Extremely Far Down the Rabbit Hole (What is Real? 25)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

 

“When you say ‘hill,’ ” the [Red] Queen interrupted, “I could show you hills, in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.”

“No, I shouldn’t,” said Alice, surprised into contradicting her at last: “a hill ca’n’t be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense—”

The Red Queen shook her head. “You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

—Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1871.

It’s sometimes said that if it’s green and wiggly, it’s biology. If it’s bubbly and stinky, it’s chemistry. And if it doesn’t make any sense at all, then it’s physics. Well, I’m going to attempt to make some sense out of physics.

Actually, it’s not that it doesn’t make sense. It’s that it goes against common sense. We think we know how things work, but physics shows us just how wrong we are. Most people don’t like that. They’d rather hang on to their delusions. And it’s hard for us to remember things that seem wrong.

In science, you have to be able to admit that you’re wrong and be open to alternative ideas—even when they’re weird and go against everything you thought you knew. This is especially true for physics. Physics is the most fundamental of the sciences. It deals with the building blocks of the universe and how everything interacts on the smallest and grandest scales—from the subatomic to the expansion of the universe. It is also the most peculiar of the sciences. Gravity is not a force that pulls things toward the ground—it’s a curvature of spacetime. Time does not pass at the same rate throughout the universe, but can even pass slightly faster for your head than it does for your feet. And sometimes it stops altogether. Etcetera.

We’ll get into that in a bit.

When it comes to the subatomic—the bits reality is made of—things get really bizarre and we have to cast aside common sense. Once again, science shows us that much of what we think about our world is wrong, but here it goes in the opposite direction than what I’ve already presented. As Baba Ram Dass (a.k.a. Richard Alpert)—who once worked at Harvard with Timothy Leary—pointed out, science brings us out of the void, but physics takes us back into it again. And while much of what I’m about to tell you will seem like nonsense, the evidence from solid experiments repeatedly shows us that it’s much of our normal thoughts and beliefs about reality really are nonsense.

Earlier I wrote about how most scientists assume there’s a base reality that can be tested with consistent results, while lawyers see reality as relative, and that it varies depending on one’s point of view. This changes when we enter the realm of physics. Here physicists become more like lawyers. Here things become relative and the idea of a base reality becomes shaky.

Most scientists operate under two assumptions—realism and locality. Realism says there is a fundamental reality that everyone can test and get the same results, and that doesn’t evaporate when we’re not looking. This seems to hold most of the time at the level of reality that we experience, but it all changes at the quantum level. There, there is no solid reality—things get hazy and reality does seem to evaporate. Locality says nothing is faster than the speed of light. If something happens here, it can’t instantly affect something on the other side of the universe, but somehow it seems it can, somehow violating Einstein’s speed limit for light.

In addition, there’s counterintuitive oddities, such as in one experiment at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where engineers took a sheet of metal film that was perforated with rows of 60 nanometer holes—about the size of a virus—and they plugged these holes with caps made of gold. Then when they shined a light at the film, they obviously expected that no light would get through, but this turned out to be wrong. The plugged holes let 70% more light through than when the holes were open. The surprised engineers figured the gold caps must somehow act as an antenna for the light. My point here is that in the quantum realm, things often do not work the way you’d expect.[1]

In the quantum world, you can also get something from nothing—things appear from nowhere and disappear again; they can suddenly transport themselves to the other side of a barrier faster than if the barrier wasn’t there and apparently without passing through it; they can be two opposite things at once; time runs at different speeds and it might not even exist at all; there is no here and there; a particle or event can be in the past and future at the same time; we can and can’t know what is real; there is no empty space and yet, everything is almost nothing.

If you don’t like any of this, you can blame much of it on Einstein. But then, he didn’t like it either. I will explain...

 

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I'll post more in this series when I can. There's a lot more to cover.

In the next posts we'll go deeper down the rabbit hole to explore Einstein's revelations, quantum physics, the multiverses, and other interesting topics affecting reality, such as whether the universe is a simulation and the peculiar nature of time.

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[1] Princeton University, Engineering School, “Blocked holes can enhance rather than stop light going through”, ScienceDaily, November 22, 2011, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111122133326.htm, citing Wen-Di Li, Jonathan Hu, and Stephen Y. Chou, “Extraordinary light transmission through opaque thin metal film with subwavelength holes blocked by metal disks”, Optics Express, 2011; 19 (21): 21098, https://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OE.19.021098.

So What’s Real? (What is Real? 24)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

 

© John Richard Stephens, 2024.

 

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

—Philip K. Dick

Okay. So everything you have ever experienced of the external world has passed through your senses, been converted into electrochemical signals, and fed into your brain, but your brain isn’t perfect and has some flaws. It messes with your perception and memories, it’s not good at keeping track of how much you had to eat, it makes you think you have more time to do things than you actually do, and it’s very good at seeing faces where there are none and conspiracies where there aren’t any. You have two blindspots about the size of bullfrogs held at arm’s length that it fills in, your retina is inside out, blocking parts of your view, your peripheral vision is blurry and lacks color, and your blinking blacks everything out, yet you’d never know it because your brain fills it all in with guesstimates. When the brain’s predictions stray too far, we call them hallucinations.

Our perceptions of the world are influenced by the variations in our senses, neuroanatomy, and experiences, so that no two people see things in quite the same way. Our perceptions are also colored by false beliefs, we believe impossible and contradictory things, and we have trouble distinguishing purpose from random chance. In addition, we make decisions and form opinions without getting the facts, preferring to rely on educated guesses, while ignoring evidence we don’t like. We create rationalizations and justifications without knowing why.

Our brains also deceive us by pumping up or deflating our self-esteem, they distort our memories, create false ones, and bury some we’d rather not be reminded of, and they subconsciously allow our biases, beliefs, and ideas to influence our decisions, even those we know to be false. Scientists call all of these, non-sensory illusions, illusions of logic, and/or cognitive illusions.

What we think of as reality is our brains’ interpretation of our world, as can be seen in optical illusions, politics, and insanity.

As theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli put it, “It takes only a few grams of mushrooms for the whole of reality to dissolve before our eyes, before reorganizing itself into a surprisingly different form. It only takes the experience of spending time with a friend who has suffered a serious schizophrenic episode, a few weeks with her struggling to communicate, to realize that delirium is a vast theatrical equipment with the capacity to stage the world, and that it is difficult to find arguments to distinguish it from those great collective deliriums of ours that are the foundations of our social and spiritual life, and of our understanding of the world.”[1]

At the beginning of my posts I mentioned that cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman believes that what we perceive is not even close to reality because reality is just too complicated—an idea that you may have dismissed out of hand when you read it, although you might see that a bit differently now. Other estimates of how much of our vision is altered or created vary depending on who you talk to, with ranges from 20% to 90% of our vision being an illusion. Perhaps it varies depending on the person, situation, and circumstances.

So what’s real? We may never know since we’re a prisoner of our senses. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus asks Neo, “What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto explains, “The photons entering our eyes, the vibrations through the air that enter our ears, the breaking of the bonds of molecules that creates friction across our skin, the chemicals that land on our tongues, and the compounds that enter our noses—all are just electrochemical energy of one kind or another. These are the elements that emanate from our physical world—real reality, as it were. Yet we don’t have direct access to those sources of energy, only to the waves of energy and gradients of chemicals that they produce. We sense the changes in stuff, not the stuff itself. It would be useless to have direct access to the ‘stuff’’ because in isolation it would mean absolutely nothing...much in the same way that a single water molecule doesn’t tell us about whirlpools.”[2]

Still, underneath it all there seems to be something we can call reality. We’re able to send spaceships to other planets with great precision, we can take pictures of individual atoms, we can alter our genes—the instructions for life—and some people can hit an erratic knuckleball flying at them at 55 miles per hour. In spite of our flaws, we can do some amazing things.

It’s probably fair to say that most scientists are scientific realists, believing, as physicist Roger Penrose put it, that reality consists of all the objects we perceive—buildings, cars, furniture, food, animals, plants, bacteria, molecules, stars, nebula; things that are physically made out of matter—in addition to some more abstract concepts such as spacetime and mathematics; that it essentially includes everything in the universe;[3] that this reality is independent of our beliefs and knowledge; and that it can be explored using the scientific method. Scientists devote their lives to exploring reality.

This is different from social reality, which makes up much of our lives. Social reality has been constructed by humans over thousands of years and is the result of consensus—it’s aspects of society that people agree on. This is somewhat flexible and varies from culture to culture. These are things in human culture that animals don’t encounter, unless they have their own social constructions. They are things like myths, money, gods, politics, laws, mortgages, personal relationships, and much of social media. Categorizations—like species, races, and stereotypes—are created. They are all products of human minds. Even your country is a social construct, no matter how patriotic you are. Nations exist because of people’s belief in them and the police and military forces that ensure their survival.

Occasionally someone comes along who insists they don’t believe in one or more of these things. They might insist that certain laws don’t apply to them, but law enforcement usually catches up with them in the end. Where I live, one business owner got away with not paying taxes for about eight years before the IRS shutdown his restaurant and took everything away from him. You don’t have to believe in social reality, but you can still suffer the consequences. This is particularly true when social reality becomes untethered from physical reality, such as with the anti-vaxxers who endanger their own children, as well as those of others.

But let’s take a quick look at some of the philosophies related to reality.

Realism is the idea that there is something that’s independent of us and it remains there when we’re not looking. It’s a world that existed before we were born and will continue after we’re dead. It continues on its merry way when we’re asleep or in a coma, and it doesn’t go all weird when we’re tripping out on hallucinogens, even though it seems like it to does.

Just as there are several type of realism—scientific realism being one of them—there are also several types of antirealism. Metaphysical anti-realism, for example, argues that nothing exists outside our minds, or that if something is there, we have no way of knowing about it. Since everything is an illusion, when you take psychedelic drugs, you are just replacing one illusion with another.

This brings us back to the question of whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if there’s no one around to hear it. According to the subjectivist view, since everything we know and experience comes through our senses, reality is a construct of our brains, therefore everything outside of our awareness either doesn’t exist or is well beyond our comprehension, which means sound depends on our awareness of it. This is the philosophy subscribed to by Deepak Chopra and others in the New Age Movement. Carrying this a bit further, some believe that everything is actually created from our thoughts.

Then there’s the social constructionists who believe truth and reality are created by society’s collective beliefs. There are those who believe that if we believe in something hard enough, it will become true, as in using imagination and visualization to alter reality and achieve your goals. This was the basis of the self-help book The Secret. And there are solipsists who feel they are the only ones who actually exist. I imagine this is how some psychopaths feel, perhaps because they lack empathy and see others as automatons for them to play with.

In between realism and antirealism is instrumentalism, which is common among physicists. They feel that it doesn’t really matter whether there’s a reality or not. That’s a matter for philosophers. As long as science can predict the results of experiments, everything is good and we can get on with our work. This is the shut-up-and-calculate school of thought.

While most scientists side with scientific realism, there’s no complete agreement yet. Scientists are still hashing it out, sometimes coming at the problem from different directions. Science writer Amanda Gefter points out that “while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality.”[4]

Even though no two people see the world the same way, humans do perceive the world in a generally similar way because we all evolved to perceive what is important to our survival. Other animals see things differently, according to what’s vital to them. As Michael Shermer put it, “Yes, a dolphin’s icon for ‘shark’ no doubt looks different than a human’s [especially since dolphins can see inside sharks], but there really are sharks, and they really do have powerful tails on one end and a mouthful of teeth on the other end, and that is true no matter how your sensory system works.”[5]

There are many different ways of seeing the world, but there appears to be an underlying reality...that is, at the level of our experience, but this becomes questionable at subatomic levels. That is our next area of exploration and it will take us further down the rabbit hole.

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Extremely Far Down the Rabbit Hole

 

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[1] Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.

[2] Beau Lotto, Deviate, New York: Hachette Book Group, 2017.

[3] Roger Penrose, “The Big Questions: What is reality?”, New Scientist, no. 2578, November 18, 2006, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225780-069-the-big-questions-what-is-reality/.

[4] Amanda Gefter, “The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality” (interview with Donald Hoffman), Quanta Magazine, April 21, 2016, https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/.

[5] Michael Shermer, “Perception Deception”, Scientific American, vol. 313, no. 5, November 2015, p. 75, and as “Did Humans Evolve to See Things as They Really Are?”, November 1, 2015, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-humans-evolve-to-see-things-as-they-really-are/.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right...but Three Lefts Do (What is Real? 23)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

 

© John Richard Stephens, 2024.

If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying “End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH”, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.

—Terry Pratchett in his book, Thief of Time

A survey of more than 2,200 Americans found that one out of four didn’t know the earth revolves around the sun, which is a surprising amount.[1] Then there are those who, during the pandemic, insisted bacteria and viruses don’t exist, some of whom were killed by the Covid virus. These false beliefs did not arise from a lack of information. While part of it is from ignorance, oddly many intelligent people reject science. One research paper identified four basic reasons for this: 1) these people think scientific sources lack credibility, 2) they identify with groups that are anti-science, 3) scientific ideas or evidence conflicts with their beliefs, and 4) a person’s style of thinking doesn’t match how a scientific message is presented to them.[2]

While you’d think most people agree on common-sense questions, a rather extensive study from the University of Pennsylvania found that what people consider common sense varies considerably and that age, politics, and education don’t factor into it, with intelligence only having a very minor effect. There’s even little variance across different types of people, but overall it varies quite a bit. They concluded, “With regard to people, we find much less variation in individual commonsensicality, but still find little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people. In the extreme, the totality of what appears common sense to any individual person may be unique to them alone.”

While most people would agree that it’s not a good idea to poke your friend in the eye with a stick or to leap out of a moving vehicle unless you really have to, common sense quickly frays when you get to other important questions, such as when you’re in quarantine, should you remain in isolation or is it fine to go on vacation with a group of careful friends. Or perhaps even to go to some parties, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson apparently did.[3]

Even though science is vital to economic growth and dealing with threats like climate change, many politicians are anti-science. In 2022, of 536 members of U.S. Congress, only three were scientists, while 194 were lawyers.[4]

While understanding the law is probably very useful in politics, lawyers are taught that issues have sides and disagreements are something to win—a net-zero game, when it rarely is.

Courts are designed to be adversarial. Each side fights to prevail over their opponent. Ideas like truth and reality, or even actual innocence and guilt, don’t factor in. They’re considered relative and dependent on one’s point of view. The defense has to presume innocence and the prosecution has to presume guilt. They each present evidence and testimony that conflicts with the other’s, along with experts that give alternate explanations. It’s not really a quest for truth, it’s more like a debate or a game. In fact, the lawyers aren’t required to tell the truth—only witnesses are. Lawyers can, and do, lie to the jury. They’re not supposed to withhold evidence, but sometimes they do when it would hurt their case. The judge then takes something that’s hazy and turns it into black and white.

A person is innocent until the court decides they’re guilt, and once the court finds someone guilty, then they are considered guilty, whether they committed the crime or not. It’s one reason why judges are often hesitant to reopen cases where new DNA testing can prove a prisoner didn’t commit the crime. To them it’s like giving the losing side a second chance to win the championship. And when everything is considered to be relative, nothing can be proven anyway. Also, saying a prisoner was wrongly convicted can affect the careers of prosecutors and judges, along with opening the government up to multi-million dollar lawsuits.

Science takes a very different approach. Most scientists assume there’s a reality out there and we can learn about it through tests and experiments. Some people wrongly think of science as a belief system, but it’s not. It’s based on evidence that can be verified and its ideas and interpretations follow the evidence. Knowing something is true because of evidence is very different from believing something is true. Belief implies a lack of evidence, even though people attempt to gather evidence that supports their beliefs. When there is evidence, it becomes science.

While scientists do have beliefs that are usually based on or inspired by the evidence and a large group of them promoting their belief can sometimes come to dominate a field, all it takes is one Einstein to come along with a rebellious new idea, and if the evidence backs him up, the group is eventually forced to give in to the evidence. While such revolutions are rare on the large scale, they do happen and they’re exciting, interesting, and revelatory. But once the new idea dominates, another Einstein might come along with something better. This is not a flaw in science—it’s how it improves and becomes more accurate.

When you view things as relative and your doctor tells you you have a fatal disease, you might feel your fate has caught up with you. Scientists, on the other hand, focus on cause and effect. They will conduct experiments to discover what it is, how you got it, where it came from, how it works, and how to combat it. Most don’t believe in fate, although we will look at some alternate ideas to this later. In ancient times people believed diseases were caused by the gods. In the past couple centuries science has discovered it’s usually microbes or genetics and this has enabled us to develop cures for many of them.

Scientists do make mistakes and experimental results sometimes turn out to be wrong. Probability guarantees it. This is why replicating experiments is so important. If results can’t be replicated, then something is wrong and it needs to be reexamined. That’s part of the verification process. Eventually errors come to light and we make corrections. In other words, science is self-correcting.

But this leads to a peculiar way scientists view the world that most people don’t understand and can cause problems when scientific results reach the general public through the media. In science, a hypothesis cannot be proven. No matter how much evidence there is, you can’t verify a hypothesis, because no matter how unlikely, there’s always the extremely remote possibility that a single observation will arise that shows the hypothesis to be false. Since science is very good at disproving hypotheses, scientists like to be extra cautious.

When writing for the general public, this doesn’t come across well, so you often see things presented in more absolute terms. That applies to parts of these posts as well, although I’ve tried to restrict it to those bits that have the most evidence.

But it is why scientists don’t normally talk in absolutes, as most people are used to. People like information that is definite. They want yes or no answers—not probably or most likely answers. Even with such a thoroughly tested idea as evolution where there’s mountains of evidence and no viable alternative, scientists still prefer to leave a little wiggle room. It’s remotely possible that someday someone might discover a fossil that’s not in the proper timeline, such as finding a chicken before the age of the dinosaurs. Since chickens evolved from a dinosaur, finding a chicken older than the dinosaurs would be hair-raising. Even though the possibility of that happening is so vanishingly small as to be nearly non-existent, scientists leave their options open as a general policy. That should definitely not be taken as a lack of knowledge or uncertainty.

We need to remember that science is behind most of our most amazing accomplishments in medicine, exploring the solar system and out to the furthermost visible galaxies, understanding microbes and subatomic particles, and technology, from our computers to our smart cars to our smart phones. You can even find it to a lesser degree in the arts. You can find it behind almost every aspect of our modern lives.

It’s very important to understand science. As Carl Sagan put it in his book, The Demon-Haunted World:

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.[...]

Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.[...]

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that[...] pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

“The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

 

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So What's Real?

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[1] Agence France Presse, “One in four Americans unaware that Earth circles Sun”, Phys Org, February 14, 2014, https://phys.org/news/2014-02-americans-unaware-earth-circles-sun.html.

[2] Ohio State University. “The four bases of anti-science beliefs—and what to do about them: Politics have potent effects on attitudes, researchers say,” ScienceDaily, July 11, 2022, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220711163156.htm, citing Aviva Philipp-Muller, Spike W. S. Lee, Richard E. Petty, “Why are people antiscience, and what can we do about it?”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (30), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120755119.

[3] “Partygate: A timeline of the lockdown parties”, BBC, March 21, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-59952395.

[4] “Membership of the 117th Congress: A Profile”, Congressional Research Service, September 30, 2022, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46705.