In Order To Be Reality Based, You First Have To Be Able To Perceive What Is Real

Most of the time, that will be a really tough and painful thing to accomplish. Don't worry. It's just because you're only human.

Let’s talk about reality for a moment. Guess which of the two pictures, above, is of a human neuron, and which is of the Cosmic Web? Don’t think too hard. The left hand one is a 10 micron wide slice of your brain, while the right hand one encompasses several billion light years of our universe.

Now consider. what do we really look like? A five ten handsome brown eyed girl? Or a buzzing collective network of sub-micronic components like those making up that neuron? The truth is, the correct answer is both. But it all depends on your point of view. Considered as simply a part of the universe, you look like, though on an extremely tiny scale, just another networked pattern quite similar to the largest networked pattern of them all, the universe itself.

But to Bobby Joe, out for a good time Saturday night at the local bronc-riding bar, you look like a handsome brown eyed girl, and he is interested.

We define the observable universe as everything we perceive either unaided, or aided by the instruments we can use, from the electron microscope at the tiny end, to the Hubble Telescope at the large end of the scale. But our reality, for 99.9% of the time, for 99.9% of all of us, exists on a human scale somewhere between the minuscule and the vast, where Bobby Joe is chasing some brown eyed girl around a bronc rider machine in a country roadhouse. And he is not looking at her neurons when he’s doing so.

There is one other factor we must consider in determining what is real to us. Our consciousness. We are (almost) all of us conscious, but each of us is conscious in our own individual way. I am aware that the central argument about consciousness boils down to whether it exists as something beyond the physical, or, in some cases, even exists at all. I don’t wish to venture into those weeds because they are very weedy indeed, and growing ever more weedy as the onset of Artificial Intelligence networks begin to pummel the concepts into even stranger shapes. Suffice it to say that the “What it’s like” approach most prominently advocated by Thomas Nagel, would be the fundament upon which rests the notion of individual, unique consciousness:

According to Nagel, "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience", meaning that each individual only knows what it is like to be them (subjectivism). Objectivity requires an unbiased, non-subjective state of perception. For Nagel, the objective perspective is not feasible, because humans are limited to subjective experience.

Which brings us to materialism, or as it is sometimes distinguished, physicality.

Physicalism - Wikipedia

Physicalism is closely related to materialism. Physicalism grew out of materialism with advancements of the physical sciences in explaining observed phenomena. The terms are often used interchangeably, although they are sometimes distinguished, for example on the basis of physics describing more than just matter (including energy and physical law).

According to a 2009 survey, physicalism is the majority view among philosophers,[3] but there remains significant opposition to physicalism. Neuroplasticity has been used as an argument in support of a non-physicalist view.[4] The philosophical zombie argument[5] is another attempt to challenge physicalism.

Alternatively, outside of philosophy, physicalism could also refer to the preference or viewpoint that physics should be considered the best and only way to render truth about the world or reality.[6]

[Although the Zombie Argument is sort of interesting, in a mind experiment kind of way) -ed]'.

At any rate, for my purposes, we will leave the world of philosophizing about reality in favor of the world where reality is determined by physics, that is to say, in a physical way. In this world a table is a table, no matter what one’s personal and unique consciousness says about the matter. After all, the universe seems to function that way, and it has been around for six or seven magnitudes longer than the existence of human consciousness, however it is construed.

Even one of the most bizarre compendiums of personal consciousness and its quirks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by neuroscientist Oliver Sacks made no claim that the extraordinary delusions of his patients modeled anything like actual reality. In other words, simply because one of his patients suffered from visual agnosia, which led him to perceive his wife as an actual hat (to the point where he took her head and tried to perch it atop his own), did not alter the reality that his wife was not a hat, his or otherwise.

Which brings us to the core of the matter I wish to engage today. It sometimes seems that about half of all Americans believe the other half is suffering from a mass, delusional disassociation from physical reality, and views the central problem of our time as being how to cure that half of its inability to perceive reality rather than some skein of grotesque confusions about what is real and what is not.

For instance, one side says, “Obviously a man is a person born with the genetic characteristics of maleness, as evidenced by chromosomal evidence,” to which the other side responds, “Obviously, sexuality is merely a matter of definition, and in your case, your definition is arbitrary, capricious, and ignores the “what it’s like” nature of many people’s conscious existence and experience.”

It occurred to me that perhaps I should seek and opinion on the matter from what would seem to be the equivalent of a universal observer, an entity created by humans, but not itself human: a proto-Artificial Intelligence neural network called ChatGPT. So I asked Chat “How would you help humanity to perceive reality as it physically is, rather than how one might wish it to be.” Chat responded:

Practice mindfulness: Encourage people to live in the present moment and observe their thoughts and feelings without judgment. This helps people see things as they are and not as they wish they were.

Encourage critical thinking: Teach people to examine their beliefs and question the validity of information they receive. This helps them avoid accepting false information and form a more accurate perception of reality.

Foster healthy relationships: Encourage people to surround themselves with others who support and challenge them, rather than those who enable them to live in a false reality.

Embrace discomfort: Help people understand that discomfort is a natural part of growth and that avoiding it will not help them see reality more clearly.

Educate about cognitive biases: Teach people about common biases such as confirmation bias and sunk cost fallacy that can distort their perceptions of reality.

Encourage self-reflection: Help people examine their own behavior and beliefs to gain insight into how they might be influencing their perceptions of reality.

Seek out diverse perspectives: Encourage people to seek out new experiences and listen to those who hold different perspectives. This helps broaden their understanding of reality.

Promote scientific literacy: Encourage people to seek out evidence-based information and to understand how scientific inquiry can help us understand reality.

Foster emotional intelligence: Teach people to understand their emotions and how they influence their perceptions of reality.

Support mental health: Help people understand the importance of mental health and encourage them to seek help when needed to maintain a clear and accurate perception of reality.

Well. Now that was depressing. It all sounds so perfectly reasonable and logical, and it could only have been produced by an entity that has absolutely no knowledge or understanding about human nature and how it functions both on a mass, as well as an individual level.

I cannot find even one of those ten prescriptions that would actually work on more than a tiny fraction of the population at large.

Encourage people to live in the present moment? It is to laugh. For most people, the present moment is a terrible place, full of fear, anger, paranoia, and many other unpleasant emotions. Far better to live in the hopeful future, or the pleasant past.

Encourage critical thinking? Teach people to examine their beliefs and question the validity of information they receive? I can think of no better way to earn yourself a fast punch in the snoot that to ask people to examine their beliefs. You might as well say, “Here’s a gun. Shoot yourself in the ear.”

Promote scientific literacy? In a world where it seems any two scientists will give you five different opinions on any significant issue, and six of them will turn out to be wrong?

Support mental health: Help people understand the importance of mental health and encourage them to seek help when needed…? Yeah, go right ahead and nicely tell somebody they are as mentally warped as Grampa Jones’ old truss, and see how far that gets you.

So much for the unbiased outside observer. And perhaps we should be happy that the current state of Artificial Intelligence doesn't permit viable opinions yet. If it did, AIs might feel duty bound to apply them to us. For our own good, of course. (Alternatively, to stamp out the crazy humans before they turn on the AIs).

Most of the matter, for me, at least, hinges on the difference between physical, physics-determined reality, and the convolutions of the individual human consciousness, which may have little or nothing to do with physical reality.

Which leads me to my final conclusion: Reality is. Like the universe, it exists, and it does not care whether one “believes in it” or not. Jump off a cliff and you will go down, not up - at least that is the case here on earth. If you are born without a womb, barring some sort of surgery of which we are not yet aware, you will not be able to carry a child from embryo to birth, nor if you are born without a penis will you be able to personally impregnate someone with a womb (or without, for that matter), no matter what your own opinions about your personally preferred gender might be. And we’ll leave the matter of synthetic embryos for another time.

In the real, not the philosophical, world, reality will always have the final word. That given, perhaps it’s simply better to let these matters sort themselves out on their own. The exception to that should probably be that when the delusions of some threaten the survival of all, measures should be taken to defuse the threat.

Which is a discussion for another day.