The human mind is able to make sense of things because it is designed to deal with observed data in high-level abstractions. We innately classify things. Solid, liquid, gas. Living versus non-living. This is highly useful. By classifying things and fitting them together in meaningful ways, we understand and deal with a bewilderingly complex world as if it were rather simple. It’s vital to spoken language, which itself uses abstractions to represent things and classes of things.

But is it all that’s really there? Consider a spec of sand. It is finely divided mineral matter. Much of it is a form of silicon dioxide called quartz. Let’s say our grain of sand is quartz. We would call it a solid. But in reality, most of that grain of sand is empty space between its lattice of atoms of silicon and oxygen arrayed in a crystalline network.

There are three commonly occurring isotopes of silicon, Si 28, Si 29 and Si 30. 92% of free silicon on Earth is Si 28, so that’s probably what most of our grain of sand contains, but there will be traces of the other stable isotopes and possibly a bit of the 20 know radioisotopes. Si 28 has 14 protons, 14 neutrons and 14 electrons in three electron shells. We tend to think of an atom as a solid, but in reality, it too is mostly open space. It’s electrons don’t really whiz around its nucleus like little moons, they exist in phase-space. And most of each atom is in reality empty space between the quarks that make up the atom’s inner parts, its electrons, protons and neutrons. None of the quarks can be measured and defined as being an up or down quark in a given location. Any one measurement disturbs the others so both location and spin cannot be known. And quarks that interact are quantum entangled thereafter, meaning that doing anything to one quark causes its distant quantum entangled brothers and sisters to react just as the one we are measuring does.

So the reality of one atom in one grain of sand, not our high-level abstraction of it, but the real thing, is so incredibly complex that in all the lifetimes that man has lived, we could never have defined that one atom sufficiently to describe it. Now step up to actually understanding the universe. Do our eyes tell us the truth? In lyrical form, William Crawford sings, in The Music of the Night. “Close your eyes for your eyes will only tell you the truth, and the truth isn’t what you want to see. In the dark it is easy to pretend, that the truth is what it ought to be.”

In fact, shouldn’t we be aware we are and always will be in the dark? As Isaac Asimov quipped, “The Universe isn’t stranger than we can imagine, it’s stranger than we can’t imagine.” Can’t even our eyes tell us that? Socrates said, “I know that I don’t know.” Isn’t it interesting that despite all mankind’s learning and abstraction, we are still no more correctly informed than “I know that I don’t know”?

Topics: human behavior, thoughts, reality, relativity, tao, abstraction