What does it mean to say that “as observers we do not so much live in the world as create an experience of a world we live in ?” To answer that question we must first ponder how it is that we know anything at all about the world we actually do live in.
As biological entities we possess a remarkable and complicated bio-sensory system that we use to obtain information about that world, the key word being information. In its simplest form, this “system” has a number of components that, when acting together, comprise our sole means of obtaining such information. It begins with the five main sense receptors – sight, sound, taste, smell and touch – which act like detectors to interface with the world. Signals from the world impact these detectors which create and transmit their own signals, via fibers in our nervous system, to our central processing system, which, again, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call the brain. Now these sensory signals are real enough, but they are not the actual attribute of that upon which they are reporting. To illustrate this let’s look at how we “see” the world.
Photons entering the eye impact upon the retina, a thin layer of cells, called rods and cones, that respond to light. When stimulated by light, these cells emit a processed signal that is carried by the optic nerve to the brain. This signal is not the light itself but a bio-chemical artifact of the interaction of the actual light with the rods and cones of the retina. This already highly processed signal is combined with others of its kind in a specific part of the brain where it is bio-chemically decoded so as to create a cogent image. There are corresponding processes for each and every one of our senses. So what we “see” is a bio-chemically interpreted experience of what actually is. I use the word experience because these bio-chemically created interpretations are for the benefit of what we may call an observer, and the only observers we know of are biological organisms. Photons or pheromones may impact a rock, or other inanimate object, to no avail, but a living observer will experience the beauty in a sunset or sexual attraction to another of its species. It is in the experience of living wherein the world is made manifest to observers, and this experience is a bio-chemically interpreted construct, fabricated from the signals generated by our sense receptors interacting with the real world, and as we know, an interpretation of a thing is not the same as the thing itself. So while we may be real, and we may exist in a real world, our experience, as observers, of that world is a bio-chemical construct and is what is meant when I say that “as observers we do not so much live in the world as create an experience of a world we live in.” This fact has deep ramifications for what we believe is real as opposed to reality itself.
It is true that we create the experience via biology and circumstance. It is also true that the same situation in the same moment will be experienced differently by each individual because each of us has different abilities to perceive or experience that moment. For example, people are sitting in a theatre listening to the Opera “Aida”. Next to me sits a woman who is blind. Her perception of that moment at the opening of the Opera will be totally different than mine. She may have a heightened ability to hear and perceive something totally different than myself because I have an artistic background of experience with the Opera.
Here is a question: Does that mean we live in different “realities”?
What you say is true with regard to the differences between the sensitivity and acuity of our sensory equipment and the different experiences they will produce in different individuals. What I’m getting at here is that we, as observers, use biology to create an experience of reality from the actual “raw materials” of reality itself. That experience is ours alone, so we don’t “exist” in different realities, but we do “create” different realities via our biologically generated experience of it. We need to understand that our biologically manufactured experience of reality is an interpretation and not reality itself. It is very difficult to accept this idea because, for all intents and purposes, we believe that our “experience” IS reality. As the book explains, this is simply not so. Once we can accept that what we experience may not be representative of actual reality, it is possible to show that our experience of time itself is a manufactured artifact of biology and that time, contrary to how we experience it, may indeed not flow at all. Further on in the book I describe how a universe in which time does not flow would appear, and how we come to experience it so differently.