Looking back on 2023, I see I was not my typical prolific self. Only six posts, and most in the first half of the year. That’s a bad look for a blog. Not that I worry too much about that; I’ve been dealing with bad looks all my life. “C’est la vie, n’est-ce pas? But I let myself down a bit in this regard because I was mainly procrastinating. I didn’t want to write what I was going to write about next so I didn’t write anything. I did make a lot of pretty pictures, but that’s not helping unjunk my brain. This post about perception and subjective reality? A step toward unjunking my brain.
“Why were you procrastinating writing about perception and subjective reality?”
I wasn’t. I was procrastinating writing about confirmation bias.
“Um…are you still procrastinating writing about confirmation bias?”
No, because originally this post was about confirmation bias, but it got too long, so I had to break it into two posts. Confirmation bias is coming out next week(ish).
And even that one isn’t one I was avoiding writing. The two that follow…those are the ones I don’t want to write. But I need to.
So for now, let’s just have some fun talking about perception and why what we think we know to be true is true. Is absolutely and unequivocally true. 100% percept of the time.
But only for us.
(If you’re curious about the animated gif I used as the post image, you can see the full sequence of it on a separate art page.)
We Know Everything We Need to Know About Everything
Until we realize we don’t.
I’m (sort of) referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a cognitive bias that causes people with little knowledge about a subject or low ability to perform a task to overestimate their knowledge or abilities, and for those with great knowledge and ability to underestimate how good they are and how much they know.
Because we know everything about something until we realize how little we don’t know. Anyone who tells you they know everything about a topic, claiming that they know more than the world experts, has just shown they know very little about that topic, not even how much there is to know.
Epistemic curiosity can reduce the influence of this bias because someone with a propensity to want to learn about everything has a vast history realizing he knows nothing about anything and that whatever he’s learned is still a drop in the bucket of true knowledge.
That can make the world feel impossible big and our place in it frighteningly small. So there’s an appeal to making the world small by believing we understand it and know most of what there is to know.
The thing is, whatever you know and believe is exactly as big as your world is. Sure, you can push on those boundaries a bit with what ifs and other suppositions but most of us can’t get too far. It’s difficult to imagine something completely new, something for which there is little to no context.
Don’t believe me? Imagine a new color.
Not a new shade or a unique blend—though the possibility of doing that is unlikely since computers can process and store variations in color so minute that our eyes cannot see the difference—I mean a color no one has ever seen before.
Terry Pratchett, Genius
Fans of Pratchett’s Discworld might have had an answer for that imagine-a-new-color challenge I posed. In the Discworld books, wizards, witches, and cats can see an eighth color, Octarine, which is the color of magic. This is because they are born with rods, cones, and octagons in their eyes, letting them perceive this additional color.
It’s described as a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple. I used “fluorescent greenish-yellow purple” as a prompt in AI. I got some interesting results. None of them are a new color.
This fits perfectly to my point, of course. This color is not detectable to most people so its existence has little to no effect on most people’s lives.
Because they cannot perceive it, they don’t need it, and it is rejected from their reality.
But it does exist.
Just not for them.
So it doesn’t.
Take a Walk Under My Skies
Take a walk under my skies
My Skies by James Keelaghan
Try to see it once the way I do
If you look out through my eyes
You’ll find a different point of view
Everything changes
Every fact wears some disguise
Cast off your troubles
Take a walk under my skies
A nice sentiment, but you can’t. It’s impossible. We are ego-driven beings. Even moments completely devoid of any sense of self (AKA ego death; I’ve had that trip) cannot be filled with the sense of being someone else.
The only thing we can be sure of is that we exist. Anything else and everyone else might be a figment of our imagination. (I’ve had that trip, too.)
Erin and I have known each other longer than we haven’t known each other (28 years versus 15 years). We’re still finding fundamental ways in which we don’t know and understand each other. Motivations ascribed to actions that were not true. Paradigms inaccurately constructed as teenagers were never updated because there was no evidence they were wrong.
She might have better luck than most predicting how I will react to something. She will never be able to fathom how I experience it.
To evolve into the creature that humans are now requires selfishness. And we remain selfish creatures even now. Our entire universe revolves around us.
It has to. We are, after all, the one creating it.
Reality
I need to get this part out of the way. Cause it’s me, and I try to be careful with how I phrase things. To a fault. It’s my attempt to make our realities sync up for a moment so we can start from a common foundation.
But you probably already know that. Which means you know what’s coming next. Definitions!
Have you ever considered how to define reality? Or exist?
And have you ever noticed that when you think about a word for a prolonged period, it loses the connection to its meaning and just starts sounding like gibberish? That’s a result of semantic satiation. #TheMoreYouKnow
To the Dictionary!
Reality (n.) – the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.
Exist (n.) – to have actual being or to be real.
Wow. Circular logic is circular. And redundant statements are redundant.
It’s not that those aren’t helpful, but we can do better. And for that, we must go…
To Generative AI!
Let me just toss this over to good old Gemini (RIP Bard!): Gemini, please provide a definition for reality.
Gemini: Defining reality is a complex task that has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries. There’s no single, universally accepted definition, as the concept itself is layered and multifaceted. However, here are some key perspectives on what “reality” might mean… [continue]
Wow, Gemini is verbose AF! No wonder we get along so well.
OK, there’s just one more place we can go…
To the Movies!
Morpheus does a pretty good job defining reality…except he’s saying that that definition is flawed because, by that logic, the Matrix is real. But for him to do what he does (and for us to think he’s a Good Guy), then the Matrix needs to be Not Real. So even though things in the Matrix can be seen, touched, tasted, smelt, and felt, they are still fake.
Morpheus believes in a single reality, the “desert of the real,” the world of the unplugged. That is why they need to unplug everyone: Morpheus doesn’t think people should exist anywhere but in the unplugged reality.
Way to decide for everyone what is best for people, Morpheus!
I would argue that both worlds are equally real and thus exist within their own reality. The people in the Matrix are unaware that another reality exists while the denizens of the unplugged reality know there is a Matrix reality even though they have no way of interacting with it. Seems like 97.43% of the human population existed solely in one of the two realities.
Just because it was created and controlled by machines, why is the world of the Matrix less deserving of the designation of reality than the world of the unplugged? We know that what happens there has the same consequences for anyone for everyone within it: if a Red Pill is killed in the Matrix, their body back on the ship is just as dead.
A Brief Aside: The Morality Justification in The Matrix
That the Matrix is not a reality, or is at best a lesser one, is a justification Morpheus (and the writers) needs to make to justify the collateral human casualties that result from the war with the machines. “Don’t worry about the Good Guys massacring a few hundred innocent security guards and then dropping a skyscraper in the middle of a city. Those weren’t Real People.”
What makes them any less real and less deserving of their lives than natural-born Zionians?
Nothing.
Does that make Morpheus and the other Red Pills the Baddies?
Yup!
Not to worry though, none of those Matrix people would survive the war with the machines anyway. Morpheus tells Neo that they don’t usually take people Neo’s age out of the Matrix because their minds can’t adjust to and accept the unplugged reality. This means if the robots are defeated and the Matrix is shut down, something like 60% of the people plugged into it (those around Neo’s age and older) won’t survive the unplugging.
I always felt like the end goal for Zion shifted between movies one and two. In the first movie, I thought Morpheus wanted to end the reign of the AI and shut off the Matrix. In the second and third movies, Zion just wants to stop the machines from destroying Zion. Bit of a big change in goals, there!
In Reality, It’s All About Perception
Reality is what we can perceive with our “five” senses. Quotes around five because we have more than five. If you want to be minimalistic, then seven (adding vestibular, AKA a sense of movement and balance, and proprioception—or body awareness [as in you know where your hand is]—to the standard five). Other arguments range upward of 30. For example, some people have a sense of time; I’m missing that one. And color coordination. And a sense of propriety. Yes, I’m missing a few.
Regardless of the number of senses, simply put reality is that which can be perceived. Whenever science makes a discovery and comes up with a novel detection method that reveals a new something, reality expands. But it doesn’t really matter to individuals what the latest skeptotransmicrodecaorscope can detect about the world because none of us has one and even if we did, we couldn’t just walk around with it all day perceiving what it does. That thing is big, heavy, and expensive!
So despite knowing that infra-red and ultra-violent “light” exists—the rays that vibrate below the frequency that our optical nerves perceive as red or above the frequency perceived as purple—I can’t do anything with that knowledge. It doesn’t affect my life. And unlike the Roman Empire, the infra-red spectrum hardly gets any of my brain space.
Unless I’m watching a Predator movie.
And now I’m thinking Predators: The Fall of the Roman Empire could be a fun movie. Someone ought to make that a reality.
Subjective Reality
Reality is what can be perceived.
My reality is what I perceive.
Your reality is what you perceive.
Sometimes we perceive things completely differently from each other, as is succinctly demonstrated in this video.
No, I’m not going to spoil the sweet, sweet surprise twist. You’ll just have to watch it.
It doesn’t matter that, in the video, the students are [spoiler alert] because they were each defending their reality. Neither one of them is technically wrong. By design, our brains fill in extraneous information, which is why it’s perfectly reasonable for both of them to believe that the other [redacted] is the same [still nope] that was facing them.
“But Shane,” you might say, “in Reality, the ball was both colors. It doesn’t matter that they couldn’t see that from their perspective, because that’s what’s True!”
Yes, my dear reader, it was. (And way to spoil that for everyone. WTF, dude? Did you not see that I was using spoiler warnings?) But I didn’t say they were defending Reality. I said they were defending their reality.
Obewon Kenobi made this point succinctly in Star Wars Ep XI: Return of the Jedi when he justified his lack of knowledge about the surprise twist at the end of the second movie (Darth Vadar is your father!) back when he made certain claims (Darth Vadar killed your father!) in the first movie that would become false: “So what I told you was true…from a certain point of view.”
Oh, and…uh, spoiler warning. About the Star Wars twist. I hope I didn’t ruin anything for anyone.
There Can Be Only One
Our subjective reality is the only reality a person can know. No matter how well I describe it nor how empathetic you are, you will never know what it is to be me, to experience the world as I see it. We can’t even be sure we see the same colors or taste things the same. Which also means no human being knows What Truly Happened (and Why). We will only ever know our own truth. But this also means on an individual level, What Truly Happened (and Why) doesn’t matter because What Truly Happened (and Why) is not what happened in our reality and only our reality matters to us.
When an adult student at the college at which my wife works made a suggestive and inappropriate comment to my wife, she took his comment to be aggressive and demeaning. When she told me what happened, that’s not how I interpreted it (generational misogyny-infused but overall meant to be complementary and flirtatious). But how he meant it and what he had hoped to achieve by saying it doesn’t matter because, in Erin’s reality, it was hurtful.
This is similar to the students from the video earlier. It doesn’t matter that the ball was two colors because, in their individual realities, it was one color. And they both knew it: They were certain. They had conviction! They would FIGHT over it!
But why?
It’s Too Big! (That’s what she said)
No human can experience Reality. It’s too big. Too many inputs coming in too quickly. We don’t have the computing power to process Everything: All at Once at the Same Time. Or to quote Cypher, “There’s way too much information to decode the Matrix.”
And our brains don’t even try.
Our brains use all kinds of tricks and shortcuts to not get overloaded and overstimulated and to fill in the gaps when information is missing. I’ve already discussed this in my Why Do You Think You Think the Way That You Think post (which is why I wrote that post before this post). You will find pattern recognition/next-step prediction in the Let’s Compute the Logic of Using Logic section and paradigms and stereotypes in Appendix C.
Optical illusions often show exactly what I mean by using the brain’s shortcuts to show you things that don’t exist or obfuscate things that do.
Humans don’t go around playing Schrödinger with every little thing by believing that both the Thing and the Opposite of the Thing are true until proven that only one is true.
Our brains don’t assume that a ball is all colors until we fully inspect it and prove it is only one. We don’t get into our car thinking that it will both work and won’t work until we turn the key (which is why are incredulous when we turn the key it doesn’t). Nor is our date both wearing underwear and not wearing underwear until we get their clothes off.
Absolute Reality
No human can experience Absolute Reality. It’s too big. We lack the necessary sensory components to even identify those inputs.
Our brains are already over-taxed by the organic sensory organs we evolve (e.g., eyes, ears, etc.) and are so overloaded with data that they take shortcuts or flat-out ignore certain stimuli so that we aren’t overwhelmed.
And yet there’s so much to our universe that we haven’t evolved organs or created cybernetic implants capable of perceiving. To quote Buckminster Fuller:
“Until the 20th century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chartered electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.”
Buckminster Fuller
“It’s too big” is the understatement of the year.
We need to be able to perceive Absolute Reality and process Everything: All at Once at the Same Time to be able to know What Truly Happened (and Why). And humans can only do like a millionth of either, so whatever you think you know about what’s happening and why is just a story you are telling yourself.
And damn are we good at convincing ourselves that that story is real, true, correct!
We Learn From Our Past, for Good or Ill
Our ball paradigm gets activated whenever we experience a ball, and the ball paradigm has all kinds of information in it*:
- Soccer balls have a foot fetish and dislike hugs.
- Golf balls are afraid of water because they can’t swim.
- Blue balls are real, not blue, not dangerous, and less common than the men would claim to have them would have you believe.
- Most balls are a uniform color or pattern.
So when you see that half a ball is a solid color, not only is there no reason to expect the other half to be different, but the rules in the ball paradigm dictate it won’t be. Every time you encounter balls that are uniformly patterned, your paradigm is confirmed and becomes stronger, more reliable, and less likely to be questioned or reviewed for errors.
And because we are biased toward wanting our paradigm confirmed, it would be a struggle to look at half a ball and believe the other side was different. Especially because you didn’t consciously choose to believe the ball was uniformly colored. Your brain did that without checking with you that it should.
So the subconscious brain is making decisions about reality (and how we respond to it) based on the information contained in our paradigms. At least we’re consciously deciding what goes into them, right?
*Individual ball paradigms will vary
Shaped Through Our Lives
Paradigms are constructed and then reinforced through our experience. Some are handed to us in the form of social norms or nuggets of wisdom. We don’t need firsthand experience with a thing to have a paradigm about that thing. Most of this begins in early childhood when most of us experience the most things for the first time.
Each past moment of our existence alters how we perceive the present moment of our existence. How we were affected by each past moment—what our brains decided to learn from that experience—mostly happened without our awareness let alone any mindful purpose or direction. We weren’t aware we were even learning something, so how could we decide what the lesson was?
Once established, most of those lessons will exist in perpetuity. After all, we didn’t know we learned anything. Why would we then try to figure out what we learned and why we learned it?
After all, how often do you think about how you think? Or put in the active work needed to change subconsciously trained instinctual responses? (See the Let’s Ditch Habits and Instead React to Instinct chapter of the Why Do You Think You Think the Way That You Think? post to understand what I mean.)
Chaos Is Bad.
Most brains don’t like randomness or uncertainty. They would rather be wrong than uncertain, which is why they make best-guess assumptions about the world to fill in the unknown bits.
Which we get wrong all the time!
But not as often as we get it right!
Or so we think because we can’t not trust our brains when they fill in information. Think about it: There’s a reason crazy people don’t know they are crazy. Because we have to trust ourselves. We’re the only person we actually know to exist.
How crippling would it be if you had to judge every assumption your brain made as to whether you believed it?
If you said, “not at all” then you are massively undercounting the number of assumptions your brain makes.
Simply standing up from a chair assumes my legs will support me (based on several assumptions about muscle strength, the ability to maintain balance, and the like), that gravity is in effect and still working as it did when I sat down, and that the vast empty spaces in the atoms in my body won’t align perfectly with the vast empty spaces in the atom of the floor such that I phase through solid matter.
I will also assume most of you are blessedly unburdened by such considerations whenever you do things. Me? I’m an overthinker who likes to keep my options open.
Needless to say (he says before needing to say it), our brains need patterns and predictability, cause and effect, action and reaction because the world is already too full for us to take it all in, and taking it all in is just the first step.
Processing every potential outcome? That way madness lies. (Come, join me! All mimsy are my borogoves, and these mome raths? Outgrabe!)
How Invested Are You?
The ball video does a good job of simplifying a complex idea. I’ve got no problem with that. However, it then simplifies the solution. “Step into the other person’s shoes”? At this point, I’ve used over 3500+ words meandering around the point that this is impossible. (Sure, I could have done in half as many but I didn’t.)
In the case of the both-black-and-white ball, neither student was particularly invested in believing the ball was one color. They had only just met that ball so there was no shared history to overcome, no prior experiences to dismantle. That ball didn’t even alter the rules in their ball paradigm. We all know this professor is the only person with a ball like that! Paradigms don’t shift for a unique “gotcha ball of surprise wisdom +2.”
Their weakly held, low-stakes beliefs were discarded without disrupting fundamental understandings of the workings of the world. No existential crisis arose for either student when their subjective reality was proven inaccurate. Simply wondering “Why is this person arguing so vehemently about something that is obviously incorrect?” would have hinted toward the teacher’s ruse.
Rejecting the “Truth” Would Have Been Weirder
On something so easy and obvious and zero-impact as realizing the Absolute Truth about that ball, it would be more difficult and mentally unhinged to keep arguing your point. Seriously. Imagine if the video went a different way and after they switched places and looked at the ball from the other side, Mr. McBeardy-Guy leans over, both hands on the desk, glaring eyes locked on Sir Clean Stubbles, and growled, “The ball…is fucking…white!”
“Yes sir, it most certainly is. And I forgot, I have a doctor’s appointment I need to be at right now. Bye!” said everyone in the class as they ran out of there.
Humans have a great capacity for changing our minds. On lots of issues. Some of us thrive on it, some of us hate it, but most of us can do it when the stakes are low. It can be easy to see general things generally from a different general point of view.
People Get Really Fucking Invested!
But that dog don’t hunt during a heated argument with someone about politics, religion, or if non-monogamy is immature/immoral/sinful because most people have already considered both sides. They probably think they considered both sides equally and fairly, and then they came to The Logical Conclusion while the other people did not (which is impossible because logic, like reality, is subjective).
Furthermore, the advice to “walk a mile in someone’s shoes” or “take a walk under my skies” (#callback) only works when the people arguing are doing so to gather information and are amenable to having their beliefs questioned and changed. Most people are resistant to being wrong (cause confirmation bias, #callforward), so they enter any debate with defenses up and offenses ready.
The Non-Debate
I recall an instance from college in which I said, “Religion is the cause of more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of the world.” And the professor (Brit Lit II) said, “I used to think the same thing when I was your age.” And I was left confused as to how I was wrong (there’s pretty good evidence for it) and frustrated as to why he didn’t tell me what was the cause.
I wonder now if I would have been receptive to his answer had he given one. In such situations, people tend to stand their ground and resist new information (not me, but that’s for the post after next). If he had tried to change my mind, I might have resisted, and in resisting, gained a more firm grasp on the belief. Him being a profession I liked and trusted and was receptive to learning from made it more likely I would have given his thoughts on the matter a fair review and not just discarded them as wrong.
However, by challenging me in that way, he prodded me into examining my belief. Simply questioning whether it was true weakened how much I believed it was true, which made me more receptive to changing my mind on my own. And eventually, I did. Did we come to the same conclusion? I’ll never know for sure, but I think so.
And Another Thing About That Ball Video….
Tricking them with the ball like that would never work. Not with the ball being on the desk at a lower perspective. Looking down on it as they did, both students would have clearly seen the black–white line of demarcation across the top and thought their teacher had gone senile with his “ruse.”
It would have to be suspended at eye level for both of them, which would require two people of near identical height and a suspension method that maintained motionlessness.
Which is also silly.
Yes, it’s cheesier than a chunk of sharp cheddar—the entire series of them are—but the lessons are valuable and if this medium alters just a few people’s minds for the better, then I’m for it.
And that professor….man, that guy has seen some shit. You can tell. His backstory…there’s something dark there. Something HAPPENED to that guy, and he made the choice that as a teacher, it wasn’t his job to teach only facts. No, he had to impart wisdom to his students, or else what he taught them was meaningless.
Do You See What I See?
Which is that you cannot see what I see? Cannot know what I know? Will never be able to understand what I experience and how that experience will affect every instance of who I am thereafter?
I’ve been trying to use this view of the word to be more understanding with people I disagree with. More sympathetic and forgiving when I see behavior I don’t understand or follow someone else’s thought to a strange conclusion.
It doesn’t matter how much like me a person seems, we are all so vastly different in ways we would never even be able to figure out if we tried. In some ways that’s kind of a lonely thought. My reality is my own, and no one else is experiencing this—just me.
But even the most concrete truth of my reality is only that strong in my reality. Even things I Know to be True (and have reasonable proof) are wrong in other people’s realities. And they are just as sure I am wrong (and have reasonable proof) as I am of them.
There’s your multiverse theory right there: 7.88 billion versions of Earth currently stacked up on top of each other, all of them different in subtle ways. All of them true. All of them real. None of them accurate.
I hope your version is a good one.