What is reality? Does it even exist?

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.

1. What is it? A dress? A robe? A costume?
2. What is its purpose?
3. Is it red, and if so, what shade of red?
4. Is it beautiful, ugly, or plain?
5. 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

1. There is no fundamental reality. Each observer experiences a slightly different reality.
2. Waking reality and sleep reality (dreams) have the same basis, and can be distinguished only subjectively.
3. What we perceive is a translation of our reactions to stimuli. Each observer translates differently.
4. Not only is information a functional part of reality, but even the potential for acquiring information affects reality.
5. The past, present, and future may be connected in ways that are not classically intuitive.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell; MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell; https://www.academia.edu/

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