About reality

Most of us may realise, from time to time, that we live our lifes with a narrow view. But in a sense, it's even worse than narrow: it's mostly automatic. But we don't realise how automatic it is. Let me show you some shocking evidence...

Human retina has two kind of light sensitive cells. They are called "rods" and "cones", the former are for low–light black and white vision, the later are for full color, detailed vision. I hope this was expected, but the shocking fact is that cones cover only a small central region of our vision, roughly the size of our open hand at arm length. The whole rest of it is made of strictly black and white rods. So our full color vision is mostly synthetic.—Oh, what a marvelous brain trick... We should realize this, but don't stop here. Visible colors are nothing special from a physical point of view. Infrared light and ultraviolet, microwaves and x-rays, radio waves and cosmic gamma rays share exactly the same nature, they are all photons, only they have different wavelenghts.

So our (mostly synthetic) picture of reality is arbitrary. Think about it: if your eyes where only radio wave sensitive, your concept of "solid things" would be different. Sure, you would discover ordinary solid things crashing against them, but if you where as small as a neutrino you could have crossed the entire planet Earth without ever touching anything. Do you think you are good looking? Look at yourself in an x–ray cranial radiography... It may be hard to realise how arbitrary is our view of what we call "reality", but it's a fact. Colors, objects, sounds, smells, temperatures... the only ones we know are all selected arbitrarily by our senses' capabilities, from our size scale. May I be a jerk, but the key word here is arbitrary, against "substantial", against "absolute", against "real".

Now let's do some mental time-trip: let's go back to the Cretacic period. We are visualizing the world some 149.994.000 years before Noe's Ark. And now I ask you: Were there any dinosaurs? —The answer is... no, there weren't: Before men there were no dinosaurs, there were no plants, there were no planet, no thing. If there were no humans talking about dinosaurs, then there were none. "Dinosaur" is an arbitrary human concept, as it is "plant", "planet", etc. Before us there were no human concepts, and after us there won't be. Human concepts need humans to support them, to define boundaries, forms that abstract them so there can be similarities and differences. It's so hard to see the obvious, that human beings keep asking themselves those silly trascendental questions: «What is our reason to exist, or the reason for everything else's existence?» «Why are we all here?»

I don't care answering such stupid questions. They suppose there should be a "reason", and then ask for it. But outside our beloved human vision of the world, there is no reason concept whatsoever; no language in which to express it, no subject for no phrase, no object for no verb. Not even anything happens! because "to happen" needs arbitrary (human) time and space marks like "begin", "from", "to", "end" to define the event which is supposed to happen. So there isn't even the need for a reason—bad news, God!. Of course we could also cast doubt on the object in the question: we ourselves; but that's worth another post.

It turns out that reality is like it is, not like we imagine it is. So simple. There is something I really love about modern physics (quantum mecanics, general relativity), it's something they show to us about reality, about how human so limited intuition crashes against it. For instance, a photon—resuming the example about our vision—is something that would have no mass at all at rest, and, being unable to stop, accelerate or decelate, appears to us as a little ball impacting on a detector screen (like our retina) or as a wave interfering itself after passing simultaneously through two holes in a barrier (diffraction blur when using small aperture taking photos is also caused by their wave–like nature) ...being neither. It's the unit of kinetical energy transfer (when two objects collide, they just interchange photons). It could not percieve time nor distance, because, from its "point of view", it takes nothing to reach every place in the universe. It's such an odd object (or phenomenon), with such an eccentric and incomprehensible behaviour... that many people think it's completely unimaginable to us. But I say: Of course it's unimaginable to us!

Everything real is unimaginable!