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Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality - Softcover

Tegmark, Max

 
9780307744258: Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307744256 ISBN 13: 9780307744258
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Max Tegmark leads us on an astonishing journey through past, present and future, and through the physics, astronomy and mathematics that are the foundation of his work, most particularly his hypothesis that our physical reality is a mathematical structure and his theory of the ultimate multiverse. In a dazzling combination of both popular and groundbreaking science, he not only helps us grasp his often mind-boggling theories, but he also shares with us some of the often surprising triumphs and disappointments that have shaped his life as a scientist. Fascinating from first to last—this is a book that has already prompted the attention and admiration of some of the most prominent scientists and mathematicians.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Max Tegmark is author or coauthor of more than two hundred technical papers, twelve of which have been cited more than five hundred times. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and is a physics professor at MIT.

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Chapter 9

Internal Reality, External Reality and Consensus Reality
 
Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, color by convention; atoms and void [alone] exist in reality.
—Democritus, ca. 400 B.C.
 
“Nooooo! My suitcase!”
 
They were already boarding my flight from Boston to Philadelphia,
where I was supposed to help with a BBC documentary about Hugh Everett, when I realized that my hand wasn’t holding a suitcase. I ran back to the security checkpoint.
 
“Did someone just forget a black roll-on bag here?”
“No,” said the guard.
“But there it is—that’s my suitcase, right there!”
“That’s not a black suitcase,” said the guard. “That’s a teal suitcase.”
 
Until then, I’d never realized how color-blind I was, and it was quite
humbling to realize that many assumptions I’d previously made about reality—and my wardrobe—were dead wrong. How could I ever trust what my senses told me about the outside world? And if I couldn’t, then how could I hope to ever know anything with certainty about the external reality? After all, everything I know about the outside world and my untrustworthy senses, I’ve learned from my senses. This puts me on the same shaky epistemological footing as a prisoner who’s spent his whole life in solitary confinement, whose only information about the outside world and his untrustworthy prison guard is what his prison guard has told him. More generally, how can I trust what my conscious perceptions tell me about the world if I don’t understand how my mind works?
 
This basic dilemma has been eloquently explored by philosophers throughout the ages, including titans such as Plato, René Descartes, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Socrates said: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” So how can we make further progress in our quest to understand reality?
 
So far in this book, we’ve taken a physics approach to exploring our external physical reality, zooming out to the transgalactic macrocosm and zooming in to the subatomic microcosm, attempting to understand things in terms of their basic building blocks such as elementary particles. However, all we have direct knowledge of are instead qualia, the basic building blocks of our conscious perception,* (* For introductions to the vast literature on consciousness by psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers and others, I recommend the books about the mind in the “Suggestions for Further Reading” section.) exemplified by the redness of a rose, the sound of a cymbal, the smell of a steak, the taste of a tangerine or the pain of a pinprick. So don’t we also need to understand consciousness before we can fully understand physics? I used to answer “yes,” thinking that we could never figure out the elusive “theory of everything” for our external physical reality without first understanding the distorting mental lens through which we perceive it. But I’ve changed my mind, and in this brief interlude chapter, I want to tell you why.
 
External Reality and Internal Reality
 
Perhaps you’re thinking, Okay, Max, but I’m not color-blind. And I’m looking at the external reality right now with my own eyes, and I’d have to be paranoid to think it’s not the way it looks. But please try these simple experiments:
 
Experiment 1: Turn your head from left to right a few times. Experiment 2: Move your eyes from left to right a few times, without moving your head.
 
Did you notice how the first time, the external reality appeared to rotate, and the second time, it appeared to stay still, even though your eyeballs rotated both times? This proves that what your mind’s eye is looking at isn’t the external reality, but a reality model stored in your brain! If you looked at the image recorded by a rotating video camera, you’d clearly see it move as it did in Experiment 1. But your eyes are a form of biological video camera, so Experiment 2 shows that your consciousness isn’t directly perceiving the images formed on their retinas. Rather, as neuroscientists have now studied in great detail, the information recorded by your retinas gets processed in highly complex ways and is used to continually update an elaborate model of the outside world that’s stored in your brain. Take another look in front of you, and you’ll see that, thanks to this advanced information processing, your reality model is three-dimensional even though the raw images from your retinas are two-dimensional.
 
I don’t have a light switch near my bed, so I’ll often take a good look at my bedroom and all the obstacles littering the floor, then turn off the light and walk to my bed. Try it yourself: put down this book, stand up, look around, and then walk a few steps with your eyes closed. Can you “see”/”feel” the objects in the room moving relative to you? That’s your reality model being updated, this time using information from your leg movements rather than from your eyes. Your brain continuously updates its reality model using any useful information it can get hold of, including sound, touch, smell and taste.
 
Let’s call this reality model your internal reality, because it’s the way you subjectively perceive the external reality from the internal vantage point of your mind. This reality is internal also in the sense that it exists only internally to you: your mind feels as if it’s looking at the outside world, while it’s actually looking only at a reality model inside your head—which in turn is continually tracking what’s outside your brain via elaborate but automatic processes that you’re not consciously aware of.
 
It’s absolutely crucial that we don’t conflate this internal reality with the external reality that it’s tracking, because the two are very different. My brain’s internal reality is like the dashboard of my car: a convenient summary of the most useful information. Just as my car’s dashboard tells me my speed, fuel level, motor temperature, and other things useful for a driver to be aware of, my brain’s dashboard/reality model tells me my speed and position, my hunger level, the air temperature, highlights of my surroundings and other things useful for the operator of a human body to be aware of.
 
The Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth
 
Once my car’s dashboard malfunctioned and sent me to the garage with its “CHECK ENGINE” indicator illuminated even though nothing was wrong. Similarly, there are many ways in which a person’s reality model can malfunction and differ from the true external reality, giving rise to illusions (incorrect perceptions of things that do exist in the external reality), omissions (nonperception of things that do exist in the external reality) and hallucinations (perceptions of things that don’t exist in the external reality). If we swear under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we should be aware that our perceptions might violate all three with illusions, omissions and hallucinations, respectively.
 
So metaphorically speaking, the “CHECK ENGINE” incident was my car hallucinating—or experiencing phantom pain. I recently discovered that my car also suffers from an illusion: based on its speedometer reading, it thinks it’s always driving two miles per hour faster than it really is. That’s not bad compared to the vast list of human illusions that...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307744256
ISBN 13 
9780307744258
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
432
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EDITIONS GALLIMARD
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