In Our Own Image?

As [what we imagine ourselves to be] a sentient species, we operate reasonably efficiently in the world we inhabit through a kind of sensory consensus constructed entirely within our brains and our nervous system; a complex of signal timing, buffering and convolution that we are thankfully, normally blissfully unaware of as we make our way through life. I mention this because on the last evening the family were gathered at Lower Down, we had exactly this discussion: what is the nature of perception, and by extension, reality itself? Untroubled by these kinds of philosophical questions, most people continue on their path from birth to death with just maybe the odd quizzical sideways glance into the unknown, but then continue on as normal without further thought on the matter.

The fact is that we don't see, hear or feel the world around us in anything like synchronised real time; all our sensory inputs are firstly perceived quite crudely and at different timings, dependent on their varying neural paths; thereafter to be synthesised into a cogent, fluid gestalt by the wondrous complex of our combined physiological intelligences: the brain and our central and peripheral nervous systems, which combine and collate all the time-slipped data received from our sensory organs into some semblance of cohesion. We construct the world we perceive as much as we actually perceive it. We even 'see' in frames, much as in any form of cinematography; the blank spaces between those frames being edited out on the fly and the 'persistence of vision' carrying through the illusion of fluid movement.

Further, we pre-process our reactions to external events that, because of the time-lagged reconstructive nature of our 'reality', we can't possibly process in any adequate sense in real time in order to function or simply even to survive. So we are constantly predicting as many possible outcomes to any particular situation before it actually occurs, to make up for all the perceptual lag times inherent in our senses/nervous system/thinking. We actively construct many models/scenarios, not only in the brain itself, but within all our neural pathways. Really quite remarkable, and we seem to have constructed technologies that record, mimic and modify our already mediated 'realities' along much the same lines, which probably says something about the nature of reality itself. Just an idle thought...