My daughter, Mila, thinks peek-a-boo is absolutely hilarious, and she may be right. Based on certain illusions, hallucinations, and misconceptions, Descartes surmised that our senses could be deceiving us. He concluded that if our senses are indeed deceptive, that sensory knowledge must be discarded. In order to gain insight into the true nature of reality, he therefore began his investigation with the only premise he could rely on with certainty: “cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am, his unquestionable axiom. Goldstein defines the mind as “a system that creates representations of the world” (p. 5), and goes on to say that “a tree, and everything else we perceive, is ‘represented’ in the brain” (p. 38). We experience mental representations, not actually what exists. He elucidated further: “our perception of the tree is therefore based not on direct contact with the tree, but on the way the tree is represented by action potentials within the brain” (p. 38). The imagery the brain processes may not actually be representative of what exists in objective reality.
Dr. Joseph Rudnick, former chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA, insists that quantum mechanics confirms this very idea, namely that Descartes’ skepticism may have been entirely justified. He discusses how newborns have the idea that when they can’t see something, it isn’t there, and that is why peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek games are so thrilling to young children. To the infant mind, it is as if you vanish into nothingness and reappear into nothing. Rudnick tells us that quantum mechanics verifies this way of thinking. When you are not looking at something, it is not safe to assume that it is what you saw before, but that it is in fact waiting for you to look at it again. He has verified this on a quantum level; essentially that perceived reality is based in part on the observer.
I find it fascinating that on a small enough scale, quantum mechanics confirms what my daughter knows and delights, specifically that our cognitive images are true, but they are not the whole truth. As Descartes speculated, we are tricked by our perceptions and the resultant assumptions about reality. The “reality” we experience is on some level a misconception, a false image produced by our brain based on limited information.
Rudnick paraphrased from:
Goodman, G. (Producer), & Russell, D. O. (Director). (2004). Special Feature on I Heart Huckabees
[Motion picture]. USA: Fox Searchlight.