Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

there are actually two differences between the snake illusion, on the one hand, and the doughnut and road rage illusions, on the other: (1) in the case of the snake, the illusion is explicit—it’s an actual false perception about the physical world and, for a moment, a false belief; (2) in the case of the snake, your emotional machinery is working exactly as designed. In other words, the snake illusion isn’t a result of “environmental mismatch”; it’s not a case where a feeling designed by natural selection to be in some sense “true” in a hunter-gatherer environment was rendered “false” by circumstances of modern life. Rather, natural selection designed this feeling to be almost always illusory in a literal sense; the feeling fills you with a conviction—a judgment about what’s in your immediate environment—that is pretty reliably untrue. This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.