Reality: Really Real, Pseudo-Real, or Unreal? Part Two

Reality – it could vary from your mind alone as the entirety of all existence to you being the figment of someone else’s imagination. Without your five senses and brain thingy, you wouldn’t experience any reality at all. There are as many versions of reality as there are living things, up through and including ‘living’ machines – artificial intelligence (AI). But is there any reality at all in the absence of living things, including AI?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

The Reality of Both Nothing and Something:

There has to be some nothing as well as some something. If everything were something, then nothing could move as all the Universe would be chockablock – like the fad of a VW, or a phone booth being stuffed full to overflowing with college kids. You couldn’t push anything out of the way as there would be no nothing to push it into!

The Reality of Something: Matter & Energy:

We live in the world of the macro and in the realm of classical physics – the physics you were taught in high school. Your homes, cars and offices are probably filled with electronic gadgets that operate in the realm of the micro – quantum physics (which you probably weren’t taught in high school). You’d think that there should be a smooth and continuous transition from the macro/classical to the micro/quantum, and vice versa, as you go up or down the scale of size. However, I’m hard pressed to think of an example in reality where both quantum and classical physical concepts or laws have to be integrated in order to explain or predict something. Again, it’s like there are two different sets of software running the cosmos!

That said, the reality of matter and energy in our macro day-to-day existence, while obvious, depends on the reality of the bits and pieces that make up the realm of the micro. So, molecules had better be real, and atoms and the particles that make them up – things like quarks and electrons and neutrinos. Thus, it’s disturbing to read in various books on particle and quantum physics that these are treated as point (dimensionless) particles. Presumably this is to make the mathematics easier or simpler (and just pick up an academic text in these subjects, open to a random page, and see what I mean). Clearly a dimensionless particle can not have reality as particles have mass. That implies of necessity that the particles must have size – a volume. If you gather up an infinite number of dimensionless particles, you could fit them into zero volume. Since macro bits and pieces have volume – you have a volume – you can not be ultimately comprised of dimensionless micro bits!

Further, we have all these high energy ‘atom smashers’ (particle accelerators) where the objective is to smash one particle into another at higher and higher energies and see what happens. If the particles, usually electrons or protons, had zero volume, they couldn’t collide! Despite phrases like ‘point particles’, particles really have three dimensions (volume), and thus objects around you, including you, have volume. Particles have reality, and so do you. And because mass and energy are interchangeable, energy has reality. If you doubt that, put your hand on a hot stove!

In addition, the very fact that we experience variety in matter tells us that there must be more than one kind of matter. If there were only one kind of stuff – say electrons and only electrons – then everything we experience would be just that stuff; only that stuff; that stuff alone. No variety – it’s all things electron! That’s clearly not the case, so there’s more to matter than just, say, electrons!

The Reality of Nothing: Time & Space: 

Go into a dark, quiet room with no sensory distractions. You know that time is passing all around you, yet you can’t detect this time with any of your five senses. You can’t see time; hear time; smell time; taste time; or touch time. To detect time, you need some intermediary mechanism – look at your watch; listen to the ticking of a clock; feel your pulse. Translated, to detect time (and by the way ditto space), you need matter/energy which time as some effect on. Put another way, if matter/energy did not exist, the concept of time would be meaningless. (Ditto space – in the absence of matter/energy you couldn’t detect space with your five senses. There’d be nothing to see, hear, taste, touch or smell.)

Space has no meaning unless there is something inside it, and/or outside it, to give it some boundary and hence reality. If there’s no matter/energy, there’s no need of any space for it to reside in. So, time and space aren’t real without matter and energy. Only matter and energy have reality.

Since time and space are meaningless concepts without matter and energy, its nonsense to talk about creating time and space. You’d automatically create time and space if you could create matter/energy. Alas, the conservation laws of physics state that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed only changed in form. Presumably nothing can create matter/energy – certainly no human being has ever done it – and since I reject the concept of a supernatural creator being (God), I’m forced to conclude that matter and energy, therefore space and time, have always existed and will always exist. [Eliminating a creator God from consideration simplifies things no end.]

Your Pet’s Reality:

I’ll assume that as your pet (assuming you have one or more), or some other animal you have had a relationship with or observed closely, can’t speak for itself or themselves, and as you’re totally familiar with your pet’s personality, that you’re a good spokesperson for them – as good as it’s going to get anyway.  So, if you were your pet (bird, fish, cat, whatever) how would your perception or knowledge of reality shift – if it does.

Firstly there’s a near universal reality for all higher life forms – including humans. That universality is expressed in the phrase “empty what’s full; fill what’s empty; scratch where it itches”!

Humour aside let’s start with the initial gateways – the senses.  We’re all aware that our sensory apparatus can and has been exceeded by some animals – including common household pets. Not only is vision more acute in some animals, but extends further into the ultraviolet and/or infrared than ours. Hearing is keener; sense of smell is sharper; pressure gradients more noticeable, etc. Be all that as it may, I can’t see that altering basic perceptions of reality in any significant way.

Ditto for physical abilities - birds gotta fly; fish gotta swim; horses gotta run. Again, there’s nothing significantly different in principle here. The fact that a horse can run faster than you doesn’t give the horse a whole different perspective or outlook on the world. 

Yet, on our home world, there is a life form, with a most alien of realities, at least relative to us or from our perspective. The most alien of realities, from our point of view, must be experienced by that of a fish, even a pet goldfish. Consider, we live for all practical purposes in a two dimensional world – the surface of our planet. Fish live in a three dimensional world. They, for all practical purposes, experience no weather or climate. There’s not much temperature variation. They, depending on species and depth, may never experience a day-night cycle, rather live all the time in absolute darkness. They don’t experience gravity per say as the water and swim bladders produce neutral buoyancy.  From our point of view, I guess, their reality is not only quite different, but certainly more boring – although boring is a rather emotive term. The fish may not have any comprehension of what boring is.  So, having a conversation with a fish (a thought experiment obviously) might be about the closest one could come to terms with a substantial alternative reality. Except the absolutes, the basics are still there – survival, food, sex, etc.

Reality is ultimately perceived and processed by our brains, and our companion animals have brains, just as we do. Animals have a “The You” component to them. Pets clearly can think, make (to them anyway) intelligent decisions; they can and do dream. They have emotions. They can learn; they have memories. They have a world view.

Yet, I’m sure that 99.9% of the time your pets and mine have absolutely no comprehension of what you are doing or why. They may like warmth, but have no idea of what thermodynamics is. They like sex but the purpose and genetics of it all is beyond them. They like food but have no comprehension of agriculture and manufacturing and transport and distribution and money and shopping and all those bits and pieces that put doggie food in the doggie bowl. Yet your activities, warmth, sex, food is of course part of their reality, although not part of their understanding.

Now our companion animals are fairly closely related species to us. Felines, of which I have two, have a worldview. However, their worldview, concerns, philosophy, science, etc. revolves around whether there’s food in their food bowl; do they have a clean litter box to access; am I around when required to open doors for them and where are the mice hiding! I often envy their relatively uncomplicated lives. No pondering the great issues like looking at a star and wondering if an alien cat is looking back in this direction; no comprehension of taxes or money so-called compulsory voting or politics.

Four billions of years of evolution (assuming an origin of life within 500 million years of Earth’s origin) made no demands or requirements for living things to comprehend abstract things like philosophy or science (like cosmology or quantum mechanics) or mathematics, not to mention politics and economics. The sum total of our (meaning life, not just humans) concerns, over those four billion years, our worldview, or our reality, centered on food, shelter, sex and just plain survival. That’s also true for the hundreds of thousands of years, all through human evolution, into what we’ve become now. And that’s true today. I’m sure 99.9% of good folks (meaning humans) today pay near zero attention to these abstract non-essentials in their day-to-day existence. It’s bad enough that our lives have been enhanced by the abstractions of government and taxes and bills and nine-to-five jobs (or lack thereof).

So herein lays my fundamental question. If our companion animals can’t come to terms with the Big Picture, ultimate reality, relative to us, but we ourselves are only just that little bit further along in evolutionary (brain-related) advancement (call that advanced IQ or whatever) relative to them, then, what makes you think that the entire vista of reality is comprehensible to you? I sometimes wonder if we’re yet fully biologically or mentally equipped to ponder the great abstracts – comprehend the fullness of reality, not just the few bits and pieces that we have come to terms with and think as being the near be all and end all of what’s real. Perhaps our worldview of these things are not only limited, but of necessity will be limited. Translated, perhaps further eons yet worth of brain development might be necessary to fully comprehend our reality; what we comprehend currently might be, relatively speaking, just a tiny bit in advance of what our animal friends comprehend! There’s a long, long, road to hoe. 

To be continued…

Ghosts That Go Bump In the Night: Part One

I think there might be a real scientific case to answer regarding an explanation for ghosts. However, IMHO ghosts have nothing to do with human spirits and evidence of an afterlife. Rather, all can be explained by postulating that we live in, and are the product of a simulated Universe.

Apparitions, ghosts, phantoms, spectres, spirits, spooks, wraiths – call them what you will like ‘things that go bump in the night’ if you wish. Here’s a mystery that needs explaining. Who hasn’t heard and/or read about ghosts? Ghosts are a staple of thousands of novels, short stories, plays, operas, TV episodes, feature films, video games, documentaries, theme park rides, songs, mythological and not so mythological legends, and all manner of campfire and other tall tales, and have been, in one form or another, for generations upon generations. So, ghosts are the theme to be explained here.

Now I must stress that I am NOT, repeat NOT, talking about séances, ouija boards, spiritualism, mediums, channelling, and yucky ectoplasm. Rather, just old fashion unexpected, unplanned, undesired, unwanted close encounters with those things that go bump in the night and go ‘boo’ and like to haunt things. The unfortunate thing is that said encounters go back to the ancient Greeks (and probably before if there were records) and proceed through every century up through and including the 21^st. Ghostly encounters are recorded across the entire spectrum of the human condition. Young and old; male and female; every race, creed, culture, socioeconomic group, nationality, IQ level, etc. has recorded encounters. By now, that’s probably in the hundreds of thousands to millions of cases, not all by any means noted and logged in the literature. I’m sure many members of the great unwashed keep quiet for obvious reasons. Problem one: has each and every one of those witnesses to ghostly happenings been mistaken?

Problem two is the counterpoint. If you can see or hear ghosts, or photograph them or record them and their activity with other instruments, then ghosts must be composed of matter and energy, yet there is no way known to science to form these ghostly apparitions, comprised of necessity of matter and energy. Since ghosts are apparently whatever leaves the body after death (including, apparently, animals as well as humans), and since a body doesn’t lose any mass in that interval or transition between life and death, there’s no decrease of X amount of grams, the ghost has to be comprised of nothing and be 100% immaterial – but then you couldn’t see or hear them! That contradicts all those millions of witnesses.

Another problem is that not all ghosts are biological. There are reports of ghost trains, and phantom ships, and other things that have no connection with the biological world.

However, sticking with the biological world for the time being, it must be noted that we humans tend to have a near universal fear, or at least intense dislike, of certain other life forms that often have relatively little to do with any actual threats they represent. We tend to hate cockroaches (but very few other beetles) even though they aren’t likely to tear you apart limb from limb. And the cockroaches-spread-disease idea behind cockroach loathing doesn’t wash. While we might kill flies, fleas and mosquitoes that equally can spread disease, we’re not revolted by them. We don’t care too much for snakes even though relatively few can harm us and in any event we can run faster than they can slither. We have an instinctive dislike of certain spiders even though we’re a thousand times their size and have a vast array of arsenal at our disposal to deal with them. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I hate and will kill huntsman spiders on sight although they pose no danger to me and are actually probably useful pest control agents in the house. On the other hand, other spiders, even the venomous red back spiders, it’s live and let live. It’s not all very rational, but then who said human behaviour was always rational! But further on the theme…

There are many biological things in this world that can be deadly to us, yet which we have to instinctive or innate fear of. We don’t recoil in horror at the sight of a tiger or lion or a wolf or a bear. Certain fish and amphibians can be toxic, but don’t cause us any revulsion. Some invertebrates like the blue-ringed octopus, box jellyfish, and some cone shells can give you a nasty, even fatal experience, but they don’t feature in our list of loathing. So there’s probably no absolute relationship between inner loathing and external danger. But, anything we are hardwired to be instinctively repulsive of is nevertheless real.

We tend to be afraid of is ghosts, in fact usually downright terrified – that’s why they feature so prominently in horror fiction.  Why this is so, if ghosts are just spirits of usually dead strangers to us, is slightly mysterious since we accidentally come across – well you come across – strangers everyday, in the street, in the office, while shopping or stopping to smell the roses in your local park without any feeling of revulsion or being scared. Somehow we’re hardwired to be nervous, probably terrified, around things that go bump in the night. So perhaps that’s an argument that ghosts do in fact exist. However, let’s look at alternative explanations.

To be continued…