Stuart's Thoughts 6/8/2018

Reality Revisited

Several books recently read deal with the topic of reality and since having commented on reality in past writings, it seems appropriate to provide an update, primarily to clarify my own thinking on the subject.  Thinking at the time of those earlier comments that it’s amazing that such a small word with a simple meaning can lead you in so many directions of uncertainty.  Of course, as noted in the past, the definition of reality doesn’t even move you off square 1.  The definition of reality i.e., all that exists doesn’t seem to say any more than the word, reality, itself.  Perhaps in reviewing some of the concepts covered in three books by Carlo Rovelli, “Reality Is Not What It Seems”, “Seven Brief Lessons On Physics” and “The Order of Time” as well as the the book “Biocentrism” by Robert Lanza, a clearer understanding of the concept of reality may emerge.

Carlo Rovelli is an eminent physicist who has made the effort to explain the mysterious subject of quantum mechanics to we laymen, a truly daunting task.  In his book, “The Order of Time”, Rovelli reveals the central point at the outset by saying “Let’s begin with a simple fact: time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level”.  The rest of the book simply elaborates on that idea, first introduced to the world by Albert Einstein, i.e., that time is not an absolute.  It is not a constant and it really doesn’t flow as we often say in referencing the flow of time or the march of time.  Time is a relative quantity.  At very high speeds or in the vicinity of a massive object such as a planet, it slows down.  A person living in the mountains at high altitude ages faster than his twin who ives at sea level or if one twin headed out into space on a rocket ship that traveled close to the speed of light, he may age only an hour or so while his twin on earth is old because his twin was away on his journey for 30 earth years.  Time is not a constant but varies dramatically throughout the universe depending on local conditions and relative to other related factors.  In most cases, time is an artificial construct that has been invented by mankind for convenience.  However, there is one concept in physics that rescues time from the trash heap of useless ideas and that is the relentless, one way, march of entropy throughout the universe.  The ever present, unidirectional march of increasing entropy is the one process in nature dictating a constant marching of time.  Entropy never decreases.  It always increases and thus, defines a progression of time.

Rovelli points out that space, like time, is also not a defined object of reality but rather a property created by interaction of processes or as Einstein stated in his theory of general relativity, space is the gravitational field.

Further erosion of the old, classic, idea of reality occurs when we dive into the wacky world of quantum mechanics as detailed in Rovelli’s “Reality Is Not What It Seems”.  Sub atomic particles, eg. electrons, can never be observed in a fixed location.  Until they are actually focused upon by an observer, they merely exist as an undefined probability cloud.  When we try to pin them down to a specific location, they jump wildly hither and yon.  The unpredictability feature of the quantum world assures that we can never be sure of the physical properties of its components.  If we know a particle’s  spin, we cannot know it’s location and vice versa.  Add Robert Lanza’s theory of biocentrism to this uncertainty of the quantum world and the slippery concepts of space and time and you have anything but a solid concept of reality.

Biocentrism

Lanza believes that Life and consciousness are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the universe, a new way of seeing reality. What eludes us is the big picture.  We provide interim answers, we create new technologies from our ever expanding knowledge of physical processes, we dazzle ourselves with applications of our new found discoveries but we do badly at the one key area, which unfortunately encompasses all the bottom line issues: what is the nature of this thing we call reality, i.e., the universe as a whole? 

Lanza points out that we have ignored a critical component of the cosmos, shunted it out of the way because we didn’t know what to do with it.  This component is consciousness.  Our science to date has failed to recognize those special properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality.

Biocentrism revolves around the way a subjective experience, which we call consciousness, relates to a physical process. Most comprehensive theories of reality fail to take into account one crucial factor: we are creating that reality, a biological creature that fashions the stories, that makes the observations and that gives names to things. A central theme of biocentrism is that the animal observer creates reality and not the other way around.

Indeed, a bit of thought will make it obvious that without perception, there can be no reality.  The only things that we perceive are our perceptions (George Berkeley).  What we unambiguously recognize as existence must begin with life and perception.  There is no independent, external universe outside of biological existence.

So, after reading the books by Carlo Rovelli and Robert Lanza, how do i define reality?  My thoughts are that reality is all encompassing.  It includes the classic physics of Sir Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clark Maxwell and a long list of others along with the revolutionary relativity theories of that genius of geniuses Albert Einstein.  I also believe that Lanza’s biocentrism belongs in the mix but I’m not sure that in the end it trumps all the others. There’s really no way of knowing how fundamentally important biological life is to reality.  Like so many ideas, once you’ve stated all of the facts as they are known, the final step in addressing the ultimate question, i.e, how was the universe and, in fact “reality” itself, created comes down to a personal choice of belief, one that, thus far,  must stand above a solid foundation of scientific fact.  Has all of this been created in the mind of humans as suggested by Lanza’s biocentrism?  Has it been created by a supreme being as suggested by the world’s religions or has it arisen from a prior universe or alternate reality? Perhaps the “Big Bang” was the emission of a super immense black hole that had previously consumed an entire earlier universe?

What do you think ?