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Reality Check


Most people assume that the world we perceive is the world that exists. It is fundamentally a flawed assumption. If you just probe this assumption a bit deeper, you will easily arrive at the conclusion that the world that we perceive is the world that we create. I am not saying that the reality does not exist or that we create the world through our imagination.

 What I am claiming is that the perception is not a passive act. Image, sound, time and space does not exist outside our perception. There may be something "out there"  (if at all) that correlates to what we perceive. But, in order to perceive a specific form of reality, we have to create them in the first place. Don't forget that the unique point of view of one's individual reality does not exist without him. Every moment of perception is an act of creation through the subconscious process of our neurological network, that evolved over millions of years of trial and error.

 Let us examine in scientific terms, how we see the world. When we look at the wold, the light reflected from the objects passes through the lens of our eye, falls in the retina, gets converted to electrical impulses and sent to the brain through neural connections. The brain supposedly interprets the signal and creates a representation in the neural synapses. This representation is what makes the objects 'appear' in our consciousness. What we see is this representation of the world not the world itself. It is preposterous to assume that the representation in our brain is exactly the same as the original . This representation is merely meant for navigating the world for survival.

 If you subscribe to Darwin's theory of biological evolution then this conclusion is inevitable. Only if you believe in some form of creationism, you can argue that the supreme being who created us also endowed us with the capacity to see the world as it is. There is no other worldview that can support this unquestioned assumption that what we see and perceive are all there is to the objective world. Ironically, it is often the materialistic scientific thinkers who believe in such a fixed objective reality.

 According to the theory of evolution, we evolved from a single cell organism to a complex multi cell creature through natural selection. At each stage in this evolutionary process, we had to represent the world in some form or another in order to survive. We have been blind all along while interpreting the world from inside.

The world of a single cell organism cannot be same as the world that is familiar to us. It may not have the three dimensional space or the events that unfold in time. The organism may have some primitive perception of the world that is good enough to go towards a food and get away from a predator. It is true that along the way we have gotten better at perceiving and representing the world. But the current representation that we have of the world is not the final and it will never be the actual. It is not only improbable but completely unnecessary from the evolutionary perspective.

We are replicating structures that out-serviced or left-out of other replicating structures. What we will ever need and possess is not a cognitive capacity that sees the reality as is but a set of representations and beliefs that is good enough for our survival. In a way our perception is nothing but a mass delusion that withstood the test of time and natural selection.

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