An interesting paper
from Cambridge
We cannot know how the science
of the future will change our thinking, but we must also consider our differing
perceptions of how things like black holes confound our intuition. Consider this strange peculiarity about nature: if I'm observing a
black hole and a cat falls into the black hole I will see it approach the black hole's
event horizon where it gets swallowed by the tidal gravitational forces. But if at the same time you fall
into the black hole along with the cat, you would observe the cat cross the horizon
safely before encountering the singularity at the core of the black hole.
Interestingly both your story
and mine would be true respectively, but depending on the perception, we appear
to have a condition under which the cat is both swallowed outside of the horizon and not-swallowed inside the black hole. There would not be two simultaneous cats because as far
as we know the laws of physics do not allow for information to be duplicated in
that way.
This must be an issue for the
mind in that it is under the illusion that we can describe events both inside
and outside the horizon simultaneously - but in actual fact, no mind can
observe both at once. This means that the physical regime can only be
apprehended if descriptions are restricted to the view of one single observer.
Given that it is possible that there are extra dimensions (as in String Theory)
that we may never interface with, and a general queerness to quantum physics
that will likely always leave one aspect of a wave/particle duality
'uncertain', it may well be true that these things are mere shadows of a reality we
will never fully apprehend.
The black hole has thus far
been one of several phenomena in nature that indicates this. The black hole example
shows the difference in perspectives; for a man entering the black hole there
will be a contraction of length and an expansion of time. But while this will be
noticed by an outside observer, it will not be noticed from his own local
perspective because the standards with which he would ordinarily do the
measuring would have altered too; that is, the standards of measuring
contractions have contracted as well, and the standard of measuring time has
expanded to make the expansion of time indecipherable. The logical corollary is
that crossing the horizon will seem like normal time to him, unless he can
register outside of his local perspective, in which case he would decipher the
changes.
Understanding that humans
perceive reality through many different lenses gives us a better insight into
just how much we can refine our understanding of reality. In considering, say,
the transition from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics, or Euclidian
geometry to Riemannian geometry, we make a useful inference about reality and
the relationship humans have with it. What we realise is that reality isn't
singularly Newtonian, Einsteinian, Euclidian or Riemannian, because the physics
or geometry under examination is contingent upon the perceptual lens of the
beholder. In other words, how reality is at any one time depends on the
particular lens of reality of the person doing the perceiving.
In a similar
sense, if you imagine something like a rock; once you zoom in on its deeper
constituent parts, you will not find anything like what imagination has always
supposed it to be. A hard rock, when probed further would reveal the deep
mysteries of matter and sub-atomic energy - a whirling mass of particles and
waves, consisting of a vast nexus of space, in which very small particles
(electrons) move around the nucleus, and are bound to it by electric forces.
That is to say, despite the rock’s appearance in front of our own naked eyes,
everything appearing solid consists almost entirely of empty space. It is the
exceptionally small particles dashing at stupendous speeds around the nucleus
of the atom that gives atoms their solid appearance.
My multi-lens of
reality theory holds that just about every part of our reality that we
interface with through perception or conception is made up of analogies,
metaphors and symbolic expressions, and that the physical perceptions of
reality are only one facet of reality – inextricable to minds like ours due to
our being physical beings. Once we begin
to trim away at the things that appear to warrant claims for having a necessary
existence, I find we can even trim away the physical reality around which we
employ our empirical considerations. My
gut feeling is that after all the trimming is done, the only things we’re going
to find left in our qualification for necessary existence are God and
mathematics. I will submit that all the
rest is, in a certain sense, fiction – but not just any old fiction – it is a
fictional interpretation that is for now a precursory disquisition to a
d̩nouement that we are at present only tapping into. As has been said before Рit is an echo of a
reality we have not yet heard in full.
This can bring
about a new perspective to our empirical endeavours – it is a new perspective
where fiction and fact intersect in an embrace.
So, science is a fictional reality in the same qualitative sense that
poetry, literature, theology and art are fictional realities. But, as indicated, by ‘fictional’ I do not
mean ‘non-factual’, I mean fictional in the sense that science is only one
branch on a huge tree of human conceptions that involve objects that are real
to the human mind in ways that they are not real in the reality ‘out there’
beyond the mind. In other words, all the
objects we convey in reductionist science (rocks, sand, water, atoms, protons,
etc) are as they are because they are projected onto our minds. If our mental conceptions are a tool box full
of tools, science is one kind of creative tool for understanding reality, and
mathematics is another, poetry another, and theology another, and so forth
(often with overlap between them).
This is what I mean when I say that our
reality is largely made up of analogies, metaphors and symbolic
expressions. Just as physical
objects like trees, rocks and buildings are made up of smaller component parts - once we get down to the full reality of those smaller component parts, we find
they are made up of, or only describable with, numbers (or more accurately,
what those numbers represent). This is
evidenced by the fact that if we don't describe them with numbers and concomitant
equations, we are forced to revert back to the macroscopic world of metaphor
and analogy to describe them - particles, waves, forces, position, momentum,
etc. Physical reality is in the eye of the beholder, it's just
that humans are one kind of beholder. Any sense of the physical is bound up in
the fact that we evolved in the realm of the physical mechanism of natural
selection, so our neural network is implicitly physical, which makes our
engagement with reality implicitly and explicitly physical. It is due to this human-centred limitation
that external reality to us is almost entirely expressed in terms of the
metaphorical, analogical and symbolical.
Given
the foregoing, we can see why Laura
Mersini-Houghton’s hypothesis that black holes don’t exist after all is possibly more than an
example of changing perceptions. If we accept, say, quantum physics as a
synthesis of propositions that align themselves to a central
conception, we find, as indicated above, that even that leaves us with an epistemological
hiatus, and we then have to resort to macroscopic metaphors (particles, waves,
position, momentum, states of possibility) to explain what our quantum concepts
mean. That’s the best clue we have that we are locked in a macroscopic lens of
reality in which physical interpretations are the only game in town when it
comes to empirical investigations, but not the only game in town in realities outside of human physical conceptions.
