We’re all ants

TL;DR: Our everyday reality is one configuration among many possible ones, and the fact that it is the configuration optimized for survival does not make it epistemically privileged, but only statistically dominant.

Some time ago I came across a video on Instagram by a spiritual atheist. She called herself spiritual, in that her atheististic worldview did not exclude spiritual and love experiences as edifying moments of the human being.

She was not, that is, one of those materialist and reductionist atheists who dismiss and/or denigrate everything that isn’t getting up in the morning, going to work, writing on Reddit forums about how naive people who believe in God are, coming home in the evening with the smile of someone who has found bliss despite the meaninglessness of existence — indeed, precisely thanks to the meaninglessness.

For them, love is chemistry. Religious and/or mystical experience is a brain malfunction. The hope of a life after death is a childish attachment to life. The meaning of life is simply an end in itself; the world is a conglomerate of cells evolved by chance from an original explosion, a transmutation of gaseous dust and minerals at extremely high temperatures and extreme physics into entities with metabolic processes.

You get the type.

Well, she was different; she took into account that human beings are special because they have always questioned the why of life.

In the video, she was talking about how, in certain cases, such as alcohol withdrawal, some people saw tiny human beings. Then, some researchers, she said, had identified the variety of mushrooms responsible for these hallucinations, but they couldn’t find the compound that causes these lilliputian hallucinations.

She then drew the analogy with the voices that people hear during a religious epiphany, and concluded that even if we can see the little men, it does not mean that they are real, exactly as with hearing angelic voices or the voice of God.

Comparing a hallucination of tiny men during alcohol withdrawal with a profound spiritual awakening is like comparing apples with oranges. Her argument is intellectually lazy, and absolutely boring. I could’ve argued this when I was thirteen years old, and I wanted to piss some adult with my cynicism.

But for me, the whole situation left me with a series of speculations and questions instead of a definitive answer.

What if the gnomes are real and we simply don’t see them because they’re not relevant for our survival? Of course, I’m not suggesting that gnomes are real. But I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this odd situation.

Just play around with chemistry a little, and anyone can spot the gnomes. I find this amusing, odd, and fascinating to say the least. For someone who considers themselves a scientist, this should raise more questions about the nature of consciousness.

But the way she simply dismissed it as an anomaly, and even compared it to the religious experience like the Damascus moment, tells me much more about her limitations than about the gnomes.

If you’ve been close to people with personality disorders, you realize that although one may consider their experience maladaptive or anomalous, these people and the distortions have a terrible influence on life.

When I tell you to close your eyes and not to think about the pink elephant, you will think about the pink elephant. And although you may reply that there is no material transposition of the pink elephant or of the unicorn, I counter by saying that we are talking to each other, emotions are flowing, and this concept is real not because it has a material reification, but because it influences our little universe, it produces chemical and metabolic reactions, it makes current flow in our brain.

Supposing that you think God does not exist, you still cannot deny that the concept of God has bent the arc of human civilization.

So let me say plainly, because I’ve been circling it.

Reality and truth are different things. A thing is real to the extent that it does work. Being made of matter is one way of doing work, but it is not the only way. The concept of God does work, whether or not there is one. Using algorithms or machine learning models to predict the stock market does work. In fact, Soros called it reflexivity: in a system where participants act on their predictions, the prediction changes the thing it predicts.

Reality is not a question of substance, but of consequence.

Our perception shapes what is real.

Matter does not have a monopoly on reality.

The fact that our brain circuits are optimized for survival is just half of the story.

We can rewire our brain, and we do that consciously or not, multiple times in our lives. When we decide to meditate, to go to the therapist, to paint the caves, to take a yoga class, to pray, to volunteer, to open our heart. None of this can be explained by simply survival. Not even arguing if God exists or not.

I often find myself watching the ants inside the house. They probably don’t see me, but they perceive me through the “earthquakes” or the change in air pressure. They do not need to see me. They survive perfectly well by remaining in miniature and living underground, or under my floor, coming out now and then when some crumb ends up on the ground. As soon as they feel the earthquake or see a shadow, they know they have to run. They care nothing about me.

And I always wondered what makes us so sure that we’re not like ants.

Yes, we’ve built instruments, extended our senses, mapped the genome and split the atom, among many other things. Impressive.

But do you know that ants are also impressive? They farm fungus and use antibiotics to protect their crops from parasites. They perform amputations, and the survival rate is remarkably high. They build rafts from their own bodies during floods, and the ants in the bottom layer still survive.

Yes, we’re different from ants.

But I believe that being honest about the narrowness of our band can “open” us up to the truth-grade perception.

Hubris is the first sign of character and intellectual decay.

Epistemic humility leads to open-mindedness, which benefits the open-minded.

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