“Ultimate Reality”?

It’s tempting to be sold on the idea of “ultimate reality”; that there exists something deeper than the reality we have, and that is the real arbiter that justifies or disconfirms the validity of our beliefs; the very concept of truth or even the mark scheme against which beliefs are considered more or less defensible relates back to an “ultimate reality”.

Part of the reason it is tempting is because we already have some insight to the idea that reality is a little more complex than we have any immediate or even scientific access to. But any proposed “ultimate reality” is a speculation. One could argue that ultimate reality is the reality we appear to inhabit, plus their favourite source of magic. But The Wachowskis proposed the idea that the “ultimate reality” is not this reality with addendums, but an entirely different reality and this one is an illusion we all share. It wasn’t novel when they wrote it; it’s actually been around for a long time. But scientific investigation appears to lead us down the idea that ultimately reality is simply increasingly reductionist fundamental explanations of observable phenomena.

For the sake of this discussion, I want to start by talking about this reality ― the one we all appear to share ― in two categories. As I go on, the idea of divided up categories will seem entirely artificial, but it’s a good starting place.

The first version of this reality is the one we understand through direct observation and sense: we can touch, smell, hear and see it. In addition to those senses, we have a mind which makes rational conjectures to tie those sense data into coherent models. As an example of minds acting with more than just ‘sense data’, we have a concept of “object permanence”, which means we understand that a building across the road doesn’t disappear when a bus drives by, but our vision is being obstructed. This reality, for the sake of this post, shall be called direct reality.

But then, we have another reality: an extended reality. That name is derived from the fact that humanity has extended all the tools it used to navigate the world: rational conjecture is extended by maths, formal logic, induction and philosophy; sight is extended by infrared and ultraviolet cameras and by telescopes and microscopes; even mathematics has extended knowledge in such a way that we don’t have to touch the sun to know its temperature. The scope for extension is so great, that it is reigned in by methods of scepticism and critique, and that undermines some of the elements of direct reality.

The extended reality is closer to an ultimate reality: it reveals that some of the models created as part of the direct reality are very narrow or even erroneous models, when viewed from the perspective of extended reality. Sight, for example, is based on a very narrow bandwidth (about 310 nm in range, from 390 nm to 700 nm) of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum is theoretically infinite (from infinitesimally short to infinitely long), but even considering only abundant wavelengths, the human eye responds to about 0.0035% of the spectrum (Quora, 2015). There are good, pragmatic reasons that direct reality would exclude all the rest; having sight of all electromagnetic radiation would stimulate eyes to the point of obscuring views more that clarifying them, which is to a pragmatic detriment.

From the extended reality, we can make greater claims about the deficiency of direct reality e.g. colour does not belong to objects. My kitchen knife is not purple, and neither is the light traveling from it to me purple. “Purple” is an epiphenonemon (Petrov, 1994), as is all colour, and the way the brain plays with it can be manipulated, as is evident with that dress or this chessboard. “Colour” is a quality the brain adds to reality, and yet it is pragmatic to talk of colour.

Anyone who has thought they were looking directly at an object only to later discover they were looking at a full length mirror (as a restaurant or hotel) may have a little further access to another deficit in the direct reality: we don’t see objects, we see the result of their interaction with light.

That last one may seem strange and pedantic, but it is important to notice that objects do not project their essence into your visual field; instead we see the light reflected off of them. Dark matter doesn’t interact with light, so it is only because dark matter exists in such abundance as to create perceptible gravity that we know it exists; if we were seeing objects and their essence, and not reflected light, we would have known of dark matter almost as soon as we pointed a telescope at the sky.

As extended reality continues to drag our understanding outside of the intuitive, obvious, common sense of direct reality, we get a glimpse of something. All of direct reality is constructed by the mind. But, really, as one focuses further down into something as simple as a uniform, solid element, one finds atoms, and then atoms give way to neutrons and protons and electrons, all of which give way to energy and waves. From a perspective at the level, there is no boundary to distinguish my kitchen knife from the chicken thighs. Entire objects are completely invisible at this level, and only emerge as we zoom out our perspective.

This is not a case of zooming in really close to an object to the point it obscures what we are looking at, but the idea that once we are looking at a quantum level there is no boundary to define one object from another. Is that ultimate reality? Because that appears entirely insensible, even if it is valid.

There is a reason we don’t consider extended reality somehow identical to this insensible reality, even though that’s a valid place for it to lead. We make the project one of understanding reality anywhere reality is ultimately sensible. The quantum haze of what I have just called “insensible reality” isn’t really insensible at all; at that level of focus, it behaves predictably and, in some cases, can be manipulated to act a certain way. Quantum mechanics, a module within extended reality, deals with this. Insensible reality is only truly insensible from the perspective of wanting to navigate this world as a massive object. What I think of as my functioning kidney is ultimately the behaviour at this insensible level and it cannot, therefore, be insensible as it gives rise to macroscopically predictable behaviour.

So, as tempting as “ultimate reality” might be, perhaps such a hierarchy (direct reality > extended reality > ultimate reality) is not useful. Perhaps the real issue is “relevant reality”, the model of reality that applies to the scale being looked at. In principle, all things could be derived and explained from the level of insensible or ultimate reality. But that would be inefficient and be a greater cause for confusion than merely picking the level of focus relevant to the question.

But, what of that other theme of ultimate reality; the idea of being a brain in a vat or plugged into the Matrix? Is there a way of dissolving that problem in the same way that a hierarchical ultimate reality could be dissolved? No. That problem is dissolved a completely different way.

The journey this post has already taken us on alludes to an epistemic journey: a journey of coming to know things via increasingly elaborate but justifiable means. Our direct reality gave way to our extended reality because of the sway of the evidence it generated and the power of the explanations it discovered. It was a reasonable and evidence based journey.

No such journey exists to lead us to the idea that we are a brain in a vat or part of the Matrix. So far as I can see, no such journey could exist to demonstrate that we are a brain in a vat, and any such journey that could demonstrate that we are in a Matrix-like reality creates an ever-deeper doubt.

If we had the same experience that Morpheus had ― of waking up in the real world and having the Matrix explained to us, and then of exploring this claim by re-entering the Matrix at will and then leaving again at will, and seeing people plug into the Matrix from the real world ― I would have one itching question: how have we validated the idea that this is the real world? It’s the Inception question: am I still in the dream? The problem with having the Matrix confirmed to you is that it does not then demonstrate you are in the top-tier reality. All it does it demonstrate the possibility and actual existence of tiers of reality; in coming out of the Matrix, Trinity has more reason to doubt the new reality she has just woken up in that she ever did the Matrix.

Although that seems to exacerbate the problem, it is actually the solution. We don’t know that it is possible for a Matrix-like situation, and we don’t know that it is impossible either. We can therefore accept it as an element of doubt in all questions, but there is no epistemic reason to follow the assertion; we have no reason to believe the Matrix likely enough to worry us. It is not sufficient to conceive of a claim and then not have it proven impossible to go on and accept it in any meaningful sense. Claims of an illusory reality ― like hallucinating brains in vats or the Matrix ― carry a burden, and accepting them should await a demonstration.

That’s not a real solution, of course. The philosophical doubt should always be there. But it shouldn’t be so great as to count as a practical doubt.

But, even with that said, those sorts of ultimate realities, where this reality is an illusion being created in another reality, is still only a diversion on the the path to the insensible reality within the Matrix i.e. in the film The Matrix, Zion ― the real world ― will, at bottom, be quantum waves. We get there, again, on an epistemic journey of explaining things in terms of increasingly fundamental or reductionist things. Deutsch defines “fundamental” in this sense as not only being a concept that explains the question you were trying to answer, but also explains other things beyond it. And he argues that the insensible reality I describe is very incomplete.

In addition to the insensible reality of quantum haze, Deutsch argues there are 3 other fundamental ideas for explaining reality: Evolution, Computation, and Knowledge (Deutsch, 2011).

Evolution ― not just biological evolution, but all evolution; the process of increasing in complexity ― is the cause of relatively bigger objects having properties or behaviors that are not obvious instantiations of the particles that make it up. For example, diamonds fired at high speed through a small hole travel in a straight line, even though the quanta that makes up a diamond would behave in a very different way. (It is important to note that complexity is: it is not just the idea of a lot of smaller parts being together, but all those parts being together in a way that if the arrangement were different, the essence of the object they composed would also be very different. To steal Dawkins’ example, a mountain would still be a mountain if we rearranged all the rocks into more or less the same shape; however, rearranging all the tissues that make up a dog leave you with something essentially different.) We can use this explanation as a tool to justify navigating up and down the ‘scales’ of reality.

Computation is a process of substrate independence. Anything in the universe that exists independent of the actual thing they are composed of are the topic of computation. For example, an idea can emerge in a brain, be transmitted by voice or writing or even a blog, and then be absorbed by a brain, and such information existed regardless of its medium. The abstract object always has a material medium, but it emerges independent of its medium; the information exists regardless.

Knowledge ― and I’d love to talk to Deutsch about whether there is a terminology problem here, and whether “meme” might have been a better word ― is anything about the universe which propagates and, in hindsight, appears to have a reason for its continuation or survival. It exists as traditional knowledge: ideas in the human mind which survive for a reason, regardless of whether that reason is rational (i.e. comports with reason and evidence) or nonrational (has some other reason for its survival. But, features of biology embody “knowledge”, in that they are features of reality that continue (through biological evolution) for a reason.

Deutsch’s perception of ultimate reality is less like a physical reality to understand, but a tool set that helps us to understand what we want to know at the scale we are interrogating the universe. It is not the case that one has to have some grasp of or access to ‘ultimate reality’ to defend that their beliefs are justified, they just have to see the evidence reality presents at the relevant level of the reality they navigate. If there was a good reason to believe we lived in the Matrix, then understanding “Zion” would be a goal, but until such a time as that reason exists, we want to understand this reality at the scales that matter to us.

Deutsch, D. (2011) The Fabric of Reality. (no place) Penguin UK.

Petrov, A.P. (1994) Epiphenomenon of Color in Visual Perception. Color and Imaging Conference. 1994 (1), pp. 14–17.

Quora (2015) What percentage of the light spectrum are humans able to see with their eyes? Available from: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-light-spectrum-are-humans-able-to-see-with-their-eyes [Accessed 1 November 2017].