What is real?
Is reality objective?
There’s an external reality it’s just that we don’t see it as it is. We can never see it. It’s even useful to not see it and the reason is that we have no direct access to that physical world other than through our senses. And because our senses conflate multiple aspects of that world we can never know whether our perceptions are in any way accurate. It’s not so much do we see the world it is, but do we even see it accurately? And the answer is no, we don’t. However paradoxical it sounds, if we think of what is visible as just what projects to the eyes. We see much more than is visible. Much more shows up for us than just what projects into our nervous system.
Our senses make up tastes, odors, and colors that we experience. They’re not properties of objective reality. They’re properties of our senses that they’re fabricating. By objective reality physicists mean something that would continue to exist even if there were no creatures to perceive it. Colors, odors, tastes, and so on are not real in that sense of objective reality. They are real in a different sense. They’re real experiences. Your headache is a real experience, even though it could not exist without you perceiving it. So it exists differently than the objective reality that physicists talk about. We always assume that our senses are telling us the truth. So it was quite a stunning shock to me when I realized that it’s not just tastes, odors, and colors that are the fabrications of our senses and are not objectively real. Space-time itself and everything within space-time, objects, electrons, quarks, the sun, the moon, their shapes, their masses, their velocities, all of these physical properties are also constructions. Sometimes it’s really difficult for people to understand that the data that your brain is receiving is meaningless because when they open their eyes, they look around. They say, well, I see everything. “What do you mean?”. A really simple example is color. Scientific knowledge of what light is shows us that our natural perception leaves a lot on the table. The human perception of color is limited really by the principles of quantum mechanics. It’s interesting to compare the human perception of color to the perception of sound. Evolution by natural selection has shaped perceptions that are designed to keep us alive. So if I see a snake, don’t pick it up. If I see a cliff, don’t jump off, I see a train don’t step in front of it. We have to take our perceptions seriously. But that does not entitle us to take them literally. Perception itself is a perspective on something defined by perception; is inherently a reduction of the information of the thing. My perspective of it is going to be a lot less total information than the actual thing is. I can look at the object from the east side of the West side, or the top, or the north side, or the inside, microscopically telescopically. They’ll all give me different information. None will give me the entirety of the information about the situation. So there is no all-encompassing perspective that gives me all the information about almost any situation. What this means is that reality itself is trans-perspective. It can’t be captured from any perspective, so multiple perspectives have to be taken. All of which will have some part of the reality.
There may also be distortion. I may be looking at the thing through a fish eye lens or through a colored lens that creates some distortion. Why does this matter? The ability to take multiple perspectives to see the partial truth in them and then to be able to see them together into something that isn’t a perspective. It’s a trans perspective capacity to hold the relationships between many perspectives in a way that can inform our choice making it fundamental to navigating reality well. How is it that we make claims of truth, and how would we begin to know if what we think is true?
Science has belief in objective truth works. Engineering technology based upon science and objective truth achieves results. It manages to build planes that get off the ground. It manages to send people to the moon and explore Mars with robotic vehicles on comets. Science works. Science produces antibiotics. So, anybody who chooses to say, oh, there’s no such thing as objective truth. It’s all subjective. It’s all socially constructed. Tell that to a space scientist. Manifestly science works, and the view that there is no such thing as objective truth doesn’t. When you write down a theory, the theory becomes your teacher. It becomes smarter than you in the way when Einstein wrote down the equations of general relativity, he did not know that they entail the existence of black holes. In that sense, the equations were smarter than Einstein’s. Einstein didn’t believe in black holes. For decades, the equations were very clear that they could exist, but Einstein said no. Turned out Einstein was wrong, and the equations were right. So it’s very interesting. We do these theories because we can learn from them. When you try to address the nature of things, you may find that asking different questions requires different ways of processing the underlying reality. For instance, in understanding the human mind, to understand it physically requires one kind of processing, and there’s every reason to think that we already have fundamental physical laws that are adequate for that kind of treatment. But to understand how a person works, how thought processes, moods and so forth add up to a personality and a human actor will require quite different ways of understanding in quite different ways of processing the underlying information structure, getting smarter.
