Is What You See & Experience Real?

 

I love to dive in the mysteries & I am always fascinated by some of the great unsolved mysteries in science, perhaps because it is personal, it is part of who we are & our role in this cosmos & I can’t help but be curious. One such mystery that has kept me awake at nights is the relationship between brain & consciousness. How is it that this three pound mass of jelly imagine angles, contemplate the meaning of infinity & even question its own place in cosmos. This mystery isn’t new, in 1868 Thomas Huxley wrote “How it is that anything so remarkable has a state of consciousness, comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the jinni when Aladdin rubs his magic lump.” Huxley knew that brain activity & consciousness are co-related but he didn’t know how or why. To the science of his day it was a mystery. Since the time of Huxley, science has learned a lot about human brain but the relationship between brain activity & consciousness is still one of the greatest mysteries of science. But why is that? Why have we made so little progress in decoding this mystery? Well some experts think that we can’t solve this problem because we lack the necessary concepts & intelligence, as it happens we can’t expect monkeys to understand the quantum theory, in the same way our species isn’t intelligent enough to probe this mystery, but I respectfully disagree, I think we have made a false assumption. Now in this blog I would like to tell you about what that assumption is & why it is false & how to actually fix it.
                        
  Let’s begin with a question; do we see reality as it is? I open my eyes & I’ve an experience that I describe, let’s say a red tomato meter away.

As a result I come to believe there is a red tomato meter away. I then close my eyes & my experience changes to a gray field.

But is it still the case that in reality there is a red tomato meter away, even when I close my eyes?  I think so, but could I be wrong? Could I be misinterpreting the nature of my perception? Before we consider this questions, let’s go back in time & see, if there is any such case in our history where our perceptions turned out to be completely wrong.  We used to think the earth is flat because it looks that way but then Pythagoras came along & discovered that earth is round hence our perception was proven wrong.  Then we thought the earth is the unmoving Centre of the universe, again because it looks that way, then Copernicus & Galileo discovered again that we were wrong. Human history is full of such examples & so is the history of science. Galileo then wondered if we might be misinterpreting our experiences in other ways, he later wrote “I think that taste, odors, colors & so on… reside in consciousness, hence if the living creatures were removed, all these qualities would be…annihilated.” Now that is a stunning claim, could Galileo be right? Could we be misinterpreting our experiences of reality? Let’s take a look what modern science has to say about this.
 
 Neuroscience tells us about third of the brain’s cortex is engaged in vision. When you simply open your eyes & take a simple look at anything, billions of neurons & trillions of synapses are engaged. Now the way we think about vision, is like a camera that takes a picture of objective reality as it is, so why on earth should such simple process require that amount of computation of billions of neurons & trillions of synapses? A part of eye is like a camera, the eye has a lens that focuses on an image, in the back of eye there are one-hundred & thirty million photoreceptors, eye is like a 130mega pixel camera, but that does not explain the billions of neurons & trillions of synapses engaged in the process of vision. What is all this computation required for? Well neuroscience tells us they are creating in real time, all shapes, objects, colors & motion that we see. We are not just taking a picture or snapshot of what we see but in fact, we are actively creating what we see & that is why all this computation is required.

Now if I describe the experience of red tomato mentioned earlier, according to neuroscience, that experience is actually an accurate reconstruction of the properties of the real red tomato that would exist even if I weren’t looking. So we don’t just construct the reality but we re-construct the objective reality in our minds. The standard argument given for this claim is the evolutionary one, those of ancestors that saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately & therefore they were more likely to pass on their genes. We’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, so we can be confident that in normal cases our perceptions are accurate.  

You see this in the standard textbooks. One textbook says, for example, “Evolutionarily speaking, vision is useful precisely because it is so accurate” So the idea is that accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions. They give you a survival advantage. Now, is this correct? Is this the right interpretation of evolutionary theory? Well, let's first look at a couple of examples in nature.

The Australian jewel beetle is dimpled, glossy and brown. The females of this species are flightless. The male however can fly. So to reproduce males have to look for a female & find it & then mate. When he finds one, he alights and mates. Now, there is another species in the outback, Australia, Homo sapiens. The male of this species has a massive brain that he uses to hunt for cold beer, and when he finds one, he drains it, and sometimes throws the bottle into the outback. Now, as it happens, these bottles are dimpled, glossy, and just the right shade of brown to tickle the fancy of these beetles. The males swarm all over the bottles trying to mate. They lose all interest in the real females.

The Classic case of the male leaving female for the bottle. The species almost went extinct. Australia had to change its bottles to save its beetles. The males had successfully found females for thousands, perhaps millions of years. Now what happened all of a sudden? It looked like they saw reality as it is, but apparently not. You see, evolution had given them a hack, a female is anything dimpled, glossy and brown, the bigger the better. Even when crawling all over the bottle, the male couldn't discover his mistake. Now, you might say, beetles, sure, they're very simple creatures, but surely not mammals. Mammals don't rely on tricks.

Well, I won't dwell on this, but you get the idea.

 So this raises an important technical question: Does natural selection really favor seeing reality as it is? Evolution is a mathematically precise theory. We can use the equations of evolution to check this out. We can have various organisms in artificial worlds compete and see which survive and which thrive, which sensory systems are fit for survival. (Note: “The Evolution that I am talking about is slightly different than what people who don’t come from a biological background think. So before you say I don’t believe in evolution & get all religious on me, you might want to consider checking the context of the concept & going into detail of this”). Now a key notion in those equations is fitness.

Consider this steak: 

 

What does this steak do for the fitness of an animal? Well, for a hungry lion looking to eat, It enhances fitness.

For a well-fed lion looking to mate, it doesn't enhance fitness & for a rabbit in any state, it doesn't enhance fitness at all.

So fitness does depend on reality as it is, yes, but also on the organism, its state and its action. Fitness is not the same thing as reality as it is, and it's fitness, and not reality as it is, that figures centrally in the equations of evolution.

In the lab of Donald Hoffman (American cognitive psychologist) they have run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations with lots of different randomly chosen worlds and organisms that compete for resources in those worlds. Some of the organisms see all of the reality, others see just part of the reality, and some see none of the reality, only fitness. Who wins? Well, I hate to break it to you, but perception of reality goes extinct. In almost every simulation, organisms that see none of reality but are just tuned to fitness drive to extinction all the organisms that perceive reality as it is. So the bottom line is, evolution does not favor veridical, or accurate perceptions. Those perceptions of reality go extinct. Now, this is a bit stunning. How can it be that not seeing the world accurately gives us a survival advantage? That is a bit counterintuitive. But remember the jewel beetle. The jewel beetle survived for thousands, perhaps millions of years, using simple tricks and hacks. What the equations of evolution are telling us is that all organisms, including us, are in the same boat as the jewel beetle. We do not see reality as it is. We're shaped with tricks and hacks that keep us alive.

Still, we need some help with our intuitions. How can not perceiving reality as it is be useful? Well, fortunately, we have a very helpful metaphor: the desktop interface on your computer. Consider that blue icon on my desktop, the mail icon, at the bottom

Does that mean that the text file itself in the computer is blue, rectangular, and in that place inside of the computer? Of course not.  Anyone who thought that misinterprets the purpose of the interface. It's not there to show you the reality of the computer. In fact, it's there to hide that reality. You don't want to know about the diodes and resistors and all the megabytes of software. If you had to deal with that, you could never write an email or edit your photo. So the idea is that evolution has given us an interface that hides reality and guides adaptive behavior. Space and time, as you perceive them right now, are your desktop. Physical objects are simply icons in that desktop. There's an obvious objection, Aaqib, if you think that train coming down the track at 200 MPH is just an icon of your desktop, why don't you step in front of it? And after you're gone, and this theory with you, we'll know that there's more to that train than just an icon. Well, I wouldn't step in front of that train for the same reason that I wouldn't carelessly drag that icon to the trash can: not because I take the icon literally, the file is not literally blue or rectangular, but I do take it seriously because I could lose weeks of work. Similarly, evolution has shaped us with perceptual symbols that are designed to keep us alive. We'd better take them seriously. If you see a snake, don't pick it up. If you see a cliff, don't jump off. They're designed to keep us safe, and we should take them seriously. That does not mean that we should take them literally. That's a logical error. Another objection: There's nothing really new here. Physicists have told us for a long time that the metal of that train looks solid but really it's mostly empty space with microscopic particles zipping around. There's nothing new here. Well, not exactly. It's like saying, I know that that blue icon on the desktop is not the reality of the computer, but if I pull out my trusty magnifying glass and look really closely, I see little pixels, and that's the reality of the computer. Well, not really, you're still on the desktop, and that's the point, those microscopic particles are still in space and time: they're still in the user interface. So I'm saying something far more radical than those physicists. Finally, you might object, look, we all see the train, therefore none of us constructs the train. Consider this example,

   In this picture you see red desks with bits cut out of them. But if rotate the desks just a little, you get this; A 3d cube.

We all see a cube because we all, each one of us, constructs the cube that we see. The same is true of the train. We all see a train because we each see the train that we construct, and the same is true of all physical objects. We're inclined to think that perception is like a window on reality as it is. The theory of evolution is telling us that this is an incorrect interpretation of our perceptions, Instead, reality is more like a 3D desktop that's designed to hide the complexity of the real world and guide adaptive behavior. Space as you perceive it is your desktop. Physical objects are just the icons in that desktop. We used to think that the Earth is flat because it looks that way. Then we thought that the Earth is the unmoving center of reality because it looks that way. We were wrong. We had misinterpreted our perceptions. Now we believe that space-time and objects are the nature of reality as it is. The theory of evolution is telling us that once again, we're wrong. We're misinterpreting the content of our perceptual experiences. There's something that exists when you don't look, but it's not space-time and physical objects. It's as hard for us to let go of space-time and objects as it is for the jewel beetle to let go of its bottle. Why? Because we're blind to our own blindnesses.

But we have an advantage over the jewel beetle: our science and technology. By peering through the lens of a telescope we discovered that the Earth is not the unmoving center of reality, and by peering through the lens of the theory of evolution we discovered that space-time and objects are not the nature of reality. When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a red tomato, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a red tomato and is nothing like a red tomato. Similarly, when I have an experience that I describe as a lion or a steak, I'm interacting with reality, but that reality is not a lion or a steak. And here's the kicker: When I have a perceptual experience that I describe as a brain, or neurons, I am interacting with reality, but that reality is not a brain or neurons and is nothing like a brain or neurons. And that reality, whatever it is, is the real source of cause and effect in the world, not brains, not neurons. Brains and neurons have no causal powers. They cause none of our perceptual experiences, and none of our behavior. Brains and neurons are a species-specific set of symbols, a hack. What does this mean for the mystery of consciousness? Well, it opens up new possibilities. For instance, perhaps reality is some vast machine that causes our conscious experiences. I doubt this, but it's worth exploring. Perhaps reality is some vast, interacting network of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each other's conscious experiences. Actually, this isn't as crazy an idea as it seems, and scientists from different fields are exploring it.


 But here's the point: Once we let go of our massively intuitive but massively false assumption about the nature of reality, it opens up new ways to think about life's greatest mystery. I bet that reality will end up turning out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we've ever imagined.