How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life by Nicholas Kardaras PhD

Author:Nicholas Kardaras, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609253493
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser Conari

9

The Physical World: The Tip of the Reality Iceberg

Do you believe the old adage “seeing is believing”? Are you like our friends from Missouri, the “Show Me State,” where seeing some-thing is the equivalent of confirming that it exists?

If you do think that seeing is indeed believing, then ask your-self, is this always true? Are our eyes the most reliable means of discerning reality? Or, for that matter, are any of our senses really reliable when it comes to perceiving what's real?

Well, I can say this: Plato and Pythagoras sure didn't think so.

Just ask yourself, have your eyes ever played tricks on you? Have you ever thought that you saw something, but then realized maybe you hadn't really seen what you thought you had seen?

For instance, have you ever been driving late at night on a long, repetitive stretch of highway when all of a sudden you could have sworn that you saw something—perhaps a shadow—on the road? But then, after rubbing your weary eyes a bit, you realized that it was just a road gremlin? Road gremlins are the highway versions of the airborne gremlins that fatigued fighter pilots during World War II were convinced that they had seen mischievously wrecking havoc on the their engines while in flight. (Twilight Zone fans will remember the classic episode “Terror at 20,000 Feet,” in which a young and ruddy faced William Shatner played the role of a wild-eyed and hallucinating— or was he?—airplane passenger that keeps seeing a hairy gremlin doing a tap-tap-tap number on the engine immediately outside of his window.)

And what about optical illusions? We've all seen the ones where one line looks shorter than the other, but is actually the same length as the other. This was an optical illusion first developed by Italian psychologist Mario Ponzo (see figures 3 and 4). It demonstrated the mind's ability to subjectively judge an object's size based on its background.

Our pattern-seeking brains often see what's not there: Aoccdring to rscheearch at Cmabbrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in what order the ltteers in a word are, the only iprmoatnt thing is that the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.

Were you able to read the preceding passage? If you were, then your mind was “seeing” and reading what really wasn't there. Your brain was interpreting the letters in a way that makes sense for it; it read an actual word even when the word was spelled out very differently than it should have been.

Then there are the more dramatic natural optical illusions like sunsets and rainbows. Is the sun actually going down in the horizon? And is a rainbow really there, or does it merely exist in the visual cortex of our brains as we process the refracting light?

For that matter, does any color really exist, in the objective phenomenological sense? Is a brown chair really brown? Or is the color that we think

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