Reality is NOT a Hallucination.


Our Theory-Laden Perception builds a better and better representation of the world around us. It is NOT a “controlled hallucination”, but rather a constructed model that the child, every human child, builds implicitly at first, beginning in infancy, that is added to throughout our lives and enhanced daily nowadays in all of us with the exponential advance of modern, explicit, theoretical science.


In the physicist David Deutsch’s classic work, he cites the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, explaining that all of our observations are theory-laden. To see a chair as a chair you must have a theory of what a chair is, what it does, if not exactly how it is made, then at least that it is a human- manufactured thing, not a natural object – and that it affords sitting: theoretical perspectives that are not obvious in the immediate visual image of a chair and far beyond the abilities of our animal cousins. Our idea of a chair is much more than a mere pattern of light reflected off of it. All objects we recognize and just as importantly, that we then give a name to, have some theoretical aspect to them which I will try to explicate below. And our perception is not random, nor hallucinated, but an ever-improving model of the world outside of our heads, that we begin building in the first few months of life.

Prof. Deutsch, in demonstrating how deep and varied theories can be – using the example of modern astronomy, finally compelled me to write down all of the following that I have been thinking about for some time – years actually.

Nowadays, astronomers don’t go outside all that often, and rarely look thru the eyepiece of a telescope. They watch a computer screen or scan printouts full of raw data, graphs, images, and computer analyses of mountains of raw data, all of which are drenched in theory at multiple levels. The telescopes they use don’t always detect visible light, but radio, infrared, or x-ray frequencies determined by modern astrophysical theory which predicts the different wavelengths of light that stars and other celestial objects emit – the vast majority of which our eyes do not detect. And their telescopes are programmed to adjust on the fly by computer control to the spinning earth (based on modern geophysical theory) or adjust to the changing atmosphere that may be in the way of the incoming radiation (utilizing modern meteorological and electromagnetic theory), just to capture photons emanating from those stars, unaltered by the wind and the clouds and then convert them to digital data – skads of it. All to be processed by another computer before it makes it to a screen for the astronomer to “see”. It is incredible to realize just how much accumulated knowledge we have in so many disciplines that is used by researchers in hundreds of different fields every day that us regular folks are wholly unaware of.

In addition, nowadays astronomers do not stand outside in the cold night air and scan the skies taking direct measurements of the position and movement of celestial objects by eye and hand, by the hour – like Tycho Brahe did in the late 1500’s (just before the invention of the telescope). This was hard-core, just insanely dedicated systematic observation – over many YEARS, of the positions of the stars and planets as they change throughout the night: recording data as precise as it could be done for the times, using sighting instruments of his own design – over decades actually. That voluminous data later allowed Johannes Kepler to find the patterns in those movements of the planets, demonstrating their orbits to be ellipses- and that took years of painstaking Herculean effort on Kepler’s part as well.

But that isn’t what I wanted to write about.

The perceptual psychologists tell us our brain creates our reality – some to the point that there is little of actual reality to be found in our perceptions at all, while others claim that our perception is merely a controlled hallucination of whatever that ultimate reality is out there beyond our heads.

Our brains do create our perception of color from different wavelengths of photons hitting our retinas. There is no color “out there” – only different reflectance properties of objects we are looking at. The bark on a tree trunk reflects mostly a mixture of wavelengths centering around 450 nanometers (a billionth of a meter – nm), and also 600 nm, which we see individually as blue and orange respectively but mixed together we see as various shades of brown. There is no brown on the tree: only the reflected light from the bark- which we perceive as brown. Color-blind people lacking certain retinal cone cells that respond to different color wavelengths may instead see a dull grey – their world may be largely black and white.

(Not being a perceptual psychologist or physicist myself, I didnt have those wavelength numbers in my head so while I was typing away at this on my laptop, I googled on my phone next to me and did a quick browser search to find the wavelengths of the colors noted above and double check my understanding of color blindness perception. Fact checking in real time – with all the world’s knowledge available in an instant in the palm of our hands! Phenomenal.
Knuckleheads like Joe Rogan could easily employ a FT fact-checker to refute any and all the nonsense his more controversial guests spew – just sayin’. Wouldn’t cost him much).

So color is completely made up in our heads, not “out there”. Fair enough. Color is an illusion created by our brains. Your dog sees the tree, maybe not in the Technicolor we experience it in, maybe more toward a grayish shade as they have less color receptors than humans. But they do see the object, don’t run into it, run around it, sniff it and typically (at least with my wife’s dogs), pee on it. They know its there as a solid object regardless of the color perception it may or may not induce in their brain.

But does your dog know it’s a tree? Your dog’s brain has categories of objects let’s say, and can discriminate a piece of flat concrete to sun itself on as different than a tree, any tree (to pee on) for example, but does he have a theory of trees? Or of concrete? Or of surfaces? We do. We understand things employing a large, possibly limitless, Theory of Objects (ToO): that there are such discrete things and their properties, their similarities (and differences), and their relations to one another. We approach the world, infants approach the world, starting with this ToO.- that there are discrete entities with properties like shape and solidity and a whole host of others the young child will suss out mostly in the first five years of life just by moving thru the world, observing and handling objects.

Take a Frisbee for example. Your dog sees the Frisbee and its motion through the air, as you do, it may look a little more grey than red but he can track it as well as you, and because dogs evolved as predators to run down, catch in their mouths and then throttle small prey, they can run, jump, and catch the Frisbee in their mouths in mid-air as easily as you and I stroll down the sidewalk. But does the dog know it’s a “Frisbee”? A plastic toy, shaped into a lightweight disc that flies well because it spins?
He sees the Frisbee like you and I, and a sophisticated tracking device could follow its trajectory as well. The Frisbee is not a hallucination. It may not be really red or off-grey as we humans and the dog may see it, but it is there flying thru the air with a particular trajectory, spinning with a particular angular momentum (that our tracking device might calculate), with its characteristic shape (red or not). All that portion of our perception: shape, motion, spatial position, and relation to other objects is not “just in our heads” like color – or could be said to be hallucinated in any way.

The perceptual psychologists love to point out color and optical illusions as evidence that our perception is flawed and that much of reality is manufactured in our heads. Therefore our perception is a “controlled hallucination” (Anil Seth) or there is precious little actual reality in our perceptions at all (Donald Hoffman).. Interestingly, the perceptual psychologists never seem to mention shape.


Shape is also a function of the reflectance properties of an object: tree, concrete slab, or Frisbee. But unlike color, I’ve never read anyone make the claim that shape is created only in our minds, just like color. Yet the object reflects light in a pattern that is specific to that object, which may change in consistent and characteristic ways when we move, or the object moves and our visual image of the object changes. But the dog, us, and the tracking device “see” the same shape, the same spatial position at any time in its flight, and its entire trajectory – from the way photons of light reflect off of it. From the same non-random pattern of photons reflected by the object we see it and its movement. Shape, motion, mass, spatial position relative to other objects, momentum or other object properties – which are not created in the brain – are never mentioned in the examples claiming how fallible and ultimately hallucinatory our perceptions may be.

One of the ways your infant child builds his ToO (Theory of Objects) is using what’s called “Perceptual Constancy” where-in the human brain perceives shape and size as remaining the same for any object, despite the changing images it is presented with.

When we look directly at the door when it is closed it creates a perfect rectangle on the back of our eyes: the retina, where our light detector cells are. When we move left or right or the door is slightly open, our retinal image changes and the shape of the image is not a perfect rectangle – the angles are not 90 degrees- and the image is really distorted when the door is mostly open and we see it almost on end. Yet our brains assume the door itself has not changed. We perceive the same door with the same shape, despite the regularly changing retinal image of the door, or any object for that matter. By keeping the shape and boundaries of objects separate and discrete, your child builds a menagerie of objects (and people, and animals) that he will later learn the names of.
And your child will learn those names for objects and living things based on shape as well.

“Ball” at first becomes any spherical or roundish thing. You will teach her later – “That’s a globe, not a ball” and “Yes, that’s a kind of ball, it’s a basketball” and so on. At first the child will overgeneralize the things a name applies to and we need to teach them all the exceptions, details, category members, and other names for things that resemble balls but aren’t. And we do that for an unlimited set of objects – and for the rest of our lives. That’s our ToO in action and its one of the key ways that we build a model of the world full of objects, people, and events (things going on – processes -more on that later) in our heads. We cut the world up in ways that seem to accurately reflect discrete entities “out there” beyond our heads. That little newborn is at it almost from the very beginning. It is incredible.

We don’t hallucinate the shape of things, nor their other physical properties which we can obtain fully, partially, or not at all using just our human senses…but which we can measure precisely with our instruments. Shape and other properties cant be said to be hallucinated or modified by the brain somehow like color. We can verify the same properties by detecting the same regular patterns of photons with various instruments that respond to wavelengths other than those which our eyes and brain use to make our perceptions.

That is what is real. Shape and other physical properties are not like color. They are the same to us and the dog and our instruments – as are the wavelengths of light that produce color perceptions in us. Our color perception though created in our brains is yet consistent with those wavelengths as well. Even if the experience of a color is not “real”– being only in our brains, the wavelengths that generate our colors are real and “out there” all the same.

Significantly, it appears what we alone possess – that your dog and instruments do not, is that constructed model of the world that is outside our heads, in our heads – full of objects of all kinds, and people, and events as well, just as in the Sims image at the top of this post. That model is driven by theory with which we conceptualize the objects that those consistent, non-random inputs of photon patterns are reflecting from: And we build that model up from infancy.

As a Developmental Psychologist, with an interest in cognitive development and evolution, and cognitive psychology, in particular concepts and consciousness – and how they evolved as well, I try to include all these different domains into questions of how we view and understand the world, how we built this formidable (for our modern well-being) model, and especially how we evolved the unique cognitive abilities that make our cognition qualitatively different from all the other animals. We are but one type of recently evolved organism; vertebrate, mammal, primate, human. We use the same DNA, similar genes and proteins as other animals, often the same brain cells and neurotransmitters that all other critters with brains use: our brain is built on the same mammalian and primate plans of our animal cousins. Yet we have evolved cognitive abilities that have allowed us to build that model of the world in our heads, which we use every waking moment to discern even more of what is actually “out there” individually and more importantly, collectively as a species, in the constant updating of that model by theoretical science.
Nowadays, we all carry around a model of the world in our heads steeped in the theoretical advances of largely the last 200 years:

Human infant’s brains are wired to learn. They are little information sponges. Born with barely 20% of their adult brain volume, that little brain will suck up more patterns of photon input, and build that model of objects, people and events, with our “selfs” moving through it, in space and time, eventually reaching 80% of adult brain weight by age 5-6: ready for first grade. That phenomenal growth and learning curve is un-paralelled in the animal kingdom to which we belong.

That little brain will create trillions of connections between the 83 billion neurons it is born with, with the help of the supporting cells that maintain those 1,000’s of connections per each neuron – synapses as they are called. The infant will go from a newborn which can hardly hold its head up or barely focus on a face or object, not answering to its own name for nearly a year, unable to speak or even make speech-like sounds for the first few months to a walking, talking, thinking preschooler, that knows its own name very well and has a rapidly growing self – concept, a head full of memories, names for things, its ABC’s, colors, and numbers up to a hundred (almost) and vocabulary of 1,000’s of words – ready for 1st grade. No other critter does this.

And this young human child now has all the basic elements of that model including its young self as the protagonist in a daily, continuing, memory-building narrative, as she moves through the landscape of the world acquiring the knowledge of more and more people, objects, and events.

Your dog, sensing the same photons bouncing off of an object, any object, never learns what that object is. The dog may have some sort of primitive model, comprised of a simple mental representation – a perceptual image at least. Let’s grant him that. For now, suffice it to say that the dog sees the tree, Frisbee, and concrete slab just as your child does. But the toddler learns the names of those things and more importantly, what they actually are within the model she is building in her head. Your dog has a perceptual category based on things that look, smell, and sound similar to him. He treats new cats he has never seen as cats, other dogs as dogs – with all the attendant dominance behaviors. He treats new people as people, and other animals that look and smell alike similarly, using his simple perceptual-similarity recognition. They look, smell, sound similar to him.

Categories, which animals implicitly employ, appear to be based on perceptual similarity alone. A dog can easily be fooled by a statue of a human and act toward it like any other human, trying to get it play fetch for example, or attack a lifelike but also very un-alive and taxidermied wolf. If something is perceptually similar enough – they may not know the difference. There are hilarious videos of such clueless behavior on YouTube, such as many a dog trying desperately to get that statue to pick up a stick and throw it for him. I say clueless as the dog has no clue the statue is not a live person, not real, just a statue – concepts that your 3 year-old already has in the constructed model of the world it is building in its head.

“Silly puppy, that’s not a real person!” Your child has more than resemblances of people to work with, she already has a complex concept of what people are – living (or dead), real or fake, like a statue or doll, or a real live talking, thinking, moving things, wanting things…etc., etc., person. Your dog has none of this. But your kid does.
Concepts are categories +. We build our model with things that look alike too, but we add all sorts of spatial, movement, and force properties, and relations to other things to that perceptual similarity – a true concept. Lets take the Frisbee again, to start with.


Like all objects it doesn’t move by itself. It doesn’t take off and fly on its own. You need to throw it. All objects need to be propelled in some way. Your infant catches on to this during the first year of life (propulsion), and adds it to her growing list of object properties such as solidity and support: objects are solid and don’t go thru one another. Objects not only must be kicked, thrown, pushed etc., to move – they don’t float out in mid-air, they must sit on something: a floor, a table, another object: they must be supported. These are some of the object properties your child adds to the perceptual similarity of any given object concept. Balls look like other spherical objects, large and small balls, colored ones, (it’s the shape similarity that defines the concept), but balls are not just a category but a concept that also contains the properties of solidity, propulsion, and support – spatial, force, movement concepts themselves which pertain to all objects. There’s no evidence that your dog or any other animal understands any of this. Animal behaviors show no evidence of containing such ideas of solidity, propulsion, or support in their representation of perceptually similar objects and other animals.

However, your child also understands that living things like people and animals, do not need to be propelled (though they can be – but drop-kicking your little brother is not recommended). Live things (people and animals at least), move under their own power, but like objects they are solid and need to be supported. Objects not only don’t move under their own power, they never seem to respond to anything done to them. No matter what you do to them they just sit there. Big sister and kitty on the other hand, do respond and in various ways, they show contingent behaviors as well as self-movement: they react to things that happen to them.

So we see the same things animals do, but we represent them in our heads as more than perceptually similar examples, we make them into concepts of real things that have properties and relations which we can verify with other people’s observations and our instruments. In this way the tree you see and your dog pees on has a name, a word you use to refer to it as an object, as a type of tree, as a particular tree. The word you use maps onto a concept of “tree” which contains not just the perceptual similarities of trees but the peculiar features of trees, and the properties of objects and living things in general: they grow, get damaged and heal: part of the concept of “alive”. And they sometimes die – also an unfortunate property of living things. Your infant is wired to build concepts and later map words onto them. And words help facilitate further conceptualization, but that is another whole essay.

So to recap, we see things like other animals do, but we go a couple of steps further, we add all sorts of spatial, force, and movement concepts to what we see, and with them build a sophisticated hierarchy of object concepts, and name them thru language. We have a built in theory-mechanism going which says what objects and living things do and what makes them different – what living things like people do, that objects or other animals don’t. And through hard-core systematic observation (detailed data collection and recording – and statistical analyses) we can discern all sorts of object properties that we cant just see at a glance, using instruments that detect the non-random patterns, properties, differences, and consistencies, of objects and living things all around us.

As David Deutsch notes, stars for millennia were just points of light in the sky that rotate together thru the night, with a select few moving against the vast background of stars which collectively move together as if fixed in a celestial sphere. That is all we could observe and theorize using only our eyes. But with Tycho Brahe’s systematic observation that tracked the patterns of the planet’s precise movements against the background of the stars, we discovered properties otherwise unseen – the elliptical patterns of the planet’s orbits.

We have a name “planet” which connotes the modern concept for these “wanderers” in the night sky. The Greek word “planet” means wanderer. The modern concepts of planet and star were first built thru systematic observation by our senses alone, and later by observation with a whole host of instruments, starting with precision sighting tools, then simple telescopes. And now those planets fit neatly within heliocentric theory – orbiting around the sun in their elliptical paths explained by Einstein’s General Relativity Theory.
The stars were eventually discovered to contain elements like hydrogen and helium due to the very characteristic traces different elements leave in the spectrum of diffracted light coming off the edges of early telescope lenses. Once an annoying distraction, spectral analysis became a science in itself in the late 1800’s. By the early 20th century we had figured out that the nuclear fusion of the element hydrogen into helium (first discovered in and named for the sun -“helios” in Greek), was the process that powered the unending light of the stars.

Nowadays we employ the modern, very theory-laden concepts of planet and star with all the details in them we have worked out in the past 2 centuries – mostly about how the planets move and how the stars work. Not just detailed descriptions of their properties and movements as distant astronomical objects – but how they work, how they “go” – we have elaborate theories now of the nuclear processes going on in the stars. Stars burning bright with fusion, just like our sun, has become a standard part of most people’s understanding of the lights in the night sky. Such knowledge is now part of the world model in their heads: even if the average Jane or Joe couldn’t begin to decipher the chemical equations below:

How the stars shine, the process of fusion in simple equations – how they “go”. (gratia again, Professor Deutsch).

Here’s the SHORT explanation of those 4 equations:
1. Two Hydrogen atoms (which are single protons) fuse to make Deuterium, a Hydrogen isotope with one proton and one neutron-releasing a positron e+ and a neutrino in converting the other proton to a neutron.
2. The positron (antimatter particle) + an electron (matter particle) annihilate each other and release 2 high energy (gamma ray) photons.
3. Deuterium and Hydrogen fuse to create a new element Helium which has 2 protons, releasing another photon.
4. Two Helium-3 isotopes fuse to form one Helium atom (2 protons/2neutrons) and 2 Hydrogen atoms – and so on it goes:

600 tons of Hydrogen burned per second in our sun.
It takes 100,000 years for those photons of light produced by fusion to bounce around inside the sun and finally escape as lower energy light that we can see – to make the 8-1/2 minute trip of 93 million miles to reach our eyes – and create ALL our perceptions of reality!
How’s that for some process! Something is really going on here!

And it all starts with your kid noticing that blocks fall off a table and:
“If you do this- you get that”. Shit happens.
Other animals don’t notice that something occurs – some “thing” (process) is going on. But we do.
And then we theorize how and why it happens.

When did that evolve in us, I wanna know. Noticing regular events, not just properties of objects, but processes: When did that recognition AND the attempt to explain such things start in the human line? Maybe just in the last few hundred thousand years when modern Homo sapiens appeared, maybe only in the last 50,000 years with Cave Art and elaborate tools, maybe only after 20,000 years and what looks like symbolic notation or after 6,000 years ago around the time of the invention of the wheel and shortly thereafter writing? When did that theory-laden perspective really evolve and become an integral part of our human curiosity?

I’m no astrophysicist or science historian so I can’t tell you exactly how we worked out all that fusion stuff in the Sun and stars over just 40 years in the early 1900’s – BUT, I betcha we could find a detailed explanation on the Net, or a cool video on YouTube, or find a course to take at the nearest University and find out ALL about it!
Phenomenal.
And it all starts with your 14 month-old knocking a stack of blocks off the table and watching what they do, where they land, how they “go”.
“What happens when you do- THIS?” This is how we roll.

Did we “roll” quite like that at say 3 million years ago? Did Lucy notice things “going on” or was she too busy learning of simple object properties and hand manipulations like a modern day infant? Was Homo erectus that astute at a million or so years ago with his handaxes and populating much of the globe – would he care about why and how some natural occurrence “happened” – would he even notice anything was “going on”? Was it not until our own species H. sapiens with enough varied objects of their own design, and their art, music, and at some point language before explanation became a thing? We know that early mythological explanations – the religious perspective – dominated human culture once large settlements, agriculture, and organized, literate, hierarchical civilizations ascended in the last few thousand years. However, more modern theory-laden, scientific, approaches didn’t take hold at least until the Early Greeks – barely 2,500 years ago. When were we first intrigued enough to investigate and try and suss out what was “happening” around us? When did we even notice?

Your toddler is fascinated by discovering how things “go”.

I coined Theory of Process (ToP) to describe our human proclivity to assume that some causal process is occurring with the many movements and transformations of objects we see in our daily lives. Your dog doesn’t notice much or seem to care if a marble rolls down a spiral ramp: but your 18 month old loves it. Or the Fischer- Price toy that has dials and levers to manipulate by pushing, pulling, spinning, turning: all to make some thing happen, a bell ring, a grinding sound, a spring release, what have you. They will play with that over and over again seeing what each lever or knob does. They approach such objects with the idea, the theory, that if you do the correct movement something will occur, something will happen as a result of their action.

“How does it work, how does it go?”

That’s ToP. Your dog, even a chimp hardly notices. The dog might sniff it once in passing, the chimp could grab the handle of the Fischer-Price contraption on carry it up a tree and fling it from 20ft up, but your kid will explore it over and over, fascinated by what it does:

“What happens when you do – this!”

ToP then, develops on its own, just like ToO – without prompting by the parent, and it progresses implicitly: the child has no apparent knowledge of what he is doing but gradually acquires the explicit theory that:

“ Hey if I do this – this happens”

And process knowledge expands throughout childhood as they learn simple explicit theory like:

“Things fall down because of gravity”

Later they (hopefully) will learn of Newton’s precise formula of Universal Gravitation in high school physics that explains how things fall down. Most humans stop there, but more than a few in academic and engineering careers learn such processes as gravity or Newton’s Laws of Motion in great detail and use them daily in science, and engineering, and in all of the marvelous technology we have become so accustomed to. They may even go on to study Einstein’s General Relativity to understand why things fall down – but that is an essay beyond my understanding to say the least.
And it all starts with the child’s brain operating as if there was some implicit ToP behind the child’s investigation.

Jean Piaget, the Swiss Psychologist and Father of Developmental Psychology (my field), called the child “a little scientist” – he wasn’t wrong. And scientists never lose that child-like curiosity. Pursuing how the world “works” has gotten us doubled lifespans, the ability to grow and distribute food to 8 billion people, and daily luxuries like A/C in home and auto, 24/7 entertainment on TV, the NET, lasers, etc., etc., – and now all of the worlds knowledge on your smartphone available at light-speed, and in the palm of your hand!

ToO and ToP are the ways that the info-absorbing infant, curious child, and still curious, still information seeking scientists keep improving that model of the world in our heads. It is not a hallucination, nor an arbitrary perception with no REAL correspondence to the “ultimate reality” out there. That model is incredibly accurate in explanation and accurate in prediction of what objects there really are, their properties, what they are made of, and what processes are going – “out there”.

Religions got us none of this.
Religions are purely old, tired, and wholly wrong, sometimes ugly, primitive attempts at explaining the world.
As Dr. Deutsch points out: No-ones myths ever explained anything.
Nobody’s gods (and there’s been hundreds of them, not just the ones you or I were taught) ever showed up.
Teach your children what we actually know – Not silly ideas full of gods and spirits from thousands of years ago that never existed in the first place.

Delight in your child’s evolved curiosity and thirst for explanation. Don’t bullshit them with silly, barbaric, myths from ancient times that condemn people to eternal torture in some Omnipotent Prick’s hell. Nobody’s hell was ever found either. Demons and spirits and gods are hallucinations.
The model of the world your child constructs by interacting, investigating, studying, and especially explaining the objects and processes they discover, is not.

end religion now.

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