Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe
What is real? Or more precisely, what do we believe is real? Our sensory input is limited relative to what is actually going on in our environment. Everything we use to interpret the world around us is filtered through the neurological pathways beginning with our five senses. Then we add to that our past experience, our cultural biases, and our genetic predisposition to further filter that information. As much as we want to believe our eyes and ears to give us accurate data, what we end up with is far from what exists based on flaws inherent in our sensory input.
For the vast majority of us, this is a very disturbing thought. I know I want to believe that what I see around me is firmly rooted in a form of definitive truth. And yet all we need to do is begin a conversation with someone who holds an opposing point of view with regard to just about anything and we soon find that the same data viewed by two individuals is interpreted in vastly different ways. I discussed some of these issues in Subjectivity but I’m going deeper here to make a point about our perception of reality.
We base our interpretation of the “real” world through the data we receive, but even prior to that information reaching our brains, it is processed in a very subjective manner. For instance, the color receptors in our eyes have developed over millions of years through the evolutionary process. The cones at the back of our eyes are broken into three categories, shorter wavelength receptors which translate light into blue, medium wavelength, translating light as green, and receptors that read a longer wavelength as red. Out of these three we create an almost infinite variety of tints and tones.
The really fascinating part of this is that colors, as we perceive them, do not actually exist in nature. The cones in our eyes translate the various wavelengths into what we view as color. Color is actually an illusion. I know this one is a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, but the reality is that color only exists in our minds. In addition, genetics and cultural biases can alter how we view color as well. For more information click here for an article on these different aspects of seeing.
Each one of our senses gives us critical information allowing us to find food, avoid danger, create shelter against the elements, and so much more, all making it possible for us to survive. And even though all of this data is skewed by our various filters impacting our thoughts and reactions, we have been able to find certain common ground. Civilization, as such, has produced tacit agreements as to how to communicate through language and symbols. This basic foundational communication permits us to work in tandem in communities and at work, to trade with foreign societies, to make laws that are supposed to keep our baser natures in check, and even rules helping us go from point A to point B without smashing into each other.
But chaos lurks just beneath the surface. The depth of our personal interpretation (or misinterpretation) of the world around us, in juxtaposition with our feeling that what we perceive is the true measure of reality, makes it very difficult to come to succinct agreements on just about anything. If we cannot communicate using definitive terms, the words we use, the method we have of communicating becomes babble. We see this happening today when we attempt to have salient conversations with those who hold opposing views.
The image used in this week’s offering is by Belgian surrealist painter, René Magritte, who created work during the early to mid-Twentieth Century. This painting is not his most famous piece (the man wearing a bowler hat with his face obscured by an apple is his best-known work), but to me it is his simplest and yet most profound painting. The title is Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe, translated to This Is Not A Pipe. The painting depicts a pipe, but it is not actually a pipe. It is merely an image of a pipe, but our minds transpose an impression of an object into something we view as reality. If the title were not imbedded in the work itself and someone were to show me the painting and ask, “What is this?” I would most likely respond, “A pipe!”, though the correct answer would be a drawing of a pipe. On the surface it may not seem important, but in actuality it is a critical distinction.
What all of this means is that our minds perceive a combination of facts and fiction allowing us to move about, make plans, to interact with others and with objects, and survive as best we can. Our job (at least in my estimation) is to filter out as much of the superfluous noise that distracts us from seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, and tasting the real world around us. By keeping self-examination as an ongoing part of our conscious minds, we can protect ourselves from the chaos that is waiting to turn humanity into an ex-species.
As I’ve mentioned several times before, by staying Mindful, by keeping our focus and questioning our perceptions and our perspective, and by remaining open to understanding our limitations, we can begin to clear away the fog created by all of the filters that stand in the way of coming as close as we can to grasping the reality of our environment. I don’t mean we need to see everything in black and white, eschewing color because of the scientific research into the mechanics of sight, but we need to keep in mind that not everything we experience has a solid, concrete truth behind it.
Science and philosophy are the two main components of our mammalian attempts at finding reality. The universe that exists outside of our subjective selves is very real.
“coming as close as we can to grasping the reality of our environment…” May be a hopeless endeavor. The best method for understanding reality is science –the baseline assumption that we do not understand reality. This has proven quite effective, even with scientists’ prejudices, “Schools of Thought,” and journal publication policies. Still, admitting we do not understand is almost a guaranteed argument lost.
By our best evolving models, reality is far stranger than what we dream in our poor philosophies.
Michael, thank you again!
I agree that science is the practically the only hope of allowing us to approach reality and to move through the bottleneck of ignorance that is chocking us at the moment. The fact that a great number of people are anti-science and anti-intellectual is really all we need to understand with regard to the predicament we are currently facing. These folks seem to be happiest living in a stupor than finding anything even remotely related to facts and truth. C’est la vie!
T
The problem I have with the scientific community in general is the framing of our personal reality into little box’s that they analyze, define and eventually conclude in their opinion is reality and truth. Each of us experiences a universe of our own, with an unlimited variety of perceptions, opinions and views of this present plane of existence. For egg head scientists to say or even suggest there is no real color to objects is utter BS. They simply want to put our world into a defined space with “scientific” rules so they can feel better about how the world works, even though they are simply grasping at straws.
To view the world objectively creates an environment of specifics, reducing our humanity to tangible rules and scientific analysis, while the subjective mindset sees the universe as being part of what we are, knowing there are mysteries in this life that simply cannot be explained using scientific methods. To reduce, define and separate the self, or our personal perception of the world via scientific analysis diminishes our humanity and lessens our ability to perceive ourselves and the world as an individual, ultimately lessening who we are.
Carl – Thank you for your perspective. I would tend to disagree with your basic premise, that is if I’m understanding your point of view correctly. My feeling is that regardless of how much we discover about ourselves and the world around us through scientific endeavors, there will continue to be questions and mysteries to solve. We have only begun to understand the mechanics of neuroscience and dark matter has researchers constantly coming up with new theories as to how and why it exists.
In addition, you have used the two words, “personal reality” which seems like a self-cancelling phrase. If something is personal, which to me means filtered through our flawed senses, then it may appear to be real, but only because we want it to be, not because it actually is real. Someone who has hallucinations wholeheartedly believes that their visions are grounded in reality. For the person seeing those visions, someone outside of their mind would be hard pressed to convince them of the delusional nature of what they see.
Science, for the most part, is attempting to clear away the cobwebs that keep us sequestered in mythology and magical thinking. I know your sense of religion, so imagine a world where science didn’t exist and we continued to believe the world as flat and that some omniscient being was coordinating all of human behavior. Science has given humanity solid answers, rooted in logic and research for many of the questions our ancestors answered through uninformed processes that became the religions of the world.
Lastly, next week’s offering will be on our personal creativity that mirrors our own views of the world. These expressions are not found in science, but are reflections of the individual notions of how the world can be seen through our various filters. Science does not refute artistic vision and so we will continue to have the individualism that is critical to our humanity.
Just a few thoughts!
If it isn’t a pipe then what is it? The “this” that you reference in your statement. Oh, now I get it, you want me to agree that the re-presentation of a pipe, the two dimensional image is NOT a pipe. I agree. I don’t know anyone who would attempt to smoke that.
I enjoyed your extended thought experiment deconstructing “reality” and indicating how the mind makes sense for our species in what is none other than undulating fields of energy. I took notes in the margins of my hard copy of your post. I recalled when I was much younger how many books I’d read and lectures absorbed that were necessary to produce the illumination that you summarized in a few paragraphs.
I get how easily we are seduced by words into believing my conflation of symbol and meaning is the universal, unequivocal truth. That is rubbish we’d be better off to be done with.
What amazes me though at this juncture, is that “reality” is as varied as there have been individual humans alive now, and indeed, who have ever lived! Boom, that lights me up with amazement. Also, there’s toad reality. If homo sapiens survive, how much time before we get around to learning what a toad feels, how it communicates? How many living species in addition…
No doubt, reality is a construct. Every thing that lives does it. Why not celebrate? I’ll raise a glass!
As you assert, we’d be well served to reduce the volume of the noise that prevents us from paying attention. The noise seduces, is an emanation of our infantile id, that demands instant gratification to want what we want. There are no short cuts or straight line answers to our deepest ponderings.
“No doubt, reality is a construct. Every thing that lives does it.”
A few weeks ago I offered a post about Curiosity, suggesting that every living thing possesses some form of curiosity since without that characteristic, the entity would not be able to survive. But I had not considered the possibility that an ameba might construct its own reality, though that makes a great deal of sense. Even one-celled critters process data and have a point of view. It may not be processing this information consciously, but it is still interpreting the data in order to make a decision (eat this, avoid that). Very interesting.