Reality Archives - Farther to Go!

It’s a Schabziger Moon. Or Is It?

November 30, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

We can’t ask (or answer) true or false questions about something if it isn’t real to begin with. By that, I mean that reality and truth are not the same thing. I also mean that there’s a hierarchy in that we have to first determine the reality of something before we can entertain questions about its characteristics or the nature of it.

I may be able to imagine a moon made of green cheese (a notion deriving from a Slavic tale involving, of course, a trickster—in this case a fox), but since such a thing doesn’t exist, I can’t claim to be able to determine that the cheese in question is Swiss green cheese.

On the other hand Swiss green cheese does exist; it’s called Schabziger. So I can ask if Schabziger is a cow’s milk cheese or a goat’s milk cheese.

What Is Real?

Dictionary definitions of the word real leave much to be desired. For example, one definition says real means:

existing or occurring in the physical world; not imaginary, fictitious,
or theoretical; actual

Something that is real, we are told, must be:

tangible: concrete; perceptible by the senses; not abstract or imaginary
objective: existing independently of perception or an individual’s conceptions; non-subjective
factual: accurate; true/truthful; conforming exactly or almost exactly to fact or to a standard

That would mean, among other things, that anything that is purely or primarily conceptual is not real. Hope, for example, or commitment or justice. What are we to make of the fact that people have apparently lived and died and killed for things—ideas, ideals, concepts, radical notions—that are, based on these definitions, not real?

Let’s put aside this characterization of real because it’s not useful—and it’s not based in neural reality. Neural correlates exist for every emotion we feel, every thought we have, and every sensation we experience. So there’s a physical basis for everything we’re aware of or even imagine. The specific thing or things we imagine may not be real, but neural activity related to our imagining can be tracked by an fMRI machine.

When I imagine a moon made of green cheese, the activity in my brain is real. The image in my mind is real, even though the image does not reflect physical reality. So I can imagine this moon to be made of Schabziger cheese—or any other kind of cheese: a different kind of cheese every day. Not only is my imagination not constrained by physical reality, it is also not constrained by a requirement for consistency. How cool is that?

What we seem to be asking when we ask whether or not something is real is does it exist, or in some cases, is it capable of existing. In fact, the definition of exist is to have being or reality; to be. Something can exist with or without being tangible. When I write fiction, I do a lot of mental pre-writing before I put words on paper or on a computer page. Those stories or story fragments are no less real when they exist only in my imagination. They don’t become real upon being written or typed. And whether or not a fictional story is transcribed, its characters and events (content) are not real, but the story is real. The story exists.

There are, of course, things we don’t know or don’t know about and things we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of. However, the idea that there are things that exist objectively, independent of our perception, is impossible to validate. Everything we perceive/experience has—necessarily—neural correlates.

What Is True (or Factual)?

The definitions of factual are even less helpful than the definitions of real, given that the words are often treated as synonyms. But as we all know, experience is real, and experience is not an accurate—or factual—reflection of reality. Our sense of self, of being a single self, is also real, but the single self we sense does not exist. It’s an illusion created by multiple processes in the brain. Our experience of it is real but it is not factual.

When we perceive a threat and experience fear, both the perception and the experience are real, but there may, in fact, be no actual threat. In order to define the nature (truth) of a perceived threat—and therefore the best response to it—we must first determine whether or not the threat is real.

Here are some things that are real, along with some facts about them that are true:

Three things that are real:

Climate
Humidity
Hurricanes

Three things that are true:

Average global temperature has increased by about 2° Fahrenheit since 1880.
Both air temperature and relative humidity affect the heat index (how hot it feels).
Since 1980, hurricanes have caused more damage in the U.S. than any other type of weather-related disaster.

Three more things that are real:

The book Deviate: The Creative Power of Transforming Your Perception
Beau Lotto
Neuroscience

Three more things that are true:

Deviate was written by Beau Lotto.
Beau Lotto is a neuroscientist.
Neuroscientists have identified patterns of brain activity that reveal how our expectations influence interpretation of sensory data.

The brain has to interpret sensory data in order to figure out what, if anything, we should do about it or in response to it. To do so, the brain constantly makes best guesses that are “good enough” for us to successfully navigate the world we live in: i.e., survive. Our brain did not evolve to interpret sensory data “factually”—meaning with complete accuracy. But we take our experience for granted—at face value—without much skepticism or even curiosity. As a result, we sometimes we get caught up in trying to determine the exact nature of the cheese constituting our imaginary moon without realizing the moon is not real.

What [Else] Is It Telling Me?

March 25, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

In 2018, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their “discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.”

As a scientist, Allison has pointed out that you can’t really prove anything with science. All you can do is disprove. He says that the data from an experiment may be consistent with your hypothesis, but it might be consistent with another hypothesis, too. So you need to ask, what else is it telling me?

Allison covered similar ground in an interview he gave after winning the Nobel Prize:

[Being a good scientist] takes discipline but [also] creativity, you have got to learn how to view your data as a crystal or something, you know when you look at every facet of it, get to know it from every direction. Look at what it tells you beyond the reason you did the experiment and figure it out. And so I think that’s pretty much it; it is the ability to really study the data and really learn what it is telling you.

As an aside on creativity, Allison is also a musician. He plays harmonica in a band composed of other scientists. This isn’t unusual. It turns out that Nobel Prize laureates are three times more likely than other scientists to have a creative hobby (performing, singing, acting, glassblowing, writing, painting, etc.). You could say they themselves have multiple facets. Knowing that people are Nobel Prize winning scientists doesn’t tell you everything about them.

WYSIATI

I included Allison’s comments at the end of an article on Daniel Kahneman’s concept of WYSIATI or What You See Is All There Is. (Kahneman is another Nobel Prize winner, but I don’t know anything about his hobbies.)

WYSIATI means that when you’re determining the meaning of something or constructing a story about it (i.e. interpreting it), your brain can only use the information available to it at the time. What it sees is all there is. The less information you have, the easier it is for your brain to construct a convincing story. You don’t cast about looking for information you don’t currently possess. What am I likely to be missing? How am I misconstruing this? What else is this information telling me?

Similarly, if the data from an experiment is consistent with your hypothesis, why go looking for trouble by asking if it could be consistent with another hypothesis, too.

The unconscious part of your brain is looking for a good enough answer right now that adequately fits your model of the world. Accuracy is not its highest priority. You need to get a move on. No straggling allowed.

We think we have a clear idea of what’s happening. We think we understand why things happen or happen the way they do. And we feel pretty certain about our assessment of events and situations.

But certainty, like confidence, is a feeling and has nothing to do with the accuracy or lack thereof of our interpretations and beliefs. The more we proceed through life assuming we are correct, the more likely we are to be wrong and the more difficult it becomes to change—our perspectives, our behavior, the trajectory of our lives.

Look at All Facets of an Experience

One way out of this predicament is to ask a lot more questions—not just random questions: hard questions. As a species, we have a unique capacity for self-awareness, but we’re not particularly good at accessing it. As a result:

trying to disentangle our interpretations of events from the events themselves is hard
trying to identify the unconscious beliefs that could underlie our interpretations is even harder
attempting to separate fact from fiction in perceiving events or situations in order to come up with alternative interpretations is extremely hard for some

But if we want different outcomes, if we want to get off the rock we’re on and get on a rock that offers a different perspective, or if we want to think different thoughts, we need to ask the hard questions. We need to be able to explore the facets or components of our experiences and recognize the roles played by our interpretations and our beliefs.

Here’s an exercise to try. But first, some definitions:

An event is something that happens (the data, if you will).
Your interpretation is the meaning you make of the thing that happens.
Beliefs are convictions you have about the nature of reality (the way the world works).

Part One

Describe an event.
Describe your interpretation of the event.
Ask yourself, what is this interpretation telling me about my perception of the way the world works?
Identify one or more beliefs that could underlie your interpretation.

Part Two

Take another look at the event (the data) and ask yourself, what else is it telling me?
Describe two possible alternative interpretations based on the data (facts) of the event.

Part Three

Identify your emotional response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
Identify the action you took in response to your interpretation of the event and ask yourself, what is it telling me?
Identify your emotional response to the action you took and ask yourself, what is it telling me?

Keep asking yourself what is it telling me? And then what else is it telling me? We can’t access our beliefs directly because they are part of the mental model our brain maintains of what things mean and what is normal for us. But the beliefs that make up our mental model affect our perceptions and interpretations of everything we experience.

We can’t create significant, sustained change unless we change our mental model. In order to do that, we have to learn more about it. We have to be curious. We have to ask the hard questions.

Part two of two parts. Part one is here.

Something’s Happening Here

March 23, 2023 by Joycelyn Campbell 4 Comments

Something happens. You get a phone call, say, or a friend invites you to a movie—or cancels a movie date—or you wake up on a Monday or a Saturday or from a nap or from being sedated, or you read a news article, or the line at the grocery checkout is longer or shorter than it normally is. Something happens. Anything. Anything at all.

The unconscious part of your brain interprets what happens in order to figure out what it means to you. And it does that so it can determine what action you will take next.

Your brain is predictive, so it was already on the job looking for specific information when the thing that happened—let’s call it an event—occurred. Your brain’s interpretation is instantaneous and presents with a high level of certainty. So much certainty, in fact, that you conflate the interpretation with the event itself. This is automatic.

Your brain formulates its interpretations via the mental model it maintains of what is normal for you, which is based primarily on beliefs you have about the way the world works. It’s easy to conflate the interpretation of an event with the event itself because you believe your experience is an accurate reflection of reality. Almost everyone holds this belief. But experience and reality are not the same thing. Furthermore, our experience is based on our interpretations and not on events themselves.

To recap: something happens and your brain immediately interprets it based on your unconscious beliefs about the way the world works in order to determine an appropriate action to take. The action, like your experience, is based on your brain’s interpretation of the event rather than on the event itself. By the time you become consciously aware of the action you are taking, it’s a done deal.

You may feel that you consciously intended or initiated the action (made the choice to take it), but you did not. That’s not how your brain works. It has to keep making the choice of what to do next. And next. And next. And next. Ordinary consciousness is far too limited to manage that process; all it can do is note some aspects of it after the fact.

Just as your experience and your actions are based on your brain’s interpretations, so are your emotional responses. You likely have an emotional response to your interpretation, as well as to the outcome of your action.

So what you are consciously aware of (whether or not in so many words) are your brain’s interpretations of events, your emotional responses, and the actions you take. What you are not consciously aware of is the beliefs that underlie your brain’s interpretations. In addition, if you’re like most people, you probably find it difficult to separate the facts of events from your interpretations of them.

What’s really amazing about belief is that biologically, what we believe about the world shapes the way our bodies respond to it. —Agustin Fuentes, anthropologist

When our interpretations of what’s going on around us or to us jibe with our beliefs we experience cognitive ease. That makes our brain happy and allows us to continue merrily on our way—no matter if we’re right or if we’re wrong. Of course, all of our interpretations are based on our beliefs, so this ongoing sense of cognitive ease is the usual state of affairs. Whether or not we like what’s going on is beside the point. It’s important to the brain to have a sense of certainty about what’s happening and what caused it to happen. The upshot is that we are not motivated to recognize our interpretations as interpretations rather than accurate representations of reality.

Even on the occasions when our expectations are not met, we rarely take the opportunity to explore the basis of them—or even recognize them as expectations based on interpretations, which in turn are based on beliefs.

This is unfortunate. It’s one of the reasons why transformational change is possible but not probable. But there’s a question we can ask that could change everything.

Part one of two parts.

Games People Play

March 24, 2022 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Since I began rereading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, I’ve noticed coincidences of birds and of John Updike. (That’s two, and I’m barely into the book, so I’m starting a mental list.)

Birds haven’t featured prominently in my life or lexicon, other than their presence in the big tree outside my bedroom, which they’re attracted to in part due to my upstairs neighbors’ feeders. That and sometimes they remind me of The Producers.

John Updike features even less prominently, although that was not the case a few decades back. I devoured most of the Rabbit books, the Bech books, Marry Me, The Centaur, and lots of collected short stories (Too Far to Go, The Music School, etc.), among others.

Some of us have a tendency to perceive meaning in coincidences. As for me, I’ve been there, done that, and thankfully survived reading way too much Carl Jung during my formative years. Now I understand that the conscious part of my brain can only process about 40 bits of information at a time, and what it gets to chew on depends on what the unconscious part of my brain thinks might be useful—or will at least keep the conscious part occupied and hopefully out of trouble.

So the unconscious sifts through the 11 million bits it’s taking in at any given moment and … on the fly, so to speak … funnels a minuscule amount to consciousness, which operates as if it has a … bird’s eye view … of what is going on—and, more importantly, knows what it all means.

Of course, the meaning comes from us, not from what is outside of us. So things mean whatever we believe them to mean, based on our brain’s interpretations. We are, as David DiSalvo says in What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite, meaning makers.

Everything Is an Interpretation

Our experience of reality is a result of our interpretations, and the vast majority of those interpretations come from the unconscious, which is only concerned about meaning insofar as it affects the next action we’re about to take.

However, we treat all of our interpretations as if they are reality, which leads to a very static, literal, and concrete view of the world. And that worldview is affected much less than we might think by looking for and perceiving meaning in symbols, coincidences, objects, and occurrences. Because when we find meaning in those things, we’re operating as if the meaning is fixed within the objects or the occurrences: static, literal, concrete.

It is the unconscious that processes associatively rather than linearly. So it’s the unconscious that links bird with the notion of freedom or hope or anything else. But only if our mental model contains a belief that the appearance of birds means something other than what is apparent. If you’re tempted to consider that the unconscious has some specialized or secret info that it’s accessing, remember that this is the same unconscious that is addicted to pattern recognition (one result of which is stereotyping) and is riddled with cognitive biases (including our all-time favorite, confirmation bias) for the express purpose of being able to quickly jump to conclusions.

Delusional and Disempowering

Ray Grasse wrote a book titled The Waking Dream, which is subtitled Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives. He quotes Nikos Kazantzakis from Zorba the Greek:

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning. Men, animals, trees, stars, they are hieroglyphics. …When you see them, you do not understand them. You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars.

On the surface, this might be appealing. But there’s so much to unpack in those three sentences, so many assumptions underlying them. At the foundation is the belief that there are specific meanings one can ultimately deduce—again, meanings that are fixed and located within the things of the world. They are there for us to uncover or not.

I take the idea of unlocking the symbolic language of our lives to be another version of the game of finding our life-purpose cheese. There’s no there there.

As it is, life is empty and meaningless and it’s empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless. And, hey, we’re making meaning, anyway. We can’t do otherwise. It seems the height (or one height, anyway) of idiocy to fail to recognize that we are the source of the meaning we’re making. It’s somewhat delusional and seriously disempowering.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth reminds us that the color green exists neither in the object we’re viewing, nor in our brain, but in the interaction between the two. In other words, it’s not fixed; it’s an interpretation.

We’re in ongoing interaction with all of the world we inhabit. Both we and the world are in constant motion at all times. Reality is anything but static, literal, or concrete. We’re making it up as we go, and we’re never in the same place twice. A far more interesting series of question to ask is what is my brain bringing to my attention, what meaning am I making of it, and what does this say about who my brain thinks I am?

So what to do with two broken wrists, a bird in my bedroom and the sound of two doors closing? I am a writer, and I keep thinking there must be a connection to make, that these are pieces of a puzzle, that there is some way everything fits together. I’m damned if I know what it is. The more I squirrel around for a meaning, the more reluctant I am to consider the obvious. But the significance of a closing door is not lost on me, and I’ve never felt quite this mortal. It’s a beautiful word, “mortal,” rhyming with “portal,” which sounds optimistic. And really, who wants to live forever? How tedious life would become. Mortality makes everything matter, keeps life interesting. And that’s all I ask. —Abigail Thomas, memoirist

A Brief “Reality” Check

July 31, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

We all accept the reality presented to us.
–David Eagleman

If you’re a synesthete, your reality may differ considerably from consensus reality. In your reality, numbers and letters of the alphabet might have colors. And they might have personalities. Or maybe you can see sounds or taste words.

It used to be thought that synesthesia was a rare condition, but it now appears to be present in at least 4% of the population and likely has a genetic trigger.

David Eagleman, who studies synesthesia (because of course he does) thinks non-synesthetes may have synesthetic correspondences in the brain but just aren’t aware of them. For example, people tend to think louder tones are brighter than soft tones and that dark liquids have stronger smells than lighter ones.

One of the shapes on the right is named “bouba” and the other is named “kiki.” Which do you think is which?

Some synesthetes consider the condition to be uncomfortable, some consider it a gift, and still others don’t even know they have it. Remember that experience is reality. At least it’s the only reality we have access to. So if your brain connects the color purple with the letter J, then J is purple. Consider the implications.

If you do or you don’t automatically associate colors with numbers and letters, are you creating that reality? Yes. Do you have any control over that reality you’re creating? No.

You operate within a host of biological constraints, many of which you share with all humans, others of which you share with various groups of them. You also operate within cultural constraints and the constraints of your own temperament, knowledge, and experience.

All of these constraints, which are part of your mental model of the world, conspire to determine what you perceive of the world “out there.” Your brain gives rise to (creates) your experience by matching streams of electrical impulses with prior experience, expectations, or beliefs about the way the world is. As a result, you are actively looking for certain things that you predict you will find so you will know how to respond.

Our experienced world comes from the inside out, not just the outside in.
–Anil Seth, Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex