Reality is different from how we humans perceive reality

In my previous post about In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, I focused on her totally scientific observation that according to Einstein’s extremely well proven relativity theory, the past, present, and future are all the same — in the sense that each is part of a single “block universe” in which every event, from the motion of a single particle to the movement of a gigantic galaxy, is captured in a four dimensional space-time continuum that simply is.

Of course, this perspective is utterly unlike how the world, and our life, appears to us.

So in the part of In Search of Now that I’m reading now, Marchant shifts from the world as it appears from the outside, scientifically, to how the world appears to we humans, experientially. But pleasingly, Marchant still uses science in her quest to explain how we can perceive reality in such a different fashion from how reality appears from the standpoint of physics.

Even if this were to be the only insight I get from Marchant’s book, and for sure it won’t be, I’m grateful to have my eyes opened to a basic fact that I hadn’t fully appreciated before In Search of Now came into my life. Which is, reality comes in two guises: a more objective guise based on the rigors of the scientific method, and a more subjective guise based on the quirks of human perception and cognition.

Here’s a passage that nicely sums up several chapters about neuroscience in Marchant’s book.

Today, science has revealed that this flowing, seamless quality of Now comes from its nested, hierarchical structure. Tiny instants changing almost too quickly for us to perceive, integrated layer by layer into ever-longer spans of time enable our awareness to reflect both deep continuity and lightning-fast change.

And at every level, our experiences have a dynamic temporal structure. Each moment is indeed a ‘saddleback,’ as [William] James originally put it, that reaches both back into the past and forwards into the future. We never find any isolated Now; there is no ‘pure’ present sensation that occurs independently of events either side.

Even the very briefest items in our awareness, spanning just tens of milliseconds, move forwards: they are more like iPhone ‘live photos’ than static snapshots. At the root of our experience there is no stillness. There are no frozen frames. There’s an implicit progression — a sense of movement from earlier to later — even within these slimmest slivers of our lives.

Often people who write about meditation and spirituality speak of seeing “as it is,” of “pure awareness,” of “perception prior to thought,” and similar notions. Their assumption is that we humans are capable of looking upon reality with no preconceptions, no prior knowledge, no anticipations, just an unvarnished awareness of what is right here, right now.

Nice idea. But it is false. It’s an illusion in much the same way as the Earth appears to be flat from our personal subjective perspective, or how the sun appears to rise and set from our personal perspective. Actually, the Earth is round and rotates while the sun remains where it is at the center of our solar system.

Likewise, Marchant speaks of how neuroscience has come to realize that Now is a mental illusion. It must have evolutionary advantages, or the human brain wouldn’t be how it is: the most advanced of any life form on our planet. However, evolution doesn’t have the aim of understanding reality. It has the aim of increasing the fitness of an organism so that it is better able to pass on its genes to the next generation.

Marchant writes:

A sensation might be blurry or ambiguous at first, perhaps a flash of darting blue. Over the next fraction of a second, our perception snaps into focus: it’s a kingfisher, skimming over the water. But there’s never a definitive, finished version of events; the story just keeps rolling on.

What about postdiction effects, when a second event changes our perception of an initial one.?If we start becoming aware of a sensation or event relatively quickly, within a hundred milliseconds or so, how can this perception be altered by something that hasn’t even happened yet? Rather than delaying our awareness, advocates of a continuous Now suggest a different — although perhaps just as unnerving — interpretation.

If our immediate, rough impression of events later turns out to be wrong, the brain simply rewrites it without storing any memory of the initial draft. Just as agents J and K use a “neuralyzer” in the movie Men In Black to wipe the memories of those who witness inconvenient events, our brains let go of our initial impressions as if they never existed.

This would mean postdictive effects don’t reach back in time at all; we just don’t remember how the story changed. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view — there’s no survival value in holding on to discredited drafts of reality.

But this interpretation too distances us from the naive view that we experience events in the outside world as they occur. Instead, our brains are constantly editing and revising our perception, apparently even of things that we have already experienced. Now remains an illusion: a construction of not just the present but the past.

The story doesn’t stop here, though. For it is a neuroscientific fact, or at least a widely accepted theory, that our brains are constantly predicting the future, which affects how we perceive the world as it appears to us in the present.

What the science suggests is that all of our perception works this way. In each moment, we’re not just passively reading our world but taking part — using all our knowledge and experience to create what we see.

…This, then, is the first big lesson that the biology of Now has for us about our relationship with reality: we have no direct line to events beyond us. There is no magic oracle that tells the brain the ‘right’ interpretations of the complex, out-of-date tangle of sensations it receives via our eyes, ears, nose and skin.

All the brain can ever do is bring all its experience and attention to bear in messy, ambiguous and ever-changing circumstances, using probabilistic rules to offer us its best explanation of what’s happening and what we are likely to experience next.

This has huge implications. Advocates of predictive coding argue that what we perceive — the vibrant, changing, three-dimensional reality all around us — isn’t the external world at all, but a guided prediction, or as some have described it, a ‘controlled hallucination’. Perception, says [Anil] Seth, is ‘a writing as much as a reading’.

A related insight is that, even at the very shortest, simplest timescales we can perceive, at the fundamental level of cause and effect, it is impossible to isolate the present moment from what comes before and what comes after. It seems that St. Augustine was right: the pure present is something we simply cannot experience.

Each sensation that passes through our awareness is woven from the two forces of past and future: it is a prediction built from our history, both recent impressions and a lifetime of experience.