An Illusion as Truth

The Scheme of Things

In the header to this page is a question- Who is to say?

Who is to say what the Nature of Reality is? Who asks the question and who thinks they can provide an answer?

You and I, as fellow Human Beings can ask the question, and we think we can articulate arguments that go some way to providing a rational if somewhat limited answer. If we try to be over confident in our arguments there are about 6 billion other Human Beings on the planet who may not share the logic or rationale of our views. The Nature of Reality is a contentious subject.

There is a problem... the problem is...we are part of the problem.

In putting a question mark after the phrase Nature Of Reality, what is the nature of the question we are creating?

THE NATURE OF REALITY?

The contentiousness arises because we are unable to put aside preconceived notions, beliefs we hold concerning matters we see as "obvious". Issues we see as axiomatic- unquestionable statements of fact around which we build our theory.

We live in a world that has all the appearances of a physical independant external-to-the-body reality.
Conventional scientific endevours have clearly demonstrated that is not the case, but the starting point for those scientific studies was the conviction that the physical world is an undeniable truth and despite clear findings to the contrary much of the scientific community, particularly those who claim the status of professionals cling to the conditioned response that appearances generate.

"Reality" is that which exists.

Your head exists, if you have a headache that also exists. Limiting the term "reality" to a question of the physical and seeking an answer through science can confine the discussion to matters of physics, but that can lead to looking for a physical explanation for your headache, which may misdirect the enquiry down irrelevant byways to nowhere.
You headache may have a physical explanation, but it is a personal experience, your headache is a feeling, it is not made of anything obviously physical.

If you look into a mirror what you see is not actually there. Your reflection, the room behind you, the furniture, the landscape outdoors you may be able to see through a reflected window. Non of that is there. The science says what you see is a creation of neural activity in your brain. By implication so is the frame holding the mirror and so is the wall the mirror hangs on.

If you commence banging your head into the wall the mirror hangs on it will be an unpleasant experience. That is regarded as the ultimate proof of the existence of a manifest physical world. Those so sure of their external world have unsurmountable difficulties explaining the perfections of reflections.

FEELING OUR WAY INTO REALITY.

Science often refuses to lay claim to ever having proved anything. When pressed the spokespersons for the scientific method tend to say they offer the best of an overall assembly of ideas and guidelines that fit the observable facts. Scientists, on the other hand hold as many views and opinions as there are scientists to hold them.

Science has today become a standard bearer and a test against which whatever we may chose to consider factual or truthful will be compared against. Many will quickly quote some assumed fact or other to contradict opinion they feel goes against their instinctual assumptions.
They will rarely stop to consider how their ideas may be influenced by years of conditioning to a particular world view. Many may understand the concept of conditioning, but may also believe it only applies to other people.

We gain our understanding of the world from many sources and confusion easily reigns. Children today may be taught about the concept of a photon and believe they have a reasonable grasp of the word, its meaning and how to use it in context.

Do you know how and when to use the word PHOTON?

The answer is probably yes, you do, and what you say may make a great deal of sense to those listening, whether you are talking about photography, the "two-slit experiment", firing photon torpedos at a Klingon Warbird or why a light microscope cannot allow you to look at the Covid19 Coronavirus.
If you can do all that why do I feel confident in saying that you probably have NO IDEA WHAT A PHOTON ACTUALLY IS.

Because context is everything. You don't have to know what you are talking about to know what you are talking about.

I said you probably don't know what a photon is because I need to accept that you may actually know, despite my assumed certainty that you don't.
This is a topic that needs careful discussion, even though you may think you are following my reasoning logically.

What does it mean to know what a photon is?

It seems like a simple question but I think it requires very cautious and careful consideration to answer something that goes to the core of human existence. Yes, I think the answer to a seemingly inocuous question really does impact on the fundamentals of our existence.

First let us rule out the obvious first step, looking at the word in the dictionary. The dictionary will NOT answer the question. The dictionary will provide an answer as to how the word is used in everyday language and a description of the scientific "definition" for purposes of technical discourse. Neither of these tell you what a photon is, they tell you how the word is used.
How a word is used does not bestow meaning onto a word.
Philosophically this is a problem of epistemology and ontology, two terms which are freely used without a jot of clarity throughout the philosophical literature, so having mentioned their existence I will tried to avoid them.

Lets consider what we "know" about photons. Let there be light.

1. Some say photons are particles of light.
2. Some say they are gauge bosons, massless particles with no electric charge carrying the electromagnetic interaction. They exhibit a duality of behaviour, excercising wave-like or particle-like properties depending on circumstance and observation.
3. When photons smash into your eyes at 186,000 miles per second they give you no pain. When they do the same to your skin they give you a suntan or maybe cancer.
4. When photons smash into complexes of proteins in the leaves of higher plants in fields and forests or microscopic phytoplankton in the oceans they give up their energy to fuel almost all life on the planet. They are fundemental to the physical existence of your body.
5. X-rays are also photons, they allow the medical profession to look inside you and airport security to look inside your luggage.
6. FM Radio stations broadcast photons with tiny amounts of energy which can carry all the talk and tunes you may require.

This list can be expanded later, mention of radio waves raises an issue concerning the nature of reality that would be valuable to investigate at this point. Have you ever considered what is going on (allegedly) in what you regard as the space between you and everything else?

Space, the distance between objects, is a densely occupied place, not the emptiness that presents itself to your senses.
It appears as an invisible container for an entire Universe of physical objectivity. On the grand scale it is home to a truely colossal amount of photonic activity, more locally, between you and your friends for example, the photon count is still enormous but shares the space with billions of molecules of gas, water, microscopic life forms and an un-noticed but vast amount of information.

Are photons passive conveyors of information?

To a linguist photons are a little over 100 years old, put together from a Greek term for light "photo" and a suffix "-on" refering to a unit, hence a photon is a unit of light, or unit of electronagnetic radiation.
To a physicist they were also an unknown quantity until a little over 100 years ago, but having been introduced to them by Albert Einstein they have decided that they have been around since the creation of the Universe. Let there be light (and something to agree with the religous community about), and let it be a fundemental fragment of reality.

To repeat the question - Are photons passive conveyors of information?

It is an obviously assumed fact that light is that which allows us vision. It is the assumed information to be extracted from light that resulted in collosal amounts of money and scientific endeavour being spent on putting the Hubble Telescope in orbit around the earth.

If the video doesn't fit your mobile screen, rotate your device!!

Hubble Extreme Deep Field Pushes Back Frontiers of Time and Space. 2min 42sec.

Note the claims about "time, the past and seeing into history" in this video.

Listen again to the presenters claims.

.............................

These are astonishing and fascinating claims that are casually accepted as unquestioned truth.

The Hubble Telescope does not "see" into the farthest reaches of the cosmos, it gathers light that has arrived from the farthest reaches and is detected just above the planet's atmosphere. The presenter acknowledges this by refering to the light from very distant galaxies only now arriving in our vicinity but says nothing about the implications of this statement.

This is something that should be taught at the most basic levels of education. Children from the youngest age should be made aware that what we see should be regarded as a reproduction, not an actuality. The images from the Hubble telescope are exactly that... images. The Hubble telescope is exactly that, a telescope, it has no visual experience, it cannot "see" anything. It gathers photons, or more accurately it interacts with photons and saves information in a digital manner.
How we create the world we experience is literally an unknown, yet the totally convincing reproduction we live as daily experience has the majority utterly incapable of recognising their mistake. The mistake is to assume you are perceiving a world outside your consciousness. You have never "seen" an external world in the way you may be so utterly convinced you do.
You can believe the objects in your room have a "real physical existence in the world", but you are not seeing a world seperate from your mind, your consciousness. Consciousness is regarded as virtually impossible to meaningfully define, but definition is irrelevant, every experience you ever have is a living and present demonstration of exactly what consciousness is.

Until this is clearly understood, you will never be able to approach the question of the Nature of Reality with any hope of an answer. It is like trying to learn Arithmetic without knowing what numbers are. Without knowing what numbers are you cannot understand arithmetic. Without knowing what consciousness is you cannot question the Nature of Reality.

There is nothing difficult about this, forget all the attempts to define, explain or otherwise make a great mystery of the "phenomenon of consciousness", just listen, look, smell, taste and touch it. There it is. No explanations required.

THE NATURE OF REALITY, THAT IS ANOTHER QUESTION.

Lets persue the question by considering why the words "saves information" is highlighted in red a few sentences above.