A Treachery of Reality: Life is A Hallucination
Where neuroscience and surrealism collide
During the first outbreak of Covid-19, walking down the streets evoked some kind of familiar, yet extra-terrestrial feeling. I couldn’t quite put the feeling down in words, but I knew it had something to do with cities being empty; buildings looking lonely and isolated. After all, we have built and normalised cities to be a prime destination for the population, making them in some ways equal to nature: eternal in our perception, as if they were always there. But the façade of the city I live in didn’t change with the pandemic. Rather, it was the atmosphere that was mutating. Everything felt devoid of life, almost as if it had lost all of its intrinsic meaning.
As time passed, I forgot all about that feeling I couldn’t name. But these intelligible questions have a way of coming around again. A few days ago, after a mindless scroll through a plethora of YouTube videos, I came across a short video titled “When The World Became A De Chirico Painting”, and I was illuminated. That sensation I felt was exactly that which the author of the video narrated: the city felt surreal, and quite accurately, like a de Chirico painting.
Even though this does not seem inherently related to the topic of consciousness and illusion, it is analogous with the thought…
