Where is reality

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Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position and shape.

Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop.

And yet the desktop is useful. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you. Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no objective, observer-independent features. The snake I see is a description created by my sensory system to inform me of the fitness consequences of my actions. Evolution shapes acceptable solutions, not optimal ones.

A snake is an acceptable solution to the problem of telling me how to act in a situation. My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.

So I decided I needed to figure it out for myself. So eventually in the s I went to the artificial intelligence lab at MIT and worked on machine perception. The field of vision research was enjoying a newfound success in developing mathematical models for specific visual abilities. I noticed that they seemed to share a common mathematical structure, so I thought it might be possible to write down a formal structure for observation that encompassed all of them, perhaps all possible modes of observation.

I was inspired in part by Alan Turing. But as Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in his new book Helgoland , quantum theory — the physical theory that describes the universe at the smallest scales — almost certainly shows this worldview to be false. During the scientific revolution, the English physics pioneer Isaac Newton and his German counterpart Gottfried Leibniz disagreed on the nature of space and time.

That is, if we could remove the contents of the universe — all the planets, stars, and galaxies — we would be left with empty space and time. Leibniz, on the other hand, claimed that space and time were nothing more than the sum total of distances and durations between all the objects and events of the world.

If we removed the contents of the universe, we would remove space and time also. The relational view of space and time was a key inspiration for Einstein when he developed general relativity. Rovelli makes use of this idea to understand quantum mechanics. He claims the objects of quantum theory, such as a photon, electron, or other fundamental particle, are nothing more than the properties they exhibit when interacting with — in relation to — other objects.

We put a cat in a box with some lethal agent like a vial of poison gas triggered by a quantum process like the decay of a radioactive atom , and we close the lid. The quantum process is a chance event. Lacking scientific specifics and given the pervasive oddity of the universe, discussions of reality have often been confined to the realm of philosophy, which afforded the ability to swing for the metaphysical fences and — perhaps more importantly — explore human nature itself.

Hence it is necessary to take the longer route of philosophical criticism. The problem? The first frameworks of human understanding of the universe relied on divine action. The gods are getting angry. Poor harvest? Probably the work of an offended or mischievous deity. Something has gone very, very wrong in the vaults of heaven. And then came the Greeks, who proposed a new way of looking at the world. They defined four fundamental elements — earth, fire, air and water — and suggested that all matter was made of these elements in differing proportions.

Early scientific experiments, such as those conducted by Empedocles, helped to differentiate between air and aether. Worth noting? While the four-element framework was simplistic and eventually gave way to a much more precise understanding of chemical components and object interactions, it represented one of the first forays into a physical rather than philosophical understanding of reality.