Posted on 04/27/2018 12:52:16 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Every generation tends to believe that its views on the nature of reality are either true or quite close to the truth. We are no exception to this: although we know that the ideas of earlier generations were each time supplanted by those of a later one, we still believe that this time we got it right. Our ancestors were naïve and superstitious, but we are objective—or so we tell ourselves. We know that matter/energy, outside and independent of mind, is the fundamental stuff of nature, everything else being derived from it—or do we?
In fact, studies have shown that there is an intimate relationship between the world we perceive and the conceptual categories encoded in the language we speak. We don’t perceive a purely objective world out there, but one subliminally pre-partitioned and pre-interpreted according to culture-bound categories. For instance, “color words in a given language shape human perception of color.” A brain imaging study suggests that language processing areas are directly involved even in the simplest discriminations of basic colors. Moreover, this kind of “categorical perception is a phenomenon that has been reported not only for color, but for other perceptual continua, such as phonemes, musical tones and facial expressions.” In an important sense, we see what our unexamined cultural categories teach us to see, which may help explain why every generation is so confident in their own worldview. Allow me to elaborate.
The conceptual-ladenness of perception isn’t a new insight. Back in 1957, philosopher Owen Barfield wrote:
“I do not perceive any thing with my sense-organs alone.… Thus, I may say, loosely, that I ‘hear a thrush singing.’ But in strict truth all that I ever merely ‘hear’—all that I ever hear simply by virtue of having ears—is sound. When I ‘hear a thrush singing,’ I am hearing … with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling and … will.” (Saving the Appearances)
As argued by philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, science itself falls prey to this inherent subjectivity of perception. Defining a “paradigm” as an “implicit body of intertwined theoretical and methodological belief,” he wrote:
“something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception itself. What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training there can only be, in William James’s phrase, ‘a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.’”
Hence, because we perceive and experiment on things and events partly defined by an implicit paradigm, these things and events tend to confirm, by construction, the paradigm. No wonder then that we are so confident today that nature consists of arrangements of matter/energy outside and independent of mind.
Yet, as Kuhn pointed out, when enough “anomalies”—empirically undeniable observations that cannot be accommodated by the reigning belief system—accumulate over time and reach critical mass, paradigms change. We may be close to one such a defining moment today, as an increasing body of evidence from quantum mechanics (QM) renders the current paradigm untenable.
Indeed, according to the current paradigm, the properties of an object should exist and have definite values even when the object is not being observed: the moon should exist and have whatever weight, shape, size and color it has even when nobody is looking at it. Moreover, a mere act of observation should not change the values of these properties. Operationally, all this is captured in the notion of “non-contextuality”: the outcome of an observation should not depend on the way other, separate but simultaneous observations are performed. After all, what I perceive when I look at the night sky should not depend on the way other people look at the night sky along with me, for the properties of the night sky uncovered by my observation should not depend on theirs.
The problem is that, according to QM, the outcome of an observation can depend on the way another, separate but simultaneous, observation is performed. This happens with so-called “quantum entanglement” and it contradicts the current paradigm in an important sense, as discussed above. Although Einstein argued in 1935 that the contradiction arose merely because QM is incomplete, John Bell proved mathematically, in 1964, that the predictions of QM regarding entanglement cannot be accounted for by Einstein’s alleged incompleteness.
So to salvage the current paradigm there is an important sense in which one has to reject the predictions of QM regarding entanglement. Yet, since Alain Aspect’s seminal experiments in 1981–82, these predictions have been repeatedly confirmed, with potential experimental loopholes closed one by one. 1998 was a particularly fruitful year, with two remarkable experiments performed in Switzerland and Austria. In 2011 and 2015, new experiments again challenged non-contextuality. Commenting on this, physicist Anton Zeilinger has been quoted as saying that “there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure [that is, observe] about a system has [an independent] reality.” Finally, Dutch researchers successfully performed a test closing all remaining potential loopholes, which was considered by Nature the “toughest test yet.”
The only alternative left for those holding on to the current paradigm is to postulate some form of non-locality: nature must have—or so they speculate—observation-independent hidden properties, entirely missed by QM, which are “smeared out” across spacetime. It is this allegedly omnipresent, invisible but objective background that supposedly orchestrates entanglement from “behind the scenes.”
It turns out, however, that some predictions of QM are incompatible with non-contextuality even for a large and important class of non-local theories. Experimental results reported in 2007 and 2010 have confirmed these predictions. To reconcile these results with the current paradigm would require a profoundly counterintuitive redefinition of what we call “objectivity.” And since contemporary culture has come to associate objectivity with reality itself, the science press felt compelled to report on this by pronouncing, “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality.”
The tension between the anomalies and the current paradigm can only be tolerated by ignoring the anomalies. This has been possible so far because the anomalies are only observed in laboratories. Yet we know that they are there, for their existence has been confirmed beyond reasonable doubt. Therefore, when we believe that we see objects and events outside and independent of mind, we are wrong in at least some essential sense. A new paradigm is needed to accommodate and make sense of the anomalies; one wherein mind itself is understood to be the essence—cognitively but also physically—of what we perceive when we look at the world around ourselves.
Gender identity is a function of the dominant aspect of consciousness, regardless of gender.
Yes. :)
Yes, and No.
Bring a Costco rotisserie chicken home and you’ll find out right away if your cat is alive
I agree entirely. It’s actually amazing to me how much we can comprehend, or at least conjecture about, with our 3-3.5 pound brains, and the flickering short existence our lifetimes in this world represent.
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I once read an article that proposed the human brain itself is connected to some dimensions beyond the readily observable, which might account for our seeming ability to hold more knowledge than 3 lbs of organic material should be capable of holding. A hidden, but spiritual level perhaps?
I will find out this morning. I have two mugs, one with a live car and one with s dead cat. The cats become visible when I poor coffee in them.
Ah, yes - "The more you amass money, the closer to the speed of light your relatives approach. And busty gold diggers, too."
Ridiculous! Reality is just fine, thank you, without “scientists” telling us that reality is not reality.
So you’re saying that things can’t exist unless they have a PLACE to exist. In these cases, that “place” is the observer.
It’s the “tree falls in a forest” koan.
If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? That depends....
Wanted:
Great insight!
I think the important thing to realize is that our current concept of reality is flawed in that we have this perception that “the speed of light” is the necessary upper limit on interactions. From the example i have given in regard to the radiation of IR in a hard vacuum it is clear this is not the case. The fact that the photon cant leave until it has a place to go means there is an instantaneous interaction between the atom that radiates and the one that receives but in spite of that immediacy the photon cannot actually transfer that energy any faster than the speed of light. It is like there are two different things going on. In regard to the ability to transfer the energy it is like the two atoms are in direct contact but in the actual transfer they are in different locations. IMHO the issue you mention about needing a place to exist and that place is the observer is an imaginary metaphysical conundrum that exists only because of our limited understanding. IOW we are being distracted by something that is unimportant and failing to see what is staring us in the face. The question about the tree falling in the forest is man’s attempt to put himself at the center of the Universe IMHO.
On my bookshelf.
I read it as a form of energy generally thought to roam free can’t move in space/exchange its energy until a spot somewhere else has already received it. The delay should be measurable by the speed of light for the transmission of the energy wave/particle, but the final effect (heat transfer) occurs instantaneously—even if totally across the universe.
It has a parallel with entanglement.
Thank you. So the “next step” for me seems to be what we are witness to in what we refer to as “reality” is not so much “Plato’s Cave” or even Kesey’s “Movie Theatre” but something infinitely more complicated. Mass and distance are almost illusions connected by light. Something very strange is going on here. And think about the constraint you mention in regard to “it seems the photon can’t move until it has a place to land”. So photons that left stars in galaxies billions of light years away left that star before our planet, much less my retina, were even created? Sort of smashes our concept of time.
We are being told how naive we are to think you can build a big beautiful majestic universe on a small number of principles our puny human brains can comprehend.
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Maybe that’s the case if a person is a strict determinist like Einstein. But others, who believe in free will, would expect to find something odd like QM.
So, at least the heat from that star continued to reside where it was until our eyes caught it.
But the photon was allowed to move, without bringing with it the heat.
But the photon couldn’t leave until it had “permission” and that permission was given billions of years ago. Bizzare. It seems to point to an “inter connectedness of all things” at an extremely intimate level.
I agree that “something very strange is going on here”.
Science’s demand for strict materialism is part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Consciousness may well permeate many things that we believe have no consciousness—and may be an integral part of all that is...
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