Maya Explained... Kind Of

A complex idea or concept tends to get simplified when explained to someone new or young. Sometimes, it gets too simplified to the point of conveying the wrong picture. Like the idea of maya in Amar Chitra Katha’s. In those comics, maya always came across as meaning something similar to a mirage, something that appears to exist but isn’t there. Of course, that’s not at all what maya means. The far more nuanced aspect of maya is that what you perceive to be reality isn’t an accurate picture.

 

Some time back, I heard this fascinating podcast with Donald Hoffman on this perceived-reality-is-incomplete theme (not maya itself). Some of those aspects are well known: we can’t see bacteria, but they do exist. Light spans a much wider spectrum than what we can see. We can’t hear sounds that dogs can. I could go on, but you get the idea: our senses are limited.

 

Hoffman goes on to add the neurological aspects to the topic. How do you think we see? Most of us would say, “With our eyes, obviously”. But reflect a bit, and you know that’s not true. The eye is more like a sensor that sends raw data to the brain. It’s the brain puts all the signals together, decides what to ignore, even fills in missing info, and compensates for any shaking. Which is probably why many argue that we see with our brains… with all the errors it throws in!

 

On a related note I remember reading in some book that the brain even creates the illusion of simultaneity! Huh? When we clap our hands, the signals to the brain from the 3 different sensors (eyes, ears and palms). Here’s the kicker: since signals travel via neurons, those signals arrive at different times at the brain. And yet, we perceive the sound, sight and sensation of clapping as being simultaneous from all three sources! It’s not because the signals arrived simultaneously, it’s because the brain stitched it together that way.

 

Some then ask, “If everything we perceive is incomplete and wrong, then the next time you see a bus hurtling down the road towards you, should you just stand there?”. Hoffman answers that the representation of reality, while inaccurate, should still be taken seriously because it has given evolutionary advantages… like staying alive.

 

Another common question is why we have evolved to have an inaccurate representation of reality? Isn’t that a contradiction? Not really, says Hoffman, because if we could perceive all aspects of reality, we’d be so swamped with information that we’d need bigger and better brains to process it all. Which would then need even more energy. So a species that deletes irrelevant-to-survival stuff actually has an evolutionary advantage! Or as Hoffman put it, “Fitness before truth”.

 

Agree with it or not, the entire topic is one hell of an intellectual roller coaster ride…