management (CISM) training is aware of the sense triggers that first
responders may experience following a traumatic event such as a
rescue in which there have been horrific injuries, even fatal ones.
These triggers can precipitate a full-blown experience of PTSD, or
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder involving any combination of physical,
emotional, cognitive, or behavioral symptoms.
To
elaborate, here is a section from a Civil Air Patrol brochure that
Dr. Sam Bernard and the CAP CISM team crafted: “Everyone
will respond to trauma or a critical incident in his or her own way.
Some reactions to critical incidents are perfectly normal, but not
everyone experiences the incident in the same way. Some reactions may
indicate problems coping with the incident. Variables that affect all
of us include:
•
Our support or lack of support.
•
The extent of the trauma.
•
Our prior exposure to trauma.
•
How we psychologically processed prior traumas.
•
How much the current incident reminded us of some past
personal issue.
These
variables coupled with the current event and
our current life stressors have a bearing on
our reactions.”
One
would think that a smell is a smell is a smell. A rose by any other
name…
But a
smell can recall a vivid memory, and our mind doesn’t discriminate
between beautiful memories and horrific ones when presented with this
trigger. The smell of strong cheese can be enough for some people to
provoke a violent physical response, throwing them mentally back into
the moment of the original trauma. Perhaps you know someone who has
experienced this. That memory is our reality in that moment.
There
are also instances involving touch, and the sensation of heat or
cold; one’s expectation
of heat can cause a blister when ice is applied to the skin. Mind
over matter?
When
we expect a pleasant or unpleasant taste, when does it become real?
How much of our perception of taste is actually smell? Why doesn’t
food and drink taste the same when we have a cold? My wife’s sense
of smell has been impaired from chronic sinus infections over many
years. She asks me to let her know what she is eating or drinking so
she can enjoy what it should taste like. The memory of taste is what
determines her reality of enjoying the meal.
I
mentioned quantum mechanics earlier, the branch of physics dealing
with the unimaginably small world of subatomic particles. Scientific
American, the magazine loved by science geeks the world over, posted
this on their blog page on 5/29/2018.
“For
almost a century, physicists have wondered whether the most
counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics (QM) could actually
be true. Only in recent years has the technology necessary for
answering this question become accessible, enabling a string of
experimental results—including startling ones reported
in 2007 and 2010,
and culminating now with a
remarkable test reported in May—that
show that key predictions of QM are indeed correct. Taken together,
these experiments indicate that the everyday world we perceive does
not exist until observed, which in turn suggests—as we shall argue
in this essay—a primary role for mind in nature. It is thus high
time the scientific community at large—not only those involved in
foundations of QM—faced up to the counterintuitive implications of
QM’s most controversial predictions.”
With
all of the ways our senses can deceive us, perhaps it's best if we
consider “reality” as a fluid concept, and one best handled
lightly. It is fine to think of objects as solid and our personal
identity as real for ordinary day-to-day interactions, but if we
choose to look closer and deeply investigate this reality as the
scientists who developed quantum mechanics have done, it appears as
anything but solid, and this self can be seen to be as much an
abstraction of an idea built of selective memories as it is a solid,
definable “me.”
Given that we construct reality out of the information
received by our senses, something that always happens a bit after the
information is recieved, we need to understand that, although we
share the same environment we do not always perceive things the same
way. Far from being a source of contention and argument, this
knowledge should encourage us to extend the benefit of the doubt to
someone who disagrees with us on the content of the sense information
we both experience. They are, after all, no less human than we.
=======================================================================
With
thanks to the following writers for reporting these stories:
Sarah
Gibbens –
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/yanny-laurel-hear-sound-audio-explained-science-spd/
Brian
Resnick –
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/16/17360332/yanny-laurel-audio-science-explained-nature-of-reality
Bernardo
Kastrup, Henry P. Stapp, and Menas C. Kafatos –
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-grips-with-the-implications-of-quantum-mechanics/
