Plato believed that what we take to be real, such as a
mountain or a chair, is really an imperfect shadow of the eternal forms. An
image that is being reflected from some distorted mirror giving us an intimation
of what the true shape is. He also believed that the world we observe is just
an illusion and that reality is hidden and unknowable to our senses and
everything is made up of abstract entities known as the forms.
The only reality that exists is the reality we choose, and
that explains why so many people live such unreal lives. Reality for them is
Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat. They pull in all of the images from the outside
to form their preferred reality and never allow the reality inside to assert
itself. Enslaved by materialism, fakery and foolishness we cheer on sports
teams and celebrities to end up watching a metaphor of ourselves. Yet someplace
deep inside we know it’s a lie but we continue with the charade and live with
the permanent contradiction because somehow it’s easier than facing reality.
Donald D. Hoffman, a cognitive scientist from U.C. Irvine studies
perception, artificial intelligence and evolutionary game theory. He believes
the world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality and that
evolution maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction. If
that’s true then I guess those 60-100 million people that are homeless due to
war and political instability have nothing to worry about. Or the 5 kids a day
that die from child abuse, or the 49 million Americans that struggle every day
to put food on the table or the 47 million currently enslaved in the world that
have no way out have nothing to fear because their perception of their horrific
life is nothing like what they think it is. Too much reality, don’t worry,
we’ll just Photoshop it out.