The Question Of Reality

The three alternative models I introduced earlier are, by no means, the only possible models. However, I chose them as they illustrate the problem we encounter when searching for the meaning of reality. Neither science nor any other methodology we have can provide us with a definite basis for preferring one alternative to another. While some models may be more appealing, seem more logical or make more sense, it was science that taught us that both logic and common sense are among the worst obstacles to new discoveries and progress.

It was not long ago that it was regarded as ludicrous to believe that time was different for each observer, or that an electron could be both a wave and a particle. Now it makes no sense to believe otherwise. Will these remain sensible assumptions in the future?

And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?’ [asked Tweedledee] ‘Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice. ‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘you’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!

While our first Model suggested that God might be a figment of the human’s imagination, in this dialog, Tweedeldee introduces the opposing view in which we and the entire world are but a figment of someone’s imagination. While for long time this was the heart of many theological discussions, development in computer science and simulation techniques may shed a new light on this concept.

Computer simulation underlies a wide range of applications like weather forecasting and finance, and it is an inseparable part of many computer games, from the simple Pacman to most advanced contemporary interactive games. For the sake of simplicity, as the reader is likely to be more familiar with computer games than any other application of simulation, I have chosen to use computer games to demonstrate the concept. It is only an analogy, and should not be taken as an attempt to draw parallels or analogies.

Many computer games provide users with the flexibility to create their own physical environment (mountains, lakes, structures, vegetation). He or she may also configure the laws of nature for their world, such as weather patterns, the length of the day, strength of gravity and the life expectancy of the living creations.

Without delving into the question of consciousness (which I may discuss in the future) let’s try to see the world from the point of view of the intelligent beings ‘living’ in the simulated world. Intuitively, they are likely to be familiar with of some of the rules governing their world. For example, they would be aware that they cannot go through walls and other solid objects, or if we defined gravity, they would know that heavy bodies fall down and that they cannot fly. Other rules may be more of a mystery to them: if – to make the simulation more interesting – we added randomness to weather patterns or life expectancy, they would find these rules harder, if not impossible, to decipher.

These intelligent beings may be programmed to strive to understand the rules of their world and develop their own science and technology (rule finding algorithms is a branch of Artificial Intelligent). But even if the rules their scientists discovered were testable, predictable and applicable, they would only be relevant to their in-simulation world. They will not be able to see the world from the programmer or user’s point of view, and could not perceive that everything in the world they live in, including themselves, is nothing but a computer-running program.

When running the simulation, the average computer-user may not be interested in waiting for the simulation world to develop ‘naturally’, but is more likely to create it at the point in time that he or she is interested in. The simulated world would start with history, and its entities would be born with their memories (they can recognize their family members, their enemies where they live, and what they like to eat.) By doing so the player has no intention to lie or deceive the entities of the world he created. But they are deceived nevertheless because the player’s objectives are entirely different from theirs, and can never be understood by them.

In this analogy, are we the programmers, the players or might we be the entities in somebody else’s simulation? Is there a way we can ever test or disprove it?

While the first model derives its truth from science and ignores any religious claims, the second alternative claims that while science is correct for the present affairs of the world, the scripts provide the ultimate truth about the creation and our past.

As neither Adam nor Eve was born of a woman’s womb, early Christian artists debated whether they should be portrayed with or without navels. A fig leaf over their lower bodies normally solved the problem for the artists, but not for theologist and naturalists.

In 1857, two years before Darwin published his theory of evolution, a British naturalist named Philip Henry Gosse, addressed this question in a book called Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. In his book, Gosse argued that both Adam and Eve had a navel, as they were created human in every detail, including the appearance of age and history of birth. In the same way, he argued, a world created by an act of creation, would have been created with the appearance of age and history.

Gosse’s argument was adopted by creationists and those with similar doctrines that propound that God created the earth relatively recently, but made it appear much older. To this day, this is one of the arguments most widely used against the scientific unequivocal claim that based on fossils and other scientific evidence, the world is extremely ancient.

Although this argument cannot be disproved scientifically, it has raised many questions. First, if the world was created with a ‘built-in’ history, why should we assume that it happened at the time described by the biblical account and not at any other time, for instance, last night or five minutes ago? After all, creation with history, which includes our own memories, could have happened at any time. Neither science nor our experience can indicate the time of such creation.

The second question is why should we assume that the creator would like to deceive us, and what might his reasons be to play such a trick? The common answer is that we, mere human, cannot expect to understand the reasons behind the deeds of a creator. The natural counter argument would be that if we can’t understand the mind or motivation of the creator, how can we be sure that it’s the ‘truth’ He told us in the scripts? Can we be so arrogant to believe that such a mighty creator owes us the truth?

While we have seen that the current parapsychology approach does contradict science, many other models attempt to explain reality while recognising that these models cannot contradict scientific discoveries.

Many such models have been suggested throughout the generations, and there is nothing new about the three models I suggested here, which have been debated, in different guises, by theologists and philosophers since ancient times. Our modern era, however, can produce some fresh insight. The three models I will explore in the following posts are:

Model 1: What we see is what there is
Model 2: Late creation
Model 3: The world as a simulation

Model 1: what we see is what there is
For many who are neither religious nor followers of philosophy or metaphysics, the experience of reality equates reality itself. Phenomena exist independent of an observer: when we see a flower it is because there is a flower; the inside of the brick is not a model but reality, and so is the electron.

This pragmatic approach does not deny that human senses do not always convey the true world, and distortions, such as optical illusions, do happen. However, advocates of this model believe that the combination of all the senses, often assisted by unbiased measurement and controlled experiments, will correct most of the biases and produce a close approximation to reality: If an illusion made us see equal lines as unequal, measuring the lines would correct this bias and provide us with a reliable description of reality.

According to this approach, science is an attempt to describe reality, and every new theory brings us closer to true understanding. God is considered a figment of human imagination, or if such a deity exists, irrelevant to the running of the world. Scientific theories produce the best estimate of the age of the world, and evolution, resulting from random events, is the most plausible explanation for human existence.

The limitation of this approach lies with quantum mechanics: the theory that deals with the behavior of matter and energy on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum mechanics, the observer affects the phenomena observed.

In the famous double-slit experiment, the setting of the experiment determined if a single electron passing through a slit behaved as a wave or a particle. Electrons shot at a screen behave as if they knew whether the person making the experiment was thinking of light as waves or particles.

For example, if a second slit, farther from the one the electron passes through, is open, electrons behave as if they were wave and will pass through both slits; if the second slit is closed, the electron will behave as if it were a particle. That is, a single electron ‘has the knowledge’ of whether a second slit is opened or not.

Such experimental results violate our everyday intuitive image of a universe in which objective phenomena happen independent of an observer or observation. They raise questions about our role, as observers, in defining the world (i.e. a falling tree in the wood would make a noise even if there were no one to hear); and lead to paradoxes not only in the quantum level but also in the macro world (Schrödinger cat).

Advocates of this alternative, including many famous scientists, would normally leave such questions to philosophy, and consider them irrelevant to science and everyday reality.

While we can use scientific methods to validate the existence of first category of PSI events, the second category includes phenomena related to the world of spirits (ghosts, spirits, guardian angels and the like.) These are suggested to exist in a parallel realm made of neither matter nor energy (in the scientific sense of the term.)

Science does not make any claims about the existence or nonexistence of domains that do not obey the laws of nature. That is, as long as they do not interact with the physical world as we know it, as any such interaction will violate the first law of thermodynamics.

One of the most fundamental laws of nature, the first law of thermodynamics, states that the energy of a system can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. Therefore, if the world of spirits does not obey the laws of the physical world, any interaction between the spiritual and the physical worlds, whether an image we see, a sound we hear, the moving of an object, a draft of wind or change of temperature, will manifest itself in the physical world as a creation ex nihilo(out of nothing), and cannot be accepted by science.

Revising fundamental scientific theories is commonplace, and it is not unthinkable that at some stage the first law of thermodynamics will be proven insufficient or even wrong – after all, if it were theoretically irrefutable, it could not be considered scientific. Until such time, however, it is wrong to claim that this category of PSI phenomena do not contradict science, and that they are merely an extension.

Therefore, it is unlikely that PSI will provide us any clues in our search for the relationship between reality and science.

Where science does not hold anymore, other ‘non-scientific’ disciplines try to fill the gap. Many of them fall under the umbrella of parapsychology (also called PSI). Parapsychology is the study (I am careful not to use the word science) of the phenomena that we know about by means other than ‘normal’ sensory perception. Many PSI scholars do not oppose science, but rather claim that the physical world, as we observe it, is only part of the picture. The big picture, they claim, includes events beyond human senses, and therefore beyond science. As such, parapsychology seems like the natural place to start our exploration. Can it provide the alternative realities we seek?

PSI is used as a blanket term for a variety of phenomena such as telepathy, ESP (extrasensory perception) and ghosts. We will group these phenomena into two categories based on their impact on the physical world.

The first category includes phenomena that although inexplicable in scientific terms, have effects which can be measured by direct observation and experimentation. By their very nature, telepathy (mind-to-mind communication), telekinesis (moving object at distance) or future-telling impact the physical world; so although science may not have a theory to explain them, it does have the tools and methodologies to measure their affects. The initial role of science in this case is not to explain, but rather to verify whether the effects of these phenomena are as claimed.

For example, to test the existence of telepathy between identical twins, scientists conducted experiments in which one of the twins was asked to transmit images from a deck of picture-cards to the other twin in a remote location. While the transmitting twin mentally ‘sent’ one picture at a time, the other twin would try to select from an identical pack the card corresponding to the ‘mentally transmitted’ image. Scientists then analyzed the matches between the selections of the two twins to determine if there were more matches than could be explained by chance alone, after eliminating all biasing factors. It didn’t really matter that science could not explain telepathy. The scientific or statistical methodologies provided science with tools to verify whether telepathy between twins existed at all.

The need for adhering to scientific methodology when conducting such experiments was demonstrated when factors unrelated to telepathy distorted early results. For example, initial tests showed a clear match and a strong ‘telepathic’ success. Further analysis, however, proved that identical twins tend to make similar choices, due to their similar process, and therefore it was the fact that the transmitting twin was choosing the cards, rather than telepathy, that caused the high success rate. This was corrected, and later experiments used computers – rather than the transmitting twin – to select the transmitted cards.

So far we have discussed what makes a theory scientific. But until now we have failed to question the most fundamental building block – the observation. (Here, the term observation refers both to direct natural observation, as in astronomy or geology, or the result of an experiment, as is the case with experimental sciences such as chemistry and physics.) As discussed earlier, no scientific theory can contradict any ‘real world’ observation. These observations, however, are never objective, and can only be done by means of direct or indirect sensory perception. To use a trivial example, when we drop a heavy body, to our eyes it seems to be falling down. If we wanted to confirm our visual observation by using other senses, we may choose to attach a sound-making device to the falling and use our hearing, or let it fall on our foot and use our sense of touch to confirm this fact. Being aware of to the unreliability of our senses, we may even decide to use instruments to measure and record the experiment. But even then, to analyze the recording results, we will still depend on human senses and interpretation.

It is the consistency of the observation that we seek, and if all our observations were consistent we would feel confident that heavy objects fall down, and no scientific theory should contradict this observation.

With some ingenuity, we might even be able to construct a new theory (as Newton did) that would explain and predict behavior of objects in general. Nevertheless, as objective as scientists may be, it is human perception that determines the consistency of the observations, and therefore, it is human perception, rather than ‘reality’, that the theory will conform with. Anything that cannot be observed, directly or indirectly, by our senses is outside the realm of scientific theory and science in general, as acknowledged by Einstein (1879–1955):

He [the scientist] may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.

The meaning of such comparison, beyond human sensory perception, is where science ends and the exploration of reality begins.

Using theoretical models to discover unknown planets reinforced Newton’s theory of universal gravitation and proved its usability. Had astronomers not found the planets, the theory would have been in doubt, or even falsified and replaced by another theory that could explain the previously observed orbits as well as the discrepancies.

Meanwhile, astrologers were enthusiastic about these discoveries, which increased the range of heavenly influences they could explain. They have endeavored to associate the discovery of each of the planets with events characteristic of its power and influence. The discovery of Uranus, associated with human rights, rebellion and progress, is related to the American and the French revolutions of 1778 and 1789 respectively. The discovery of Neptune, the planet linked to both cults and the occult, was closely followed by the emergence of a Chinese clerk, Hung Hsiu-Ch'üan, who decided that he was the son of God, and in 1847 attempted to conquer China and establish his own dynasty. It is believed that more then 20 Million people were killed during his Taiping Rebellion The discovery of Pluto, which rules atomic energy, is associated with Cockcroft and Walton splitting the atom in 1932.

Astrologers forecast; yet there are no known records of astrologers foretelling the discovery of the new planets. No mismatches between astrological observation and earthly events had ever been attributed to unknown heavenly bodies, nor is there any evidence whether adjusting the charts for the new planets has improved the accuracy of astrological predictions. Whatever the reason for the planets’ orbital mismatch might have proved to be, astrology would have remained unchallenged, irrefutable, and therefore, by definition, unscientific.

As we have seen, testability is crucial for any scientific theory. However, as crucial as it might be, it is not enough to test a theory against the observations that led to its creation. A scientific theory must also be able to predict unknown facts that can only be confirmed by fresh observations. If any of the predictions are proven wrong, the theory must be deemed incorrect. This potential refutability is a powerful criterion that can help distinguish scientific from most non-scientific theories, as can be demonstrated by comparing astronomy with astrology.

For thousands of years astrologers had been using the apparent movement of the sun, moon, and the five known extraterrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) to foretell earthly events. Once the sixth planet, Uranus, was discovered in 1781, astrologers adjusted their charts to include the new planet and continued with their forecasting as before.

Astronomers, on the other hand, were fervidly striving to calculate the orbit of the new planet. Their calculations, however, did not match the actual path of Uranus. The discrepancy could be explained by assuming that either Newton’s theory of gravity was wrong, or that the gravity of an unknown heavenly object, farther from Uranus, was responsible for the deviation. Using the law of gravitation, astronomers calculated the assumed celestial position of the undiscovered planet. They confirmed their calculations in 1846 when, by means of a telescope, they managed to view Neptune at the predicted location.

Just as discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus had led to the search for Neptune, irregularities in the orbit of Neptune, and to a lesser extent in the orbits of Uranus and Saturn, had led scientists to suspect the existence of a ninth planet. Again, it was theoretical calculations that led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930. The theory of Gravity is therefore a scientific theory.

To demonstrate how established scientific theories can be refuted, let’s look at the theory of ether, which was the established theory for an entire generation of scientists.

Since Maxwell (1831–1879) formulated the electromagnetic theory in 1865, 19th century scientists had puzzled how electromagnetic waves, such as light, traveled through vacuum and the emptiness of space. Just like waves in water or sound in air, the argument went, electromagnetic waves needed a physical medium to travel through. For this reason alone, a new substance, ether, was proposed. (Although the term ‘ether’ was borrowed from Aristotle, the 19th century’s ether was a different concept altogether.)

According to the theory, ether filled in the entire universe, including vacuum and the inside of material bodies. As such, it had to be a weightless, transparent, frictionless matter that did not take part in any physical or chemical interaction, and was, therefore, impossible to test or verify.

Yet, the theory of ether could predict that light emanating from a moving object in the direction of its movement would travel faster than light emanating from the same object in any other direction. (To illustrate, imagine an item thrown from a moving car. Clearly, if we threw it in the direction of the travel it would travel faster than if we threw it in the opposite direction.)

Michelson and Morley relied on this hypothesis in 1887, when they attempted to determine the speed of earth relative to ether by measuring the difference between the speed of a beam of light traveling with the movement of earth, and that of a beam of light traveling perpendicular to earth’s movement. (The importance of this experiment was that according to Galilean/Newtonian physics, motion is always relative, and there is no way to distinguish a body at rest from a body moving at a constant velocity. Ether could have offered a reference point and define absolute movement.)

Had Michelson and Morley detected the difference as expected, it would have put their names, in a side note, as the first scientists to measure the absolute speed of earth. As it turned out, the experiment failed and no difference could be detected. Even though Michelson and Morley could not explain their result, it was sufficient to inflict a death sentence on the theory of ether, and to win Michelson the 1907 Nobel Prize for physics. This was the experiment that subsequently it led Einstein to develop the theory of special relativity.