How Real, Reality?

Glenn Caleval, January 31, 2007

On a recent trip to Ottawa, I met a fellow who has thought a lot about reality. He took an interest in meeting me as a result of hearing an exchange between another passenger and me.

The passenger was repeating the medical magic about no safe limit for second hand smoke. I pointed out that cigarette smoke is not a “thing” but is composed of many substances. All I wanted to know is which of those substances fall into the zero limit exposure risk because we should then logically go about having those particular substances eliminated from all human environments.

.However, it appears the part of the conversation the fellow zoned in on was my assertion that “cigarette smoke is not a thing. It’s all hoodoo.”

When he struck up a conversation with me at the luggage claim, it was all about how nothing is real. He particularly argued against physics and causation, citing examples of a shaman “rubbing two sticks together and things happen” while Einstein was “undone” by quantum physics. The discovery of quantum physics is presented as proof of the mystical character of science.

Basically his argument appears to be that everything is subjective and reality is what we make it.

The problem with this idea is that it leaves no room for practical living. It also gives short shrift to how physics actually works and how science progresses.

His conviction that “science is just one more religion” rests on the fact that ultimately everything can be boiled down to solipsism. In this case, “where did the Big Bang” come from is equated with the inability to demonstrate the existence of [pick your particular deity].

The claimed fatality of quantum physics is its reliance on probability. Basically, at the quantum level events are measured based on odds. As well, for some time there has existed an “uncertainty principle” that proves that it is not possible to know everything with certainty. Some things, such as quantum events, must be uncertain until they are actually observed. It is a mistake of ignorance about scientific principles that allows one to apply the probabilistic nature of quantum events to macro events like driving a car or hammering a nail. It can be a difficult idea to grasp that there are different rules for different kinds of environments or “sizes” of things.

If you can accept that light can pass through a window and your hand cannot, then you already accept that different kinds of events can happen to different kinds of things. You also know that gravity is strong enough that its power will kill you falling off a cliff. Yet it is so weak that it can be embarrassed simply by jumping upward. At the macro level -- the reality in which we live and move and act -- things are very predictable. So they must be for any of us to conduct our lives. Consider if you had to calculate the probability that taking a step would result in moving one unit forward rather than flying off the surface of the planet. Predictability at the macro level is so good that we have radios and computers and cars all built on science that predicted accurately if these sets of things were done, this other thing would be the result.

So the reality of probability in quantum mechanics in no meaningful way reduces the certainty that the sun will rise in the morning.

Further, the fact that science cannot answer all questions is not evidence of similarity to religion. It is rather one of the key characteristics that separates it from religion, since religion pretends to answer all questions and entirely repudiates attempts to ask inconvenient questions. My conversant pointed out that scientists have always clung to wrong ideas before events caught up to them and forced them to accept a new paradigm. In fact, good science builds in the possibility that it’s wrong. It is true that scientists as a group tend to strongly resist radical new scientific ideas. Thomas Kuhn very adequately documents this in his Structure of Scientific Revolution. But this is a merit not a weaknesses. It ensures that major claims are thoroughly, even painfully tested before they achieve acceptance and redirect the efforts of research down entirely new paths.

An historically recent example was the Cold Fusion folly. A pair of scientists claimed they have achieved cold fusion which would have meant an essentially endless supply of energy for the world. But scientists were unwilling to simply take the claim at face value and aggressively went after the work of the two making the claim. Several scientists immediately set about trying to replicate the claims and could in no detail find credible or even ambiguous evidence of a cold fusion reaction. Ultimately the pair were humiliated and the claim dismissed. Consider the consequences if this had not happened; if scientists easily accepted such a radical claim. Resources and efforts would have been massively reallocated to fields of enquiry that would turn out to be quite fruitless. The social consequences would not be zero as the hopes of all, particularly third world countries being given the promise of cheap, unlimited energy, were dashed.

Radical change does not come easy in science but it does come. From flogiston to electricity, from Newton to Einstein and from E=mc2 to quantum physics; science does change.

My airport conversationalist pointed out that religions change also. What was immoral yesterday is perfectly moral today. For me, this misses the entire point of religion and in fact is evidence of religion’s greatest weakness; its most condemning internal contradiction.

If religion is about Absolute Truth in the form of the morally right and morally wrong, then it cannot change from one day to another or one century to the next. If god told your religious leader that abortion is wrong last year but this year he changes his mind, what does this say about god? Talk about your uncertainty principles, a capricious god has be the epitome.

Science leaves room for the possibility, and generally the expectation, that it does not have the absolute truth about anything. Instead it has testable theories and falsifiable laws.

For me falsifiability is a key to recognizing any “knowledge” as useful or generally actionable. To be objectively meaningful knowledge a statement or theory must be capable of being proved false.