How can we know with certainty that what our eyes are telling is real and not an illusion or program imposed on us or programmed into us?

Answer

Dear Tim,

your question contains several questions:
1. Can we know “the” reality?
2. Is there free will?
3. Is there such a thing as a “Supreme Power” manipulating reality?

It is impossible to provide a comprehensive and “complete” answer to all these questions within this framework. That is why I propose to give you an impetus for an answer, which you may or may not go into more deeply by asking me further questions.

1. Can we know “the” reality? My answer to this is short and sweet: NO.
So what can we know? That is the question that is called “epistemology” in philosophy. However, the answer to that question cannot be found within philosophy, but within science.
I’ll ask you another question first: Is there such a thing as “the” reality?
You yourself refer to Plato – who got his ideas from another Greek philosopher, Parmenides of Elea. Plato said that we only perceive a shadow of reality.
The same thought can be found in Immanuel Kant, who states that THE reality is the “Thing in itself”, while our perceptions are the “Ding für uns”.
But quantum mechanics contradicts that. According to quantum mechanics, there is no such thing as an absolute world (cf. Newton). The entire universe consists of elementary particles that constantly “grab” each other and “release” again at an unbelievable speed. If our senses could perceive at a subatomic level, we would see nothing, hear, smell, feel… nothing at all.

Sounds weird? Yet it is so. Look, the Greeks ascribed to things an absolute, independent existence and they attributed properties, attributes to those things… that’s how we perceive the world, by the way. But that is precisely what is wrong: things have no inherent properties … there is no such thing as color, smell, sound …
For example: take a red button. You see “red”… Now wrap your hand around that knot… what’s the color of the knot? Red? No … NO color … red is not an inherent property of that knot, but it is a property that results from the incidence of light on the matter that makes up that knot. Take away the light, and the color is gone too. Color is thus an emergent property of matter, a property that arises as a result of a relationship between elements.
And the same goes for smell and sound. In Taoism, the famous koan (question) is asked: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, is there any sound?
Think carefully about that question…and ask yourself: WHAT is sound?

All his life Einstein has resisted the idea that there is no absolute reality and that everything is the result of quantum physics random processes. But Einstein never managed to build a tenacious argument against quantum mechanics.

So we argue that there is no absolute reality, there is no “thing in itself” and Plato was wrong with his cave allegory.
What is the reality then? Well, reality is what we make of it, each of us, with our senses… and every living thing too.
For example, the world of blue tits is MUCH more beautiful and colorful than ours, because in addition to Red, Green, and Blue (the primary colors that make up light), they can also see infrared and ultraviolet, two colors that are outside the spectrum we can perceive. lying down. And you also know that a dog can perceive many more sounds than we can.
What is the “real” world now? Ours? The one from the blue tits? The dog’s? None of them. They are all nothing more than perceptions… signals sent by the senses to the brain and interpreted there.

I could go on and on about this for pages and pages, but I hope you already have a start to understanding: Each individual makes perceptions and those perceptions are interpreted by the brain… there is no absolute, unique reality; everything is interpretation and everything has a DEPENDENT existence… so nothing can be without everything that surrounds that “something”. For the simple reason that everything comes about through the constant exchange of subatomic particles.

2. Is there free will? YES and NO. It’s just how you look at it.
The findings from neurology teach us that we are, in fact, our brain. Jan Verplaetse (Without free will), Dick Swaab (We are our brain), Viktor Lamme (Free will does not exist) and so many others argue that there is no free will, since we are conditioned from before birth during growth of our cerebral cortex.
But I have very serious reservations about that myself, and I think it’s more a matter of how you look at it. I agree to say that we are conditioned, on the one hand genetically and also by the circumstances in which our mother completes her pregnancy, on the other hand by our upbringing, the environments we end up in, the people we meet, and so on.
But to deduce from this that there is no question of free will is a bridge too far… I think this is very short-sighted.
I think there is still a question of choice and free will… and I’m not talking about the choice whether I’m going to drink a Duvel or a Leffe, but about fundamental choices.

See, everything has a cause, that’s true, but nothing has a purpose. We also inherited that concept from the Greeks: Aristotle’s teleos… everything has a purpose.
But that’s a matter of interpretation. People say, “everything has a reason.” But do they mean that everything has a cause, or that everything happens for a specific purpose? Because that’s not the same.
This kind of thinking is also typical of the West: linearity… everything happens along a causal deterministic line, just as Newton proposed.
Sorry, but this is wrong. The world is not a line…
In his book, Jan Verplaetse starts from a proposition: If causal determinism is true, then alternative options and source control are excluded.
And according to Jan Verplaetse, causal determinism IS true.
Sorry, but I absolutely do not agree with that … and immediately the entire argumentation of Jan Verplaetse lapses for me.
In addition to causal determinism, Verplaetse also sees acausal determinism and acausal indeterminism, both of which he rejects… and rightly so.
But there is one last possibility, which he mentions briefly in his work, on p. 120: “It is possible that our decisions are anchored in CAUSAL networks that work INDETERMINISTically.” – We are therefore talking about causal indetermism: everything has a cause, but nothing is determined – but Jan Verplaetse immediately pushes that off the track.
Now it is precisely this causal indeterminism that connects – again – with quantum mechanics. In Eastern thinking this is represented by a circle thinking instead of a line thinking.

So I say: everything has a cause, nothing is determined. The choice is yours.
Think of it as walking in a fog that moves with you: you vaguely see the contours of your surroundings and you know roughly where you want to go, for example a tower. When you come to a fork in the road you have to make a choice. That choice can bring you closer to your goal, or further… and so it goes with every split.
When you turn around you see everything clear and bright, but in front of you the fog remains.
In this way you can say afterwards: If I had made that or that decision then, then now… and so on.

3. Finally, is there such a thing as a “Supreme Being” who manipulates everything? NO
You yourself are that Supreme Being. You are in control, as you make your own world, both literally and figuratively. And your world is also constantly changing, as you have a frame of reference in your mind that evolves according to the experiences you have, the people you meet, the things you learn…
There is no absolute world outside of yourself and nothing is preprogrammed… the world you know is the only real one, because that is YOUR world, just as it is for each of us. There are as many worlds as there are people and living beings (=observers).
And COMMUNICATION is the key word in all of that. Communication should allow us to develop a “common” language (verbal, physical, auditory …) that allows us to understand each other, or better… to understand each other’s world.

So, I’ll leave it at that for now. If you would like to go into more detail or have recommendations for further reading, please do not hesitate to write to me: johan.dhaenen@howest.be