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Is Reality Real? · Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really glad you are here with me today.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday we slowed down and stepped into wonder.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: We remembered that each of us began as one cell and that every one of our own cells came from it.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: We walked that one cell through our five questions, and we sorted what we observe from what we model, what we experience, and what we hold by faith.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Today we pick up the question we touched on yesterday.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is reality real?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: On Monday, I said every question we ask stands on things we've already decided.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: The first two were what is real and how we know what we know.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Today we look at both of those directly, because if reality isn't real, then everything we said about science this week falls apart.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it goes further than science.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: If nothing is really there, then there's only my truth and your truth, and no way to ask the simplest questions of all.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Is it true?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Why does this matter for our health?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because every time we're told what's real about our bodies, someone is asking a claim about reality.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: A scan can say one thing, our body says another.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: One person says it's all energy, another says it's all chemistry.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: If we don't know what we mean by real, we can't weigh any of it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: We either believe whoever sounds most certain, or we stop believing anything at all.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Knowing what's real and how we know it lets us sort what's measured from what's modeled, and what's experienced from what's assumed.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then we can choose where to stand.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Let me start with a story about a stone.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: On August 6, 1763, two friends walked out of a church in Harwich, a port town on the east coast of England.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: One was Samuel Johnson, the man who wrote the first great dictionary of the English language.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: The other was his young friend and biographer, James Boswell.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: They were talking about an Irish bishop and philosopher named George Berkeley.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: We met him on Monday.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Berkeley argued that matter doesn't exist on its own, that everything we call real is made of ideas and perceptions in our minds.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Boswell said that even though they were sure Berkeley was wrong, it was impossible to refute him.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: And Boswell wrote, he would never forget how quickly Johnson answered.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Johnson kicked a large stone so hard that his foot bounced back and said, I refute it thus.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great story, and people have been arguing about it for more than 250 years.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because Berkeley would have said, Of course the stone hurts.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: I never said you wouldn't experience it.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm asking what the stone is.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's our question today, not whether we experience the world.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: We all do.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: The question is whether what we experience is really there and whether we can know it.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Here's where we have to be honest.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Our senses don't hand us the world directly.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: They take in signals and our brain builds what we experience.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Light enters the eye, pressure waves enter the ear, molecules touch the nose and tongue.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Every one of those becomes an electrical signal.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the brain turns those signals into color, sound, smell, and taste.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can test this yourself today.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Each of our eyes has a blind spot.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's the place where the optic nerve leaves the eye.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: There are no light sensing cells there at all.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And yet you don't see a hole in your vision.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Your brain fills it in.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: Close one eye, hold up a small dot on a page, look a little to the side of it, and move the page slowly.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: At the right distance, the dot disappears.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone can repeat it.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Or think of two lines of equal length.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: One with arrowheads pointing in, one with arrowheads pointing out.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: One looks longer.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Measure them and they're the same.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the remarkable part.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Even after you know, it still looks longer.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's called the Mueller Liar illusion.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's been repeated for more than a hundred years.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2015, a photo of a dress split the internet.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Millions of people saw it as white and gold.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Millions saw it as blue and black.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Same photo, same screen, different brains.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Our brains render our own bodies too.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: After an amputation, many people still feel the missing arm or leg.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: Some feel it cramped and painful, clenched in a fist they can't open.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: In the 1990s, a neuroscientist named V.S.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: Ramachandran at the University of California, San Diego tried something simple.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: He put a mirror in a box.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: So a person could see the reflection of the healthy hand where the missing hand should be.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: When the patient moved the healthy hand, the brain saw the missing hand move.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: And for some, the cramp let go.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: A mirror, a box, and the brain changed what the body felt.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: So yesterday's quote from Anise Nin holds up, we do not see things as they are.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: We see them as we are.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Now, some thinkers take this much further.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Donald Hoffman is a cognitive scientist at the University of California Irvine.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: In 2019, he published a book called The Case Against Reality.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: His argument goes like this: evolution shaped our senses to help us survive, not to show us the truth.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: He compares what we see to the icons on a computer desktop.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: A blue folder icon is useful.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: You can click it, move it, open it, but the file isn't blue, and it isn't a folder.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: The icon hides what's really going on, and that's exactly what makes it useful.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Hoffman says space, time, objects, even our own bodies are like those icons.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: He and his colleagues built computer simulations and a mathematical theorem they call quote unquote fitness beats truth.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: In their models, creatures that see the truth lose out to creatures that see only what helps them survive.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: And yet Hoffman himself doesn't step in front of trains.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: He says we should take our perceptions seriously, just not literally.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: A train icon may not be what a train really is, but it still means get out of the way.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: He's not alone in asking these questions.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: More than 200 years ago, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we never know things as they are in themselves, only as they appear to us.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: In 2003, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom asked whether we might be living in a computer simulation.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three scientists whose experiments showed that tiny particles called photons don't behave as if they carry fixed instructions ahead of time.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Something about the smallest level of nature is stranger than common sense.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: So when someone says, quote unquote, science has shown that reality isn't real, it can sound like the final word.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Let's look closer.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the twist I want us to see.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Hoffman's case uses science to argue that our senses don't show us reality, but science is built on our senses.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Every observation, every measurement, every reading on an instrument comes to us through our eyes, our hands, and our minds.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: So if our senses can't be trusted to show us what's real, then the observations that taught us about evolution can't be trusted either, and neither can the science used to tell us our senses can't be trusted.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: The argument saws off the branch it's sitting on.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: And notice something from Tuesday?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Hoffman's key evidence is computer simulations and mathematical models.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: Those are models, not observations.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: They may be brilliant, but a model can't overturn the very observations it was built from.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: The philosopher Elvin Plantinga, who taught for decades at the University of Notre Dame, raised a related question back in 1993.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: If our minds were shaped only for survival, why should we trust them to find truth at all?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: This answer was that we can trust them because they were made for truth by a God who is truthful.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that brings us to what science has to assume.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Every experiment we talked about this week rests on three things.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: First, something is really there.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Something exists apart from us whether we're looking at it or not.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Second, it behaves the same way each time.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: The same conditions give the same results, today, tomorrow, and in a lab across the world.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Third, our senses and minds can know it, not perfectly, but truly.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: Take away any one of those and science has nothing to stand on.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: When Simon Stevin dropped two lead balls from the church tower in Delft, he trusted that the balls were real, that they would fall the same way again, and that his ears would tell one sound from two.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: One sound.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: And people have been repeating it ever since.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: Science doesn't prove these three things.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: It can't.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: It has to assume them before it can begin.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: And these assumptions aren't only for physicists.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: They're in every clinic.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Every time a dose is prescribed, it assumes the body tomorrow will work the way it worked in the study.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: Every time we keep a log of our sleep or our pain, like the notebook from Tuesday's blog, we're trusting that what we write down is really happening and that a pattern will hold.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Without a real and consistent world, there's no such thing as evidence-based anything.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: And here's what moves me.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: For many of the people who built early modern science, those assumptions came from faith.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: This season the Torah readings are in Bereshit, which is Genesis, and in Bereshit the world is made with order, light and darkness, night and day, each kind bringing forth after its kind, and God sees that it is good.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Centuries later the prophet Jeremiah spoke of God's covenant with day and night, and the ordinances of heaven and earth, an ordered world, a world that can be known.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: So where does that leave us?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: I believe reality is real, and I believe our experience of it is a rendering shaped by who we are.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Both can be true at the same time.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: In 1933, a Polish American scholar named Alfred Korbinski wrote a line that's become famous.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Quote, a map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory which accounts for its usefulness.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Our perception is a map.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: It isn't the land, but a good map matches the land well enough to get us home.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: When we catch a ball, our eyes and hands agree.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: When a dozen people measure the same line, they get the same length, even while it still looks longer.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: This matters deeply for how we think about pain.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Pain is real, and it's also rendered.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: The brain can turn it up or down, depending on fear, memory, attention, and what we expect.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: The mirror box showed us that.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: So when pain is shaped by the brain, that doesn't make it imaginary and it doesn't make it all in our heads.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: It means the whole person is involved.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's good news because it means there's more than one door into healing.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly why we test, why we repeat, why we compare notes with others.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Not because reality isn't real, not because of each of us sees it through our own filter.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Science, done honestly, is how we check our maps against the land.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: There are two kinds of doubt.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: One says, I might be wrong, so let me check.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of doubt is the engine of science.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's what sent Stevin up the tower.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: The other kind says, nothing can be known, so why check it at all?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: And humility is part of it.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: When we remember that we see things as we are, we hold our certainty a little more gently.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: We listen to the person who sees the dress in different colors.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: We stay curious.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: Our practice this week is to question.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Today, when you notice a strong reaction to a person, a headline, a sensation in your body, pause and ask one question.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Is this what's there or how I'm seeing it?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: You don't need to answer it right away.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just asking it opens a little space.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: And in that space, we can choose how to respond.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Today we asked whether reality is real.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: We stood with Samuel Johnson as he kicked a stone.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: We saw that our senses render the world from the blind spot to the dress to the mirror box.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: We looked at Donald Hoffman's case against reality, and we saw that using science to argue reality isn't real undercuts the science itself.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Science stands on three assumptions.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Something is there, it behaves consistently, and we can know it.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Faith gives us the reason to trust those three, and a good map.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Though it isn't the land, it can still bring us home.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow we'll ask the question underneath all of this.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: What actually exists?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: Even the people who doubt reality agree on one thing.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Experience is happening.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: We'll start there and ask what must be true for any of this to work.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'll see you there.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the conversation going.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.