You Inhabit a Dream 🌌

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 106

The Mystery of Experience

Look around the room you’re currently in. Notice the colors, shapes, and sounds around you. Notice the feeling of your clothes against your skin, the feeling of having a body in space.

It all seems perfectly ordinary. But in these ordinary experiences lurks the biggest mystery of life (as far as I am concerned).

Take the color red.

We know quite a lot about how seeing works. Light of different wavelengths enters the eye and stimulates specialized cells in the retina. These cells send electrochemical signals through the nervous system to the visual centers of the brain.

So far, so good. But nowhere in this chain is there any redness.

Photons don’t have a color.
Neurons don’t have a color.
Electrical signals don’t have a color.

If you zoom in far enough, there is no red to be found. And yet here it is. Bright and undeniable. The same is true for every other aspect of experience.

Chemicals are not taste. Pressure changes in the air are not music.

The electrochemical activity of some nerves is not the memory of immersing yourself in an MMO for multiple hours a day because most subjects in school bore you to death.

It’s not the feeling of real camaraderie with voices coming out of a box and their fantasy avatars on a screen. It’s not the feeling of triumph when winning challenging battles together, when being celebrated for the skillfulness of controlling an avatar in such fantasy combat.

Calcium channels opening in neuronal membranes aren’t the loneliness that can go along with seeing things differently. It’s not the longing to be seen, to be understood by even just one other person.

Science has become extraordinarily good at describing the mechanisms associated with experience. We know about receptors, transmitters, and specific brain regions.

But there is still a question nobody knows how to answer: How does the experience of red emerge from electrochemical activity? Why is there something it is like to be here at all?

The fact that this question remains unsolved doesn’t make the world less meaningful to me. It means that even the most familiar things in my life are deeply mysterious. Every color, sound, thought, and memory. All of it appears within this bright circumstance of my experience.

The World As A Map

The mystery of experience (felt aliveness) emerging from “dead” matter is the so-called hard problem of consciousness.

We don’t know how exactly it’s connected to processes in the brain, but whatever it is, consciousness helps us solve a specific problem: navigating an infinitely complex world as a finite organism.

The brain lives inside a dark box, connected to the outside world only through a bunch of thin filaments. Some of these nerve fibers are used to measure certain aspects of the world, such as pressure changes in the air, photons bouncing around in the room, and chemical levels in the blood.

Other fibers cause muscles to contract, allowing for goal-directed action. That’s not an arbitrary feature of life as we know it. Sara Walker comments beautifully:

“For a plant, which cannot move or verbalize, its behavior is its three-dimensional shape. Imagine if your best way to express your unique history and experiences was to slowly grow the shape of your body to express features of your past experience.”

All those cute plants and flowers? Aliens among us!

The brain processes information across vastly different scales. In consciousness, however, the world has a very specific scale. It is exactly the map our system needs to navigate an overwhelmingly complex terrain.

When we enter a room, we don’t see a messy soup of atoms occupying the entire space. We see walls and furniture as places to sit or as obstacles to go around. Roughly speaking, the scale of our experience ranges from dust particles to mountains, which is perfect for a creature like us.

We also seem unable to just leave the structure of our experience behind. You cannot simply imagine a new color or hear a new kind of sound. I imagine these limitations to arise from the mechanism by which the brain generates experience, which evolved to reliably solve a navigational problem on our particular scale.

For all the fascinating developments of the neurosciences, I think the hard problem of consciousness remains a mystery. Will we ever be able to solve it from within the constraints of our experience? I don’t know. But I’m certain of this:

Perception is not reality itself. It is a map. A vivid dream-like model of the alien territory we inhabit, generated from past lessons, compared with current sense data.

The Edge Of The Dream

There may be no way to escape the limitations of perception.

Every scientific instrument we build ultimately reports its findings back into experience. No matter how far we extend our senses with microscopes, telescopes, particle accelerators, or artificial intelligence, the final result still has to appear in the theater of consciousness, in a form that fits the anatomy of our mind.

There seems to be no way around it. The world we know is always the world as it appears to a particular kind of creature: A human being.

As a teenager, I started interpreting astronomy through a nihilistic lens. The universe seemed so large that human life appeared insignificant by comparison. We are tiny organisms on a tiny planet orbiting a mediocre star in a galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars. Nothing matters.

Today I have almost the opposite reaction.

What amazes and guides me is not the size of the universe but the fact that any part of it appears at all. Somehow, after billions of years of cosmic history, a small region of it has developed eyes - to look at itself.

Our light might only be a small torch in an endless cave, but it’s on. What it illuminates is a map - always finite, forever incomplete.

But standing at the edge of understanding isn’t always scary. There is another ancient response as well: awe.

The feeling of recognizing that your map is useful, beautiful, and astonishingly sophisticated - while also sensing that whatever lies beyond it is larger than anything that can ever fit inside the architecture of your mind.

This is your reminder to go look at the night sky, get lost in the stars, and explore the edge of your dream. Honestly, shouldn’t that be something a doctor can prescribe?

✒️ Quote of the Week: “Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

🍿 Video of the week: maybe I'm the alien

🎧 Song of the Week: stereOMantra - Projections

Now I’d love to hear from you!

Did something in my writing catch your attention?
Was there an idea you found particularly intriguing?
Or is there a question that’s been on your mind related to these topics?

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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

Can’t wait until next week’s edition? Check out my essays.