What Is Reality?

Are you real?

It’s a pretty simple question that seems to have a very simple answer. (Yes.) Yet it is a far more complicated thing to consider than you might think. It’s an onion question, meaning there are many layers to it and the more you dive into it, the more you’ll want to cry. I think the best way to talk about this is to go layer by layer.

Layer One

The first layer of reality can best be described as the superficial. This is literally what you see. When I hold my hand in front of my eyes, I see four fingers, a thumb, skin, a few cuts, and the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Behind that, I see a blurry classroom filled with students. Go ahead and try this. Hold your hand about 6 inches from your face and think about what you see. Done? OK, good. You probably saw a lot of the same stuff I did. Whatever your eyes were focused on you observed the most detail. But what’s really going on here?

As best as we can tell, light (which is really just the part of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see, more on that in a bit) is bouncing off objects, ricocheting into our eyes, and being interpreted by our brains. This is pretty basic stuff that you probably remember from school. There is a much more complicated process happening but I will skip the biology lesson. If you’re interested, feel free to check out this video. Light isn’t any different from any other part of the EM spectrum, other than we’ve evolved body parts that can natively interpret and detect them. That’s all.

Other animals have evolved the ability to see different parts of the spectrum. Some can’t see visible light at all. We only see what we “see” because it benefited our genes to evolve (over millions of years) the ability to see it. There’s nothing special about it or remarkable. Animals that can detect infrared waves aren’t any better or worse than us. Just different. And over millions of years, we never had the need to develop such a sense. Will we someday in the distant future? Perhaps. Maybe we will be able to alter our genes to gift ourselves the ability. But for now, all we can see falls within the visible spectrum.

This is a massive handicap when it comes to understanding the world around us. The visible range is a very narrow band of the EM spectrum. It contains every color we’ve ever seen or imagined and yet it is missing so much information. “Blue” isn’t really the color blue. That’s just how our brain (and our eyes to a lesser degree) interpret a wave of electromagnetic energy with a wavelength of 450nm, a frequency of 6.66 10 to the 14th hertz. It doesn’t really have a color, per se. By seeing that wave of energy it allowed our species to evolve. Many other animals might see blue in a different area of the EM spectrum. Or they might not see blue at all.

That’s the physical, superficial process on a very basic level. Energy goes into our eyes and we see color, shapes, objects, and depth. Our brain decodes that information and allows us to understand what we are seeing: a hand, a classroom, your mother’s face, etc. But there’s a big issue with this process, namely, that the brain is the one doing the thinking.

Layer Two

The human brain is remarkable. We have some of the biggest, most complex brains on the planet. Perhaps even the entire solar system. It allows us to move around on two legs, to understand the difference between prey and predators. It helps us communicate, tell jokes, and feel love. Everything that you have ever experienced, your entire reality, is held within your mind. That’s it. You really only exist because your mind tells you that you do. There could very well be organisms that have no idea they are alive.

But there is a flaw in this. A malfunctioning brain means reality malfunctions for that person. You can see this in virtually every aspect of mental health. A thin person could look in a mirror and see a fat person. Nothing you can say to them will make them see anything else. Within the 3 pounds of brain sloshing around your skull is the entire world. Take someone with schizophrenia. They live in the same world as us yet because their brain operates differently, their reality is very different than ours.

Since we all have different brains with different chemistries, none of us share the exact same reality. They are close enough that we can agree on most things but not exact. Reality is a complex blend of different signals and interpretations. You might see a blue-gray ball while I see a light blue ball. You might think someone’s tone is rude, I might think it’s perfectly fine. I might think someone is attractive, you might think they are ugly. Why is this? Wouldn’t it have been more beneficial for our minds to all think the same, at least when it comes to basic survival stuff? Not at all. Our brains are flexible for a reason. We learn and grow with experience. All of it informs what we perceive as reality, which is really just a hallucination.

If you’ve ever done magic mushrooms or LSD (or seen someone on them) they seem to experience a world that doesn’t exist. They hear things that aren’t there or see things that you can’t. We tend to call this a hallucination. But it’s no different from what a stone sober person experiences. We hallucinate all day long. Our brains trick us during every second of every day into believing a reality that may or may not be there.

Pretty cool, right? Also… mildly terrifying?

Layer 3

Let’s expand outward a bit. If you were to describe reality in the most basic of terms, what would you say? I would say that we live in a world of 3 spatial directions (up/down, left/right, front/back) with an added dimension of time. This is easily provable. Say I wanted to meet up with you at the mall, what information would I need to give to you? It would need to be something like “meet me on the second level in front of Barnes and Noble.” But I would also have to tell you what time to meet, otherwise, you could end up standing there for days.

But again, we must ask WHY we live in a world with 3+1 dimensions. It comes back to the same answer as to why we see blue — it benefited our genes to experience the world in this way. That’s it. There is no cosmic explanation, no mysticism needed. We think we live in the world we do because if we didn’t, our ancestors would have run off a cliff. Why we experience the dimensions we do has been something humans have considered for a long time. Take Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” for example:

Plato was using his allegory to explain something other than spatial dimensions but it works for our purposes as well. Imagine what a 4th dimension would look like. Can you? Now imagine what it would be like to live as a two-dimensional being, able only to move left/right, forward/back, with no up/down movement possible. What would the world look like? What could you understand about it?

We may be suffering from the same dimensional blindness as our two-dimensional friend. If other dimensions exist, we could be feeling their consequences without fully understanding why. Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Imagine you are a two-dimensional being, like a dot living on a flat piece of paper. You can move all around the paper but never know what is above the paper or below it. Now imagine that I, as a three-dimensional being, put my fingertip onto the paper. You would see the part of my finger that is touching the paper but nothing else. You wouldn’t see the rest of my finger, my hand, my arm — nothing. You wouldn’t be able to pass through it. It might even feel like it suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

If other dimensions exist within our reality and we are unable to perceive them, we would be as confused as that dot. Or as the prisoners within the cave. There would be an invisible force acting upon us without any clear explanation. Sounds a bit like gravity, does it not? In fact, modern physics tells us that there may be as many as 11-dimensions (including our own) that exist around us.

Reality may be far, far more complex than we can even imagine. What would a five-dimensional being look like? What would time be like for them? Would time be no different than a direction for us? Could they look into the past and see things? What kind of organ could even understand or detect such a thing? These are questions we might never know the answers to. Yet, they could very well inform our reality as we know it.

Layer 4

This is the last layer we are going to talk about (thanks for hanging in this far). Everything we have discussed so far might all be moot. Maybe you aren’t real at all. Maybe everything you think and experience and feel is the result of a simulation. You don’t actually breathe, you think you breathe. In simplest terms, what if you are living within The Matrix? What if our entire existence is programmed by a computer and we only think and feel the things we do because we are programmed to do so? We know every living being is programmed. Taht’s what DNA is. It’s our programming. But what if there are no other beings and you are the only living thing? What if you aren’t even alive? Seems far-fetched but there are very serious people doing very serious research into this exact question.

As the video notes, it is unlikely that we are some other creatures computer game. But it is possible. And if we were, what would that mean for our reality? Do we have fate or have we always known there is a superior being who controls our destiny? Fascinating questions to ask, for sure, but not rooted in a lot of evidence or science.

So let’s talk about a mind-blowing idea that IS rooted in science. There is a good chance that we are living in a holographic universe. This is a concept waaay beyond my understanding so I will post a video below that explains it much better than I can.

Are you exhausted yet? I am. I told you that you’d want to cry by the end of this. What’s the point of all this? Well, for me, it is twofold. First, I am humbled by the sheer size and scope of something as simple as what reality is. You can take it to the microscopic level and look at brain chemistry. You can get into subatomic particles that behave as both waves and particles (like light). You can follow those all the way out to the most distant edges of our universe and see that reality is nothing like we know it. There could be multi-dimensional beings messing with us for laughs. We know so much about the world around us and yet with each step into the void, we find we have learned so little. That’s incredible.

Second, and this is the most important part of all of this, is that reality is not a shared experience. It is not identical between us. We all see and feel things differently. And regardless of whether or not we are holograms, a simulation, or hallucinations, we all feel pain. We all feel happiness. We can all feel love. It doesn’t matter why we exist as much as what we do with the knowledge that we DO exist. I genuinely believe it is possible for a biological male to look into a mirror and expect to see a woman staring back at them. I cannot imagine what kind of Hell it would be to live that way. This is all a long way of saying that you never know what someone is going through or what they perceive and understand about the world. Greet them with kindness and an open heart.

You never know what reality is for them.