When you obtain information about the universe you live in, how is that achieved? It begins with input. Your brain detects input from your senses. Your senses are a collection of cells which react to external stimuli. I won’t list all the senses because I don’t know how they are currently classified. But you have nerves which detect heat, tactile stimuli, taste, sound vibrations, light, and I don’t know how many other senses I can split hairs with. But what does it mean to say that certain specialized cells detect something?
These cells have evolved to be sensitive to external stimuli. They are different in that light cells detect photons, and taste cells detect chemicals, and touch cells detect pressure, and so on. What do they all have in common? They all react to their stimuli by producing an electrical signal which travels to the brain.
Each signal travels to an area of the brain that has been trained to respond to that electrical signal, that is, to your visual, hearing, or taste parts of the brain. Or maybe the signals travel to your entire brain and only certain areas respond to the particular frequencies resulting in seeing, hearing, or whatever. I am not a brain scientist. It doesn’t matter.
So when the brain receives an electrical signal, what happens? The signal arrives at what? A cell! What does the cell do with it? It reacts chemically! What does that mean? It means the cell probably produces what…more cells? No. It produces an electrical response. So what has just happened? Gee, we started with an external stimulus, it was transmogrified into an electrical signal which was shipped off to a brain cell which converted it into – hey – another electrical signal. We have gone full circle and are now back to the beginning. We began with an electrical signal, and we end up with the same. Some electrical signals are issued by your brain in a specific response to an initial signal. For example, if you burn your hand, the heat causes your sensory cells to emit an electrical signal which goes to the brain cell which transforms that into a chemical signal, which creates another electrical output which travels to emergency muscles in your arm to withdraw your hand. But that’s not all. I believe some emergency reactions bypass the brain, at least initially. Reflexes are one such example. Whack your knee with a hammer and it jerks. I think also some quick responses, such as the hand burning, react first THEN the signal reaches the brain. Whew!
But other signals are not so clear, such as the signals or collection of signals which don’t do anything like that, but still contribute to your sense of being. I’ll give you an example. Photons from the sky which we perceive as the “color” blue travel to your retina and the photon is converted to an electrical signal which goes to a brain cell(s) and causes a chemical reaction which produces more electrical signals. You have the color blue in your mind. There is an evolutionary value in having your brain recognize the color blue because then you can find things like water or avoid toxic mold or whatever. But what IS it? Is it just a bunch of chemical signals? If so where is the “LCD” screen in your body that “displays” it. Think about the color blue and you can imagine it. But the color is not as clear as actually opening your eyes and seeing the real color. This implies that it is a memory you are accessing when you think of the color. It is reinforced briefly when you see the real color, but the longer you think about the color blue with your eyes closed, the less blue it becomes and the more black it becomes. You see it can get quite complicated.
So, close your eyes and picture the color blue…wait a minute. I can close my eyes and “see” the color blue, however briefly. It quickly fades to black unless I can imagine various objects, one after the other, which are blue. If I just think of “blue” the color fades to black almost instantly. Only if I “parade” a series of blue colored objects through my mind can I “refresh” the concept of blue and actually continue to see the color in my mind. One gets tired really quickly trying to maintain the freshness of the blue against fading to black.
Let’s take something else. Like say, a landscape. Picture a typical forested series of hills with a blue sky and the sun low over the hills. Make sure your eyes are closed. The scene can be fictional, it does not matter. Can you see the three colors like you would in a photo? Green forest, blue sky, and yellow for the sun? Or does your mind jump from one color to the other while the other two colors fade to black? Weird isn’t it? Lets take something even weirder like abstract thought.
What about abstract thought? What or “who” initiates it, directs it, controls it? I don’t want to make the mistake of “irreducible complexity” and suggest that it is impossible to decipher the tangled web of the brain. Nevertheless, I feel at this point in my life that there is a higher authority which controls (and happens to be limited by) your body. You might want to call it a soul. But it is the “spiritual you” that operates your body just like you operate a motor car, with your eyes being your windshield. (If this is true, living in the past is like driving a car while looking in the rear-view mirror. Don’t do it, you’ll crash and burn!).
I am not going to talk about God or try to ask what “higher authority” controls the soul because that is meaningless. I am merely trying to point out that there probably IS a controller ( a soul) which operates the body, yet is limited by its physicality. Don’t comment, please, on who created the creator or who controls the controller. The bottom line here, is that you have a huge amount of data and stimuli pinging off of the insides of your skull and you have something else which controls and interprets it.
So where am I going with this? I initially planned on commenting on how unreliable your senses were as a guide to interpreting the universe so let me get back to that. I shouldn’t have to point out that seeing is NOT necessarily believing but I will anyway: Just look at optical illusions.
We cannot hope to understand the universe because we are limited by our senses. We can’t see ultraviolet or infrared, never mind all the other frequencies ranging from 1 Hz and up through the billions and trillions of Hz to gamma radiation and beyond. We can’t hope to observe in any meaningful way the interior of a neutron star because to do so would mean our death. We can only infer certain things and make analogies. We can never truly understand it. Even today no one really knows what a photon is. The normal person can’t understand its wave/particle duality. We can never see a photon because it takes one to see one. We cannot measure something that far beyond our senses because the “objects” we are trying to see are smaller than our “seeing” mechanisms so we make up a “picture” based on throwing smaller things at it, bouncing off of it and then converting that to an artificially equivalent picture we can see. For example, how can we see something smaller than a photon?
Answer: You can’t. We see things because photons bounce off them or are emitted by them and the photons impinge on your retina. If I take a photon and try to bounce it off something smaller than itself, or even close to the same mass, the photon will actually affect and change the object we are trying to see. This is part of the problem known as the uncertainty principal which states that you can’t know the state and position of a sub atomic particle at the same time. Knowing one changes the other. You can only deal in probabilities. It would be like trying to see a grain of sand by bouncing cement trucks off it.
So when you see pictures of atoms, they are not really picture of atoms, because the atoms are smaller than the wavelength of light used to picture them. They are representations based on their measured positions and charges, converted to something we can interpret. We have to use an electron microscope to picture details smaller than is possible with the longer wavelengths of light. The shorter the wavelength, the greater the resolution. We cannot see in those wavelengths so we translate the information down to a wavelength we can see. It is the same with radar. We cannot see radio waves because they are too long for our seeing mechanism. So we use machines. We bounce radio waves off of aircraft, and when the reflected wave is received we process that and display it on a computer screen that we can see.
Having said all that about our senses, I hope I gave you an inkling on how it all works. I hope you realize that your senses can be fooled. Optical illusions are the most dramatic illustration of how unreliable our senses can be. I hope you spend some time with them to reinforce that lesson. That lesson is that as humans, we are extremely and severely limited in our capacity to understand the universe because we do not have the inputs and processing equipment to deal with it. No matter how smart we are, we will never be able to understand concepts like infinity simply because we are finite.
Finally I get to the point! Beings who rely on biological sensory inputs are subject to misinterpretation and error. That is why in science we have to measure everything over and over again, and why we have to be able to replicate an experiment and why we need the input of many many individuals over a long period of time to come to a proper interpretation of what we detect with our biological senses. As individuals, we are unreliable. The higher the number of individuals, the greater than reliability, just like in any other sample. Take that with a grain of salt, because we all used to believe the Earth was flat, didn’t we?
So what’s the sense of living? We live because we are ignorant beings with a passion for discovery. Next time I will talk about multiple dimensions, and aliens.
