“However vast is the darkness, we must supply our own light.” – Stanley Kubrick
This is the “metaphysics” episode in our series about… understanding, apparently? Anyways, you are not into this stuff, feel free to skip it. But if you are curious to know how understanding is possible in the first place— what makes knowledge possible — then read on, as we zoom-in on this part of the puzzle.
So, what can we know about the subject of our understanding — about our reality, its nature? Well, strictly speaking, not much. This idea is otherwise known as Cartesian doubt — so named after a French philosopher Renée Descartes, who explored it in great detail. He asked himself precisely this question — what can we know for sure, without a doubt? For example, right at this moment you are reading these words on some screen — but can you be sure that that screen is real? How can you be sure that you are not living in the Matrix’s “reality”, your real body suspended in a power plant? Or maybe it’s just a dream — your own dream… or a dream of Cthulhu (which would actually explain a lot)?
Well, the answer to these questions — how can we know? — is simple: we can’t. No way, no how. We cannot be sure about anything, and that was Descartes’ conclusion.
OK, actually there is one thing that you know must exist for sure — your perceptions, and you as the perceiver1… if that’s even a word. As to what your perceptions represent, if anything — that, again, you can’t know for sure, and you never will.
So that was the scary part (one of those lol). Many of us don’t even want to come close to thinking about these things — which is unfortunate, because running away from darkness robs us of the chance to supply our own light, to consider it rationally. And yes, there are quite a few things left to consider here — because even though we cannot know something for sure, we can still make a few useful assumptions about it!
Wait what? — you might be thinking. How can any assumption be useful if we already established that we will never know if it’s true? Well, that’s the whole purpose of assuming something — even though we might not (or, in this case, cannot) know for sure if it’s true, we may have good reasons to believe that it is likely to be true. And then we can start building on that foundation.
And this is exactly what we are going to argue about our Reality — that we a) can make certain hypotheses about its nature, and b) that we have good — rational — reasons to believe that these hypotheses are, in fact true.
Perhaps at this point you are getting the feeling that there won’t be any mind-blowing Matrix-like revelations forthcoming. And you are right. Mostly, we are going to spell out what many of us already implicitly — so we can start exploring both these assumptions and their implications consciously.
So, without further ado, the holy trinity:
There exists one and only objective Reality, a reality that we all share and belong to. “Objective” means it’s existence is independent of our own — it was here before we came around, and it will be there after we’re long gone. It also means that any event in it happens for everyone of us regardless of their perspective. For example, when the proverbial tree falls in the forest, it makes the sound whether anyone hears it or not.
This Reality is deterministic. Nothing in it just happens at random, but each event is caused (created) in a predetermined way by a certain event in the past. This means that, at least in theory, everything can be traced back to its cause.
Finally, we humans can understand this Reality by doing just that — by tracing events back to their causes; by identifying repeating patterns in the way causes create their effects; and, eventually, by discovering the laws of creation driving those patterns — the laws that govern this realm and our lives in it.
Again, none of this is new. The idea of the objective reality appears to be under a siege in recent years, and many seem to struggle with it. But this was hardly the case historically. Religious beliefs, for example, were always offered as everyone’s — objective, that is — truth.
To think of it, any statement made in good faith is a claim to objective truth. Even if you were to describe your feeling to someone else, the implication is that you and your feelings exist not just for you, in your own private realm (or your imagination), but in the reality that you share with the other person. In other words, you state that your feelings are also their truth… I mean it’d better be!
Now, our perspectives of this Reality could be quite different. Nonetheless, we have to assume that more often than not, when it appears that we are looking at different things (or that the other person is blind or something), we are actually looking at the different sides of the same coin, so to speak — and that we can only appreciate the real thing if we succeed at reconstructing its complete, multi-dimensional model from individual perspectives (i. e. recognizing that it’s neither head, nor tail, but a coin that has both of those sides).
The second assumption — about this Reality being deterministic if, at times, chaotic2 — is also old news. In fact, one of its most powerful affirmations is found in the opening verses of the Gospel of John. There it says, in reference to the Logos: “All things were made through it; and without it was not any thing made that was made.”
In this context, Logos refers to the design of our Reality.3 In particular, it describes the laws of nature — the laws of creation — prescribing how causes create their effects. The immutability and consistent application of those laws makes our Reality deterministic and, to that extent, predictable. Notably, it also means that the Reality can be understood as a machine, as a clockwork. Of course, the Reality’s clockwork is huge and almost infinitely complicated. Still we can understand it by visualizing its simplified — though by no means incomplete4 — model in our imagination.
This brings us to the next question — what are our reasons to believe that the above assumptions are true? And the simple answer is this: it’s science, the very possibility of doing it. Specifically, it would not be possible to do science if the above assumptions were not true — if we, again, didn’t share the same reality (which the scientific theories aim to describe); and if this reality were not deterministic — that is, if the Universe was lawless, or if its laws kept changing at random.
Or, if you want, here is another way to state the same point — the above assumptions, far from being just wishful thinking, qualify as a scientific theory in their own right. This means that even though they cannot be proven true once and for all, they are still testable — and so we can accept those assumptions as being true for as long as they keep passing the tests!
Which, to be sure, they do with flying colors as we keep doing just that, testing them at every moment and with every choice we make. We don’t think about it consciously, but we only act when we expect certain outcomes, and all those expectations are ultimately rooted in our ideas about reality. We, therefore, test those ideas whenever we act.
So this is what makes knowledge possible — the fact that our Reality appears to be objective, predictable, and, as such, understandable. We can even argue that we humans owe our very existence to that. This is why we have evolved, actually, to be scientists, to have the capacity for understanding how things work — because our Reality makes science possible.
Summing it up, let’s emphasize this critical point — that our Reality is, effectively, a machine, a clockwork, and that it can be modeled and understood as such.
One implication of this is that the ultimate truth cannot be found in words — or even in mathematical / logical expressions. The Reality is the ultimate truth, and because it is a machine, this is what the whole truth is to describe — a machine. Now, think of the information that a machine “encodes” — it’s not just in its parts, or in the way they are connected together. It’s also in the way they interact, in the process — in the algorithm — that the machine runs.
What this means is that any communication is (or should be) an attempt to describe the inner workings of a certain machine. And as such, it is only successful when the reader/listener succeeds in reconstructing a model of that machine in their imagination. This is how we understand each other, one person describing a model they see in their mind, and the other reconstructing that model in theirs — until they too see it!
This, by the way, is where ChatGPT and other AI chatbots fall short. Instead of actually trying to understand, to reconstruct the model that the words “encode”, they rely on statistics to guess how they should respond — respond in a way that would create the appearance of understanding.
As such, a machine learning AI is designed to play the imitation game — to fake the real understanding. But then again, the same is often true about us, humans! The AI in our subconsciousness makes understanding optional — in fact, it makes it tempting for us to skip that step.
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” — Stephen A. Covey
The other implication of the Reality being a machine is that its every part is also a machine — and that very much includes you. You are a machine, and you can understand yourself as such. Now, this bit might sound counterintuitive (if not disheartening) — but only because most of the mind’s machinery is hidden in subconsciousness, in the underwater part of the iceberg. Only the final results of the subconscious processing bubble up to our conscious awareness, manifesting itself as feelings, as insights, as inspiration — even as our sense of beauty. Add to this the fact that a machine learning AI is fundamentally unexplainable, and you too could see why so much of our nature appears to be forever shrouded in mystery — if not coming straight from divine.5
And this is just one of the reasons why, machine or not, we don’t need to worry about having free will! You see, free will is a byproduct of uncertainty. And, sure enough, knowledge, understanding reduce uncertainty. Still, our models cannot eliminate it completely (e.g. the butterfly effect). And that’s why we will always have a choice and, therefore, free will.
In the future episodes we might explore this part in better detail, perhaps taking an honest look at the double-edged nature of truth — in what way it makes us free, and in what way it takes away our freedom. We will focus on other relevant subjects (for example, how quantum uncertainty fits into the concept of the deterministic Universe) as we keep piecing together the puzzle — the Logos, the model of our Reality. So stay tuned!
… if you dare ;)
Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I exist” refers to this exception.
Chaotic does not mean random. Rather, it describes a process where a slight change in the initial conditions can lead to drastically different outcomes — a.k.a. the butterfly effect. Such systems are still deterministic, and their future states can be, therefore, computed — however, it would take an impractical amount of calculations to do so. The now-famous three-body problem is one example of a chaotic system. Earth’s weather is another.
The design that we can reconstruct in our minds. This is what Jesus did, thus embodying the Logos itself. And not just Jesus — the Logos becomes flesh in every person who succeeds at piecing together its copy.
A world map is an example of such a model. It is simplified due to its limited resolution, yet complete, covering the whole territory of the planet.
Actually, that feeling of divine is far from being just an illusion. The spiritual world is real — but this is the part of the puzzle that we’d have leave for future episodes.