Illusions of Reality

Sweet Bites for May 2, 2025

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of Story.

Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.

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🍰 Mini Bite

The author Robert Greene’s life changed one day while driving. Mid conversation, Greene’s wife told him to pull the car over.

He argued for a second before complying. Within moments, his entire reality shifted.

“Suddenly everything started getting really strange. Everything looked strange, my voice didn’t sound the same...”

Greene was in the midst of a stroke and his wife had noticed something was not right. Shortly after, everything went blank for him. When he awoke, he was in the hospital and had sensations he’d never experienced before.

“In the process of dying, strange things happen to the brain… you have kind of visions of things that you might think are hallucinations but that later seem like you are actually glimpsing the reality as opposed to the illusion that the brain creates.”

Greene, whose works (48 Laws of Power, 33 Strategies of War, Laws of Human Nature) often focus heavily on reason and rationality, suddenly found himself experiencing a world that was completely unfamiliar and unexplainable.

“My idea of the brain is that it creates endless series of Illusions for you, it creates this seamless version of reality—the sense of a self, the sense of a continuous self through time, it creates a linear sense of time progression, it creates colors, it creates a world that visually seems familiar… But it's all illusion. It’s all a construction.”

“Evolution shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive,” the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman has observed. “But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don't need to know. And that's pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be.”

The reality we know, is a story that our brain has programmed for us, one we can easily digest and understand. It helps us build a cohesive narrative to our existence and cement us in a time and place.

“Images come into your brain and they're not organized in any way and the brain organizes it in a way that you can understand it well,” Greene continued. “When you're dying all of that scrambles up and you actually are seeing something else.”

As Greene lay there in the hospital, the reality his brain had created had disappeared and he was left with the many aspects of himself in a way he could barely explain.

“There are like 50 different selves inside of you that are all competing and you think there's just one, and you think it's consistent but there's not, it's an illusion. The self is literally an illusion that your brain constructs.”

Our perceptions are a part of us, we’re an active participant in them. But what Greene’s experience shows us is that beneath our engagement with the story of our reality is a deeper experience. The story we know is just what our brain has deceived us into knowing.

Much of our experience of the world we come to know like the back of our hand is in fact an illusion. Our brain is always working to form a clean and clear picture of the world for us.

But by recognizing the fragile nature of the brain’s narrative abilities, we can better awaken to the stories that we allow to form our reality.

In turn, while the world may be constructed, we’re still the ones holding the pen, and that means we can choose the stories of our life.

🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation

🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom

💭 Thought I’m Taking into the Weekend

It’s not about writing a happy ending, it’s about going on the journey, taking a chance on the story of your own life, filled with all its ups and downs, twists and turns. It’s about following Nietzsche’s amor fati, embracing all you come across in life.

Because ultimately, our story may have a beginning, middle, and end, but it’s the pages in between that make the journey worthwhile.

📚 Wisdom

“It is when we are engaged in a skilled practice that the world shows up for us as having a reality of its own, independent of the self. Reciprocally, the self comes into view as being in a situation that is not of its own making. The Latin root of our English word "attention" is tenere, which means to stretch or make tense. External objects provide an attachment point for the mind; they pull us out of ourselves. It is in the encounter between the self and the brute alien otherness of the real that beautiful things become possible: the puck-handling finesse of the hockey player, for example.”

Matthew Crawford

Source: The World Beyond Your Head

🧊 Exploring Philosophical Ideas

In the below video, Alex O’Connor explores the Existential Iceberg which dives into theories ranging from basic existentialism, to an after life, to determinism and even quantum mechanics.

If you haven’t had an existential crisis, you may after exploring some of these ideas.

⏰ Thought Experiment

In this video, the YouTuber Vsauce explores the idea of time as an illusion, similar to some of the experiences Robert Greene had after his stroke.

It also delves into the idea of the Ship of Theseus which can be summarized as follows:

A ship departs a port for its voyage. During the trip, the boat goes through a series of repairs. First one board, then another, then another. By the time the ship makes it to its destination, everything about the ship has been replaced and is completely new. Is the ship still the same ship that left port or a new one?

So, with us ever changing, what makes us us?

Think someone you know would enjoy these? Hit below to forward and spread the love.

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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