The world’s smartest scientists are saying it’s actually not. Imagine a pilot flying an airplane at night in bad weather.

He can’t peek into the world outside of his plane. All he has are the instruments on his dashboard, indicators of speed, air pressure, all kinds of dials that tell him about a world he cannot directly see.

They’re very reliable and provide the pilot with what he needs to maneuver safely through his environment. Well, of course not.

Just because the menu in a restaurant can give you accurate information about the food, it isn’t food. The menu is not the meal.

It seems like you couldn’t possibly confuse the two. And yet this is exactly what human beings do all the time.

..by looking upon our world as fundamentally material. We deal with matter and therefore assume that it is reality. But matter is only our dashboard, it is the interface we use to interact with reality.

All we have are these ‘indicators’ to touch, smell, and feel it, so our intuition tells us those indicators are all there is.

In this sense, the way humans deal with matter is like pilots flying by instruments... ...without a clear-glass windshield.

We can never see the actual reality ‘outside,’ although many scientists are trying, like this team of neuroscientists from the Institute of Neurology of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London.

They discovered that organisms must represent their environment in an encoded manner to survive. Every species, including human beings, has their own set...

..of dials and indicators: the forms and colors we see, the sounds we hear, the flavors we taste.

What we see is an evolutionary ‘best guess’ constructed by our biology. It paints a nice picture, but a picture isn’t reality.

This is the startling conclusion arrived at by a team at the University of California. Through analysis and experimentation, they’ve shown that our senses are evolutionarily built to construct a useful...

..but untrue picture of reality, one that suits our survival. As Prof. Donald Hoffman likes to say: It may all sound very complex, because… well, it is!

But it all comes down to the most important question of all: What is reality? If it stands to be quite different from the colors, shapes, sounds, and textures that we call ‘matter’...

..then what is it? When we get down to the essence, what do we see and what do we get?

Why Our Reality Is Not What It Seems...

Why Our Reality Is Not What It Seems...

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