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In a rainbow, the physical frequency of the light changes smoothly and linearly with distance (1). Yet, when you look at a rainbow, you see colors grouped into bands, with relatively sharp borders. And it's not just you. Everyone sees the bands.
It gets worse. Consider: The frequency of light is a linear, scalar, real number. The visible frequencies of light rise linearly from red to blue, bounded by infrared and ultraviolet. But if you look at a color wheel on your computer, you'll see that it's a wheel. Red to orange to yellow to green to blue to... purple? ... and back to red again. Where does purple come from? It's a color that doesn't exist, seemingly added on afterwards to turn a linear spectrum into a circle!
It turns out the color purple and the bands in a rainbow are both artifacts of the way humans perceive color space, which in turn is a result of the way our visual cortex has evolved to distinguish objects in the ancestral environment and maintain color constancy under natural lighting. (For more about this, see "The Perceptual Organization of Colors" in "The Adapted Mind". It's definitely a cool article.)
The color purple, and the bands in the rainbow, aren't real. But everyone sees them, so you can't just call them hallucinations. I prefer to strike a happy compromise and say that purple and rainbows exist in the Consensus. Nobody actually lives in external reality, and we couldn't understand it if we did; too many quarks flying around. When we walk through a hall, watching the floor and walls and ceiling moving around us, we're actually walking through our visual cortex. That's what we see, after all. We don't see the photons reflected by the walls, and we certainly don't see the walls themselves; every single detail of our perception is there because a neuron is firing somewhere in the visual system. If the wrong neuron fired, we'd see a spot of color that wasn't there; if a neuron failed to fire, we wouldn't see a spot of color that was there. From this perspective, the actual photons are almost irrelevant. Furthermore, all the colors in the hall you're walking through are technically incorrect due to that old color-space thing. Heck, you might even walk past something purple.
This is the point where the philosopher usually goes off the solipsistic deep end. "It's all arbitrary! Nothing is real! Everything is true! I can say whatever I want and nobody can do a thing about it, bwahaha!" I hate this whole line of thinking. If I ever start sounding like this, check my forehead for lobotomy scars.
The Consensus usually has an extremely tight sensory, predictive, and manipulative binding to external reality. No, it doesn't work 100% of the time, but it works 99.99% of the time, so the rules are just as strict. Just because you can't see external reality directly doesn't mean it isn't there.
Everything you see is illusion, the Veil of Maya. Where Eastern philosophy goes wrong is in assuming that the Veil of Maya is hiding something big and important. What lies behind the illusion of a brick is the actual brick. The vast majority of the time, you can forget the Veil of Maya is even there.
Nor does our residence in the Consensus grant the Consensus primacy over external reality. The Consensus itself is just another part of reality. That's how reality binds the Consensus; it's just one part of reality affecting another part, under the standard rules of interaction imposed by the laws of physics. External reality existed before the patterns in reality known as "humans" or "the Consensus". People who ignore external reality on the grounds that "all truth is subjective" tend to have their constituent quarks assimilated by the quark-patterns we call "tigers".
However, sometimes it's important to remember that tigers only exist in the Consensus. Suppose someone asks you for a definition of a "tiger", and you give them a definition that works 99.99% of the time - "big orange cat thingy with stripes". Then whoever it is paints a tiger green and says, "Ha, ha! Your definition is wrong!" What I would do in this case is give a more precise definition based on genetics, behavior patterns, and so on, but then you have cyborg tigers and mutant tigers. At that point, it becomes important to remember that it's "just" the Consensus. You shouldn't expect things in the Consensus to have perfect mathematical definitions. Evolution doesn't select for tigers, or tiger-perceiving minds, that have philosophically elegant definitions; evolution selects whatever works most of the time.
So why does the Consensus work? Because of a fundamental rule of reductholism: Forget about definitions. Anything true "by definition" is a tautology, and bears no relation to external reality - does not even refer to external reality.
Forget about definitions, and if you find that some cognitive perception is inherently subjective or observer-dependent - that the perception relies on qualities that exist only in the mind of the observer - then relax and accept it as being useful to intelligence most of the time, and don't go into philosophical fits. It isn't real, after all, so why should you worry?
Hey, that's life in the Consensus.
| DEFN: | Consensus: The Consensus is the world of shared perceptions that humanity inhabits. Things in the Consensus aren't really really real, but they usually correspond tightly to reality - enough to make the rules about what you can and can't say just as strict. What distinguishes the Consensus from actual reality is that there is no a priori reason why things should be formalizable, philosophically coherent, or unambiguous. |
| Next: | 2.2: Sensory modalities |
| Up: | 2: Mind |
| Prev: | 2.1: World-model |