Does Science Prove
That All Reality Is Subjective?
I am no kind of scientist. I’m even less of a mathematician.
I haven’t had a science class since I was a college undergraduate in the late
1960s, and I haven’t had a math class since the early 1960s when I was a
sophomore in high school. So I certainly don’t claim any understanding at all
of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. I see programs about it on TV. I see
chalk boards covered with mathematical formulas that mean absolutely nothing to
me. I am no kind of scientist or mathematician, but I find quantum mechanics
absolutely fascinating. I suppose I’m fascinated with it because even the
scientists who claim to understand it say it makes no sense. They say you know how
a subatomic particle is moving or where it is but not both, or something like
that. They say a subatomic particle doesn’t take an actual shape until we
observe it. When we’re not observing it it’s just an amorphous mass of
probabilities, or something like that. Quantum mechanics is so bizarre that I
even have a book in my bookcase with the wonderful title Alice in Quantumland. The scientists say quantum mechanics explains
reality at unimaginably small sizes. They say Einstein’s theories of general
and special relatively explain reality at very large sizes. Then they confess
that no one has ever successfully put quantum mechanics and relativity together
into a unified theory that explains all of reality. I don’t understand it, but
I find it all quite fascinating.
Then there’s something called “quantum entanglement.” I’ve
seen a program about it from PBS’s Nova series. I’ve actually seen that program
twice in an attempt better to understand it. Here’s what I got out of it. Albert
Einstein figured out mathematically that in quantum theory something affecting
one entangled quantum particle must simultaneously affect another quantum
particle entangled with it regardless of how far apart they are. Einstein
thought his discovery proved that there was something wrong with quantum theory
because what came to be called quantum entanglement just makes no sense.
Einstein, despite being the great genius that he was, wanted things to make
sense; so he never quite accepted quantum mechanics. The quantum scientists
couldn’t find anything wrong with Einstein’s math and the prediction it made,
but of course science doesn’t accept much of anything that it can’t prove
through experimentation. They couldn’t prove quantum entanglement
experimentally, so the concept sort of got forgotten for quite a while.
Then back in the 1960s some scientists at the University of
California at Berkeley rediscovered older papers on quantum entanglement and
set out to prove or disprove it experimentally. Their experiment, the specifics
of which I don’t understand but which don’t much matter here, seemed to prove
that quantum entanglement was real. There remained, however, the possibility
that some unaccounted for variable had gotten into their experiment an influenced
the results. Finally to prove quantum entanglement scientists has to come up
with a way of demonstrating it that eliminated that possibility. Eventually
some scientists led by a physicist from the University of Vienna did just that
using two telescopes on the Canary Islands to capture light from two separate
quasars billions of light years away that couldn’t possibly have been altered
as part of the experiment. They showed that quantum entanglement is real. When
we observe one entangled particle, thereby giving it shape, its entangled
particle takes the same shape at precisely the same instant though they are
physically unconnected with each other. I don’t understand it. It makes no
sense, but I have to admit that it’s immensely fascinating.
One of the scientists on that Nova show, trying to explain
quantum entanglement, said that it is as if space and time disappeared. I take
that to mean that what we perceive as space and time, as distance between
objects and a period to time that it would take anything to move between them,
at the quantum level doesn’t exist except in our perception of it. We perceive
it, but it has no objective reality outside of our perception of it. We set up
an experiment that has quantum particles located at what appears to us to be a
distance. To them they aren’t at a distance at all. Space disappears. Time
between an effect on one and the effect on another disappears. We perceive them,
but they aren’t objectively there.
And of course all of that makes absolutely no sense. Or does
it? Quantum entanglement suggests to me that science may be proving through
experimentation what I have long maintained on the basis of my understanding of
how we sentient beings are created and function in the world. In my book Liberating Christianity, I put it this
way:
Because we humans perceive the world from a center that we
call our self, because as humans we have no other way of being in the world,
all we can know is what we perceive, what we experience. Whether anything beyond
that is real, we simply cannot know.[1]
And:
Because as humans all we have is our perception, our
experience of things, all reality is subjective and experiential. The only
reality that we humans can know is subjective, experiential reality. Reality is
subjective for me because I experience
it. I know what I experience through my senses. I cannot know that my senses do
not deceive me. Indeed, I know that sometimes they do.[2]
When we stop to think about the matter, which of course we
rarely if ever do, these conclusions, that all we humans have is our perception
or experience of things and that therefore our reality is necessarily
subjective and experiential, seem unavoidable to me.
Perhaps another reference to Liberating Christianity will help here. I trust you’ll excuse me the
faux pas of quoting myself again.
Perhaps you’ve seen the movie The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves. In that movie computers have
taken over the world. They have enslaved all humans so they can use the
electrical current every human body produces to run themselves. The humans,
however, or at least most of them, don’t know that they live in little pods
hooked up to machines feeding the computers because from birth the computers
have manipulated their consciousness, their perception, so that they perceive
what we would call a normal human existence. They have homes and families. They
have jobs. They live the way we live, except they really don’t. They only perceive that life, they experience it,
and so, to them, it is real. The movie shows us that their perceived life is in
fact objectively unreal. The point that we have to come to terms with is that we cannot know that the same thing isn’t
happening to us! All we have is our perception, our experience of reality,
and our perception and experience are what make ‘reality’ ‘real’ for us.[3]
Some of the conclusions that necessarily flow from this
understanding are troubling. I don’t do a very good job of wrestling with them
in Liberating Christianity, and I won’t
tackle them here. The point for now is that those troubling conclusions do not
make the understanding any less unavoidable. Perception and experience are all
we have. Therefore reality is for us unavoidably subjective.
What we perceive as reality when it comes to quantum
entanglement is unavoidably subjective too. We perceive distance between two
entangled quantum particles. The particles don’t. We’ve set up an experiment that
includes placing our detection devices for the particles some significant distance
apart. The particles couldn’t care less. To them, as the scientist on the Nova
program said, it is as if space and time didn’t exist.
That reality of quantum entanglement seems to me to support
my contention that all reality is for us experiential and subjective. I don’t
of course need science to prove my contention. I am convinced that it remains
valid even if science has nothing to say about it, and I don’t think science
could ever disprove it. We aren’t talking about scientific truth here. Still, I
find it fascinating that this odd, counterintuitive, nonsensical conclusion of
quantum mechanics, a conclusion that even the great Albert Einstein could not
accept (though his contemporary and co-Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr could and
did), fits so neatly with my understanding of the nature of reality. We
perceive space between entangled quanta. They don’t. So is space real? To us
yes. To them no. Actually, it all makes perfect if perfectly counterintuitive
sense.
[1]
Sorenson, Thomas C., Liberating
Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and
Stock, Eugene, Oregon 2008, p. 202.
[2] Id., p. 203.
[3] Id. pp. 203-204.
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