Foreword

“W“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.” This was written by Anaïs Nin in 1961 in The Seduction of the Minotaur, but the idea itself is much, much older. It is one way, but only one, into the mystery and the wonder of Maya.

One of the questions explored, examined and playfully (but rigorously) dissected in Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon’s wonderful novel—the entry point into an entire new world—is the mystery of consciousness. Somehow, the tofu-textured tangle of wetware inside our skulls is more than just an insanely complicated object. The brain, when embodied in a body that is embedded in a world, creates—or enables—the appearance of a subject. We experience our worlds, and we experience being ourselves within these worlds.

The challenge of understanding how and why physical stuff, such as a brain, can give rise to consciousness has been around forever. For the last few decades, it’s been most famously cast by the philosopher David Chalmers as the “hard problem.” And despite a thriving and resurgent science of consciousness, a sense of the unknown persists. How is it possible, one might ask, to be objective about something that is intrinsically subjective?

This is not just an arcane philosophical puzzle. It is a question that matters. How we think about consciousness, individually and collectively, has seismic implications. Who and what has rights? What counts as a “self”? What happens after we die (and what happened before we were born)? Are we in control of our actions, and, if not, what is? Are there states of consciousness that are somehow ethically superior to others? What is the relationship between experience and reality? And perhaps most urgently: who gets to shape the experiences of others, and to what ends?

In this book of extraordinary riches, Gandhi and Memon give us new tools for thinking about these topics, provocative philosophical frameworks wrapped in a narrative both sweeping and immersive. These frameworks challenge the stories we implicitly absorb and they empower us to think for ourselves. Maya is therefore also a political book, carefully and vividly unpacking the consequences of the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we are told, about who and what we are.

One concept running throughout Maya (again, there are many) is that of prediction. In the brain, according to my own research and that of many others, prediction is key to how we experience the world, and the self. The brain doesn’t just passively register the world (or body) through the senses. Instead, it is always making predictions about what’s going on, and using sensory signals to update these predictions, keeping them tethered to reality in ways best suited to staying alive. As I like to say, our conscious experiences are kinds of “controlled hallucinations”—brain-based guesses with prediction at their core.

And when we can predict, we can control. An organism that can anticipate its world can act more effectively within it. This is true not only within brains, but also within societies. The ability to shape the context, to shape the narrative, can shift the delicate balance of our individual controlled hallucinations so that our perceptions, and our behaviors, change too. This is one route by which minds become governable.

In 1951, the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen placed an oversized plaster egg beside a herring gull’s nest. It was bigger, rounder, and more vividly speckled than any real egg. The gull abandoned its own eggs and sat on the fake one. Tinbergen realized why. An amplified signal, one that pushes the same buttons as the real thing but harder, almost always wins. He called it a supernormal stimulus.

He was studying birds, of course. But every gently glowing screen in every pocket runs on the same principle: mental junk food engineered to be sweeter than fruit. Images calibrated to hold the eye longer than any landscape. We now inhabit environments radically unlike the ones that shaped our nervous systems, and the mismatch between evolved drive and engineered stimulus produces a peculiar modern condition: the feeling of being perpetually almost-satisfied, always reaching for the next scroll, the next hit of novelty. We live within cages made of desire.

Maya takes this tension and scales it to a civilization, played out by a mind-expanding cast of characters and imaginary species, each inhabiting its own controlled hallucination.

Over a century ago, Jakob von Uexküll—like Tinbergen, an ethologist—proposed that every organism lives inside its own perceptual bubble: its Umwelt. A tick perceives the world through butyric acid and the tactile properties of hair. A honeybee perceives it through polarized light and the Earth’s magnetic field. Maya builds an entire society of radically different Umwelts. The naags perceive through heat pits and forked tongues. The garudas are sensitive to wavelengths beyond the reach of others. Gandharvas have two heads, two different personalities sharing a single consciousness.

We humans have learned to change our environments according to our own Umwelts—a society-wide amplification of the stimuli that we evolved to be sensitive to. And this has consequences for others. We build cities lit by our visual spectrum and wonder why migrating birds crash into our buildings. We light our coastlines, and turtle hatchlings crawl the wrong way, toward our lamps instead of the sea. The failure to perceive another creature’s sensory world goes hand in hand with a failure to perceive its inner life.

Maya does not stop with perceptual differences. The distinct Umwelts of its creatures carry through into the deep physiology of each—perception in the service of homeostasis, of staying alive—and equally into the higher realms of cognition, of patterns of thought. The garudas, perceiving from high above, have a form of spatial reasoning organized around altitude and the rising and falling of columns of air. Constraints like these don’t impoverish imagination; instead, they empower and extend it. The creatures in Maya are pioneering excursions into the terra incognita of possible minds, through which we can learn a great deal about our own ways of seeing, ways of thinking, and ways of being.

And about our ways of grading lives. In human society, systems of caste embed and entrench inequalities. Every group is assigned a position above some other group, and everyone has a stake in maintaining the structure. The real tyranny of caste is in how it naturalizes itself. It takes real or perceived differences, whether biological, cultural, or economic, and manufactures a hierarchy that claims those differences as its justification. In Maya’s world of Neh, the different Umwelts are real, but the social hierarchy built on top of them is by design. It embeds itself so deeply in perception, in who you think matters and who you see as background, that the design becomes invisible, and its influence on everyday life pervasive, like the weather.

And like weather, this social architecture can seem inevitable and beyond control. But again, there are hidden forces at work.

In 1961, the meteorologist Edward Lorenz made a tiny change to a computer simulation of global weather, and the entire simulated atmosphere diverged into an unrecognizable pattern. A difference of one part in a thousand had, over time, produced a completely different world. The discovery gave us the concept of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” and the popular image of a butterfly causing a hurricane.

Maya stages this mathematics in ways both glorious and devastating. When small changes cascade into large ones, who chooses which small thing to push, and who bears the cost of the cascade?

Many other ideas surface throughout the novel: the nature of dreams, the possibility of a collective consciousness, the minimal conditions for a mind, the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Maya subtly installs these concepts and provocations in our minds, and then thoroughly examines their social and political consequences. But always without prescription, allowing us to discover the implications for ourselves.

Will we ever crack the problem of consciousness? In my own work, I focus not on solving David Chalmers’s hard problem, but on dissolving it: building bridges between neural mechanisms and conscious experience, and testing the weight of explanation they can bear. Perhaps the biggest obstacles are the stories we’ve inherited. We are told that the brain is a computer made of meat, and that consciousness is an algorithm, as equally suited to silicon as to carbon. We see ourselves in our algorithms, and we see our algorithms in ourselves. But other narratives, other ways of thinking, are possible. In my own work, I’ve come to see consciousness as primarily an embodied phenomenon, a property of living flesh and blood, and not of the dead sand of silicon.

For me, reading Maya reinforced this intimacy between life and consciousness—an intimacy prominent in the very concept of Maya itself, as a biological network hosting a multitude of minds. (There is, of course, another interpretation of Maya, from Indian philosophy, as the illusory nature of the world as it appears. This interpretation lines up neatly with the idea of perception as controlled hallucination.)

Maya describes an adventure, and reading Maya is an adventure too. It does not explain itself, nor does it translate itself. The meanings of things resolve over time through context, thanks to the inferences and cognitive predictions our minds inevitably make. The text of Maya carefully controls our own narrative interpretations, but each reader will take away something different, something personal, since—as Nin pointed out—we will not experience Maya as it is, but as we are.

So, immerse yourself. Pay attention, and notice the moment, if it comes, when you feel the faint unease of recognizing your own cage.