Who Are We, Really?
On the Nature of Reality
Two cornerstones of our everyday worldview are causality and objective reality. Everything we do causes changes to the reality we all share. This is so fundamental to our day to day existence and so ingrained in our notion of reality it hardly seems worthy of discussion.
Except it turns out that both of these ideas are fundamentally flawed, or at least questionable, and it has serious implications about the nature of conscious beings and our place in the universe.
Causality
The other day, while I was marveling at how beautiful my children are, as you do, a thought popped into my head: “maybe they are beautiful because their parents are?”
Yes, that’s quite egotistical of me. But isn’t it also a true statement according to genetics?
Anyway, for whatever reason, my train of thought didn’t stop there and I started wondering about causality itself. When we say event A caused event B, we mean that event A and B are causally linked, or B happened because of A. Furthermore, that event A happened before event B, and event B wouldn’t have happened without event A.
Simple, right?
Not so fast.
The first objection is that correlation isn’t causation. Just because two events occur around the same time doesn’t automatically mean there’s a causal link between them. We can establish a causal link by running experiments repeatedly, but that isn’t always possible outside of physics and chemistry. The replication crisis in the fields of social sciences, economics and even medicine can attest to this.
The second objection is that, even if you could somehow eliminate correlation and establish causation, the laws of physics is time agnostic. In other words, they can be run forwards or backwards in time. You can see this in action when you watch a video in reverse. If we can capture the complete state of an object in the present, we can run the clock backwards and see where it was in the past. That’s how forensic ballistics work and how cosmologists came up with the idea of the Big Bang, to name just a couple of examples.
The third objection is that retro-causality is one of the possible interpretation of John Wheeler’s delayed-choice experiment, in which a decision to observe light as a wave or a particle may retroactively change how it behaved in the past before the decision was made to be consistent with the decision made in the present.
In other words, the chain of causality may in fact run in both directions.
The chain of causality connecting all that ever was and all that will beSo what? So everything! This means, “our children are beautiful because of us” and “we are beautiful because our children are” are equally valid.
But wait a minute, you say, time doesn’t run backwards!
Correction: time doesn’t run backwards for us.
The fact that entropy means we can only experience time in one direction doesn’t change the fact that two events are causally linked regardless of which one of them occurs first in time.
For example, the fact that we can only see the visible part of the spectrum, a tiny sliver of the whole, doesn’t mean the rest doesn’t exist. The fact that we can only experience time in one direction, doesn’t mean that time can only be experienced in one direction in principle.
What if reality is not time bound? Light, for example, exists outside of time. Time slows down as speed increases, and at the speed of light, time stops or ceases to exist. Which means from the perspective of something traveling at the speed of light, or conversely at the event horizon inside blackholes where speed of light is zero, time does not exist. From that perspective, everything just is. The past and the future connected in a vast causal chain that runs in both directions.
Note, this doesn’t mean the future is fixed aka determinism. Everything can change, even the past.
Here’s another interesting point about light. The entire universe, down to the last atom, is made of energy. Matter is merely energy condensed, and light is a manifestation of electromagnetic energy. Through nuclear fusion, stars release energy locked inside matter in the form of light and in the process creates all the elements of the periodic table which makes up the material universe, and together with light makes life possible.
Light is everywhere and nowhere, because the entire universe is made from it.
Light is the source of everything, without which existence itself is impossible. You might say light is the ultimate, transcendent reality that exists outside of time, and from this perspective, we are both the cause and consequence of everything that happened and will happen to us.
From the perspective outside of time, we are both the cause and the consequence of everything that happened and will happen to us.
Of course, that’s not how we experience reality, but that doesn’t make this perspective any less valid. In fact, I’d argue it’s more valid because, unlike us time bound creatures, light is eternal.
Objective Reality
One of the cornerstone of Classical Physics is the idea of an objective perspective, meaning it is the same for all observers regardless of where they are located in time and space. It is an absolute, universal frame of reference against which everything else can be measured. The Greenwich Meantime is an example of an objective frame of reference for measuring time on earth.
However, there’s a reason why Classical Physics is, you know, classical. You may have heard of E = mc squared, which is the best known part of The Theory of Special Relativity and responsible for the invention of the atomic bomb and nuclear energy. But another, more interesting aspect of the theory is that it abolishes the idea of an universal objective frame of reference.
Ironically, it turns out that a truly objective perspective is something no mere mortal, or creatures bound in spacetime can attain. It is truly a God’s Eye View. All experiments are conducted by human beings who can never experience the subjective experience of another human being, let alone the objective point of view that 17th century physicists dreamt up.
If Einstein demolished the notion of an absolute, objective perspective with The Theory of Special Relativity, Quantum Physics followed suit by eliminating the very concept of an objective reality.
The Copenhagen Interpretation is one of the foundational interpretations of quantum mechanics, developed primarily by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s. It says that quantum mechanics does not describe an objective reality independent of observation. In other words, objective reality does not exist at the quantum level, which is the level of foundational building blocks of the universe such as atoms and subatomic particles.
In the famous double slit experiment, quantum physicists have been able to demonstrate that subatomic particles such as photons behave differently based on whether a conscious being is observing it. The details of the experiment is beyond the scope of this short article, but the gist is that light behaves like particles (aka photons) if observed when passing through a double slit and produce a scattershot pattern. If not, it behaves like waves and produce an interference pattern.
In other words, the mere act of observation causes light to behave differently. This is also true for all other subatomic particles. Since light and other subatomic particles are the fundamental building blocks of everything in the known universe, it seems to suggest that there is no objective reality out there. That’s not to suggest that everything we experience is “in our heads”, like The Matrix, rather that there is a shared reality out there, but it is co-created with conscious beings such as ourselves.
Why is this important? Because it means our worldview is fundamentally flawed. The world is neither an objective reality, indifferent to our existence, nor is it simply a product of our subjective imagination.
Every conscious decision you make creates the reality you live in. What you see out there in the world is a reflection of who you are inside.
What if you go through life passively? Can you opt out of this observer co-created reality by not making any decisions? The answer is no. Beause even if you make decisions based on a coin toss, the gold standard of “leaving it up to chance”, you are still making the decision to use a coin toss to decide what to do. Even if you do nothing at all, you are still choosing to do nothing.
Conscious beings have no choice but to participate in co-creating the reality they experience.
So What?
So what does this all mean? If the two cornerstones of our understanding of reality are fundamentally flawed, where does that leave us?
To be honest, I’m still having trouble adding it all up, but here’s where I’ve landed for now. Observer co-created reality means that we aren’t merely passengers, but active co-creators of the reality we all share. We aren’t here to merely survive a universe that’s indifferent to our existence, but inextricably participate in the creation of the shared reality we all experience.
Furthermore, if causality doesn’t work the way we think it does, and future events can indeed influence the past, which means that, with our every thought and action, not only do we co-create the future, we are also redefining the past.
I’d like to leave you with this quote from the immortal Bill Hicks on the nature of who we really are.
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves.
Here’s Tom with the weather!“
-Bill Hicks