Is Reality an Illusion?

Philosophical Idealism is only the First but Necessary Step towards Post-Materialism

If we want to be able to go beyond a strict physicalist paradigm, we have to become aware first of how we construct reality in our minds. Because the strength of physicalism is based on the overwhelmingly convincing power of how our mind constructs, in itself, what we call ‘reality.’ We can hardly believe that all that we perceive of what we call the ‘physical world’ is merely an illusion or even that it doesn’t exist.

While there are very good reasons to agree that there exists an objective reality independent from our consciousness, mind, and subjective experiences, not so self-evident is the belief that what we perceive has anything to do with reality.

Yet, becoming aware of the illusory nature of the world we perceive is one of the most important realizations that one must achieve to be able to go beyond the grips of physicalism. This is why I always come up with the controversial statement that, contrary to the claims of so many, while there is, indeed, a post-material awakening in the masses, nonetheless most, even scientists, cling to a 19^th-century scientific conception of reality that has been shattered into pieces long ago by science itself.

We must become aware of how all that we see, perceive, sense, and think is not only relative to a state of consciousness but is an interpretation, a figment, a phantom, a shadow of reality. It isn’t enough to accept this as a belief, it must become a deep realization that we comprehend intimately. Otherwise, any further progress toward a post-material worldview, let alone post-material society and even a post-ideal paradigm, will remain a nice intellectual wishful thinking that will have no effective power of change.

Idealists often state that “everything is in consciousness” or that “all is mind.” I prefer the former statement since mind and consciousness aren’t the same thing, there is a qualitative and decisive difference between a thought of the mind and the subject that witnesses that thought. Anyway, for the time being, if you feel more comfortable with the latter statement, that’s fine, it isn’t so much the point I’m going to make here.

But what does it mean that everything is in consciousness? Is a stone rolling down a hill not really ‘out there’? Is it only an illusion in my consciousness?

If you have never pondered on these existential questions you might consider the idea that everything is in consciousness only a silly claim. Let me try to make clear what the real issue is with some simple conceptual reflections on how we perceive the world.

Look at an object, say a chair. Do you see the chair ‘directly’–that is, as it is in itself? Think about it.

When we look at a material object what we really see is the reflected light of the object, not the object itself, let alone as it is in itself.

You might point out that, after all, if one has no visual impairment, one can safely say to perceive a quite precise representation of the object, as if having almost direct contact with the object itself.

Let us think further.

First of all the lens behind our pupil flips upside down the image of the world, and what reaches the retina is actually a reversed projection. It is a further modification of reality which, fortunately, isn’t a real issue, because our brain processes this information and interprets it as a right-side-up image.

That’s true, but wait, the chain of processes detaching us from reality is far from over.

Not to forget is also that, all the 3D information of the object is converted into a 2D image on the retina. We never see the world in 3D but the brain, again, helps us to reconstruct back, or more precisely, mentally ‘project back’ the 2D information into a 3D model of reality. Furthermore, there is also a transformation of a continuous mapping (the image encoded in the reflected electromagnetic light waves) into a discontinuous–that is, pixelated coarse-grained picture–due to the finite number of receptors on the retina surface.

In other words, the original information representing the objects has already undergone several modifications and transformations and how much it retains the ‘reality’ of the object itself (whatever that might mean) is questionable. Nonetheless, one might contend that we still have a good representation of reality as it is: We might have a bit of a coarse-grained image, and lose a bit of sharpness or colors, but the overall model of reality might still be precise, and ‘truthful.’

But do we really perceive this ‘model’ of reality that reaches the eye retina?

The answer is negative, again: At this stage of image processing we still don’t see a thing. We don’t see the light itself either, because the retina converts it through photoreceptor cells into electrochemical signals, and even these signals are far from having been converted into perceptible sensations. This bioelectric information on the retina is first processed further by bipolar and ganglion cells which integrate the information. Then the signal exits from each eye which is then sent to the brain via the optic nerve.

At this stage of processing, we can’t consider the information content of the electrochemical nerve impulse as a one-to-one representation of the object we are looking at. We can't even say that it is a more or less imprecise representation of the world as we considered the geometrical light projection onto the retina. While the image projected by a lens might be somewhat blurry and may lose details, but can still be thought of as a one-to-one map of the object itself, here, however, once the light signals have been converted into chemicals and electrical impulses that travel through complicated nerve pathways in our skull, they no longer retain anything of the original form, structure, colors, and other properties of the image. Everything has been encoded in neural spikes: a time series of electrochemical signals having an amplitude and frequency modulation that encode reality and which have no longer anything in common with the original reflected ‘map of light rays’ that triggered them.

How much of the reality of the object in itself is left at this point? And do we have finally the subjective experience of perceiving an image? Far from it.

The spikes traveling along the two optical nerves from the two eyes cross each other in the center of the brain at the optic chiasm. At this point, things are complicated further because the brain cuts the image from each eye into two halves and sends it towards separate hemispheres: the left (right) half of each retina is sent to the right (left) hemisphere of the brain. This contrived splitting and mixing of the retinas’ information turn out to be useful for binocular vision and the above-mentioned 2D à 3D reconstruction visual process.

Do you now see something? Nope, still nothing.

Because, from the optic chiasm, the information travels through a series of structures in the brain, including the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and, especially, the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe where it is further processed.

Do we see something now? Stop asking! Still not.

All the information must finally be integrated with different areas of the brain responsible for analyzing different aspects of the visual scene, such as color, motion, and shape.

Only at this point, for an utterly mysterious reason that nobody can explain, these neural spikes are transformed into a subjective experience of a sentient being. Before that instant, it was all about the electrochemical neural activity that didn’t produce any sensation (at least not consciously.) However, suddenly something binds all that convoluted information scattered throughout the brain into one single semantic object and subjective perception that makes us say ‘I see a chair.’

The question is how much of that complex and sophisticated neural processing retains anything of the reality of the object as it is in-itself? The point is that there is no longer whatsoever connection, point of contact, or relationship between the object ‘as it is’ and what shows up as a completely chaotic and indecipherable ‘bio-electrical storm’ in the brain. What we see, perceive, and interpret of the world ‘out there’ has no longer anything to do with that world. What we are aware of are only an interminable series of neural spikes that ‘represent’ or ‘model’ reality, no more and no less than the ones and zeroes digital digits of an image ‘represent’ an image in a computer chip. Those spikes, bits, and bytes have nothing in common with what they stand for.

The purpose of this short tour into the neuroscience of our visual perception, which could be made also for all the other senses–that is, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting–aims at making it clear that all that we perceive, sense and think of the world is an illusion that does not reveal us anything about the world ‘as it is’ independently from those figments, fabrications or ‘shadows’ going on in our brain (or should we speak of a mind?) In a sense all that we call ‘reality’ stands for reality itself as a shadow stands for the object projecting the shadow. That shadow is not a ‘model’ or an ‘approximation’ of the object itself. The shadow could be as precise as possible, but it can never, even not in principle, convey to us the real and full structure of the projecting ‘entity’ for which it stands.

Of course, this metaphor is inspired by Plato’s allegory of the cave. In this allegory, prisoners are chained inside a cave, only able to see shadows cast on the cave wall by objects passing in front of a fire behind them. These shadows represent their entire reality. When one prisoner escapes and sees the true world outside the cave, he realizes the shadows were mere illusions. Upon returning to inform the others, he finds that they don’t believe him and prefer their familiar, limited worldview. The allegory illustrates how our perceptions can limit our understanding of truth and reality, and how difficult it can be to accept new knowledge that challenges our existing beliefs.

However, you don’t need to be chained in a cave to experience a similar fate. All the phenomena registered by our sensory apparatus, and their transcriptions into mental images and representations, are our own ‘shadows.’ Consider an object illuminated by a light source that projects a shadow on a wall. One might ask whether the shadow exists if the light is turned off. You would understand that once the light is turned off, the shadow—representing the phenomenon—disappears. However, unless you are a toddler no older than 18 months, you would also understand that this doesn’t imply the object projecting the shadow—the thing in itself, the noumenon—disappears as well. It still exists, in darkness, but it is still there. We can still touch it. You know it exists even if you can’t see it.

Now, suppose you mistake the shadow for the object that projects it. You aren’t aware of the distinction and conflate the phenomenon produced by the object with the thing in itself. In a sense, we could say that our sensory perception of the world is like a projection—a depiction or representation—onto a screen in our mind. Then someone asks you again whether the things we perceive still exist if we don’t look at them. This question echoes Einstein’s famous pondering about the strangeness of quantum physics: “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?” The answer is that the moon is just a ‘shadow’ in our mind, not the thing in itself as it truly is. Therefore, in a way, it isn’t really there even when we are looking at it!

Notice that this is not a nihilistic realization. It does not imply that nothing exists. There is a real-world ‘out there’, but we will never have any direct access to it and apprehend and comprehend things as they are in themselves.

I hope that the initial statement that “everything is in consciousness” sounds a bit less silly. After all, if everything is an illusion, who or what is having that illusion? What is the central presence that has all those perceptions, images, concepts, feelings, and emotions? There is an invariable fact that never changes throughout. There is a presence, a subject, a witness that perceives all those sensations and thoughts, no matter how unreal or delusive they are. That is consciousness. Saying that everything is in consciousness means that there is nothing we can speak, think, feel, or sense that isn’t already a reflection or modification on a ‘screen of consciousness.’

Allow me to insist by making another example. Another way to further enhance the understanding of our sensorial abstraction of reality could be to use a less scientific but more metaphorical approach.

You may have heard of ‘steganography’–that is, the technique of encoding and embedding information into the same set of data. A simple example could be the sentence “Harriette is definitely done entertaining nonsense” which hides the word “hidden” if we convene to read only the first letter of each word. With modern digital technologies, much more sophisticated encoding schemes could be invented to make the ’real information’ invisible to human senses which see a completely different ‘reality.’

The image of a cat steganographically hidden in that of a tree.

In these two images, you can see an example. The left image of the tree is what we perceive with our senses and the brain reconstructs. However, if one removes all but the two least significant bits of each color component and further normalizes the scale of numbers therefrom obtained, the hidden image of a cat becomes visible.

The question is, in what sense is our perception of reality different?

One might protest, again, and point out that there are no hidden or ‘alternative’ images embedded in the sensory information with which our brain works. Of course, in fact, this is a metaphor, and the idealist doesn’t claim that there are hidden images encoded on our eye retina. But I hope you got the point. The information and semantic content of the image of the tree represents what we perceive of the world, while the hidden image of the cat stands for the ‘world in-itself’. And that image is sensed in consciousness. Its semantic content is reflected on a ‘mental screen’ as well, but the associated thought is, again, a perception, an apprehension, still in consciousness.

If, instead, you still believe, at this point,  that we sense reality as it is with ‘representations’, you still have to dig further. So-called ‘representations’ are useful mental projections that serve our daily pragmatic needs but ‘represent’ the intrinsic nature of reality no more and no less than shadows represent the object projecting the shadow. If you are a scientist or philosopher of science and still contend that while science does not represent reality it, nevertheless, is a good ‘model’ of the world, I nurture serious doubts you got the message and invite you to go through this all over again. If you still maintain the belief that science is an ‘approximation to truth’ you still don’t get it, because there is nothing to approximate in the first place. No more and no less than a higher resolution image of the tree will make ‘pop into existence’ the steganographically encoded image of the cat.

Philosophical idealism is only a first step toward a more integral synthesis of reality. But to understand, realize, and comprehend intimately this truth is the necessary basis for any form of post-materialism that goes beyond physicalism. It must sink into our mind, and become at least an intellectual base of how we understand the world. If we still believe that, when we look at things, we are seeing them ‘as they are’, we will remain forever stuck in a naïve 19^th-century scientific realism that is preventing us to see further.