THE SEARCH FOR REALITY
What we perceive is not reality. It is an illusion. This post describes a search for reality.
Imagine someone who is just learning English, and a speaker says to them, “Hold your horses. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth; don’t flog a dead horse, and don’t put the cart before the horse.”
Wouldn’t that person believe you are talking about horses, when not one line has anything to do with horses?
I give that as an example of how our senses interpret input. Interpretation is not reality.
When we see, what we see are photons, but our visual system does not interpret them as photons. Instead, the photons are translated into things of all sizes, shapes, and colors.
We “see,” for instance a table — or rather the photons coming off that table into our eyes — and this “seeing” is verified by other senses. We can “feel” the table, though what we feel is not a table but mostly hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen atoms (for a wood table).
Those atoms don’t “know” they are wood. They simply are very common atoms that happen to be arranged into something we perceive as wood. Also, they don’t know what color they are. We perceive them as brown, flat and shiny, though the atoms are none of those.
We don’t “see” all photons, just those in our visual range, which differs from other animals’ (and plants) reaction range. Most photons hitting our bodies are not sensed by our eyes.
Some photons are sensed by our skin as heat. They are mostly in the infrared range. Ultraviolet photons are sensed by the melanocytes, which darken in response, giving us sun tans. The vast majority of photons are not sensed at all.
Try to imagine a world where we could “see” radio range photons. Much would be transparent. Much would be invisible. In some cases, we could see around corners. What we currently believe to be reality would be different, depending on the specific radio wavelengths we could interpret.
Similarly, we do not hear music. We interpret sound waves — those in our hearing range — to be music, or words, or thunder. But the waves are none of those. They are merely movements of air molecules.
Our entire bodies continually receive stimuli, thousands every second, from outside and from inside, each of which we interpret uniquely.
All of these interpretations constitute what we consider reality, though none of them is real. Red is not red. It is our own invention. A note on a piano, an itch, a pain, an odor, a taste — they are not reality. They all are interpretations of stimuli.
What we perceive is an interpretation of the stimuli we receive. And what we believe is our interpretation of those interpretations.
“Big, small, loud, soft, heavy, light, fast, slow — all are interpretations of our interpretations of the stimuli we receive. At best. What we believe is two levels from reality.
But it gets worse in our search for reality.
Our beliefs are an amalgum of what we remember, what we sense, and how we combine them into a whole. Consider someone wearing a red dress to a funeral. You make several interpretations.
- What is it? A dress? A robe? A costume?
- What is its purpose?
- Is it red, and if so, what shade of red?
- Is it beautiful, ugly, or plain?
- Is it appropriate?
These are all based on many factors, including our immediate responses to stimuli, our memory of past responses, and our combined interpretations.
And together, this is “consciousness,” which we define, not in vague metaphysical terms but very simply: Consciousness is the response to stimuli. The more stimuli and the greater the response, the greater the consciousness.
Ironically, much of our “consciousness” happens without our awareness. We are not aware that individual photons are hitting the rods and cones in our eyes. We are aware only of the translations our visual system makes of those photons.
We can remember only a small percentage of what we have interpreted. We can bring forth into awareness a small percentage of what we remember. Everything we know evolves from that same source: Our memory of interpretations.
And that also is where dreams come from.
Thus, dreamed “reality” and awake “reality” have the same sources, and so at first, the same degree of confidence. While dreaming, we believe our dreams. While awake, we believe our awake interpretations. It is our information processing system that sorts them out to create a coherent pattern of what we believe
(There is “lucid” dreaming, in which we know we are dreaming and can even control a dream to some extent. This has the same basis as every other thing we believe.)
Everything remembers. From the smartest human to a brick in a wall, everything retains the scars of previous encounters with stimuli, and these scars are called “memory.”
Though everything meets the definition of consciousness — the response to stimuli — we do not know whether everything dreams. However, there is evidence that many animals dream.
Dreaming is merely the brain’s assembly of memories, beliefs, and desires, which is exactly what awake thinking is. The only difference between a dream and an awake thought is the brain’s interpretation. Otherwise, they are the same in that they are illusions of reality.
Sometimes, there can be confusion, in that a person may have a memory of a dream about something that did not occur, and believe it did occur. (“Did that really happen, or did I dream it?”)
All of what we believe has been filtered through our brain, and may have only a distant relationship to any reality.
But it gets worse in our search for reality.
Quantum mechanics tells us that quantum particles do not have definite attributes like position in space, momentum, and spin.
Perhaps the most bizarre property we’ve discovered about the Universe is that our physical reality doesn’t seem to be governed by purely deterministic laws.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you cannot know everything about a quantum particle.
It says it is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a quantum particle with perfect accuracy at the same time. The more precisely you can measure one of these properties, the less precise you can be about the other.
In short, you can never discover everything it’s possible to know about every atom in the universe.
And even if you could, and you owned this impossibly huge computer, you still would not be able to calculate exactly what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen.
Is reality simply unknowable? Yet, knowing reality is exactly what each human brain attempts to do with the limited stimuli it receives.
But it gets worse in our search for reality.
According to Einstein’s Relativity, reality depends on an observer. This has been proved many times. For instance, in the famous “twin paradox,” one twin takes a rocket to another planet and then returns, while the other twin remains on Earth.
The stay-at-home twin sees that the round trip has taken a year, but the returning twin believes it has taken less than a year. Upon his return, the twins discover that the traveling twin is younger than the stay-at-home twin.
So what is the fundamental reality?” Was the twin gone for a year or for less than a year? The answer is, both are correct. Each twin lives a different fundamental reality because time is affected by motion and gravity, especially very fast (near light speed motion) and strong (near black holes) gravity.
If you were to come near a black hole, your reality would be that you are being sucked faster and faster into the black hole and entering it with no change.
For someone standing on Earth with a radio telescope, their reality would be that you are moving ever more slowly toward the black hole, eventually to be almost stationary on the outside for millions of years.
Two different realities, both real and both accurate, and most importantly, both dependent on the observer.
This observer-dependent reality is what makes a search for reality fruitless and alien. In our experience, stimuli as translated by our brain, exist at a defined time and place and move at a defined speed, no matter who is watching. That is what we call an “underlying reality.”
Except there seems to be no underlying reality. Every object in the universe, including you and me, is moving at its own speed, affected by a different amount of gravity, and interpreting stimuli differently. There is an infinite number of realities, all equally reliable and truly real — none more “real” than the others.
Given the probability of infinite realities, and that each is legitimate, what can we deduce about the fundamental mystery of quantum mechanics: Entanglement?
When two particles, such as a pair of photons or electrons, become entangled, their properties always are correlated even if they are light years apart.
“It may be tempting to think that the particles are somehow communicating with each other across these great distances, but that is not the case,” says Thomas Vidick, a professor of computing and mathematical sciences at Caltech. “There can be correlation without communication,” and the particles “can be thought of as one object.”Entanglement can also occur among hundreds, millions, and even more particles. The phenomenon is thought to take place throughout nature, among the atoms and molecules in living species and within metals and other materials.
Science believes that what we know is reality. But, as we have already seen, what we know is our brain’s interpretation of stimulus responses, which are themselves interpretations of the effect of stimuli — two steps away from the stimuli themselves.
That is, the brain synapses receive signals in electronic code. The code might be interpreted as: “Here is a strong signal along with a weak signal in these two particular synapses.”
Then the brain interprets that as: “When you receive a strong signal and a weak signal in these two synapses, and you are looking at a circle, that circle is bigger than the one next to it. Otherwise, it is smaller.”
Confusion in those kinds of interpretations is what leads to illusions, for instance, where parallel lines seem skewed, as below.
In attempting to find reality, intuition fails us. Special relativity shows that two observers moving relative to each other won’t agree on what events are simultaneous.
What one observer considers “now” could be in the past or future for someone else. That is, I literally could see your future — not just predict it, but literally see it happening. That’s reality.
Then there is the “block universe” hypothesis, where past, present, and future all “exist” equally. The entire history of the universe is laid out like a loaf of bread.
We are not moving through time; we are located at a particular slice of the time dimension. There’s no universal “now”—just different cross-sections of this block from different observers’ perspectives.
Even Einstein believed in the block universe. He wrote, “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”In classical physics, energy must be preserved; you neither can create nor destroy energy (though you can convert it to and from mass (E = mc^2)
In quantum mechanics, information is preserved. In Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment, A photon seems to “decide” whether it behaves like a wave or a particle after you choose whether to observe its path.
This raises the idea that just the availability of information determines physical outcomes. So the mere potential for obtaining information changes what happens. Information is not just about what is known—but about what can be known
Mathematics is our one comprehension bridge between classical reality and quantum reality. Only through mathematics can we begin to discover any of the many possible realities.
SUMMARY- There is no fundamental reality. Each observer experiences a slightly different reality.
- Waking reality and sleep reality (dreams) have the same basis, and can be distinguished only subjectively.
- What we perceive is a translation of our reactions to stimuli. Each observer translates differently.
- Not only is information a functional part of reality, but even the potential for acquiring information affects reality.
- The past, present, and future may be connected in ways that are not classically intuitive.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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Whenever I hear about the nature of reality, dreams, and illusions, I say, “Go stand in front of an onrushing locomotive. Let me know what ”is” is.
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Thank you, tetrahedron720 for your comments about this and the previous post. I can understand that discussions about reality and consciousness can seem like imaginary, metaphysical nonsense, and I agree that many are.
But let me give you a few thoughts. First, to discuss anything, we should agree on what it is. So, what is “consciousness”?
What is your definition (and please don’t just provide a synonym like “awareness”). Come up with a usable definition that would allow us to answer the question, which of these is conscious and which is not: A 1-year old human. A human embryo. A sleeping human. A drunk human. A chimpanzee. A dog. A parrot. A bee. A bacterium. A tree. An atom. A flame. The Earth.
Answer those questions and give a reason for each of your answers.
Given my definition– the reaction to stimuli–I easily can answer every question and give you reasons for each.
Second, as for you being the same person as you were (and presumably will be), consider this.
There was a time when you were of microscopic size. Since then, you, including your brain, have changed massively. Every cell in your body has been replaced, added to, and deleted thousands of times.
Your brain is not the same as it was five minutes ago. Just reading this sentence is changing your brain.
Because your brain has changed dramatically, you can remember nothing prior to your 4th year. And your brain has continued to change, day by day. Depending on your age, it now has begun to shrink and will continue to shrink for the rest of your life.
If you live into your 90s, your brain will have lost 20% of its neurons and will have changed significantly hundreds of times. You are a different person today, than you were yesterday.
In the future, you will learn, forget, re-learn, acquire beliefs and lose beliefs. You will receive information via your senses, some of which will alter your brain. Your comprehension will change. The neurons will change.
And all of these changes will affect your perception of reality.
Both Relativity and quantum mechanics show that perception actually is part of reality. The twin paradox, the double-slit experiment, and quantum entanglement all demonstrate that reality is related to each individual and that there is no fundamental reality.
Reality depends on the observer. This is not an illusion. It is reality.
If you head toward a black hole, its gravity will send you into it at near light speed, meaning very little time will pass for you, as you approach and enter the black hole.
But I, as an outside observer will see you approach the black hole slower and slower, ultimately I will see you take you eons to enter.
So what is reality– your quick entrance or your slow entrance. Answer: They both are reality, not illusions, but actual reality.
It’s not intuitive, but Relativity and quantum mechanics are not intuitive. Entanglement, Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” is not intuitive. Particles being in two places simultaneously is not intuitive. Observation affecting reality is not intuitive.
You mentioned a locomotive coming at me as an example of reality, presumably because I “really” would be killed. But, counterintuitively, if that train were coming at me at near light speed, it would take centuries to get to me. I’d be long dead before it ever got to me.
However, the engineer on that train would see me killed in seconds. That is the “twin paradox.” Two different realities affected by speed and gravity, each equally real.
I’m sorry you didn’t have the time to read all of each post. Having done so would have changed the neurons in your brain. It would have changed your reality and your consciousness
Again, thank you for your comments.
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These are interesting thought experiments, but I think there are a few holes in your theory (not black holes, just conclusion holes).
First, I had a long online argument with a physics teacher about the conclusions of the Alain Aspect experiments that first supposedly demonstrated the idea of quantum entanglement. I took the position of Einstein – usually a safe bet, though that’s not why I took it – that there really is no such thing as “spooky action at a distance.” But I specifically attacked Aspects conclusions over his “first quantum mechanics experiment to demonstrate the violation of Bell’s inequalities with photons using distant detectors. Its 1982 result allowed for further validation of the quantum entanglement and locality principles. It also offered an experimental answer to Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen’s paradox which had been proposed about fifty years earlier.”
I’ll spare you all the arguments and counter-arguments made over Quora, but the gist of my argument is this: the properties of the photon don’t change from their initial state of relation to another photon because…why would they? Imagine two billiard balls instead, interacting with each other, creating “spin” and then flying apart. Now, remove gravity, air, even molecules and atoms – so they are subatomic. What is left to change their spin after that? Nothing, except when clumsy, elephant-sized (relatively) humans with their pesky eyes try to observe those photons and thereby change the results “by the act of observing” so that everything after that is void. We don’t have a physics problem, we have an observer interference problem. It turns out observing photons is hard and there’s a very small “error” rate – something like 0.0012% (I can’t find it at the moment but it was something like that). Aspect and others ignore this, but maybe that unpredictability is really the big, klutzy universe putting its thumb on the scale?
You can read more about Aspect’s experiments here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect%27s_experiment but the math gets pretty complicated, though I believe it’s irrelevant to my higher level objection to his conclusion. I don’t deny his results, just his conclusion about quantum entanglement. It turns out there isn’t much support for it besides this and similar experiments.
OK, so much for a Mind Universe, if I and Einstein are right (Einstein, of course, didn’t live to see Aspect’s 1982 experiments).
Second, the concept of Consciousness is a human one; it comes out of our language – well, which language is important too, some other cultures may have multiple words for consciousness, for all we know, like those that believe in Buddhist Enlightenment, which is an altered state of consciousness. But in any case, all our definitions will be anthropomorphized, and in the English-speaking world, Anglo-sized too. That’s OK. We get to define words according to our needs, and language itself may be a function of consciousness too. So, if there’s some workable definition that includes Awareness – which, yes, has to be defined too – that’s our species/culture’s right to define too. It does have to be workable, so I accept your point about “reaction to stimuli” fulfilling that requirement, though ease-of-definition should not be the only goal of conceptualizing either.
It’s like the definition of God: everyone talks about God – even atheists who deny His/Her/Its existence – but if you get 10 random people to type a single-spaced page on what God is, its guaranteed there will be some contradictions so great that at least 9 of them must be wrong, and most likely all 10 (or all except the one that says God does not exist except in individual human minds, to us atheists).
Disbelief in God does not mean we are God. In fact, it means just the opposite. We are very imperfect creatures, unable to see most of the electromagnetic spectrum, some of which other creatures can see, mostly unable to live beyond 100 – Greenland Sharks live over 300 years, so how hard would it have been for God to grant us that and isn’t wisdom better with age, so wouldn’t that have been a good thing? Etc. etc. There’s too much reliance on “seeing” in these speed of light experiments. What I really want to know is:
If someone leaves Earth on a Spaceship going 90% of the speed of light, does time actually slow for them, or is that just the perception of someone back on Earth watching them recede? If they then returned to Earth at the same speed, would they “catch up” to the time that passed of the observer on Earth? If so, then the different aging rates were just an illusion due to the pokey – relatively – speed of light hitting our observer’s eyes. That’s how I see it.
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This is a great, well-written piece. I’m a mathematician and I’m not sure I understand your comment toward the end about the special nature of mathematics and reality.
Robert
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Thanks, Scott. We all live in a classical physics world. We don’t move at light speed and we don’t see microscopically. So we try to visualize classical answers to problems.
But neither Einstein’s Relativity nor quantum mechanics are classical, and you will not be able to use your classical intuition to answer questions.
The famous “twin paradox” addresses your question. Two identical twins. One leaves Earth at relativistic (near light speed). The other stays home. When the traveling twin returns, he actually will be younger than the “stay-home” twin — not just feel younger or seem younger. He will BE younger.
This will not be an illusion or a trick of the mind. By virtue of his moving faster, his time will move more slowly than his twin brother’s. That is reality.
The other thing that makes time move slower is gravity. The stronger the gravity, the slower time moves. So, ignoring speed, someone standing on the move will age slower than someone standing on Earth. More gravity = slower time.
The practical application of this is your car’s navigation system which relies on time. The navigation satellite moves faster than your car, so its time moves slower. The satellite company makes an adjustment is made for this time difference, otherwise the satellite would not know where it is and would give the wrong directions.
Also, the entanglement you mentioned is not caused by a “thumb on the scale.” At one time, Einstein thought there was some hidden factor that caused the seeming “action at a distance.” But, after Einstein made that comment, subsequent tests called “Bell tests” confirmed that there were no hidden factors.
The condition of one particle of an entangled pair really does correlate with the condition of the other particle, no matter how far apart they are. This takes place only when they are observed. In quantum mechanics, the observer is part of the solution.
There is no fundamental reality. There is nothing lurking behind the scenes that is “really” correct. There are numerous realities, all equal, all real. Speed and gravity really do affect time. Particles really can be in two places at once.
When you say, ” It turns out there isn’t much support for (entanglement) besides this and similar experiments,” make that “thousands of experiments, none of which has been able to find that “thumb on the scales.”
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What experiment proves that a twin moving at the speed of light will hardly age and return to earth younger than his twin sibling? Is this an extrapolation from an experiment done with time, lasers, and mirrored reflection?
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The proof is the well-documented phenomenon of time dilation,
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If time is dilated, so is energy, as they are inseparable. As an object approaches light speed, its time frequency is reduced dramatically, so life hardly ages. Time is merely the principle of relatively different frequencies of energy. But the stuff about being in two places simultaneously, no matter how far apart, is over my head. It violates energy conservation; no creation is possible, i.e., one object becoming two objects is the creation of another object. I cannot see it justified.
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I agree with Thomas Vidick. Correlation is not causation. And initial conditions persisting is not causation either.
Fortunately for our species, end every other one too, we only need to roughly understand reality that affects us directly to survive. It’s far more important to us to be able to perceive a lion about to pounce on us in visible light, than to have X-ray vision that allows us to view its skeleton, though maybe on the planet Krypton, evolutionary pressure worked a different way for Superman’s ancestors 🙂 (Actually, I always leaned towards the theory that parallel human evolution was impossible on two such different worlds, so it must have been aliens scooping up prehistoric humans from Earth, modifying them genetically in super-advanced ways so they could survive on higher gravity, less sun illuminated Red Sun washed Krypton, then depositing them onto Krypton. Kryptonian evolution was never explained in any Superman comic, TV show or movie but connections to ancient aliens WAS implied on at least the Superboy series, so that’s my hill to die on… 🙂 ).
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