Our environmental problems are the result of a fundamental disconnection between our understanding of reality and what it seems to be. In other words, we are discovering that the world doesn’t work the way we have thought it works, and that we now have to make major adjustments in how we individually and collectively behave.
Of course, we have always been doing this, both as individuals and as cultures. Our personal experiences, registered through consciousness, adjust our basic sense of reality, and cultures are always undergoing similar changes. Fundamentally new understandings totally remake us. As the media guru, Marshall McLuhan, said in one his intriguingly aphoristic reversals, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.” Consider history.
During the Middle Ages, the Sun was thought to move around a flat Earth that was the centre of Creation, and authorized Christian beliefs were the measure of all truth. The only continents that could exist were Greater Europe, Africa and Asia because they corresponded to the Holy Trinity. Humanity was in a heaven-or-hell struggle against the forces of Satanic evil. Individuality was only relevant for the saving of souls. The shift to “man the measure of all things” in the Renaissance challenged this paradigm. Then the evolving empiricism of the 17th century wrecked the old religious sense of reality by inventing a new one. Science and the Industrial Revolution then refined this reality almost as dramatically as did the Agricultural Revolution of some 12,000 years earlier—agriculture changed our relationship with nature from being passive recipients of its generosity to being active regulators and controllers of it. In the past century, as technological innovations have accelerated, our sense of reality has again been dramatically altered. Change always creates confusion. So, what is reality?
Reality seems to be created by consciousness. When the 17th century rational philosopher Descartes tried to clarify the mystery of consciousness, he got as far as “Cogito ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am.” He could doubt everything, but he could not doubt that he was doubting. However, this explained neither consciousness nor the reality that is the consequence of being conscious—two problems that have frustrated modern science’s pride in answering such difficult questions.
The assumption science makes is that we live in a material, objective world that can be understood by rational, empirical inquiry. But the consciousness that we use to understand this reality is neither material nor objective. Consciousness can’t be studied by any scientific method because we can’t get outside it to conduct the necessary examination. No matter what we do, it always remains subjective. Where does it come from and where does it go? Theologians and philosophers have made many heroic attempts to answer these fundamental questions, which science cannot. Illuminating insights are now being proposed by neuroscientists, and one of the most recent and interesting ones comes from Anil Seth in his book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.
Seth, a British professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, defines consciousness as “any kind of subjective experience, whatsoever”, and describes it as a “controlled hallucination.” In other words, it’s not fixed, final or objective. It varies by person, by culture and over time. He describes the brain as a “prediction machine” that is continually using sensory input to minimize errors about what will happen next. This process constructs a cohesive reality with the semblance of order and structure that we each need for our physical, psychological and social survival. “Reality” is the “controlled hallucination” that works for us.
The sensory input that creates “our perceptual experiences of the world are internal constructions shaped by the idiosyncrasies of our personal biology and history.” The result, Seth explains, is that, “We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.” Our individual needs and uses vary, so our individual realities vary.
As social beings, we also adjust our perception of the world to conform to a “reality” that we can share with others. This process of reciprocal influence is largely how we define ourselves and how we agree on a common reality. Disagreements do occur as a normal part of the evolutionary process. In times of change, however, these disagreements are amplified in both number and degree. And the faster the change, the greater and more disruptive are the disconnections. Thus, reality gets confusing.
The burgeoning evidence of a global environmental crisis is now forcing a change in our previous sense of reality. Our individual and collective “controlled hallucination” is being dramatically altered again. Earth is not just an objectively defined scientific idea, but our only real home in the vastness of a hostile universe. Biological processes and ecological principles are replacing the importance of industrial production and capitalist economics. The awesome complexity and intelligence of the natural world, which once seemed composed of merely remote species, is becoming alive and vital to our sense of survival. The atmosphere is not just the impersonal air that we have thoughtlessly breathed, but a dynamic regulator of our weather, climate, security and lifestyles. The oceans are not just water with “marine product”, but living places that are vital to our health and wellbeing. Forests are not just a casual distribution of trees, but ordered and organic communities of intricate and sophisticated co-operation that have been evolving their communication systems for 500 million years.
The aspect of reality that we call nature, instead of being an abstract and detached object, is becoming very alive and extremely personal in our “controlled hallucination”. Even though some of us may be unaware of this reality-altering change in consciousness, it is already occurring. Ready or not, it will profoundly reshape everything we think and do—even for us on our little island in the wholeness of things.
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
top photo credit: Photo by Tobias Bjerknes on Unsplash
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