Reality perceived is a conscious illusion

You wake up from a bad dream and say to yourself, ‘Thank God it was a dream, now let me get back to reality’. You really mean — let me get back to my dream. If you define reality by what is real, then we are far from it. How do you define a dream? Probably something your mind perceives, where you see things, feel emotions, respond to situations, make decisions, take reflex actions, touch, talk, and above everything, experience stuff. By definition, how is that different from what we call our reality? Perhaps wakefulness? Or really?? What is ‘Wakefulness’? How do you tell you are wakeful? How can you tell the so-called reality is not just our perceived reality — but the real truth? The mere arrogant and baseless assumption that we are wakeful is the greatest proof we are not.

The wave or particle nature of light has always been one of the greatest topics of contention, debate, and intrigue. When we couldn’t convince ourselves we told ourselves — it is both — ‘Wave-Particle Duality’. It just behaves in one or the other form in different physical circumstances. Circumstances’?? Here comes the greatest mystery of quantum physics. Tomas Young’s great double-slit experiment. The one experiment that defies thousands of years of our research about the universe, reality, and consciousness. For those who are not aware of this experiment, in simple words here is how it works:

There is a wall with two tiny vertical slits. If you project a beam of particles on this wall, the pattern that is formed on a screen on the other side is of two vertical lines, as expected. But if you pass a wave through these two slits, two new waves are formed originating from each slit. When the crest of one wave meets the trough of another wave, they cancel each other, when crest meets crest it intensifies. This creates an Interference Pattern on the screen, with one brightest vertical line in the center with many alternating dark and bright lines on both sides. So just by looking at the pattern formed on the screen, you can judge if the projected element is particle or wave. Simple enough. But at a quantum level, all our understanding about the reality goes into trash the moment consciousness enters this experiment. First shocking observation was that when this experiment was conducted with electrons (assuming them to be matter), the pattern that was formed on the screen was actually an interference pattern (wave behavior). So scientists inferred that at quantum level electrons passing through slit 1 and 2 are interfering with each other just like waves and forming an interference pattern. So the experiment was altered to pass one electron at a time so that it should not get interfered and should only pass through either slit 1 or 2 and create a particle-like projection on the screen (2 vertical lines). But second shocking moment came when scientists observed that electrons still produced an interference pattern. This was inexplicable because it means that the same electron actually passed through both slit1 and slit2, and also at the same time didn’t pass through any slit at all. All possibilities true at the same time (a superposition behavior). So scientists thought that if mathematically electron proved to be in all of these possible states, why not we measure what it actually did. So they placed an apparatus to observe the actual behavior of fired electron — whether it passed through slit 1 or slit 2 or didn’t pass any. When this was done, every electron was observed for one of the three possibilities as it was fired. Then the third shocking moment came. Scientists observed that just by observing the experiment, the electrons stopped exhibiting the wave behavior and now formed two straight lines on the screen, just like particles. This was extremely shocking because it meant that just by the addition of conscious observation, a quantum particle changed its very own fundamental behavior as if the electron had its own mind to know it is being watched. How does consciousness alter a fundamental physical reality? The moment the observation of electron passing through the double-slit was removed, it again started behaving as wave and formed interference pattern on the screen (wave behavior). In other words, consciousness was found to be altering the reality we observe. An experiment so simple turned out to a rabbit hole of mystery. This didn’t end here. Scientists thought that whether an electron will behave like a particle or wave is somehow decided at the time it passes through the slits, depending upon whether at that point it is observed or not. So how about we let the electron think it is not observed and let it exhibit wave nature, and after this wave has passed through the slit we later observe it just before it hits the screen. Then came the fourth shocking moment for scientists when they found that observing the electron after it has already passed through the slit unobserved still exhibit particle behavior. This was beyond belief. It means that the electron, when found to be observed, went back in time — at the moment it entered the double slit and changed itself from a wave to particle. The astounding result of this experiment is unexplained to this day.

What is natural versus supernatural? Our observation in line with our knowledge gained so far is natural. A ball when dropped should fall down and not go up. Because that’s what our knowledge of reality expects to be logical. If that doesn’t happen, what should we challenge? Our knowledge, or our perceived reality. No matter how gravely inexplicable the double-slit experiment turned out to be, at least one thing that humanity learned from it is that our consciousness plays a role in our perceived reality. What does it mean? Is our perceived reality a conscious illusion?

How perfect our world seems, is suspicious. How is it that everything around us is so well perfected to an unbelievable precision? During scorching heat, when it rains we love to step into the rain and feel the coolness of perspired water vapors on our face. But just by following fundamental laws of motion the water droplet if accelerated with gravitational constant g, would fall on earth like bullets, easily piercing our bodies into shreds. But that doesn’t happen, due to a force called Drag force exhibited by all fluids in the direction opposite to the motion of an object inside the fluid. It slows down the gravitational acceleration of raindrop making everything so blissfully convenient for us. Is that by chance? There are hundreds of such examples all around us and within us. Look at our body, constantly forming from interstellar dust and shedding away dead cells, but everything working with such extraordinary precision, every cell, every organ, every micro-organism, every function and every bit of everything within us, and outside of us working in favor of our existence. Such an incomprehensible well-crafted equilibrium that for our mediocre intelligence, we would just rather stay in our blissful ignorance crediting everything to chance. As per the second law of thermodynamics, everything moves towards a higher degree of entropy, in other words — everything must move towards disorder. But some great minds define consciousness or life as we know it, as order reducing the entropy degree. But clearly we see nature around us so well perfected and constantly in order, with a purpose to support us. Does it mean nature has consciousness? Perhaps. Or maybe this is all just our perception of reality, like a dream, or probably actually a dream.

There have been many attempts to understand and study consciousness, but this concept itself is paradoxical. Studying something involves observation of reality, and observation requires consciousness, and we now know that consciousness alters reality. It’s like attempting to push a train while still standing inside the same train. Where does it lead to? Does it mean any attempt to understand consciousness would result in an altered reality, a reality that is pre-destined for us? If yes then this means we are seeing what we are meant to see, we feel what we are meant to feel and we experience what we are meant to experience. That is a gravely depressing revelation. An abysmal darkness where our reality is only a version of perception, no better than any wild dream.

The double-slit experiment became infamous for opening doors to the unknown. A dark sinking realization that we can never realize the true reality. Scientists further wondered, what is it in the observation that causes the wave function to collapse. What is meant by conscious observation? Is it just the fact that someone or something is watching the experiment? Wait, is it ‘someone’ or ‘something’? Does it matter if the entity that is watching the experiment is a conscious entity like a human being or if it is a computer? Well, that calls for another version of the double-slit experiment where the observation source will be studied. Scientists conducted extremely sophisticated versions of the double-slit experiment where they used human mediators to simply meditate and imagine in their heads that they are observing the experiment in real-time. In another version of this experiment, they made people from across the world from different continents observe the experiment occurring thousands of miles away using the internet. In another version, they compared human observation versus Linux computers doing the same observation making the same judgments using the same interface. After every version of this experiment, the result only showed that every time a conscious entity makes the observation the waveform collapsed, but when a computer or a non-conscious entity makes the observation, it retained the wave nature. Even if a human meditates and focuses on imagination of making an observation, the waveform collapsed. The fact of the matter is that it remains one of the greatest mysteries of science to this day. Without knowing the answer to this question, new doors are already opened for us. Doors that question the very fundamental reality as we know it, doors that question our very existence, doors that question everything we ever thought was true. This brought us in a state where we sort of know we are not yet wakeful. But I am glad we know that because believing that we are wakeful is the greatest proof we are not. At least we are one step closer.