The Case Against Reality
By Donald HoffmanMystery
Split Brain Patients
Consider experiments done with split brain patients. That is, patients who have had their corpus callosum severed for one reason or another (usually to treat epilepsy).
If you flash the words “KEY + RING” across the screen, while asking them to fixate on the cross between the words, and then ask them what they saw, they will say ring. Even when asked what kind of ring, they will still say just ring.
If you then blindfold the split brain patient and then bring out a box of random things which includes a key and a ring and a keyring, and ask them to reach in with their left hand and pull out what they say on the screen they will always pull out a key and reject the keyring if they encounter it. If you ask the patient what is in their hand they can’t tell you, they guess randomly.
If you now ask them to perform the same task with their right hand, they will always pull out a ring and reject a keyring if they encounter it. If you ask the patient what is in their right hand, they will confidently say ring.
If you remove the blindfold and ask them why they are holding a key and a ring when they said the word they saw was ring, they’ll have no idea or they’ll concoct a fake story about why they pulled out the key and the ring.
If you ask the patient to draw with their left hand what they saw they will draw a key.
What’s going on here? When you ask the patient to focus on the cross between the words, the information about the key only enters the right hemisphere and the information about the key only enters the left. In a normal person, the corpus callosum allows the sides of the brain to exchange information about what they say and you can easily produce “KEYRING”.
In the split brain patients, only the left side of the brain has information about a ring and since that is the side of the brain that can talk, they say they only say a ring when prompted. The left hemisphere controls the right hand which is why they pull out a ring when asked to do so with their right hand.
When the patient pulls out the key with their left, they have no idea idea what’s in their hand because only the right hemisphere knows whats in their and it can’t talk.
This suggests that when split, separate consciousnesses develop in both sides of the brain. In fact, in another study, when asked about their career goals the left hemisphere said it wanted to be a draftsman. Whereas the right hemisphere wrote using scrabble letters that it wanted to be a race car driver.
There have also been cases where the left hand lights a cigarette and the right one puts it out or one hand buttons a shirt while the other unbuttons it. The two sides of the brain seem to have distinct consciousnesses.
Complexity
As a cats cannot do calculus and monkeys cannot do quantum theorem, maybe humans are not equipped with the right mental faculty to understand how subjective experience arises from electrical impulses.
Beauty
Our perception of beauty is shaped by evolution. Women at age 20 have the highest reproductive value, so we should expect men younger than 20 to find slightly older women more attractive and men older than 20 to find younger women attractive. This is exactly what we see across cultures and across time.
Women find markers of testosterone more attractive. Men who had high testosterone during puberty will tend to have longer squarer jaws and such levels of testosterone are correlated with good genetics. However, testosterone levels are also correlated with less investment in the offspring and a greater tendency to cheat. So there is a tradeoff here in preferring men with more or less testosterone.
During the fertility phase of her menstrual cycle a woman is more inclined to find more masculine faces more attractive and less so during the rest of the month. The woman’s genes want her to capture the genetics of a high testosterone man but the love of a lower, higher parental investment man.
Women are also more likely to cheat and dress attractively during their fertility phase and are more likely to flirt with new men. If however, the woman’s partner is attractive or if his immune system encoding genes compliment hers, then her wandering eye is less pronounced.
Fun Fact Human’s are the only primates that have whites in their eyes. In other species, staring eyes might be considered a threat from other members or from a predator, but humans have evolved to rely heavily on eye contact during interactions.
Reality
Human’s are essentially a bundle of neurons trying to figure out how they emerge from such a thing as a neuron. Therefore, we are trusting that the idea of a neuron that our neural bundles allow us to see and interact with is actually similar to what a neuron really is.
Sensory
When we realize that our perception has been shaped by evolution to achieve evolutionary goals, the objectivity of anything dissolves. Even our perception of the spacetime within evolution takes place was shaped by the process of evolutions and is therefore unlikely to reflect the reality of spacetime.
In the last 20 000 years, human brains have shrunk 10%. This suggests that the safety of society eases the selective pressures for intelligence, allowing people to survive an procreate today that would otherwise have perished in the ancestral environment.
Gravity
Wheeler’s delayed choice variation of the double slit experiment involves waiting until the quantum has already based through one or the other slit and then measure and ‘decide’ which slit it shall have gone through. What we chose after the photon has passed the screen determine what the photon did before. Our decision in the present impacts the unfolding of the past.
This type of phenomenon occurs on cosmic scales as well. When a supermassive black hole sucks in material it emits and astronomical amount of light. If the quasar happens to lie behind a massive galaxy relative to us, then according to Einstein’s theory of gravity, the light from the quasar can take two paths because of the bent spacetime from the galaxy. Using a telescope to capture photos, we can choose to measure which path the photon takes. If we choose to measure it’s path and we find that it is on path A, that means that for billions of years this photon has been on that exact path because of the choice we made today.
Information Theory
Information theory finds that the amount of information or data an area of space can hold is relative to it’s 2D area. This suggests that the space we occupy might actually be 2D but we interpret and interact with it as if it were 3D. Reality is therefore, a hologram, an image codded on a distant 2D surface. We have no access to objects in space, we only have access to bits written on a boundary that surrounds space. This theory sounds ridiculous but is widely accepted in theoretical physics.
Virtuality
Our perception of the world has been shaped by fitness pay-off functions through evolution. We see 3 dimensions of space and experience 1 dimension of time, not because that is what objective reality looks like, but rather because this is the data format that was conducive to our survival and reproduction. It’s possible that other living beings experience reality much differently than we do.
Our perception is influence by the current state of our machine as well. Studied have found that people make shorter estimates of distance when given a sugary drink compared to one with artificial sweeteners. People who are more fit will also make shorter distance estimations. Our perception of distance is relative to our bodies ability to traverse the distance.
Community
Consciousness
When you speak with a friend, you have no way of knowing if they are conscious, but you would be wrong to conclude that they are unconscious just because you are not conscious of they’re consciousness. Similarly, you would be wrong to conclude that your own unconscious mental processes are not conscious simply because you do not have awareness of them.
Reason
We best argue for an idea when we already believe it or when we are arguing against another ideas we already disbelieve. We did not evolve the ability to reason to pursue truth, we evolved the ability to reason as a tool of persuasion. As a result, our reasoning is full of biases and heuristics that don’t always serve us well.