The Random House Concise Dictionary defines an illusion as “something that deceives by producing a false impression of reality.” In fact, the “something” being alluded to is our bio-sensory system and its product, our experience of reality itself.
The easy part of coming to terms with the fact that our experience of reality is an imperfect and unreliable representation of actual reality is the grudging acceptance of the truth that our bio-sensory system can only supply us with a minuscule slice of the huge gamut of content our universe has to offer. This wealth of content does not hide from us or try to trick us, rather, our bio-sensory system is simply limited in its ability to interact with and report on the vast majority of objects and attributes that constitute our universe. The proof of the limits are easily discovered by parsing each of our sense receptors range of data outputs against the vast range of inputs available around us, even from within the limited environment that supports us. One simple example is the tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum our eyes can detect and our brains process.
No, the real difficulty comes with the acknowledgement that, even at its best, our bio-sensory system supplies us, as a reality interpretation factory, with illusions. As I mentioned in my last post, Freud showed us that sanity and insanity exist as experiences along a continuum of a single cognitive process. Put differently, all of our, that is, the observers, experiences of reality are of the same class or family, by dint of the process by which they are created. We want to believe that the “crazy” person’s experience is wrong and of a different nature than ours, while we want to believe that ours is right, meaning “real”, but we no longer can. What is most difficult to accept is that, by its nature, according to the process by which it is created, no observers experience of reality can transcend the very process by which it is produced. That means that nowhere on the continuum of the available fabrications of reality by any individual’s bio-sensory system is there even one fabrication, or interpretation, of reality that is on par with the actual reality it is reacting and relating to.
In TotIs I used the metaphor of bread making to make this point, but it can be compared with other processes like wine or cheese making, whose products are recognizable outputs made from a separate class of inputs. None of these products possess any other attributes other than those of the family they belong to. Along the continuum of the family of wines are, complex wines, sour wines, sweet wines, white and red wines, etc., but you can find no actual grapes in the processed family called wine. Likewise, for our bio-sensory experience of reality, there is simply no place along the continuum of its family type where it leaps off of the tracks of its process and becomes actual reality.
This greater difficulty we face lies in the fact that our bio-sensory experience is the only evidence we have of reality, and as such, is the foundation upon which our identities are based. Our identities make use of the remarkable interpretations and creations of our central nervous system wherein a profusion of individual experiences of reality become manifest across our species. A cross section of the belief systems of humans in both their abundant and irreconcilable natures can attest to this fact. And yet none of these “products”, that is, experiences, is actual reality itself. They are, by design, interpretive processes of limited sensitivity at best and prone to inaccuracy, error and disorder. And so we encounter this great difficulty in that, as observers, our experience of reality created by our bio-sensory system, is of a family we might call “illusions”, yet includes the very experiences we are having at this and every moment, and that we have come to depend on in order to survive. This realization shakes us to our cores, and for most people is simply an untenable situation to encounter. The dictionary’s definition itself relies on an a priori assumption that there is a “true” experience of reality by which the “false” impression can be judged. From what process does this true experience appear?
The evidence that our experience of reality is a bio-chemical/bio-electrical creation of our central nervous system is clear. Until we are capable of removing that experience from its throne as the center and pinnacle of nature, and see it for what it is, an illusion produced to serve our biology, we will remain forever unable to peer beyond the veil our own biology places between us and reality. The implications of the reality beyond that veil are, to say the least, momentous, and include the illusory source of time’s arrow as a biological construct, among others, but more on that later.
