Black Holes and Misconceptions - What Do We Really Know About The World?
It's fascinating to consider the differences between what we see and what is. There's a gulf between our models of phenomena and what those phenomena are.
@locikll shared a post last month explaining how scientists detect black holes. It's fascinating stuff, and I can't do justice to the technical side of his explanation here. It comes down to this: the mental image we carry around in our heads of a "black hole" as a dark patch in space, maybe surrounded by a shimmering donut of escaping light - that's all bunk. Instead, we infer the presence of black holes from observations of gravitational lensing and concentrations of x-rays. There really isn't much known about how they behave, or even exactly what they are. Given the dangers of approaching one and studying it up close, we may never truly understand them.
So much of the world is like this.
Photo by Joel Filipe, provided by Unsplash.com
Consider how a young child understands a car. It's a shiny box on wheels. It has one pedal to make it go, another to make it stop, and a steering wheel. Mom straps the child in and takes her from a to b. That's what a car does. That's what it's for. That's what it is.
Mom knows there's more to it than than that. A car is something that consumes fuel and breaks down occasionally and requires registration and insurance and adherence to traffic laws. But as long as she operates it safely and within the law, she's got a pretty complete picture the car, right?
A mechanic would say, "Not really. You've also got this engine and these brakes and this steering system." He might also lecture her on the frequency of oil changes, and point out that the head gasket's leaking some oil and the tie-rods are ready to snap. At least the mechanic knows what he's dealing with. Surely, if he can take the thing apart and put it back together again, he knows what a car is.
"Wait a minute," says a physicist. (He's here for an oil change.) "None of this would work without the laws of thermodynamics." And he could launch into a lecture about how heat and pressure drives the pistons, and how the coefficient of friction affects the grip of the tires on the blacktop, and the optics of the rear-view mirror, and...
No particular interpretation is "wrong." They're all talking about the same car. But there's a hell of a devil in the details.
Consider another example. Look at the tree outside your window. Let's say it's a maple. It does what trees do, right? It's a tree.
Well, it's also a vascular pump for sucking up moisture from the ground. It's a cellular factory for the manufacture of oxygen and complex sugars and ever-expanding rings of woody tissue. It's a replicator for producing those funny little helicopter pods that float off on the wind and make more copies of itself. It's part of a system that provides nectar and pollen to bees, shade to animals and shelter to birds.
The more you consider the details, the less a tree seems an object and the more it resembles a process.
Our own bodies are amazingly transient. I'm not talking birth to death. I'm talking day to day.
Red blood cells live about 120 days. You haven't got a red blood cell in you today that was manufactured in April. That may seem like a quick turnover, but anyone who's donated blood is comfortable with the idea that we'll make more.
The other tissues listed on this chart are more alarming (at least to me): the alveoli in our lungs are replaced every eight days. Our stomach regenerates every two to nine days. We re-grow our trachea every one to two months, and ladies, you get a brand new cervix each week. Our bones stick around for a decade and, sadly, our fat lasts almost as long - but at least we can take solace from considering our beer belly is a completely different beer belly than it was eight years ago.
We think we know what a body is, what a person is, and we imagine a man bounded by skin and self-assurance and a social security number.
In reality, a person is a pattern, woven, maintained, and discarded: a veritable fountain of cells, a temporary interruption in the flow of otherwise disinterested matter.
Touch the wall in front of you. Try to push your hand through it. You can't, right? It's solid. Everyone knows you can't walk through walls. That's what walls are: solid objects that stop you.
But why do they stop you? Not because they're solid. Most of that wall - the vast, vast majority of it - is just empty space. Billions of neutrinos flow through it every second. So does your wifi signal. Why can't you?
It's not because you're made of any solid, permanent stuff. It's because the electrons on your hand are pressing against the electrons on the wall. And two negatively charged particles will repel each other. Trillions of negatively charged particles will repel each other a lot - enough to convince you that you're pressing against a solid wall. But in reality, you're just a cloud of atoms. Positively vaporous.
I read that article about black holes and thought, Huh, what do we really know about them. Then I thought, What do we know about anything?
The answer seems to be: "Enough to get by." That's what we've evolved to do. And we know a little bit more every day. Our eyes and our brains keep our bodies moving in the patterns of survival and propagation. (Strangely enough, the only tissues we don't throw away are those of our brains and central nervous system. If only the thoughts and memories it carried could last as long!) And now that we've wrapped those brains around the scientific method we're able to refine our perceptions into models that more and more closely resemble "reality."
But hell, I don't think we'll ever see things as they really are.
Do you?
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The similarities with my post are indeed striking! Your examples are in some ways much better than mine! The way the story about the car builds up for example.
I've had this thought: what if I never came up with my idea, and I read your post now? I think I would like it, as much as the other sections (about identity and black holes), but it wouldn't cause a light bulb moment. I guess it's the same way so many people bred plants and trees and dogs for so many years yet none of them thought up Darwin's theory of natural selection. I would say "interesting thought", and I would relate it to psychology more than philosophy. In other words, I would fail to appreciate it as much as I ought to.
Regarding the difference between what we see and what there is, or your last question, "I don't think we'll ever see things as they really are," my take is as follows: An object is objectively the sum of all its possible uses. Not only the actual uses perceived by organisms that happen to exist, but all the possible uses, meaning by all the organisms that could possibly exist. Their sum is the true objective reality about the object. So you are not just your wife's mate, but also potentially the lion's meal, or a tree's fertilizer. Unfortunately, that's part of the objective description of what you really are. Subjectivity is not bad, unless you insist that one of your possible uses is the whole of your objective description. So if a Nazist or Racist views a Jew or Black person as just one single thing, insisting that he's got the objective description of this person, by "objective" meaning "whole". That's when subjectivity becomes harmful. If subjectivity remains within its proper confines, then it doesn't pose a problem nor lead to relativism.
What you seem to imply when you talk about objective reality, is the lack of a POV. That would be the way a rock views reality (it doesn't affix subjective uses to objects, since it's not conscious). You can imagine it as total darkness, but really it's just nothing. So I don't think that's what we mean by "objective reality".
Another interesting application of this theory, is how I use it to argue for the superiority of humans to other animals, or even humans to other humans! I define the genius (and superiority) as the person who can perceive the most uses in an object. A good way to imagine it would be to think of those IQ tests, that have you think of novel uses for objects. Or the candle problem. These are artificial tests, but in real life you could think of artists who use objects in their paintings in new ways, or interweave them, or turn them upside down turning swans into elephants (Dali), etc. In literature, it's using words in novel ways. In science it's using hydrogen to make weapons of mass destruction. You get the point. If this is correct, then we can argue that a human is superior to a given animal, because that animal perceives an object in a very limited way, whereas a human can use it in a multitude of ways. Thus you can more properly define why our learning to manipulate nature in increasing ways, means we perceive reality more objectively: it's because we tap deeper into the object's universe of uses, as I call it.
I like this idea of considering the quantity of perceived uses as a lens to measure of our accurate perception of reality. It speaks both to the scientific understanding of reality (Is a photon a particle or a wave? Most accurate to say it's both...) and to the artistic ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day..." or really any rich metaphor).
I've often felt that the yearning for God is so powerful because we long to believe there's a mind out there powerful enough to see things as they are, absolutely and unequivocally. We're limited to approximations by our senses and our intellect, but maybe if we're well-behaved enough we can go to heaven and talk to this guy and find out just how close we came to getting it right.
Great post! I loved the body bit. Perception really is everything, and remembering this can get you through many stressful situations.
Thank you, @onetree.
You're right, and putting yourself into another person's perception can really help to explain a lot.
a very good post. thank you for sharing the story, success is always my friend! I want to like you post. But not yet. Guide this friend!
Excellent observation! Your post is complementary to a recent post by @alexander.alexis, which your esteemed.
Regarding black holes, they are not really "holes" but encapsulation of space-time upon itself, in which the events within the encapsulation does not affect the events outside the encapsulation; thus, the conceptually baffling theoretical phenomenon of the monkey suspended in space-time at the event horizon of a black hole.
Regarding replacement of human tissues on daily, if not hourly basis, the conceptually baffling phenomenon of scars freezes the mind from accepting the above fact. If we replace all our cells in 7-years, then why the scars? What information "encodes" scars?
I think these conceptually difficult phenomenon causes some to speculate that we live in a simulation of reality rather than reality itself.
Yeah, it was funny because Alexander and I were writing on similar themes at the same time - synchronicity. I left a comment on his post about it.
Scars endure because the replacement cells are always a little crappier than the originals, and seem to respond to the stresses suffered by the originals. Hence aging. It seems a shame, doesn't it? Like, your car breaks down and you get to replace it with a model that's just as old, but at least it runs okay, for a while longer.
Philip K Dick would agree with you!
I just now realized how much his work predated the simulation theory that has only now become popular!