What is Reality? #9 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

The human brain is an amazing computational instrument. It can reason, project, control, and otherwise fuse together thousands of inputs at once, creating an awareness, a synthesis of understanding. It’s something that philosophers and scientists throughout the ages have struggled to fully understand and, of late, have attempted to model in silicon and hardware to create things like artificial intelligence and neural networks. The complexity of our creation belies the infinitely complex interconnections between chemicals, electrical signaling, and perhaps, a deeper unseen aspect. Whatever is composed out of the chaos of our cortices, it holds true that we are masters of narrative, of creation, of reality.

Total Words

1,224

Reading Time in Minutes

5

Key Takeaways:

  1. Humanity is incredible for their collective ability to create and imagine.
  2. Reality is defined by our collective narrative and stories.
  3. Reality is a collision between the observable and the imagined.
  4. Shaping reality, especially in the day/age of AI and all of its permutations, must be grounded in who we are as creative, sentimental beings.

About Dave Graham:

Dave Graham is a research technologist and the technology advocate lead for Dell Technologies’ Office of Research where he focuses on how technologies are integrated into organizations, society, and their potential for global transformation.  He is currently working on his PhD at University College Dublin – SMARTLab looking at how data is used to increase social agency.

Contacting Dave Graham

You can follow Dave’s daily musings on Post.News, read his Substack thoughts or check out his photography on Instagram

By Dave Graham

What is reality?

Take a look at the picture presented here. What do you observe?

On first pass, I’m sure that you notice the line of separation down the horizon, separating the two halves of the picture. There are coloured leaves, resplendent in their autumnal finery; the water is still, reflecting mirror-like the sky and the traces of flora that find themselves front and center in this idyllic scene. It’s a tranquility that speaks of preparation, of stillness, of potential. It’s a capture of reality.

On second look, there are perhaps other things that catch your eye: the darkened corners, the almost too-reflective water on the lower half of the picture, the slight blurring of leaves on the trees. There seems to be an almost casual distortion in parts of the image as if some digital thumb swooped in and mucked about with the pixels, upsetting their natural order.

Your brain has determined one of two things in this moment:
1. This is nothing more than a picture showing a tree reflected in the water.
2. There is something amiss with this picture which may mean it’s altered or generated.

So, which is it: which explanation is real?

The human brain is an amazing computational instrument. It can reason, project, control, and otherwise fuse together thousands of inputs at once, creating an awareness, a synthesis of understanding. It’s something that philosophers and scientists throughout the ages have struggled to fully understand and, of late, have attempted to model in silicon and hardware to create things like artificial intelligence and neural networks. The complexity of our creation belies the infinitely complex interconnections between chemicals, electrical signaling, and perhaps, a deeper unseen aspect. Whatever is composed out of the chaos of our cortices, it holds true that we are masters of narrative, of creation, of reality.

The picture you see here was captured no less than 24 hours before writing this piece, near a pond a scant few kilometers from my residence. The fall air was still, the water placid, and the leaves on the maples and birches were stunning. As I leaned over the water, watching for the reflections to align just-so, I was rewarded with momentary calm and reality was captured.

With a slight tweak to colour (I prefer my reality a bit darker than lighter), I noticed that the image was a perfect mirror of itself. That up could be down and down, up. That reality wasn’t constrained to the cardinal directions of captured 3 dimensional space: it could exist completely upside down or right side up. Would the story change, I wondered, and would it represent the same truths of the moment in which I observed it?

I created a reality out of a momentary capture of photons hitting an electrical sensor and simultaneously my optic nerves. My brain flipped the image, letting my neurons do the dirty work of interpreting the scene in meaningful ways. On my laptop, I engaged in digital arbitrage, exchanging light for dark, up for down, reality for a narrative of my own devising. I created the foil for today’s story, an image to back a narrative, a device.

Reality is what we define it to be. I’ve provided my version of reality through an image here: I’ve taken a pastoral scene, flipped it upside down, and made you consider what I’ve done. If you were casually browsing through a collection of photos, you’d more than likely miss what I had done. You’d have seen the darkened corners, the slight blurring and perhaps ascribed an artist’s aesthetic to it: “Ah, this photographer didn’t get their focus correct” or “It’s a bit dark…why do they edit it like that?” It’s easy to pass over because this slice of reality doesn’t jar the senses, doesn’t force a fusion of sight, sound, touch, and emotion. It just is.

The struggle with our definition of reality is that there is an inevitable collision between our reality and that of others.The galling violence we’ve seen displayed via various media outlets over the last year point to this very ideal. There’s a collision between the reality of our daily lives and that of the greater world around us. Our inoculation from war, from violence, from the depravity of humanity allows us to very narrowly define reality to what is directly in front of us, what we can taste, touch, smell, see. When confronted by an outside reality, we have no box to put it in; it affronts our hallowed senses, our stories and we are galled by it.

Reality, then, is a construct of our imagination, composed of our senses and assembled together from the rudiments of experience. It’s a constant metering and evaluation of what lies before us: the click of these keys, the movement of letters on a screen to form words, the vibrant beauty of an idyll captured not so long ago. It’s a story composed for an unconference, a stroll through the meadows of a caffeine-and-ADHD addled mind, and the ideas that reality is a creation, beautifully ugly, of our own devising.

I suppose the grand challenge (and what I’ll leave you with today) is to understand more how reality is shaped: by experience, by novelty, by intersection and to make it life-defining. I challenge you to understand how your reality is shaped by the stories of others and the stories you write for yourself. How can the tide of humanity’s experience be channeled to create a more wholesome reality for all while simultaneously be true to the story of its creation?

Thoughts for another day, another unconference, another journey through the solemnity of the woods outside my domicile, in a world that is more upside down than right-side up in my reality.

May it ever be so.

The Nature of Reality #8 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

Reality is individually perceived.

Total Words

750

Reading Time in Minutes

3

Key Takeaways:

  1. Reality does not care what you think.
  2. Your reality and mine are driven by our perceptions.
  3. Our perceptions of reality are based on our biology, neurobiology and experiences.
  4. It is important that we consider that our perceptions may be faulty.

About Ger Mulcahy:

Dad, husband, writer, leadership coach, technology leader, flyfisherman, adapted introvert. I live in Dublin with my wife and three daughters, and read and write as much as I can around family activities.

Contacting Ger Mulcahy

You can contact Ger by email, or connect with him on LinkedIn

By Ger Mulcahy

I spoke with a colleague recently over dinner, and we started talking about physics, which is his passionate interest. I’m not a physicist, nor can I play one even in my mind, never mind on the Internet. He, on the other hand, studied physics in college. He continues to read widely on things I consider borderline arcane, including quantum physics and mechanics. The conversation briefly moved onto the nature of reality before diverging and heading into more mundane conversational waters. But it triggered something because I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that the nature of reality is about individual experience.

Neuroscience-based coaching, which I practice, teaches us that every brain is different. We have the same basic structures, but our experiences shape the physical structures of our brains over time. What we focus on shapes our brains. For example, studies on London taxi drivers showed their hippocampus grew substantially due to learning “the knowledge”. Our brains establish and strengthen connections based on what we consciously or unconsciously place a value on.

We all operate, in addition, with a set of filters and biases which help us make sense of the world quickly. Our brains are expensive to run, so we use these forms of biological shorthand to lessen the cost. If we don’t have to engage “system 2” thinking per Daniel Kahneman, we can save resources. Cognitively demanding thinking is more expensive from a glucose and oxygen perspective.

The result is that we often accept the world as it appears to us. We believe that our perception of reality is reality. This is known as “naive realism”. This is an easy mistake to make – we are primarily visual and have learned to accept the evidence of our eyes and other senses. If we take that visual reality to start, mine will always differ from yours. Depending on my age and optical quality, I may see more or less detail in the world than you. Does that make my visual reality different to yours? Absolutely. Throw in something like red/green colour blindness, and suddenly, my perception of reality is very different to someone without that visual challenge.

Perception is the core of our reality. What I perceive and what you do can be entirely different based on our position in a room, our experiences, our height, gender, and attitudes to life. I may witness precisely the same thing you do, but my experience of that event and my memory of it may be totally different. We do not make good crime scene witnesses as a result. The car was blue, or maybe red. The man was tall, fat or perhaps a powerfully built woman.

Why does this all matter? Because when someone has a different viewpoint from us, it is entirely possible that what they perceive or recall is more accurate (or at least just as valid) than our viewpoint. In addition, the introduction of “realistic” AI-generated imagery or textual output can be sufficient to fool our senses. We must question our perceptions of the world and understand that reality is not a fixed concept – it is fluid, contextual and personal. Some things are objectively real, but even determining those can be challenging. Using the philosophical thought experiment that we may exist in a simulation or one universe of a multiverse of parallel universes should be sufficient to raise questions about our macro-reality.

Being willing to question ourselves and to openly question others to determine why they believe certain things can be helpful for us to ground ourselves. It can also help us develop more diverse ways of thinking about our challenges. And it can help us avoid becoming stuck in believing that our ideas are the best ones and allow us to understand that what we “know” is largely illusory.

If Reality is Perception – What Else Can We Not See #3 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

We largely experience and interpret reality through our senses but what energy fields exists beyond these, how can we access them and what do they mean.

Total Words

941

Reading Time in Minutes

4

Key Takeaways:

  1. Our senses and the brain interpretation help from our reality
  2. We are surrounded by energy fields
  3. These energy field could change our sense of reality
  4. We are still evolving

About Eoin Kennedy:

Ex teacher, marketing lecturer, startup founder, PR professional, events organiser, digital marketing head and currently working as a content strategist.  The slave behind CongRegation.

Contacting Eoin Kennedy:

You can follow Eoin on Twitter,  connect with him on LinkedIn or, email him.

By Eoin Kennedy

Sometime around 1674 Antony van Leeuwenhoek, the first man to make and use a real microscope, became the first person to observe bacteria and protozoa .  This might not seem like a ground breaking event but similar to the first viewings through a telescope it revealed entirely new worlds we did not know existed and changed our perception about reality.

Much of what we believe is real is directly connected to what we perceive and much of what we perceive is through our senses.  The Berkely Greater Good project defined it even further “What we perceive in any given moment is not only determined by sensory input, but by our personal physical abilities, energy levels, feelings, social identities, and more.”

Simplistically our perception of reality is formed by a muscle inside a bone casing that depends on inputs from our sensory organs – taste, smell, vision, hearing, and touch amongst other contested senses.

These sensory organs are unreliable, can be easily fooled plus they are quite limited.   Some animals for example can detect forms of energy invisible to us, like magnetic and electrical fields .

It would also appear that our senses and perception system might be blinkered in order to protect us or keep us focused on our more core function or put more succinctly by Jay van Bavel at New York University “The main goal of the perceptual system is to keep the brain alive, so you can pass on your genes,”

Let is also consider the claim that we only use 10% of our brains (this figure is hotly contested and criticised)  but with training our brains can perceive things that are otherwise relatively invisible so logically it stands that there energy fields or other phenomenon around us that could change our sense of reality.  At its simplest what would change if we could experience what animals can like sharks being able to detect electric fields, snakes seeing thermal images,  reindeers seeing ultra violet light, birds seeing extra colours, elephants with infrasonic sounds and Honey bees ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field.

But what if there was more.   And if so how would we access it and also how might we evolve further in the future to do so.

Various religions has long relied on storytelling about spirits and energy fields that exist around even though we have little proof.  Could hallucinogenic drugs or entering trance like states where people report experiencing spirit guardians who guide them be real or simply altered dreams.  Ceremonies with the drug ayahuasca are rough experiences and its unclear are they opening up access to energy fields or simply deeply resetting the brain and allowing people to view deeper in to the mirror?

If everything is energy it holds that we are surrounded by energy.  Frequently this is translated as the presence of spirits.

Unfortunately despite lots of theories there is little tangible evidence and proof.  However we have all had that six sense of something positive or negative when we enter a certain room or a premonition of something to come.

There are also plenty of Out of Body stories especially near death experience ones.  Frequently these feature being to see/experience events in other rooms normally during operations or even being clinically dead. Science explains some of these as an output of the brain.

Personally I believe that our brains and sensory inputs are still at a pretty primitive stage of evolution.  Taking this a bit further there are energy fields flowing around us that in future we may be able to detect (either through enhancements or biological evolution) and equally in the future we will be able to interpret these energy fields.  I don’t see this as being able to see our dead parents but rather the core energy that once formed them but disintegrated once they died.

Currently we are very poor at both perceiving and understanding energy fields but acknowledging that we do not know everything and being open to new thinking and curious in our pursuit of knowledge could be to our benefit.  It has served us well in the past.  In Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens he explains that what distinguished the European powers from other similar empires and lead to their almost global dominance was their embrace of ignorance and the desire to overcome it.  In this case it was seeking out distant lands and conquering them but the principle is probably reasonably similar.

We appear to be at a meeting point where quantum physics/multiverse theories seem to be intersecting with and almost validating Shamanism and more simplistic religious beliefs, that have long been ridiculed.  The evidence might already be there but we cannot process it using our currently understanding of what we believe is real.

For certain there is much more to know and understand about our reality and we should not just trust what our senses tell us.  Afterall we could just be stuck in a computer generated matrix.

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