Light Fiction

a note to readers: the following is an argument in favor of objective reality that I wrote for my friend Kim, who took an opposite position. If you agree or disagree with me please feel free to criticize any particular point, I doubt anybody cares enought to take the necessary several hours to respond to the entire thing. With that said, onward!

I just read the rotten.com library article and it has forced me to come to some conclusions. The first of which is that the guy who wrote that article writes a lot like I do, which statement can be read: the guy who wrote that article writes more for effect than clarity and actual promotion of the facts. But still, I will make my brief points.

You brought up quantum reality in the midst of your effort to argue that we both do not know/cannot talk about reality on the fundamental level; and that objectivity is something amounting to faith in our intersubjective perception of hallucination (which hallucination I will heretofore refer to as “reality” because it will make the argument clearer, and not because I necessarily believe it to be so). We were also talking about different levels of reality and objectivity and their respective values and the interrelationship between value and objectiveness (ontological status) but as soon as you start talking about levels of reality instead of just the possibility of objectivity you get into book-length dissertations, even if you’re going as fast and loose as I’m going here. So, much as it pains me, I’m going to ignore the fact that I think that numbers are more real than any of the bullshit which I state below.

With regards to your first point, that we cannot talk meaningfully about the fundamental nature of the universe, I will have to quickly define “meaningfully” in this context and hopefully you will agree that it is an appropriate definition. For the purposes of this conversation (until and unless you disagree) when I talk about “meaningful knowledge” or “meaningful conversation” I will be saying that ‘our understanding of these things which we have not and can not experience is sufficient to correctly affect the way that we interact with them on the level that we do experience”

Actually the main point of my argument is going to be that what I just described is in fact a good definition. To start, I say that it works because of what language is and can mean; language is strictly limited to our experience, it does and can express nothing that we don’t experience. But it does express every experience that we share. It is only limited to everything that we experience in common. We live in the world that we experience, and we don’t experience atoms or the weirdness of atoms on subatomic scales. We do however experience televisions, pressure, gravity, and nuclear devastation (although one can hope not to experience the first and last). We (or at least physicists) experience the concepts behind submicroscopic reality, and they can and do regularly converse about the concepts.

According to one school of thought (A fairly popular one in a lot of the fields of theoretical physics, possibly because of how fucking stupid quantum mechanics is) pragmatically called anti-realism, the things which we have no hope of ever seeing do not exist. Or at least they don’t need to exist. This philosophy considers science to be something like a programmers experience of a videogame: it doesn’t matter whether the gun you’re coding “actually” exists, because within the context of the game the gun exists. Within the context of our experience, atoms exist. The advantage that this philosophy (and it is philosophy, this is not even close to the realm of science it is meta-science) has is that it allows us to not have to deal emotionally with the various absolutely extreme weirdnesses of quantum realities.

Personally i find the anti-realist point of view kind of disgusting, at least partially because it represents scientists essentially adopting the view that what they’re doing is magic. Don’t get me wrong, I love magic, but science should not be striving to be magic. That’s just a personal aside though, not really relevant to the topic.

Now, the only option other than anti-realism (the only other mainstream scientific option, there are a couple of pseudoscientific, hard-line skeptical (think matrix), and religious options which I’m not considering because really they fall under the broad anti-realist perspective and mentioning them in depth would just obfuscate the issue) is, oddly enough, realism. Guess what that says. Atoms exist, particles are waves, time travel and instantaneous teleportation are not possible, (according to current theory. That’s a whole other debate, and a much more technical one than this) and black holes have mass because they consist of matter. All of these propositions are implied by current science if you take the realist view. If you take the anti-realist position then everything can be made of god, or gummy bears, or care bears for all the difference it makes. But no matter which perspective you take the world does behave as though it is made up of atoms.

Ok, if you’ve read this far than I can make my first point about the capacities of language. If you take the anti-realist view then language is exactly sufficient for dealing with reality, because reality is only what we experience. Physics is, not bullshit, but not real. It’s just a way of affecting the world that we experience. A finely tuned way of affecting the world. God knows what the fuck part of the world we’re affecting, but you certainly experience the results of it because the computer screen you’re reading this on is built upon technology which is dependant on quantum physics for it to work.

On the other hand if realism is true then we have made enough progress understanding and talking about the quantum realm that thousands of scientists over the course of the last 85 years or so have managed to collaborate and share data about something that is so fucking mind-boggling that Einstein rejected it out of hand as ridiculous. The reason for his rejection? “god does not play dice.”

I think that the anti-realist perspective actually creates a stronger basis for the ability of language to talk about this shyte, if only because it kind of lends itself to formalism, and if formalism is reality then however we talk about reality is how reality is. Oh fucking jesus you have no idea how hard I am working to keep from qualifying that sentence with about 5 paragraphs of objectivist propaganda.

If the realist perspective is right though, and there really are atoms and subatomic “particles” (now often referred to as wave-forms, probability waves, or wavefunctions, depending on which scientific clique you’re associating with) then we can certainly talk about them to the extent that we know about them as well as we can talk about anything else we know about. Maybe the language gets confusing and paradoxical (according to the rules of physical reality that we experience) but the language does exist to such an extent that thousands upon thousands of people are talking about it more clearly than americans seem to be able to debate about evolution, or gay marriage, or abortion. What I’m saying with that sentence is that physics-speek is more meaningful than pretty much all of the language that has gone on in every national debate in amerikan history.

So then, even though I haven’t actually proven my point I think that I have made it sufficiently that you can at least see where I’m coming from. I’ve at least given you something reasonably clear to criticize. I hope. On to your second point!

Objective reality. What actually exists? How is it possible to say with a straight face that atoms exist, or that numbers exist? Or the fucked up simultaneity and atemporality of quantum mechanics? Because even though quantum physics does not seem to allow for time travel or teleportation (or faster than light travel of any sort) it certainly seems to completely ignore time. There is still such a thing as “truth,” though. It’s not just a matter of us deciding what we want the results of our experiments to be and then creating the experiments to justify our hypotheses. If our hypothesis is wrong, then the experiment will tell us that it is wrong. Even a quantum experiment.

So then is there such thing as “objective reality?” Well, that is a question that we can give a resounding and definite yes to. Descartes helped us out there (although he didn’t come up with the idea, I can’t remember who did right now, I think it may have been Anselm). I’m sure you know “cogito ergo sum,” I think therefore I am. There is absolutely no way for it to be possible that nothing exists. You might not exist, I might not exist, but something fucking exists. I believe it is me, you (probably) believe it is you. Whatever. We can say, objectively and with complete logical certitude, that something exists. So then what about experiential reality? Well, we know that our experiences exist. The amount of skepticism necessary to doubt the reality of our experience is kind of absurd, but it is definitely possible that we’re dreaming, or in a computer simulation, et cetera ad nauseum.

So then how do you prove that the world as we experience it exists? You can’t, it’s not possible. The only way to prove a system is from outside the system. That has been proven. An illustration of this concept: we can prove that we exist because we don’t only exist, we also move and die. So you have to assume experiential reality is true because of the way it affects you. You only have to take it one step farther to justify belief in atoms and subatomic structures. They exist because they affect the world which affects us. It is an almost identical amount of faith. If you can believe in the world that you experience, then you should have very little problem believing in atoms and whatnot.

Ok, so on to my last reason for believing in the reality of quantum mechanics, and this one is the quickest, and also the weakest. I just like it, and so I’m throwing it in here as a little treat for the one or two people (if that) who read to the end of this thing. You remember how, when you asked me to define reality, I said “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, refuses to go away?” Well, first and foremost I need to credit Douglas Adams with the best definition of reality I’ve come across (that one I just repeated). But also I’m going to use it as the jumping-off point for my last reason. Who the fuck believes in quantum physics? I mean seriously, that shit makes no sense. It flies in the face of everything previously considered rational, and almost actually defies logic. For a long, long time physicists actually thought that it did defy logic. As in, they thought that it ignored logical truths. Something which, if true, would pretty much undermine everything ever. Luckily it doesn’t, but only barely. Also, if it did then we would know for a fact that it’s wrong, because logic can’t be wrong. It just can’t. But I digress. Here’s the thing: nobody believed in quantum physics for a long time. Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Planck, they all thought that quantum mechanics was bogus in the beginning. And these are the guys who discovered it. Schrodinger even created a thought experiment to show how ridiculous he thought it was (it’s now referred to as Schrodinger’s Cat). The thing is, despite the fact that everybody who knew about quantum physics thought that it was ridiculous, they kept getting results in their experiments which supported it. Quantum physics was proved time and again despite the best efforts of pretty much every scientist in the world trying with every experiment to disprove it. That strikes me being symbolic of a type of actual reality, not just superstition or faith.