Shadows of Reality
We're not (just) who we think we are
At first, most of us tend to think of reality as everything we can see, touch or hear; that it’s whatever our senses tell us is ‘out there’ (this is sometimes called naive or direct realism). But with some reflection it soon becomes apparent this isn’t quite good enough. What about our bodies, our emotions, or our thoughts? Are these also ‘out there’? And if they are, then what is ‘in here’?
Writing almost 2400 years ago in the Allegory of the Cave, Plato described our perceptions – our experience of the external - as mere shadows of reality, cast by the light of our consciousness. Most of the time, these shadows are good enough for us to be able to get on with our lives without having to think too much about the actual objects they represent (which Plato described as ideal forms that cannot be directly experienced).
Using Plato’s metaphor, when we look at a table we are seeing a shadow – an impression – formed in our minds by a few bits of wood arranged in a particular way. It’s also a haze of countless molecules and forces gently buzzing together in equilibrium.
Although these kinds of descriptions might be closer to what is ‘out there’, for most intents and purposes table is generally a good enough abstraction because it enables us to reliably interact with whatever it actually is; in short, the mental shadow we call ‘table’ works.
Typically, the more familiar an object the stronger its abstraction. For example, whereas we cannot help but see a ‘laptop’ when we look at one, a person from the 19th century would see a silver-coloured rectangular object with some odd nooks and crannies around the edges.
The same object can mean different things to people, who can therefore use it in different ways. An object’s function is in the mind of its beholder, and it’s this ability to see beyond strictly physical characteristics (e.g. laptop instead of rectangular silver object) that opens the door to tools and technology.
Our capacity for abstraction took off in our evolutionary history around 100 thousand years ago. With increasingly symbolic thinking and language, homo sapiens created an entirely new realm of experience for themselves beyond the immediate confines of their senses. Like an advanced alien race disappearing into another dimension, our ancestors stepped out of the animal kingdom and vanished into their imaginations.
We’ve since expanded and colonized this realm to such an extent and become so accustomed to living there that, for most of us, trying to step back out - even for a moment – seems impossible (as anyone who’s tried the ironically named practice of mindfulness can attest).
The madness of being human
But with this fantastic new realm we call imagination comes a potentially lethal problem. How do we tell the difference between mental experiences based on something real versus those that are not? This is ‘reality testing’ and is a critical feature of the modern human operating system, and when it goes wrong we get psychotic symptoms.
An hallucination is an entirely mental construct that’s wrongly perceived as originating from one or more of our senses, i.e. the person sees / hears / smells / feels something that isn’t actually ‘out there’. A delusion is an unjustifiably fixed belief, i.e. one that’s based on insufficient or incorrect reasoning, and inconsistent with the person’s social context. It is very often wrong - though coincidences can happen - but the key criterion is the (delusional) reasoning for the belief.
There are a number of indirect measures of reality testing, such as the ‘The Inventory of Personality Organization-Reality Testing Subscale’. This test is based on two premises: firstly, that our beliefs sit somewhere along an intuitive-rational spectrum (similar to the fast/slow paradigm popularized by Daniel Kahneman); and secondly, that the more rational a belief the less prone it is to reality error.
If there is a spectrum of experience across the animal kingdom from instinct to imagination, then human beings are extreme outliers at the imaginative end. All tests have an error rate, and as might be expected evolution has biased our innate reality test towards mistaking imaginary perceptions as real rather than the other way around (the opposite error – not perceiving something that actually is there – is called a negative hallucination and is much rarer).
The prevalence of positive hallucinations in the general UK population is estimated to be 3% to 7%, with the higher end of the range usually seen in younger people. This is consistent with the observation that children start off more intuitive and gradually mature towards rationality as their reality testing improves with experience. Eventually, their imagination is sufficiently tamed that it no longer fills the darkness with nightmares or puts a monster under their bed at night.
Returning to our original question, could our thoughts and emotions also be shadows cast by processes upstream of our consciousness? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be yes.
Psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has found that emotions are not just generic plug-and-play modules slotted into everyone’s brains, but are instead dynamic culturally influenced constructions of the mind. Similarly, research and anecdotal evidence on meditation and psychedelics suggests that thoughts can also be experienced as somehow distinct or detached from awareness, at least temporarily.
But with these more self-generated phenomena the shadow metaphor breaks down, because in experiencing a thought or emotion we can potentially change it. We can modify our internally-cast shadows in a way that seem impossible to do with those cast from an apparently external source; our perception of a table remains the same size / shape / colour / etc. irrespective of our will.
In fact if it didn’t, if we could intentionally warp the perception in some way, then we would doubt the table’s realness, and perhaps also our sanity. The degree to which we can modify our experience of something seems to be one of the variables in our reality test, with fixed perceptions experienced as being from a non-imagined - i.e. ‘real’ - source.
This relentless rigidity of the external world is why mental illness is sometimes dismissed as ‘all in the mind’, i.e. not as real as something physical, because the assumption is it can be changed. Speculatively, this could be why the intensity of phobias seem proportional to their rigidity, in that the more inflexible a thought (e.g. this spider is a psychopathic assassin hellbent on attacking me) the more real it seems.
Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) is the main psychological treatment for obsessional and phobic conditions. Through repeat reality-checking, CBT confronts sufferers to gradually learn that the bulk of their concerns are imagined, and therefore modifiable.
Avatar therapy is a more recent innovation that flips this approach in people who hear hallucinatory voices. The treatment involves helping the person to first relocate the voice(s) out of their imagination and into a computer simulation where they can then be confronted ‘in the real world’, thereby empowering the person to re-assert control.
Living the dream
In the 1999 film The Matrix, human beings are unaware they have been enslaved in a global computer simulation constructed and controlled by an artificial intelligence. A resistance group have somehow come to realise they live in this simulation, but frustratingly are not able to fully use this knowledge while still inside it. Neo, the hero of the story played by Keanu Reeves, is ‘The One’ who finally breaks through to fully own his simulation within the artificial world and thereby take on and defeat the AI on its own turf.
If we replace the AI in this story with our subconscious (i.e. the mental processes we are generally not aware of), then the Matrix is a useful metaphor for our experience. Most of the time, we go about our daily lives oblivious to the fact that all our experiences – including our thoughts and emotions – are shadows constructed by our minds. But if, like Neo, we could truly ‘wake up’ to this realisation, then perhaps we too could live more freely, knowing that the person we believe ourselves to be is a simulation who lives in our imagination.