What If You’re Not Seeing the Real World?

Looking at how our cell phones work is the simplest demonstration for understanding the mechanics of perception.

You ever open your phone and tap an icon—not because you’re thinking about it, but because you’ve done it a thousand times before? Maybe your hand just knows where the app is. You’re not really seeing the pixels; you’re seeing the meaning. You’re seeing “text message,” or “email,” or “Instagram,” not the code underneath it.

Now just imagine for a minute that everything you see and hear works like that.

Not just your phone. Not just your routines. But your whole experience of the world.

What if your brain is showing you a kind of mental shortcut—an interface—rather than giving you direct access to reality? What if your perception is mostly built from the top down, shaped more by what your mind expects to find than by what’s actually “out there”?

This might sound strange, even uncomfortable. But it’s not mysticism. It’s actually where neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the spiritual traditions all agree.

This isn’t about rejecting science and floating off into the woo woo. It’s about asking a deeper question that’s surprisingly hard to answer:

What are you really seeing?

And maybe more importantly:

Who’s doing the seeing?

The Brain: A Prediction Machine, Rather than a Camera

We tend to think of perception like a camera. Light comes in through the eyes, sound through the ears, and the brain just records it all, right?

Well… not quite.

Over the last few decades, neuroscientists have learned something fascinating: your brain isn’t passively receiving the world—it’s guessing at it.

Seriously. Around 80 to 90 percent of the signals traveling through your brain’s cortex are actually top-down—meaning they move in the opposite direction of what are intuitions tell us. They originate within our brain, and move towards our sensory organs-- our ears, eyes, skin, nose, and tongue-- they don’t come from the outside world.

This is a fact that is accepted by neuroscientists because they can now spy on the neural processes with technologies like EEG (electroecephalography), and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging machines).

Afferent neurons transmit information towards the central nervous system (the brain and spinal chord) while efferent neurons transmit signals out from the central nervous system, sending the signal out toward the sensory organs.

Here's the surprising fact they found: Around 80 to 90 percent of the neurons involved with our sensory system are efferent. Sending rather than receiving information.

To say this in a more meaningful way, only about 10 to 20 percent of the signals are bottom-up, meaning raw data from your senses. The rest is made up of predictions, based on your memories, expectations, and past experiences.

This process is called predictive processing, and it means your brain is constantly trying to minimize surprise. It builds a model of the world and updates it as needed—not to uncover objective truth, but to keep you feeling safe, stable, and functioning.

In short: perception is a controlled hallucination. One that usually lines up just enough with reality to keep you alive.

But if your brain is mostly guessing, it leads to a deeper question: What’s guiding the guess?

Donald Hoffman: The Interface Isn’t Reality

This is where cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman comes in. His work builds directly on this idea, but he takes it a step further.

Hoffman argues that we don’t perceive reality as it is. We perceive a user interface, like icons on a desktop screen. The red trash bin icon doesn’t show you what’s really happening inside your hard drive—it just gives you a symbol that’s useful.

Your perceptions—tables, people, and sunsets—are icons too. Not because they’re fake, but because they’re functional. Your mind evolved to show you what’s helpful, not what’s true.

It gets even weirder.

We usually think of the brain—the neurons, the chemicals, the wiring—as the thing causing all of this. But Hoffman invites us to flip the script.

What if the brain itself is part of the interface?

Just another icon—useful for analogies sake, but not the true source. We see a “brain” the same way we see a “folder” on a computer. It’s a simplified symbol, not the underlying code.

When we study the brain and say, “This is where consciousness lives,” we may be mistaking the reflection for the cause. Like thinking your smile in the mirror caused you to feel happy.

This opens a door. Because if the brain is part of the display… Then maybe consciousness isn’t generated by the brain.

Maybe it’s the canvas underneath the interface.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness: What If We’re Asking the Wrong Question?

This brings us to one of the biggest philosophical challenges to scientific research: the hard problem of consciousness.

It asks: How can physical stuff—like neurons and electrical signals—give rise to something as vivid and internal as conscious experience?

We can track brain activity. We can map emotions to regions. But we’ve never found a formula that turns molecules into a mind. Science can describe the behavior, but not the being.

And maybe that’s because we’re asking the wrong question.

If consciousness is fundamental—if it’s the starting point rather than a byproduct—then trying to explain it in physical terms is like trying to explain music by studying the radio.

You can learn a lot. But you won’t find the song.

Leibniz’s Mill: A 300-Year-Old Thought Experiment That Still Frustrates the Phsyicalists

The mainstream of science assumes that space and time--what we call “reality”-- are fundamental; that they’re the origin of everything, including, somehow our conscious experiences. Mentalism is the opposing theory which this author is arguing for. This debate isn’t new. Back in the 1600s, philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz imagined a thought experiment.

He said: imagine walking inside a giant mechanical brain—a mill. You could see every cog, every gear. Everything would be moving and functioning just as it should.

But you’d never find a thought. You’d never find “the taste of chocolate” or “the feeling of loneliness” among the gears.

Because consciousness isn’t a mechanism. It’s an experience. It doesn’t break down into parts. It shows up all at once—from the inside.

Three centuries later, we’ve built our own mill. We call it neuroscience. And it’s incredible. But even with all our tools, we still haven’t found a thought. Just the same movements. The same cogs.

So maybe it’s time to ask again: What if we’re looking in the wrong direction?

A Course in Miracles: Projection Makes Perception

If consciousness comes first—if it is what reality appears to—then perception isn’t something passive. It’s creative.

A Course in Miracles puts it like this:

“Projection makes perception.” [CE: T-13.V.3]

That means we don’t just perceive a world that’s already there. We project meaning, story, belief—and then we perceive a world that reflects those projections back to us.

According to the Course, there are two “thought systems” we can project from:

• The ego, which projects fear, separation, and scarcity.

• The Holy Spirit, which projects love, unity, and peace.

Whichever one you choose becomes the lens through which you see. Not because the outer world changes, but because your interpretation does.

This suggests that perhaps your mood dictates what you see and hear. That’s not illogical is it? When you wake up “on the wrong side of the bed”, doesn’t every experience seem to go awry? You end up having a pretty bad day, right?

The Course isn’t trying to convert you. It’s simply pointing at a simple fact: your perception isn’t neutral. You’re always projecting something. The only question is: what do you want to see more of?

Hermeticism: As Within, So Without

This idea isn’t just modern or mystical. It’s ancient. The Hermetic tradition, rooted in ancient Egypt and Greece, teaches this core principle:

“As within, so without.”

In other words: your outer experience mirrors your inner state.

This principle shows up everywhere. In psychology, philosophy, and science.

Quantum physics’ most famous experiment, the double-slit experiment, demonstrates that the observer shapes the outcome of the experiment.

But at its heart, Hermeticism is inviting us to take inner reality seriously.

If your outer world feels chaotic, check your inner world.

If everything feels threatening, notice what part of you is feeling unsafe.

If peace feels impossible, ask whether you’ve made space for it inside yourself.

It’s not about control over the external world. It’s about alignment in the internal realm.

And the good news is: you don’t have to fix the whole world. You just have to start with correcting your perception of it by shifting your mood, because that’s where the real shift happens.

You might say, “But I’m in this bad mood because of all the bad things that are happening to me.”

My answer would be, “Read this article again, more slowly, and with an open mind."

And pay attention to science. Some of us put signs on our front lawn which, among other things, say, “SCIENCE IS REAL”.

Well... we might want to start paying attention, then, to what the science is telling us.

It’s quite literally, a 180 degree spin on what most of us assume to be true; that the world is happening to us.

Thanks to cognitive dissonance, I wouldn’t expect this concept to effortlessly integrate into your belief system if you’re believing the opposite. It does, however, have profound implications about our relationship to the world and ALL the crazy things we’re experiencing there.

It implies we can change the world we see, by changing our minds.