Whose Reality Is It Anyway?

Thomas Nagel wondered if the world a bat perceives is fundamentally different  to our own

By Keith Tidman

Do we experience the world as it objectively is, or only as an approximation shaped by the effects of information passing through our mind’s interpretative sieve? Does our individual reality align with anyone else’s, or is it exclusively ours, dwelling like a single point amid other people’s experienced realities?

 

We are swayed by our senses, whether through the direct sensory observation of the world around us, or indirectly as we use apparatuses to observe, record, measure, and decipher. Either way, our minds filter the information absorbed, becoming the experiences funneled and fashioned into a reality which in turn is affected by sundry factors. These influences include our life experiences and interpretations, our mental models of the world, how we sort and assimilate ideas, our unconscious predilections, our imaginings and intuitions unsubscribed to particular facts, and our expectations of outcomes drawn from encounters with the world.

 

We believe that what serves as the lifeline in this modeling of personal reality is the presence of agency and ‘free will’. The tendency is to regard free will as orthodoxy. We assume we can freely reconsider and alter that reality, to account for new experiences and information that we mold through reason. To a point, that’s right; but to one degree or another we grapple with biases, some of which are hard-wired or at least deeply entrenched, that predispose us to particular choices and behaviours. So, how freely we can actually surmount those preconceptions and predispositions is problematic, in turn bearing on the limits of how we perceive the world.

The situation is complicated further by the vigorous debate over free will versus how much of what happens does so deterministically, where life’s course is set by forces beyond our control. Altering the models of reality to which we clutch is hard; resistance to change is tempting. We shun hints of doubt in upholding our individual (subjective) representations of reality. The obscurity and inaccessibility of any single, universally accepted objective world exacerbates the circumstances. We realise, though, that subjective reality is not an illusion to be casually dismissed to our suiting, but is lastingly tangible.

In 1974, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel developed a classic metaphor to address these issues of conscious experience. He proposed that some knowledge is limited to what we acquire through our subjective experiences, differentiating those from underlying objective facts. To show how, Nagel turned to bats’ conscious use of echoed sounds as the equivalent of our vision in perceiving its surroundings for navigation. He argued that although we might be able to imagine some aspects of what it’s like to be a bat, like hanging upside down or flying, we cannot truly know what a bat experiences as physical reality. The bat’s experiences are its alone, and for the same reasons of filtering and interpretation, are likewise distinguishable from objective reality.

 

Sensory experience, however, does more than just filter objective reality. The very act of human observation (in particular, measurement) can also create reality. What do I mean? Repeated studies have shown that a potential object remains in what’s called ‘superposition’, or a state of suspension. What stays in superposition is an abstract mathematical description, called a ‘wavefunction’, of all the possible ways an object can become real. There is no distinction between the wave function and the physical things.

While in superposition, the object can be in any number of places until measurement causes the wavefunction to ‘collapse’, resulting in the object being in a single location. Observation thus has implications for the nature of reality and the role of consciousness in bringing that about. According to quantum physicist John Wheeler, ‘No ... property is a property until it is observed’, a notion presaged by the philosopher George Berkeley three centuries earlier by declaring ‘Esse est percepi’ – to be, is to be perceived.

Evidence, furthermore, that experienced reality results from a subjective filtering of objective reality comes from how our minds react to externalities. For example, two friends are out for a stroll and look up at the summer sky. Do their individual perceptions of the sky’s ‘blueness’ precisely match each other’s or anyone else’s, or do they experience blueness differently? If those companions then wade into a lake, do their perceptions of ‘chilliness’ exactly match? How about their experiences of ‘roughness’ upon rubbing their hand on the craggy bark of a tree? These are interpretations of objective reality by the senses and the mind.

Despite the physiology of the friends’ brains and physical senses being alike, their filtered experiences nonetheless differ in both small and big ways. All this, even though the objective physical attributes of the sky, the lake, and the tree bark, independent of the mind, are the same for both companions. (Such as in the case of the wavelength of visible light that accounted for the blueness being interpretatively, subjectively perceived by the senses and mind.) Notwithstanding the deceptive simplicity of these examples, they are telling of how our minds are attuned to processing sensory input, thereby creating subjective realities that might resemble yet not match other people’s, and importantly don’t directly merge with underlying objective reality.

  

In this paradigm of experience, there are untold parsed and sieved realities: our own and everyone else’s. That’s not to say objective reality, independent of our mental parsing, is myth. It exists, at least as backdrop. That is, both objective and subjective reality are credible in their respective ways, as sides of the whole. It’s just that our minds’ unavoidable filtering leads to the altering of objective reality. Objective reality thus stays out of reach. The result is our being left with the personal reality our minds are capable of, a reality nonetheless easily but mistakenly conflated with objective reality.

 

That’s why our models of the underlying objective reality remain approximations, in states of flux. Because when it comes to understanding the holy grail of objective reality, our search is inspired by the belief that close is never close enough. We want more. Humankind’s curiosity strives to inch closer and closer to objective reality, however unending that tireless pursuit will likely prove.

 

COVID-19: We Would Do It All Again

by Thomas Scarborough

'Compound Risks and Complex Emergencies.' PNAS.

Staying in a South African township in the autumn of 2021, once a week an old woman in worn out clothes slipped into the house unannounced, and sat down. She sat quietly for four hours, until lunch was served. She quietly ate her lunch, and left. I was curious to know the reason for her visits.

Her son, she said, had lost his work through the pandemic. He had been supporting her, and she could not now afford to feed herself. She couldn’t keep the lights burning after dark. She couldn’t even pay for candles—let alone the rest. Every day, she would slip quietly into a house like this, she said, and wait for a meal.

This was a direct result of a COVID-19 lockdown. Not that lockdowns are all the same, or have the same effects. The University of Oxford has developed a Stringency Index, which monitors a wide range of measures adopted by governments across the world, in response to the pandemic.

Without weighing up the rationale behind them, it is clear that these various measures have had grievous effects.

It is estimated that more than 200 million jobs were lost worldwide, in 2020 alone. The United Nations’ International Labour Organisation estimates that 8.8 percent of global working hours were lost, which is equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. This is without considering the knock-on effects—apart from which, such losses are seldom made up in the years which follow.

According to the World Economic Forum, 38 percent of global cancer surgery was postponed or cancelled in the early months of the pandemic. The backlog, they said, would take nearly a year to clear. Of course, one can’t afford to postpone or cancel cancer surgery. Many surgeries were stopped besides—in fact, millions of surgeries per week.

Frustrations and the pressures of life under lockdown brought about huge increases in certain types of crime. Gender-based violence soared. The United Nations General Secretary reported a ‘horrifying global surge’. Scattered statistics confirm it. Many cities reported increases in gender violence of more than 30%. Some reported more than 200%. The effects of such violence never go away.

The lockdowns, in all their complexity and diversity, had negative effects on personal freedoms, supply chains, mental health, inequalities, and any number of things—and since everything is related to everything, almost anything one may think of was skewed.

Of course, not all of the effects of lockdowns were negative. Drug arrests plummeted in various places. Break-ins, not surprisingly, decreased as more people stayed home. In South Africa, a ban on liquor sales quickly emptied out hospital emergency rooms. Most importantly, it is thought that very many lives were saved from COVID-19.

How many lives were saved? This is hard to tell. Imperial College London judged that ‘the death toll would have been huge’—which is, there would have been millions more deaths. Surely this is true. At the same time, they noted that there are ‘the health consequences of lockdowns that may take years to fully uncover’—and paradoxically, the many attempts to stall the pandemic may have prolonged it.

How do we calculate the advantages and disadvantages of a pandemic response? It is, in fact, frightfully difficult. One needs to identify the real issues—or some would say, select them. One needs to weigh all relevant factors—however that might be done. There is a place, too, for the human trauma, whatever its logical status may be, and this is hard to quantify. 

At the end of the day, however, it all comes down to priorities.

An absolute priority during the pandemic was life. No matter how many or how few, lives should be saved. This emphasis is easy to see. Almost any graph which has traced the pandemic shows two lines: the number of cases, and the number of deaths. Other effects of the pandemic are by and large excluded from everyday graphs and charts—which is not to say that they are completely overlooked.

What does one mean, then, by loss of life? One means rapid loss of life, of the kind which overcomes one in the space of a few days from hospital admission to death. Such death, in most published instances, has been an almost complete abstraction—a number attached to COVID-19—signifying the priority of death pure and simple.

At the end of the day, the avoidance of rapid loss of life was the absolute priority in this pandemic. All other priorities were demoted, or put on hold, even repudiated as side-issues. Ought life to have been given absolute priority? Who can say? It has to do with human, cultural, and social values, as we find them, in the early 21st century.

The fact is that life—or the possibility of losing it quickly—was the immutable priority. Therefore, we would do it all again.

The Limits of the ‘Unknowable’

In this image, the indeterminacy principle is here about the initial state of a particle. The colour (white, blue, green) indicates the phase, that is the position and direction of motion, of the particle. The position is initially determined with high precision, but the momentum is not. 

By Keith Tidman

 

We’re used to talking about the known and unknown. But rarely do we talk about the unknowable, which is a very different thing. The unknowable can make us uncomfortable, yet, the shadow of unknowability stretches across all disciplines, from the natural sciences to history and philosophy, as people encounter limits of their individual fields in the course of research. For this reason, unknowability invites a closer look.

 

Over the many years there has been a noteworthy shift. What I mean is this: Human intellectual endeavour has been steadily turning academic disciplines from the islands they had increasingly become over the centuries back into continents of shared interests, where specialized knowledge flows over one another’s boundaries in recognition of the interconnectedness of ideas and understanding of reality.

 

The result is fewer margins and gaps separating the assorted sciences and humanities. Interdependence has been regaining respectability. What we know benefits from these commonalities and this collaboration, allowing knowledge to profit: to expand and evolve across disciplines’ dimensions. And yet, despite this growing matrix of knowledge, unknowables still persist.

 

Consider some examples.

 

Forecasts of future outcomes characteristically fall into the unknowable, with outcomes often different from predictions. Such forecasts range widely, from the weather to political contests, economic conditions, vagaries of language, technology inventions, stock prices, occurrence of accidents, human behaviour, moment of death, demographics, wars and revolutions, roulette wheels, human development, and artificial intelligence, among many others. The longer the reach of a forecast, often the more unknowable the outcome. The ‘now’ and the short term come with improved certainty, but still not absolute. Reasons for many predictions’ dubiousness may include the following.

 

First, the initial conditions may be too many and indeterminate to acquire a coherent, comprehensive picture of starting points. 

Second, the untold, opaquely diverging and converging paths along which initial conditions travel may overwhelm: too many to trace. 

Third, how forces jostle those pathways in both subtle and large ways are impossible to model and take account of with precision and confidence. 

Fourth, chaos and complexity — along with volatility, temperamentality, and imperceptibly tiny fluctuations — may make deep understanding impossible to attain.

 

Ethics is another domain where unknowability persists. The subjectivity of societies’ norms, values, standards, and belief systems — derived from a society’s history, culture, language, traditions, lore, and religions, where change provides a backdraft to ‘moral truths’ — leaves objective ethics outside the realm of what is knowable. Contingencies and indefiniteness can interfere with moral decision-making. Accordingly, no matter how rational and informed individuals might be, there will remain unsettled moral disagreements.

On the level of ‘being’, why there is something rather than nothing is similarly unknowable. In principle,  ‘nothingness’ is just as possible as ‘something’, but for some unknown reason apart from the unlikelihood of spontaneous manifestation, ‘something’ demonstrably prevailed over its absence. Conspicuously, ‘nothingness’ would preclude the initial conditions required for ‘something’ to emerge from it. However, we and the universe of course exist; in its fine-tuned balance, the model of being is not just thinkable, it discernibly works. Yet, the reason why ‘something’ won out over ‘nothingness’ is not just unknown, it’s unknowable.

 

Anthropology arguably offers a narrower instance of unknowability, concerning our understanding of early hominids. The inevitable skimpiness of evidence and of fine-grained confirmatory records — compounded by uncertain interpretations stemming from the paucity of physical remains, and of their unvalidated connections and meaning in pre-historical context — suggests that the big picture of our more-distant predecessors will remain incomplete. A case of epistemic limits.

Another important instance of unknowability comes out of physics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle, at the foundation of quantum mechanics, famously tells us that the more precisely we know about a subatomic particle’s position, the less we know about its momentum, and vice versa. There is a fundamental limit, therefore, to what one can know about a quantum system.

 

To be clear, though, seemingly intractable intellectual problems may not ultimately be insoluble, that is, they need not join the ranks of the unknowable. There’s an important distinction. Let me briefly suggest three examples.

 

The first is ‘dark energy’ and ‘dark matter’, which together compose 95% of the universe. Remarkably, the tiny 5% left over constitutes the entire visible contents of the universe! Science is attempting to learn what dark energy and dark matter are, despite their prevalence compared with observable matter. The direct effects of dark energy and dark matter, such as on the universe’s known accelerating expansion, offer a glimpse. Someday, investigators will understand them; they are not unknowable.

 

Second is Fermat’s ‘last theorem’, the one that he teed up in the seventeenth century as a note in the margin of his copy of an ancient Greek text. He explained, to the dismay of generations of mathematicians, that the page’s margin was ‘too small to contain’ the proof. Fermat did suggest, however, that the proof is short and elegant. Four centuries passed before a twentieth-century British mathematician solved the theorem. The proof, shown to be long, turned out not to be unknowable as some had speculated, just terribly difficult.

 

A last instance that I’ll offer involves our understanding of consciousness. For millennia, we’ve been spellbound by the attributes that define our experience as persons, holding that ‘consciousness’ is the vital glue of mind and identity. Yet, a decisive explanation of consciousness, despite earnest attempts, has continued to elude us through the ages. Inventive hypotheses have abounded, though remained unsettled. Maybe that’s not surprising, in light of the human brain’s physiological and functional complexity.

 

But as the investigative tools that neuroscientists and philosophers of the mind yield in the course of collaboration become more powerful in dissecting the layers of the brain and mind, consciousness will probably yield its secrets. Such as why and how, through the physical processes of the brain, we have very personalised experiences. It’s likely that one day we will get a sounder handle on what makes us, us. Difficult, yes; unknowable, no.

 

Even as we might take some satisfaction in what we know and anticipate knowing, we are at the same time humbled by two epistemic factors. First is that much of what we presume to know will turn out wrong or at most partial right, subject to revised models of reality. But the second humbling factor is a paradox: that the full extent of what is unknowable is itself unknowable.

 

Picture Post #69: The Wallpaper

by Martin Cohen

Robert Polidori, Hotel Petra, Beirut, Lebanon, 2010

If there was something ‘a little spooky’ about last month’s Picture Post, on the face of it there should be too with this abandoned hotel room in a, to some extent, abandoned city, Beirut. 

And yet, that’s not my own reaction to it. On the contrary, the emptiness of the room creates the palette, and the symmetry of the disappearing doorways provides all the action the scene needs.

The colours too, seem to have been chosen by a master artist, as well, in this case they evidently were by the photographer, Robert Polidori. Unlike many of our other photographers, Polidori is well-known for his images of urban environments and interiors with his work exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Martin-Gropius-Bau museum (Berlin), and Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) to mention just a few. 

Polidori has photographed the restoration of the Château de Versailles since the early 1980s and recorded the architecture and interiors of Havana, and this portrait of the Hotel Petra, once one of the most popular hotels in Beirut,  located in the city centre adjacent to the Grand Theatre seems to me to show that, for an artist, all buildings are equally valid as canvases.