Thinking Out Loud about Reality, Experience and Truth

     Our experience of reality is created by the brain. We know reality indirectly, since the brain creates our experience from the sensory inputs. Past experience, expectations, emotions, social context, focus of attention, etc all determine what we perceive as reality “right now”. Thinking about our experience produces what we believe is an accurate description of reality. One way to understand reality is to list a hierarchy of complexity, like the following. It’s not original with me, but I can’t recall exactly where and when I first came across it. “Many decades ago”, is about all I can tell you.

Sensory data
Sensation
Perception
Fact
Knowledge
Significance
Insight
Understanding
Wisdom

     Every level in this hierarchy combines data, primarily from the immediately lower level, but also from any other level. Controlling the data used at any level controls the experience. Magicians know this, and do their best to control the data the audience receives.

     Sensation and higher levels occur entirely in the brain, not the sense organs (which, by the way, also combine data from several sensors), although the process can be affected by factors like alcohol, oxygen deprivation, etc. For example, “seeing” is what the brain computes from the data provided by the eyes. However, perception of a shape (and its colour and motion, etc) is not enough to identify the object: Fact is another computation, which includes information from other senses, and from memory, etc. And so it goes. Your conscious experience consists of the level on which you focus your attention, perhaps surrounded by a kind of nimbus of all the other levels of experience. That’s something that seems to vary both between and within individuals.
     For example you’re looking at your back yard at night, and perceive a dark irregular shape moving across the visual field. What is it? A bear, or the neighbour’s dog? The answer is the fact that it’s the dog.
     Once you’ve identified your neighbour’s dog, the next level is knowledge: What is it doing in your back yard? At this point, guesswork (hypothesis) enters in. You know the dog roams the neighbourhood, so that’s what it’s doing. Is this knowledge significant? To compute that, you need more information, such as the dog’s habits, whether or not the neighbour is at home, whether coyotes or foxes have been seen in your neighbourhood, etc. It depends on how you get on with the neighbour and their dog, or your knowledge about doggy lives, or your tolerance for strange animals in your back yard, or your town’s ordinances about stray pets, or any combination of these and many other factors that make up the context of the event. You may decide to call your neighbour, and tell them their dog’s out. Or maybe not.
     Will you derive some insight? Maybe. Perhaps you realise that the dog is on patrol, and will return tomorrow night. Could be that you realise that you rather like the idea of a dog roaming in your back yard. Or that you really must find some way of persuading your neighbour to keep their dog under control. Or whatever. And then perhaps you may understand that the inconvenience, if any, if the dog’s invasion is really of little importance. With luck, you may achieve the wisdom of deciding not to call the neighbour about their dog.

     All the while, your attention flits around the total constellation of disparate sensations, perceptions, facts, significance, etc, as you try to figure out what to do about the dog. At any moment, some event may attract all your attention so that you forget about the dog, until next day, when your neighbour tells you that he came home badly injured from an encounter with the fox.

    The brain makes errors at every level, some of which can be corrected by training/education, and some of which cannot be corrected, even when they are recognised as errors. This is most obvious in the computation of perceptions from sense data: Visual illusions persist even when we know we are seeing an illusion.
     We also suffer from illusions of fact: that dark irregular shape is actually a bear, but our brain has computed it to be a dog. We need more data to correct that illusion. But even with added data we may be still be convinced it was a dog we saw. Why? Because we expected to see a dog, and not a bear.
     There are illusions at more abstract levels. We suffer from illusions of insight, understanding, etc. Call them conceptual illusions. Some can be detected and corrected (with some effort) by applying logical analysis to our descriptions of our insights and understanding. This is one of the goals of scientific inquiry.
     Science is a method of recognising errors, and if possible correcting them. It begins with our remembered experience, which modifies our present experience. To understand what the dog is doing in our backyard we test a guess against everything we know about that particular dog, about dogs in general, about our neighbourhood, about wildlife in our neighbourhood, etc and so on and so forth. We do all this very quickly, mostly unconsciously, and repeatedly modifying our guess until we have a plausible explanation. “Plausible” merely means “fitting the specific and general facts well enough to feel correct.”
     This still isn’t science, however. Science is systematic and conscious framing and testing of guesses in order to have a more general understanding of dogs, and neighbours, and wildlife, and social obligations, and so on. It will likely entail gathering more facts, and/or integrating several pieces of knowledge. Items will have to be evaluated for their significance, and with luck and perseverance, we may arrive at some insights that lead to a more complete understanding. We want to be able to say,  “Because of my understanding of reality, I know how to make wise choices”

      We want the feeling that we have an understanding of reality that’s general enough to include a large swath of our experience. We want to be able to say, “This, my individual experience of reality is valid. What I have to say about it is true.” More, we want a Theory of Everything. We want to believe that, at least in principle, all human experience can be explained, that it’s possible to describe Reality in such a way that everything is included, and that every possible statement in that description is true.