In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete using wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus ignores his father’s instructions not to fly too close to the sun, so when he does, the wax in his wings melts and he falls into the sea and drowns. Icarus is the story of hubris; we fail when we forget our place, as the oracle at Delphi warned. If you think that this is simply a fable told by dead Greeks with no relevance in today’s digital world, then you fail to understand that humans have a nature because we are animals, not angels.
I’ve just recounted a story to make a larger point. Humans tell stories as a way of dealing with the nearly infinite amount of data coming into us through our senses and the software of our brains; there is too much and it must be compressed using a model of reality that was developed over time by each individual. We even tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. The requirement to understand our world through stories means that each individual lives in their own universe in a very real sense.
What about actual reality? Real reality? We are incapable of knowing it because we can only know the world as represented by our senses. An object in the real world is not even an object because the term “object” has imbedded in it, the human understanding of things we call “objects.” For example, a desk is an “object,” but it is a grouping of subatomic things with huge gaps between them, which makes the desk mainly nothing. It has no color itself because an object’s color is a human concept based on the photons reflected by the thing that we experience, not the thing itself; take away the photons and the human experience and there is no color. The desk is hard. “Hard” is what we call things that create the sensation we call hard, but this means only that the arrangement of particles, atoms and molecules is such that they are rigid to a greater degree that other things we call soft. Again, hardness is does not exist except in the human experience of it.
The oddities of relativity, mass, shape and velocity changes are also the result of the stories we tell. The terms we use in our stories by definition are relational and hence relative. Velocity for example is concerned with direction and speed relative to the observer; two observers’ frames of reference result in different velocities for the same movement of the same object, yet there is no same movement or same object because frames of reference are not privileged; no one observer is really “right” because the concept of velocity, shape and mass themselves prevent it.
The point is that there is no way for us to think about what we call “reality” except as how we experience it—all our terms and thoughts are strictly operational in nature, contingent upon how we experience them directly or indirectly. To have a God’s-eye view we would have direct knowledge of everything at once, without terms that describe a discrete thought,” velocity,” because it is the discrete thought that causes the relativity of observations. We cannot forget our place and flourish; it is the horizon of our ability to know.
Blog 81: The horizon of our ability to know
In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete using wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus ignores his father’s instructions not to fly too close to the sun, so when he does, the wax in his wings melts and he falls into the sea and drowns. Icarus is the story of hubris; we fail when we forget our place, as the oracle at Delphi warned. If you think that this is simply a fable told by dead Greeks with no relevance in today’s digital world, then you fail to understand that humans have a nature because we are animals, not angels.
I’ve just recounted a story to make a larger point. Humans tell stories as a way of dealing with the nearly infinite amount of data coming into us through our senses and the software of our brains; there is too much and it must be compressed using a model of reality that was developed over time by each individual. We even tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. The requirement to understand our world through stories means that each individual lives in their own universe in a very real sense.
What about actual reality? Real reality? We are incapable of knowing it because we can only know the world as represented by our senses. An object in the real world is not even an object because the term “object” has imbedded in it, the human understanding of things we call “objects.” For example, a desk is an “object,” but it is a grouping of subatomic things with huge gaps between them, which makes the desk mainly nothing. It has no color itself because an object’s color is a human concept based on the photons reflected by the thing that we experience, not the thing itself; take away the photons and the human experience and there is no color. The desk is hard. “Hard” is what we call things that create the sensation we call hard, but this means only that the arrangement of particles, atoms and molecules is such that they are rigid to a greater degree that other things we call soft. Again, hardness is does not exist except in the human experience of it.
The oddities of relativity, mass, shape and velocity changes are also the result of the stories we tell. The terms we use in our stories by definition are relational and hence relative. Velocity for example is concerned with direction and speed relative to the observer; two observers’ frames of reference result in different velocities for the same movement of the same object, yet there is no same movement or same object because frames of reference are not privileged; no one observer is really “right” because the concept of velocity, shape and mass themselves prevent it.
The point is that there is no way for us to think about what we call “reality” except as how we experience it—all our terms and thoughts are strictly operational in nature, contingent upon how we experience them directly or indirectly. To have a God’s-eye view we would have direct knowledge of everything at once, without terms that describe a discrete thought,” velocity,” because it is the discrete thought that causes the relativity of observations. We cannot forget our place and flourish; it is the horizon of our ability to know.