Stories of Fiction, Placebos and the Fabric of “Reality”

Does objective reality exist? Does space and time exist?

We are living in a simulation — a simulation generated by our own brains.

Wake up, Neo. It's time to follow the white rabbit.

Part 1: Stories of Fiction

How did apes from Africa end up taking over the entire world?

Historian Yuval Noah Harari offers a fascinating framework to this question in his 2015 Ted Talk, 'What Explains the Rise of Humans?'' He says it boils down to two components of cooperative behaviour. Humans can cooperate both 1) flexibly, and 2) in large groups. Bees and ants cooperate in large groups but they aren't flexible. They're rigid and can't manipulate their social system overnight, overthrow their Queen, or establish a Republic of Bees. However, many mammals like wolves, elephants, and chimpanzees, can co-operate flexibly, but NOT in large groups.

He explains that the cooperation of a chimpanzee is based on personal intimate knowledge of each other and trust. A group of 10 chimpanzees might beat a group of 10 humans, but in large groups the humans are dominant.

He uses the example of giving his TED Talk. Yuval didn’t know the pilot who flew him to the theatre, the maker of the microphone he was speaking into, all the people who organized TED, or the people who wrote the books he studied for the talk. Yet, he shows up and can cooperate to create a global exchange of ideas.

Why can we do this?

He says the answer is our imagination. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of humans because of our ability to create and believe in fiction. As long as everyone believes in the same fiction, everyone can obey the same norms, rules and values.

All other animals use communication to describe reality. “Look! There’s a lion. Let’s run away”. But a human can say “Look, there’s a god above the clouds and if you don’t do this he’ll punish you.” We can never convince a chimpanzee to give us a banana because when he dies he’ll go to chimpanzee heaven and get lots more bananas.

Rights, money, law, countries, religion, culture, brands, and corporations, are all incredibly powerful and often useful fictional stories.

Part 2: Placebos

Between my career in hospitality / marketing and studying psychology, I think a lot about the power of placebos and top-down psychology - how our expectations, beliefs, and prior knowledge shape our perception and interpretation of the world.

Indeed, as Harari said, placebos are stories of fiction we tell ourselves that change the way our brain and body work. They can cure diseases, make us better at sports, get us to buy designer clothes, and even make food taste better.

We all choose our placebos every day. When I play basketball or go for a run, I choose Nike athletic gear over other brands. I think of their sponsorships with my favourite athletes, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Eliud Kipchoge and others. Even though I know it's just a label and likely no different than the next t-shirt, it's a story that empowers me, an in-group I can be a member of. It just feels good, despite me knowing that it's just a story. But the wild thing is this story can actually often make me run faster and jump higher. The story changes my brain, which changes my body. Yuval would likely point out that no other animals do this.

I will say some placebos are likely better than others, especially ones that are rooted in pseudo-science and thwart curiosity. It's hard not to secretly roll my eyes when someone prejudges my character based on an astrological sign. Or that the planet "Mercury is in retrograde" and that's why they're feeling moody and their blender stopped working. But hey, as long as we choose stories that enable us and are overall positive for society, we should celebrate the power of these beliefs.

Author Seth Godin writes, "When someone says, “that’s just a placebo” they’re undervaluing the magic of culture and the power of our minds to actually influence how our bodies perform. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, “we’re fortunate that a powerful placebo is available". Purveyors of fancy sneakers, designer handbags, rare wines, acupuncture and herbal remedies can proudly lean into the work of producing the conditions where placebos have their maximum impact. If it’s not helping us believe, then it’s not properly designed."

I love Seth's last idea. As leaders, as we continue to shape our cultures, communities, customer experiences, product designs, and ourselves, there are stories embedded everywhere that are opportunities to elicit positive change, pride, purpose, passion and compassion. We are all storytellers. If it’s not helping us believe, then we're not telling the story right and/or the right story.

Ok. So stories of fiction and placebos are everywhere and this is not always a bad thing. Moving on. Is it possible to draw the line between what's real and what's not? Could it be possible that everything is a story? A base layer objective substrate reality must exist, right? From here things are going to get a bit stranger as we hand it off to the theoretical psychologists, physicists and philosophers.

Part 3: The Fabric of Reality

"You may want truth, but you actually don’t need truth." - Donald Hoffman

Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman in his book, "The Case Against Reality", uses the metaphor that our perception is akin to that of a computer desktop interface on an operating system.

He says, "That is what evolution has done. It has endowed us with senses that hide the truth and display the simple icons we need to survive long enough to raise offspring. Space, as you perceive it when you look around, is just your desktop - a 3D desktop. Apples, snakes, and other physical objects are simply icons in your 3D desktop. These icons are useful, in part, because they hide the complex truth about objective reality. Your senses have evolved to give you what you need. You may want truth, but you don’t need truth. Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons."

Woah.

Evolutionary psychology, natural selection and cognitive sciences show us just this. It appears we only get to experience a tiny sliver of the natural world as to best allow us to survive and reproduce. This is why sugar tastes sweet, babies are cute, symmetrical faces are "beautiful", and we can't see radio waves with our eyes. 12 atoms of carbon, 22 atoms of hydrogen, and 11 atoms of oxygen (a sugar molecule) doesn't actually have a "taste". Our brains create the experience of "sweetness" as a positive reinforcement for finding a high energy source.

Cognitive scientist, Joscha Bach, continues down this road. He says that we exist inside the story that the brain tells itself. Yes. Read that back slowly. We exist inside the story that the brain tells itself.

Joscha states on the Lex Fridman Podcast #212 that we are like a character in a video game, being created by a video game engine (i.e. physics). "When you play an actual video game it doesn't matter that it's zeros and ones or the nature of the CPU that you're playing on - what you care about are the properties of the game. And a similar thing happens when you interact with physics. The world we're in is NOT the physical world, it is a dream world."

"Quantum mechanics is very different from what we perceive as the world. There are no colours and sounds in the physical world, they only exist in the game engine generated by your brain."

He uses the example of the waves of the ocean on the beach. "Waves" are a nice approximation of all the complexity that is going on underneath. "You feel the beach waves of the ocean crashing on your feet, but there are no waves in the ocean, there are only water molecules that are the result of electrons in the atoms interacting with each other and even more complicated stuff underneath those atoms. This is all a form of data compression. It's an attempt to deal with dynamics of too many parts to count, at a level that we are entangled with the best model that we can find."

"Everything happens inside the dream. Nothing is 'real'. The physical universe is real but the physical universe is incomprehensible and doesn't have any feeling of realness. The feeling of the realness of "you" gets attached to certain representations that your brain says 'this is the best model of reality that I have'."

We are living in a simulation, but a simulation generated by our own brains.

Neuroscientist Sam Harris, argues for this as well. He says, "The feeling that we call “I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is - the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself - can be altered or entirely extinguished.”

Oh boy.

Hoffman proposes that even space and time itself are likely not "real", and rather just an interface. He explains on The Lex Fridman Podcast #293, "We're not little things inside spacetime. Spacetime is a little data structure in our perceptions. The interface is there to hide certain aspects of reality - it's an uneven representation. Certain things just get completely hidden. Dark matter and dark energy are most of the energy and matter in the universe, but our interface just flat-out hides them. We only get hints because gravitational things are going wrong."

So what happens to brains that are unable to create a predictive version of our made-up reality? Then we, the collective storytellers, remove these people from society into psychiatric wards or give them mind-altering medicine to align their attitudes and behaviour to our collective enabling stories of fiction.

Hoffman says, "The universe is a lot more interesting than you might expect. And you are a lot more special and interesting than you might expect. You might think you're a tiny irrelevant person in a vast billions of light years across space - but that's not the case. You are the being that's creating that space all the time, every time you look. Waking up to who you really are, outside of space and time, as the author of space and time and everything you see. Space and time is just one little data structure. Other consciousnesses are creating other data structures of various other things. Bacteria, viruses, ants, bats, fungi, trees and dogs all experience the world very very differently than we do."

In one way, through thermodynamics, evolution, chaos and emergence, humans are this incredibly elaborate strategy for copying DNA helixes. We wake up one day as these conscious and physical things. Our bodies are temporary containers for housing genetic information, equipped with both "software" and "hardware" to best not die in the amount of time it takes to make copies of more autonomous containers to store more DNA copies. (PSA: don't call your child a DNA container, they may not like that.) And all in this time we get these intricate emergent substrates like emotions, language, relationships, culture, love, pain, music, art, pizza, mint chocolate chip ice cream, and most importantly a feeling of what it is to be you - a self.

If you feel special and important and also irrelevant and meaningless at the same time, I would argue you should try to embrace just the former.

Astrophysicist, Brian Cox states, "Meaning is a local and temporary phenomenon. It emerges from configurations of atoms, which is what we are. We are simply that and nothing more. We’re very very rare configurations of atoms. If you go all the way down that line of logic, we are the only island of meaning in the cosmos."

What an incredible thing to be - meaning. We are the cosmos, observing itself. Whatever itself is. It's all astounding. The most complicated thing we've ever discovered in the entire universe, discovered itself, and exists floating in a dark vat just behind our eyeballs.

To wrap up, a quote from one of my favourite shows, Rick and Morty. Super-scientist Rick is speaking to his 14 year old grandson, Morty:

"Listen Morty, I hate to break it to you, but what people call 'love' is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are gonna do it. Break the cycle, Morty. Rise above. Focus on science."

Yes, focus on science, Morty. But since we live inside the story, focus on "love" too. It may be a "story", but it's real to us, and it's one of the best stories we have.