What's Real?

So what is real? No seriously, what do you think is real to humans?

The Unthinking Realist argues that everything we experience is exactly the way the world is. Sugar is sweet, water is wet because that is what water is, roses are red, the sky is blue because that is just how it is.

Well, actually, no. Thinking realists beg to differ. A thinking realist would say color does not really exist out there, it is all in our brain. A rose is not red. Red is a particular wavelength of light, and our brain converts that into the sensation of red. So the sensation of red belongs to us, not to the world. Same with taste. Sugar is not sweet. It is sweet to us because of a particular reaction in our tongue that our brain interprets in a particular way. Sugar is not sweet, it is just a chemical.

If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and no one was there to hear it, did it make a noise? No, it does not, because there is no one to experience that noise. Sound does not exist outside the brain. When a tree falls, it emits a vibration. Those vibrations tickle the hair cells in our ears, which activate frequency specific neurons in the brain. The brain then constructs the sound we perceive. A noise is an experience. It needs an observer in order to exist.

Subjective reality is the way you personally experience and interpret the world, based on your thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Objective reality is the way things actually are, independent of your personal thoughts. The human brain interprets and processes sensory information to create a subjective reality that we perceive as real, shaped by our perception, experiences, and biases. So what we experience is not an accurate reflection of objective reality.

This is to say, the mind does not seek truth and accuracy. It seeks meaning. Our minds did not evolve to be scientific tools, they evolved to be survival tools.

Now let us talk about belief. There is a phenomenon in the medical field called the placebo effect, when a person responds to a fake treatment because they believe it will work. There is even a syndrome called Koro, a psychiatric disorder characterized by acute anxiety and a belief that one's body is shrinking, where the belief itself produces the physical experience. This is real, and it is grouped under what are called culture bound syndromes, where only a specific society or culture experiences a certain syndrome based on their beliefs.

So if I were to ask, is God real? Our answer focuses on the wrong word, which is God. The word we ought to focus on is real. Whether God is really real or not, if we feel him as real based on our personal experiences or societal biases, then he is real to us. Because we all experience real subjectively, and that subjective reality makes complete sense to us.

I will end by asking you one question. Do our brains conform to the world, or does the world conform to our brains?