The Illusion of Perception: How Our Habits, Thoughts, and Beliefs Shape Our Reality

Personal thoughts, images, and sensations are false and tell us nothing about who- or what, we really are. Thoughts shape what we believe to be reality as a function of survival. This results in a distortion of what lies beyond vision (and the other senses, too). What lies beyond the senses is what we really are. Unfortunately believing we have a complete picture of reality has cost us (or seems to cost us) our wholeness.

The human body is designed to endure generations of growth and our ability to interpret sense data is biased toward this very specific human survival end-game. At the University of California, Irvine, Professor Donald Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models. In his Interface Theory of Perception he shows that what is interpreted with the mind is not the truth.

The Interface Theory of Perception (ITP) compares how our perceptions interpret the world with the way a desktop-screen and the circuitry of a computer interact.

A desktop makes it easy to use the computer. It is the interface we interact with. To delete or copy files, for instance, one simply needs to drag icons around on the desktop.

But a desktop interface does not make it easy to know the reality of a computer—its transistors, circuits, voltages, magnetic fields, firmware, and software. Indeed, it’s in part by hiding this complex structure that the desktop makes it easier to use the computer. A lot of energy would be spent if we had to know the circuit-path in order to view a photo.

In similar fashion, says ITP, our perceptions have been shaped by natural selection to make it easier for us; we can have enough energy to survive and reproduce (or, more accurately, so that our genes can survive and reproduce) in this way. Our perceptions have not been shaped to make it easy to know the true structure of the world but instead to hide its complexity, (again- to save energy).

How we experience space/time through the human body is akin to using the desktop, what we see as objects are like desktop icons. Just as the language of desktops and icons is an incomplete model to describe the true structure of the computer, so also is the language of space-time and what we believe we see for describing the true structure of the world. Humanity uses concepts to make sense of a world that is not conceptual. In truth, nothing is outside of us but is constantly exchanged and recycled with us, through us, and as us.

A blue and rectangular icon on a desktop (a folder) does not represent something in the computer that is blue and rectangular. This is because the icon is there to help you use the computer, not to distract you with irrelevant details about circuitry. In the same way- what we believe ourselves to be: limited, independent entities with our own personal consciousness is an incomplete representation.

Knowing the truth of what we are matters. In forgetting our connection to the ground of reality- the ocean that we are swimming in- we become like fish who feel they are dying of thirst. ITP is a model put forth by a reputable source intended to describe how we have forgotten the ground of our being and that this a function of biological design. This need not give way to apathy, but instead can be a door to greater peace.

Humans have the capacity to go beyond biology with our unique ability to re-represent information. I not only know, but I know that I know. This self-reflexive capacity allows us, perhaps for the first time ever in any species’ evolution, to consider the implications of believing the icons on our desktop to be all there is to truth and reality.
In recovering the knowledge of our individual wholeness, we allow for the capacity to love and honor what appears to be outside of us yet is fundamentally not separate from ourselves. We allow for the capacity to shine as our fundamental wholeness and welcome others to be as they actually are.