Forewarned is forearmed

Lisieux. The brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy.

A

Lyf is but a dream

This is indeed true. Our lives and the way we experience this Universe are mere dreams.

Everything we see is presented to our conscious selves by the same part of the brain that also generates our dreams when we sleep. The only difference is that when we are awake, these dreams are created with signals that arrive from our senses. When we dream, the worlds we see are less based on reality. Sometimes they rhyme with what we remember, though. The distinguishing feature of the daytime dream that we call life is that when we communicate with other people, some aspects of their dream that they call their life is shared between them and us. We can, for example, tell each other that we both see a tree. In our night dreams, our experiences are private. One of the things that don’t really exist is colors. They are filled into our representation of reality by the part of the brain that creates dreams.

Furthermore, what we see is only loosely based on reality. We are animals that evolved adaptations to avoid danger and obtain food in the savannah. It has been mathematically and experimentally proven that a biased view of reality, in which some aspects of it are ignored, and some are exaggerated, improves our evolutionary fitness and survival. This means that we literally evolved to be deceived in our conscious experience. How we understand reality is also connected to the process of thinking in which our brain assigns tags or names to fragments of reality.

Our perception of the Universe cannot be correct likewise because of our ultimate condition of being forms of life. The clump of matter that is us needs the energy to maintain its structure over time. Our thinking is a process, as the signals travel in our nerve cells. The Universe is fundamentally just a series of stills, like film frames. Our brain has a dedicated subsystem to create movement out of these stills. We are irreversibly locked into a change around us in sync with our metabolism, which keeps us alive. If the metabolism stops, we die.

This and all the above prevent us from knowing the true nature of the Universe for now and maybe forever, but the stories we create and tell each other about the workings of the Cosmos can keep us amused and busy in the neverending pursuit of the elusive Truth about the reality that is merely a persuasive dream.