Why Do We Say Reality Is An Illusion?

What Do We Mean by It?

It’s rather used by people as a way to cope or to reduce the significance of things. It has just been reduced to a catch phrase just to look cool. It’s true, yes—but these words are heavy. Simplicity is heavy.

Our brain isn’t meant to comprehend simple things. We assume simplicity means stupid and complexity means smart. This is an evolutionary bias. We are evolved to solve problems by overthinking them. It looks for problems that aren’t even there; when we see a simple solution, we think it must be stupid or we take it at face value. Simple facts often are a condensed version of different branches of reasoning. They are held by a strong foundation.

Additionally, our brain is wired by evolution and honed to detect nuances in our environment that are critical for our survival. This predisposition is well adapted for favoring complex environments over simple ones. For example, our ancestors needed to quickly recognize and react to different threats, leading to a confirmative bias towards useful patterns that were perceived as more significant or intelligent.

Understanding these limitations in our perception sets the stage for exploring how our inner selves further shape what we experience.

The Ego’s Mirror: How We Project Our Inner World

Building on our insight into the illusory nature of perception, we now turn inward to examine how our ego acts as a mirror, projecting our inner world onto our experience of existence.

We are talking here about reality being said to be an illusion. When we use the word “reality,” we mean the latter while intending to define the actual reality—but we don’t have the capacity to see reality as it is. Why not? We, as humans, see what’s beneficial or relevant for our survival.

Think of reality as a reflection within our ego or self—imperfect and warped by our experiences, emotions, beliefs, and senses. The ego or self is like a mirror, an ever-evolving mirror that keeps changing. We perceive reality as what we are inside. It’s a projection.

For example, if two people eat two halves of an apple, they will taste it differently; they will have different experiences.

Even twins, who are genetically almost the same, will still experience it differently. We cannot perceive reality as it is.

It’s more than imagination and less than it too, because there’s a limit to how imaginative it can get depending on how far intersubjective reality can support it or how abstractive your thoughts are.

Additionally, the destruction of the ego implies making the mirror smoother.

This inner projection not only colors our personal experiences but also influences the shared constructs we accept as reality.

Intersubjective Reality: The Shared Hallucination

Expanding from individual perception, we now explore how collective beliefs shape a shared, yet illusory, framework of existence.

Intersubjective reality is a “shared hallucination” that only exists because people agree to believe in it. It’s like an invisible rulebook society creates to make sense of the world. These rules aren’t based on hard facts but on collective trust—essentially a social contract.

Examples to Understand It:

The Kingdom of the Blind

In a kingdom where everyone is born blind, “sight” is unimaginable. If a sighted person arrives and describes colors and shapes, the blind society calls him insane. To protect their shared reality, they blind him.

“Is It Human?”

If a robot looks and acts human, we’ll treat it as human—until we discover wires inside. Our initial agreement that it’s human is intersubjective. Only by “cracking it open” (objective truth) do we see reality.

This is the dilemma humanity is facing with the advent of AIs like ChatGPT and Deepseek. We assume it’s human as long as it’s good at pretending to be one. This is ironically a reflection of how little we know about ourselves. We shall explore this topic some other day.

Similarly, money, society, or even civilization are intersubjective: they work because we all agree they’re real, even though they’re just ideas.

Intersubjective realities hold society together. Without them, we’d have no laws, art, or culture.

These socially constructed layers underscore the complexity of our collective experience, prompting us to look beyond to the fundamental layers that underpin all we perceive.

All Is Illusion: Layers of Reality

In light of our personal and collective illusions, let us delve into the deeper layers that constitute what we perceive—revealing the distinctions between our sensory experiences, objective existence, and the elusive truth.

What is reality? There’s actual reality and the reality we perceive. When we use the word “reality,” we mean the latter while intending to define the actual reality—but we don’t have the capacity to see reality as it is.

In this context, “all” can mean three things—these are layers of reality:

• All = What We Can Perceive:
  This is our immediate experience, processed solely by our brain. It can only be experienced by our brain.

• All = What Is, or Objective Reality:
  This is the realm of existence measured by machinery and scientific equipment designed to remove our evolutionary biases.

• All = Truth:
  This is the elusive essence that we cannot directly experience, yet we can use the process of elimination to discard falsehoods. We will never know what the absolute truth is, but by eliminating what isn’t truth, what remains must be the truth.

These layers illustrate that while our perception is limited and subjective, objective reality and ultimate truth exist on separate, often inaccessible planes.

Conclusion: The Impact of Illusory Perception

While our perceptions may be shaped by illusions and simplified labels, reality still matters—it has real consequences in our lives. Even if what we perceive isn’t the absolute truth, it remains useful and affects us in tangible ways. Being aware of truth is important; after all, truth doesn’t exist merely to be useful—it just is.

And, in a humorous twist, by “truth” we mean what we know to be false, because we really have no idea what the rest might be.