Stuart’s Thoughts  10/22/2020

The Grand Puzzle - Four Little Words-It’s A Numbers Game

I’ve long been intrigued by the concept of reality and whether or not an “absolute reality” actually exists.  I’ve suggested that rather than thinking that there is a single “absolute reality”, perhaps we should think of there being a universe of individual subjective realities.  After all, the reality that I picture may well be different, in various ways, than the version of reality in my neighbor’s mind.  For that matter, my reality may be unique and not entirely similar to anyone else’s concept of reality.

If we can uncouple our emotions, which run “wild” in this highly politicized season, we might explore the interesting observation that roughly half the U.S. population favors the reelection of Donal Trump as President while the other half favors rejecting Trump and electing Joe Biden.  I’ve heard this question stated another way that I’m sure would be even more difficult to decouple from emotion.  Many people have expressed the thought that Trump is the best, most successful, U.S. President in History while an essentially equal number believe him to be the worst.  Certainly, such an extreme  and evenly divided difference in opinion seems incompatible with there being a single absolute reality.  Either that or a very large segment of the population, i.e., ~50% are  totally out of touch with the proposed reality.  Presumably, the ultimate goal of all good citizens of the U.S. is for our country to elect that person who would do the best job and create the most positive outcome for our country.  Predicting the future is always uncertain but if an “absolute reality” actually existed and we all had a clear view of that reality, we would stand a good chance of making the best choice possible.  But actually, thanks to the multitude of confounding factors leading to our current highly politicized environment, we have two nearly equal versions of reality with nearly half of the population convinced that their view of reality is most correct.

I didn’t introduce this highly charged political question to initiate a political discussion but rather to demonstrate the unlikely existence of an “absolute reality” or at least one that the majority of people would subscribe to and accept.  My position is that while there may, in theory, be an absolute reality, there is a good chance that we may never know when or if we will ever recognize it.

To explain my thinking on the subject, I offer the following numbers game featuring the four little words - information, knowledge, truth and reality.  In playing this game, we need to shed our bad habits of self righteousness, arrogance, selfishness and hypocrisy.  We need to be open-minded, humble and willing to admit that, relative to the universe of knowledge that exists, we know very little, in fact as some have suggested, almost nothing.
Considering that we humans obtain information by way of our five senses: sight hearing, touch, smelling and taste, all of which have extremely limited ranges, I suspect that we may only be aware of a tiny percentage of all information that exists in our universe.  We could represent this limitation by assigning a very small value, perhaps 1%. Even that modest amount may be grossly exaggerated in spite of all the help we obtain from all our wonderful spectrum of instrumentation and technology.  We can get a glimpse of this limitation when we consider how little we actually know regarding two of the most significant aspects of our universe, its origin and the largest things believed to exist, black holes.  We believe that the universe began approximately 4.5 billion years ago with the “Big Bang”, the creation and rapid inflation of all matter and energy in the current universe from an infinitely small point source, or “ singularity”.  The only problem with this description of the beginning of everything is that our current “Laws of Physics” “breakdown” as we look back to that creation event.  With respect to “Black Holes”, after listening to an hour’s program of description and explanation from a panel of our most brilliant astrophysicists, the program ended with them unanimously admitting that, in spite of all the elaborate theories of how black holes behave and why they are so significant in the structure of the universe, we still have no definitive proof that “Black Holes” actually exist.  When we can’t even yet assign such centrally important aspects of our universe to the picture of “Absolute Reality”, where are we?
I propose the following game involving the four little, but very key, words to provide an image of where we might exist in this pursuit.

Let’s think of “Absolute Reality” as the scene or picture that is destined to be  revealed as we assemble an enormous jigsaw puzzle composed of a number, just short of infinity, of individual elements of truth.  Let’s think of each individual puzzle piece as a speck of information.  As we collect pieces (bits of information), we try to connect them together.  When we succeed in connecting two pieces of the puzzle (bits of information), we have an element of knowledge.  However, in order to verify that this element of knowledge represents a fact (i.e., truth), we must be able to string several elements of knowledge together.  These facts are what scientists regard as theories and if they survive the test of time long enough, they may be considered the “Laws of Physics” laws of some other hard science or social science, or ultimately, “The Laws of Nature”.  If and when we are able to connect together all possible facts or truths, we will reveal that grand puzzle or the spectacular Mosaic of Absolute Reality”.  But for now, just think of how far we are from that accomplishment if you accept the original premise that we are aware of only a tiny fraction of all of the information contained in our universe.  in addition to revealing the remaining 99%+ of the total bank of information, we need to join together trillions of bits of information in order to form hundreds of billions of elements of knowledge and eventually billions of facts.  Now all we have to do is figure out how to interconnect these billions of facts (truths) to reveal that elusive picture of absolute reality.  I won’t even suggest how impossible our task would become if we considered the thoughts of some, i.e., our universe may only be one of many in a multiunivercse reality.