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The Nature of Reality - Part VI

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 4/4/2007

An Epistolary Dialogue Between Roberto Calvo Macias and Sam Vaknin

Dear Roberto,

I wish I could hide behind established physics. Unfortunately, the ideas presented in my previous letter to you are all mine and borrowed from my Ph.D. thesis. They have nothing to do with current trends in physics. But I seemed to have been too vague or obscure because I failed to convey to you my message. I wanted to make you privy to the mental process that led me to the conclusion that time is NOt a simulation or a language element but an INTERACTION between bodies, probably carried by a particle. As such, it is in no need of the intermediation of intelligence, exactly as you suggested. I contrasted this view with modern (quantum) physics which postulate the existence of observers and incorporate them as an indispensable part of the description of the world.

But, you are right, enough about all this. Let us - in the style of the zen koan - kick the rock instead of trying to capture it in the spider cobwebs that are words (though I think you did a fabulous - fabula - job with your Time Tale).

Reality is less critical to us, as a species, than its representations. We while most of our lives manipulating symbols and representations (models, theories, simulations, language, art, diagrams, blueprints, etc.). We have no access to objective reality. Our sense organs and our brain employ powerful mathematical models in a biased manner. The bias is in favour of survival. We interpose apparatus between us and the Universe, extensions or refinements of our sense organs. And then even this highly selective data is subject to rigorous and utterly transforming processing. We see, we hear, we smell, we touch through the protective and survival-enhancing veil of our senses, a membranes which filters out the unnecessary, the familiar, the already catalogued, the irrelevant.

We have always strove to influence the input of our senses, their output or the processing of the data. Psychotropic drugs, hypnosis, directed dreaming, psychotherapy are all consciousness altering techniques. But none of these had the potential to delude us completely and irrevocably (accept in extreme cases of abuse). In other words, a control group always existed, ready to be wheeled out and to be contrasted with the "unreal", the "fantastic", the "wrong" input, or processing or output. The influence of drugs wane, hypnosis ends and so does psychotherapy and we wake up after a dreamful night. There is no permanent distortion of our perception of reality - in other words, our representations remain intact.

Not so with the digital revolution.

At its root is the realization that the distinction between "reality" and "information" is, at the most, a matter of degree. At the core of every physical phenomenon lies a kernel of data which can, in principle be extracted, transported, recreated and manipulated. And all types of data can be transmitted and communicated in the language of digits. At first, only text was converted into this lingua franca. Then graphics and animation and audio and video. In principle, we - physical objects such as humans - are all reducible to energy which can be translated to information. So, this was the first qualitative phase transition. A universal language was found to carry not only information but whatever can be reduced or translated to information. The second qualitative leap was the sudden realization that everything is data - perhaps packed differently but data althesame.

These two postulates led to the inevitable third. If everything is data, then our brain is data. If our brain is data - then it is an inseparable part of its environment, a drop in the data sea as it were. If this is so - then every change in the (data)-environment of the brain is bound to have a "real" (=data related) effect on the environment and vice versa. A change in perception is a change in what we used to call objective reality.

Now, this sounds far fetched if not downright mystical - but it absolutely is not. "Objective" reality out there does not change if our perception of it changes. But "objective reality out there" is not accessible to us, humans. The closest we get to this mythical beast is through our senses, namely via representations. If all the scientific measurement instruments were to go wild in an identical manner, yielding the same consistent divergence from "objective reality" - we would have no way to know, because we would have no basis for comparison - because we have no access to reality but through our senses and through our instruments. We would have been the victim of our own limitations.

But let us go one step further. What if WE were to DELIBERATELY re-calibrate all the scientific instruments in the world and then hypnotize each other into a collective amnesia of this act? The answer is that "reality" would have changed. And this is what the new technology does. By informing us that it can, in principle, re-calibrate our "reality" at any moment, it substitutes its own authority for the authority hitherto exercised by our senses. We see a photograph and we cannot believe our own eyes because it may have been doctored with a software. We watch filmed stunts and we need to be told if this is a motion picture or a real event. We play a virtual reality game and we react as we do to "real" reality. We teleport a particle but whether it is the same particle or not (labelling) is not important because particles are where "objective" reality and representations converge.

And this, of course, is where fractals come in. Physics has reached the stage where the same formalism is used to describe a particle and a universe. Technology has reached the stage that it can convert all of reality into digital streams (=streams of particles). Computers have reached the stage that they can provide access to all the information anywhere in the world. Put these three together and you will see the hologramic world of fractals - a change of scale (particle, brain, world) does not add information. All the information is stored in the tiniest element of the universe which, in itself, is a whole universe. These statements are not to be taken too literally, of course. I am not claiming that Roberto and Sam are to be found in each neutrino. But I am saying that the essential information which contains the minimum complete description of Roberto, a neutrino and the Universe is really one and the same.

Sam


Dear Sam,

So, finally, we are in the arena of reality (I would like to read your thesis, it sounds fascinating! It was also the reason for our encounter, don't you remember? I was looking for your thesis in the UMI but I didn't find it).

It was reading your last letter ( reading it in a special manner, as a picture) when I finally got it. Your letter is digital, my Time-Tale is analogue. It tries to catch reality through bits, through data, almost linearly. Your comments about scientific measurements are, indeed, revealing, for it is true that if we were to see reality only through instruments (let's say the TV or the internet) the true possibilities of collective dreams would have been "in re". And so it is!!! (let us remember Kosovo's "CNN reality"). And here precisely lies the Great Lie. Reality is measured with human senses. An instrument is created - or bought. Our senses, on the contrary, are our true possessions, our wealth. As people say: poor, BLIND, fool! and it is painfully true.

Another thing is your opinion on the survival instinct as the basis for all senses which is, on my opinion, wrong (we fatally know where Darwinism ends), and is even insulting to me, as an individual. Such an a idea can be maintained as long as we see the universe as a "will to power". Based on other conceptions of the universe (Chinese, almost every tribal culture, antiquity, etc.) this idea looks strange, to say the least.

An artist, for instance, would say it is a matter of beauty and exuberance. The list of artists who preferred beauty to survival is almost infinite. A savage Dyonisus destroying and creating forms restlessly is what artists are all about. A romantic will say it all for love. The "self-proclaimed intellectuals" will view progressive spiritualization as the source and so on.

In one of my first letters I made the point that tech-simulations were only audio-visual. The path from digital to analogue is false. It is precisely on the limitations of our sense that video-audio technologies make their diabolic play.

A digital photograph will never be the same as its analogous counterpart, for that is simply impossible ( as it has been recognized by the "now modest" science of physics which "now" accepts the impossibility (and stupidity) of finding the universal minimum particle or bit). It is ridiculous, if not hilarious, to hear Murray Gell-Man (a renowned scientist) talking about quantum chromatism?!?! Digital things only need to get beyond certain limits (3000x pixels in photos, the Niquist theorem in audio, etc...) to fool the senses of men senses. So, tech-made products keep on getting more and more false, pure simulations. Yet, that they can - and do - mislead us is not the point (unless and until someone starts to use "the game" to fuck us). Even as they do so successfully, they keep being simulations.

It remains to be seen how will technology simulate with such perfection the rest of our senses (including that one called sensibility, the mental eye). Its seems a bit more difficult to simulate smells, surfaces and flavours than pure paper or screens. And even more so, to manipulate and simulate the third dimension (at which stage, physics directly metamorphesizes into pure "magick"). But, even in such cases it would keep being a simulation, not the thing itself.

To come back to the example of the apple: even in the case, which it is not, that some "technique" were to reproduce exactly an apple (and not only its vitamin B12), it would continue to be a simulation of an apple, not the apple itself. This is because an apple, as a living element, embodies a principle (the same one that distinguishes a living human from a corpse of a human) which is superior and different to the sum of its elements. Such a power was not conceded to us, humans, and we will be the wiser in accepting that.

There is also a second problem: the difference between creation and the will to create. A great artist, Velasquez, for instance, has a mastery that is also revealed in its limitations. This knowledge is of a superior kind (it was a Greek decisive knowledge: "Know your self, BUT NOT TOO MUCH"). It means that the master, in our case Velazquez, knows not only the "infinite" power of knowledge (creation) but also its limits.

Limits that bring upon us destruction when we, whether innocent or guilty, cross them (you mentioned drug-addicts, it is a good example). In each of his paintings, let us take for instance, Vulcanus Forge, the more the possibilities foster its powerful form, the slightest bit more will the composition be perturbed. In such a superior level, all the visual vibes, all "its reality" is analogous, every motif is entangled with each other. It can be viewed on all levels, like a good book can be read once and again from different angles (curiously, this is not the case in films or photos, which only admit to one viewing). A photograph can mislead us in the first viewing, but after we discover it, it is only dead matter, in decomposition. By comparison, a great painting, viewed with loving eyes always gets better, always gets "younger", a photo is condemned to forever age.

Photography can keep getting more perfect, still, it will keep being dead, because there is no living, intelligent act of observation (as is precisely the case with technology, as you well stated is not a first order phenomenon). This does apply to the paintings of Velasquez. In his brain, and not only in his brain but also with all his being, he is present in his art. A process (enlightenment) which in the case of photography happens in the inner mechanism of the "scientific instrument", has been tied down and mastered (not by coincidence does mastery imply dominion, real power). He knows also how much light his new painting can support. When the total figure (and this concept of total is essential, it means closed on itself and perfect) is created (poetically) in his mind he is now in a disposition to bring it to reality, to the canvas with more or less perfection.

Are geneticists in possession of such dominion, or are they simply betting in the Russian roulette with false cards?

It is not arbitrarily that I introduce to this dialogue reflections on limits but precisely because limits were to the pre-Socratic philosopher the logos itself (data, in your language), information principles were the limits themselves. That is to say, nature is by no means merely its data, it is its limits that are the data. The the elementary realm (aka chaos), by its very essence refuses and denies data. Here lies the necessity of using statistics with quantum mechanics, it is an approach: the simulation of big numbers. This elemental, irreducible "citadel" of reality shall be represented then as an "hassard sauvage" (Heraclito's child) precisely due to its denial of data, of the control of numbers.

Precisely because of this, the knowledge of elemental reality is inconceivable, for as long as we continue to be humans. Because this very knowledge is of a divine nature, it is divinity itself. So, the question remains open: Are the foolish a kind of gods? or, on the contrary, are gods, in an irreversible manner, completely foolish?

wishing you the best
roberto

(continued)