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!

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 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.