Perception

Based on a recommendation from my mother, I have been binge watching the past seasons of a TV show called Perception. The show follows Daniel, a professor of neuroscience with paranoid schizophrenia, who helps solve crimes for the FBI. His hallucinations help him focus and see the cases from different angles, which helps him see clues or put pieces together that he might have otherwise missed. The only issue is that he’s not always sure that the “person” he’s talking to is real or a hallucination.

The show is fascinating in that it always begins and ends with Daniel giving a lecture about some aspect of the brain and how it affects how people perceive and experience the world. Obviously, the aspect being discussed becomes the central theme of whatever case he’s working on. It’s interesting to ponder how much of life is reality versus our brain’s perception of reality. Or whether things are truly real UNTIL they are perceived by the brain.

I had a psychology professor that brought up the age-old question of “If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” He went on to suggest that the answer is in fact, no. The reason is that sound is not actually sound until it’s perceived. So the tree might make waves, but wouldn’t technically be sound until those waves were received and processed.

Is reality the same? Does someone or something truly exist if nobody perceives them? And if so, how can you be sure? Because the only way to verify it is to actually perceive it, and then it could be argued that your perception of it actually brought it into being.

It’s like Schrodinger’s cat, which was a thought experiment proposed to refute the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum superpositions. Quantum superpositions claim that a quantum system, such as an atom or photon, can exist as a combination of multiple states corresponding to different possible outcomes. The Copenhagen interpretation says that a quantum system remains in superposition until it interacts with, or is observed by the external world. When this happens, the superposition collapses into one or another of the possible definite states. The thought experiment surmised that a cat locked in a box with acid and a decaying atom would exist in a state of both alive and dead until someone opened the box and observed what state the sat was actually in. The argument being that the observation itself is what caused the system to settle into one state or the other. While this famous thought experiment has been used to evoke a myriad of theories and paradoxes, I find it fascinating in the sense that it proposes things exist in an indeterminate state until observed or perceived. Therefore, reality is defined by observation.

However, further theories have gone on to define “observation.” Does that mean an outside observer, or could the object or person itself be defined as an observer of itself? Which would mean that we could bring ourselves into reality by observing ourselves. But then is it the same reality as everyone else, or our own construct? Is an inanimate object truly capable of observation? Or does it require the ability to “act” on a system? Can a brick “observe” us into reality?

I ponder all of this, because in the show they both contend that the hallucinations are real because Daniel perceives them just like he perceives a “real” person, and they’re not real because nobody else perceives them. But if observation is what makes a thing so, then both are technically true.

But the hardest thing to reconcile is the thought that I, or you, could be a schizophrenic and not know it. If someone else isn’t around to “dismantle” our hallucinations, then how would we ever know? And what if other people WERE around, but they were all hallucinations too? Could one hallucination confirm or dispel another hallucination? Then, how could you ever know what was real?