According to British physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, 99.9999999999999% of everything we call "matter" is immaterial - empty space.
***
Feel Like a Butterfly, See Like a Bee?
The Mystery of Perception
Deepak Chopra, Special to SFGate
Sunday, February 10, 2013
By Deepak
Chopra, M.D.,
FACP, Murali
Doraiswamy, MD,
Professor of Psychiatry, Duke
University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina and Rudolph
E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph
P. and Rose F.
Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard
University, and
Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts
General Hospital (MGH); Menas
Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher
Jones Endowed Professor in Computational
Physics, Chapman
University
In any collection
of quotes by Albert
Einstein, one of the most intriguing is this: “Reality is merely an
illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Anyone who is interested in going
beyond the illusion to find a more satisfying reality would pay attention, but
in actuality we all have made ourselves comfortable with the illusion that
convinces us. Even physicists, who know with certainty that seemingly solid
objects are actually constructed of invisible energy clouds, treat tables,
chairs, and cars stalled in traffic like solid, tangible things. Quantum
mechanics has shown for more than 80 years now that the perceived reality of
hard objects that senses give us is an illusion.
Yet if things
lost their thing-ness, which our senses make us believe in, we’d have little
choice but to re-evaluate what is real and what isn’t. For example, what if you
had the following experience, recently related on the opinion page of the New
York Times: “First, riding in
the passenger seat of the car, I started noticing, from the corner of my eye,
vistas opening in the landscape out the window. I saw little woodland trails I
could follow dreamily, even as we drove down city streets after dark. Once we
were out of the city, trees by the side of the road morphed into towering brick
walls suggestive of a maximum-security prison, sometimes intricately patterned
with what looked like droplets of colored sugar.”
The writer, Maxine Kumin, wasn’t having a psychotic break. She was suffering from “non-psychiatric” hallucinations caused by a loss of sight in her central visual field due to macular degeneration. Normally when the central field of vision deteriorates, the person experiences blurry sight followed in time by blindness that moves from the middle of the visual field outward. In this case, however, the brain’s visual cortex, unable to decode the signals arriving from the eye, substituted its own fully formed images. The brain’s best guess wasn’t just a filled-in version of what was actually there. It replaced a blurry tree with a brick wall, a bare patch of woodland ground with a winding trail.
Which
raises a startling possibility. How do we know that our own “normal” sight
isn’t a “fictive visual percept,” to use the medical term for hallucinated
images? Actually, we don’t. No philosopher using deduction or researcher using
brain scans has been able to prove with certainty that our perception of the
world matches “reality as is out there”, whatever that may mean. Hallucinations
are identified medically because they arrive with other symptoms, usually
schizophrenic, and because if one person sees a brick wall where everyone else
sees a tree, the outsider must be hallucinating.
If
we follow the mystery of perception, many more issues arise than the fairly
simple one of hallucinations. They are rare, but the brain’s ability to turn
electrical impulses and chemical reactions into a world we see, hear, touch,
taste, and smell is incredibly baffling. There is no light in the brain. Yet
the light of the sun is blinding. This disparity is crucial, because without
someone to see it, the sun is invisible. There is no visible light in Nature
without an eye to perceive it. What if your brains, having taken a totally
different evolutionary path, didn’t “see” light but “heard” it? There’s no
obstacle to such a development. (A phenomenon known as synesthesia, in which
the senses get mixed up, is well known to neuroscience. It became much more familiar
during the LSD Sixties when trippers discovered that they could taste colors or
see music.)
The
fact that our senses don’t match reality can’t be taken for granted, even
though we do that all the time. We want to discuss the profound implications of
perception versus reality, but first let’s look at the best proof we have. You
and I may agree that the street is lined with trees rather than prison walls,
but other species live in the world with us and do not agree. All living
creatures sense “reality” through specific filters and all assume that their
filters (i.e., senses) have perfect fidelity. (Cats, dogs, bees, and
butterflies can’t tell us what their assumptions are, but we will accept that
they don’t think they’re hallucinating. Every species operates efficiently in
the world it perceives.) We take it for granted that every species using its
filters sees a common reality, but what is “common” among all these perceptions
is much harder to pin down.
In
fact, sensory abilities differ vastly among the millions of species on the
planet. What is real to one species (like a bat’s sonar) is hidden to another
(a deaf paramecium). Even among 7 billion humans, every person has a different
“mix” of reality depending on personal acuity, predispositions, habits,
memories, and upbringing (the child of a horticulturalist might automatically
see twenty different wildflowers in a meadow where you see a blur of color). We
tend to ignore that sensory abilities differ from one person to another, unless
the difference is striking, as between one person who is tone deaf and another
who has perfect pitch. Yet the larger truth is that each of us uses the brain
like a personal CGI factory, creating a 3-D movie of the world unlike anyone
else’s. Are we illusion makers or reality makers? That’s the big question.
Let’s
start with visual systems first, since color and imagery impact much of how we
perceive reality. Humans have one lens in each eye, and our eyes are
trichromatic – we have three types of color sensing cells, or cones, which
allows us to distinguish combinations of a million or so colors. But even
within humans, there is a twofold or threefold physical difference from one
person to another in every aspect of our visual system (e.g. the size of the
optic nerve, lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex, etc.).
Variation in cone pigment genes is very widespread, particularly between
genders. Recent evidence suggests that somewhere between 9% and 50% of women
may have four cones, giving them super color vision (tetrachromats) while color
blindness is a male trait.
However,
color vision and eyesight vary even more dramatically among different species,
many of which are monochromatic, such as seals, sea lions, and owl monkeys. If
a species is a rod monochromat, then for it the world is free of all colors
other than shades of gray. If a species in a cone monochromat (e.g. only has
one type of cone) then it can see about 100 shades of a single color or its
combinations. Some species, such as cats, are dichromatic, which means they can
see only about 10,000 colors. There are also surprising gender differences in
animals – among New World monkeys, males are dichromatic but many females are
trichromatic, like us. Honeybees are trichromatic but not quite like humans. They
cannot see red but can see ultraviolet frequencies
Evolution
hasn’t ordered living creatures in a straight line from crude sight – as we
humans would judge it – to more evolved sight, meaning our own. Many birds,
insects, and fish are tetrachromatic, so that some spiders and birds can see
ultraviolet, which humans cannot. This would make insect prey glow green in the
dark. The reason that we cannot see UV is that our lens blocks it from striking
the retina, but people whose lenses have been removed in a cataract procedure
or who were born without a lens (aphakia) have been reported to detect
UV light.
As
evolution has developed different sensory systems, reality shifted. There is no
“normal” way to decode photos of invisible light. Pigeons and some butterflies
are actually pentachromats; in theory such creatures could distinguish up to 10
billion colors even though we have no way to prove this. The mantis shrimp
probably has the most amazing eyes in the animal kingdom with sixteen different
receptor types, including four types of receptors just for seeing UV light, and
four others for polarized light. A human would need many distinct kinds of
sunglasses to duplicate the sensation. Many snakes can also “see” infrared, or
heat radiation, using special detectors that send thermal information through
their visual system.
Even
the density of rods and cones differs greatly. Humans have about 200,000 per
square millimeter, whereas sparrows have 400,000 and buzzards 1 million in the
same tiny area. Giant squid, who live at ocean depths that are inky black,
outdo all other species with a sensitivity that is several thousand times that
of humans (possibly a billion total receptors though the density is not
well known).
It’s
hard to escape our assumption that eyesight connects us to the real world, but
every living thing is connected to a created world. The question of matching
our creation to a possible “real reality” will come next. The conclusions of
quantum mechanics will certainly have to be brought in. For the moment, we need
to realize that the world created by other species is inconceivable to us.
Humans have one lens in each eye. Insects have more complex compound eyes with
individual components that resemble a single human eye. Depending on species,
flies can have 3,000-25,000 lenses; bees have 5,500. Some box jellyfish have 24
eyes, some scorpions have 12 eyes including several pairs in different
locations on their body, scallops have 100 or so eyes along the edges of their
mantle with special reflector lens and two types of retinas, and some spiders
eight eyes including some with special telephoto like lenses. No doubt you’ve
seen multi-lens photos that attempt to show the world through a fly’s many
eyes, but they are misleading, because the fly has yet to process all those
snapshots into a coherent world, which may have dozens of facets or only one.
Are those snapshots still or moving? Another mystery, because humans have a
flicker fusion rate of fifty per second, which means that anything slower is
captured one image at a time while anything moving faster appears as continuous
motion. But chickens are at 100 flickers per second and flies at 300, so for
these creatures the world doesn’t turn into a movie until long after it does
for us.
Finally,
the mystery of perception must be sorted out from defective perception. Humans
suffer from certain peculiar visual defects. For example, we can fill in
information that we partially see (e.g. if an edge is blocked out), but some
animals don’t do that. Optical illusions have proven that our visual system is
often wrong in its detection accuracy for size, shape, color, motion, and
depth. (Think of desert mirages where shimmering hot air looks like water.) Yet
in a sense confining our examples to eyesight is misleading, since the world is
created by blending all the senses, and variations in touch, taste, hearing,
and smell lead to bewildering riddles. The Indian elephant hears better than
humans at lower ranges, bats at much higher ranges. Cats cannot taste sweet.
Cows have about 25,000 taste buds, pigs about 15,000, and catfish about 150,000
outstripping a gourmet operating with the human complement of 10,000, but this
too varies two to threefold, as in eyesight.
So
while feeling superior to chickens with their hundred taste buds and ignoring
bees, who can smell something miles away, or sharks, who can detect faint,
distant electrical impulses, humans must take advantage of one extrasensory
gift – our ability to reason – in order to find out where we stand in the
shadowy realm of illusion versus reality.
If we follow the
mystery of perception, many more issues arise than the fairly simple one of
hallucinations. They are rare, but the brain’s ability to turn electrical
impulses and chemical reactions into a world we see, hear, touch, taste, and
smell is incredibly baffling. There is no light in the brain. Yet the light of
the sun is blinding. This disparity is crucial, because without someone to see
it, the sun is invisible. There is no visible light in Nature without an eye to
perceive it. What if your brains, having taken a totally different evolutionary
path, didn’t “see” light but “heard” it? There’s no obstacle to such a
development. (A phenomenon known as synesthesia, in which the senses get mixed
up, is well known to neuroscience. It became much more familiar during the LSD
Sixties when trippers discovered that they could taste colors or
see music.)
The
fact that our senses don’t match reality can’t be taken for granted, even
though we do that all the time. We want to discuss the profound implications of
perception versus reality, but first let’s look at the best proof we have. You
and I may agree that the street is lined with trees rather than prison walls,
but other species live in the world with us and do not agree. All living
creatures sense “reality” through specific filters and all assume that their
filters (i.e., senses) have perfect fidelity. (Cats, dogs, bees, and
butterflies can’t tell us what their assumptions are, but we will accept that
they don’t think they’re hallucinating. Every species operates efficiently in
the world it perceives.) We take it for granted that every species using its
filters sees a common reality, but what is “common” among all these perceptions
is much harder to pin down.
In
fact, sensory abilities differ vastly among the millions of species on the
planet. What is real to one species (like a bat’s sonar) is hidden to another
(a deaf paramecium). Even among 7 billion humans, every person has a different
“mix” of reality depending on personal acuity, predispositions, habits,
memories, and upbringing (the child of a horticulturalist might automatically
see twenty different wildflowers in a meadow where you see a blur of color). We
tend to ignore that sensory abilities differ from one person to another, unless
the difference is striking, as between one person who is tone deaf and another
who has perfect pitch. Yet the larger truth is that each of us uses the brain
like a personal CGI factory, creating a 3-D movie of the world unlike anyone
else’s. Are we illusion makers or reality makers? That’s the big question.
Let’s
start with visual systems first, since color and imagery impact much of how we
perceive reality. Humans have one lens in each eye, and our eyes are
trichromatic – we have three types of color sensing cells, or cones, which
allows us to distinguish combinations of a million or so colors. But even
within humans, there is a twofold or threefold physical difference from one
person to another in every aspect of our visual system (e.g. the size of the
optic nerve, lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex, etc.).
Variation in cone pigment genes is very widespread, particularly between
genders. Recent evidence suggests that somewhere between 9% and 50% of women
may have four cones, giving them super color vision (tetrachromats) while color
blindness is a male trait.
However,
color vision and eyesight vary even more dramatically among different species,
many of which are monochromatic, such as seals, sea lions, and owl monkeys. If
a species is a rod monochromat, then for it the world is free of all colors
other than shades of gray. If a species in a cone monochromat (e.g. only has
one type of cone) then it can see about 100 shades of a single color or its
combinations. Some species, such as cats, are dichromatic, which means they can
see only about 10,000 colors. There are also surprising gender differences in
animals – among New World monkeys, males are dichromatic but many females are
trichromatic, like us. Honeybees are trichromatic but not quite like humans.
They cannot see red but can see ultraviolet frequencies.
Evolution
hasn’t ordered living creatures in a straight line from crude sight – as we
humans would judge it – to more evolved sight, meaning our own. Many birds, insects,
and fish are tetrachromatic, so that some spiders and birds can see
ultraviolet, which humans cannot. This would make insect prey glow green in the
dark. The reason that we cannot see UV is that our lens blocks it from striking
the retina, but people whose lenses have been removed in a cataract procedure
or who were born without a lens (aphakia) have been reported to detect
UV light.
As
evolution has developed different sensory systems, reality shifted. There is no
“normal” way to decode photos of invisible light. Pigeons and some butterflies
are actually pentachromats; in theory such creatures could distinguish up to 10
billion colors even though we have no way to prove this. The mantis shrimp
probably has the most amazing eyes in the animal kingdom with sixteen different
receptor types, including four types of receptors just for seeing UV light, and
four others for polarized light. A human would need many distinct kinds of
sunglasses to duplicate the sensation. Many snakes can also “see” infrared, or
heat radiation, using special detectors that send thermal information through
their visual system. Even the density of rods and cones differs greatly. Humans
have about 200,000 per square millimeter, whereas sparrows have 400,000 and
buzzards 1 million in the same tiny area. Giant squid, who live at ocean depths
that are inky black, outdo all other species with a sensitivity that is several
thousand times that of humans (possibly a billion total receptors though the
density is not well known).
It’s
hard to escape our assumption that eyesight connects us to the real world, but
every living thing is connected to a created world. The question of matching
our creation to a possible “real reality” will come next. The conclusions of
quantum mechanics will certainly have to be brought in. For the moment, we need
to realize that the world created by other species is inconceivable to us.
Humans have one lens in each eye. Insects have more complex compound eyes with
individual components that resemble a single human eye. Depending on species,
flies can have 3,000-25,000 lenses; bees have 5,500. Some box jellyfish have 24
eyes, some scorpions have 12 eyes including several pairs in different
locations on their body, scallops have 100 or so eyes along the edges of their
mantle with special reflector lens and two types of retinas, and some spiders
eight eyes including some with special telephoto like lenses. No doubt you’ve
seen multi-lens photos that attempt to show the world through a fly’s many
eyes, but they are misleading, because the fly has yet to process all those
snapshots into a coherent world, which may have dozens of facets or only one.
Are those snapshots still or moving? Another mystery, because humans have a
flicker fusion rate of fifty per second, which means that anything slower is
captured one image at a time while anything moving faster appears as continuous
motion. But chickens are at 100 flickers per second and flies at 300, so for
these creatures the world doesn’t turn into a movie until long after it does
for us.
Finally,
the mystery of perception must be sorted out from defective perception. Humans
suffer from certain peculiar visual defects. For example, we can fill in
information that we partially see (e.g. if an edge is blocked out), but some
animals don’t do that. Optical illusions have proven that our visual system is
often wrong in its detection accuracy for size, shape, color, motion, and
depth. (Think of desert mirages where shimmering hot air looks like water.) Yet
in a sense confining our examples to eyesight is misleading, since the world is
created by blending all the senses, and variations in touch, taste, hearing,
and smell lead to bewildering riddles. The Indian elephant hears better than
humans at lower ranges, bats at much higher ranges. Cats cannot taste sweet.
Cows have about 25,000 taste buds, pigs about 15,000, and catfish about 150,000
outstripping a gourmet operating with the human complement of 10,000, but this
too varies two to threefold, as in eyesight.
So
while feeling superior to chickens with their hundred taste buds and ignoring
bees, who can smell something miles away, or sharks, who can detect faint,
distant electrical impulses, humans must take advantage of one extrasensory
gift – our ability to reason – in order to find out where we stand in the
shadowy realm of illusion versus reality.
Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 70 books with twenty-one New York Times bestsellers and co-author with Rudolph Tanzi of Super Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)
Murali
Doraiswamy, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center,
Durham, North Carolina and a leading physician scientist in the area of mental
health, cognitive neuroscience and mind-body medicine.
Rudolph
E. Tanzi, Ph.D., Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at
Harvard University, and Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), co author with Deepak Chopra of Super
Brain: Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health,
Happiness, and Spiritual Well-being. (Harmony)
Menas
Kafatos, Ph.D., Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor in Computational Physics,
Chapman University, co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who
Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)
99.9999999999999% empty.
"The impasse contained in the scientific viewpoint itself can only be broken through by the attainment of a view of nothingness which goes further than, which transcends the nihil of nihilism. The basic Buddhist insight of Sunyata, usually translated as "emptiness," "the void," or "no-Thingness," that transcends this nihil, offers a viewpoint that has no equivalent in Western thought.
The consciousness of the scientist, in his mechanized, dead and dumb universe, logically reaches the point where --- if he practices his science existentially and not merely intellectually -- the meaning of his own existence becomes an absurdity and he stands on the rim of the abyss of nihil face to face with his own nothingness. People are not aware of this dilemma. That it does not cause great concern is in itself a symptom of the sub-marine earthquake of which our most desperate world-problems are merely symptomatic.... It is becoming ever clearer that the terrors of war, hunger and despoliation are neither economic, nor technological problems for which there are economic or technological solutions. They are primarily spiritual problems..." Frederick Franck
Frederick Franck was born into a non-observant Jewish family in Holland. He was subsequently baptized a Protestant. After graduating as a dentist, Franck began the first dental clinic at Albert Schweitzer's hospital in West Africa. Later, having embarked a career as writer and artist, Mr. Franck heeded Pope John XXIII's call to build a society of peace on earth (Pacem in Terris.) Franck became the official artist of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and, as a tribute to Pope John, has created a temple of all faiths called Pacem in Terris on his property in Warwick, New York.
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