Realism

In a previous post I wrote about the limitation of human experience through our senses and how machines pose an interesting question of how much more of the world they could experience given how easy it is to give them new senses.  There is another element to this thought experiment that I didn't touch on because it is a topic in and of itself.  That element is the definition of what is real.  This is a question that has entire branches of psychology and philosophy devoted to answering that question but it's not as straight forward as you would think.

Let's take an example, most people would say that what is real is what they can perceive through their five senses, through sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.  If I was to present to you something that looked like a bear, sounded like a bear, smelt like a bear, felt like a bear, and if you managed to get close enough to taste it and knew what a bear tasted like, assume it tastes like one too, would you say it is real?  You'll probably be smart enough here to respond not with a yes or no answer but to say "it depends" in that you want me to define what is real in this sense.  Yes, the bear does exist and is right in front of you, but you're probably more interested in whether or not it is a real bear or whether it is an animatronic or some other form of technological imitation of what you define as a "real" bear.

The interesting thing about this example is that you define what is real by what meets your expectations, not what meets your sensations.  Even though you can sense everything that you would sense when met with a real life bear, you still want to know whether it is biological or mechanical in nature.  That's a good thing because it demonstrates a critical mind and inquisitive nature, but it's also a bad thing because it illustrates how you are sceptical in an environment where you are predisposed to being sceptical.  If I was not around, and you were to meet the same thing in the middle of a forest, on your own, with no-one else around, and nowhere to run to for shelter, would you react the same way?  Would you stop and think about whether or not it is an actual bear, or whether it might be something made to convince you it is?  Most people with their wits about them will make the assumption it is real and act on impulse in order to survive.

In situations where you abandon your critical mind and your scepticism, what is actually real in the sense of being what it portends to being becomes irrelevant, instead you rely only on your senses.  This brings us down to a more basic, primitive state of being where anyone who wishes to convince us something is real when it is not, needs only to convince our five senses that this is the case.  Arguably in the example above you don't even need to convince all five, most people would get nowhere near the bear to touch it, and it would be quite bizarre to try and lick it to see what it tastes like.  That leaves sight, sound, and smell.  The last one, again, most people won't get close enough to smell it, nor would they know what a bear smelt like to begin with, so you can cross that one off too.  The reality emerges that what is real in this situation is limited only to what you can see and hear.  Those two senses are very easy to trick.  It's not hard to produce noise especially if you have the equipment at hand to do it, and it's also not hard to create a lifelike model of a bear, which is conveniently big enough to hide the aforementioned equipment. 

The movie 'The Matrix' takes this idea to a different level, incorporating a philosophy known as 'The Brain In A Vat' which postulates that every sense the human body has is an interpretation of electrical signals by the brain and that it would theoretically be possible to suspend a human brain in a vat and attach electrodes that could feed it the signals it expects to receive, making it possible to convince that brain that it is living in a world that it can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear, even though none of it is real and the brain doesn't even have a body.

Whilst not taking the idea to that extreme, there are examples within our world of instances where we see and hear things that aren't there.  If you have bad experiences with drugs, or if you have a mental illness such a Schizophrenia, the combination of visual and auditory hallucinations can make you see and hear things that aren't there.  This is a concept that is quite unnerving for me because it demonstrates how much we rely on our senses to know what is and is not real.  In the movie 'Alice Through The Looking Glass' there is a scene where Alice wakes up in a mental institution where she was brought after she returned from Underland [the canonical name of the place she refers to a Wonderland] and nobody in our world believed anything she was saying.  There is something incredibly unnerving about that scene for me because there's a question that arises there for Alice as to how much faith she has that what she experienced was real, as opposed to the idea that it was a delusion and none of it actually happened.  In the original movie from the franchise and the original story by Lewis Carroll, Alice did awaken at the end as if from a dream which leaves the whole thing ambiguous as to whether or not Underland actually exists.

Staying with the theme of Alice, the idea that you can't always trust your senses is not only limited to illusions and attempts to make us see or hear or feel things that aren't there.  There is actually a real neurological condition known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome named after the story it is a rare condition where the sufferer has an experience where their senses alter their perception of the world, they can feel much bigger or much smaller than they actually are, resulting in a warped spatial awareness that causes them to see things grow or shrink rather like Alice when she grew and shrank and the world around her changed size.  This is something that is purely perceptive though, the body doesn't actually change size of course, only the perception of the world shifts.

Can you trust your senses?  Are you capable of believing things which you cannot experience or prove without those five senses?  As I mentioned in my previous post, the human body can actually sense much more than those five basic senses, things like temperature, orientation, gravity, and sense of self awareness etc extend our experience beyond those five senses so why are we so eager to define what is real and what is not by what we can experience through them alone?