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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.

[W]hat 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

That list looks pretty exhaustive to me, dear djf! How delightful to hear from you!

Like you, though (1) had initial appeal, I gravitate to (3) above: “We are asking the wrong question.” You credit an essay by an Oxford mathematician for insight into the issue. You mentioned his mathematics was “fairly simple.” That would be all to the good: For historically, “simplicity” is the sign of beauty and truth in mathematics….

I didn’t come to (3) by that route. I started with the question, “What Is Reality?” to see whether it is definitionally well founded. And discovered that “reality” is usually taken to mean “that which can be observed” in the debased currency of positivist, materialist thinking that so afflicts “science” nowadays.

Since obviously immaterial entities, non-observable in principle, exist “in” the world — e.g., mathematics itself and the laws of nature which science endeavors to disclose — that would not do.

Instead, I reconceived the question as: “What Is Life?” For “life” seemed a more capacious category than “reality” as dumbed down by the “New Atheist physicists” to consider such questions as the origin of the universe, of life and mind. It seems we need observables and non-observables alike — and understanding of how they dynamically interact — if we want to understand the universe of which we are parts and participants….

Positivist/materialist thinkers do not like to engage questions about origins, whether it be of the universe, life, or mind. Rather, they put up fictitious “counter-proposals” to the actual reality they tacitly perceive. These are the “multiverse theories,” hundreds in number by now, maybe over a thousand. The one feature that all such constructed “second realities” have in common is the obvious, shared passion of their authors for trying to produce an “explanation of the universe” that obviates divine action of any kind.

[Of course, if any of these nutcases actually were to pull this off “in” reality, they would obviate themselves and all of human thought and history in the process, including the foundations of science.]

Better put a sock in it for now….

Before closing, I’d just like to mention that I am particularly interested in the fitness or aptness of classical — that is, Newtonian — physics as a tool in biological theory. On questions of life and mind, it just seems so limited to me:

(1) Of the four Aristotelian causes, classical physics recognizes only two: the material and the efficient. Formal cause and final cause are banished. Yet, how is it even possible to speak of a “biological function” without necessarily invoking the idea of final cause?

(2) Newtonian mechanics is premised on abstract “particles.” These are posited as the “ultimate building blocks of all that there is.”

(3) Also it is premised on the idea that only local causes can have effects capable of being measured locally.

Moving on....

Djf, I really liked this:

…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!
As soon as you try to imagine [a “dead universe”], you have injected yourself into it! The religious and philosophical implications of that are pretty daunting.

Indeed! Then you added: “the universe is sort of a tautology”… Could that mean sort of fundamentally self-reinforcing entity of some kind?

Perhaps this is what the great mathematician/philosopher Bertrand Russell had in mind when he declared he “hated” what he called the “impredicativity.” I’m no mathematical genius; but it seems to me the hated impredicativities are simply mathematical axioms which, by definition, cannot be subdivided into lesser, analyzable parts. Which means they are difficult, if not impossible, to subsume under the rules of purely computational models.

Heaven knows, the great mathematician David Hilbert tried. He recognized that mathematics was a “language”; and thus like any other language, it was composed of two parts: syntax and semantics. Syntax — the rules that constitute the transactional grammar, or “rules of the road,” of a language — was found to be easily rendered into “computizational” terms.

Unfortunately, the semantic component of language strenuously resisted being “reduced” to “computizational” terms, even though it was Hilbert’s mission to prove that semantics could be so reduced, replicated by more sophisticated forms of syntax, thus rendering semantics to computational form.

But what is semantics? It is the irreducible meaning of life and experience of human beings as captured by human beings, expressed and carried as an irreducible “value-added” component in human language wherever that language is spoken.

And mathematics is the universal language….

Anyhoot, Hilbert’s project came up a cropper, when Kurt Gödel showed him he was “barking up the wrong tree.”… [e.g., the Incompleteness Principle]

Must leave it there for now. Thank you so much for writing, dear djf! It’s good to see you again. Like you, I appreciate threads like this one. So thanks to you — and to Heartlander, for posting “In Search of a Road to Reality.”