Why Reality is Imagination

[Ninja_pig]

It may be wildly cliche on this forum, but I think I have a unique angle on this idea that makes it worth sharing. In this essay I will clearly illustrate that reality is imagination in plain language using your own direct experience, no psychedelics or meditation expertise required.

This insight recently struck me from a new angle while practicing mindfulness meditation. During mindfulness meditation the goal is often to focus our awareness on some object of perception or imagination. This can be the breath, the pressure between two fingers, or an imaginary object such as a crystal ball or lotus flower or something. I stuck with the breath because I could never hold a clear picture of a crystal ball for very long. After refining my attention over the course of a few weeks however, I started to experience my breath as much vivid and 'there' than before. In a way it became more 'real'. Immediately, I was reminded of many crystal ball meditation proponents who claim that the perception of the ball stabilizes and becomes more vivid with practice. I would never have guessed that the same thing happens with observing breath. As it turns out, even focusing on the breath is using imagination just as much as visualizing a crystal ball would be.

As you breathe, you experience your chest expanding, the air rushing through your nostrils, into your nasal cavity, down your throat, into your lungs. However, there is no "air rushing past" nerve. There is no nerve that sends a signal when the chest is expanding, and another one that sends a signal when your chest contracts. Instead, raw sensory data comes in from nerves all over your lungs, diaphragm, nose, and throat. These signals are very low level. Your brain must then interpret these signals and build those higher level perceptions (chest expanding, air rushing) using a predefined mental model, otherwise known as imagination. As a result, most of what you experience when observing your breath is not coming directly from sensory neurons, and the mental image of breath can become more vivid even if there is not an increase in the quality or quantity of sensory neurons in your respiratory system.

This realization about the breath led me to a disturbing question: if my breath is imaginary, what else is? The answer, it turns out, is everything. All of our senses work this way. Our brain interprets raw input and constructs our experience of reality. We don't experience the raw input of our senses directly—or rather, we do, but what dominates our experience is our brain's interpretation of that input.

Consider vision. How does your brain take action potentials sent from photoreceptors in your retina—this stochastic, messy noise—and turn it into what looks like a real, three-dimensional environment? The world you see is not the real world. It's a controlled hallucination, a construction built by your brain using information from your eyes plus your intuitive understanding of how three-dimensional reality works, how light works, and so on. We take the environment our brain creates and mistake it for reality itself.

The same applies to hearing. You can focus on the raw sensation of sound, but even this is already an interpretation. Your brain must take action potentials from the hairs in your cochlea, which respond to pressure waves entering your ear. Your cochlea performs a frequency analysis by examining the spacing between these pressure differences, then converts them into frequencies. But you don't experience frequencies—you experience meaningful sounds. Your brain tells you: that's a fan, that's a door closing, that's footsteps. When someone speaks, the sound signal gets directed to your language processing areas, which parse the sounds into words, which then get sent to your higher-order reasoning centers so you can understand what's being said. At every step, your brain is constructing meaning from noise.

Consider proprioception and touch. Your brain maintains a mental picture of your body, and you overlay sensations—heat, pressure, roughness, pain—onto this mental model to give each sensation a location. You don't experience raw nerve firings; you experience "my left shoulder hurts" or "my hand feels cold." The mental body map comes first, and sensory data colors it in.

In every case, our brain follows the same pattern: it takes sensory input and turns it into an interpretation. That interpretation requires enormous amounts of imagination. What's being imagined? A mental model of reality. Our senses provide the raw data that colors in this model, like a picture in a coloring book. The outline of the picture—the fundamental structure of our experienced reality—is imagination. The sensory input just fills it in.

As Peter Ralston points out in The Book of Not Knowing, we imagine everything, and our entire sense of reality is built on concepts. You can see this principle at work in children and animals. Watch kittens play—they pretend to hunt, chasing a feather on a string or a ball of yarn as if it were prey. Human children do the same thing. They invent hundreds of unique characters with distinct personalities and complex relationships. They create entire worlds in their coloring books or with their toys. They love video games precisely because these activate their imaginations. Ralston's insight is that when kittens grow up, they don't stop hunting—the behavior just becomes more practical. Similarly, adult humans don't stop imagining—their imagination just becomes more applied, more integrated with everyday life.

Think about what you know about the world. These days, perhaps 95% of what we know doesn't come from direct personal experience. We learn it in school, through books, the news, YouTube, social media. We build up a picture of the world, and most of it is imaginary. We have to take information and construct a mental picture, even though we've never actually experienced most of what we claim to know. Most people have never seen Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin in person. No one alive has seen Adolf Hitler or ancient Egypt. No one has ever seen a living dinosaur or witnessed the Big Bang. No one has seen a black hole up close or visited another star or set foot on an exoplanet. Most people have never seen direct evidence of atoms—if you asked them how we know atoms are real, they probably couldn't explain it. They believe the story because it's a reasonable explanation and they've heard it repeated enough times. (I'm not denying atoms are real—I'm just pointing out that this too is part of our imagination.)

When you really examine it, most of our "reality" is imagined. It's something we've constructed from information we get from other sources. And notice how reality itself changes depending on the mental picture you build. You hear about a new car model and suddenly you see it everywhere. You learn a new word like "presumptuous" and suddenly you hear it constantly. The cars and the word were always there—your mental model just didn't accommodate them before. Now it does, and your experience of reality shifts accordingly.

All the information we receive—from our senses, from other people, from the news—gets filtered through our imagined reality and used to continuously construct and augment that reality. This is how the human mind works. This is why imagination is the bedrock of reality as we experience it.

Here's something worth sitting with: the whole idea of "reality" is itself imaginary. The notion that all our experiences and everything we know comes from a unified source that exists outside ourselves—that's just another concept, another product of imagination. The idea assumes a fundamental division: there's "me" (or "us") and then there's "reality out there." But this division is itself a concept, perhaps the first and most fundamental concept. We need it to have all other concepts. We start with the assumption that there's a world outside us, and then we can reason about it abstractly rather than just taking our senses at face value. To have an idea about something, you need to separate yourself from it. Your mind creates a division between you, your body, and reality.

Of course, we know there's no real division between the human body and reality. Both are governed by physics, made of atoms. Your brain follows the same laws of physics as everything else. But we still create this distinction because it makes thinking easier. We imagine an "outside world" separate from our "inner ideas," and we try to build an accurate inner picture of the outer world. We assume the outside world exists beyond our imagination.

But here's the thing: we can never verify this. We can't confirm that there really is an outside world that exists beyond our perception and imagination, because perception and imagination are all we have. Everything is imagination. To say that there is a reality—a real world out there—is an assumption, something taken on faith. It's a quirk of how the human mind works.

We can never know whether we're just imagining everything or whether there really is a reality out there. And perhaps there's no meaningful difference. Even if there is a "real" reality, we have to imagine all of it. Our consciousness never comes into direct contact with this supposed outside reality. Even to pretend it's real doesn't really make any difference to our experience. What we call reality is imagination, and what we call imagination is reality. They are one and the same.

[Ramasta9]

I Magi Nation