Saturday 16 August 2003

Pic of the day: Imaginary world from the anime Daa Daa Daa. Actually it looks more like our planet than our planet looked to our ancestors ... I mean, they all just knew the world was flat with the sky as a bowl above.

Imaginary real worlds

I don't think I could do justice to such a title, even if my hand wasn't acting up. (I have been on ICQ again. It is hard on my hand, the thing acts like an old typewriter, but it is worth it to learn to know another human soul a little bit more.) Anyway, bear with me if what I say is simpler than what you deserve.

I play some online games, and now there is this forum with the dress-up dolls. They all set certain guidelines for the people who come there, and not all these guidelines are spelled out in a text document. For instance in Gaia Online where your character is a big-eyed barely legal teen, there are some kind of roles that would be hard to play. You could also imagine a game in which everyone is male, or everyone is female. That would lay down a lot of rules right there, without a word. Is that not so?

Of course we are not really playing a role playing game when we go about our daily life. Not really. But only because it is not a game – we are role playing in earnest. We are following rules, many of them unwritten, laid down in our civilization through subtle clues. We are not selecting freely from all the options that "being human" would offer us. Instead, we fall into our pre-made races and classes, like good role players do. Oh, we still have a lot of freedom within this. There are many totally different lives that can be lived within the consensus reality. But we are not all we could be. I doubt we could even survive that with our sanity intact.

Imagine someone from the stone age suddenly waking up in our world. No, even someone from 500 years ago. So many things we take for granted, but to this person they would be all like witchcraft or divine miracles. The contrail of an aircraft across the sky; the cold in a refrigerator on a summer day; electric light at the touch of a switch: the sound of an orchestra from a box; talking to people miles away ... The list goes on and on. We shrug it off.

***

Surely the natural world is constant, though. It is not like the sun burned coal in the years before Einstein discovered how to transform matter into energy. (Actually the best theory according to Newtonian physics was that the energy came from gravity, contracting the sun and thereby heating it.) It is not like the world was less than 6000 years old in the time when most advanced nations believed this for sure. And even then, the Indian philosophers believed just as firmly that the universe was billions of years old and had trillions yet to go. They and the Christians could not both be right at the same time.

So consensus reality has its limits. Even if a lot of people believe something, it does not actually change the natural world. It is just that, as far as each of us is concerned, it might as well. During the early years of the Enlightenment, scientists laughed at the idea of stones falling down from above. That was the matter of religious doctrine, not science. Sure the Bible might say that stones fell down on the enemy from above, and the Muslims might kiss a holy black stone said to have fallen from Heaven. But real scientists did not deign to discuss such things. Well, not until some of them fell down again and were seen by many. And even then it took some persuasion to include the new idea of "meteors".

Ten years ago, the universe was expanding ever more slowly after its initial growth spurt. It had exploded outward in all directions, but now gravity was holding it back. Scientists were uncertain whether gravity would eventually make our cosmos fall back into a single point again ... this was a favorite theory because it also conveniently explained why the Big Bang happened in the first place, it was the result of the previous Big Crunch! But some thought that perhaps gravity was too weak to pull us back in. There was some dissent about this.

Now, the common view is that the universe is expanding faster and faster. And what is more: The universe we see is only a tiny fraction, less than a tenth, of the real thing. Most of our cosmos consists of "dark matter" and "dark energy", which are so unknown that they might as well be invisible turtles swimming in invisible water for all we know about them. Or perhaps it is turtles all the way down...

***

My point is, at all times we believe we know almost the whole truth, and we pity the fools that came before us and knew so much less. And we also pity the fools who think they see things that aren't there. Poor loonies who believe in magic or ghosts or telepathy or miracles. They don't fit in.

Now, I personally think that your old aunt who talked to dead people was probably not right in her head. She was deluded, poor thing. But I also have this creepy feeling that we are all deluded. When we find the next truth, it is probably not what old auntie believed. But neither is it what we believe. And it might be any bit as startling as whatever the loonies come up with. It might be the end of the world as we know it. But when the day comes, we will feel fine.