UNIVERSAL REALITY
UNIVERSAL REALITY
Much of the evidence for our worldview comes to us in the form of visual information. When we look around us it seems that light is all around, to and from all directions; this erroneous impression is especially deceptive in the case of man-made light after dark. Of course what we see is mostly the dispersal of light (in the atmosphere) and its reflection off objects, from which some happens to enter our field of vision. In fact the orientation of the light we see is always coincident with the lines-of-sight collected by the lens in each of our eyes: light at other angles does not pass through the iris and, hence, is invisible to us.
According to Relativity space is curved in the presence of a gravitational field: space-time is not linear (Euclidean). The quantum theory presents evidence that this (Lorentz) space-time continuum breaks down at microscopic scales at which physical elements appear as discrete indivisible quanta. Humans are not equipped with senses that can detect the small deviations (from Euclidean geometry) that result from the earth's weak gravity and the low velocities experienced in our terrestrial environment, nor with senses to resolve the microscopic texture of reality. Perception of anything beyond the human scale has no specific survival value. For instance, we do not need eyes with sufficient parallax or focal range to accurately judge distance to and between objects at and beyond a safe distance. Our sense of touch and our eyes acquire bulk samples from our environment whose microscopic features are submerged at our human scale because the former suffice while the later do not matter in daily life. In fact the spatial data that our tactile and optical senses capture are essentially two-dimensional with just enough stereometric information for our brain to synthesise into an image that corresponds to our immediate physical world that at least at a human scale extends in three directions. However, the fact that we have survived and thrived is evidence of correspondence between such a world and our myopic image of it- not confirmation that either is three-dimensional. Certainly it provides no justification to blindly assume that our perception actually represents all of reality. Indeed, true three-dimensional vision at a human scale would imply that we should see an object in its entirety: for example, all six sides of a cube simultaneously and not, as we do, the projection of the front and one or two sides but never the back. Accordingly, we should suspect that the aggregate physical world is instead reconstituted from projections of a larger reality.