01.15.08
Reality vs. illusion
Interesting post from Frontal Cortex:
So I’m reading about the latest cosmological absurdity and feeling pretty smug. It turns out that, according to the equations, your existence is simply “some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space…Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.”
Aren’t those physicists funny? Once upon a time, we thought quantum mechanics was weird. Then came string theory and all those extra unfolded dimensions. And now comes the latest hypothesis, which is so surreal it’s almost nihilistic. Apparently, I’m just an elaborate illusion, a fictional figment of the universe. Only the equations are real.
But then I started thinking about neuroscience, my own specialty. According to the facts of neuroscience, your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you, or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don’t even exist. You are simply an fancy kind of cognitive fakery, an “epiphenomenon” of the cortex. The self is a fiction.
This idea is hardly newsworthy – the ghost was expelled from the machine a long time ago – and yet we often forget just how crazy the concept really is. Think about it: the facts of modern science contradict the most basic facts of our experience. If we know anything, it’s that we are real, that our first-person experience is lucid, vivid and tangible. We feel like more than just a loom of electrical synapses. And yet, what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland is also true of self-consciousness: “there is no there there.”
My worry is that the experiments of modern science, both in physics and neuroscience, are becoming increasingly detached from the empirical actuality of everyday life. Our sciences are turning themselves into immaculate abstractions, unable to reduce or solve or even investigate the only reality we will ever know. Instead, that reality is disregarded as an “illusion”. That hardly strikes me as a satisfying answer.
My comment at his blog:
Enmeshed as we are in the antics of phenomenal activity, it isn’t surprising that our immediate (empirical, daily) experience is at variance with the underlying facts (truth) of existence. Is anyone surprised that (for example) a cat’s empirical experience doesn’t touch of the underlying truth of existence? We’re just primates who talk: why would we have special God-like immediate knowledge of underlying reality?
That said, the picture that emerges above reminds me strongly of some of the teachings of Buddhism. Did that not strike you as well?
Eric said,
16 January 2008 at 3:51 am
The Buddhist angle was one of the first things that struck me on reading this as well.
But, to make another point: doesn’t it ever occur to anyone that our understanding of physics might actually be deeply flawed? I think something, or several somethings, has or have been overlooked and the entire edifice has gone wrong somehow. With a bit of luck I still have thirty years in me, and I look forward to seeing the next generation of physicists laugh at the stuff their forebears – our contemporaries at present – came up with.
God does not play dice, it was said. That’s as may be, but given the current state of physics it seems that he sure likes a good laugh …