Have you ever seen a photon? You probably think you see them in uncountable numbers every day. In fact neither you, I nor any entity has ever seen a photon. If we see red or blue it’s our own cells telling us “there’s something out there, here’s my interpretation of it.” A signal from a rod or cone cell to your brain is not a photon. The same goes for every sense our biology uses.
Einstein said that “reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” Reality is, by definition, real, and is what we seem to interact with constantly. In fact it’s the only real thing there is. The illusion referred to is the observers bio-chemically created experience of reality. We believe that what we see, feel, taste, hear, and smell is real, but it’s all our brain’s interpretation of signals, highly processed signals, and as we know, an interpretation of a thing is not the same as the thing itself.
A reading of human history reveals a species who has equated their experience of reality for actual reality. This led to “knowledge” that, though we think quaint today, was breathtaking in both its fallaciousness and its acceptance as the truth in its day. Sir James George Frazer, in his book “The Golden Bough”, has detailed the depth of magical and superstitious thinking that permeates human consciousness, not as an anomaly but as its basis. And though we, in these “modern” times of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, believe we have attained a pinnacle of objectivity and reason, we still hold firmly to the belief that our biologically interpreted experience of reality is reality itself.
In his day, Sir Frazier admonished us to beware, for all it takes is to scratch the thin veneer of modern culture, civility and mind, to reveal the depth of magical thinking and irrationality that suffuses our interactions with the world. It still holds true today. Likewise, Sigmund Freud showed us that the insane are not a different order of being, as believed up to that point, but that sanity and insanity exist as experiences along a continuum of a single cognitive process. It is the very same process that creates for us “observers” an experience of reality. It is an interpretive process that, even at its “best”, keeps us out of touch with actual reality.
In TotIs I go to great lengths to illustrate the disconnect between an observers experience of reality and reality itself. It is nearly impossible for us to believe that our bio-sensory experience is not reality. Interestingly, it is quite easy for us to believe that others are experiencing delusions, that they are “not in touch” with reality. I go to such great lengths because understanding that even the most perfect and efficient bio-sensory interpretive system is still not reality is the passageway through which we must pass in order to see that the most unassailable “fact of nature”, the arrow of time, is, like everything else, an interpretation by our biology and not the thing itself. If time does not flow, as many physicists believe, then its arrow, its movement, is a product of our biology, a creation of our central nervous system and its bio-sensory apparatus. To view the world from our “observers” vantage point of flowing time is to mistake for reality the opaque surface of a hidden dimension. From this perspective TotIs begins to describe a universe unfettered by the need for it to comport with an observers experience of it.
