One of the most significant discoveries of modern science is that the world we perceive around us is not as it appears. Rather, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and quantum physics have demonstrated that our day-to-day reality is a relative construct, built upon a scaffolding of information bits that betray their real origin and causation. In India, Vedantists, particularly those of the Advaita persuasion, have argued that the world of appearance is a beguiling illusion which hides the truth of the universe’s real essence, and as such it is akin to the curtain in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz (where a balloonist from Kansas plays out his antics in order to gain power and respect) which deceives by hiding that which is behind it.
Likewise, in early schools of Gnosticism they saw the world as the manifestation of a demiurge that entraps all who succumb to its tempting guises. The higher truth is lost because one believes that the image to be real, whereas it is merely a secondary power.
What early philosophers and mystics understood (even if they couldn’t articulate it scientifically) was that humankind was under the spell of a cerebral mirage, one which gave a false sense of knowledge and certainty. Although religious thinkers of differing persuasions drew out most of these ancient insights, it has turned out to be remarkably prescient in light of modern science. The brain tricks us into believing something to be real when it is not, provided that such trickery provides with a survival advantage.
In this book, I will focus on my early research work with V.S. Ramachandran at UCSD on motion capture and information processing which demonstrated how and why the brain “uses impressionistic” and “filling-in” procedures so as to best compute color and motion and synchronize them as a whole even though processed by different channels. I will then expand upon this into other fields of neuroscience and evolutionary biology to better understand why the brain is indeed a deceiving machine which should give one pause about subjectivist revelations. Finally, I connect the latest work on neural trickery to provide a series of warning signals for those interested in developing a genuine science of mysticism. In sum, we are under the spell of a cerebral mirage and to understand what consciousness is we must first come to grips with its beguiling and deceptive nature. Includes a number of original films and is augmented with pictures and graphs.
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