On whether reality or truth even exists

A friend referred me to a truly delightful website today,   the Institute for Art and Ideas and their weblog "Changing how the world thinks - an online magazine of big ideas."     I was immediately captivated by a post "The Fantasy of Reality-- Why belief in reality is a dangerous mistake", which I disagreed with entirely but found a great stimulus to examining why it was I disagreed and articulating my own viewpoint.

I made a comment - or tried to, since I can't see that the comment was actually submitted or accepted by my pushing the "Post" button.  In any case, I am cross-posting my comment below, except I added a few images for fun.  Enjoy!

======================

 Actually,  speaking as one who has actually taken a course in the General Theory of Relativity in graduate school in astrophysics,  Einstein dealt precisely with the question of how to deal with a world in which different diligent observers get different results.  That is the  whole POINT of the Theory of Relativity -- that it is possible,  mathematically,  to precisely, accurately, and with good effect tease apart the physical entity that is being observed from the artifacts caused by the accidental context or "reference frame" of the observer.    He demonstrated how all the apparent paradoxes in measurement went away when this was done -- all careful observers,  after correcting for the distortions caused by the accidental choice of lens on their camera,   could and would report the same results.     This message is almost universally misquoted and misunderstood as saying "everything is relative" and taken to mean "there is no truth."

I don't know whether he spent much time wondering whether the results everyone agreed upon were "real" or not, but he showed that there was a uniquely cleanest reference frame, what he called a "proper" reference frame, in which the mathematics of the observed physical phenomenon was most simply and elegantly explained, and in which it was by far easiest to compute ramifications and consequences that predicted other observations about the world that have been shown to be true.  

What he directed people to focus on were precisely those things that did not change regardless who was observing them -- the "invariants of the motion."    For a simple example, imagine one observer of a simple billiard-ball collision in a stationary reference frame and another observer in a world where all dimensions, including both space and time, have been scrunched up by traveling near the speed of light or being near a massive black hole, or even being in an accelerated reference frame such as a rocket ship or elevator.   

These two observers would have dramatically different measurements of the positions and velocities and accelerations of the two billiard balls -- BUT,  using their own numbers, they would each observe that, in this collision,  both "energy" and "momentum" were conserved, and that Newton's Law  ( F=ma,  force = mass times acceleration) was applicable and correctly predicted the results actually observed.  So, yes, they would measure different masses, different positions, different velocities, different times, different accelerations, and yet,  astonishingly,  all of those differences exactly cancelled out when they were put into an equation such as F=ma.    The skewing and stretching of space and time resulted in some quantities getting larger, and other quantities getting smaller,  in such a way that the product of the two exactly balanced out.  Which is pretty amazing. And quite "cool".    The equations that appeared to be true,  or at least something upon which all observers in different times and places agreed,  were those things called "Scientific Laws."
  

I cannot speak as to the ULTIMATE nature of reality, or consciousness, or time, or language - and maybe no one can.  We are probably demonstrably unable to determine one way or another whether we "really exist" or are simply some higher-being's video game.  Heck, I run Windows 10 on my computer, but I also run Oracle VirtualBox,  which allows me to create a world, a window,  on this same computer, but one that is running, in my case the Ubuntu version of Unix.   If I "go into" my Ubuntu window and make it "full-screen" there is absolutely no program I can run or test I can do that will be able to "see" that I am now in a virtual container in a different larger world. At least, until I hit the ESCAPE key.   Philosophers might find this mental model and example useful.   In fact, the outside Windows universe CAN provide services for, or messages to the captive Unix universe, but the flip side only occurs if the Windows universe allows it.  The Windows operating system is 100% ( integer 100%) hidden from view and indetectable by any observations the Unix programs might run. That's the whole point -- to keep some rogue and runaway Unix program from crashing my entire Windows computer.  It's a security feature, not a bug.    Modelers of "God" and "man" take note.

On a more practical basis, while there may be no ultimate truth,  I think there are two take-away lessons from all this:  (1)  What we observe is, and what will always be,  a conflation of whatever is out there, and the mechanism by which we observe it -- the very active, very impactful lens and active filters of our perceptual system's "camera",  and the impact of biases, stereotypes, nearby-mental-models, etc. by which that fire-hose of data is resolved into a "mental impression and understanding",  and the Procrustean process which attempts to project that 4-Dimensional living understanding into or onto a 1-dimensional string of words whereby we try to "convey" it to another person or record it in our lab notebook.

But (2)  once we gain the intrinsic intellectual humility of realizing that such distortion is not a personal failing, we can get on with the process of actually comparing notes with each other to try to figure out what underlying "facts" or "local truth" could possibly explain the observations we make.

There are other physical processes that actually seem to "work" that could suggest further applicability to this discussion.  Maybe we do not NEED to sort out all the differences between people's perspectives and biases and histories -- maybe we can leap past that into where we really wanted to go,  which is to ask whether there is some way to aggregate, to assemble, to "add up" all these very tangled and messy individual observations, and by some magic like the Central Limit Theorem,   reach a collective realization that is vastly superior ( pick your criteria ) to any individuals noisy data-point.   If we can do that, then it doesn't matter to figure out who is "right" or who is "wrong". 

Well,  radio-astronomers came up with the mathematics, and then the electronics and computational super-computer required to take the separate observations of the sky, taken by different receivers and arrays and "dishes",   and to do what is called "aperture synthesis" and to input all these different 'observations" and produce at the output end a single, unified,  image of what is out there that is demonstrably better than any of the individual observations that went into it, by every criteria they care about. The result has less noise, counters local atmospheric distortions,  has better sensitivity to low-power ( faint ) signals,  and has immensely higher ability to resolve two nearby objects into two distinct objects, not a single larger blurrier fuzzier object as any individual radio-telescope sees it.

We might get somewhere constructive by trying to take heart from that result, and ponder how it might be applicable to the question of thousands or millions or billions of us humans trying to make sense of the world.     Maybe it's not "ultimate truth" we will be able to computer or resolve but it seems very likely to be "better" than what any one of us could accomplish.        

In aperture synthesis by the way,  it is extremely desirable to have the dishes as far apart as possible -- so we use telescopes in Sweden and combine signals with those in Chile and Australia to simulate a radio telescope the size of the Earth.     My final point is this -- it is diversity that provides high resolution.   God (?) forbid that we should all have similar views or be clustered all in one homogeneous context.   

We just need to find the secret of accomplishing the type of "unity with diversity" that maximizes the signal and minimizes the noise.    It's almost certainly not "optimal" or "true" but it's also almost certainly a way to find some common ground and avoid blowing each other to bits while arguing who is right.

Why aren't we all dead? A clue to SETI - the search for extra-terrestrial life

I was thinking today about SETI -- the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,"   I think SETI has it all wrong and that's why it's not finding anything or anyone out there despite an enormous search effort.

It's not that there's no one besides us to find -- it's that the entire premise, the mental model of the world, on which SETI is based is wrong.

Because we are talking about a civilization that is a billion years more advanced than we are,    not something like 200 years more advanced than us,  there is no reason I can think of to assume that we would even recognize what an artifact of such a civilization would look like. 

Well, golly,   if we cannot find signs of an advanced civilization that way how should we look? 

Maybe to them we are a diversion, a garden,   a pretty thing to watch grow.

Or maybe, they are doing more than just watching -- maybe like good gardeners the world round, the are actively intervening in Life here to assist it reaching some sort of completion.

If they were hostile, we'd already be dead.  But we're not, so they're not. But maybe they're not neutral either -- maybe they actually are more like loving gardeners, tending to the evolving Earth.

That's just speculation but it leads to a good solid Scientific question --

If they were intervening here,  would we know it? 

There are two reasons we might not see it:

(1)     US anthropologists visiting old cultures try to take great care not to mess them  up by studying them.   It may be they are watching but not intervening because they are careful.

(2)    There are perfectly functional  devices, which I described before such as siphons and magnetrons, that do the job but have zero moving parts.    See my post "Amazing devices to impress your friends". Maybe they are advanced enough to know how to steer without pushing.  And we tend to believe that managing and manipulating something must involve pushing on it. On the other hand we are a clumsy and primitive race -- and our "art of management" and "art of government" leaves a lot to be desired.

Just as an example -- Say Joe drives his car into a ditch and needs help getting it out.  How would ET help without force?  Well,  they could see this coming, and back when Joe was deciding which route to take, they could nudge him slightly into feeling frisky and taking a different route today.  It violates no law of Physics, but it gets the car out of the ditch -- by seeing it coming and avoiding it.

The semi-miracle is that the event is dealt with by causing it to un-happen-in-the-first-place.

Actually, on a smaller scale, packets of light called photons have a similar creepy behavior where they seem to see something coming and react to it to avoid it coming.  There is the famous Young experiment -- light comes up to a wall with 2 slits in it, and has to pick a slit.  If it were a wave, it would generate an interference pattern on the far side ( see picture below ) but as a particle it can only go through one slit.  It does that, and yet only picks a direction to go that it would if it had gone through both slits, which it hasn't and yet which it sort of has.

So the revisited SETI question isn't how to detect radio waves from them -- it's to figure out where to look to find unmistakable and unambiguous signs that someone not from here is, in fact here now, messing about with things but in a very low key fashion.  Near zero, but not zero.

You see, it's relatively easy to design an experiment to notice unexpected forces lifting Joe's car out of a ditch, and we would have noticed those by now, but it's quite another matter, and a tricky one, to detect something causing mild nudges from time to time in Joe's mood or preferences, even though the physical result is the same.

This brings to mind an old Chinese story about how the best doctors use the least visible intervention. This is from Thomas Cleary's introduction to the ancient book The Art of War

 A Chinese lord once asked his physician, a member of a family of healers, which of them was the most skilled in the art.

The physician, whose name was such that his name became synonymous with medical science in China, replied, "My eldest brother sees the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house.

My elder brother cures sickness when it is still minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood."

"As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords."

So how could we tease such an effect out of the ambiguous zone??   What I'm looking for here is the right question to ask, a simple question like the the question asked by the astronomer Olber once upon a time, namely,

Why is the sky dark at night?

Well, duh,  because the sun has set dummy!  No, it turns out in an infinite universe,  regardless which direction you point, in that direction sooner or later there will be a star. And together, they should all add up so that the sky should be as bright, in any direction, as the surface of the sun.

Here's a better full description of what turned out to be a great question:  Olber's Paradox.
The paradox resulted in Astronomers realizing that the universe must be expanding, so that the red-shift from stars moving faster and faster away from us in the distance cancelled out the fact that the volume of space for stars got larger and larger as you drew a larger sphere around the earth.

Well in our observation of life on Earth, I'm asking my echo of Olber's Paradox, namely

Why are we not all dead?

This seems like a neutral, fair, scientific question.

It's of interest because it might turn out to be an indicator that there is some kind of outside intervention in outcomes occurring here.  Here's my reasoning.

We are in a battle with microbes and viruses, right? They are perfectly capable of killing us, at least on an individual basis.   Heck, the Spanish Flu in 1918 killed more people than the number who died in all of World War I.   Wikipedia describes The Black Death in Europe

The Black Death, also known as the Pestilence, the Great Plague or the Plague, or less commonly the Black Plague, was one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia and peaking in Europe from 1347 to 1351...The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population.

Deadly viruses today have the huge advantage over 1350 of more cities on Earth densely packed with tens of millions of vulnerable poor people with no health care to act as sort of gasoline-soaked rags in the basement just looking for a spark,  idiot scientists experimenting with recombinant-DNA,  and lately, jet aircraft travel world-wide.

And, all of our magical antibiotics are running out of steam.   This is a huge known problem.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is worried about pandemics. Shouldn't we?

But back to our larger time scale and the question I asked above. Why haven't viruses already won? Why aren't we all dead?  If viruses can mutate far faster than Drug Companies can generate vaccines,and if we are in a life-or-death race against them, then it seems the outcome is a certainty that we will lose, or should have already lost.  It's like opening the faucet wide into a bath to fill it with water ( the viruses ) while we also open a much smaller drain ( the Drug Companies ).  The outcome is clear, sooner or later that tub is going to overflow.

 It seems like something we should build a simulation model of and try to tweak it to fit the reality we see around us.

One possibility is that there is some mathematical law that determines such outcomes and, if i understood that law, I'd see that out of 100,000 simulation runs,  almost all don't die: maybe death is statistically very unlikely.  Ok, that's one.

Another  possibility is that by modeling this we would discover that yes, with 99% certainty we can state that there must be some other factor in play because given all the empirical parameter we have, and our model of how things work ( basic pandemic model, etc.) we should indeed all be dead.   This is pretty important to address because it might be some factor that industry in its insatiable greed,   is at the current time undermining and destroying.   It would be good to know that.

In my mind this is the kind of question that Computational Public Health could and should be asking.

Unlike the risk of planetary extinction by being hit by an asteroid,  the death by virus risk is one that isn't stable over time, but one that is growing rapidly in our time,  aided by the trends of urbanization and growing inequality that are generating larger and larger dense pools of vulnerable people. 

This trend cannot continue.  It's like putting more and more people on a bridge.  Sooner or later the bridge will simply collapse.  Unless -- there is something else going on to make that not happen,

Sidebar -- Don't get me wrong.  Rich people are just as vulnerable.  A pandemic anywhere is a pandemic everywhere.   There is no safe place to hide.   In the US, with a huge hospital system, for example, there is also no "slack" -- there are essentially no empty beds in which to put a sudden rush of new sick people.   I used to work at a Hospital and we did a desk-top simulation of how the hospital would respond to a sudden influx of patients, and it was not pretty.   All the lobbies and corridors and then the parking lots would fill up with patients or those afraid they might be sick, and all new admissions would cease.   Your odds of seeing a doctor would be slim to none.  If you did manage to see one they would have no drugs left for you anyway.

Anyway, that's my thought for the day.  Your thoughts? Comment below!

God is here now, ready to help us -- a reason for Hope!

As a Scientist I believe in GOD, and a GOD who is right here ready to help us all if we simply turn and tune in and ask for help.   There, I said it, and put my career in Science on the line.

But, I put the word GOD in all capitals because I'm using that word in an uncommon sense, and need to keep reminding my readers that I am doing that.   In today's language,  I am talking about God-2.0,  a new version of God, like a new, improved version of a video game or App.   And there, I said it, so now I have also offended and outraged most Religious communities.

I'm losing friends and "Likes" and followers pretty fast here.    But I press onward, undaunted.

I want to address this post to the people who made it this far in reading it -- those who are willing to believe that our context, our universe on Earth,   is alive, awake, aware of us,  and at least partially responsive to our behaviors, actions, and words.   Maybe it's not Jupiter, or Thor, or some old white guy with a long beard on a throne in the sky, but there is definitely something going on here that rises above simply nature or even a larger term "Nature". 

And this is important because whatever is going on here, I believe,  interacts with us heavily in everything we do and to ignore it is to completely misunderstand why some things we do fail and why others succeed,  and to miss out on opportunities to succeed with way less effort and much greater impact in our daily lives.     We are immersed in and swimming in a sea of "tough love" -- it is not our servant to tap into and order about like some Genie in a bottle or some mystical loving parent, though it can "come through for us" and give us things that we would never achieve unaided.  It also is "tough" because there are some facts, rules, guidelines, restrictions on what sort of things we can get assistance on. 

We have to live by its rules, not expect it to live by ours.  This is no different from learning to live with the Law of Gravity -- it just is a fact we can like, hate, believe in, deny it, but regardless it will "rule" our lives all the same.    We all understand Gravity.   There is no "magic" involved,  just higher mathematics which, fortunately, we can be content to let other people understand.  This is just the way things are.   It is no big deal.    We can adjust to it and live with it.

So we all accept that there are things-like-Gravity,   part of the structural design of the world we live in, that we just have to live with.   A good question, and one that we never really articulate and ask out loud in school is

"How many more things like Gravity are there that we need to know about?"

Very much like the "Artificial Life" that I described in my last post here,  the definition of the term keeps changing as we learn more and more,  as it should.  After all we started with a very weak notion of what Artificial Life could be, and it truly needed updating over time.

Sadly,  just suggesting that we raise the question of whether we have this concept,  the meaning of the word "God" as correct and nuanced as possible, and as helpfully defined as possible,  raises a firestorm of heated outrage from all sides - Science, Religion,  and Atheism!   It is discouraging and I must digress for a moment to reflect upon why that is.

In fact, this digression takes up the rest of this post and I have to defer what I was actually trying to point to to my next post in order to keep this reasonably short and coherent.

Over the last 5000 years, as society has evolved, we learned more about the world around us. We added new concepts to our thinking, and refined old ones.   That is a normal and natural process,  which continues at a dizzying pace today, and we need more of it. 

It seems there are three distinct kinds of "facts" that behave quite differently when we try to update them in our minds and in society.  

There are neutral facts that no one cares if we change;  there are socially-connected facts that rock the boat somewhat if changed, but in a tolerable way;  and there are deeply-rooted-beliefs that set the boat on fire and overturn it if changed, and which trigger violent response, even death,  if even challenged, let alone changed.

No one ever seems to mention this or teach it, but it's a very useful distinction to learn.

So long as Scientists retreated from society and focused on neutral facts, like "momentum" they could play happily and no one really noticed or cared, unless maybe a cool documentary on the Discovery Channel came along to share.  Most of the so-called STEM subjects are in this category, and it is also termed "hard science" ,  a misnomer if there ever was one.

Socially-connected-facts are things like Psychology or Sociology or Economics or, surprise,  Geology and Astronomy.    Groups of people have set up camp around certain exact meanings of these facts,  and become agitated if someone rocks the boat.   The camps take on shape and names and become things like the "Chicago School of Economics".    Groups argue often heatedly about who has the better understanding and meaning of the same words.  But in general no one actually dies.

Deeply-rooted-beliefs, as I mentioned above, set the boat on fire and capsize it if challenged or changed.   Not just small camps, but entire nations or cultures argue heatedly over who is right and often are quite willing to go to war, killing or being killed in great numbers, to protect their own understanding of certain words and concepts.    Protestants go to war with Catholics in Ireland.  Sunni Muslims go to war with Shiites in most of the Middle East.   Christian Crusaders invade and attack all of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages.    Scientists like Galileo, suggesting the Earth is not in fact the center of the solar system,  risked death if they did not recant.

But these deeply-rooted-beliefs are not just about religion, or culture, or the role of women in society, or differences between races and racial identity.    So called Scientists also become emotionally attached to and even ardent defenders of certain understandings.    Revolutions and changes in "paradigms" such as Quantum Mechanics,  Plate Tectonics, or the nature of "disease" ( invisible tiny organisms living inside us? Really?!!!) were fiercely denounced and resisted and proponents of new ideas excluded from funding or mocked and shunned.

Heck, even the guy Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that women were dying in childbirth in the hospital because surgeons were not washing their hands, and tried to tell them that,  was driven out of practice and put in a mental institution where he quickly died. 

There are things that some people do not want to hear.

Anyway,  where all this was going is that the subject of the nature of GOD is one of those live-wire, hot-button topics that typically causes much heat and no light to emerge from a discussion or attempt to study and grasp the kernel of truth out of the shell of attached meanings of old.

I've spent most of my life believing that there is, indeed, something, some kernel of Truth that matters to me,   buried in and tangled up inside this bundle of meanings attached to the word GOD.  Yes, most of the simplistic meanings are just laughable and can be dismissed out of hand.  There is no dude in a white robe sitting on a throne running or ruining our lives.

But on the other hand, there are some aspects of reality that are as important as the Law of Gravity,  but equally invisible, that still change the outcome of what we try to do as surely as they change the trajectory of a ball we throw upwards.

It is just plain wrong not to try to investigate, in a clear-headed, skeptical but curious manner,  what those structural laws and design features of the world around us might be.  In my book, that is precisely what Science is all about and we should not be deterred by skulls on stakes and big signs that say "Forbidden territory -- all hope abandon ye who enter here!"

Heck with that.  Let's go see what is over there on the other side of the police tape.

To be continued in my next post!