Finding Reality
As much as we like to believe, reality is not the default
The propagation of fake news over the past few years has created wide reaching problems, elevated tension, and tearing at the fabric of a globalized society. The control of information has always been a critical tool throughout social development. One of the most widespread original uses of the printing press was to disseminate religious text. Within the realm of warfare, the gathering of intelligence is necessary to make informed decisions and strategies. Throughout the political sphere, the use of propaganda and its modern cousins, attack ads, are powerful tools to shape electoral outcomes.
This ability to manipulate information serves as an inherent advantage in human evolution. Children that learn to lie signals a sign of intelligence. It shows that they are able to understand some advanced psychological concepts. Firstly, they grasp theory of mind, meaning they know other people have minds separate from their own. This is considered a critical developmental milestone. Secondly, it shows that they understand different minds have different access to information. And, thirdly, they are able to create stories that make some contextual sense. Like if some cookies went missing they could blame it on their sister or their brother, especially if they’re usually causing trouble anyway. There’s also a fourth discovery that not all children are able to grasp, except for those keenly aware of the inherent power of stories.
Stories are able to construct realities. To lie is a simple task. It is about fabricating some alternative truth for one independent episode. The dog ate my homework. But when a series of lies can be strung together to create a cohesive narrative it becomes something more complicated, something more real. There is a reason why great empires all had their own story-writing machines. It is the narrative that gives rulers their power and constructs their legacy. One example of such a story is the Great Chain of Beings. God sits above angels, which sit above humans, which sit above all other living things. Along with this sits royalty which were considered the beings closest to the heavens. Similar stories of divine right are almost universal across any historical civilization. The Chinese had their Mandate of Heaven. Ancient Egyptians, Greek, and Romans all had their own hierarchy of those closer to the gods and the rest.
In recent history, there have been similarly extreme forms of information reconstruction. Ranging from the book burning of the Nazi reign, to the Cultural Revolution’s attempt of erasing history to idolize its ruler. The central idea is always the same — to purge a targeted set of information, an ideology, a set of novels, or an entire chapter of history, to essentially clear it from memory. By denying history, it would sever the connection to the past and serve as a catalyst to enshrine the present as the absolute truth along with its ruler as the absolute ruler. This kind of fascist rule might seem like an extreme contrast from children lying, but both center on something fundamental about the human mind, that reality is constructed.
There is a classical concept called tabula rasa, a blank slate, that people are born with empty minds. Over the course of their lives the mind develops and begins to explore its potential. Modern psychology has ruled out a purely blank slate. It is clear that newborns have innate, instinctual reflexes. They are born with a suckling response to ensure they can feed without needing to learn how. They also have automatic motor responses like the feet curling when brushed and hand grasps. That’s why they will always hold your finger when you put it in their hand. Newborns also show facial mimicry. They smile when someone else smiles at them, forming the foundation for socialization.
Beyond these basic instincts there is less certainty of how much a mind is actually born with. Generally, infants are considered to have a certain kind of tendency or temperament. Some are fussy while others are quiet. Some are clingy and others more adventurous. Personality is pretty fuzzy within psychology, but there are much stronger, more concrete evidence when it comes to the senses.
Babies are born legally blind. They can’t see very well because their ocular muscles aren’t able to adjust the lens in the eye well enough to focus until they learn to train it. Infants also seem to develop a sense of depth over time meaning their world starts off two-dimensional. There is also strong evidence that they start to construct a model of the world, not only through depth, but through things like constancy. Object constancy is the concept that an object doesn’t simply disappear when out of sight. Peek-a-boo is so amusing because they literally think you disappeared. Infants also eventually learn to control their bodies to walk and be potty-trained. They learn to decipher all these odd sounds into words. They start to understand things, including themselves, have names. And, as mentioned above, they learn about their own mind and minds of others.
There is a growing movement in neuropsychology of the brain as a pattern recognition machine. It simply takes in information, figures out the patterns, and remembers it for future use. When a baby learns depth, for example, it learns specific cues like motion parallax, when things further away move in our vision slower than those close up. When object constancy is learned, they figure out that when a ball goes behind something else they can go to the other side and see it’s still there. Infants also probably learn about minds the same way. They realize they have their own thoughts and intentions that are different than those of other people after experiencing it thousands of times.
Neuroscientists like David Eagleman and Lisa Feldman Barrett are continuing to provide more evidence that the brain simply recognizes patterns, albeit complex patterns. Eagleman has strangely fascinating experiments like learning to read through vibrations in the skin. As long as the pattern of vibrations is consistently coded to the words, he showed it is possible to read in this way. Barrett tackles the more controversial realm of emotions. She believes that we simply react to the signals our bodies provide and constructs emotional responses after the fact. One example is a study where subjects were given a shot of adrenalin and asked to do a task, but those actually given the drug rather than a placebo made up stories for why they felt the way they did. They said they were nervous, or excited, or anxious, but it was really the injection. They felt they had a certain emotion because they rationalized that is how they should be feeling given what they’ve learned in the past.
Modern technology is starting to cross over heavily with psychology and neurology for a myriad of reasons. Some of the more obvious ones are virtual reality and machine learning. VR is intended to mimic the way our minds perceive reality — at least visually speaking — and in order to do so it must understand all those cues our little infant brains learned so long ago. Within machine learning one of the tools growing in popularity is the convolutional neural network. These AI systems are modelled closely after the layered structure of the neurons in the cortex of the brain, the few millimeters of the wrinkled surface likely responsible for a lot of who we are. Both of these avenues are based on understanding how the brain works and co-opting it to develop better tech.
There is a darker, and more subtle, side to tech psychology too. Mainly it fits into the realm of user manipulation, or as it’s more widely known, behavioural modification. This could be something simple like the use of loot boxes in gaming, and how it replicates the same dopamine hits as slot machines. It provides positive reinforcement when the player “wins” a rare item after many common ones. Something a bit more complex lies in personalize content and advertising. By tracking what people are doing and looking at online, they can be provided with tailored content to keep them on longer and see more targeted ads based on their recent interests. These kinds of tactics are used by major tech companies to optimize engagement of users, or, in other words, keep them addicted. But there’s something even more treacherous going on at a much larger scale, information control.
Cambridge Analytica is a company that utilized information science to hack elections, often against the will of the people. In the documentary, The Great Hack, it outlines how this one company helped elect ruling dictators across many nations including the United States. They did so by weaponizing the pinpoint targeting abilities of a digitally connected world. In the 2016 U.S. election Cambridge Analytica was able to mine data from Facebook for millions of users to create a map of political profiles. They then created a nefarious ad campaign targeting very specific counties in very specific states to swing votes just enough to win the electoral votes. All it took was a few percent in some special areas to hack the convoluted US electoral college.
That was only the beginning. What really mattered wasn’t the ability to tip the scales in their favor, but how it was being done. By constructing a detailed profile of voters, they were able to swing the votes by altering their reality. They were bombarded with, what is now called, fake news so strongly that four years later that chasm has only widened. This is the high tech version of propaganda that is far more subversive and far less obvious, making it all the more dangerous. Whether or not Russia was somehow involved, this cyber attack posing as an advertising campaign was able to tear apart the world’s most powerful nation into two competing realities. This isn’t just about posts and memes and ads anymore. The minds of nearly half the country has been permanently altered. An entire generation of thought has been derailed. A culture torn into state of distrust.
In a way, being able to mold the information around us is the definition of intelligence. The foundation of science and math is, at its very core, the gathering and restructuring of information. They serve as the foundational tools utilized to bring us closer to the true nature of reality. There is a cycle to the development of knowledge. Information is gathered, theories are made, models are created, and if validated, it leads to new insights, new tools that allow more new information to be uncovered.
The way we are born into the world, full of naive imagination, we start to make sense of the things around us. It is said that people are natural born storytellers. We take what we know and piece it into a narrative that makes sense to us whether its about sacrifices to divine beings or the theory of relativity. The pattern deconstruction machines in our heads responsible for the grandest scientific discoveries are the same brains that believe in spirits, ghosts, angels, and demons. Humans are only able to perceive as much as the theories around us allow us to understand.
What makes one story true, or perhaps more truthful, than another story is where we get the information from. What gives the method and field of science its power is that it grounds the truth in the world around us. It fosters a sense of healthy skepticism by questioning our natural intuitions and interpretations and scrutinizes them against hard data. If the numbers are reliably obtained and vigorously checked, it allows the truth to emerge as fact. There is no way of tricking nature into providing a certain truth or validating a certain theory. It is simply what it is. The only way of moving away from reality is to lie. To lie to ourselves, to lie to one another, to lie to the world itself.
We aren’t born into the world knowing reality. We aren’t born into the world as liars either. We are born to learn and decode the world around us with the tools and knowledge at our disposal. Reality is something that is constantly in flux as our ideas of the world change with it. If we are to keep building on the shoulders of giants and get closer and closer to reality, we must understand that the control of information — especially in this digital age — is key to shaping the reality that’s to come. If we continue to embrace our instincts to lie and deceive one another, the only kind of reality that will be left is a fragmented one.
Reality is not the default. It must be earned.
