Ask aloud whether reality is real, and you’re liable to be regarded as never truly having left the freshman dorm. But that question has received, and continues to receive, consideration from actual scientists. The Big Think video above assembles seven of them to explain how they think about it, and how they see its relevance to the enterprise of human understanding. For the most part, they seem to agree that, even if we accept that something called “reality” objectively exists, of more immediate relevance is the fact that we can’t perceive that reality directly. Any information we receive about it comes to our brain through our senses, and they have their own ways of interpreting things.
As cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman puts it, our senses are “making up the tastes, odors, and colors that we experience. They’re not properties of an objective reality; they’re actually properties of our senses that they’re fabricating.” What’s physically objective “would continue to exist even if there were no creatures to perceive it.”
Therefore, “colors, odors, tastes, and so on are not real in that sense,” yet they are “real experiences”; the trick of separating what exists in objective reality from what only exists in our minds as a result of that objective reality — “the beginning of the scientific method,” as evolutionary biologist Heather Heying describes it — is an even more complicated endeavor than it sounds.
“Reality, for us, is what we can sense without sensory surfaces, and what we can make sense of with the signals in our brain,” says Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain author Lisa Feldman Barrett in the video just above. “Trapped in its own dark, silent box called your skull,” your brain “has no knowledge of what is going on around it in the world, or in the body.” It does receive signals from the senses, “which are the outcome of some changes in the world or in the body, but the brain doesn’t know what the changes are.” With only information about effects, it uses past experience to construct guesses about their causes and contexts. We might also call that function imagination, and no scientists worth their salt can do without a good deal of it.
Related content:
Is Consciousness an Illusion? Five Experts in Science, Religion & Technology Explain
Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Technology Can’t Grasp Reality
The Simulation Theory Explained In Three Animated Videos
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
