An illusion is a false sense-impression of something.
Your brain creates your perception of the world, which can be an illusion. Your experience of the world is false most of the time. Your brain fills in gaps. When there's incomplete information, your brain fills in the gaps with your memory or past experiences. Your brain enhances what you see. Your brain modifies and enhances what your senses perceive. For example, your brain fills in the blind spots in your eyes with information from your memory. Your brain bends reality. Your brain can unconsciously bend your perception of reality to meet your expectations or desires. Your brain constructs images. Your brain decodes, deconstructs, and reassembles sensory input into a coherent picture. Your brain is limited. Your senses are limited, and your brain is blind to over 99% of the electromagnetic spectrum. For example, your hearing range is limited to 20–20,000 Hertz. Your brain is biased. Your brain is biased by your beliefs, expectations and based on various types of conditioning. Optical illusions can help us understand how our brains work and how limited our experience of reality is.
Sometimes your brain fills in gaps when there is incomplete information, or creates an image that isn't even there! Why does this happen? Evolution!
We see only a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is divided into colours that exist only in our brains. We hear only a limited range of vibrations, onto which we impose meanings the vibrations do not themselves contain. We have no idea what and why dogs and bees see and hear and find them so interesting. We feel as soft or solid what is nearly all empty space, apart from a few fundamental particles in different arrangements. We can grasp directly only scales from around one millimetre to one kilometre. We think that the present is now, when we’re actually experiencing what happened half a second ago. Our personal, political, and ideological hang-ups and squabbles are blind to natural ecology and history – including the cells and DNA of our own bodies. Our heads are full of phantoms we impose on a world that is fundamentally indifferent to them. And yet that very indifference proves that the world is real!
Objects have, what the experts call, primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are those considered to be intrinsic to the object: its size, solidity, shape, number and position. Secondary qualities are not intrinsic but the result of “a power in the object” to create a sense-impression: to create colours, sounds, tastes, smells, feels in our minds.
What do exist independently of our minds are things consisting of molecules, particles, waves, forces.
Our sensory apparatus – our sense organs, sensory nervous system and sensory cortices – creates the illusion that the world is bright and colourful by transforming the raw data provided by our senses into colours, sounds, tastes, smells, sensations of hot and cold (and pain). These secondary qualities didn’t exist until they were invented by evolution. They evolved over time because the organisms that had the most informative senses had an evolutionary advantage.
When considering whether the world is an illusion, the first question that comes to mind is what we mean by ‘world’. Is it the material part – the molecules and atoms that make up our universe? Or is it the part that makes up human experiences because of its existence – our sense of self, our emotions, thoughts, and feelings?
Consider first the fact that an atom is almost empty space. But the illusion gets deeper: scientists are now strongly suggesting that all matter is made up of wave-particle duality. Sometimes in the field of physics "matter" is simply equated with particles that exhibit rest mass (i.e., that cannot travel at the speed of light), such as quarks and leptons. However, in both physics and chemistry, matter exhibits both wave-like and particle-like properties, the so-called wave–particle duality. If so, then our perception of reality is a major illusion.
Now let’s examine human existence, starting with what seems like an unshakeable notion – the idea of ‘I’. But there is no ‘I’ and the self is an illusion. Thanks to neuroscience and MRI scans, some scientists are now suggesting that since they have been unable to find in our brain a single entity that controls our decisions and analyses our thoughts and emotions.
Your thoughts come and go; You remain. You are not your thoughts.
Your emotions come and go; You remain. You are not your emotions.
But that leaves one big question: If you are not your thoughts or feelings, what are you?
Things are neither this, nor that
In fact the wise would confirm that your desires, thoughts and emotions cannot be considered a fixed ‘you’ since they come and go, replaced by a new wave of them as time goes by.
What about free will? The debate around whether we have it may be endless, but many neuroscientists agree that our subconscious makes our decisions for us, while the conscious part of our brain creates a narrative for why we have made these decisions without us knowing the true reasons behind them; a fiction which has the purpose of explaining to the outside world our decisions and actions.
So is the world an illusion? It seems the answer is yes, since both the material and immaterial aspects of our life are deceiving us on a daily basis.
We think of colour as being a fundamental property of objects in life: green trees, blue sky, red apples. But that’s not how it works.
Colour is not part of our world. “Every colour that people see is actually inside their head... and the stimulus of colour, of course, is light.”
As light pours down on us from the sun or from a lightbulb in our home, objects and surfaces absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. “The ones that are reflected then land onto our retina." . There, those reflected wavelengths are transformed into electrical signals to be interpreted by our brain.
So we don’t really “see” colour, but reflected light, as interpreted in our brain. “It’s a useful perception of our world, but it’s not an accurate perception of our world.".
Colours are a result of how our brains process light and are not a part of the real world.
A "colour" is what we call a categorisation within our conditioned brain of a particular combination of not just wavelength but saturation and hue.
Colour is not real. Colour is just how you perceive the light spectrum.
There is no absolute, tangible thing called "colour." Colour is not really "out there." But the different wavelengths of light are really "out there."
But this video gives different view of it:
We see our world in a huge variety of colours. However, there are other “colours” that our eyes can't see beyond red and violet; they are infrared and ultraviolet. Comparing these pictures, taken in these three “types of light," the rainbow appears to extend far beyond the visible light.
Different animals have different colour vision, depending on the pigments in their eyes and how their brains process them.
They see the world differently from ours.
Our sensory apparatus – our sense organs, sensory nervous system and sensory cortices – creates the illusion that the world is bright and colourful by transforming the raw data provided by our senses into colours, sounds, tastes, smells, sensations of hot and cold (and pain). These secondary qualities didn’t exist until they were invented by evolution. They evolved over time because those organisms that had the most informative senses had an evolutionary advantage.
Not only colour, each individual's perception of the world with regard to other things is different from others around.
The Physical world you experience isn't really what the world is like. Your brain constructs an 'experience' based on a summary of all the information your limited senses give it. Different people get different inputs from their senses! Therefore, each person's world is different from those of others around them.
Like we say, the world is an illusion for normal people. What you see is not reality, just a perception based on what your brain 'constructs' as the world.
Self-scrutiny can be done at an intellectual level, but is meaningful and beneficial at the experiential level too. True, a mind and an intellect associated with it is essential for achieving self realisation. Upon attaining this self-realised state, where the boundary between one’s self and the universe disappears, one becomes an enlightened person – one who has realized the supreme reality of the universe, which is devoid of illusion.
Science provides such perception too if you approach it in the right way.
And we see things around and in the world completely different from you. Our perceptions don't tally with yours at all. However, we "pretend" that we are in harmony with you, and that takes quite an effort on our part. We somehow manage things to have good relationships, but still, in our minds, we have no doubt we are huge distances apart.
And we can understand, if you can't, why things can never be 'normal' between us until we have these pretensions. Bridging these gaps is not easy. But we try at each step of the way.
We are drifting away more and more, as the world is becoming further superficial and illusionary based on false perceptions and these distances can become huge as time goes by and as we 'learn' more the right way.
Forgive me for saying this, but that is reality. And we accepted this long ago.
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