In the scene where Morpheus first meets Neo in The Matrix, he explains that “reality” is just a series of electrical impulses in our brain. He shows Neo images of what the post-apocalyptic city actually looks like, calling it “The Desert of the Real.” I touched on this in my recent post, “Everything is an Experience.” Our entire reality is constructed in our minds. Our brains create a Matrix for each of us.
This is not to say that there are no physical things in the world. Of course there are. If you jump in front of a bus, you’ll find this out the hard way. It’s just that how we see those “real” things isn’t as they actually are. The bus is a swirling mass of electrons, protons, and neutrons that form atoms that come together as molecules of elements that combine into metals, glass, rubber, and plastic.
But the bus is mostly space. Atomic structure contains very little “matter.” In fact, only one quadrillionth of an atom’s volume is matter; the rest is probabilistic electron clouds (the space where an electron might be at any given time). Without getting into quantum mechanics, if the matter that makes up the bus were compressed to eliminate all the space, it would be the size of a grain of sand, though it would still weigh about 12,000 pounds.
Our Brains Are Simulation Engines
Just as the bus is an illusion of matter, our perception is an illusion of completeness. We can’t see the bus as it is because our eyes are processing the light reflected off the bus and its various elements. And our minds reconstruct that light reflection into an image. It turns out that the bus is a very heavy mirage. And a low resolution one at that.
Vision starts with roughly a billion bits per second hitting the retina in a flood of light, color, and motion. The retina detects edges and movement, discarding nearly 99.9%. Only about a million bits per second make it through the optic nerve, and by the time that data reaches conscious awareness, you’re down to around 50 bits per second, which is barely enough to form a coherent sense of “what’s happening.” What you see isn’t the “real” world; it’s a high-efficiency simulation, built for survival speed over objective truth. But we believe it’s “reality.”
Hyper Reality
Matrix Easter egg: The hollowed-out book from which Neo retrieves the floppy disc for the guy who comes to his door at the beginning of the movie is Simulacra and Simulations.
Morpheus’ comment about the Desert of the Real comes from Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book entitled Simulacra and Simulations. A simulcra is a replication of something physical. A simulation is a replica of a process. The book is a philosophical exploration of what happens when our replicas and simulations replace the things they are meant to represent.
Baudrillard calls this Hyper Reality. When we lose track of what’s real and what’s a representation. The VOID’s Curtis Hickman co-opted this term to describe their virtual reality experiences, where the physical space was mapped to the virtual environment. In its Ghostbusters experience, for example, when you enter the first room, you see a plush chair in a small room, the walls lined with bookshelves. If you are either brave or stupid (a fine line that I cross repeatedly), you can actually sit down in the chair, because there’s a real one anchored in place.
But Baudrillard’s Hyper Reality isn’t about a practical simulation like a VR experience or Google Maps. It’s a metaphor for when a society loses track of its reality and begins to believe the simulacra and simulations are the genuine thing. It’s when we start thinking that the map is actually the territory, not just a representation.
The Media is the Message
Malcolm McLewen, in 1964 (the year I was hatched), wrote The Medium is the Message. It’s taken me a long time to understand this sentence. In McLewen’s time, mass media shaped reality more than the content that showed up on the television screen. More recently, the speed of the internet has shaped our reality. Optimized for rapid clicks, online media eliminated fact-checking, leading to an erosion of trust. Social media now lets everyone become a news source, eroding the very nature of truth. And over the last couple of years, artificial intelligence and deepfakes have led people to question the reality of everything and anything.
“If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly […] this fable has now come full circle for us […] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.” – from Jean Baudrillard‘s Simulacra and Simulation.
We’ve become so caught up in representations of reality that we’ve totally lost touch with reality itself. The media, tech companies, and governments have so colored our perception that we can no longer see what’s real. We’ve replaced the territory with a series of ever increasingly warped maps. Which begs the question: What is reality? Is anything true?
The Concept of Truth
“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.”
Jean Baudrillard’s opening line in Simulacra and Simulation
Truth is a concept. As soon as we think there’s a universal truth, we lose sight of the truth, because truth cannot exist. The truth is, there is no truth.
What’s true for you might not be true for me because our individual beliefs, values, trauma, emotions, and thoughts color every moment. Believing that there’s a universal truth is what’s tearing humanity apart. The projection of our truths onto other people, countries, religions, and cultures is the source of so much suffering.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
But America’s truths are not universal. Those truths are just concepts of the founding fathers. In fact, America, like every other country, is just a concept. Men draw lines on maps and proclaim them to be real. They enforce them with checkpoints, walls, and guards. Soon, people form identities around those concepts. “I’m American!” We lose sight of the fact that we are all human and replace the territory of the planet with the map and its borders.
Truth is the story we tell ourselves to make sense of this incomprehensible experience of life.
Bob Cooney
It’s an oversimplification of something unfathomably complex. Truth isn’t something you find “out there.” It exists only in the unveiling of each moment. And as soon as you try to grasp it, it’s gone. Those moments then exist only in memory. Then we string those memories together into stories, which become our maps. Over a lifetime, those maps stack up over the territory of authentic, present experience. The maps are all we can see.
Slow Down
In a world that’s coming at us a million miles an hour, with change that feels unsettling, we have to stop occasionally, let go of the maps, and experience the moments. They are found in the awe of a sunset or in the sight of the Milky Way at night. They’re felt when hugging your child or kissing your partner. You taste them in the first sip of coffee in the morning, or the last drop of wine at night. They’re in the laughter of your friends at dinner, and the quiet solitude of a meditation. The only way to experience life is to let go of the stories and the concepts, and just be with experience as it unfolds in every moment.
One of the best ways of slowing down is developing a meditation practice. It’s helped me immensely over the last decade. In case you didn’t grab the chance to sign up for 3 months free of Waking Up, one of my favorite meditation apps, here’s your last chance. No obligation, no credit card needed. I don’t get anything out of this. Other than possibly making the world a better place.
