This One Idea Will Forever Change How You View The World

Are you ready to change your perspective?

Photo by Ina RH on Unsplash

In the movie, The Matrix, the protagonist, Neo, intuits that something isn’t quite right about the world. His life feels off to him, though he has no idea why.

Spoiler alert. In truth, Neo is living in a computer simulation created by advanced artificial intelligence, and his body is stored in a vat in some nightmarish factory alongside the rest of humanity.

As twisted as this idea is, it sparked the imagination of an entire generation, myself included. It’s such a strange and interesting thought that life may be nothing like we assume it to be and that we may be clueless about this truth.

The disconcerting reality is that life is just like this — it’s weirder than we think it is.

A truth you can’t unknow

You tend to take your experiences at face value, right? When you’re walking to the grocery store, for example, you tacitly assume that what you see, hear, smell, and touch are real — you assume that you are making direct contact with the world.

But, this couldn’t possibly be true.

Consider your sense of sight. How does it work? Light enters through the eyes and falls on photoreceptors, which are cells that translate that light into electrical signals that then travel to specific parts of the brain. Those parts of the brain interpret those electrical signals — make sense of them — and our consciousness is presented with that interpretation in the form of an image.

What’s weird about that? you ask.

Stop reading this article and look around you. Maybe you can see the sky out a window, maybe you can see your living room, maybe you can see other people. But, the thing to notice is that if your brain is interpreting the visual information it’s receiving (as it must be) then you’re not directly seeing any of it.

You think you’re seeing the external world, but you’re not. You’re “seeing” the inside of your mind — you’re “seeing” consciousness. You’re watching the most sophisticated movie you can imagine, and the theatre in which you’re sitting is inside your brain.