Nothing's Real!

We rely on our senses to tell us what's real. What we see, smell, taste, hear and touch cause neurons to fire signals to our brain, where the magic takes place; that grey mass takes all those countless signals and builds from that a model of the reality we perceive.

_{source: YouTube}

We've known for hundreds of years that we can not take the mental model of the world for granted... You see, the Earth is flat, that's obvious! And the sun and stars revolve around the Earth; that's what we see. But that's not reality; to know what's real, we have to look deeper and further. By doing that we now know that there's no geocentric universe, that the universe has no center at all, and that our planet revolves around the Sun in a heliocentric solar system, which in turn revolves around the center of the galaxy; it does so at a mind-boggling speed of 220 kilometers (137 miles) per second, and even at that speed a full orbit takes between 225 million and 250 million years..!

All these fascinating facts aside, I want to concentrate on the model created in our brain, the model we rely upon to tell us what's "out there." Galileo was one of the pioneers who told us that what we see with our own eyes isn't true. What we see is that the Earth stands still, that it's flat, and that the Sun and the stars revolve around us. But, and this I didn't know, he went one step further; Galileo also said that tastes, odors, colors and so on, reside in consciousness, and that all these properties would seize to exist if living conscious creatures were to be taken out of the equation. These properties are not part of what we call "objective reality," they only exist in the model of reality created in our minds. From this we immediately get the definition of "objective reality," which is "everything that would continue to exist, even if there were no creatures to perceive it."

But surely space and time, planets, moons and stars are part of objective reality, I hear you think... That's what I think as well. I've grown up with a deep and unflinching belief that spacetime and everything in it, except living creatures, would still be there, even if no living creatures would exist. We are made of "stardust," that's what I believe. Donald Hoffman, the scientist and narrator in the below linked video, gives the moon as an example; we believe that the moon existed long before there was life on Earth, it existed even when there were no creatures to perceive it. The tastes, smells and colors we perceive are not part of objective reality, they're not real in that sense; they are, however, real experiences. This is as far as Galileo was willing to go. He wouldn't go as far as to say that shapes, mass and space and time themselves are constructions of the mind. Galileo and I agree; I wouldn't go that far as well.

But I also believe that we have to have an open mind, so I listened to Donald Hoffman, who is willing to go that one step further. You see, I've written about this in the past; our senses haven't evolved for the purpose of seeing what's real, they've evolved for the sole purpose of survival of the species. That's why edible fruits generally taste sweet, why things that are bad for us generally smell bad, why we're generally attracted to certain members of the opposite sex... I can imagine that fruits that we like are poisonous to other creatures, and that for those creatures a banana doesn't taste sweet at all. Something that smells bad for us can smell heavenly for other creatures, although they wouldn't call it heavenly.

Hoffman explains what the roles of "truth" and "reality" are in the game of survival. He and some fellow scientists, mainly mathematicians and experts in "game theory," developed a simulation of evolution and they made some perplexing discoveries. He starts by explaining that evolution through natural selection is a mathematically precise theory; the field of evolutionary game theory was established in the 1970s and is now a very advanced and mathematically precise field. As such Hoffman and his team have been able to ask the technical question: "does natural selection favor organisms with sensory systems that tell them truths about reality?" If you've read the title of this post, and I'm sure you have, you can already guess the answer to that question. I really hope you'll watch the video; it's so interesting and mind-blowing in my opinion, that I don't believe you'll regret spending the 27 minutes.

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