What are the limits of knowledge?

 This was the Question of the Month in Philosophy Now (Issue 157, August/September 2023) and 11 answers were published in Issue 159, December 2023/January 2024, including mine, which I now post complete with minor edits.

 

Some people think that language determines the limits of knowledge, yet it merely describes what we know rather than limits it, and humans have always had the facility to create new language to depict new knowledge.

There are many types of knowledge, but I’m going to restrict myself to knowledge of the natural world. The ancient Greeks were possibly the first to intuit that the natural world had its own code. The Pythagoreans appreciated that musical pitch had a mathematical relationship, and that some geometrical figures contained numerical ratios. They made the giant conceptual leap that this could possibly be a key to understanding the Cosmos itself.

Jump forward two millennia, and their insight has borne more fruit than they could possibly have imagined. Richard Feynman made the following observation about mathematics in The Character of Physical Law: “Physicists cannot make a conversation in any other language. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in. She offers her information only in one form.”

Meanwhile, the twentieth century logician Kurt Gödel proved that in any self-consistent, axiom-based, formal mathematical system, there will always be mathematical truths that can’t be proved true using that system. However, they potentially can be proved if one expands the axioms of the system. This infers that there is no limit to mathematical truths.

Alonso Church’s ‘paradox of unknowability’ states, “unless you know it all, there will always be truths that are by their very nature unknowable.” This applies to the physical universe itself. Specifically, since the vast majority of the Universe is unobservable, and possibly infinite in extent, most of it will remain forever unknowable. Given that the limits of knowledge are either infinite or unknowable in both the mathematical and physical worlds, then those limits are like a horizon that retreats as we advance towards it.

Philosophy in practice

 As someone recently pointed out, my posts on this blog invariably arise from things I have read (sometimes watched) and I’ve already written a post based on a column I read in the last issue of Philosophy Now (No 158, Oct/Nov 2023).
 
Well, I’ve since read a few more articles and they have prompted quite a lot of thinking. Firstly, there is an article called What Happened to Philosophy? By Dr Alexander Jeuk, who is to quote: “an independent researcher writing on philosophy, economics, politics and the institutional structure of science.” He compares classical philosophy (in his own words, the ‘great philosophers’) with the way philosophy is practiced today in academia – that place most us of don’t visit and wouldn’t understand the language if we did.
 
I don’t want to dwell on it, but it’s relevance to this post is that he laments the specialisation of philosophy, which he blames (if I can use that word) on the specialisation of science. The specialisation of most things is not a surprise to anyone who works in a technical field (I work in engineering). I should point out that I’m not a technical person, so I’m a non-specialist who works in a specialist field. Maybe that puts me in a better position than most to address this. I have a curious mind that started young and my curiosity shifted as I got older, which means I never really settled into one area of knowledge, and, if I had, I didn’t quite have the intellectual ability to become competent in it. And that’s why this blog is a bit eclectic.
 
In his conclusion, Jeuk suggests that ‘great philosophy’ should be looked for ‘in the classics, and perhaps encourage a re-emergence of great philosophical thought from outside academia.’ He mentions social media and the internet, which is relevant to this blog. I don’t claim to do ‘great philosophy’; I just attempt to disperse ideas and provoke thought. But I think that’s what philosophy represents to most people outside of academia. Academic philosophy has become lost in its obsession with language, whilst using language that most find obtuse, if not opaque.
 
Another article was titled Does a Just Society Require Just Citizens? By Jimmy Aflonso Licon, Assistant Teaching Professor in Philosophy at Arizona State University. I wouldn’t call the title misleading, but it doesn’t really describe the content of the essay, or even get to the gist of it, in my view. Licon introduces a term, ‘moral mediocrity’, which might have been a better title, if an enigmatic one, as it’s effectively what he discusses for the next, not-quite 3 pages.
 
He makes the point that our moral behaviour stems from social norms – a point I’ve made myself – but he makes it more compellingly. Most of us do ‘moral’ acts because that’s what our peers do, and we are species-destined (my term, not his) to conform. This is what he calls moral mediocrity, because we don’t really think it through or deliberate on whether it’s right or wrong, though we might convince ourselves that we do. He makes the salient point that if we had lived when slavery was the norm, we would have been slave-owners (assuming the reader is white, affluent and male). Likewise, suffrage was once anathema to a lot of women, as well as men. This supports my view that morality changes, and what was once considered radical becomes conservative. And such changes are usually generational, as we are witnessing in the current age with marriage equality.
 
He coins another term, when he says ‘we are the recipients of a moral inheritance’ (his italics). In other words, the moral norms we follow today, we’ve inherited from our forebears. Towards the end of his essay, he discusses Kant’s ideas on ‘duty’. I won’t go into that, but, if I understand Licon’s argument correctly, he’s saying that a ‘just society’ is one that has norms and laws that allow moral mediocrity, whereby its members don’t have to think about what’s right or wrong; they just follow the rules. This leads to his very last sentence: And this is fundamentally the moral problem with moral mediocrity: it is wrongly motivated.
 
I’ve written on this before, and, given the title as well as the content, I needed to think on what I consider leads to a ‘just society’. And I keep coming back to the essential need for trust. Societies don’t function without some level of trust, but neither do personal relationships, contractual arrangements or the raising of children.
 
And this leads to the third article in the same issue, Seeing Through Transparency, by Paul Doolan, who ‘teaches philosophy at Zurich International School and is the author of Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies; Unremembering Decolonization (Amsterdam Univ Press, 2021).
 
In effect, he discusses the paradoxical nature of modern societies, whereby we insist on ‘transparency’ yet claim that privacy is sacrosanct – see the contradiction? Is this hypocrisy? And this relates directly to trust. Without transparency, be it corporate or governmental, we have trust issues. My experience is that when it comes to personal relationships, it’s a given, a social norm in fact, that a person reveals as much of their interior life as they want to, and it’s not ours to mine. An example of moral mediocrity perhaps. And yet, as Doolan points out, we give away so much on social media, where our online persona takes on a life of its own, which we cultivate (this blog not being an exception).
 
I think there does need to be transparency about decisions that affect our lives collectively, as opposed to secrets we all keep for the sake of our sanity. I have written dystopian fiction where people are surveilled to the point of monitoring all speech, and explored how it affects personal relationships. This already happens in some parts of the world. I’ve also explored a dystopian scenario where the surveillance is less obvious – every household has an android that monitors all activity. We might already have that with certain devices in our homes. Can you turn them off?  Do you have a device that monitors everyone who comes to your door?
 
The thing is that we become habituated to their presence, and it becomes part of our societal structure. As I said earlier, social norms change and are largely generational. Now they incorporate AI as well, and it’s happening without a lot of oversight or consultation with users. I don’t want to foster paranoia, but the genie has already escaped and I’d suggest it’s a matter of how we use it rather than how we put it back in the bottle.

Leaving that aside, Doolan also asks if you would behave differently if you could be completely invisible, which, of course, has been explored in fiction. We all know that anonymity fosters bad behaviour – just look online. One of my tenets is that honesty starts with honesty to oneself; it determines how we behave towards others.
 
I also know that an extreme environment, like a prison camp, can change one’s moral compass. I’ve never experienced it, but my father did. It brings out the best and worst in people, and I’d contend that you wouldn’t know how you’d be affected if you haven’t experienced it. This is an environment that turns Licon’s question on its head: can you be just in an intrinsically unjust environment?

Are people on the Left more intelligent?

 Now there’s a provocative question, and the short answer is, No. Political leanings are more associated with personality traits than IQ, according to studies I’ve read about, though I’m no expert. Having said that, I raise this subject, because I think there’s a perception on both sides that there is, which is why people on the Right love to use the word, ‘elites’, to describe what they see as a distortion of reality on subjects like climate change, the COVID pandemic and just about anything they disagree with that involves a level of expertise that most of us don’t have.
 
We live in a world overflowing with information (of which, ironically, I am a contributor) and most, if not all of it, is imbibed through a political filter. On social media we live in echo-chambers, so that confirmation bias is unplugged from all conduits of dissent.
 
To provide a personal example, I watch panel discussions facilitated by The Australian Institute using Zoom, on topics like plastic-waste, whistleblower protection, Pacific nations relations, economics of inflation (all relatively recent topics). The titles alone have a Leftish flavour (though not all), and would be dismissed as ‘woke’ by many on the Right. They are a leftwing think tank, and the panellists are all academics or experts in their field. Whether you agree with them or not, they are well informed.
 
Of course, there are rightwing thinktanks as well; the most obvious in Australia being the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) with the catchcry, The Voice for Freedom. The Australia Institute has its own catchcry, We Change Minds, which is somewhat optimistic given it appears to be always preaching to the choir. It should be pointed out that the IPA can also provide their own experts and research into individual topics.
 
I’ve never hidden my political leanings, and only have to look at my own family to appreciate that personality traits play a greater role than intelligence. I’m the political black sheep, yet we still socialise and exhibit mutual respect. The same with some of my neighbours, who have strong religious views, yet I count as friends.
 
It’s not a cliché that people of an artistic bent tend to be leftists. I think this is especially true in theatre, where many an eccentric personality took refuge, not to mention people with different sexual orientation to the norm. We are generally more open to new ideas and more tolerant of difference. Negative traits include a vulnerability to neurosis, even depression, and a lack of discipline or willingness to abide by rules.
 
One of the contentious points-of-view I hold is that people on the Left have a propensity for being ahead of their time. It’s why they are often called ‘progressives’, but usually only by history. In their own time, they could be called ratbags, radicals or nowadays, ‘elitist’. History tends to bear this out, and it’s why zeitgeist changes are often generational.
 
Recently, I’ve come across a couple of discussions on Russell (including a 1960 interview with him) and was surprised to learn how much we have in common, philosophically. Not only in regard to epistemology and science (which is another topic), but also ethics and morality. To quote from an article in Philosophy Now (Issue 158, Oct/Nov 2023) titled Russell’s Moral Quandary by David Berman (Professor Emiritus Fellow, Philosophy Department, Trinity College Dublin).
 
…our moral judgements [According to Russell] come from a combination of our nurture and education, but primarily from our feelings and their consequences. Hence they do not arise from any timeless non-natural absolutes [like God], for they are different in different times and places.
 
It’s the very last phrase that is relevant to this essay, though it needed to be put in context. Where I possibly depart from Russell is in the role of empathy, but that’s also another discussion.
 
Even more recently, I had a conversation with a mother of a son and daughter, aged 22 and 19 respectively, where she observed that her daughter was living in a different world to the one she grew up in, particularly when it came to gender roles and expectations. I imagine many would dismiss this as a manifestation of wokeism, but I welcome it. I’ve long argued that there should be more cross-generational conversation. I’ve seen this in my professional life (in engineering), where there is a natural synergy between myself and cleverer, younger people, because we are willing to learn from each other. It naturally mitigates against close-mindedness.
 
The Right are associated with 2 social phenomena that tend to define them. Firstly, they wish to maintain the status quo, even turn back the clock, to the point that they will find their own ‘evidence’ to counter proposed changes. This is not surprising, as it’s almost the definition of conservatism. But the second trait, for want of a better word, has become more evident and even dangerous in modern politics, both locally and overseas. It’s particularly virulent in America, and I’m talking about the propensity to oppose all alternative views to the point of self-defeatism. I know that extremists on the Left can be guilty as well, but there are personalities on the Right who thrive on division; who both cultivate and exploit it. The end result is often paralysis, as we’ve seen recently in America with the House Speaker debacle, and its close-encounter with a nationwide catastrophe.
 
There is a view held by many, including people who work in my profession, that the best way to achieve the most productive outcome is through competition. In theory, it sounds good, but in practice – and I’ve seen it many times – you end up with 2 parties in constant argument and opposition to each other. Even if there are more than 2, they tend to align into 2. What you get is decision-paralysis, delays, stalemate and a neverending blame-game. On the other hand, when parties co-operate and collaborate, you get the exact opposite. Is this a surprise? No.
 
From my experience, the best leaders in project management are the ones who can negotiate compromises and it’s the same in politics. The qualities are openness, tolerance and persuasive negotiation skills. I’ve seen it in action numerous times.
 
In a post I wrote on Plato, I talked about his philosopher-king idea, which is an ideal that could never work in practice. Nevertheless, one of the problems with democracy, as it’s practiced virtually everywhere, is that the most popular opinion on a particular topic is not necessarily the best informed. I can see a benefit in experts playing a greater role in determining policies. We saw this in Australia during the pandemic and I believe it worked, though not everyone agrees. Some argue that the economy suffered unnecessarily. But this was a worldwide experiment, and we saw that where medical advice was ignored and fatalities arose accordingly, the economy suffered anyway.

On the philosophy of reality

 This follows on from my last post, after I saw a YouTube interview with Raymond Tallis on Closer to Truth. He’s all but saying that physics has lost the plot, or at least that’s my takeaway. I happen to know that he’s also writing a book on ‘reality’ – might even have finished it – which is why he can’t stop talking about it, and, it seems, neither can I.
 
I think there are 3 aspects to this discussion, even though they are not clearly delineated. Nevertheless, it might be worth watching the video to better appreciate what I’m talking about. While I agree with some of his points, I think Tallis’s main thrust that physicists contend that ‘reality dissolves’ is a strawman argument as I’ve never heard or read a physicist make that claim. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, who hosts all the talks on Closer To Truth, appears to get uncharacteristically flustered, but I suspect it’s because he intuitively thought the argument facile but couldn’t easily counter it. It would have been far more interesting and edifying if Tallis was debating with someone like Paul Davies, who is not only a physicist, but knows some philosophy.
 
At one point they get onto evolution, as Kuhn attempts to make the distinction between how we’ve evolved to understand the world but culturally moved beyond that. This leads to the 3 aspects I alluded to earlier.
 
The first aspect is that there is an objective reality independent of us, which we need to take seriously because it can kill us. As Tallis points out, this is what we’ve evolved to avoid, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. As I’ve pointed out many times, our brains create a model of that reality so we can interact with it. This is the second aspect, and is part of our evolutionary heritage.
 
The third aspect appears to be completely at odds with this and that appears to be what Tallis has an issue with. The third aspect is that we make mathematical models of reality, which seem, on the surface at least, to have no bearing on the reality that we experience. We don’t see wavefunctions of particles or twins aging at different rates when one goes on a journey somewhere.
 
It doesn’t help that different physicists attempt to give different accounts of what’s happening. For example, a lot of physicists believe that the wavefunction is just a useful mathematical fiction. Others believe that it carries on in another universe after the ‘observation’ or ‘measurement’. All acknowledge that we can’t explain exactly what happens, which is why it’s called the ‘measurement problem’.
 
What many people don’t tell you is that QM only makes predictions about events, which is why it deals in probabilities, and logically, observations require a time lapse, no matter how small, before it’s recorded, so it axiomatically happens in the past. As Paul Davies points out there is an irreversibility in time once the ‘observation’ has been made.
 
The very act of measurement breaks the time symmetry of quantum mechanics in a process sometimes described as the collapse of the wave function…. the rewind button is destroyed as soon as that measurement is made.
 
So, nothing ‘dissolves’, it’s just not observable until after the event, and the event could be a photon hitting a photo-sensitive surface or an isotope undergoing some form of radioactive decay or an electron hitting a screen and emitting light. Even Sabine Hossenfleder (in one of her videos) points out that the multiple paths of Feynman’s ‘sum-over-histories path-integral’ are in the future of the measurement that they predict via calculation.
 
Tallis apparently thinks that QM infers that there is nothing solid in the world, yet it was Freeman Dyson, in collaboration with Andrew Leonard, who used Wolfgang Pauli’s Exclusion Principle to demonstrate why solid objects don’t meld into each other. Dyson acknowledged that ‘the proof was extraordinarily complicated, difficult and opaque’, which might explain why it took so long for someone to calculate it (1967).
 
Humans are unique within the animal kingdom in that we’ve developed tools that allow us to ‘sense’ phenomena that can’t be detected through our biological senses. It’s this very attribute that has led to the discipline of science, and in the last century it has taken giant strides beyond anything our predecessors could have imagined. Not only have we learned that we live in a galaxy that is one among trillions and that the Universe is roughly 14 billion years old, but we can ‘sense’ radiation only 380,000 years after its birth. Who would have thought? At the other end of the scale, we’ve built a giant underground synchrotron that ‘senses’ the smallest known particle in nature, called quarks. They are sub-sub-atomic.
 
But, in conjunction with these miracle technologies, we have discovered, or developed (a combination of both), mathematical tools that allow us to describe these phenomena. In fact, as Richard Feynman pointed out, mathematics is the only language in which ‘nature speaks’. It’s like the mathematical models are another tool in addition to the technological ones that extend our natural senses.
 
Having said that, sometimes these mathematical models don’t actually reflect the real world. A good example is Ptolemy’s model of the solar system using epicycles, that had Earth at its centre. A possible modern example is String Theory, which predicts up to 10 spatial dimensions when we are only aware of 3.
 
Sabine Hossenfelder (already mentioned) wrote a book called Lost in Math, where she challenges this paradigm. I think that this is where Tallis is coming from, though he doesn’t specifically say so. He mentions a wavefunction (in passing), and I’ve already pointed out that some physicists see it as a convenient and useful mathematical fiction. One is Viktor T Toth (on Quora) who says:
 
The mathematical fiction of wavefunction collapse was “invented” to deal with the inconvenient fact that otherwise, we’d have to accept what the equations tell us, namely that quantum mechanics is nonlocal (as per Bell’s theorem)…
 
But it’s this very ‘wavefunction collapse’ that Davies was referring to when he pointed out that it ‘destroys the rewind button’. Toth has a different perspective:
 
As others pointed out, wavefunction collapse is, first and foremost, a mathematical abstraction, not a physical process. If it were a physical process, it would be even weirder. Rather than subdividing spacetime with an arbitrarily chosen hypersurface called “now” into a “before observation” and an “after observation” half, connected by the non-unitary transformation of the “collapse”, wavefunction collapse basically implies throwing away the entire universe, replacing it with a different one (past, present, and future included) containing the collapsed wavefunction instead of the original.
 
Most likely, it’s expositions like this that make Tallis throw up his hands (figuratively speaking), even though I expect he’s never read anything by Toth. Just to address Toth’s remark, I would contend that the ‘arbitrarily chosen hypersurface called “now”’ is actually the edge in time of the entire universe. A conundrum that is rarely acknowledged, let alone addressed, is that the Universe appears to have no edge in space while having an edge in time. Notice how different his ‘visualisation’ is to Davies’, yet both of them are highly qualified and respected physicists.
 
So, while there are philosophical differences among physicists, one can possibly empathise with the frustrations of a self-identified philosopher. (Tallis’s professional background is in neuroscience.)
 
Nevertheless, Tallis uses quantum mechanics just like the rest of us, because all electronic devices are dependent on it, and we all exploit Einstein’s relativity theories when we use our smartphones to tell us where we are.
 
So the mathematical models, by and large, work. And they work so well, that we don’t need to know anything about them, in the same way you don’t need to know anything about all the technology your car uses in order for you to drive it.
 
Tallis, like many philosophers, sees mathematics as a consequence of our ability to measure things, which we then turn into equations that conveniently describe natural phenomena. But the history of Western science reveals a different story, where highly abstract mathematical discoveries later provide an epistemological key to our comprehension of the most esoteric natural phenomena. The wavefunction is a good example: using an unexpected mathematical relationship discovered by Euler in the 1700s, it encapsulates in one formula (Shrodinger’s), superposition, entanglement and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. So it may just be a mathematical abstraction, yet it describes the most enigmatic features discovered in the natural world thus far.
 
From what I read and watch (on YouTube), I don’t think you can do theoretical physics without doing philosophy. Philosophy (specifically, epistemology) looks at questions that don’t have answers using our current bank of knowledge. Examples include the multiverse, determinism and free will. Philosophers with a limited knowledge of physics (and that includes me) are not in the same position as practicing physicists to address questions about reality. This puts Tallis at a disadvantage. Physicists can’t agree on topics like the multiverse, superdeterminism, free will or the anthropic principle, yet often hold strong views regardless.
 
I’m always reminded of John Wheeler’s metaphor of science as an island of knowledge in a sea of ignorance, with the shoreline being philosophy. Note that as the island expands so does the shoreline of our ignorance.

The mystery of reality

Many will say, ‘What mystery? Surely, reality just is.’ So, where to start? I’ll start with an essay by Raymond Tallis, who has a regular column in Philosophy Now called, Tallis in Wonderland – sometimes contentious, often provocative, always thought-expanding. His latest in Issue 157, Aug/Sep 2023 (new one must be due) is called Reflections on Reality, and it’s all of the above.
 
I’ve written on this topic many times before, so I’m sure to repeat myself. But Tallis’s essay, I felt, deserved both consideration and a response, partly because he starts with the one aspect of reality that we hardly ever ponder, which is doubting its existence.
 
Actually, not so much its existence, but whether our senses fool us, which they sometimes do, like when we dream (a point Tallis makes himself). And this brings me to the first point about reality that no one ever seems to discuss, and that is its dependence on consciousness, because when you’re unconscious, reality ceases to exist, for You. Now, you might argue that you’re unconscious when you dream, but I disagree; it’s just that your consciousness is misled. The point is that we sometimes remember our dreams, and I can’t see how that’s possible unless there is consciousness involved. If you think about it, everything you remember was laid down by a conscious thought or experience.
 
So, just to be clear, I’m not saying that the objective material world ceases to exist without consciousness – a philosophical position called idealism (advocated by Donald Hoffman) – but that the material objective world is ‘unknown’ and, to all intents and purposes, might as well not exist if it’s unperceived by conscious agents (like us). Try to imagine the Universe if no one observed it. It’s impossible, because the word, ‘imagine’, axiomatically requires a conscious agent.
 
Tallis proffers a quote from celebrated sci-fi author, Philip K Dick: 'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away' (from The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick, 1955). And this allows me to segue into the world of fiction, which Tallis doesn’t really discuss, but it’s another arena where we willingly ‘suspend disbelief' to temporarily and deliberately conflate reality with non-reality. This is something I have in common with Dick, because we have both created imaginary worlds that are more than distorted versions of the reality we experience every day; they’re entirely new worlds that no one has ever experienced in real life. But Dick’s aphorism expresses this succinctly. The so-called reality of these worlds, in these stories, only exist while we believe in them.
 
I’ve discussed elsewhere how the brain (not just human but animal brains, generally) creates a model of reality that is so ‘realistic’, we actually believe it exists outside our head.
 
I recently had a cataract operation, which was most illuminating when I took the bandage off, because my vision in that eye was so distorted, it made me feel sea sick. Everything had a lean to it and it really did feel like I was looking through a lens; I thought they had botched the operation. With both eyes open, it looked like objects were peeling apart. So I put a new eye patch on, and distracted myself for an hour by doing a Sudoku problem. When I had finished it, I took the patch off and my vision was restored. The brain had made the necessary adjustments to restore the illusion of reality as I normally interacted with it. And that’s the key point: the brain creates a model so accurately, integrating all our senses, but especially, sight, sound and touch, that we think the model is the reality. And all creatures have evolved that facility simply so they can survive; it’s a matter of life-and-death.
 
But having said all that, there are some aspects of reality that really do only exist in your mind, and not ‘out there’. Colour is the most obvious, but so is sound and smell, which all may be experienced differently by other species – how are we to know? Actually, we do know that some animals can hear sounds that we can’t and see colours that we don’t, and vice versa. And I contend that these sensory experiences are among the attributes that keep us distinct from AI.
 
Tallis makes a passing reference to Kant, who argued that space and time are also aspects of reality that are produced by the mind. I have always struggled to understand how Kant got that so wrong. Mind you, he lived more than a century before Einstein all-but proved that space and time are fundamental parameters of the Universe. Nevertheless, there are more than a few physicists who argue that the ‘flow of time’ is a purely psychological phenomenon. They may be right (but arguably for different reasons). If consciousness exists in a constant present (as expounded by Schrodinger) and everything else becomes the past as soon as it happens, then the flow of time is guaranteed for any entity with consciousness. However, many physicists (like Sabine Hossenfelder), if not most, argue that there is no ‘now’ – it’s an illusion.
 
Speaking of Schrodinger, he pointed out that there are fundamental differences between how we sense sight and sound, even though they are both waves. In the case of colour, we can blend them to get a new colour, and in fact, as we all know, all the colours we can see can be generated by just 3 colours, which is how the screens on all your devices work. However, that’s not the case with sound, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to distinguish all the different instruments in an orchestra. Just think: all the complexity is generated by a vibrating membrane (in the case of a speaker) and somehow our hearing separates it all. Of course, it can be done mathematically with a Fourier transform, but I don’t think that’s how our brains work, though I could be wrong.
 
And this leads me to discuss the role of science, and how it challenges our everyday experience of reality. Not surprisingly, Tallis also took his discussion in that direction. Quantum mechanics (QM) is the logical starting point, and Tallis references Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation, ‘the view that the world has no definite state in the absence of observation.’ Now, I happen to think that there is a logical explanation for this, though I’m not sure anyone else agrees. If we go back to Schrodinger again, but this time his eponymous equation, it describes events before the ‘observation’ takes place, albeit with probabilities. What’s more, all the weird aspects of QM, like the Uncertainty Principle, superposition and entanglement, are all mathematically entailed in that equation. What’s missing is relativity theory, which has since been incorporated into QED or QFT.
 
But here’s the thing: once an observation or ‘measurement’ has taken place, Schrodinger’s equation no longer applies. In other words, you can’t use Schrodinger’s equation to describe something that has already happened. This is known as the ‘measurement problem’, because no one can explain it. But if QM only describes things that are yet to happen, then all the weird aspects aren’t so weird.
 
Tallis also mentions Einstein’s 'block universe', which infers past, present and future all exist simultaneously. In fact, that’s what Sabine Hossenfelder says in her book, Existential Physics:
 
The idea that the past and future exist in the same way as the present is compatible with all we currently know.
 
And:


Once you agree that anything exists now elsewhere, even though you see it only later, you are forced to accept that everything in the universe exists now. (Her emphasis.)
 
I’m not sure how she resolves this with cosmological history, but it does explain why she believes in superdeterminism (meaning the future is fixed), which axiomatically leads to her other strongly held belief that free will is an illusion; but so did Einstein, so she’s in good company.
 
In a passing remark, Tallis says, ‘science is entirely based on measurement’. I know from other essays that Tallis has written, that he believes the entire edifice of mathematics only exists because we can measure things, which we then applied to the natural world, which is why we have so-called ‘natural laws’. I’ve discussed his ideas on this elsewhere, but I think he has it back-to-front, whilst acknowledging that our ability to measure things, which is an extension of counting, is how humanity was introduced to mathematics. In fact, the ancient Greeks put geometry above arithmetic because it’s so physical. This is why there were no negative numbers in their mathematics, because the idea of a negative volume or area made no sense.
 
But, in the intervening 2 millennia, mathematics took on a life of its own, with such exotic entities like negative square roots and non-Euclidean geometry, which in turn suddenly found an unexpected home in QM and relativity theory respectively. All of a sudden, mathematics was informing us about reality before measurements were even made. Take Schrodinger’s wavefunction, which lies at the heart of his equation, and can’t be measured because it only exists in the future, assuming what I said above is correct.
 
But I think Tallis has a point, and I would argue that consciousness can’t be measured, which is why it might remain inexplicable to science, correlation with brain waves and their like notwithstanding.
 
So what is the mystery? Well, there’s more than one. For a start there is consciousness, without which reality would not be perceived or even be known, which seems to me to be pretty fundamental. Then there are the aspects of reality which have only recently been discovered, like the fact that time and space can have different ‘measurements’ dependent on the observer’s frame of reference. Then there is the increasing role of mathematics in our comprehension of reality at scales both cosmic and subatomic. In fact, given the role of numbers and mathematical relationships in determining fundamental constants and natural laws of the Universe, it would seem that mathematics is an inherent facet of reality.

 

Addendum:

As it happens, I wrote a letter to Philosophy Now on this topic, which they published, and also passed onto Raymond Tallis. As a consequence, we had a short correspondence - all very cordial and mutually respectful.

One of his responses can be found, along with my letter, under Letters, Issue 160. Scroll down to Lucky Guesses.
 

What is your philosophy of life and why?

This was a question I answered on Quora, and, without specifically intending to, I brought together 2 apparently unrelated topics. The reason I discuss language is because it’s so intrinsic to our identity, not only as a species, but as an individual within our species. I’ve written an earlier post on language (in response to a Philosophy Now question-of-the-month), which has a different focus, and I deliberately avoided referencing that.
 
A ‘philosophy of life’ can be represented in many ways, but my perspective is within the context of relationships, in all their variety and manifestations. It also includes a recurring theme of mine.

First of all, what does one mean by ‘philosophy of life? For some people, it means a religious or cultural way-of-life. For others it might mean a category of philosophy, like post-modernism or existentialism or logical positivism.
 
For me, it means a philosophy on how I should live, and on how I both look at and interact with the world. This is not only dependent on my intrinsic beliefs that I might have grown up with, but also on how I conduct myself professionally and socially. So it’s something that has evolved over time.
 
I think that almost all aspects of our lives are dependent on our interactions with others, which starts right from when we were born, and really only ends when we die. And the thing is that everything we do, including all our failures and successes occur in this context.
 
Just to underline the significance of this dependence, we all think in a language, and we all gain our language from our milieu at an age before we can rationally and critically think, especially compared to when we mature. In fact, language is analogous to software that gets downloaded from generation to generation, so that knowledge can also be passed on and accumulated over ages, which has given rise to civilizations and disciplines like science, mathematics and art.
 
This all sounds off-topic, but it’s core to who we are and it’s what distinguishes us from other creatures. Language is also key to our relationships with others, both socially and professionally. But I take it further, because I’m a storyteller and language is the medium I use to create a world inside your head, populated by characters who feel like real people and who interact in ways we find believable. More than any other activity, this illustrates how powerful language is.
 
But it’s the necessity of relationships in all their manifestations that determines how one lives one’s life. As a consequence, my philosophy of life centres around one core value and that is trust. Without trust, I believe I am of no value. But, not only that, trust is the foundational value upon which a society either flourishes or devolves into a state of oppression with its antithesis, rebellion.