Infinite Regress

The Matrix was the first movie that ever made me question my ideas of reality. There have been many more (Fight Club, Memento, just to name the two that spring immediately to mind), but The Matrix made the greatest impression on me. It made me wonder, and has kept me wondering for many years, about what we really know about reality.

Films such as The Matrix raise a whole constellation of intriguing philosophical questions, not all of which merely concern whether or not our reality is an illusion. Here are a few:

• This is the primary question that often goes along with The Matrix: what if our reality is an illusion, or worse, a deception? And if it were, how could we face this fact, and how could we deal with its ramifications? What if we were to “wake up” from this dream-world? Would the “real world” we find ourselves in be anything like the one we came from? What if, in the “real world,” humans breathed chlorine rather than oxygen? What if there were laws of physics in the  “real world” that didn’t even exist in “The Matrix”? Or, perhaps most frightening of all, what if the “real world” was no more real than the world we woke up from? What if there was no end to the recursion, and each world that we had assumed to be real was just another simulation, within another simulation, ad infinitum?
• To what extent do our senses reflect the true nature of the world? Isn’t it entirely possible that there is a huge component of the universe of which we are completely unaware, merely because we have no senses to apprehend it, and it is so distant or otherwise removed from us that we haven’t even considered the possibility of constructing such senses? Suppose that, in addition to the four physical forces with which we are familiar (gravity, electromagnetism , the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force), there was a fifth force with a profound influence on the world, but an influence we were incapable of seeing?
• To what extent is reality actually “real”? How much of reality is non-objective, but is merely a product of our own minds? If you are aware of the existence of something, and I am not, does that mean that we inhabit two separate worlds (such that in your world, the thing would exist, but in mine, it would not)? What can we really know about other people? Were the solipsists right, and our own minds are the only things of which we can be certain?

It is unfortunate that more films like The Matrix with both a broad appeal and a deep philosophical message are not made.

Physics

A moment ago, I saw the winner of physicist Brian Greene’s “Explain String Theory in Two Minutes” contest. In my current philosophical frame of mind, it got me thinking, and I believe that I’ve realized a fundamental truth about the universe.

I’ll try to explain it as best I can for readers who know little or nothing of physics. I’ll start with some fundamental physical principles:

1. The universe is composed of constituent particles. Every object consists of particles of different sorts, all held together by forces. (Atoms, for example, consist of a nucleus held togehter by the strong nuclear force, and a cloud of orbiting electrons, held to the nucleus by the electromagnetic force).
2. The forces, however, turn out to be the result of the exchange of force-carrying particles. (Think of two people throwing a really heavy ball back and forth: each time the ball is exchanged, it pushes them apart. In the case of attractive forces, think of a rope instead of a ball).

So, the things we call “physical laws,” such as the force of gravity and the strength of the electromagnetic force, are all really just approximations of the result of particles sloshing about. So, in reality, there are no laws of nature. There is only stuff, exchanging particles (which are also stuff) with other stuff.

This worldview seems to take care of a problem that has been irritating physicists for years: Where does time come from? We can’t observe it directly. And what’s more, our physical laws work essentially the same way whether time is running backwards or forwards. Physicists like Julian Barbour have attempted to solve this problem by constructing physical principles that don’t depend on time, but perhaps the only real physical principle is embodied by a tremendous web of particle interactions, unchanging in time because this web is completely timeless.