5. Taking a Deeper Dive
On the everlasting mystery of reality
I once went on a journey in which I flew, at great speed, over an extensive and variable landscape - desert, forest, green hills, plains with farms and villages, snow-capped tops, and vast areas of clear blue sky. It was an extraordinary and exciting adventure, one that you might have had yourself. For this was my one and only experience of virtual reality. All the time, I was sitting in a big chair wearing a headset display attached to a computer and other components.
What seemed to be very real to me - my flying through three-dimensional space, over the desert, forest, hills and mountains, etc. did not exist as such. It was the result of the activity of nerve cells in my visual system and brain. And what triggered this activity? Arrangements of light, produced by silicon and software; electrons flowing through circuits and creating patterns of photons emitted by microscopic displays inside the headset. I may say that that was 'reality'. But how I experienced that reality - flying over all those dramatic and varied landscapes - was nothing resembling 'the real thing'.
The above provides an analogy, albeit an imperfect one, for the assertion that each one of us only experiences the world as it is uniquely represented by our mental maps and not as it really is 'out there'. The analogy is imperfect because in the virtual reality set-up, we can compare what we experience with the external source of that experience, but only as our mind represents it; both are mental maps. Were we to be really flying over the terrain described above, we have no means of comparing what we experience with reality itself.
Indeed, even scientists can only rely on their mental maps. Just like the rest of us, they speak of the vastness of space and the universe, galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars, black holes, planets such as our Earth with oceans, rivers, mountains, forests, deserts and so on. And they can tell us many things that we do not know about them. But ultimately, they are in the same position as someone in the virtual reality set-up. Except that in that situation one can provide a description of the actual sources (the software, electronic hardware, etc.) of what one is experiencing (sky, mountains, forests, etc.) whereas one cannot do so in the 'everyday world'.
Remember, however, that our mental maps, just like any physical map, can be more or less accurate. And science does provide us with more accurate maps. But it's a good idea that we all try our best to ensure that our mental maps are accurate and, when others communicate with us, to think about the accuracy of theirs.
We have dived deeper into the domain of philosophy, specifically those branches of this discipline that consider what we mean by concepts such as 'reality' and 'existence'. Not being qualified in philosophy, what I conclude from all this is that while we assume the existence of reality, what either of these is will always remain a mystery.
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