—SECOND PART: Representalism. Additional details, and the profound implications of it...
Diving into the depths of our world simulation:
When we sign or try to describe some phenomenons that appear within our experience, they forcibly seem covered by the fact that we actually live inside a representation of the environment, so we’re describing the behavior and properties of our own world simulation, not about the “objective” world per se, because we don’t have access to it. So, according to this argument, some subjective impressions that we’ve about certain events or phenomena from our experience can be justified. For this reason, I wouldn’t blame the people from the past, who believed (as an example) that the sky was a huge dome painted blue —As I mentioned previously, these kinds of beliefs, and subjective impressions can be explained in a simple way—.
The sky actually seems to have a curvature —which reminds of a dome—, but the thing is that this comes within the category of empirical observations, which can be explained in terms of how our experience of the world works, but not in the terms of an external world per se. Otherwise, we could become lost within extended narratives that don’t lead us anywhere, such as it was common in the past. We can get a complete explanation for everything if we first understand how human experience works by itself.
I remark that our human phenomenology is in essence a system, a model that’s ruled by certain parameters, and principles, which can be comprehended. I make a brief pause here to remark that in the past there were a lot of beliefs of this kind, which were well received and accepted within social groups. Their aim was trying to give an explanation to some apparent phenomena shown inside our common experience of the world. I suggest that if we desire to comprehend the “folklore” that involves human dynamics, such as culture, religion, society, theology, etcetera; we should before base our conjectures on a proper and complete understanding of how the human mind works, especially of our conscious experience.
Our experience of the world works in terms of represent, and maintain a stable and coherent appearance, all the time, without needing an “additional dimension”; we could think of our mind as a kind of extravagant, enveloping and interactive theater, whose main aim is reduced to perform a well-made play that can be congruent. Allowing us at the same time to build up consistent models about the contents that are shown within the experience; objects, phenomena, events, etcetera. Reinforcing the illusion that we’ve direct and immediate access to a genuine, objective and detached world (direct realism).
Then there are other kinds of odd assertions, such as those based on subjective impressions made behind the curtain of non-trivial conditions of the mind (altered states of consciousness), in which the parameters of our world simulations stop worrying about constructing a coherent model of the environment, becoming chaotic, giving rise to these astonishing phenomena of experience. Where the subject can find itself within completely hallucinated spaces or places, and even capable of interacting with objects, or entities apparently independent. In other words, some sensory modalities can also interlock and synchronize with one another to create hallucinated objects, events, even “beings” that are completely congruent, which may convince most people, although this isn’t always the rule, other experiences can be overly chaotic, bordering on the bizarre. As I put emphasis on lately, all the stuff mentioned before can be explained as mere changes in the parameters of our world simulation, also with certain dynamics the brain uses to represent external stimuli, and render our experience of the world.
In the type of skepticism I promote, on the basis of indirect realism, and phenomenology, we could think of the world we experience as an extension of our own minds, and the mind works according to its own terms and rules. “Look around you, listen to your surroundings, feel your body; this is the form of your mind”. The fact that the mind instantiates a representation of the “genuine” and inaccessible external world, makes the task of understanding reality even more confusing. We only have access to a completely simulated environment.
So, what we’re actually studying are the contents of our experience, therefore we create a mental model about the world our mind represents, but this makes us blind to the phenomenon of the experience by itself.
The most prominent feature of our experience is the quality of “directess”; and is in essence the observation that leads the main premise upon which we construct our suppositions. All the mentioned points before are actually observations of the phenomena and general features that exist exclusively inside the world simulation we inhabit.
Returning to the previous topic, our world simulations appear to have properties attributed to direct realism, in other words, the world we experience seems to behave as if we were actually perceiving our environment directly and immediately, but this is only another parameter of the representation itself, a kind of adaptive illusion.
Is evident that evolution made a great effort to convince us of the authenticity of this simulated world, in order to maintain ourselves immersed and continuously cooperating with replicators, besides, knowing that we’re within a representation doesn’t provide any substantial value in terms of survival. Unfortunately we haven’t evolved to contemplate the implications of our own condition…
Most people —if not everyone— are naive-direct realists, even a great number of scientists committed to study perception still fall within this category. There are also people who know that direct realism is indeed not the case, but they keep not knowing the implications behind it.
I would say that direct realism is a fact, BUT!, only WITHIN our world simulation, because this representation is by itself a clear consequence of INDIRECT REALISM —perceive=represent—.
Our brains are capable of rendering whole virtual worlds that exhibit a unified behavior. Though each sensory modality is rendered individually in a different place of the brain, in relation with others —spatially distributed—, they can appear simultaneously within the same “bubble” of experience, in such a way that we can inhabit a unified-complete virtual representation of the environment. Combined with that, our world simulation corresponds to a sophisticated system of nonlinear waves moving and interacting with one another, which is similar to a dynamic lattice of interrelations, so there’s an obvious interconnectivity throughout its structure. This, translates itself into a continuity that permeates the world we experience.