The Great Game of Illusions — As the eyes open…
By: Sreeram Vengayil
Tags: Universe, Spirituality, Science, Philosophy, Neuroscience

All of us stumbled onto life one day without having any idea about life itself or the world where we are going to live it out. Then slowly, subconsciously and consciously, we start to make sense of the world around us. The mind wakes up to colourful stories and vivid imaginations.

The fundamental questions are all answered with the help of religion and community. However, as life progresses, the stories lose their sheen and delusions unravel. The vagaries of thinking mind have been the subject of literature since the days of Marcus Aurelius at least! The mind found solace in different ideologies but as Camus wrote the divorce with the universe couldn’t be reversed.

Ever since the advent of complex societies, religion played the biggest role in shaping the human psyche. The biggest question was the role that humans were destined to play in the grand scheme of things devised by God. Treading the righteous path as per the laws of God was the challenge that humans were supposed to live up to. However, this unraveled as men were exposed to different religions than their own, with different value systems and the search expanded to an undefined force controlling the universe. The secular enlightened mind gave birth to the natural philosophy and led to the demise of theology as the dominant philosophy, but then the special place of men in the scheme of things was unchallenged.

As the natural sciences advanced, so did human understanding of the universe. For as far as eyes can see, there is no heaven. There were only lifeless bodies following the laws of physics. It was then revealed that the human body too is bound by the same laws. But then the inexplicable mystery of consciousness gave weight to the concept of mind body dualism which insulated the human mind from the difficult and demeaning inevitability of bringing everything human under gambit of the laws of physics.

But the onward march neuroscience did not leave the stone un-turned. It turned out that the feelings and ideas have a physical basis and is subject to the fallibility of a worldly object. The human mind assumed that it is the master of its own destiny while it was proven that the conscious mind is not even in charge of the neural processes involved in reasoning and feelings, let alone the events outside. Most often the conscious mind is made aware of the decisions, though it can have a modulating effect, which are made by the body as a whole in its sole purpose of reproduction and survival. The mind was considered divided into the human neo-cortex, the mammalian limbic system and reptilian R-complex, with the last two blamed for all that seemed irrational and primitive. The thoughts and tendencies which were considered as irrational biases and useless emotions have since been proven to be an essential part of being human and that presumed that neo cortical thinking is the highest state of human existence was indeed Descartes’s error, as has been elucidated by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. It was human body which survived and thrived and hence, following from Taleb’s assertion that whatever survives is rational, the human bundle must be rational as a whole that puts the last nail in the coffin of mind body dualism. The realization that our brains are as subject to the laws of physics as the wayside flower and stone and the conscious self is not really in charge of our lives led to the modern era of neuro-existentialist angst.

The human mind which sees through the delusions has barely reached the end. Our understanding of the universe has evolved continuously that all the fundamental postulates about the universe derived from the quantum physics, general relativity and string theory are counter-intuitive to the conscious human mind which is evolved to maximize survival in the macroscopic world around us. It is now theorized that the universe as a whole does not change and that the observer and the observed change in equal and opposite ways. It then follows that everything from the big bang is a giant illusion. Most of these mathematical epiphanies are closer to the imaginations of psychedelic mystics of a millennium ago than that of natural philosophers of 18th century that they have given a voice of confidence to the dogmatic chest thumping religionistas. We can hardly assume that we have reached full understanding or we are anywhere significantly closer to the truth than we were a century ago, assuming the existence of an absolute truth.

In part 2, The Great Game of Illusions — Into the Yonder, we shall explore our possible days ahead as a species.