Seeing and Believing

Is there an objective reality? Probably. Maybe. Does it matter?

Part of the human condition is being doomed to seeing the world only through a series of lenses and mirrors. Your eye does not exactly show you the “world”, it bends light of a limited wavelength from a limited field of view at a focal length focusing at a specific distance to create an image at a limited resolution. Then parts of the brain, evolutionarily trained and consciously inaccessible to you, have a go at all this raw information and whittle it down to the experience of “seeing” and in the process give rise to all the fun optical illusions we seem to be susceptible to.

Our experience of seeing is therefore limited to our process of seeing. We don’t see infra-red like snakes or ultra-violet like reindeers. We can’t see as far as a hawk or as wide as a bunny. Goldfish can see more colors than we do and we can not even imagine what those colors must be like, to say nothing of completely different modalities of seeing, such as bats and dolphins echolocating to “see” their surroundings.

Even if we, as humans, share similarities in our sensory plumbing, we still don’t necessarily see the same. A cloud that simply looks like a cloud to me, might look like the face of your old pet to you. We ascribe meaning to what we see when we make sense of it and that meaning might very well be unique to each and every one of us. And these differences in our personal experience of being might very well be impossible to ever communicate and get past.

Mirrors are pretty cool. It’s almost as if there is an inverted replica of the world behind the smooth transparent glass. What about the funhouse mirrors though? The ones that make you look tall, short, fat, thin, and curvy? What twisted realities exist behind those wobbly metal sheets? Sure, I guess they are actually just distorted representations of reality as we see it. But are those representations “real”? Why do we use flat mirrors instead of the “fun” ones anyway? If, for some reason, I want to have the body shape of a tube man, why don’t I just use a mirror that makes me look that way?

Because when you see me, I am not what the mirror shows me to be, you might say. Why should I care? What do I get by sharing a reality with you anyway? I will never understand what it is exactly like to be you anyway. But I do know that I don’t like the way you see things. I wanted things to be different and so I decided to subscribe to a reality in which I was. Let’s take it further. I know me. I am a good person and believe in good things. So, of course, my mirror should show me as good and this little telescope here that I just crafted should show me all the things I believe to be good and true. For example, the moon is actually cube-shaped. Did you know that? I am being irrational, you say. And you are right.

You show me “normal” mirrors and “normal” telescopes to try and convince me along with explaining all the optical physics behind them. I find it crazy how you believe in physics. I know what the reality is supposed to be and physics just isn’t good enough for it. It’s all a bunch of “theories” anyway that might get disproven at any time. That is the point, you tell me. You claim that if your beliefs don’t meet your reality, you rethink them. I find this assertion hilarious and preposterous. You see, my beliefs shape my reality and since we share neither the reality nor the beliefs, there is nothing you can do to convince me into your reality. My ignorance is self-consistent to me in ways even your rationality is not to you. But how I choose to structure my reality is something that I alone have autonomy over, and therefore, I alone am guilty of any and all damage caused by the faults within it.

We all see the world differently. Our perforated perception of the world and the beliefs that we use to fill in the holes have been molded over years of personal experiences. We also make sense of the world differently. When encountering novel circumstances, we adapt by adjusting how we see things and thereby how we act. And the manner by which we go about these adaptations is unique to all of us. This diversity of thought is undeniably beautiful and in my opinion the crux of modern civilization as it exists today.

But we must use this diversity to expand the depth and width of our shared understanding of the world and not as an excuse to justify the continued existence of shallow and problematic perspectives. All the myriad ways of thinking about the world become meaningless to me if I refuse to acknowledge them and instead choose to go live in my own bubble where things are simplistic in my favor and all anomalies are ignored. Truly appreciating diversity of thought, therefore, implies engaging with and learning from it.

But it is almost a part of human nature to want a lazy, stress-free, and happy life, isn’t it? Why should I bother looking down from my ivory tower to the suffering masses below? Maybe their condition is my fault for not sharing my inherited resources? Or maybe their condition is their fault for being born without them?

It would be hard for me to figure out.

It really would be. It seems easy, I know. But the problem is that I don’t see the tower. To me, the tower is where I have lived all my life and so has everyone I know, trust, and care for. It is logical of me to assume that all the people must live in towers like these because that is the life I have known. But now, all of a sudden, you climbed up all the way to outside my window and are banging it repeatedly, forcing me to look out and take in the startling new information that there are a whole bunch of people barely surviving down below. And now, instead of taking my daily afternoon nap, I have to figure out how this information fits in my version of reality.

There is always the most convenient option of denial. I could cut your rope off, go take the nap, call the whole thing a weird dream, and continue never looking out of the window. A close cousin of denial is a hack; I could make up a quick reason why those people don’t have lives as good as mine. I decide it is because the sacred eagles don’t pick those people’s shacks for nesting like they do my tower and tell you as such. Eagles happen to only pick high places to nest but that is an irrelevant fact.

But if I am committed to understanding the world as it really is and willing to restructure my sense of reality to achieve that, then I might ask you some questions, knowing fully that I might not like the answers and they might make me unhappy. And through this sincere endeavor alone can I take responsibility for my actions and their true consequences to others.

We are all guilty of living in such towers, looking through warped mirrors, seeing through tampered lenses, and subconsciously ignoring prickly windows. It is simply a part of being human. We may not be evil for not seeing them as they are but we do become so if we refuse to do anything about them.

Human subjectivity is simultaneously mankind’s greatest blessing and a curse. We have it to thank for centuries of creative and scientific genius and we also have it to curse for centuries of war, oppression, and injustice. Building better selves and a better future for others is incumbent on us opening our hearts and minds to new possibilities and accepting the limitations of our perspective. This makes it our moral duty to always be curious, hold nothing beyond reproach, and find the courage to challenge the limitations of ourselves and others.