Why We Lionize Our Lyin' Eyes

Seeing is believing. But, to employ one of my favorite analogies, seeing is like the truth but it is NOT the whole truth. Not even close.

We all know that dogs, for example, can smell and hear things that we humans can not. We are also intelligent enough to accept as fact that whenever a dog smells or hears something that we cannot, that thing does in fact exist. It must exist, or else the dog could not smell it. In this situation we do not take our failure to smell it as evidence of its nonexistence.

Yet when it comes to sight, we stray across this common-sense thresh hold and seem to believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. When we consider how little of the spectrum our eyes can see, we understand the error of that assumption.

By definition, we cannot see the huge majority of what is around us. UV rays, X-rays, microwaves, and sound waves are just a few examples of the universes that are right in front of our face yet utterly invisible.

This is do to the logic of evolution, which has so far dictated that we are most efficient with our current arrangement of senses. And it does seems reasonable that if we could actually see everything that there was to see, it would probably immediately result in a mental breakdown due to sensory overload.

I do not understand biology or evolution nearly well enough to make educated observations of how and why our senses evolved in the ways that they did, but I know history well enough to understand that this naturally-selected blindness does not stop at physical perception; it's the perfect metaphor for how we see and remember our lives, whether individually or collectively.

Have you ever seen film footage from the early 20th century? If you have, you can call to mind the way people move in those films. They are jerky and sporadic in their motions, as if people back then simply hadn't learned yet how to walk gracefully.

This illusion, of course, is not caused by our ancestors lack of grace; it is caused by the film. Back in the day, film had far fewer frames per second than it does now, so the end product actually looked a lot more like what all film actually is: a flipbook of individual photographs shown in quick enough succession to give the human eye the illusion of a continuous motion picture.

And an illusion is all it is, of course. There's no such thing as a "movie", per se; all movies are simply rapid fire photograph shows. But when the film is of sufficient quality to obscure all the blank spaces in between the photographs, we are left with the illusion of motion.

This dynamic serves as a useful metaphor for many things. But it is not only metaphor. The motion picture illusion, which is made possible by the evolutionary limits of the human eye, is actually the illusion that nature employs for all of "reality".

The smallest things we know of used to be atoms. Now the smallest things we know of are subatomic particles, of which several specific types have been identified. These elemental pieces will no doubt be further broken down by science, but they've already been studied sufficiently to learn one amazing thing: the universe itself is an illusion, just like a movie.

Science has learned that the smallest particles, of which everything that exists are by definition made, do not continually exist. Instead, they blink in and out of "existence" hundreds of time per second. This is obviously far too fast to be perceived by the human senses, just like a movie. But the result is the same.

If you ask a scientist where a certain particle was located at a certain moment in time, he or she will tell you that the question cannot be answered because the building blocks of everything are NEVER in one place or fixed in one time. Instead, they flutter in and out, like a movie at thousands of frames per second, creating a perfect illusion for our limited senses.

The most important thing that can be taken from this is that for every image, there must be an equal amount of empty space. If you have 100 frames of images per second in your movie of life, you must also have 100 frames of nothing. Our senses are not developed to perceive this emptyness, or even to understand what it is, but we know it is there.

While emptyness of often associated with loss or death, due mostly to our sensory limits, they need not be seen that way. In fact, since this "emptyness" makes up so much of the invisible universe around us, it is an integral part of our lives.

I suspect that if we could truly see everything around us, we would learn a few truths very quickly. Firstly, we would be able to see previously invisible forms of energy and light and to perceive how connected people are with each other, even by virtue of passing one another on the street.

If we could also slow down our universe so that our eyes could perceive its true nature, that of a light being flicked on and off a million times per second, we would have to being a whole new inquiry: what happens when the lights are off?