Exploring the notions of consciousness and reality within contemporary society.

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THE TRUMAN SHOW ON REALITY, ILLUSION AND
SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION.
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‘We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.’
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Some of you may recognise this quote from the 1998 film The Truman Show, written and
directed by Andrew Niccol and Peter Weir and starring Jim Carrey. The film features the
life of Truman Burbank, who lives with his perfect wife, in a perfect town full of perfectly
happy people who all know and love him. What the unsuspecting protagonist doesn’t
know is that since before birth he has been the star of a 24h reality TV show, broadcast
live around the entire world. His hometown of Seahaven is built under a giant arcological
dome in which everyone except Truman himself is an actor involved in the screenplay. He
is furthermore classically conditioned by negative imagery and memories that dissuade
him from travelling or moving away from the setting.
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The film touches on some of the greatest philosophical debates of all time such as the
distinctions between free will and determinism and appearance and reality. The
question of what is real has been debated for centuries. In Ancient Greece, almost as a
presage to Einstein’s general relativity, Heraclitus identifies the essence of the universe in
‘becoming’ believing that everything is subject to time and change and that even that
which appears static is effectively moving. This philosophy is incorporated in his famous
aphorism “πάντα ῥεῖ” which means “everything flows”.
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2. ‘It is not possible to descend into the same river
twice, or to touch a mortal substance twice in
the same state; due to the impetuosity and
speed of change it is dispersed and collected, it
comes and goes’
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Parmenides on the other hand on the other
hand offers a more static and objective notion
of reality, according to which man can only
choose between truth (ἀλήθεια), based on
reason which guides us towards true essence
and opinion (δόξα), based on sensation, which guides as towards appearance, or false
essence.
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‘For nothing exists or will exist except being, since Fate fettered it to be whole and
unmoving’. (fragment 8)
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The most famous analogy to the Truman shows depiction of an illusory reality can perhaps
be found in Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which tied up prisoners observe shadows on a
cave wall believing they are all that there is to reality. In this analogy one prisoner breaks
free from his bonds and notices that the shadows are
mere imitations of puppets behind him and, upon
leaving the cave, sees the real things which these
puppets are meant to represent. Truman, until he
begins doubting the world around him is like such a
cave prisoner.
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The notion of an illusory reality has also been
depicted in many fictional masterpieces such as the
Matrix, 1984, Blade Runner, Brave New World,
Memento and Inception. What, in my opinion, makes
the Truman Show such a modern depiction of man’s
perception of the world is how it is dealt with in a
lighthearted and almost humorous manner, almost as
presage to the superficiality of our age, which
unsurprisingly is obsessed with reality shows and
gossip culture. But most of all, what I find particularly
refreshing in the Truman show, which is absent in
many film and literature depictions of the topic, is that it provides a motivation as to why
Truman begins to question his reality: technical difficulties. While for example, in the
Matrix, the protagonist Neo is portrayed as some sort of mystical prophet with a strong
inner eye, Truman is a completely normal man, living his day to day life. If it weren’t for
some particularities in the production, he would most probably never have questioned his
odd existence.

3. !
Which leads to some rather complex questions: (1) Why is it that we ask ourselves
certain questions and others we do not think of? (2) Why is it that some question
reality and others do not? (3) when is it or rather what is it that makes us question
our reality, or rather, which are the technical difficulties that cause our attention to
shift away from what we know, and lead us to question our worldview?
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To answer questions (1) and (2), let me bring your attention to the topic of ‘attention’
itself, which I believe is extremely relevant to this argument. I want you to imagine for a
second walking down a busy city street and paying attention to your surroundings. You
are likely to set your eyes on many different people and situations: perhaps a particularly
skilled busker, an interesting architecture, a woman talking loudly on the phone about her
husband or a police officer placing a fine on a badly parked vehicle. Now imagine you are
not alone on this walk, but your best friend is walking beside you. You have many things
in common but still, do you think he/she will notice the exact same things you do? You
might both notice the busker as you have a similar taste in music, but for a million
reasons, most of which determined by the casual setting of your eyes (maybe you stop to
tie your shoelace and notice something on the ground) your 50 metre walk is
characterised by a million different particularities. Extend this argument to the whole
street and you’ve got 200 people living a completely different experience.
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This subject is discussed brilliantly by cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz in her
research book titled ‘On looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes’. In which she purposely
goes on walks with people in different fields of expertise to see how differently everyone
perceives the world around them. The author points out how “attention is an
intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us
up to notice only that.”
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I often pride myself upon my ability to be
distracted by the beauty in life. In my first post
on this blog I wrote about a woman playing
the violin in the tube in Berlin, and how angry
at humanity it made me that no one else
seemed to notice her. Now my mind flutters to
all the thousands and thousands of things that,
every day and in every situation skim past me
unnoticed. Even in this moment, while I
concentrate on writing this article, I am
missing out on the majority of things
happening around me. In her book Horowitz
invites the reader to a similar reflection.
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‘By marshalling your attention to these words’
she writes: ‘you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to
bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large

4. room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the
roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the
cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawn-mower,
the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a
bug or whine of a kitchen appliance’.
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The absurd level of individual bias that affects perception and hence, reality, is rather
scary. The scary question is: if I had handled and directed my attention differently, would I
be a different person? If I hadn’t read a particular book, smelled a particular smell, met a
particular person, or been in a specific place at a specific time, would my reality be
different? If a stage light had not fallen from the sky right in front of Truman’s nose, would
he ever have questioned his world?
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How much of our notion of reality is dictated by sheer and utter casualty? As I have
previously pointed out, it is impossible for a human being to see the world without the
filter of our perception: this is made up by our cognitive functions and conserved
knowledge. We don’t see the world how it is exactly, but how it is projected through our
own beliefs, knowledge and sensations. I am not sustaining that man has some magical
thinking ability that can create phenomena with his mind, but simply that what we look at,
and the way we look at it are what construct our notion of reality.
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These considerations on attention explain both, why it is that we pay attention to certain
things and others not, and why different people pay attention to different things. This is
made up largely by casualty, and increasingly more by the personality based decisions
that are constructed through time by the combination of our casual experiences, which
eventually determine the objects of our attention.
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I recently have embarked upon an online course in Philosophy of the Sciences offered on
Coursera by the University of Edinburgh (brilliant course by the way, I suggest it to anyone
who is interested in the notion of reality and consciousness and exploring the origins of
our universe and the world as we know and perceive it). During my studies I found a
similarity between the casualty of attention and experience and what Australian physicist
Brandon Carter referred to as the Anthropic Principle in 1974, which has since become
a key worldview in philosophy of science. Anthropic reasoning is based on the notion that
the kind of observer we are will set restriction to the kind of physical conditions we are
likely to observe. In other words, we are context-sensitive physical observers that can
only thrive in a narrow range of physical conditions and are only likely to observe
conditions suitable for our observation.
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Think of this from a cosmological point of view: our bodies contain a very wide range of
elements, from lighter ones such as hydrogen to heavier and rarer ones such as iron and
sodium. These last ones are only formed in the heart of stars through stellar
nucleosynthesis, in which lighter nuclei combine together to form heavier ones. This
means, quite literally, that our bodies are made of stardust. Now think of all the other
natural phenomena that have permitted our existence on planet Earth, in the Solar

5. System, in the Milky Way, in our Universe. (for a good picture of the size of Earth in the
Universe, check out this interactive scale). Without gravity, carbon chemistry (which is only
possible at particular temperature and pressure conditions), the freezing of water or the
particular structure of space around us, we wouldn’t even be here to observe these
phenomena.
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The absurdity of circumstances that has permitted our existence, which is often referred to
as ‘cosmic fine tuning’ has lead to many theories according to which the universe has
somehow been ‘designed’ for our specific existence. This is, unfortunately, a categorical
generalisation, of the anthropic principle, which is far from what the principle wishes to
suggest. Imagine being a frog in a pond. It is one thing to say: it is likely that I have grown
up in conditions that allow for frog spawn, and thus these are the conditions I can
observe’. It is another to generalise and say: my presence in this pond indicates that the
universe was designed with a view to generate frogs’.
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The reason why we cannot make this generalisation is intrinsic in the anthropic principle
itself. We know what we observe. And it is likely that what we observe is a reality that has
allowed for our existence, for us to be there to observe. In other words we are in
someway codependent on the specific reality we observe. Who is to say that there may
not be other types of reality, in which there are not conditions for our existence and
hence we are not able to observe? Scientists have speculated the possibility that our
universe is merely a subset of a much larger ensemble (often referred to as multiverse)
that can contain all the physically possible ways the universe could be. From such a point
of view, it is not surprising that we inhabit this particular universe with just the right
conditions for life.
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If it isn’t clear to this point, I am offering a critique of the scientific and philosophical
notion of causality, which is at the basis of Newtonian science. The sheer casualty (by
which I intend chancely, accidental, unforeseeable nature) of our daily experiences, leads
me further and further away from the scientific cause-effect laws of physics. Which leads
me to another consideration on scientific progress.
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To answer question (3) let me introduce another topic we looked at in the afore
mentioned course: the different stages of ‘science’ as described by Thomas Kuhn in ‘The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ (1962). Before Kuhn, science was seen as a
sequence of scientific theories which build on and perfectioned its predecessors by
providing a more accurate image of the world.
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But according to Kuhn this picture is totally wrong and there is no such thing as a distinct
scientific method. He describes how, during periods of normal science, scientists work
within a scientific paradigm. This includes the main scientific theory, the experimental
and technological resources as well as the system of values of the community, such as
simplicity, mathematical elegance, parsimony, etc. During this time, textbook work is
fundamental. Kuhn moves away from Popper’s notion of falsificationism, towards a view of

6. scientific research as ‘problem solving’, or rather attempting to solve the minor
difficulties and discrepancies of textbook knowledge.
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When a significantly large number of these anomalies accumulates, the normal science
enters a period of crisis. At this point the community may decide to abandon the old
paradigm and move onto a new one, in what Kuhn
refers to as a paradigm shift. The choice of this new
theory is not dictated by its superiority over the old one
but on its higher puzzle-solving power, which accounts
for the anomalies in the old one. In short, according to
Kuhn, a scientific paradigm is picked over another
one not because it is closer to the truth, but because
it is better at problem-solving than the previous one.
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In the Truman show, Truman constructed his notion of
reality with what he was presented. When anomalies
started to present themselves, he attempted to find
solutions to them, based on his conserved knowledge of
how his world worked. When the number of anomalies
accumulated (stage lights falling from the sky, people
acting in a repetitive and staged manner, meeting his supposedly deceased father, etc.)
he no longer had the ability to solve them according to his rationale. Truman entered into
a period of crisis, and decided to search for solutions elsewhere, similarly to what Kuhn
would define as a paradigm shift. When Truman discovered that his life was a TV show
and decided to exit the little door in the sky, he did not move closer to reality. He
did not pick reality over fiction. He merely chose a different reality, in which the
anomalies he couldn’t account for in the first one made more sense.
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Shift this argument to our human notion of reality and you get the same reasoning.
Newtonian science has worked so far, and we’ve managed to find solutions to minor
difficulties with its basic principles and assumptions. With the introduction of quantum
mechanics in the 1920’s, this is no longer possible. What quantum mechanics
demonstrates is that the reality we observe is dependent on the observer. This seems to
have rather strong connections with the psychological notion of consciousness: the fact
that we experience an internal world of images, sensations, thoughts, and feelings
that are related to the external world.
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However, mainstream science seems to have always largely ignored the anomaly of
consciousness which its traditional methods were unable to explain. This kind of goes
against Kuhn’s view that unexplainable anomalies cause a crisis and then a paradigm shift.
Based on recent times, one could ironically revise Kuhn’s theory as follows: when science
has unexplainable anomalies that accumulate it does not immediately enter a crisis. It
quite simply ignores the problem until it happens to discover a theory that works
better, causing a paradigm shift. Consciousness has been ignored because it didn’t

7. make sense with traditional newtonian science: it could not be empirically observed, and
it clashed significantly with science’s search for objective and universal truths.
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However, with the introduction of quantum mechanics, the phenomenon of consciousness
is no longer ignorable and can in no way be explained by our current paradigm. Many
theorists have tried to do so, opting
towards a better understanding of brain
chemistry, towards computing theory
according to which consciousness rises
from complexity of the brain’s processing,
or looking towards chaos theory. But
how can something as immaterial as
consciousness rise from something as
unconscious as matter?
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The impossibility of answering such a
question leads me to think that we may
be approaching the time to stop with the
problem solving and justifications, and to
question the basic assumptions of
science and reality. What I’m trying to
get at, in this rather diverse argument which has fluttered from cinema to philosophy and
from cosmology to consciousness, is that I feel it might be time to question the validity
of cause-effect, materialist newtonian science. I believe we have reached a point in
history were the failure in its explanatory value is significant, as quantum mechanics and
consciousness show us. From a broader perspective, cosmology and anthropic reasoning
show us how so called cosmic fine-tuning have pushed a us towards an anthropocentric
view of reality which is widely supported by cause-effect laws. Is it possible that we are
now shifting from a causal view of reality to a casual one, in which our existence is
based upon chance and not cause-effect laws?
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References
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Gilmore, Robert (1995). Alice in Quantum-land, Springer Science and Business Media,
illustration.
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Horowitz, Alexandra (2012). On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, Simon and
Schuster: 2014
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Kuhn, Thomas (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Einaudi: 1999
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Professors Massimi, Michela and Richmond, Alistair. Lectures in Philosophy of Science at
the University of Edinburgh.