Is reality real? These neuroscientists don’t think so | Big Think

Is reality real? These neuroscientists don’t think so, with Richard Dawkins, Heather Heying, Donald Hoffman & more

Is there an external reality? Is reality objective? Is the information your senses are feeding you an accurate depiction of reality? Most neuroscientists, biologists, and scientific leaders believe that we only understand a sliver of what is real.

Although we assume our senses are telling us the truth, they’re actually fabricated to us. Considering senses are unique from person to person, and through our unique senses we can only intemperate a fraction of what is real, there is no all-encompassing perspective one can have. Because of this, we need to take our perceptions seriously, but not literally.

Multiple perspectives have to be taken, as each will have some sort of truth lies within them. Seeing partial truth in multiple perspectives is fundamental to navigating the world and making informed decisions.

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CHAPTERS:

0:00 Beau Lotto on how we perceive our external reality.
0:32 Alva Noë on how our reality projects into our nervous system.
1:20 Donald Hoffman on if our senses are telling us the truth.
2:58 Frank Wilczek on how we perceive color and sound.
4:41 Daniel Schmachtenberger on perception, choice making, and navigating reality.
6:01 Heather Heying on how to figure out what is true in reality.
6:28 Richard Dawkins on objective reality vs. science
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Read more of our stories on objective reality:
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[bobhughes]

This concept is directly related to the phenomenon wherein most "intelligent" folk realize that the more they know, the less they know, i.e., knowledge evokes far more questions than answers.

[billross]

When I was a kid, one of my teachers said that every single person has a different perspective because no two people can occupy the same space at the same time. This stuck with me through the years.

[serenecatweather]

I finally found my people lmao. Since I was 6 I’ve been having these thoughts about reality. It started after my grandma died. Every year, my thoughts kept progressively getting more detailed and abstract, to the point where I nearly passed out ahahaha. That was the time where I tried to process the word ‘infinity’ and just how damn long it really is. Btw, I hate that word. I’m so convinced we all perceive reality differently, and that is why we like certain things more than others e.g. the color pink instead of yellow, loving maths instead of art etc. everything around me (objects, landscapes, people) are really just all in my head. Everything is just an illusion, a way to interpret the potential abyss I might find myself in. I might already be dead and living my life all over again.

I just cannot understand life. I feel as if something is always off. WHY do humans have the need to explain our existence? This is something universal and something all humans in many cultures tried to figure out. Is this a sign that there really is a creator out there? Are we just existing by pure chance? Maybe I’m all alone in this world and every single one of you do not exist. Maybe I’m mentally insane, lying in a hospital bed somewhere, and imagining ‘this’ form of reality. Maybe everyone sees humans a little differently, and that’s why we are attracted to certain people.

Have you ever thought about the fact, that maybe we just won’t die? We see forms of death everywhere around us, but have you ever told yourself ‘damn, I’m lucky I didn’t die from that’ etc? Maybe we’ll continue on living, surviving anything and we’ll just get older and older. We’ll think we’re immortal and we’ll be the only one who’s getting this old, because the reality ‘WE’ perceive, really might only be your reality. Ok I’m making no sense anymore and I can feel myself nearly having a panic attack.

If you read this far, I hope you understood my ramblings and maybe relate lol

[dazparry]

My focal seizures give me experiences i can only describe as getting a glimpse of what's actually going on. Makes 'reality' feel like a simplified version at best.

[ergovisavis]

I remember laying awake at night in my early teens when I had a mind-bending epiphany. I had just learned that we perceive color by the wavelengths of light reflected off an objects surface - a red apple is not inherently "red", we perceive it such because "red" wavelengths are reflected when light shines on it. The implications of this sunk in as I realized that none of the objects in my room (or anywhere) have a color when the lights are off.

I tried to imagine the true form of an object in the absence of light, but the best I could do was to see them as white or black. The truth is that they are neither, but I couldn't visualize their true properties independant of my perception. White, black or red are not properties that exist in reality, Color is just a construct of our brain's information processing.

[deluuno]

I was once in a lucid dream and I told someone "This is a Dream, your Not Real!" He preceded to give me a long explanation on his entire life story on how he had two sister, a dog that didn't like his cats, a salutatorian in school, and he even talked about how he had a dream last night and more and more stuff and that if he wasn't real and if this was just a dream then how could all of that happened. It stunned me realizing that this person had this entire life they thought was real, and was in reality no more different then you or me, and they thought they were real. And when I woke up they were gone, dead, non-existent. That could happen to all of us one day.

[tomahzo]

Interesting that it was never once mentioned that the human brain synthesizes the impression that it consumes to a large extent. It doesn't just consume sensory signals from the outside world - it tries to predict impressions and if the external impression does not match up with the prediction then that's can be a very jarring event. That's why we sometimes do a double take when something unexpected happens. "Hey, I just entered the room and didn't see that you had moved the couch at first - my eyes just assumed that it was standing where it had always been. I had to do a double take". Obviously our reality is just what our mind conjures up in order for us to navigate the world around us efficiently enough to avoid dying too quickly. Of course, you can still do a lot of useful stuff with that very distorted view on the world but it really is incredibly limited and is largely fabricated in many ways.

[boywithoutaparachute]

So what they are saying is that since we all observe the world subjectively through our senses, it is impossible to experience the world objectively as it is.

[avateraangshoe]

A lot of people need to watch this cause people tend to forget that the world exist outside their perception

[hadara]

"It is not the aim of science to open a door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error."
-Bertold Brecht

[emmaabumere]

I truly believe The sense that "Nothing" is real leaves us in a phenomenon of everlasting nothingness.

[dmtdreamz]

So the value of the psychedelic is that it shows you the fluidity of consciousness. That's one of the key values, just the fact that you get to change states and change into very radically different states. That's a huge eye-opening experience. Do not underestimate the value of that. That alone right there will change your whole life. To be able to pop out of your life and look back upon it as though it was all an imagined hallucination.

That's what it happens to be imagining right now. The next second who knows what it could imagine. It can imagine anything it wants but it just so happens that it keeps imagining something consistent so that we can get a sense of reality.

[jessegandy]

As humans, we only perceive what out 5 senses are able to receive' or 'pick up'. There can still be plenty of other things out antennas can't pick up in, but they're still there 😳

[defalt]

I used to think like this as a kid. But public school sucked that imagination out of me.

[aisthpaoitht]

Nothing is "real" in our experiences except for the fact that we are experiencing something. That is all we can ever truly know.

[eirafukuda]

This is EXACTLY what I needed to help me articulate why it is vital for human civilization to embrace diversity of perception when it comes to anything approaching objective truth. Intersubjective verifiability is the closest we can get to grasping objective reality. Thank you for this! It needs desperately to be incorporated into our current society on every level.

[mattmaes]

Basically: There's more than what meets the eye.

[motaman]

Thinking about this is giving me a headache that I perceive to be real.

[donadfull]

Another interesting nugget is that it takes time for stimuli to reach and be processed by our senses. And during that time, whatever objects or processes we perceived will have changed.

For example, We touch something, but the “feel” doesn’t register to us until 100ms later. By then, a lot of things change. Most of the time we don’t perceive those changes. But the fact remains that what we perceive is old info, and not exactly what is “currently” there.

So it’s impossible to know what is truly and exactly “there” or what is “happening” at the moment called “now”.

[GasMaskParade]

This is something I try to explain to people when they ask me what I "believe", and it's rarely understood, much less agreed upon.And there's nothing closer to any kind of truth, than this.