Meditation and Reality
Meditation and Reality
Annaka Harris
Meditation entails the difficult task of cultivating concentrated attention on one’s moment-to-moment experience—the endless stream of feelings, thoughts, and perceptions—without judging or interpreting them, or allowing them to take immediate control of our actions. In its simplest form, meditation is a skill that undercuts all our evolved drives: planning for the future, learning from the past, following our desires to eat, drink, avoid pain, etc. Instead, during meditation practice one simply allows the feelings, thoughts, and perceptions to come into and out of being, and in doing so, these experiences begin to take on a different character than they do in daily life.
The Fitness-Beats-Truth theorem (FBT), developed by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, claims that the way evolutionary processes succeed is by hiding the truth (the underlying reality). In other words, the less a system models the true nature of the universe, the more likely it is to survive. [1] Our experience of seeing the color green, for example, is useful for navigating the world but gives us no indication of the underlying phenomena of lightwaves bouncing off a leaf, entering the retina, and being processed by the brain. FBT simply goes a few steps further, arguing that all of our experiences—even of space and time itself—are misleading us about the true nature of reality. [2] That’s not to say that our perceptions aren’t good maps of reality—if they weren’t, they obviously wouldn’t be evolutionarily advantageous. “Green” is a great way to compress a lot of information into a single experience, but our experience of seeing green tells us nothing about lightwaves, etc., and it causes us to believe there is “green” outside of our experience of it. If FBT is correct, as I’m convinced it is, it would make sense that meditation training has the potential to help us better understand a more fundamental layer of reality, as it is in part an exercise in “un-training” our evolved perceptions.
Perhaps we shouldn’t find it surprising that people regularly experience spaceless and timeless states in meditation, embodied as a “oneness” that no longer takes on the character of being a separate “self.” All three of these perceptions—space, time, and self— have been revealed by neuroscience and physics to be a distortion of what we now understand to be the underlying physical reality. These perceptions can even be considered illusions in one sense of the word. [3] That’s not to say that meditation practice should cause us to lose appreciation for our lives as evolved human beings. Quite the opposite. By expanding one’s curiosity, freedom, and ability to be present, meditation helps people more naturally find beauty and awe in the full range of human experience. But it is no surprise that cultivating this particular skill might also serve as a tool to help us perceive reality more accurately in some instances. If evolution hides the truth from us by definition, it would make sense that training the mind to unravel our conscious experience to the purest form we have access to—letting go of our evolved perceptions and drives for minutes, hours, or days at a time—could give us a clearer window on to the universe in which we are embedded.
NOTES
[1] Donald Hoffman’s FBT theorem
[2] For more, see Chapter 8 of my audio documentary series LIGHTS ON, “Space and Time”
[3] There is a distinction to be made between what I refer to as an illusion with a lowercase “i” and Illusion with an uppercase “I.” A typical visual illusion falls into the category of what I’m calling illusion with a lowercase “i,” which takes place when our visual system, which works well at mapping the world for us in most circumstances, fails us under an unusual condition. There’s a whole world of fun examples of visual illusions in which we can trick our brains into hallucinating an inaccurate map of the outside world, rather than an accurate one—seeing two arcs of equivalent length as different lengths, for example. But an Illusion with an uppercase “I” is an experience that gives us an accurate and useful map of the world, but it tricks us into believing we have a perfectly clear window onto the world (i.e. “green exists out there in the world”), rather than a perception or map, or an interface, as Donald Hoffman likes to call it.
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