PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSIONS, STARTING WITH REALITY.

Unfortunately, discussion on the above topic requires the use of language and logic, both of which have been proven to be inadequate for the task. Language has been unmasked; instead of being an ontologically neutral instrument, capable to describe and discuss any topic, it has been found to have its own "baggage", and its use itself constitutes a branch of philosophy. So, for my discussion of the topics below, it is suspect. As for logic, it too has been proven to be non-inclusive, that is to say the use of syllogisms is not enough, and Goedel has proven that all (actually, those that are powerful enough) deductive systems are incomplete, hence Hilbert’s (and Russell’s) dream of mathemticising logic and philosophy cannot be fulfilled. I could spend a great deal of time and effort to follow the footsteps of others to explain the above predicament and then bemoan it, and maybe succumb to the Wittgensteinian temptation of remaining silent about the most important issues. Instead, I will merely make obeisance to the above problems, try to be as clear as possible, and accept the limitation of Language (Truth?) and Logic.

REALITY

Most philosophical and scientific discussions sooner or later have to face this topic. The most thoughtful ones start with the Nature of Reality (whatever that is.). Few distinguish two totally different questions, both loosely speaking can be framed as "What is Reality?". Most discussions start with the discussion of what I term the Nature of Reality #2, (NR2), and start describing it, most often by distinguishing it from appearance.

The second, and in my opinion, more important question is what a description of Reality would look like, not how it is, but what entity, what description would qualify. So I am at the meta level. This question I would abbreviate as NR1. What I would like to discuss first is what a Reality would have to be to qualify for NR1.

I too notice that I immediately have to clarify my term, and defining it by its negation. Fortunately, the Oxonian philosopher, Austin too agrees with me, pointing out that "real" is a "trouser word", it is what is not real wears the trouser. He points out that the predicate, " is real" has a different form than "is red". We can look at blood and see that it has the color red. "Real" doesn’t have the same property. "Red" inheres in an object in a way real isn’t. Everything that is is real, in the same way that everything that is exists. "Existence is not a predicate", said, I believe, Kant, and I echo his lead about real: real is not a predicate.

The reason the above is relevant is that Reality suffers the same malaise: what is not Reality?

As much as I would like to define it instantly, as a provisional definition, I wilI appropriate Wittgenstein’s definition of the world: Reality is all that is and is the case. The problem with this definition is that, while it is unexceptionable, we do not know what is, let alone what is the case. Hence I need to proceed in a somewhat different manner.

I think I will proceed slowly, and somewhat historically. The most obvious way to define Reality is to separate it from Appearance. Alas, this immediately open up a larger can of worms than I would like to handle, since an appearance itself has a reality, except maybe with a lower case "r".

The usual treatment point to delusions, illusions, mirror images and bent sticks, trying to tease apart the "essence" of Reality from its appearance. In this view, appearances can be deceiving: a stick is really straight, but if immersed halfway in water it appears bent. Hence in Reality, sticks are straight. Similarly, a mirror image a person is not real, behind the mirror there is no live person. Also, being close to an object makes it look large, being away from it makes it appear small. The real object should be independent from its appearance.

Furthermore, our senses are not all-encompassing. We do not notice the real small, like molecules or atoms, let alone electrons, nor do we able to perceive the real large or the far, like distant galaxies. We only see a portion of the color spectrum, hear only a part of the decibel scale. Hence our senses, through which we experience Reality are not good guides.

Realizing this, one can separate Reality from Appearance. I know I am giving short shrift to this treatment, because it is not all that relevant to my treatment. Suffice it to say that at first blush it would be desirable to define Reality as that which remains when all the distortions of appearance have been removed. If we could develop a machine which records everything objectively, maybe we could look at the evidence and gain a picture of Reality. Alas, this simplistic view will not suffice; we still have to be involved in deciding what to measure and record.

We cannot separate Reality from ourselves, not only because of the above, but because the very fact that our senses are at times distort, at times are inadequate, is also a fact, hence this fact, and all the underlying biases are also part of Reality. Any description of Reality must take into account the fact that there are observers whose very act of observing results in different description of Reality. This is not the Heisenberg principle however similar it appears

In addition, Reality must take into account understanding...

Realty then is a description and explanation of everything there is, and of every possible interaction between them. In this way, there is no dichotomy between Appearance and Reality, since a description of the latter will contain understanding and explanation of the former. What now remains is to flesh out this skeleton, to find out how Reality is in the World. This is the task of N2, the nature of reality of the second kind.

(Please note that my description does not allow for "different Realities", higher levels of Reality, different planes of Reality. If such things exist, they are real, no more, no less than that of our senses and reasons, and certainly not higher, except maybe in an Ethical sense, in which altruism, for instance is higher moral than the tenet "an eye for an eye" is. But both are Ethical norms).

NR2:

We are now ready to see how Reality is, or more precisely our Reality as we as Homo Sapiens in our Universe experience and deduce it.

Our view of what Reality is changes with improvement in our observing and reasoning capabilities. In the beginning, Man thought that what he saw and experienced was all that was real. The data of the senses was all which was used, the Earth was stationary, and the starry sky, whatever it was distant and revolving.

The first major dislocation was the Copernican revolution, a prototype of the type of event which necessitated revising Reality. This event has been described hundreds of times before, there is no need for me to elaborate it, except to indicate its paradigmatic position in a series of event requiring subsequent revising Reality. The Copernican worldview, coupled with Newtonian laws prevailed untroubled for several hundred years, when a series of shattering scientific findings shook up our view of Reality.

Darwinian Evolution, radiation and quantum findings, the theory of Relativity, and the Big Bang theory, all within about 50 years from each other have altered our view of Reality in an even more drastic way.

Relativity:

I want to discuss extremely briefly Einstein’s contribution first. His discovering the equivalence of matter and energy itself was a pivotal finding, overshadowed by the conclusion of his Special Theory of Relativity, that time, our most cherished concept, is not absolute, that it is only one of the dimensions, not qualitatively different from the three spatial coordinates. Coupled with the conclusion of his General Theory of Relativity, that gravity is merely the distortion of space due to mass, it has resulted in a vast revising of our view of Reality: to accept it, we had to give up common sense, or at least common sense as inherited from thousand of years of our History.

Block Universe:

As drastic as Einstein’s findings were, they still described a Universe (or a Reality) which was fixed, in a sense that its parts had definite properties that could be measured or calculated. Reality was strange but accessible. For any amount of energy one could calculate the equivalent matter which could be created from it, for any speed and distance one could calculate the amount of time elapsed; the measurements corresponded to the theory. There still was a fixed, safe Reality.

Quantum Reality:

The above view of Reality received an even greater shock from studies on subatomic particles. They not only indicated that in our World it is not possible to simultaneously ascertain orthogonal properties, like position and momentum of subatomic particles (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle), but that it is meaningless to even ask what these are apart from the measurement. In essence it is the essence of the measurement, or more accurately its conscious observation, which brings the event about. By this (the Copenhagen) interpretation, there is no fixed Reality independent of the act of observation. Its corollary is that Reality is such that observation is required for a subatomic event to come into being, and we have the freedom to choose which property to observe.

The idea that such strange Reality is restricted to subatomic particle was dispelled by the realization that there is no qualitative difference between subatomic and other particles. The paradigmatic illustration, described countless of times, Schroedinger’s cat indicates the difficulties: In this (hopefully) thought experiment, a cat is locked in a box in which a poisonous capsule is connected to a device which is triggered if a radioactive particle is emitted from an adjacent material. The probability of emission is 0.5, that is to say there is a 50% chance the cat will be killed. The emission is totally random, hence it can not be determined whether it will happen or not. Whether the cat is alive or not in the box cannot be determined until the box is opened. According to the best interpretation of quantum phenomena it makes no sense to talk about the state of the cat until the observation is open, until then the cat is half alive and half dead. Of course, the cat presumably knows all the time.

This paradox can be made more vivid by replacing the cat with a person. After opening the box, if he stays alive, we can ask him whether he had been alive during the experiment; he will, of course, answer in the affirmative. But we cannot know until the box is opened, and according to the interpretation, it makes no sense to even ask whether this person is alive or dead in the box, only the act of observation brings his state about.

The paradox indicates that quantum events can have consequences to regular, i.e. life-size events. This will become even more important when we ponder one of the deepest questions of Reality, its origin, or the origin of the Universe. As a preview, we may contemplate the following thought experiment. Suppose we increase the size of the box and place the entire laboratory inside. We then will not know whether the cat or the person is alive, until someone opens the box and observes the results. And

This paradox, so far not resolved, underlies our Reality. Suffice it to say that every attempt to explain it away creates as many contradictions as this one.

Big Bang.

In the 1920s Hubble has observed that the galaxies in the Universe recede from each other at speeds approximately proportional to their distances from each other. Extrapolating backwards, it was found that all galaxies converge at a single point, about 8-15 billion years ago. The current view is that the Universe came into being at that time as a result of a gigantic eruption, the Big Bang, from a singularity (maybe a single point of zero dimension) of infinite density. This eruption created Space, time, initial conditions, and maybe all laws of nature.

Scientists dislike the philosophical implications of singularities, and even more, of infinite dimensions, hence they sought to find an alternative explanation.

Quantum Fluctuations.

The Universe, this explanation also believes, from total vacuum. However, in quantum mechanical interpretation, that does not mean a total absence of matter; in fact vacuum is full of particles which can (and do) emerge spontaneously, provided they disappear (and the debt repaid) in such a short time that the Heissenberg Principle is not violated. According to this theory, the Universe was created from such a quantum fluctuation, and the ensuing violent inflation prevented matter to re-coalesce into the vacuum.

Strange as this hypothesis is, it is even more difficult to contemplate, since according to the prevailing interpretation, quantum events have no definite properties until the act of observation. But since no conscious observer was present for at least several billion years, we are faced with a paradox that the Universe did not really exist until the first conscious observer evolved, or that it could somehow evolve and have definite properties in the absence of observers.

Fortunately, Science is resourceful, and has an explanation. In a block Universe all 4 dimensions already exist, hence time is only one, and not privileged. In a sense, the creation of consciousness several billion years "later" can "retroactively" bring the Universe into being by conscious observation.

To recapitulate, Reality is the way the Universe behaves, the way the Universe is. This Universe, any other universe, multiverse, appearances, delusions, ESP, PSI, uncertainty principle, quantum uncertainty and anything else there is.

Does the Universe behave in any fixed way if there is no observer? Maybe not.

But even if a conscious observer is needed to bring it about, even if quantum events random and a priorily undeterminable, that is still Reality. I have trouble believing in universes in which all counterfactuals become factuals, but if that is how the Universe (the totality of everything with its laws) behaves, then that is Reality. Confusing? Yes. Hard to fathom? Yes. But still Reality.

I see no need to stipulate different realities, different levels of realities, or alternate realities.