Suspension of Disbelief

 

Sheldrake is right, I am sure of it, but he cannot get traction within any scientific community and he is not charismatic enough to get a lot of traction in the religious or New Age communities. Alan Watts was the greatest when it comes to Charisma. Of course, Neville Goddard didn’t even try to sugarcoat his ideas. Goddard, therefore, says things in such a dogmatic way that it doesn’t always penetrate the reader’s mind in a convincing way. I ran into this problem reading Thomas Campbell, who is completely convinced we are in a simulation; but cannot explain it.

Well… are we?

I suppose it really all depends on your definition of a simulation. Do I believe in the accuracy of my experience of the objective world? I do not. I don’t believe things are as they seem to me. So if I had to define what I do believe about the objective world, I think it would be fair to say that I think my experience of it is similar to it; aka, a simulation.

Once, many years ago, I was looking through many photographs taken by a friend who was just then getting into photography. When I closed the album, my friend, Ben English, asked me, “Did you have a favorite?”

“I did,” I said, “I particularly liked the close-up of the yellow flower, about midway through the album.”

He furrowed his eyebrow and didn’t say a word.

Later that year, he gave me a gift I still have. It was the framed photo of the yellow flower; only it was not yellow at all. It was a black and white image.

“I wanted you to have this,” said Ben, “It was actually yellow, but I knew I had taken the photo with black and white film. It was interesting to me that you somehow saw it as yellow and remembered it that way.”

When I received the gift, I was sure he was mistaken. I was sure the flower I saw in his book was, indeed, yellow. In the years since then, it has occurred to me that my brain guessed at the color of the flower and was likely basing its guess on other, similar flowers; all of which were typically yellow.

This is how I believe we are experiencing the world around us all the time.

Color would probably be the easiest and oldest trick in the book. It is not, therefore, difficult to find scientists who are happy to explain how we perceive colors; even though colors are not actually colors. This is fairly easy to prove. Colors, under different forms of light, appear to be different in value; sometimes, entirely. It only takes a few pixels for me to see a sport-coat as orange. I don’t find that fact difficult to accept. The pixels only need to suggest orangeness to my eyes, by the way they filter the light being used, and my brain will take it from there.

Making colors to compliment lit objects is just one of the ways in which my brain navigates through life. Our senses cooperate to mix all of the available data, funneling it all down to a finer, best guess. If it walks like a duck, my brain sometimes yields a duck; while the truth, were it known, I’m considering a black, trash-bag, being carried to a pond by the wind, with some duck-like characteristics.

Recently, while being entertained by the amazing skills and talent of a Cirque du Soleil performance, several artists cooperated to bring a giant puppet to life. The music was beautiful and each performer knew exactly what to do in order to give this giant his humanlike qualities. Within seconds, I was no longer considering any actual human involved in the performance; I was enthralled by the puppet himself. It was his personality I began to identify with. I felt love for the character and found myself hoping he could simply go on living in the real world as I do. He seemed to possess compassion and his own personality; including a will to live and love. The scene required the cooperation of several puppeteers. I believe the music was also a necessary component.

Even more recently, I went to a wonderful play in Atlanta. After the play, my siblings and I went back to the stage door to meet the actors. The first on to greet us was already unrecognizable until his dad made the connection. “That is my son.” Said the proud parent, “He was Tom in the play, but he don’t talk like that.”

The dad of the actor was making a necessary correction for anyone who might have mistaken his beloved son for the character his son had played just moments earlier. However, in order for the audience to really enjoy the play, it was necessary for us all to suspend our knowledge of the actor and allow the character to replace him.

With the perceptual phenomenon known as The McGurk Effect, our brains do the work of the suspension of knowledge, by allowing hearing and vision to cooperate in making us believe we hear what we know isn’t being spoken at all.

All objective experiences require varying degrees of knowledge-suspension in order for the disbelief in reality to create a belief in a more useful, perception of reality.

To me, it is obvious that we are in a simulation, but there is no reason to believe that reality is unlike our experience. Knowing that there are no windows in my skull, I know I cannot really see light, but having eyes and the proper wiring, I see no reason to believe I am not perceiving things “like” rather than “as” they are.