By: Ranilo Abando (Manila, October 6, 2020) ***
Folks, today I will introduce you to the tricky concept of reality. It may take time for some to digest it, but it’s okay because there is no need to rush.
Reality is a matter of perspective. One reality may be real for an observer inside it, but if he shifts to a higher perspective, that reality could become unreal for him. For example: While watching a 3D movie, you could begin crying because you are engrossed in the short-term reality of the movie. A character of Sharon Stone once called that “suspension of disbelief”. The movie then becomes unreal for you after you finished watching it and you re-enter the longer-term reality of everyday life, which from my own perspective is…well, less unreal I would say. I think the general rule is: Except for the one Real, all the other multitude of realities are unreal, though some realities are more unreal than the others. Ultimately, one of the most important objectives in life is to attain the absolutely Real perspective, or at least somewhere near it – while still alive.
Our physical reality is rules-based. However, the fact that physical reality is rules-based does not necessarily make it real. Remember that realistic video games, like the Grand Theft Auto, are also rules-based, except probably their justice aspect. The laws of physics are consistent and unbreakable and that is good because it allows the thinking aspect of our minds to operate in it and learn. Learning allows us to grow intellectually. If the rules in a reality can be broken or can be changed from time to time, then that reality is useless for the operation of the thinking aspect of the human mind. We cannot learn there.
That is why the human dream reality during sleep is not as useful for the thinking mind — because it is not a rules-based reality. In our dreams, we can fly like a bird, defying the rules of gravity, and the flow of events there is not as ordered in terms of cause and effect as compared to physical reality. Human minds, at this evolutionary stage, are not yet capable of producing rules-based dream realities. A human dream is an apparent attempt by what seems to be a dumber “dreamweaver” aspect of the human mind to connect generally random memories stored in it into some sort of a story — often with bizarre results. I indicated “human” there because we cannot discount the probability that other sentient beings were able to develop powerful “dreamweavers” that could produce high-quality rules-based realities.
As many physicists already suspect and propose, our physical world is fundamentally an information-based reality. Actually all realities are information-based. Well, actually everything that exists is information-based. If physical reality is a high-quality virtual reality, as it seems to be, based on the implications of double-slit experiments in quantum physics, then the information processing needed to produce it must be occurring outside that reality. You could see that kind of setup in a virtual reality video game where the computer hardware and software producing the game are outside the reality of the game itself, and are inaccessible to the virtual characters of the game.
The following are the other likely philosophical implications of the various double-slit experiments in quantum physics, including the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment, with inputs from ancient sources:
1. The “builder” aspect of the human mind processes the formless primary information that it receives from an outside source and builds them into a virtual display of ordered forms that we perceive and experience as the physical world. The rigid, persistent, and high-resolution virtual world being perceived and experienced is all inside the human mind. It is hard to believe, but the physical universe is not out there. Even your hands that you use to touch it, your eyes to look at it, and your brain are all virtual parts of that world, making the reality simply too realistic. The observer, the seat of consciousness, is the one who perceives that reality.
Basically, the mind produces a reality by putting a certain degree of new order into, interconnecting, and elaborately arranging a certain amount of pre-existing information that are usually lower-order. The newly ordered and interconnected information produced are then perceived by the observer as reality. The observer wouldn’t want to observe raw and low-order information. Luckily for the “builder” aspect of the human mind, the information it is receiving from a source to build this physical reality were already pre-ordered and pre-arranged into a blueprint that it only needs to build and display. It is like a carpenter who builds a house based on a ready-made design that is being provided to him.
2. The “thinker” aspect of the mind normally processes the form-based secondary information that it receives from the virtual physical reality built by the “builder” aspect of the mind. The processing generally involves trying to rearrange different combinations of the information so that it can choose the best combination. This is what separates us from the animals. The “thinker” aspect is latent in the latter.
Thus, the “thinker” is capable of making modifications to the physical reality it found itself in. Our physical reality system is interactive, just like those video games you can find in the arcade.
Information being processed by physical computers are based on physical differences, such as presence/absence of electrons, and presence/absence of light pulse. The information being processed by the mind (and probably the mind itself) could be based on other kinds of differences unknown to science. Probable candidates are like – exist/not exist and this-way-motion/that-way-motion of its kind of existence. I know that this is not scientific, but we have to at least make our best efforts because science can never go this far.
Because the information-processing power of that reality system is not unlimited, just like a physical computer is, it appears that physical reality breaks down if the amount of information being handled is too much or too little, such as too much gravitational information that results in black holes.
I hope you are able to digest most parts of the discussion.
(Thanks to pexels.com – Simon Migaj for the photo of mountains above)