The Nature of Reality

During a recent philosophical conver­sation, a friend of mine asked: “Do we really create our own realities?” That’s a tough question to answer directly because it depends on the precise definitions of the words “we”, “create”, and “reality”, none of which are reliable when the topic at hand is one that purports to dismantle the entire framework of conscious perception. That said, what follows is a somewhat roundabout approach to a possible answer.

Right now I’m focusing on the coffee cup sitting on my desk. The cup is made of hard plastic with a stainless steel lining. If we look very carefully at the situation, however, it becomes clear that ideas like “desk”, “cup”, and “stainless” are purely conceptual labels that my mind has assigned to represent various properties of the phenomenon that I’m observing (a process that Buddhists refer to as “nama-rupa”). Similarly, “coffee”, “plastic”, and “steel” are just conceptual shortcuts we use to represent various combinations of atoms and molecules. While those are concepts with a bit more of a physical basis than “stainless”, they are still concepts and are really only valid at the macro level from which I’m viewing the situation. From the point of view of a molecular-sized observer looking at the arrays of atoms, these concepts don’t even make sense. In fact, at the molecular level, the boundary where the cup ends and the desk begins is not nearly as well-defined as we generally assume.

Let’s look at the concept of “cup” for a moment. What is the material basis from which I can legitimately call this plastic and steel object a “cup”? Is its cup-ness embedded in either the plastic or the steel? Obviously not, because I could melt either of those materials down and use them to construct some other object which is clearly not a cup. Moreover, I have a number of other cups in my possession — some made from aluminum, some made from glass, some made from ceramic, and even one made from wood — yet, despite the disparity of materials, I still choose to call them all “cups”. In reality, the thing that makes this object in front of me a “cup” has nothing to do with the object itself but rather with the affordance it presents by virtue of its purpose and function. A cup affords me the ability to constrain some other material into a well-defined space. So, essentially, what makes the cup a cup isn’t actually part of the “cup” object at all but rather depends on the existence of an (often empty) quantity of “non-cup” that defines a volume of space into which some other material can be constrained. In fact, if that volume of space “inside” the cup was never empty, then it’s likely my so-called “cup” would no longer be a cup because it would lose the affordance of being able to constrain my morning coffee.

Let’s add the dimension of color to this image. The outer plastic shell of my cup is orange (since it’s a “Get Out Of Hell Free” cup, the shade of orange is the same as that of the “Get Out Of Jail Free” cards in the game of Monopoly). The stainless steel lining of the cup is your typical metallic gray except that the bottom and sides are a grayish brown because the coffee has started to stain the steel (further evidence that “stainless” is nothing more than a mental construct). But where exactly, for example, is the “orange” located? If you were to examine the molecular structure of the plastic with an electron microscope you would not find any “orange atoms”. Moreover, if you were able to perceive the actual photons traveling from the cup to my eyeball, none of them would be orange. Likewise, there are no orange particles forming in either my eyes or in my brain (there’s likely no light at all in my brain at the moment). The color orange, like all other colors, tastes, smells, etc, is a mental construct triggered by the interaction of my sense organs with whatever is actually “out there”. But all my brain actually receives from my sense organs is a stream of electrical nerve pulses (action potentials) whose frequency of occurrence is proportional to the degree of stimulus on some sensory cell. So not only are the colors not actually conveyed to my brain but the shapes aren’t either. The entire perception is being reconstructed as a mental image in my mind based on second-hand information.

Now… that’s not to say there isn’t actually something “out there” in objective space. After all, I can’t turn a frog into a prince no matter how many times I kiss it (I’m taking that statement on faith, of course — I haven’t done the experiment myself). Moreover, I suspect that I couldn’t find anyone capable of such a feat even if I asked the highest-attaining leaders of every religion on the planet. But I know that limitation isn’t likely to be coming from my own mind because, in the dream state, pretty much anyone who wants to could transform that frog into a prince quite easily. So something “out there”, external to what I think of as my mind, is placing constraints on the image of reality that I’m constructing in my head.

But what could that “something” be and how does it work?

There things get even more interesting. The state of the art in quantum physics suggests that this “something” doesn’t actually exist in the absence of measurement (ie: observation). In other words, objects in what we think of as objective reality actually come into existence only when they are observed. Until then, the “exist” only as waves of a probability function. Observed pheno­mena are just as much a product of the observer as they are of any objective reality (whatever that actually is). And because our sense organs reduce observed phenomena to neural pulses and the brain reconstructs an inner “reality” from those pulses (much like your television reconstructs the transmitted image from a field of digital bits), there are few, if any, people who can actually perceive reality as it is without resorting to mathematics and/or a butt-load of conceptual imagery.

Some neuroscientists have been proposing a model of consciousness called “predictive processing” which suggests that the mind generates a model of external reality and that our physical senses (which all have limited bandwidth) provide information that is used to correct the model when necessary … but not always (as when we see a length of rope on the floor in the dark and mistake it for a snake). The view that arises from this model is surprisingly similar to what Buddhist teachings on dependent origination (and some ideas from a few “new age” religions) have been saying for a very long time. If this is close to the truth then it’s quite likely that each of us does create our own reality but that the reality we create is constrained by the need for us to interact with each other and with some mysterious something “out there” that is based on probabilities but persistent enough to be able to constrain what we can do within our own reality models.

Interestingly enough, when our minds package some collection of related sensory perceptions into a single mental object and assign that object a name (such as “cup”), more often than not, that provides us an excuse to stop carefully observing the perceptions and start dealing with the assigned name as a representative symbol of the actual phenomenon. For something as simple as a cup, that’s a useful shortcut. Unfortunately, this sort of labeling can sometimes be used as a crutch when more complex mental constructs are involved. One solution to that tendency is to recognize that the symbol (or name) is not the same as the object and the object is not the same as the raw perceptions (similar to the idea that the map is not the territory).

As to whether “we” actually exist as independent subjective observers … well … that will have to remain a question for a later post.