Perception

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” — William Blake

Aldous Huxley used this as the inspiration for this book The Doors of Perception. The idea was then taken up by the band The Doors, who said, “there is the known and there is the unknown and in between are the doors of perception.” If you haven’t just consumed a potent batch of LSD while floating on your back in a heated pool, this quote may not make a whole lot of sense, but I think what Mr. B was getting at was… we cannot know what we cannot perceive.

Our Senses

What we, as humans, perceive comes to us through our senses. And in case you didn’t get through 3rd grade or just really like M. Night Shyamalan, we have 5 of them. But as Chuck Klosterman states in his book But What If We’re Wrong “our own senses are quite feeble when it comes to recording objective reality.”

I can “sense” directly when I get kicked in the nuts because I can feel— I can then see who did it and pummel them while hearing their screams while I taste their tears and smell the feces coming out of their bowels because of my revenge anger beating. But that’s about it. I can’t sense their thoughts, I can only surmise them.

What is Out There that We Cannot Perceive?

There is SO much that we cannot perceive — infrared, ultraviolet radiation, electromagnetic waves, low pitch sounds, etc. This is why it is ridiculous to completely rule out the concept of ghosts, or God, or anything else fundamentally unknowable. It would be like a dog “knowing” color doesn’t exist because they can’t perceive it. But it does. They simply don’t have the wiring and thus capacity to know it.

Our imaginations are limited by the variables we can perceive. Fantasy isn’t really “fantasy” at all — it’s basically just a re-combination of “normal” things we see all the time. A talking tree, morphing man and horse, etc. Aliens in movies basically always look somewhat like humans. They arrive in ships that look like ours and use mouths to utter sounds. Not terribly original, because we have a hard time being completely original because our limited senses won’t allow it.

Similarly, we explain things figuratively, using imagery that is well-known to use from our everyday lives: journey down a road, mountain to climb, across an ocean, window of opportunity, etc.

We are, in a sense (pun intended), bound by our limitations. This is probably frustrating for many sci-fi writers. We simply can’t write what we don’t know and no audience is going to enjoy something so esoteric.

It’s scary to think of all the things happening around us that we don’t have the tools to decode. Dog whistles, ultraviolet radiation, atomic collisions. We cannot perceive quantum physics without tools. Humans can’t “see” or register these things, but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Scientific Method

This gets into deeper questions concerning the very nature of reality itself. Is what we see all there is or is there another form of reality that we can’t even conceive?

We used to think the world was flat, that the earth was the center of the universe and even Aristotle thought that things fell to the earth because they “wanted” to be there. Our understanding of what we thought about how things worked was limited to our built-in sensors.

In Klosterman’s book, he questions whether in the future, our current understanding of how the earth works will someday turn out to look similarly stupid. He talked with Neil DeGrass Tyson who answered his question with an emphatic “no” —

“The only examples you can give of complete shifts in widely accepted beliefs — beliefs being completely thrown out the window — are from before 1600…What was different from 1600 onward was how science got conducted. Science gets conducted by experiment. There is no truth that does not exist without experimental verification of that truth — In the ancient world, science was connected to philosophy. Since the age of Newton, it’s become fundamentally connected to math. In the same way that religion defined cultural existence in the pre-Copernican age, the edge of science defines the existence we occupy today.” Chuck Klosterman, But What If We’re Wrong?, 2016

Basically — before 1600, we never measured anything. Since, then we have and thus, are less likely to be wrong.

Tools of Measurement

Much of our understanding of the world has changed due to our tools of measurement. In order to fill our vast data stores of information about the universe, we need to be able to measure what’s going on in the world.

We have invented thousands of ways to do just that — the microphone, camera, ruler, clock, scale, speedometer, accelerometer, compass, fMRI, X-Rays, and microscope allow us to see or record what used to be unseeable.

Ultraviolet radiation has existed since the dawn of time, but it wasn’t until 1801 that we discovered a way to perceive it. There’s a reason we call it ‘discovery’ and not ‘creation’ — Newton didn’t discover gravity so much as he ‘found’ it.

As Klosterman points out, the microscope was invented in 1603 and the telescope in 1609, right around the time our current understand of the universe started to unfold. We built CERN to discern more about the quantum universe and have since discovered more about the atomic world than ever before. Our measurements allow us to build models to predict actions and eventually create laws — seemingly immutable truths about the universe.

(search for Planet Nine, Neptune)

Why science and religion are not so different. A ‘God’ would need a language to express his creation and math is that language.

What tools haven’t we built to ‘discover’ that which we currently can’t perceive?

What is Reality?

In Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave, he imagines a cave in which there are people in chains, whose only perception of the world is in shadows cast along a wall by object sitting between the wall and a light. This is their reality, it is all they know. But it isn’t reality.

The allegory is probably related to Plato’s theory of Forms, according to which the “Forms” (or “Ideas”), and not the material world known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality.

Although it might seem insane that those shadows are reality, many of those things we thought in the past look ridiculous now, precisely because we can now measure and know with a degree of certainty that they aren’t true. Anyone who thinks the world is flat today is seen as insane, just as anyone who thought it was round back in the day was seen as insane.

But are we closer to the truth, because of our shiny new tools and toys? Perhaps. But then there are those who believe the more we find out, the harder the questions become. As Bill Bryson states in A Short History of Nearly Everything:

Matters in physics have now reached such a pitch that, as Paul Davies noted in Nature, it is “almost impossible for the non-scientist to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the outright crackpot — Karl Popper, whom Steven Weinberg has called “the dean of modern philosophers of science,” once suggested that there may not in fact be an ultimate theory for physics — that, rather, every explanation may require a further explanation, producing “an infinite chain of more and more fundamental principles.” A rival possibility is that such knowledge may simply be beyond us.

There are many theories about what exactly is going on. Much like the Allegory of the cave, Brian Greene talks about the Multiverse — the concept that there are an infinite number of different universes with infinite possibilities of what’s happening.

“As a species, the concept of “infinity” might be too much for us. We can define it and we can accept it — but I don’t know if it’s possible for humans to truly comprehend a universe (or a series of universes) where everything that could happen will happen. I suspect the human conception of infinity is akin to a dog’s conception of a clock.” Chuck Klosterman, But What If We’re Wrong?, 2016

When we get to these levels of comprehension, we try to frame difficult issues in terms of things we already know and understand — “there are as many stars in the milky way as there are grains of sand on the beaches of earth”, etc.

Then there is the simulation argument (Elon Musk is also a proponent of this) which Klosterman gets into as well. This basically states that the exponential advances in computing are such that it seems likely that whatever existence we inhabit can very likely be recreated by humans using technology in the future and that our world is simply one of those simulations. 2,000 years ago we were using clubs and now we can use technology to recreate human faces, voices, near personalities. CGI allows us to create virtually indistinguishable landscapes and environments. So think about what we’ll be able to accomplish in the next 10,000 years. Could our entire universe be the creation of some 16 year old in his parents garage?

What We Measure

We measure what we can. And assign importance to it.

Our “value” in society is typically measured by our net worth. But what if we found a way to measure happiness in a number that was publicly displayed to all? I believe that would fundamentally change the way people operated in the world. People wouldn’t work long hours in jobs they hate to buy things they don’t need. But “perception is reality” — we do these things so others perceive us as being happy. We can trick people like this because there is no objective way to measure happiness, although I believe that also is likely to change in the future.