Sense Perceptions and Reality

Jack Dikian

November 2010

In psychology and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The study of perception gave rise to the Gestalt school of psychology, with its emphasis on holistic approach.

Perception is one of the oldest fields in psychology and represents one of the oldest quantitative laws in psychology quantifying the relationship between the intensity of physical stimuli and their perceptual effects.

But can we really trust our senses?

Descartes did not believe that the information we receive through our senses is necessarily accurate and set out to attack what he considered the very foundation of perception systems: the idea that sense perception conveys accurate information.

In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's eye. Others, who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes.

This has been shown by experiment: an ambiguous image has multiple interpretations on the perceptual level. The question, "Is the glass half empty or half full?" serves to demonstrate the way an object can be perceived in different ways.

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The analogy of Plato's Cave was coined to express these ideas

What is time

Jack Dikian

Sep 2012

Again, as so often these days, casual remarks made in late night conversations sets me thinking about those ideas we hold with seemingly little need for scrutiny. These are ideas that involve everyday concepts, that, on the surface, are supposedly well understood, defined, and seem as natural as day and night. I’m talking about time.

How hard can it be to explain the passage of time. After all, we can measure time precisely and we all have an innate ability to gauge the flow of time.

The question, perhaps overly simplified: is time a "real thing" that is "all around us", or is it nothing more than a way of speaking about and measuring events.

Psychologically, time can seem to take forever or be over before we know it. The past only exists as memory. The future is something we can’t remember. So, there is really only the present. In the novel “The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea”, by Randolph Stow, a novel I couldn't put down when I was 12, Rob's life is "jolted" by the impending war comes to the realisation “I am six years and two weeks old. I will never be that old again”.

Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in the International System of Units. An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second.

There are two distinct views on the meaning of time. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. This is the realist view, to which Isaac Newton subscribed, in which time itself is something that can be measured.

A contrasting view is that time is part of the fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them, and compare the motions of objects. In this view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that "flows", that objects "move through", or that is a "container" for events. This view is in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, in which time, rather than being an objective thing to be measured, is part of the mental measuring system.

According to John A. Wheeler, Princeton cosmologist, "Time is the most mysterious of the four usual dimensions of our space-time continuum. It's not so much that there's something strange about time, the thing that's strange is what's going on inside time. He continues, we will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange time is.

Einstein’s in his Special Theory of Relativity he united space and time into one entity - space-time. Within this new continuum, time slows down as you move faster, the time dilation effect.

So time can be viewed as both a psychological construction which we use to interpret our world and a mathematical kind of time, the most basic estimate of which is reflected on our watches and clocks. Also, the direction that time points to can be delineated by a number of physical and psychological phenomena.

• The Psychological Arrow of Time is our subjective sense of time, the fact that we remember events in one direction of time, the past, but not the other, the future.
• The Electromagnetic Arrow of Time as described by Maxwell's equations providing solutions to the propagation of radio waves, and light.
• The Cosmological Arrow of Time sees the history of the universe moving forward in time in an irreversible manner.
• The Thermodynamic Arrow involving the Law of Entropy, explaining the behavior that all the universe progresses from order to disorder

On Consciousness and Reality

Jack Dikian

November 2010

Background

Anyone who has undertaken a physics course beyond that of secondary school will have no doubt been confronted and perhaps shocked with the strange and schizophrenic nature of atoms. The comfortable Copernican view of the atom had to make room to a much weirder explanation of the atom and, by implication, the very bedrock of reality itself vis-à-vis Quantum Mechanics, Exclusion principle, Uncertainty principle, Schrödinger’s cat…

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics described as a key feature of quantum mechanics the state of every particle as a wave-function, which is a mathematical representation used to calculate the probability for it to be found in a location or a state of motion.

According to this interpretation, the act of measurement causes the calculated set of probabilities to "collapse" to the value defined by the measurement. To put this simply, the notion that an unmeasured atom is, in some sense, not real, and its attributes are created or realized through the act of measurement.

This interpretation places observers in a special position - the founders of quantum mechanics debating the role of the observer, and believing that it is the observer that produces collapse. Incidentally, this view was rejected by Einstein calling it anti-scientific. Pauli described quantum mechanics as lucid mysticism.

Hugh Everett in the 1950’s postulated the idea of the many-worlds interpretation which asserts the objective reality of the wave-function, but denies the reality of wave-function collapse, which implies that all possible alternative histories and futures are real. Here, the memories of the observer split at every measurement, leading to the subjective appearance of collapse.

Eugene Wigner made quantum physics even more subjective when in the 1960’s, in his "Remarks on the mind-body question", an assay in his collection of assays Symmetries and Reflections, claimed that a quantum measurement requires a conscious observer, without which nothing ever happens in the universe. The key idea has become known as the consciousness causes collapse interpretation.

Where are we know

Thomas J. McFarlane in an article “Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics” provides a summary of what the quantum realm has revealed to be beneath the illusion of Newton's classical universe. The points below are paraphrased;

• Atomic matter dissolves into waves of potential existence.
• Rigid determinism falls apart, giving us a world with spontaneity.
• The objective world, existing "out there" independent of observers, vanishes, leaving a world in which the observer and the observed are interdependent.
• That the manifold world of separate independent objects interacting locally within space and time is transcended, revealing a realm where all things are nonlocally united in an indivisible whole.

It is the last two points that seem to suggest that consciousness is linked at a deep level with physical reality. Many theories, including interdisciplinary approaches such as that of Saul-Paul Sirag have been developed.

I would like to concentrate on Sirag’s approach in the remaining of this piece.

Sirag's strategy is to look to mathematics for an appropriate structure to describe the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. He finds that unified field theories of the physical forces depend fundamentally on mathematical structures called reflection spaces, which are heierarchically organized in such a way that an infinite spectrum of realities is naturally suggested.

Sirag studied the works of Sir Arthur Eddington and was impressed by Eddington’s use of group theory in developing his unified field theory. Eddington's unification was based upon the 4-element group called the Klein group K4. Eddington thought of this group as describing the structure of the most elemental measurement: seeing whether or not two rigid rods are the same length.

Eddington had declared K4 to be the primary group structure of the acquisition of physical knowledge. Sirag recognized a connection between Eddington’s use of the K4 and Piaget's work on the structure of the acquisition of knowledge by children. Piaget found, by testing children in precisely contrived situations, that K4 was also the basic structure of children's acquisition of physical knowledge. Piaget's names for the four elements of K4 are identify, negation, collaterality and reciprocity.

It is generally believed by physicists working on unified field theory that space-time is hyper-dimensional, with all but four of the dimensions being invisible. Beside space-time dimensions, there are also other internal dimensions called gauge dimensions. In Sirag's view both the extra space-time dimensions and the gauge dimensions are real. This provides scope for considering ordinary reality a substructure within a hyper-dimensional reality.

Sirag's approach is that his version of unified field theory embeds both spacetime and gauge space in an algebra whose basis is a finite group. This is a symmetry group of one of the Platonic solids -- the Octahedron. Thus it is a mathematical entity contained in the reflection space hierarchy. In fact the reflection space corresponding to the Octahedron is 7-Dimensional and is also a superstring-type reflection space, so that a link with the most popular version of unified field theory is provided.

The central theme of Sirag's theory is that this 7-Dimensional reflection space is a universal consciousness, and that individual consciousnesses tap into this universal consciousness. This implies that the high level of consciousness enjoyed by humans is due to the complex network of connections to the underlying reflection space afforded by a highly evolved brain.

Is our brain hard-wired to believe in God

Jack Dikian

August 2003

Are human beings hard-wired to believe in God. That is, it possible that brain-structure is designed such that the belief in God is to serve as an anxiety reducing function.

The connection between the temporal lobes of the brain and religious feeling has led a Canadian neuroscientist, Dr Michael Persinger, from Laurentian University to attempt and answer if there is a biological and brain basis to some of the concepts that are called the God belief and the God experience.

If the brain basis for the sense of self is tied to language and left hemispheric processes then the right hemispheric equivalent, Persinger believes is a second sense which when experienced is the sense presence or the prototype of the God experience.

One hypotheses is that as we developed an ability to forecast our own self disillusion, and our own death, which generates a great deal of anxiety, the efforts of our brain’s

right temporal lobe is to relieve the anxiety of death - what we sense when we think we are sensing God.