Truth, Illusion And The Reality There's So Much More
If science can't measure something or we humans can't perceive it, does that mean it doesn't exist? Susan Marsh weighs in, wrestling with how facts fall short in explaining a deeper spirit in nature
Hikers on a misty day move through Yellowstone's Hoodoo Basin. As nature writer and former wilderness specialist with the US Forest Service Susan Marsh notes, science, empiricism and reason can fall short of explaining what's really in front of us. For example, centuries have had to pass since The Enlightenment before scientists acknowledged that non-humans have their own state of being. They can sense things we can't and yet we deny these things often because it makes destruction of nature easier. Photo by Jacob W. Frank/NPS
By Susan Marsh
Truth, fact, reality—we humans seek verities in quests that can take a lifetime. Yet the more we grasp for it the more truth slithers away like a slippery fish between our fingers. Even the “hard” sciences chase ever-moving targets, as findings are announced only to be altered based on emerging information. Mystics and philosophers have kept us wondering for centuries if truth even exists. Is it all just an illusion?
That tree, the spruce outside my window there, its spreading branches festooned with last fall’s curling aspen leaves: it is as real (I think) as anything could be. Some philosophies question the very existence of external reality, an idea that makes my eyes cross. Do we not perceive the world through physical senses developed over millions of years? How can it fail to be real?
I try to understand what the gurus are talking about. Some seem to suggest that the spruce tree, and everything else, is real only because I perceive it. But if I glance away, the spruce doesn’t disappear. The chickadees picking insects off its needles haven’t noticed that I have stopped looking out the window. This concept must be some kind of koan or metaphor I am too dense to understand.
Myths and creation stories are exempt from my confusion. Sacred mountains made of gold and lapis, continents resting on a turtle’s back—though not my stories, as myths and traditions to gather around, they make a kind of spiritual sense. Some aspects of what I will call traditional (rather than current) Western philosophy, the culture of my inheritance, do not. As I try to understand why, I conclude that my resistance to them has to do with how little they have to say about any form of life on earth besides humanity. I understand that there are ongoing efforts to make up for that omission, which is heartening.
Some subsets of the western tradition ask me to wonder if I myself am real. In the 17th century, when modern science was barely stirring in its womb, Rene Descartes felt the need to prove his own existence with this formula: I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.
I prefer to tweak his “proof” somewhat. When I quit thinking, I cease to exist. I don’t mean it literally. While I continue to exist in my physical form, I can set my busy mind aside when I walk alone in the woods, and simply be there, hardly aware of my unconsciously moving legs.
This is what I’m told should happen while sitting in meditation, but meditation does involve cognition, if only to notice one’s breathing. It’s more about self-awareness than melting into the environment.
From what I gather, Descartes was responding to an ancient Greek philosophy that basically said we humans are highly unlikely to know anything (however convinced we may be that we know everything). The older I get the more I agree with those radical skeptics of antiquity.
Still, I often catch myself muttering under my breath I know nothing, which of course is an impossible statement. I’d have to know at least that much—that I know nothing. This is how philosophy can drive you up a wall with endless circular arguments in which the mind chases its ever-elusive tail. Better to just go out into the forest and take a few deep breaths. Inhale those terpenes and feel your body, soul and mind relax into their embrace.
In an effort to clear my head of brainteasers, I turn my attention back to the spruce, this morning’s anchor of reality. But then I notice that the window could use a squirt of Windex and instantly I’m off on another mental tangent.
I know the glass is real because I can’t reach through it to touch the tree. Yet by design it is clear, a deliberate illusion to bring the outdoors in. If you had never seen a window before—even my dirty one—you might attempt to penetrate it with your hand. Birds are fooled by windows too, so in order to protect them I use illusory silhouettes.
The heritage of thinkers like Descartes, for all his contributions, is part of the reason that the culture I come from (western European) has such a man-apart relationship with wild nature. If we knew how closely we are related to other animals and plants, perhaps it would be easier to feel that elusive oneness.
We live in a world of both illusion and reality, often mixed together and our acceptance this state is often unconscious. Consider the clear mountain sky, for instance: we know it is blue yet we know it isn’t really. What we call light is the part of the electromagnetic radiation that is humanly visible, which is either absorbed or reflected by the object hit. There is no such thing as color without light and our eyes confirm this as a rosy sunset fades to mauve then gray, then…darkness.
When earth’s atmosphere reflects wavelengths of 400-500 nanometers, it gives us shades of blue from violet-blue to cyan. This bit of physics, while “proven” to be real, does not help us understand why we respond emotionally to the color blue. The alpine forget-me-nots, the sky reflected in a deep clear lake: are these not colors that touch our hearts?
At the sight of blue in nature we replace the abstract notion of a 450-nm wavelength, if such a thought occurred in the first place, with a feeling of joy, serenity, and wonder. The meaning we give to color lies closer to the human soul than a bit of scientific data that rests in a dusty corner of the brain. Yet, aren’t both of these ways of seeing color real?
Illusion, such as the meaning we give to the color blue, enlivens dry scientific fact and helps us rejoice in miracles. It inspires our myths and stories. We savor it the way we delight in being fooled by a magician with a hand saw and a maiden in a box. We also use it to our benefit in the mountains or at home: imagine a house without windows.
Illusion helps us live. Clever apes, we have been known to throw a hide over our shoulders before approaching members of species who still retain their hides, in order to hunt them. And we are not alone: some insects mimic flowers to ambush prey or to avoid becoming prey. Some flowers smell like carrion, attracting pollinator flies. As the designer of creation, the god must delight in artful deception.
While we can usually distinguish reality from illusion and live comfortably with both, it is deliberate fantasy in the face of objective reality, or what we might call willful ignorance, that stymies me. Back to Descartes, who is said to have whacked his poor dog during a public lecture and when the dog yelped in pain, he told his audience that it was a purely mechanical reaction and it didn’t actually hurt.
Really? I would have gotten up and walked out, taking the dog with me. This is the worst kind of self-deception, when another being reacts the same way you would under the same circumstance and you manage to delude yourself into believing there is some imaginary gulf of experience between you. Illusion versus delusion—another topic to explore.
For generations, old-growth forests more than a millennium old were treated not as remarkable communities where incalculable, sentient inner-connections existed between individual species, but rather big trees were treated like corn, commodities harvested without pondering their living essence as more than board feet. Photo of Idaho cedar grove by Todd Wilkinson
One might excuse a 17th century European, if not for his cruelty at least for his innocence of the fact that we share something like 84 percent of our genes with dogs and our nervous systems are basically identical. But I don’t excuse Descartes completely, for the essayist Michel de Montaigne, in the previous century, observed that many animals are superior to humans in certain respects and that dogs in particular use deductive reasoning to understand the world around them.
Anyone who lives with a dog knows this. Mine can count biscuits and if I give her fewer than the required three, she will sit and stare and the top of the refrigerator until I realize my mistake. Montaigne rightly concluded that the over-glorification of human mental capabilities is, to be kind, an illusion.
The contrast between these two historical gentlemen seems somehow emblematic of our divergent ways of assessing what is real. Sometimes we observe without judgement or preconceived ideas. Other times our minds are made up before we approach the subject. I doubt that this mix is balanced as if on a weight scale, and it’s surely not always conscious.
The heritage of thinkers like Descartes, for all his contributions, is part of the reason that the culture I come from (western European) has such a man-apart relationship with wild nature. If we knew how closely we are related to other animals and plants, perhaps it would be easier to feel that elusive oneness.
Along with genes, intelligence, sentience and emotions, we share the art of illusion with many lifeforms on earth. Modern science continues to offer us evidence of the intelligence of other creatures and the senses they possess that we cannot imagine. Bats echolocate and cavefish have acute hearing. Honeybees use the earth’s magnetic field to find the best nectar sources and return to the hive to do their waggle dances. There are so many forms of communication and perception out there it’s hard to imagine that some people continue to believe we are the only species with a complex language.
We continue, as well, to indulge in willful ignorance. American animal lovers castigate Asian cuisine that involves dogs—with good reason, in my opinion, but it’s more about the treatment of these animals before they are killed than the fact of eating them. Yet, how do our factory farms treat hogs, which are arguably at least as wise as canines?
We continue, as well, to indulge in willful ignorance. American animal lovers castigate Asian cuisine that involves dogs—with good reason, in my opinion, but it’s more about the treatment of these animals before they are killed than the fact of eating them. Yet, how do our factory farms treat hogs, which are arguably at least as wise as canines?
We must know before we can love. Estrangement from the rest of the natural world has led us to stop caring about what ends up on the dinner plate and the steps taken to get it there.
It is not a long stretch from a dismissive attitude toward other life forms to the one that allows us to kill one another. We assign other groups of people epithets to dehumanize them in times of war and conflict: savages, gooks, infidels. Yet our tales of war include those moments when we look into the eye of the enemy and see…us.
Perhaps this is what distinguishes our species from the others: we are the only ones to intentionally deceive ourselves.
About Susan Marsh
Susan Marsh spent three decades with the U.S. Forest Service and is today an award-winning writer living in Jackson Hole.
