Saint Augustine and the Flood of Visual Versions of Worlds That Never Existed
For centuries, in doubt, we repeated Saint Augustine's mantra as if it were a universal law: seeing is believing, with sight occupying the place of the sense that showed us the truth. The eye, that absolutely ingenious piece of equipment, functioning as a portal that gives us access to reality, with its colors, nuances, shapes, and facts.

But it seems that time is over.

And perhaps, in fact, it never existed.

Sight has always been the sense that has betrayed us the most. The most vulnerable. The most manipulable. You think something is near, it's far. You think it's blue, it's gray. You think it's standing, it's upside down. The brain juggles light and contrast all the time. That's why only optical illusions exist; there are no olfactory illusions, no tactile illusions. No one runs their hand over sandpaper thinking it's silk, no one smells smoke thinking it's jasmine. Can you imagine how many historical decisions were wrong because those who made them trusted only what they saw?

And if it was already complicated to trust what we saw before, now, with generative artificial intelligence, we are reaching a point where we need to distrust everything that is offered to us! When Pope Francis appeared wearing a white quilted coat, reminiscent of Balenciaga, in an image that went around the world, everything seemed absolutely real and possible, even with a hint of strangeness. I remember it was funny and unusual. Perhaps one of the first AI tricks. From then on, it never stopped.

Today, every week new models appear, joining Gemini, DALL·E, Nano Banana, Midjourney, among so many others, competing for the position of executioner of our supreme sense, increasingly demoralized. From the most bizarre fake news, with diverse motivations, to the wave of algorithmic girls who, in an almost erotic tone, offer themselves as personal assistants, we are beginning to live in an era where it seems that reality, fact, and truth are diluted in a flood of visual versions of worlds that never existed.

If sight has always been the most easily deceived sense, what remains for us to check what is still real? In which senses can we, in fact, trust?

Touch, smell, taste, and hearing are today a kind of human frontier, seemingly offering greater resistance to technological ambitions in manipulating our ability to interact with reality. You can simulate the sound of the sea, but not the vibration of the ground under a bare foot. You can create the perfect image of a coffee, but not the smell that fills the kitchen or the warmth of the cup in your hand. You can invent an entire dinner in augmented reality, but you can't reproduce the acidic taste of a lemon, the texture of a ripe mango, the crunchiness of freshly baked bread crust. You can generate anyone's voice, but you can't recreate the rhythm of their breathing when they're emotional.

As long as there's no smell on a website, texture in a link, taste in a file, we'll still have a safe haven, a space for verification. Sensory experience remains our reality detector. Ultimately, it's the body that confirms whether something happened or not.

Contemporary psychology has already given this a name: embodiment, the idea that our mental health, our sense of identity, and even our ability to learn depend on us being, in fact, embodied, present, in real relation with the environment. It's not poetry, it's neuroscience. When the body participates, the mind flourishes, increasing the chance of real presence.

That's why it's frightening to see how much children are being pushed out of the sensory world. Hours of screen time, little street, little tree, little ground, little adventure. A childhood that knows more pixels than textures, more logos than smells, more notifications than silences. This disconnection is not just an educational problem, it's an evolutionary one: we are producing generations that experience the world less with their bodies than with their thumbs.

At the same time, art, which has always been the radical laboratory of human experience, has been warning us for a long time. Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Marina Abramović, and so many others shifted the focus of the work from what is seen to what is lived. The work you wear, dance, touch, inhabit. The performance in which you are not a spectator, but a present body. They had already understood that vision was insufficient, that the truth of experience resides in more dimensions.

In the midst of this whirlwind of simulations, it seems that the only way to know if someone is who they say they are will not be through their profile picture, nor their LinkedIn profile, nor their perfect Instagram video; it will be through oral proof, through the live body, through encounter. It's seeing the person stumble over their own sentence, laugh out of turn, fall silent, change expression, sweat on their palms. It's this sensory imperfection that gives us back the certainty that there's a human being there.

It may seem like dystopian melancholy, but it's profoundly pragmatic: in a world where anything can be manufactured, real experience becomes the last resort for verification. When nothing else is reliable, we will return to what has always been here, the sum of sensory experience, the fruit of thousands of years of evolution, which has enabled us with the sophisticated capacity to feel reality, with all its exuberance and subtleties. But, for that, we need to make more space to experience real encounters, often overcoming the laziness of leaving the endless series, the addictive scrolls, true digital hypnotists.

We need to invest in friends, hugs, parties, sports, relationships, walks in the forest, swims in the sea, eye contact, and everything that allows us to exercise our senses, our physical bodies, our natural abilities to interpret and enjoy reality.

And, while all of that doesn't fit into a prompt, there is still hope.