The Grand Illusion

There’s a reason why I started writing this stuff…or is there?  …Do such questions or for that matter any question that has ever bubbled up in the human brain have a perfect and precise answer? Is even asking questions a justified act or is it just a habit our brain has concocted for itself to give itself an illusion of intelligence and consequent superiority over other beings? Are we really any better off than the moth in the garden or is it just an illusion that we are faced with?  …Some bloke called Darwin said that we constantly try too change ourselves to suit our needs (like we got rid of our tails when we no longer needed it) and even made up a fancy name for this…”evolution”. . Is our brain any different from the rest of our body or does it behave the same way and if the latter is true…then …could it just  be possible that our brain is keeping us under a grand illusion of supremacy and knowledge just to keep our race in the “fittest” position.. Definitely a smart, happy monkey would be fitter than a sad, dumb one in the struggle for existence with all other factors remaining the same for both. Maybe our brain has “evolved” in a way to give us the impression of being the way we find and think of ourselves to be and showing us the way everything seems to be.

           That’s not all… As I delve deep into the intricacies of my mind, I keep getting more and more perturbed. Am I being too skeptical about it or is there actually an element of truth in what I am thinking. .Is all that I and every other human being who ever existed on earth have thought just an illusion created by our brain..?? 

           Let me elaborate on another example.. When I was in school I had been taught of the three dimensions, the 3-D space and it was enchanting to be able to express the position of everything in the universe with just three numbers…until  …Einstein and Co shattered the way I looked at things and pelted me with a hard hitting 4th dimension of time. .I asked my self …if there exists, this new dimension, why can’t I see it? Surely Mr. Einstein is a farce and has no understanding of the   nature of the universe…But wait a minute… it might just be my brain which is playing tricks. .Maybe it has “evolved” to dissolve this sense of ours…to keep us unaware of the existence of this fourth dimension, as rightly it’s of no use, as we can’t possibly travel through this dimension…Keeping in with the good old laws of Darwin… Anything that’s of no use is chucked out (remember the tail, why should our sense of knowing the fourth dimension be any different?)         

But that’s not all… let me take this a step further. .have you ever realized that mathematics, which is a creation of the human mind has kept up so well in matching with the reality of the universe….How can something which is made up by the human mind (an evolved human mind that is, which can hardly see…err.. who knows…maybe a measly 1% of the reality of the universe. .scope limited to only that portion of the universe that it needs to understand and experience to keep the race alive) explain each and every experience that we have with such degree of accuracy??… Is Mathematics the best way to go about finding the truth of the existence of the universe? Or has our mind again concocted a tool called mathematics which keeps us satisfied (and thus happy and fit for existence in competition with other living beings) by maintaining a fine balance between what we experience and what we understand through science. . We talk about the Big Bang theory but no mathematical evidence has come out yet about what happened before the highly talked about event. .singularity has us dumbstruck on all accounts. .May be this is where our brain fails to maintain that fine balance. .when there is an illusion there is bound to be an angle from which the illusion looks absurd. .and you realize that what you have been seeing was not actually there. . You just have to look long and close enough. .and you get the hint …may be singularity is the hint for us…. The question remains… is mathematics and physics actually going to lead us anywhere in our search for the truth or is it just our perception of logic which keeps telling us that mathematics and physics are the torchbearers to truth…. And is that perception not a part of the ongoing process of evolution… Is it not possible then that rather than seeking true logic our brains just chose the easier way of defining “logic” as the natural way we see the world which is highly likely to be flawed given the long process of evolution… through which our senses have gone through. Haven’t you noticed how easy it was to believe in Newton’s laws (which our senses could directly perceive) and how difficult it was to even understand, let alone visualize Einstein’s theories which talked about different dimensions than what our brain works in. Are mathematics and physics as reliable as they are believed to be?

           Why blame just mathematics and science… I wont be surprised if every single thought I have ever had about the nature of the world… be it a scientific thought or not… had been an illusion …who knows, the world may not at all be the way it seems to be.. the trees and the flowers may not be beautiful at all …the earth might not be a large place at all…I might not have even seen the way the back of my hand actually looks like….

           In fact every perception, every emotion we have,… joy, beauty , fear, anger, pleasure, sorrow… might not be the way we think of them…Do you remember the first time you felt pain? Do you remember the first time you were sad?  …Probably not …how did we know then what it felt to be hurt or pained or sad …how do we come to he conclusion that it wasn’t good for us? …probably, there’s an explanation I can provide …Here goes…

           As soon as we were born our brains started its activities…with whatever little it knew of the world in its “evolved” form as the inputs to this complex circuitry… It started averaging all the feelings …all the emotions…or more technically all the electrical pulses running through the synapses and soon set up a limit switch for each emotion to be switched on or off…The higher the average limit calculated for an individual for the feeling of pain, the more he could tolerate pain and similarly for all other human emotions. As soon as the limit is crossed the feeling of pain is experienced….But there’s a catch to it. As mentioned all the levels(limits) and their identities were determined by the “evolved” brain itself….The brain learnt to do this in the same way the cell learnt to divide itself and the heart learnt to pump blood…All these were the results of evolution. Now consider this, what about the beginning of the process of evolution. Did the life form then have no feeling of sorrow, pain, joy etc? Quite likely… it had not yet learnt to set the levels and define them….It’s precisely the state of some of the other lower life forms now.

           So it was equally likely then to define a level as sorrow as it was to define it as joy. So there are practically no differences between the two feelings except for the way our brain has made us treat the two electrical pulses. Or so as to say… the two different emotions…And thus it would have been equally likely to define the feelings of joy and sorrow the absolute opposite way of what we know of them now, The point that I am making is that every little thought, every little feeling mankind has ever had is nothing more than a figment of his own assumptions and imaginations. The likelihood of our lives being entirely different from now is a clear possibility… had the coin spun the other way round we might well be enjoying a harsh reprimand or torturing ourselves with a cup of coffee at this point in time!!

           What if our existence in the form we see ourselves is nothing but an illusion our brain provides for us to give us the lead in the struggle for existence? What if the shape and composition of our bodies and our lives not actually the way they look like and are just mere mirages that we can see and be sure about but are actually just a trap? Sometimes when I look at a non living object, a book, a table, or for that matter a dead body of a person… I wonder, are these really non-living or are they just living in a realm which our brain is not equipped to experience (just like the fourth dimension)? They might just be smart enough to be looking at us from their realm of the universe which is unknown to our brains, laughing at our ignorance and enjoying the fact that their entity and existence is superior to ours just as we enjoy watching animals and birds that our brain considers to be less developed species than ours.

           In fact to be true, our brain has only two kinds of information… first, the natural instincts that have “evolved” with time (flawlessly or not, remains a lurking question) and secondly, the things taught to us by someone else, like language. But the latter too is taught by someone whose brain is no different than ours in the nature of evolution it has gone through. So, whatever be the knowledge that we have, be it the time on the clock now, or the color of the sky or the sound of the radio or even the feeling of existence that we have, might all be just illusions- small parts of a grand illusion that our brain has taught us to live in. For all I know, I might be wrong… but there’s an equal chance that I might be right. I, for one never can tell. In fact, I can’t even tell if the action of writing that my fingers are experiencing now is actually occurring or not. God, if that entity exists that is, made a great illusion and implanted us with a tool called the BRAIN which gave rise to the illusion as well as holds the keys to the puzzle, a mystery that can never be solved, at least not by a brain which is programmed not to solve it ever by the natural process of evolution.