The ouroboros of reality and perception
How the when and where of our here and there is indefinite and indeterminable
What is reality?
If there was ever a question without a definitive answer, it’s this one. This is the question that sets us and our humanity upon the precarious edge of an indeterminable void.
We know that reality is something that is both universally lived, and subjectively perceived. No one person experiences it the same way. We don’t experience it at the same time. Even our perception of color varies from one individual to the next. And then there are our ideas of things, based on what and how we perceive. Knowing the expansiveness of our brain’s ability to create and construct ideas, we know that these ideas in turn shape our experiences of the world—our reality. What comes first? The influence of our surroundings upon perception, thought, and understanding? Or do our thoughts and perception shape an understanding of our surroundings?
I think either and both of these are the case, an ouroboros of our simultaneous and inextricable state of perception and creation. But still, these questions teeter on the brink of many things, not the least of them being the question of what it means to be able to perceive not just the self as located within the world; but the self as interior, amidst a vastness that is inconceivable—it becomes entirely uncertain as to what is more real: the physical world, or the immaterial one of our mindscape and spiritual being. Of course it is both, and more—reality is a palimpsest of perceiving and being. There are in fact, a multitude of worlds. But, that means we have to question what we believe to be the very nature of human-formed realities.
I suppose in a sense, we’re talking about human consciousness, and whether or not it is trustworthy. Reality comes into question—or rather, I should say, my definitions of reality become questionable—in those moments when I’m uncertain if I’m awake or dreaming; those moments when I’m so sure that what I see is the sky but it turns out to be the reflection of the sky in glass; when I know I’ve been here before and I can recall what’s about to happen almost frame by frame but it’s the memory of a dream. The questioning arrives in those moments when I can feel the slippage of membranes that hold my definitive grasp of what I think is reality. It creeps in when I’m not entirely sure that what I’m experiencing is really happening and who’s to say that I’m not on this freeway shifting into another lane but on a sidewalk somewhere else about to cross a street. I falter in those moments where I’m speaking with a friend about a moment we spent together, a conversation we had, an event we went to, a place we were; only to have them look at me strangely to say, “no, I don’t think so, that wasn’t me” but for myself it is a clear and distinct memory. What are these uncanny occurrences? Are these Otherworld travelings? Interdimensional crossovers? Past or future life events? Who knows. My brain doesn’t.
In fact my brain is so susceptible, it could very easily be tricked by any simple illusion. Maybe you’ve seen this one: scientists set up an individual in an experiment to test perception and physical senses. They attached a fake hand and arm to the volunteer, and then stabbed it with a fork after first convincing them that they felt the scientist’s hand on their fake hand by touching both hands. I can feel myself experiencing this, every time I watch the experiment. I know it’s possible because I have felt my equilibrium affected by a convincing panoramic first-person view of an animated roller coaster ride, or a disruptive experience wearing VR goggles. My brain really has no idea; it literally cannot tell this experience is not real. Only the part of my brain that has the intellectual capacity to evaluate and discern this schism between realities can; but the part of my brain that rules my body, doesn’t have a chance.
At the risk of being a cliché or a parody of myself, indulge me for just a moment in this reference.
I always think of this iconic scene from The Matrix in which Morpheus leans forward and asks Neo, “Do you believe that my being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles in this place? You think that’s air you’re breathing now?” Neo pauses, because of course it appears and it feels like he is in his body, exerting physical effort against another body that delivers physical resistance, and contact, and pain. He is out of breath, bruised, and exhausted. He hasn’t figured it out yet because his brain still perceives this workroom, this training exercise, as reality—the same reality he thinks he’s grown up in. But we know that what Neo thought was reality was the construct of AI, a program plugged into his brain to activate his senses, and as such, keeping the mind busy while his atrophied body supplied the mechanical population with energy. In another scene, after gazing out the car window at a familiar streetscape and seeing a place he used to get noodles at, Neo asks Trinity, “I have these memories from my life. None of them happened. What does that mean?” And Trinity replies, “That the Matrix cannot tell you who you are.”
Is that true?
A long time ago there was a RadioLab episode about memory, in which the main thesis was that memory itself is a lie, because every time we recall a memory, we alter it, corrupting it further from whatever it is that initially happened. This deterioration occurs to such a degree as to suggest that whatever our memory is, it’s not reality anymore. It reminds me of the way a jpeg becomes corrupted with each subsequent replication. The image deteriorates exponentially, and eventually if it continues, the image becomes unrecognizable as its former self. Perhaps none of our memories ever happened. Does this mean that like the matrix, they are unable to define who we are? But who are we without them? A jpeg still retains pieces of the original data, and image. I think like the jpeg, our memories do, too. Is the essence of recollection and resemblance, as a symbol of something that has occurred, the point of the memory, then; more than a faithfulness to whatever it was to begin with?
So I guess that, reflecting on this, the brain perceives what it receives, through a multitude of sensory stimuli which informs us of our surrounding world, and acts accordingly. Our interior world is by definition, an inseparable experience, inextricably linked to our external one; and in fact, expressly informed and shaped by it. Yours is profoundly different from mine. Our uniting perspectives aren’t defined by “reality” but rather our constructs of it, and whether or not we share the same constructs, and agree on them or what those constructs should be. And we will walk away with increasingly different and varying memories. But hopefully, we take actions together in collaboration and community, to make all that we share better for us all.
I think I’ll set us down gently into an invitation to simply reflect on the multiplicity of reality, rather than veering off into more of those multiplicities and their variances. What I think about so often are how our realities are based on one, general reality of living in this world, at this time, on this planet. But there is so much more to it than this. We must be open to considering the fact that simultaneous existences are occurring, all the time; even within our own lives. The infinite array of human experiences vary across worldviews, spiritualities, cosmologies, and religions. Our experiences of reality vary through our differences across race, class, gender, neurodiversity, ability, and mental makeups and frameworks. Our belief and understanding of dimensionality and multiple worlds as it pertains to our understanding of life, sentience, habitat, and ecosystem of both material and immaterial worlds varies depending on whether or not we understand the world to be only the one in front of us, or to be only one among many more. The material impacts and realities of social and political circumstances, systems, and constructs vary for us depending upon where we fall within and between such circumstances, systems and constructs. And in the end, because of the increasing weirdness of social and cultural fracturing, siloing, and division of the digital age, our participation in the ways we use technology plays an important part in the impact of our contemporary world’s increasingly rapid, capitalist-fueled pace on our material conditions and, to be frank, our hardships. Our perception based on information we consume about our varied realities differs across a multitude of aisles, platforms, outlets, and paywalls. And as we progress through this material, we’ll be touching on the hyperreality of a media-based world and how that’s impacting our sense of reality, and possibly even preventing us from understanding other realities; even as we have a sense of multiple realities becoming exposed.
The movies we’ve watched in this month’s Beyond the Altar seminar series ranged from addressing dreams and spirit worlds, to peering into the abyss and the extremities of the digital age; the dangers of consumerism and dualistic ideology; and throughout, the severance between ideology and materialism; between humans and nature; between humans and each other. Who are we to say which, and whose, realities are real or not real? That is not our objective. Instead, what I truly believe, is that we must embrace the complexity, and continue to learn how to hold multiple views through several different lenses, question what it is that we are going through, the information we are given; and try to find stable, if not common, ground.
Related movies, television series, and further reading for those interested:
Brazil, Directed by Terry Gilliam; Screenplay by Tom Stoppard, Terry Gilliam, and Charles McKeown, Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox, 1985
Dreams, Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Written by Akira Kurosawa, Warner Bros Pictures, 1990
Her, Directed by Spike Jonze, Written by Spike Jonze, Warner Bros Pictures, 2013
Inception, Directed by Christopher Nolan, Written by Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros Pictures, 2010
Paprika, Directed by Satoshi Kon, Screenplay by Seishi Minakami and Satoshi Kon, Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan, 2006
Solaris, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, Screenplay by Friedrich Gorenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
Solaris, Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Screenplay by Steven Soderbergh, 20th Century Fox, 2002
The Matrix, Directed by the Wachowskis, Written by the Wachowskis, Warner Bros Pictures, 1999
The Truman Show, Directed by Peter Weir, Written by Andrew Niccol, Paramount Pictures, 1998
Westworld TV Series, HBO, 2016-2022
Stanisław Lem, Solaris, 1961
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Translated by Sheila Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994
Kocku von Stuckrad, Making Senses: Poetic Knowledge of Nature in Science, Art, and Shamanic Ritual, Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, 2018