“Subjective certainty is the new evidence…. [So] In this wilderness of unknowns, how do we decide what’s modern science and what’s modern folklore? What makes ET more believable than Bigfoot, apart from evidence?”….
“Multiverse theory is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to defend atheism. It makes no predictions, it gives no insight, it provides no control, it produces no technology, it advances no mathematics, it is a science in name only, because it is really metaphysics. — Rob Sheldon, who warns: “… [S]cience cannot thrive outside reality: ‘Now some will say that this is still a small price to pay for the freedom it provides from a creator-god.’ But I want to make it very clear what the terms of the exchange will be.”
“Most people believe that there is an objective reality out there and that our senses and our science directly convey information about the material world. ... The way physics has been going, realism is becoming difficult to defend.” — Stephen Hawking….Yet as Denyse O’Leary observes:
“Hawking is comfortable with non-realism: ‘I'm a positivist [he says]. ... I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don't know what [reality] is.’ The end of reality is captured in a telling vignette: The lead character in the film Happy Go Lucky, browsing in a bookshop, pulls Roger Penrose's “Road to Reality” from a shelf, glances at the title and puts it straight back, saying, ‘Oh, we don't want to go there!’ … [R]idding science of God has turned out to mean ridding it, not of religion, but of the need for evidence…. Here’s an alternative: On the road to reality, evidence must matter again. The weight of the evidence must count. And when it does count, if our cosmos is orderly, new approaches will emerge. They may be emerging now.”
Actually, I believe new approaches have been emerging, in the work of such physical cosmologist/theoretical biologists as David Bohm, Menas Kafatos, mathematician/theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, others. Their ideas have been resisted tooth-and-nail by the “establishment.”
Instead, the Hawkings and Everetts of this world evidently prefer to dump Reality as presented in observation, experience, and evidence if that’s what it takes to get rid of God. Of course, they destroy science itself in so doing. But they hardly seem to notice, or even to care.
Britain's Guardian asks, thinking about the multiverse, ‘Has physics gone too far?’ Perhaps a better question would be, is New Atheist cosmology failing as physics? Because, make no mistake, an admitted motive for seeking alternatives to the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of our universe is getting rid of their theistic implications.It seems to me the proper role of science is not to be getting rid of inconvenient evidence already strongly suggested to be valid by experimental scientific means (e.g., satellite studies of the cosmic microwave background which strongly indicate the necessity of a beginning in time as an explanation for the observed cosmic inflation/acceleration).
In consequence, I surmise that the “New Atheist” physicists have entirely evacuated the field of science in order to pursue ideas and objectives which are metaphysical through and through. And they are doing all this “under the color of science.”
There is an obvious analog to this in biology: Darwin’s theory. But space prohibits that investigation here.
For it’s time to close for now.
I’d just like to leave the reader with some telling insights from David Bohm:
“…[A] theory is primarily a form of insight, i.e., a way of looking at the world, and not a form of knowledge of how the world [actually] is….Thank you so much, dear Heartlander, for posting this splendidly thought-provocative article!
The Newtonian form of insight worked very well for several centuries but ultimately (like the ancient Greek insights that came before) it led to unclear results when extended into new domains. In these new domains, new forms of insight were developed (the theory of relativity and the quantum theory). These gave a radically different picture of the world from that of Newton (though the latter was, of course, found to be still valid in a limited domain). If we supposed that theories gave true knowledge, corresponding to “reality as it is,” then we would have to conclude that Newtonian theory was true until around 1900, after which it suddenly became false, while reality and quantum theory suddenly became the truth. Such an absurd conclusion does not arise, however, if we say that all theories are insights, which are neither true nor false but, rather, clear in certain domains, and unclear when extended beyond these domains…. — Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980
That appears to be a very subjective certainty.
I would say that your affliction is reality, Hawking . . . and you are dealing with it.
Seems to me this search is the same as the search for God...
So many options and opinions on this planet.....
Some never find God, and some never find Reality....
Others find Reality "In" their God... with others Reality "IS" their God..
Since both terms are abstract... they are "perceived"...
What one perceives as real others perceive as illusion..
As thoroughly a mental game of Chess as one could imagine..
Gambits parried in a dumpster dive for truth(Truth)...
What an adventure it is being Human...
Watching a baby grow into adulthood continues...
Even when that baby is old!......
****
Thank you so much for your excellent insights, dearest sister in Christ!
Thanks for the pings!
Once again, we are faced with the question. THE BIG ONE!!
I’m always delighted and energized to see these threads on FR, knowing that there are people out there pondering things much bigger than themselves!
It’s sad that I don’t have the time to read all the references and do a proper analysis/critique of all the ideas presented.
So, without further adieu, what is reality?
There are a couple answers, I will spell out a few, please add to the list if you think of one!
1) We don’t know and we will NEVER know
2) We are in the process of figuring it out but need more time
3) We are asking the wrong question
Now if you had asked a young boy who used to read every Scientific American he could get his hands on, his answer would have been number 2.
After years of frustration, his answer started leaning towards number 1.
Now, my answer is 3, and here is why.
In college, hanging out with math people, comp sci people, and stoners, it was not unheard of for us to argue about “Is space flat or curved?”
It’s a good argument. It sounds like something that can be answered. Show me the evidence one way or another and we will decide.
Much of this is based on ideas as mathematicians that even though the universe might be discontinuous, might be non-differentiable, might contain singularities, it wasn’t internally inconsistent, it didn’t somehow contradict itself.
Now about 1984 I read an essay written by a mathematician at Oxford that dealt with the issue. In the essay, with fairly simple mathematics (just as Bell’s theorem is pretty simple), he shows something:
A curved universe with straight lines is homeomorphic with a flat (Euclidean) universe with curved lines.
And it is true. As long as the one you are investigating is continuous and differentiable, there is a transform to make it into the other. Singularities in one will map to singularities in the other.
In this case, math proves superior, and shows us our question of “flat or curved” is lacking from the definitional side.
This is a pointer towards something.
If we ask a question, and there is no clear answer, it may be because the answer doesn’t exist, but it may also be that we haven’t really defined the question enough.
We know the slippery-ness of language. Complex, deep-rooted ideas are often simply put into words. Is the universe just some kind of computer code following Backus-Naur form, some kind of SNOBOL program?
We can’t say. We will never know for sure. No matter what the hypothesis are, it would seem we are stuck in THIS PARTICULAR UNIVERSE. Everything we see is part of it, everywhere we go, we are still in it. Sort of.
Let me qualify that statement.
If we thought or expected that something extra-universal had been in our experience, no one could argue against it, but neither could we prove it!
Imagine a dead universe. Stars, galaxies, planets, nebulae. But no life.
Imagine that same universe, with one exception: On one planet, on a rocky hill, there is one ordinary housefly.
No one could argue that universe B is QUALITATIVELY different from universe A.
And that difference is not explained by leptons or neutrinos or the strong force or any of the other building blocks and laws of physics. It takes a DIFFERENT KIND OF SCIENCE to explain to this poor fly why he is sitting there on a rock!
Now thinking about that, consider this: I deceived you when I said “Imagine a dead universe...”
You can’t.
As soon as you try to imagine one, you have injected yourself into it! The religious and philosophical implications of that are pretty daunting.
I may add to this later, but for now my summary is that the universe is sort of a tautology. We need to define the question better.