Tag: Reality

Attachment to the False View of Self

Posted on by jabittan
When we try to compartmentalize reality and split our experiences into separate categories, we end up with a view of the universe that is incomplete and incorrect. Everything that happens is interconnected, and how we experience the world at one moment is influenced by our experiences of the past and expectations for the future. The time of day, how much we have eaten, and the temperature all shape the way we experience and interpret the universe. We are unavoidably connected to the matter of the universe, and we are truly matter observing other matter.

 

When we think about ourselves, we put ourselves apart from the universe. We view the person that we are as separate from the natural phenomena of the universe, as someone who experiences reality with a rational mind that views the things happening around us. We create a story about our selves that helps us understand the world we live in.

 

However, this is not reality. We cannot stand ourselves apart from the universe and we cannot look at ourselves as individual, objective, observers of the universe as though we are immune to the happenings and occurrences around us. Through meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh, and other Buddhist monks through time, have come to recognize this problem with the way that we think about ourselves. They call this problem the false view of self. A view that creates a self as a rational actor moving through the world in control of ones perception, experiences, and outcomes. This false view can be dangerous and is formed on unfounded views of reality. As Hanh writes, “Attachment to the false view of self means belief in the presence of unchanging entities which exist on their own.”

 

What Hanh and Buddhists found through meditation, Amanda Gefter learned from the study of Physics, particularly from the discoveries of John Wheeler. In a previous post of mine, I wrote about a quote from Gefter where she explained that the universe can only be viewed from the inside, where everything is changing. Trying to view the world from the outside, from a Gods-Eye-View, violates general relativity and breaks the physics of the universe.

 

The view of self that we adopt as we move through the world (especially in the United States) is inconsistent with the view of the self described by monks who noticed their inability to control their mind during meditation. It is also inconsistent with the reality of physics which highlights the challenges of trying to the view the universe as an unchanging object outside the universe. Giving up the concept of self is difficult, but when you remember that there may not be a self, you can let go of stress and pressure to be the person your story is telling you to be. You are connected to the universe and you are a changing being within the universe. Your actions are not your own conscious choices, but the culmination of phenomena occurring within the universe. For me, mindfulness in this area helps me to think about my choices and decisions and react to the universe in a more calm and clear way, even though I am not standing apart from the universe and from forces around me to make the decisions that I make.

Social Constructionism in Physics and … Everything!

Posted on by jabittan
I just finished a semester at the University of Nevada focusing on Public Policy as part of my Masters in Public Administration. Throughout the semester we focused on rational models of public policy and decision-making, but we constantly returned to the ways in which those models break down and cannot completely inform and shape the public policy making process. We select our goals via political processes and at best develop rational means for reaching those political ends. There is no way to take a policy or its administration out of the hands and minds of humans to have an objective and rational process free of the differences which arise when we all have different perspectives on an issue.

 

Surprisingly, this is also what we see when we look at physics, and it is one of the big stumbling blocks as physicists try to understand quantum mechanics within the framework of physics laid out by Einstein and relativity. Throughout her book, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, Amanda Gefter introduces us to the biggest concepts and challenges within the world of physics and how she and her dad attempted to make sense of those concepts within their own physics studies. A major influencer on the world of physics, and consequently on the adventure that Gefter took, was John Wheeler, who seemed to bring this idea of social construction to the rational and scientific world of physics. Wheeler described the idea of the self observing universe, to say that we are matter, observing other matter, creating our reality as we observe it. This idea is exactly the idea of social construction that I touched on in the opening note, but Gefter quotes a note in one of wheeler’s notebooks, “Add ‘Participant’ to ‘Undecidable Propositions’ to Arrive at Physics,” which sounds a bit like social construction to me as someone who studies public policy.

 

Social Constructionism is a theory from the social sciences. It is used to describe the ways in which a society or group comes to understand the problems it faces: who is at fault for the problem, who receives a benefit from our solution, who has the right to complain about a problem, and in what order should we attempt to solve our problems? These are all serious questions to which there is no perfect answer. We cannot identify a perfectly rational answer that will satisfy everyone. Our individual preferences will always be at play and our interactions in the decision-making process will shape the outcomes we decide we want and the solutions we decide to implement to reach those outcomes. In a sense, these large political questions are like the undecidable propositions in physics described by Wheeler. Politics is the outcome we arrive at when you add participants to undecidable propositions in society, and physics is what you arrive at when you add participants with limited knowledge and limited perspectives to the observation and understanding of major questions such as how gravity works.

 

We use questions of social science to inform the way we think about our interactions with other people and how we form societies. Social Constructionism reminds us that what seems clear and obvious to us, may seem different to someone else with different experiences, different backgrounds, different needs, and different expectations. Keeping this theory in mind helps us better connect with other people and helps us see the world in new ways. Similarly, physics informs the way we understand the universe to be ordered and how matter and energy interact within the universe. Recognizing that our perspectives matter, when it comes to politics, science, and even physics, helps us to consider our own biases and prior conceptions which may influence exactly how we choose to model, study, and experiment with our lives and the universe.

Only Referencing the Inside

Posted on by jabittan
The problem of physics and the universe being relative to observers haunts Amanda Gefter in her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. Throughout the book she writes about the challenge of understanding physics and finding a set, definitive, absolute reality within physics. Motion, matter, electromagnetic waves, particles, and time all seem to change relative to an observer. The observer does not need to be alive, but it just any given point of reference.

 

During her quest to better understand physics and find an objective agreed upon base for reality Gefter spoke with physicist Fotini Markopoulou. Recounting the conversation Gefter writes, “Was there some way to continue talking about the universe while only referring to it from the inside? Markopoulou seemed to think so, but it came at a serious price. It meant tossing aside ordinary Boolean logic and replacing it with a kind of logic that depended on the observer. It meant redefining what we mean by “true.” It meant stripping physics of the ability to make absolute statements about ultimate reality. Propositions were no longer true or false. They were true or false according to some particular observer.”

 

Einstein’s theories of relativity tell us that observers make a big impact on how the universe is measured and understood. Where an observer exists in space, the observer’s scale, and its motion all impact the measurements for the observer.  Gefter was on a quest with her father to understand and determine what it is in the universe that is the absolute reality of the universe. What is the basic constant that forms the simplest building block of all of the universe? Here quest was to find the one thing that was not relative to a reference point and an observer and to find the one thing that everyone and everything in the universe can point to and say “yes, that there is X, and it is always X, and is X for all of us who look at it.”

 

The challenge is that we are all within the universe. We are all matter and each point within the universe is a point of the universe and is itself changing and interacting with other things in the universe. There is no way to stand outside the universe and set a universe clock to a specific time and see everything a specific way. There is no ‘outside’ to the universe, and that means that any point of reference or timeframe is relative to others based on a host of factors. Gefter wanted to find an objective piece of the universe that was not determined relative to another point, but the only way such a point could exist is if it were outside the universe, something we philosophically understand to be impossible.

Spacetime as a Wave Function

Posted on by jabittan
Amanda Gefter dives into complex physics in her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, and helps us better understand the challenges of modern physics research today. When we look out into space we see stars and planets and if we look really closely with telescopes we see asteroids, galaxies, and lots of dust floating through space. What physics tells us exists within the empty space between those objects (and indeed within all space) is spacetime. Spacetime is a thing. It bends and is warped by matter and it can ripple through the universe and change the physical matter that we can see and feel.

 

Gefter describes our complex understanding of spacetime as a wave function, describing probabilities of our observations. She writes, “When it comes to spacetime, though, there’s no such thing as spacetime at an instant, because spacetime contains all instants. And you can’t have spacetime evolve in time, because it is time. The only way forward seemed to be this: break four-dimensional spacetime into three dimensions of space and one of time, then describe the spatial portion as a wave function that can evolve relative to the dimension you called ‘time’.”

 

Gefter’s quote is how we as humans experience spacetime. We do not experience all instances of space and time at one exact moment, but instead we experience space and our movement through space over time. Here on earth, where things operate on scales that seem constant and continuous to us, this works. But once we start operating on different scales in different parts of the universe with different masses, different speeds, and different energies, the experience of three dimensional space and one dimensional time break down. Gefter continues:

 

“Different observers can slice up spacetime in different ways. So when we decide to quantize only the three dimensions of space, we have to choose certain coordinates to call ‘space’ and others to call ‘time.’ But whose space? Whose time? Making any kind of choice would suggest that one observer had a truer view of reality than all others. But that can’t be so. That was Einstein’s whole point: the laws of physics must be the same for everyone.”

 

What is so concrete and clear in our world and in our experiences as human beings falls apart on scales beyond those that we can observe unaided with our senses. The universe is more complex and more challenging than we often imagine, and the priors that we bring to conversations, thoughts, and observations impact the way we come to understand the universe. There is no absolute time from which we can measure the universe, because as soon as we set a specific reference clock, physics breaks down for another observer somewhere else in the universe at a different scale of mass and energy. Similarly, there is no clock sitting outside the universe ticking away the lifetime of the universe as a whole. Spacetime is relative according to Einstein, and while we may be able to break spacetime into a wave function that predicts probabilities of space throughout time, we have to understand that the way we break space and time apart is specific to our observation and that both space and time change for other observers who separate spacetime differently from ourselves.

 

But why is any of this important? With physics and a deeper understanding we can begin to see that we are not outside the universe and our observations are not at the center of the universe. We are matter arranged in a way that allows us to observe other matter. Our perspectives and views are incomplete and the observations and perspectives we adopt shape the reality we can measure. There is a parallel between physical science and social science in this way. We may not realize it but our brains turn us all into social scientists, walking around with a megacomputer carefully recording observations of human behavior and reality, analyzing patterns, and crunching data to help us understand our position. If we assume that our observations and our reference frame is the one absolute and correct frame, then we miss the fact that the reality we live in is relative to where and when we make observations and how we have chosen to separate different points and parts of that reality. Perhaps not everything in the social sciences is completely relative since we do live in a constrained world, but we should recognize that there are not any absolutes living outside of our universe measuring us or anything else from the outside.

What is the Ultimate “Thing” of the Universe?

Posted on by jabittan
Amanda Gefter’s book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is about her journey into the world of physics with her father. Throughout the book she and her father search for the ultimate building block of the universe. What is the smallest particle that forms the basis of all other particles? What aspect of the universe is constant among all scales and all perspectives? What constitutes reality in our universe?

 

From our perspective here on Earth, these questions seem like they should be strait-forward and easy to answer. However, once we start looking into the universe and observing more than what we can simply experience here on Earth, we begin to see that what we understand as reality is not as clear as it appears. The deeper we peer through space, the more we see strange phenomenon such as the curving of spacetime, and the more energy we put forward in the search of smaller and smaller particles, the more we find that matter seem to come and go and not behave as we expected.

 

Throughout their search, Gefter and her father look into the physics of various candidates for the ultimate building block of reality and meet many interesting scientists and physicists.  From the beginning, one of Gefter’s favorite physicists was John Wheeler, and early on in his research he took down the idea that spacetime itself was the most basic unit of the universe. “Wheeler emphasized that spacetime couldn’t be reality’s ultimate ingredient, because at its highest resolution quantum mechanics and general relativity conspire to destroy it, warping its geometry until it isn’t geometry anymore.”

 

Over the last two years a principle predicted by Albert Einstein has been proven correct as we have discovered gravitational waves. These are ripples through spacetime caused by events of massive energy. The empty space of space, according to the theory of Einstein is not actually empty but is composed of what we have confusingly named spacetime. Our planets and everything in the universe permeates across and through this spacetime according to physics that Einstein helped describe. In her book, Gefter turns back to Wheeler to describe this concept, “As wheeler put it, ‘Matter tells space how to curve. Space tells matter how to move.” Our planet, our sun, our galaxy, and everything in the universe is interacting with spacetime which is everywhere and all around us. As matter interacts with what appears to be empty space it actually distorts that space, because that space is more than emptiness. Light, energy, and matter are all influenced by spacetime which itself is simultaneously shaped by the matter and energy flowing through it. Even more bizarre, across spacetime, particles seem to pop in and out of existence continuously, with particles and antiparticles appearing from nothing and then colliding on a sub-microscopic level to vanish back into nothingness.

 

Early on what Gefter demonstrated with the help of Einstein, Wheeler, and spacetime, is that our concrete understanding and experience of reality is not as concrete as it appears. We can only see, measure, and experience so much, and there is far more in the universe than what we currently know and understand. The ultimate reality of the universe is beyond our current comprehension, and what this reminds us is that we should not be too sure of our own knowledge, for we are always limited by what we can experience and observe from our perspective. The universe is more than the stories we tell ourselves about it.

Self-Reflection and Seeing Your Place in the World

Posted on by jabittan
When we think of ourselves and who we are as people, we can easily fall into a trap where the best parts of who we are standout and shine, while the worst parts of ourselves are hidden in the shadows where we are not able to recognize them. We are rational beings, and we are so good at being rational that we can explain away almost anything. Our bad behaviors are never just our own bad behaviors but they are a result of someone else’s bad behaviors in the first place, and our bad habits really are not habits and they really are not that bad, and our lack of initiative on that thing we tell everyone we are working on is due to how hard we work on everything else and how busy we are. In the end, we paint a picture of ourselves in our mind that makes us really awesome. Our decisions are motivated by all the right reasons and we are on the correct side of any given political debate, parental decision, and freeway driving style.

 

Ta-Nehisi Coats grew up constantly questioning and challenging this instinctual way of thinking. In my last post I described his mother’s method of punishment when he got in trouble as a school child. His mother would make him sit down and write about his poor behavior and answer questions about why he was disrespectful, why his behavior was frowned upon by his teachers and by society, and why he thought it was ok for him to do the things that got him in trouble. He explains that all this writing did little to change his actual behavior as a child, but it gave him a unique skillset, the ability to look at the world, ask why it was the way it was and why people acted the way they did, and to then turn inward and ask if he himself acted the way that others did, and why he acted as he did. His mother built a sense of self-awareness in him that shaped his life and the way he understood the world.

 

What Coats found when he became more reflective of himself was a world that was not as innocent as many have believed growing up. Each time he got in trouble he was forced to recognize that he was not the perfect person that he wanted to see in the mirror. He was forced to acknowledge his shortcomings and negative instincts, and he began to make connections from himself and his behaviors to other people. About his reflective writing Coats writes, “Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?”

 

We all act in ways that best serve ourselves, or ways that we think will best serve ourselves and our tribe. We shape the stories we tell about the nature of the universe to align with the lifestyle, the privileges, and the opportunities we have. This is part of our human nature, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. When left unchecked, this part of us does not always lead to perfect outcomes for everyone. Our impulses may lead to tribal decisions that reflect discriminatory biases and our habits may disempower other people. If we cannot build a practice of self-reflection in our own lives, then we end up searching out and defending our decisions with information that is comforting to us, but not connected with the reality of our actions and the reality of the world that other people live within. Coats began to question the world around him because he understood his impulses and his own thoughts and behaviors. He understood why he got in trouble, and began to see that other people were not just the perfect individuals they presented as, but dealt with the same impulses and the same dark side that he dealt with. From this perspective, Coats could ask new questions of himself, his society, and how everyone built a shared understanding of who they were and where they came from.

Our Actions are the Answer

Posted on by jabittan
In writing about our ability to turn obstacles into opportunities for growth and our ability to always strive toward new goals, author Ryan Holiday turns to an Austrian psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl for a unique perspective. In his book, The Obstacle is the Way, Holiday writes,

 

“The great psychologist Viktor Frankle, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?” As though it is someone else’s responsibility to tell you. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it’s your job to answer with your actions.
    In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer. Our job is simply to answer well.
    Right action—unselfish, dedicated, masterful, creative—that is the answer to that question.”

 

Holiday is explaining in this quote that each moment of each day, our present decisions and actions, define the life we live. How we respond to the world around us, what we choose to do with our time, and the perspectives we adopt are all part of what creates our purpose and reality. We build our own meaning, and it is established in the actions of our lives.

 

For Holiday, this means that the obstacles we face and how we react to those obstacles is all part of the meaning of life. Will we react positively and overcome our challenges, or will we be defeated and complain about the difficulties we see in our own lives but not in the lives of others? Will we build upon a solid foundation of meaningful action, or narrowly act in our own self-interest for our own desires? Recognizing that our life is not defined by the things we have or the lifestyle we pursue can help us see that we are truly defined by how we interact with the world around us. In each moment we decide how we will act, and we can decide whether those actions will be shaped to fit our own desires, or whether they will help us move toward greater ends. There is no ultimate truth that establishes the ends toward which we strive. It is up to each of us to decide what a truly meaningful existence will entail, and our actions and decisions will reflect the reality of what we find important and meaningful.

The Right and Wrong Perspective

Posted on by jabittan
“The difference between the right and wrong perspective is everything,” Ryan Holiday writes in his book, The Obstacle is The Way. “Where the head goes, the body follows. Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective.” In the two quotes above Holiday lays out his thoughts for the importance of the systems we build for looking at the world. Stepping beyond our initial view of the world and learning to adjust our perception is incredibly important in the world today. Limiting our views and entrenching ourselves in our single perspective creates a reality for us that is not shareable nor understandable beyond ourselves to those with different experiences, beliefs, and views.

 

Holiday’s quotes feel very timely for me given the recent election. Our country has become increasingly polarized and there seems to be a great disconnect between those living in rural and urban areas. I’m afraid not that we have different opinions, but that we are not cultivating the ability to see the world from multiple perspectives, and that we are not striving to to better understand the other half of the country that does not live the way we do. When we limit our perspective and don’t seek a greater understanding of what others believe, we cut ourselves off from a large number of people. It becomes easy to hide behind those who share our views and we fail to even talk to those who are different from us.

 

In his writing, Holiday approaches our ability to change our perception as a tool for adapting to life’s many challenges. We can become more productive by thinking about the work we do from a different angle, and we can learn to better appreciate any given situation when we can focus on the present moment. For Holiday there are two parts of perception that shape the way we experience the world. We have the context of our lives that connects our view with the larger world, and we have our individual framing which is our determination of the meaning of a given event. We decide what something means according to our world view, and our entrenched perspectives on the specifics determine how that thing fits in with our daily actions and individual reactions.

 

Expanding on the idea of perspective as discussed in our daily lives makes me think about Amanda Gefter and her quest for ultimate reality in her book that I recently read, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. Gefter is a science journalist and author, and she explains how she built a career for herself reporting on physics. What she and her father have spent their life focusing on as a hobby is the search for ultimate reality, the search for the truest building block of the universe that may be the foundation for all of physics.  Ultimately, what she and her father found is that to the best of our understanding right now, there is no ultimate reality. Our perspective truly is everything. Where we are in the universe, how we choose to view the universe, and what we choose to look at determines the reality of the physics around us. Stepping outside the universe and taking a god’s-eye view of everything causes physics to break down, and ruptures reality. Change your frame and you lose gravity, divide atomic and subatomic particles far enough and you reach a possible eleven dimensional field of vibrations where there is no actual physical thing, accelerate yourself to the speed of light and time ceases to exist.  The physics and reality of our world only seem to work from our single perspective where we view the world and assemble our own information. There is no ultimate reality that can be agreed upon by everything, and there is no gods-eye view that can help us find “truth”. If this is true in the world of physics then it can be applied to our lives, and we can begin to understand that we never have an answer to the right way of doing things, we only have our perspective and how we choose to understand the world given the framework and understandings that we have built and adopted from our slice of the universe.

Projections of Positivity

Posted on by jabittan
James Harmon published his book, Take My Advice, as a collection of letters written to him by creative artists, writers, and philosophers. Some of the letters are very short, lasting only a page or two, and some of the letters are full essays.  Joe-Peter Witkin is one artist and photographer who supplied a short page-long letter for Harmon’s book.  His letter is all about perspective and interpretation, “Your life is the life of the world.”  Witkin uses this quote to explain that we get to choose how we want to see the world and assign meaning to the events that occur around us.  Witkin continues, “If your life is of love, the world will love. Anything less and the world will continue to bleed.”

 

I truly believe that we all have something inside us that urges us to be the best version of ourselves possible, and pushes us to do positive things each day.  Each small positive action on its own may be meaningless, but I like to view each small positive action as a tiny grain of sand being added  to the good side of a giant balance beam.  The more positive acts that we put into the world, the more sand piles up on the good side, and when everyone begins to adopt this focus we pile on the positivity to outweigh the negativity.

 

The quote from Witkin shows that we can choose how we want to react to the world, but also how we want the world to react to us.  When we begin to see good things in other people as opposed to the negative, then we change how we act towards others which in turn causes others to act more positively towards us. When we adopt a softer and more compassionate view of reality, that reality will then begin to reward us by providing us with new opportunities and positive events.  Richard Wiseman in his book, 59 Seconds, would agree with Witkin, and he would push people a level further.  Rather than just deciding that one would like to see the world more positively, Wiseman would return to scientific research to encourage everyone to journal about the positive events in their life, or to write about what they enjoy in other people, their job, or their city.  This process forces the individual to process the good things and to truly evaluate their situation which drives the meaning to a new level in their mind.  When we turn to journaling we truly shape our mind to become more positive as we learn to avoid fixating on the negativity.

 

I will end this post with the anecdote that Witkin used to end his letter, “Recently, I heard a story of two men who worked carrying stones.  One of the men was asked what he was doing. He replied, “I carry stones.” When asked the same question, the other replied, “I’m building a cathedral.”