How Real is Real?

Reality: is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or may be thought to be. In its widest definition, reality includes everything that is and has being, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible.

We as human beings are gifted in the right that we have our senses to rely on, our senses of sight, touch, tasting, smelling, and hearing are highly developed and in many cases provide us with vital information we need in our daily lives.  Not to mention the sheer amount of emotional responses we receive from these senses are tremendous and can in many cases make or break the emotional content of our daily lives as well. It is estimated that if you were to estimate the amount of information we take in from these senses and then compare that to how much we are actually able to process with our astounding super computer of a mind, you would find that our senses actually provide us with more information that we can process at any given moment. To put it in another way lets say right now our minds are capable of processing information at the rate of 8 million bits of information at any given moment, our sense by way of comparison are providing us with 8 billion bits of information at the same time.

With this much information being provided our brains have developed and amazing system of processing information that allows us to not only make sense of the information but to also interpret and function in a virtual flood of information. We filter the incoming messages from our senses in 3 ways;

1.)    Distortion: Ever notice that when you were with another person or in a group and you went to an event (sort of like a concert, a movie, a party, etc…) and later when you and your friend or group of friends, compare your experience and find that everyone’s recollection is not the same? This is because the details of our experience is determined by what particular sights, sounds, scents, etc… catches our attention there for we pay attention to. Also these particular details also have a way at times of becoming larger that life in descriptions we recall and share. (A friend of mine once told me about a concert that he went once. He spent a great deal of time telling me about the scarves tied to the singers microphone stand and how they swirled around the singer while he moved about the stage, I’m pretty sure if I found another person that was there that night I could probably get a description on how well that singer also sang that night.) But to simplify no matter if we and make certain details larger & more grandiose or make them smaller and/or less significant this is an example of how we distort information we sort into our minds as we have any experience.

2.)    Generalization: Generalization is when we sort information base on how similar something is to something else or we sort of blend details into the background of our thoughts. Also this can manifest as the grouping of details that we recall and describe as one description for a group of things. Such as if I asked can you describe the colors in a rainbow? You could say sure, red, yellow, blue, green, etc… But in truth, the colors of the rainbow are not just one solid pallet of any of these colors but a blending of them, (i.e. how many shades of orange are there between the colors yellow and red?)

3.)    Deletion: In this case there is any number of details we chose to forget as they may seem unimportant or insignificant as compared to others. This differs from the other filters in that there is not information from these details sorted into our memories for recall at another time. In comparison with the other 2 filters it differs because with Generalization and Distortion information about the details remain even though they have been altered in some form, whereas when we delete details there is nothing to recall and the information is simply no longer available.

The first time I learned this information I had to ask “is there no way that is a purely factual form of filtering that we utilize that keeps details unchanged?” The answer is no, there is no form of filtering we use that does not involve using these 3 forms of filtering. When it comes down it the thing we know as “reality” is a description of our experience based upon how we filter the information that is available to us at any given moment, in this sense we are separated from reality by senses, as we have no other way to interpret our surroundings and the events we are participants in or observe.

We all learned about this phenomenon when we were kids, it was shown to us with a game called “telephone” where a person whispered something into a persons ear at the beginning of a line of people, and then they in turn whispered into the next persons ear the thing they were told and so on till it gets to the last person in the line and then the last person says out loud what they were told, and it is always totally different from the original statement that was said.

It all boils down to the fact that we are separated from reality by our senses, and everything we experience is subject to our own interpretations as we filter it into our conscious minds. Which leaves us always asking the question in the back of our minds how real is real?