Inspired by a recently exhumed zombie thread on why your hand doesn’t go through your desk, I’m starting this because I wasn’t sure continuing the undeadification of a six-year-old thread was the most conducive to discussion…
Anyway, given that most (if not all) matter is, at base level, the interaction of various electromagnetic and energy fields, how much of what we see is actually what we’re seeing?
To create a frame of reference for this question, let me explain something from one of my hobbies, computer gaming (specifically MMORPs). In something like World of Warcraft, while the program is SHOWING you orcs and trolls killing giant fungus people, what’s really going on is that there are a WHOLE lot of mathematical operations being run determining whether the set of conditions that you call your character or toon has hit the set of conditions that you perceive as the fungus giant. All of the visuals and flash and magic spells and sparkling armor is a veneer created by the client program for the game to provide you with a visual representation that you’ll enjoy.
I find that if I start to think about the underlying state of events of the game for too long, the game itself becomes unenjoyable to me, at least until my brain stops trying to peek behind the curtain in a week or so.
But I’ve found that I get that same feeling, mildly, when I read or participate in discussions about the underlying nature of reality and matter, such as the thread about hands and desks. Is what we’re seeing really there, or is it a veneer that our animal brain has evolved to allow us to perceive the world in a less confusing manner than seeing all of those quantum fields and things?
This question is one of metaphysics, not physics.
Our bodies have evolved to perceive the world in a certain way - we call these the five senses - sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. These are the only ways we can observe the universe around us. To say that a red ball should “really” appear as a superposition of a huge number of electron wave functions is missing the point - those wave functions appear to us as a red ball - anything else would be a different object.
So, there is no “right” or “wrong” about our perception, it just is.
In this day and age, we have a lot of ways of “seeing” the world around us, from our own eyes to electron microscopes and even particle accelerators. In fact, pretty much any physics experiment is a way of trying to “look at” the world around us. For example, our eyes see certain wavelengths of light. But we can do many experiments showing that there are many different wavelengths of light that our eyes can’t see. Our eyes are good at showing us the physical dimensions of large objects, and some of their chemical and physical properties (ie which wavelengths of light are absorbed, reflected, transmitted). But if we want to look at very small objects, like bacteria or atoms, or subatomic particles, we need to use different methods. In the end, we have enough tools to form a very accurate picture of the physical world around us.
That said, I’m also not sure what you are trying to ask.
The brain’s machinations on the raw visual data does account for a great deal of what we perceive - the ‘colourisation’ of our peripheral vision, for instance - but the reason objects appear as they do is more that our macroscopic view is the aggregate of the billions of microscopic items in front of us. It isn’t like the end of The Matrix - that if we achieved a profound Keanu-Messiah state of consciousness that we might sweep back the veil of learned perception and see the quantum forces at work. They’re too small.
Before I was even halfway through the OP, I started thinking about The Matrix.
But I agree with what I think Staggerlee is saying. Suppose I see a red ball in front of me. On the one hand, “red” does not have any real existence. It is merely how my eyes and brain interpret particular wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. But the ball does exist, sort of. True, it is mostly empty space, and it isn’t really solid. One could even say that it isn’t “matter”, but is merely a bunch of subatomic “energy strings” vibrating in a certain way. However, those “strings” (or whatever they are) are similar to each other, and they are distinguishable from the “strings” which make up the air surrounding the ball, and have a distinct spherical shape. This is VERY different than a ball which is merely imposed on my brain by The Matrix.
I’d say the ball and its red color have much the same level of real existence. Each winds up as a mental image of a physical phenomenon that at its lowest level is exceedingly complicated and non-intuitive. But each is predictable and repeatable.
I’ve always thought that our brains produce a sensical interpretation of the phenomena of objects. Only in the philosophical sense could we said to be seeing an object as it really is. This is my opinion though.
Absolutely. In fact, this was big discussion we had in Philosophy 101 (seriously) and a wrote a paper on it, probably like every other freshman. This whole topic is a philosophical one. The brain creates a model of the world based on sensory input. People missing any of the senses have a little different model, I think, but I think the human mind pretty much ends up the same place after all is said and done.
Seriously, don’t allow yourself to think about things like this, because they are unanswerable (or some would say philosophical) questions. You cannot observe the world through another person’s eyes, or through the “impartial” eyes of the “real world”, whatever that might be. You are a human and you can only observe the world through your human eyes.
The quantum thread in here has enough material to explode our collective brains as it is
Clap your hands together. You see your hands hit, feel your hands hit, see your hands hit all at the same time. Right?
Not really.
It takes about 200ms from when a photon hits your retina until your brain decodes what you’re actually seeing. Hearing a sound takes about half that time. Feeling tactile pressure is about one tenth of that, about 20ms if I recall correctly. Your brain has to synchronize all of that and put things in the correct order. It predicts what you’re going to sense based upon all you’ve experienced in the past. Then when it’s done decoding reality, it goes into your short-term memory and replaces its predictions with what you actually experienced.
Now go and look at a door. Face it straight on, about three to six feet away from it. The edges look straight, right?
Stare at the dead center of the door. Then, while keeping your eyes centered there, use your peripheral vision to examine the edges. You should notice that the edges are all curved, almost as if the center of the door is bulging in towards you. This is due to the physical geometry of the world and our eyes. But your brain “knows” about this, based on past experience, and corrects for it.
Yellow is an interesting color: if you view a combination of single-frequency “red” and “green” wavelengths, it looks just like a single-frequency “yellow” wavelength lying somewhere between them. Also white: broadband emission can look exactly the same as three single-frequency emissions.
In other words, an alien eyeball with a large number of color channels might think sunlight was white, but “white” video screens would be very strongly colored. “White” fluorescent tubes would be colored brilliantly greenPurple.
Banana again: we can’t see the inside and the outside at the same time. We can’t even see the Other side; we can only see This side. A creature with multiple eyestalks could perceive a much better approximation of “True Banananess.” And in an environment with a large flux of neutrons, x-rays, electrons, etc., a creature with detectors for those things would think bananas look very Potassium-y. Human bodies would look like transparent jellyfish containing two large air bubbles and a brightly colored skeleton. Isn’t that what we REALLY look like?
Sniff. Nitrogen. Fee, Fie, Foe, Fum, I SMELLS ME SOME NITROGEN. I bet some HUMANS been in here again, messing with my stuff.
If you want to become slightly Transhuman, wear radio headphones set to the AM band and tuned down near 550 in a blank section. It lets you “hear” all sorts of EM “sounds” such as electric city busses, malfunctioning light dimmers, squealy neon sign ballasts, etc. Can’t sleep with an electric blanket, it’s much too loud.
Some studies have shown that the brain replaces your actual experience with what you predicted. That is, the brain’s desire to predict is so strong that sometimes what you remember is what you expected, rather than what actually happened.
