There’s No Free Will

Just about every human on Planet Earth holds near and dear to their worldview that they have control over their own lives, or at the very least control over their own mind. Even if you live in a dictatorship or you are a slave or a prisoner you have free will of the mind. You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking. But wishing or believing or faith doesn’t make it so and there are many scenarios that render your alleged free will to the state of an illusion, if not a delusion.

Here are a few reasons why your alleged ‘free will’ is in fact an illusion at best; a delusion at worst.

* We’re all simulated beings living in a virtual reality obeying the commands of the master computer software program. Characters in a video game do what they are programmed to do, no more and no less.

* God lied! All our strings are being pulled by outside evil (satanic, demonic, etc.) vs. good (angelic) forces. Humans are trapped in the middle of this tug-of-war, mere pawns for the larger forces at work. But as someone once told me, “I have free will because I take responsibility for my own actions”. Well actually that’s just those goody-goody-two-shoes angels pulling your strings. And if you argue in court say that “the devil made me do it”, well that’s probably spot on the case. The devil should be on trial, not you!

* Make of this what you will, but many people who report having involuntary visitations by otherworldly entities, be they described as aliens, shadow ‘people’, beings from other dimensions or parallel realities, etc. note that they were compelled against their will to carry out the wishes or instructions of these entities who have complete, total, absolute control over their human victims. If you have free will, it apparently can be overridden, but then that’s known from case studies in hypnoses. 

* Classical physics rules! Cause and effect rules! Causality rules, OK? All the laws, principles and relationships of classical physics were established and set in motion at the moment of creation (the Big Bang event) and all follows as clockwork (Newton’s point of view) from that in a totally deterministic way as far into the future as you care to calculate. The clockwork, causality rules universe of which you are a part, means no free will for you.

* Quantum physics rules too! Quantum physics apparently has no causality (Einstein disagreed) which immediately sets my teeth on edge, but that’s another matter. Quantum physics is expressed in probabilities, like either/or. Since your brain which houses your mind isn’t exempt from quantum physics (nothing is exempt anytime, anywhere, anyhow), all those billions of either/or quantum physics reactions collectively can give rise to all the apparent free will choices you apparently have at your command. It’s all one massive superposition of state after another after another as your mind lurches from one decision to the next. But whether it’s one either/or or the sum total of billions of either/or probabilities, the possibilities are still finite. You may not do the same thing twice in identical scenarios, but that’s not your free will, just the coming to the fore of one of those random probabilities that result from all those either/or possibilities inherent in quantum physics that hold sway over your mind, which, if truth be known, is comprised of the same matter and energy regimes that are the realm of physics, classical or quantum. 

* Your body cells, tissues, organs, organ systems on up the line are all on biochemical autopilot. No free will need apply. So why should your brain, housing your mind, be an exception to the rule? Your mind is not a something which exists independently of your body.

* Your ‘conscious’ decisions are by-products of what’s already happening within your subconscious. Our subconscious mind comes to a decision before we are consciously aware of it as has been demonstrated by actual experimentation.

* If you accept the probability of a Megaverse, a conglomerate of the Multiverse, with each individual universe having associated Parallel Universes and an infinite space (volume) and time (thus eliminating the awkward questions of ‘what’s beyond’ and ‘what was before’) then every possible timeline and history and scenario has happened – an infinite number of times. An infinite number of you have made every possible decision you can possibly make, compatible with the laws, relationships and principles of physics, an infinite number of times. How do you reconcile free will with that?

* Any competent neuroscientist worthy of their salt and status can stimulate parts of your brain using electromagnetic (EM) energy and get a physiological response, like your fingers twitching, ditto your arms and legs flapping like puppets on a string, your head turns and your posture changes - all grist for the neuroscientist’s mill. What you experience under the EM stimulation is the urge to do it (say tap your toe) and then you do it but you do not get the urge to, nor perform the action, voluntarily or willingly. Someone else, in this case the neuroscientist, is in control. That applies equally to your emotions as well as your movements. Stimulate this brainy bit and you cry; here and you laugh; somewhere else will hit your guilt complex, etc. What makes you, you, is just being reduced to the basics of electrical signals.

Conclusion: You are a part of life, the Universe and everything, or, to shorten things, a part of Mother Nature. Mother Nature operates on a select number of non-negotiable laws, principles and relationships, starting with the most basic of elementary particles and forces and working on up the line. No correspondence will be entered into or answered by Mother Nature. As such, you dance to Mother Nature’s tune. Do not attempt to change the tune and adjust reality. She controls the horizontal; She controls the vertical; She controls all that you see and do. Mother Nature is a bitch, but there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  Myth busted!

But, and there’s nearly always a ‘but’, while ‘free will’ may well be, and probably is, an illusion (or delusion), it does have practical applications in the real world (like forcing one to be accountable for their actions) and thus is a concept unlikely to bite the dust anytime soon. It’s akin to the notion that God may not, and probably does not exist, He forms a useful function in society by keeping a lot of people here on Terra Firma employed!

P.S. If there is such a thing as free will, why is there such an obesity epidemic? You’d think one of the last things people would want to look like is blubber personified. But what do I know? Maybe roly-poly is the latest in body fashion statements!

Further Reading:

Harris, Sam; Free Will; Free Press, New York; 2012:

All Our Yesterdays; All Our Tomorrows

We are all familiar with the concepts of ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’. We probably use the terms all the time in daily conversation and correspondence. But exactly where do we find ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’? What exactly is ‘yesterday’ or for that matter ‘tomorrow’? When exactly is ‘yesterday’ or ‘tomorrow’? We use the terms loosely, but pinning them down is elusive.

Actually, to start the ball rolling, the concepts of ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ are totally artificial since your today is already someone else’s tomorrow, or someone else’s yesterday, depending on the relative time zones you and that someone else inhabit. Rather, there is a universal ‘now’ (even if it’s noon in one place and midnight 180 global degrees opposite), and at that point defined as ‘now’ there’s what’s past ‘now’ (history) and what’s still ahead of ‘now’ (the future). However, since we are all familiar and comfortable with the terms ‘yesterday’ (history), ‘today’ (now) and ‘tomorrow’ (future), let’s stick with that though they are unnatural time units since they are artificial distinctions or inventions by humans. Other unnatural, artificial, meaningless, manmade time divisions include the second, minute, hour, week, month, decade, century, and related. But there are some natural time divisions: the ever varying day-night cycle and the broad yearly cycle of the seasons are reflected in the natural world, from annual tree rings to the awake-asleep patterns of wildlife. The Lunar cycle is another natural time unit that influences life on Earth but one that has no corresponding manmade equivalent.

Anyway, even though an artificial concept, where does ‘yesterday’ reside? Where are all our yesterdays? Where does ‘tomorrow’ reside? Where are all our tomorrows?

Let’s consider ‘yesterday’ first, but perhaps one needs to start off by distinguishing between a personal ‘yesterday’ and a generic or universal ‘yesterday’, a ‘yesterday’ that contained all things that happened ‘yesterday’ throughout the entire universe.

When it comes to ‘yesterday’, and the day before ‘yesterday’ and the day before that, etc. you could say ‘all our yesterdays’ resides in what someone tells us happened, or what’s recorded in a book or newspaper, or what’s on tape as in a radio show or TV news bulletin. Yet, if you hear that person, read that article, see that TV program that details all things ‘yesterday’, you are hearing, reading, seeing that ‘yesterday’, today, so you are experiencing ‘yesterday’ today. That’s not what we really mean by ‘yesterday’. 

What happened ‘yesterday’, even if you find out something about ‘yesterday’ today, ultimately resides in your mind and in your memory. That’s what makes ‘yesterday’ really real to you. But ‘yesterday’ is even more real if you directly experienced ‘yesterday’s’ happenings ‘yesterday’. Your ‘yesterday’ is your past; your past is contained in your memory.

But where does ‘yesterday’ reside after the oldest person alive who can remember or recall a ‘yesterday’ beyond the recall of any other living person, dies? Then records that detail all our ‘yesterdays’, say an historical museum exhibit, are only experienced afresh today. There’s no way you can deal with a ‘yesterday’ in ancient Egypt in the same way that an ancient Egyptian who lived through that ‘yesterday’ dealt with it.

A universal ‘yesterday’ suggests that not everything that belongs to ‘yesterday’ is known to other people or is written down or otherwise observed or recorded. In fact most of what happened ‘yesterday’ is in total oblivion to all and sundry. 

What if there was absolutely nothing to preserve for posterity an event that happened ‘yesterday’, say a raindrop impacting the middle of the ocean and there’s not even a fish around to see it splash. Or perhaps a meteor impacted the far side of the Moon or several hydrogen atoms fused to create a helium atom in the core of our Sun releasing a photon which has to ‘fight’ it’s way to the surface and escape, but that takes thousands of years, or if inside a faraway star in a faraway galaxy that photon wouldn’t be visible to us (or our descendents) on Planet Earth for maybe millions of years, if ever (since 99.999% of such photons will bypass Earth). Unless there is a cosmic consciousness, that photon will go unobserved and unrecorded, in which case, did the event happen? Does the photon exist? In fact, ‘yesterday’, 99.999% (add at least 100 more 9’s) of events that transpired in the greater Universe went unrecorded and unobserved. So the historical record of ‘yesterday’ is grossly incomplete, unless again you wish to argue that unobserved, even by the humblest of microbes, means it didn’t happen. It’s a variation on the old ‘if a tree falls in the forest and there’s nothing or no one there to observe it, did it make a sound’?

In any event, perhaps this photon event is an example of ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ merging – a ‘yesterday-tomorrow’ connection. A photon created ‘yesterday’ (sometime in the past) but not observed until ‘tomorrow’ (sometime in the future) is still just a single timeline event. In fact, ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ are always linked because what happened ‘yesterday’ has a direct causality bearing on what will happen ‘tomorrow’. So in one sense ‘yesterday’ resides in ‘tomorrow’, and ‘tomorrow’ will in turn reside in tomorrow’s ‘tomorrow’. On a human level, a dance between the sheets ‘yesterday’ can result in quite another event nine months worth of tomorrows later!

Where does ‘tomorrow’ (the future) reside? Well, as hinted at above, the future resides in what happened ‘yesterday’. That’s the generic or universal future. What of your personal future? Where does that reside? There’s only one place your personal future resides – inside your mind.

You can imagine the Sun rising ‘tomorrow’, but until it actually does happen that event is all in your mind, but of course when it does happen it’s no longer ‘tomorrow’ is it? ‘Tomorrow’ never actually comes around, just morphs into today. But sooner or later all your personal mental ‘tomorrows’ come to an end, at least that’s the accepted wisdom.

Your future ceases when you’re declared brain dead, or does it? Not entirely, for each and every elementary particle (electrons, etc.) that makes up what was you in your past still has a future – another case of the ‘yesterday and tomorrow’ connection – as those bits and pieces have had as many ‘yesterdays’ as there were ‘yesterdays’ and will have as many ‘tomorrows’ as the Universe allows for. Some of those bits and pieces were no doubt once part of a ‘yesterday’ pre-you life (or even non-life) form and will no doubt become a part of a post-you ‘tomorrow’s’ life form (or non-life form), so you were part of someone or something else’s immortality and you in turn will be immortal as bits of you will become incorporated into other pieces of matter and energy, ‘tomorrow’. 

In summary, your personal ‘yesterday’ is just a memory, housed and locked away in your mind. Your personal ‘tomorrows’ are just patterns of thought and probabilities, possibilities, even near certainties, but only near certainties as nothing is ever set absolutely in concrete (death and taxes excepted). What may, or may not have happened unobserved in your non-personally experienced ‘yesterday’ resides in your imagination. What may or may not happen unobserved outside of your personal world ‘tomorrow’ is also within your imagination. So where does your ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ reside – in your mind and nowhere else.

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

Reality – It’s all relative; it’s reversible; it’s symmetric; it’s personal; it kicks back when you kick it; it’s conceptual; it’s theoretical; it’s actual; it’s abstract; it’s bio-friendly; it’s unforgiving; it’s emotional; and ultimately the reality of life, the Universe and everything resides in your mind.

Reality from Two More Points of View – Squared:

Position yourself way above the Sun’s North Pole and film the motion of the solar system, or just the inner solar system ‘below’ you. You’d film the Earth revolving about the Sun in a counter clockwise direction, and rotating in an easterly direction.

If you now role that film in reverse, you’d see the Earth revolving in a clockwise direction and rotating in a westerly direction. An inhabitant of that time reversed Earth would see the Sun rise in the west and set in the east! However, that’s no violation of physical law. It’s relatively easy to picture a solar system is which the revolution of planetary bodies is the opposite of ours; planets that rotate in the opposite direction. 

Such opposites with respect to motion are what you’d see in a mirror reflection – if you had a mirror big enough. So, if you reverse time [T], you produce a mirror image of the motion (left handedness motion becomes right handedness motion and vice versa), which in physics is called parity [P]. If you look in a mirror, your right hand now looks like a left hand and vice versa – that’s parity. That applies equally on the micro scale; with the added feature that to preserve the overall symmetry, the charge [C] needs to be reversed too. So, a positive [CPT] is symmetrical with a negative [CPT]. Since the macro is made up of the micro, in our time reversed; parity (motion) reversed, Earth; said Earth would have all the charges in all the particles that made it up reversed. In short, said Earth would be an antimatter Earth!

On the micro level, a positron (positive charge), rotating clockwise (spin up) while moving forward in time at one second per second is symmetrical with an electron (negative charge), rotating counter clockwise (spin down), and moving backwards in time, at a rate of one second per second! Again, there’s no violation of physical law. The laws of physics do not make any distinction between time frames moving from past to present to future relative to time frames going from future to present to past. It’s the same reality from two different perspectives. Which version you prefer is solely up to you – either interpretation is a valid one. Most people of course prefer the classical time frames forward version – the Earth revolves counter clockwise and rotates easterly and is composed of matter and goes from past to present to future. But, you can be, if you wish to be, justifiably stubborn and reverse the CPT and accept that reality.

Again, if you reverse the time frame, you need to also reverse the image of whatever is in motion to its mirror image instead. Now that image may be hard to swallow and isn’t really a ‘reflection’ of your day to day macro world. If you look in your home mirror, and see a reflection of a grandfather clock with hands rotating and pendulum swinging, it will look odd – the hands going the wrong way around (counter clockwise) and the pendulum going right-left-right instead of left-right-left. But, physicists can handle it (at least via their abstract equations – just like the mathematics can deal with the ten or eleven dimensions required of string theory.    

So, in general, negative [CPT] and positive [CPT] are the two symmetrical sides of the same physical law reality coin.

But there are two other ways of looking at and interpreting this. There’s 1) a real mix of (a hell of a lot of) matter and (a very little amount of) antimatter all going forward in time together in step, or 2) you can postulate the concept of additional pseudo-antimatter by postulating that every now and then elementary particles of matter reverse direction in time (hence reverse charge and parity as well) thus mimicking what we call antimatter. That mimicked antimatter elementary particle can reverse time direction again and revert back to what we call normal matter. That applies equally to real antimatter reversing time’s arrow and becoming pseudo-matter. While the former (1) is the commonly accepted, commonsense point of view, it’s actually the latter (2) that has greater explanatory power in solving some of those mysteries of physics, such as entanglement, and double slit experiment weirdness and why are all electrons or positrons identical (because maybe there’s only one of each zigzagging backwards and forwards in time).

Reality Really Is A Personal Thing:

The most unique thing about you is “The You” inside you – your mind. There’s nothing unique about your sex, blood type, pigmentation, hair style, body shape, age, etc. Your genetic makeup isn’t unique if you have an identical twin. Many of your body’s organs can be transplanted into other bodies. But your mind is unique. Even if you had an identical twin, your minds would be different.

Your brain, which houses the mind, is the organ that has to absorb the sensory input we constantly receive from the outside world. While we have some limited control over the sensory barrage or onslaught reality inflicts on us, we so have some – control that is. You can often choose what you want to taste or listen to or see. You can close your eyes or stick your fingers in your ears if you want.  Another form of control is that you can choose your surroundings, maybe eventually immerse yourself in a totally artificial reality, as in the Star Trek’s holodeck programs.  So, in one sense, reality really is all in the mind as all sensory input flows into it. And since your mind is unique, your reality, or your version of reality, must be unique too.

Quite apart fro having some control over external sensory input, the inner workings of your body also can affect the mind and therefore your notion of reality. Migraine headaches can cause you to ‘see’ flashes of light where no optical input is preset. A build-up of this chemical, or lack of that substance, can cause quite considerable alterations in your perception of what’s happening – reality. Near Death Experiences (the NDE) is a case in point. Control over those inner workings is possible, in some cases, to a greater or lesser degree. However, you’re body often tends to do its own thing and mind over matter is a useless exercise!

All of which leads to the point that you can also alter your own perception of reality, not directly via sensory stimuli, but chemically. There are lots of drugs, prescription, legal and over-the-counter (alcohol, etc.), not quite so legal (LSD, magic mushrooms, marijuana, various herbs, etc.) which affect brain (mind) chemistry and how you perceive the outside world.  The question then arises, if you can alter your brain’s (mind’s) chemistry, and that alters your perception of reality, how do you know that your unaltered (normal) brain chemistry is giving you an accurate reflection of what’s out there? If you’re honest, you don’t! But you can assume that you are getting a reasonable facsimile of reality, otherwise basic survival would be highly problematic. I mean if you thing that’s a purring pussy cat approaching you when it’s actually a roaring man-eating tiger, you’re in deep shit. Or, equally in the fertilizer, that’s not really table salt you’re sprinkling on your veggies, its cyanide!

There’s also the area of electrical stimulation of the brain that can produce realities which aren’t real but which, to you, are very real indeed!

There’s an opposite side to the altering-your-mind’s-sensory-input. Instead of adding or replacing inputs, eliminate them – deprive yourself of as much sensory input as possible. I’m thinking of isolation tanks where you float in water at body temperature, there’s no light, no sound, no smell. Of course your heart still thumps and you can still think (therefore you are and therefore you still have a grip on reality, even if the sum total of that reality is just you, and only you. Regardless, it’s a far removal from your day-to-day perception of what’s real!

Lastly, while mind melds (or telepathy) are probably an ever unlikely possibility, I can se the day when there is a direct interface between a computer, an artificial intelligence perhaps, and the human mind. Perhaps that computer link might be an interface between one human mind and another. That way you could directly experience another person’s reality!

The key point: Actual reality has relatively little to do with your brain chemistry (apart from providing the matter/energy needed to run the apparatus).  Your perception of reality has everything to do with brain chemistry. That’s true even if reality is augmented by technology, from telescopes to microscopes; mass spectrometers to particle accelerators; eye glasses to hearing aids.

To be continued…

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

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…

Personal Reality: 

For all you know, you might actually be a multi-tentacled, slimy green blob-thing living on the Planet Zork and dreaming that you are a human living on Planet Earth and deriving near infinite amount of civic pride/satisfaction and/or orgasmic pleasure in paying your way (mainly via taxes and rates). Then again, maybe your really Triffid-like, living on some extra-solar hot Jupiter, hallucinating that you’re on Planet Zork and consequently dreaming of being a Planet Earth humanoid.  

Well, maybe not. But be that as it may…

It’s probably impossible to ever know of experience absolute reality since everything external to us, in order to be experienced, has to be filtered and processed through a complex biochemical laboratory via our eyes, ears, skin, etc. hence via our nervous system up to the brain. Who really knows what kind of translation happens along the way or what’s lost (or wrongly gained) in translation. Our reality might be a total hash of actual reality! But, we do the best we can with what we get to work with.

We perceive the reality of the Universe (and its component parts) via our five senses – sight, sound, touch, taste and smell – and through instruments (technology) which, while extending the range of those senses, translate their measurements back into the range we can comprehend with our sensory apparatus. A radio telescope can see and record radio waves, but the (computer or paper) image spat out for our viewing is obviously in the visible light range to cater for our eyes. Ditto our radios translate radio waves we can’t see or hear into sound we can hear.

While there are probably differences in the perceptions of reality twixt males and females, it’s probably also true that these are so minor as to not be really worth elaborating on. 

No two people ever experience seemingly identical things exactly down to the Nth degree. That is, you and I will not experience vision, hearing, taste, smell or touch in the precise same way. That’s quite apart from relativity theory which can illustrate these differences quite dramatically. No, even in our relativity-irrelevant day-to-day life and world, for example, what’s blue to someone might appear slightly blue-green to another; what’s a perfect C-note to one is ever so slightly sharp (#) to another; what’s a hot cup of coffee to one person is only very warm to another, even though the temperature is identical in both cases. Even two people tasting the same food will perceive things slightly differently.

Yet clearly the blue/blue-green color has one and only one specific wavelength; the note has one and only one frequency; and the hot/very warm cup of coffee really has just one uniform temperature. [Note that these differences have nothing to do with individual likes or dislikes – that’s a separate category of an even more personal ‘reality’ altogether.]  

Speaking of temperature, differences in perception extends to instruments which augment our senses as well. We might be able to estimate temperature to within a degree or two. But even two seemingly identical thermometers will register ever so slight differences, perhaps to with 1/100^th or 1/1000^th of a degree, but differences nevertheless.

So what aspects of the Universe do we sense? Well, obviously things that are composed of matter and energy (which are two sides of the same coin). We can see matter and energy, we can hear energy, we can touch matter and experience its energy, and we can smell and taste matter. 

Yet, those aspects are quite incomplete. Our sense of vision is useless over most of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our sense of hearing is adequate over only a relatively small range of frequencies or octaves.

Our reality, apart from vision and hearing is also confined to a relatively narrow range of temperatures, gravitational and magnetic fields, and chemical elements. But we don’t sense Earth’s magnetic field (though apparently some animals do), which is a tad strange since we can sense or feel the Earth’s gravitational field or force.

Our senses can’t see, hear, taste, touch or smell time, and time is a fundamental aspect to our existence and to the properties of our Universe. And if string or superstring theory is correct, then we exist in a ten or eleven dimensional Universe, yet we can’t see, hear taste, touch or smell them. An extra six or seven dimensions to our Universe is not trivial, yet we’re not equipped to experience them. That’s weird! We’ve no direct awareness of the quantum world. What would our reality be like at the atomic level or below? I don’t know, but it sure wouldn’t mirror the comfortable reality we deal with in the macroverse. Although the strong nuclear force holds together all the atomic nuclei in our bodies, we don’t feel or sense it, nor for that matter the weak nuclear force

There’s strong circumstantial evidence that parallel universes should exist, yet we’ve no apparent perception of these. We’ve no perception of what it would be like to experience reality inside a Black Hole, and for that matter, we’ve only an academic understanding of the reality of the interior of a stellar object, like our Sun, not a personal reality, or for that matter most of the environments in our Universe. Think of all those realities we’ve never experienced, and probably never can experience.

What else might we lack knowledge or perception of that’s not yet been dreamt of in our philosophy or science? I shudder to think of all that we’re missing!

Personal Reality from Two Points of View:

Let’s return to our favourite imaginary couple, Jane and Clive, one of which sees blue, hears a pure C-note and perceives coffee as hot; the other a shade of blue-green, hears C#, and perceives equally hot coffee as only very warm.

Jane is aware of the idea that matter is mostly empty space. Jane knows that neutrinos can pass through light-years of ‘solid’ lead unimpeded. “Why can’t I be like a neutrino and pass through ‘solid’ matter?” she asks. Jane, being a good experimental scientist, decides to personally experiment and test the idea. Both Jane and Clive look up a physics equation, F=ma (force equals mass times acceleration).  They ponder this abstract representation linking force, mass and acceleration and how it could be translated into showing that matter was mainly empty space. Jane gets an idea of accelerating a mass (her fist) to provide a force against another mass (say a brick wall), expecting her fist mass and the other brick mass to intersect. [Boy is she going to be in for an unpleasant surprise.] Jane was aware of course that just leaning her hand on the wall wasn’t sufficient enough oomph – she needed more force. Anyway, Jane and Clive discuss this practical demonstration of Jane slamming her fist into a brick wall; Clive tries to talk her out of this experiment, but has to capitulate (a woman just has to have the last word) and just observes while a remote camera films the event for posterity.

So, we have Jane slamming her fist into a brick wall and Clive watches. We assume that Jane’s fist doesn’t pass harmlessly through the brick wall – empty space or no empty space. So Jane experiences the physical reality of intense pain; at best black and blue bruising; at worst, broken bones in her hand. Clive of course experiences no such pain (though he’d better show some sympathy or else he just might), but he certainly experiences the intense sound (scream) of Jane’s ‘ouch’!

So one definition of reality could be something along the line, and I’m sure Jane would now agree, is that reality is something that hits back when you hit it! Yet, there’s got to be more to reality than that.

Later on, we have Jane and Clive watch the film of Jane slamming her fist into a brick wall. Neither Jane nor Clive now experiences any actual pain, yet the mental reality of watching the film will trigger quite different memories in each of the two participants.

We have Jane and Clive just think about Jane slamming her fist into a brick wall; we have Jane and Clive dream about Jane slamming her fist in to a brick wall; we have Jane and Clive hallucinate (being somewhat under the influence) about Jane slamming her fist into a brick wall – these are all variations on the same theme.

If these mental processes (thinking, dreaming or hallucinating) happened before-the-fact that Jane slammed her fist into a brick wall then that’s going to produce quite a different mental image(s) than if these mental processes happened after-the-fact that Jane slammed her fist into a brick wall.

So you see, one scenario gives rise to many varieties of reality. There’s the abstract reality of the equation. There’s the mental reality of what might be. There’s the mental reality of what was. There’s the physical reality of Jane’s pain and Clive’s throbbing eardrum! There’s the reality of the film to remind them never to try this stunt again!

To be continued…