What is reality? What do you think it is? How do you know what you believe is true? Are there limitations to the model you’re using?

We Humans have been trying to understand our reality and environment since the dawn of humanity. We are natural born storytellers. I’ve been having fun challenging my perceptions of reality and questioning my models of reality. Here is an exposé of how my conception and perception of reality has evolved over the past years. Do your best to keep an open mind and suspend your judgement.

I’ve come across 5 main types of models for reality. This is a two part series. In Part 1, I’ll cover the first two models I’ve been confronted with. In Part 2, I’ll cover alternatives. It so happens that these first two models are the most popular.

Science

The first perspective that has appealed to me and still does to this day is the scientific evolutionary perspective. The quest for objective truth. The appeal of this model is that it is predictive in nature and helps explain a lot of the world around us. It also appeals to our insatiable appetite for knowledge and our desire to know the Truth.

Science’s predictive utility and accuracy at depicting our environment has evolved and is improving constantly, from the Mathematics of the days of Pythagoras, Euclid, Galileo and Guass, to Newtonian Physics, to Einstein’s Relativity, then Quantum Mechanics. Time and Space and Matter. From Socratic questioning, Aristotle’s character types and virtues, to Darwin’s Evolution, Freudian Psychology and Jungian Archetypes, to Dawkin’s Selfish Gene and Buss’s Evolutionary Psychology.

There are however limitations to science. It does not explain everything.
Today Science falls short of explaining dreams, out of body experiences, mystical and spiritual experiences. It doesn’t explain the placebo effect or how spontaneous remissions from cancer are possible. In essence science fails to explain the paranormal and supernatural.

Science relies on the normality of Guass. Therefore anything that belongs to the extremes of the bell curve get gently thrown away and are deemed unscientific, an exception to the rule, or random error. Nassim Taleb eloquently shows in his work titled Incerto, of which Antifragile and Black Swan are a part, that it is really the extremes that shape the world. As he puts it History is a succession of very rare and unlikely Black Swan events (therefore by definition unpredictable) that have enormous consequences. It is the meteor that wipes out the dinosaures, the Ice Age that freezes the world and volcanoes who plunge the world into centuries of darkness that shape the world, more than the constant linear improvement of daily life. History is not linear.

Another drawback of science is Evolution. Evolution is a wonderful theory. The drawback of relying solely on this, though, is that it reduces the human experience to being a mere animal that is here to survive and reproduce—a slave to our Selfish Genes. There is no meaning in this model. Everything becomes bland and devoid of life energy. Why would you want to continue living if that is all you’re supposed to be doing?

We must keep in mind that this is still a model, it is just a story we choose to believe. And a damn good story at that, but a story all the same. As Descartes once put it, the only thing you can know as really true is Mathematics. His famous cogito ergo sum came to him when he was challenging what he knew of reality and questioned Truth.

To summarize, science is great for it’s predictive utility but it misses anything that doesn’t submit to the tyranny of the bell curve.
Despite Science gaining popularity, Religion has not disappeared. Nietzsche wasn’t entirely right when he said God is Dead.

Religion

Nietzsche once said, God is Dead. What he meant was that the Enlightenment and the rise of science killed the possibility of belief in God or any gods having ever existed. And he is right if you are a hardcore scientist for you cannot prove or disprove that God exists. Hence the rise of Atheism and Agnosticism. An interesting thing to note is that despite Science killing God, God still lives on in our societies. Religion is an attempt at explaining what science cannot and giving meaning to our lives.

Religion is one of the oldest societal constructs that exist. Religion is a tool of great utility. The stories religion tell help organise huge masses of people into communities and helping them co-operate. They give meaning to what goes on around us. They satiate our human desire and need to believe in something. They help us deal with the natural uncertainty inherent to life.

People who fight over religion don’t understand what religion is. Religion in and of itself is neither good nor bad. It is a tool. It is never the tool that is the problem it is the way it is used. As Yuval Noah Harari explains in Sapiens and Homo Deus, we humans are great story tellers.

I’ve never really much liked the story of religion because from it implies that some all powerful being is controlling me and that my destiny is written in the stars. My father being Muslim increased my resistance and incomprehension of this model that obviously to me was flawed. The personification of God in monotheic cultures only heightened my angst in this respect. I’d always been content recognising that there were forces greater than me, but I preferred calling them Nature or the Universe. The term God was problematic to me as it implies someone is superior to you. Hence Nietzsche proclaiming that God is Dead.

Then, after reading the works of Joseph Campbell, namely who writes about comparative mythology and the stories humans have been telling forever, my resistance to God lessened. I realised that God was just a story. That other cultures had masculine and feminine gods. The greeks had a god for everything. Native American cultures had gods for everything and venerated Mother Nature. Essentially I moved away from my identification with the purely scientific story by seeing that all stories where an attempt of humans at understand their environment. So despite Science killing God, God lives on. When I read the masterpiece of Vladimir Bartol, Alamut, I was dumbfounded by the power of belief in a specific story. This fictional account of how one man manipulates the islamic religion to create deadly Assassins and amass huge amounts of power was foundational in opening my eyes to how your perception of reality influences you.

Religion has built in limitations, as do all models of reality. All religions are based on an us-versus-them mentality that fosters identification to the group. That is very beneficial to the members of the group but detrimental to outsiders. Religion has many stories that are for the most part metaphorical. And that is where our human nature plays tricks on us. This is where interpretation and group identification can spiral out of control and create wars, destruction and chaos. When two people believe in different stories and more importantly when they believe that these stories are mutually exclusive, big problems arise.

Many people believe Evolution and Religion are mutually exclusive. One of the main arguments is that the genesis myths (Adam and Eve being one of them) don’t fit in with Evolution. The thing is, both are not mutually exclusive. Many scientists are religious. If you ask the question how can both be right? You can find arguments that validate both.

Many people will get frustrated and angry if you start questioning their belief systems. If you start showing them how their models of reality are flawed they will attack you and try to discredit you or tell you you can’t understand because you don’t believe what they do. You must have compassion and develop empathy. You are essentially threatening the only thing they have relied upon to understand this world and survive. And they’ve perhaps relied on it their whole life. So if you start invalidating their beliefs they will feel like they’ve been living a lie, and no one wants to feel that. That is normal. Truth doesn’t always feel so good at first.

A common trap, one of which I am guilty of falling into is to recognise that Science killed God but then confusing Science and by proxy Humans for God. Science becomes a new religion by it’s resistance to religion. How ironic. Why do you think it is so effective to just cite that a theory is based on scientific studies and that it’s proven by peer-reviewed scientists, PhDs, and Doctors? Randomised controlled studies and meta-analysis have become a new religion. If you can’t use those tools to validate something, then it must be false.
This is the same as the analogy: when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Once my resistance to Religion and fanaticism for Science settled, and I got to see that these are both tools and stories we use to understand the world around us, I became more tolerant of different opinions and perspectives. I also recognised that in particular the religious stories didn’t suit my critical mind mainly because of the requirement of belief. If you’re not a believer, you can’t use the model.

Virtual reality was starting to intrigue me and films like the Matrix, Memento, Ready Player One were getting me to question reality. Zan Perrion with his book The Alabaster Girl opened my eyes to a new world of possibilities in the realm of relationships. After playfully experimenting with some of his ideas I was both confused and overjoyed to see that what he talks about actually works. My mind was now open to possibility. Utopian novels like the Kin Of Ata Are Waiting For You, where the society is organised to optimise for dreaming made me question dreams and their source.

Quite randomly or perhaps synchronistically I came back to Steve Pavlina’s work as he had been instrumental to shaping some of my perspectives in the past. I got to participate in the creation of his program called Submersion and to say the least that was the best investment I’ve made in my life so far. He opened some doors I’d never even considered.

In Part 2 I’ll be talking of the other three main models of reality their advantages and limitations, mainly Source perspective, Dream perspective and Simulation theory.

What’s your experience with belief been? What is your preferred model of reality?