Belief-dependent Realism

"We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs, we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations.  Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.  I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it.  Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time."


Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (2011)

Our brains do not simply record and play back experiences as they occurred.  Put in general terms, our conscious recall and even direct experiences are filtered through our beliefs and assumptions.  We even unconsciously attach false information to events.  I believe near death experiences involve these elements of brain activity.  The brain reacts to physical conditions and ome of these reactions result in what we interpret later as visual input.  Then our perception of what we think was visual input results in ideas and thoughts which later merge with the event.  The end result is sometimes a recall of an event which has only a small connection to what really happened.