Is This Table Real? Wrestling with the Edges of Reality

the color magenta doesn't actually exist there's no wavelength of light for it it's something our brain invents to bridge the gap between red and violet because it can't process them being at opposite ends of the spectrum wait really it just makes it up completely and that got me thinking last week in episode 19 we were wrestling with what it feels like to see a color but this makes me wonder what if the world we perceive isn't actually the world that's out there at all oh man so we're just gonna jump right into the deep end today is this table real is this microphone real exactly i mean the default sort of common sense answer is yes of course it's real i can knock on it it feels solid this is what philosophers call naive realism right the world is exactly as we perceive it right

it's the most intuitive position and honestly it's the one we all have to live by just to you know get through the day without walking into walls but it starts to fall apart almost immediately when you poke it because science tells us this seemingly solid table is what 99.9% empty space just a cloud of subatomic particles whizzing around exactly the solidity the color the texture that's not the table itself that's a story our brain is telling us about the table based on the very limited sensory data it's getting it's a user interface a user interface i like that so my entire experience of reality is like the desktop on a computer it's showing me helpful

icons not the raw code underneath mhmm and it's a brilliant ui it's been beta tested by millions of years of evolution to help us do one thing survive it doesn't need to show us the truth of quantum physics it needs to show us the tiger in the grass and the ripe fruit on the tree okay so that's one step away from naive realism the world is real but we don't see it directly we see a translation a helpful summary but then you can take it another step what if that underlying reality the particles the empty space what if that's just another story another concept that exists only within a mind woah okay so that's idealism

the idea that ultimately everything is mind or consciousness we can't ever prove there's an out there that exists independently of our perception of it because any proof you could offer any scientific instrument any mathematical equation would still be something you perceive and process with your mind you can't get outside of your own head to check so that user interface metaphor is really sticking with me a ui is designed to be useful which means it highlights what you need and hides what you don't it hides the complexity it hides the raw data it hides everything that isn't relevant to the task at hand and if our task is survival what is our perception of reality hiding

from us what kind of world are we choosing to live in by default because our biology made the choice for us that's the question isn't it we're living in this incredibly useful elegant fiction and it works but it's still a fiction it's a particular version of reality tailored for a creature like us so what does that say about us that our whole existence is based on a convenient lie or maybe it's just a different kind of truth the truth of experience i don't know once you realize you're only seeing the icons on the desktop it's really hard not to wonder what the code looks like and yet even with all this i'm sitting on a chair that feels solid i'm looking at you and you seem pretty

real to me we have to live inside the interface there's no other way to do it right you can't just decide to perceive the quantum wave function of your morning coffee you just drink the coffee maybe the philosophical move isn't to try and escape the illusion but to appreciate it for what it is to understand its limits but also its purpose the experience itself has a reality to it even if the things it represents are something else entirely it feels like we're living in two worlds at once then the world as it feels and the world as it might be and we just sort of toggle between them depending on how much we wanna think

about it i guess my question is how many other realities are layered on top of this one that we don't even have the senses or the concepts to imagine