- Sometimes people wanna say,
"No, we definitely don't experience reality
the way that it actually is."
And some people wanna say, "Yes, we do."
Philosophers have been arguing about this
for like as long as philosophy has existed:
The question of does your experience match reality,
or are you really experiencing reality
in its stark, objective truth?
And the answer is simply: "Not exactly."
Reality, for us, is what we can sense
with our sensory surfaces,
and what we can make sense of with the signals in our brain.
The signals in our brain are as necessary
for our experience of reality
as the sensory signals that come from the world.
So, I'm gonna use a metaphor
to describe how the brain works.
It goes something like this:
Your brain, my brain, everybody's brain,
is trapped in its own dark, silent box called your skull.
And the brain has no knowledge
of what is going on around it
in the world or in the body, right?
Because it's in this skull,
and it's receiving sensory signals
from the sensory surfaces of your body.
These signals are the outcomes of some changes
in the world or in the body-
but the brain doesn't know what the changes are,
it's receiving the outcomes.
And that is what philosophers and scientists
call the 'Reverse inference problem.'
You start with an outcome,
and you have to guess at the cause.
For example, if you hear a loud bang,
it could be a car backfiring, a door slamming,
it could be a gunshot.
Your brain doesn't know what the causes are,
it only knows the effect,
and so, it has to guess.
And the guess is important, right?
Because you would do different things if it's a gunshot
versus if it's a windy day that slammed a door.
And luckily, it has one other source of information,
and that is your past experience.
The really cool thing about this-
if that wasn't cool enough-
is that it's actually doing it predictively.
Sometimes scientists talk about this
as the brain running a model of the world,
but the brain is not running a model of the world;
the brain is running a model of its body,
and it's doing it in this really interesting way.
In psychology,
a group of instances which are similar is called a category.
In essence, what your brain is doing,
when it's making a prediction,
it's creating a category of instances from the past
which are similar in some way to the present,
in order to predict what's going to happen next,
what the brain has to do next,
and what your experience will be next.
And so, when a human brain
is creating a category,
you have to ask, "What features of similarity is it using?"
Is it these sensory and motor features?
An apple is round.
An apple is hard and crunchy.
Or is it these abstract features;
abstract, multimodal summaries of patterns of features.
I could take a bunch of apples
and I could say, "Well, these are good for baking,
and these are not good for baking."
And these patterns, this summary, only exists in your brain.
Because our brains are structured to construct categories
based on the function of things
rather than what they look like,
or taste like, or smell like,
humans can create something called 'Social reality,'
which is where we collectively impose a function on objects
that the objects don't have
by virtue of their physical nature.
So, a really good example of this is money-
little pieces of paper.
We all agree that these little piece of paper
have a function of value.
And it turns out that many things that we think of
as being part of reality are actually like this.
We can draw lines in the sand
and create the borders of countries,
which creates categories of people
called immigrants and citizens.
We can create governments
because we all agree that certain actions
like making little tick marks
has a meaning to elect someone
into a position that has certain powers-
it's a form of social reality.
In our lab, we work on the hypothesis
that many psychological categories
are forms of social reality.
We impose a meaning on a scowling face
that it did not evolve to have,
but because we all agree that it has that meaning
or that function in a particular culture,
then it does.
To say that your brain resides in a dark, silent box
doesn't mean that you are trapped in that box.
Your brain has this wonderful capacity
to take bits and pieces of past experience
and create something completely new
that you've never experienced before.
We call it imagination.
That's a double-edged sword, right?
Because our brains are so good at imagining
and creating predictions
that are not yoked to our immediate surroundings,
sometimes we have a lot of trouble staying in the present.
You have to practice your ability to control
how much you wanna be constrained
by what's going on outside that box-
and how much you wanna be free of it.