Reality and our perception of it

The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 146, Oct/Nov 2021) has as its theme, ‘Reality’. The cover depicts Alice falling down the rabbit hole, with the notated question, What’s Really Real? I was motivated (inspired is the wrong word) to write a letter to the Editor, after reading an essay by Paul Griffiths, titled, Against Direct Realism. According to the footnote at the end of the article: Dr Paul H. Griffiths has a background in physics and engineering, and a longstanding interest in the philosophy and science of perception. I have a background in engineering and an interest in philosophy and science (physics in particular), but there the similarity ends.

 

Griffiths gives an historical account, mostly last century, concerning problems and points of view on ‘direct realism’ and ‘indirect realism’, using terms like ‘disjunctivism’ and ‘representationalism’, making me wonder if all of philosophy can be reduced to a collection of isms. To be fair to Griffiths, he’s referencing what others have written on this topic, and how it’s led to various schools of thought. I took the easy way out and didn’t address any of that directly, nor reference any of his many citations. Instead, I simply gave my interpretation of the subject based on what I’ve learned from the science, and then provided my own philosophical twist.

 

I’ve covered a lot of this before when I wrote an essay on Kant. Griffiths doesn’t mention Kant, but arguably that’s where this debate began, when he argued that we can never know the ‘thing-in-itself’, but only a perception of it. Just to address that point, I’ve argued that the thing-in-itself varies depending on the scale one observes it at. It also depends on things like what wavelength radiation you might use to probe it. 

 

But, in the context of direct realism or indirect realism, various creatures perceive reality in different ways, which I allude to in my 400 word response. If I was to try and put myself in one of Griffith’s categories, I expect I’m an ‘indirect realist’ because I believe in an independent reality and that my ‘perception’ of it is unique to my species, meaning other species would perceive it differently, either because they have different senses or the senses they have can perceive other parts of the spectrum to mine. For example, some insects and birds can see in the ultra-violet range, and we can see some colours that other primates can’t see.

 

However, I never mention those terms, or even Kant, in my missive to the Editor. I do, however, mention the significance of space and time, both to reality, and our perception of it. Here is my response:

 

 

Paul Griffith’s essay titled, Against Direct Realism (Issue 146, October/November 2021) discusses both the philosophy and science of ‘perception’, within the last century in particular. There are two parts to this topic: an objective reality and our ability to perceive it. One is obviously dependent on the other, and they need to be addressed in that order.

 

The first part is whether there is an objective reality at all. Donald Hoffman claims that ‘nothing exists unperceived, including space and time’, and that there are only ‘conscious agents’. This is similar to the argument that we live in a simulation. There is, of course, one situation where this happens, and that’s when we are dreaming. Our brains create a simulacrum of reality in our minds, which we can not only see but sometimes feel. We’re only aware that it’s not reality when we wake up.

 

There is a major difference between this dream state and ‘real life’ and that is that reality can be fatal – it can kill you. This is key to understanding both aspects of this question. It’s not contentious that our brains have evolved the remarkable ability to model this reality, and that is true in other creatures as well, yet we perceive different things, colour being the most obvious example, which only occurs in some creature’s mind. Birds can see in almost 300 degree vision, and bats and dolphins probably ‘see’ in echo-location, which we can’t even imagine. Not only that, but time passes at different rates for different creatures, which we can mimic with time-lapse or slow-motion cinematography. 

 

But here’s the thing: all these ‘means’ of perception are about keeping us and all these creatures alive. Therefore, the model in our minds must match the external reality with some degree of accuracy, yet it does even better than that, because the model even appears to be external to our heads. What’s more, the model predicts the future, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to catch a ball thrown to you. *

 

There is one core attribute of both reality and its perception that is rarely discussed, and that is space and time. We live in a universe with three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, so the models our brains create need to reflect that. The reason we can’t imagine a higher dimensional space, even though we can represent it mathematically, is because we don’t live in one.

 

 

·      * There is a 120 millisecond delay between the action and the perception, and your brain compensates for it.