We're Hallucinating Our Objective Reality
And we keep forgetting about it! So here's why objectivity doesn't point to truth, and here's what to do about it instead.
We like to point to objective reality and refer to it as truth, but this could not be further from the truth.
Yet, this is only normal. After all, we are social creatures who feel our best when we’re in agreement with others.
But this can also leave us vulnerable to take what we’re told at face value and operate out of belief systems created by everyone but us.
This is a topic I’ve been having lots of fun talking about, researching and writing about. It kept coming up in conversation for me, but I didn’t have the knowledge to explain it well enough.
Then, in rather divine timing, I came across a piece by
on personal truths and its relation to objective reality, so I took this as a sign it was time to collect my thoughts.But the truth about the truth is that it’s not personal. Truth is grounded in objectivity. And while the universe adheres to objective reality, individual people also have their own subjective reality. When I say “objective,” I’m referring to something measurable, like an object. And when I say “subjective,” I’m referring to things that relate to a subject, such as oneself. If one’s truth is not anchored in objective reality, it is not the truth; it’s an opinion. Clinging to personal truths often leads to conflict and self-inflicted suffering, as it’s hard to battle over an opinion.
—
, Expectations, Opinions, and New Friends
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with what Jen has said here. There is indeed a clear distinction between objective and subjective reality in context of our human experience, and truthfully, it also serves as a great introductory quote to this piece.
However… we’re here to expand past the conventional paradigms of what we think we know.
To do that, we’re going to explore the idea that the objective reality we experience as humans, is entirely subjective by nature.
That is, there’s no such thing as objective reality (and therefore truth) — it’s all opinion.
Here’s what our journey of exploration will look like from here:
First, we'll kick this party off by exercising our 💡 Perspective muscles.
With that, we’ll expand our 👁️ Awareness and cement the ideas presented.
Lastly, we’ll come back down to planet earth for some 🧬 Integration into our everyday experience.
💡 Perspective
Perception
The first thing anyone thinks about is about how they can interact with objective reality through their five senses; seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting and touching.
“If I can see, touch and smell this flower right here in front of me, how could that not be real or objective?”.
It is real or objective to you (and most other humans), but what we tend to overlook is the fact that different organisms on this planet perceive the same reality entirely differently, and this happens between humans too!
For example:
Humans can look at the same colour and see two different colours.
Humans with synesthesia can hear feelings, see thoughts and taste words.
Electric eels interact with and perceive reality primarily through electricity.
The zebra finch (bird) can see 4 independent colour channels versus 3 in humans (tetrachromatic vision).
The takeaway:
All experiences are filtered through the faculties of human thought and perception, which is entirely subjective by nature.
Subjective humans corroborate reality exclusively with other subjective humans (the ultimate echo chamber).
We’re limited by the fact that we are human, so we cannot be certain that what we see out there is representative of true reality.
Evidence
The next thing people think about is how objective reality can be quantified or somehow validated through empirical evidence.
“I’ve just checked the weather and it’s 5°C (41°F) outside. I also feel cold, so how can you tell me it’s not cold when I can point to the weather to prove it?”.
Sure, but what about the fact that the temperature scale is an entirely arbitrary invention created by completely subjective humans? The same applies to the entire faculties of science, mathematics and physics.
Subjective humans have been inventing, defining, labelling and shaping our existence since the beginning of time — we’ll call these structures. Once others have agreed upon these structures, they become “objective”, but there’s plenty of examples where these appearingly objective structures are in direct conflict with one another, are in the process of being discarded for newer and better ones, or just entirely different all together.
For example:
Ethiopia runs on its own calendar, which is seven to eight years behind the Gregorian calendar.
Only three countries in the world use the imperial system, while the rest of the world uses the metric system.
Newton’s laws of motion which are ingrained in us as fundamental truths are irreconcilable to quantum mechanics (laws that govern subatomic particles).
It’s widely accepted that genes determine our destiny, but Bruce Lipton’s work on epigenetics challenges this view, suggesting our beliefs and perceptions can directly alter and influence our gene expression1.
The takeaway:
People invent arbitrary structures, provide logic, reasoning and a platform to validate ‘truth’ from, and if enough people agree, they become the objective reality we point to as truth.
The objective truths we point to are in conflict with one another and are heavily influenced by cultural orientations and belief systems.
Objective reality operates as consensus or put another way, it operates more like a collective hallucination, rather than something absolute.
👁️ Awareness
The Universe Is Not Locally Real
Local realism says we live in an objective reality whose properties exist completely independent of our minds, and although classical physics agrees (Newton & Einstein), quantum mechanics does not.
Locality: an object can only be influenced by its immediate surroundings and that any influence can only travel at the speed of light, so if you clapped your hands right now, only the people within hearing distance from you can hear it, but not someone on the other side of the world.
Realism: objects possess definite properties independent to observation, so when a tree falls in the woods with no one around to witness it, it not only makes a sound, but it has specific properties too (e.g. weight, colour, etc).
Just recently in 2022, John Clauser, Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on quantum entanglement, proving particles can become linked and influence each other instantaneously even if they’re billions of light-years away, completely violating local realism as a result and proving the objective universe is not locally real2.
So what does that mean for us?
Spacetime Is Not Fundamental
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that spacetime (the way matter and energy interact over time) is not fundamental to reality, rather it’s more like an evolutionary user interface.
In other words, we’re all wearing VR headsets to experience a rendered version of reality, rather than looking out to absolute reality — just like how the user interfaces we interact with on our computers and smartphones are completely disconnected from the diodes and resistors under the hood that produce the visual experience.
Donald loves to say “spacetime is doomed”, but this theory was first introduced in a 2005 paper by David Gross, which said that spacetime has no meaning once we zoom into reality past a certain point called the Planck scale. Donald goes on to say that quantum theory is also doomed, and there’s much deeper structures at play that modulate reality — for which physicists are currently developing highly sophisticated mathematical models for3.
This is all terribly complex, and this ain’t a science paper, but essentially we’re at a pivotal moment in history where a new framework for understanding the true nature of reality is needed. The most compelling theory, at least to me, is that everything in reality — including us — is derived from, suspended within, and experienced through and as consciousness.
The Hard Problem of Matter
Rather beautifully, this all ties into ‘The Hard Problem of Consciousness’, a term coined in 1995 by philosopher David Chalmers which attempts to explain how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience — how do we get the subjective taste of chocolate from the neural activity in our brains? Still to this day, nobody knows — all we have is theories.
One of the more popular theories, Panpsychism, which has been around for hundreds of years and is also supported by David Chalmers, says consciousness is present at a fundamental level inside the brain and inside all physical matter within the universe. This theory is entirely based on the presupposition that matter is fundamental to the nature of reality… which we now know ain’t looking too good.
If consciousness is fundamental to reality, how then does the apparently physical world contained in spacetime arise? That’s the truly interesting question here.
Rupert Spira, a philosopher and proponent of non-dual teaching Advaita Vedanta, says ‘The Hard Problem of Matter’ is a much more suitable name as he predicts we’ll look back on all this in the not too distant future the same way we now look back on flat Earth theory.
We'll realise that the universe is not a physical universe that has consciousness.
The universe is consciousness.
All there is to the universe is consciousness.
And the universe is what consciousness looks like when it perceives itself from the perspective of a separate subject of experience.
— Rupert Spira4
🧬 Integration
It’s easy to see that objective reality doesn’t truly exist, but rather is resultant of our perception of it.
Our minds project all kinds of distortions like thoughts, feelings, perceptions, preferences and belief systems onto reality, so reality appears to the mind in accordance with those distortions.
Since we are humans who can only know reality as it is refracted through the human mind (being human is the largest distortion of them all), we may never come to know an absolute objective reality.
At least one that can be proven and not in conflict with any other theory or version of objective reality so that it may be agreed upon and accepted by all humans unanimously.
And that’s if we don’t encounter or find out about any hyper intelligent extraterrestrial beings who have a much more sophisticated view on reality than us.
But, a concession… we do of course need to point to objective reality to show up and interact in the world of today.
So then what can we do with this information? I think we can do a lot with it.
We can…
Trust Ourselves More
All structures within the paradigm of the objective reality we find ourselves in are a result of people making stuff up, and the majority agreeing on it.
If everything is consensus based, what if we went inward and checked with our inner material more often rather than taking everything we hear, see and learn out there at face value?
When looking for the answers to circumstances that are entirely unique and nuances to us as an individual, we can go within and trust our inner knowing, rather than seek answers externally.
Remain Open
As humans, we like to think we’re quite literally the centre of the universe, but we tend to forget just how insignificant we are in context.
Our galaxy has at least 100 billion planets alone, with 60 billion estimated to be habitable.
There are approximately two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each containing hundreds of billions or even trillions of stars.
In the entire observable universe there are about 23 sextillion planets (2 followed by 23 zeros), with 50 sextillion estimated to be habitable.
So yeah. That’s like, a lot.
We only know what we know because of our experience of being human (reality is filtered through our minds), but we don’t and can’t know anything else.
Instead of walking around like we’re the centre of the universe and imposing our limited and distortional belief systems onto other humans, why not be ready to disidentify with them and drop them in favour of a better cause, like becoming a better human so we can be better and do better for humanity as a whole?
After all, what we do know, is that we don’t know anything at all.
Be Kinder
The exercise of writing this article had me realise that I’ve unconsciously judged others when their subjective version of reality wasn’t syncing up with the widely accepted objective reality.
The thing is, we can never truly know exactly what it feels like to experience life as that other person, let alone how they experience a very specific and isolated moment of objective reality that everyone else points to as truth.
People deal with so many struggles and distortions which are then layered ontop of their reality, that we (someone who is not them) cannot see; health issues, work issues, financial stress, mental worries, etc.
Is this person really not getting it, or are they just being entirely unique and completely them? Is there anything wrong with that? There shouldn’t be!
I think the more interesting question is: why does it bother us in the first place?
With all the destruction going on in the world, we could all stand to be kinder and more empathetic toward others in general.
Thank you for being here with me, it means a lot! Three things before we go:
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Great article Roc. I love it ❤️
This is deep Roc. It’s fascinating how ‘truths’ arise from culture, consensus, and agreement. And it gives me hope to know we can alter our subjective reality through a shift in perspective. Great article 🙌🏽