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Everything we think we know is probably bullshit

Unfortunately, this is a post about how everything we claim to know is probably


bullshit. I say 'unfortunately' because I am a huge fan of science over faith, and
of evidence-based analysis over sentimental junk and guesswork based on
wishful thinking. I like being able to discard explanations in favour of better
explanations, when better evidence presents itself, and I like interrogating the
world I live in based on observation, deduction, and experiment rather than on
received 'wisdom' and folklore.

Nevertheless, everything we claim to know about the world is probably bullshit.

By 'everything' I mean very fundamental things, like chemistry and physics: the
basic facts we think we know about the universe we inhabit. And by 'bullshit' I
mean 'not objectively true'. The things we claim to know may be useful, and we
may be able to achieve practical results when we base our actions on them. But
that does not mean that our appreciation of those things, our understanding of
them, our explanations for them, are correct and accurate, objectively speaking.
It is perfectly possible for a person to drive a car even if they believe the car
operates on fairy dust. Of course, eventually the car will run out of petrol and
they won't be able to get it going again. The same thing could possibly lie in
store for human beings at some theoretical future point where the scientific facts
we claim to know turn out to be fairy dust, but for the time being, we can and do
work with what we think we know quite successfully, and I don't dispute that.

So upon what line of reasoning do I base my outrageous remark? It's something


that has bugged me for many years, and which I assume must have bugged real
scientists too, except I don't see much evidence of them being too worried about
it. In fact, the lack of articles and essays and books dealing with this issue is so
enormous that I have decided to raise the issue myself, over here in this
darkened corner of the blogosphere. I'm really quite amazed by how little has
been said or written (that I can find) about this fundamentally distressing issue,
which is this: the mechanism of perception is a mystery.

Most likely you read that statement and went "Meh." Or, "Wtf?" Bear with me:

Things we claim to know are, invariably (if you're a scientist), based on


observation. The scientific method works like this: observation, hypothesis,
experimentation, analysis, more observation, more hypothesis, etc. It's really
quite elegant and not complicated. At its core is observation, the process of
noticing something in the world which makes the scientist go "Hm, I wonder how
that works." The scientist then comes up with a plausible explanation, and then
tests that explanation using experimentation (and again, observation of the
experimental results), followed by analysis, which may lead to a new hypothesis,
or a new experiment, or simply more observation. The point is, everything that
scientists do starts and proceeds with observation of the world.

The problem is not with the scientific method. The problem is with how
observation works. Observation of the world involves some basic steps:
information out there in the world - which we claim exists in various forms such
as electro-magnetic energy, chemicals etc - hits some organs we claim to have
(ears, eyes, tongue, skin, nose etc), and these organs pass that information
along to our brain (we claim) using (we claim) our nervous system. They don't
pass all the information they receive, and they are not capable of receiving all
the information that's available. Both of those facts are very problematic and I'll
discuss them soon, but let's keep burrowing to the core of the problem. When
the information that gets passed along arrives in the brain, something happens.
We call it 'perception'. It's the process of translating the information we receive
into 'the world'. It is, arguably, the most important process in the framework of
human experience. And nobody knows how it works. Worse, nobody knows if the
translation corresponds to the actual world 'out there', and no one even knows if
the translation is the same from person to person. Quite simply stated, we don't
know that what we are perceiving is an accurate reflection of the world because
we simply cannot explain the mechanism that our (alleged) brain uses to
perform the translation.

This is a bad thing. It's not one of the many common scientific problems, like not
yet being able to explain in meticulous detail how organic chemistry started, or
not knowing why the universal constants have the values that they have. This is
much more distressing and fundamental than that. It's not knowing whether the
world we think we inhabit is actually that way at all. The tool we use to gather
information about the world is inexplicable; consequently, we cannot trust it. It
could be feeding us a line of bullshit and we would have no defence against it.
We are completely at the mercy of the tool. Human perception is like the Oracle
of Delphi. We go to it, we ask it questions, it gives us answers, and because the
Oracle doesn't tell us its mysterious processes, we simply have to have faith.
This is terrible! It means that at the bottom of science there is a leap of faith, the
very thing science aims to render unnecessary.

Of course, mine is an extreme position, and most people, including scientists,


would say: "Hang on, there's no reason to assume that our perception is not
accurate. In fact, given that we evolved in the world, and given that we are able
to make such practical use of the things we claim to know, it's highly likely that
our perception is accurate. Yes, the possibility exists that it is inaccurate, but the
possibility is so remote that we might as well proceed as if everything is hunky
dory. It's worked so far."

Maybe it has, and maybe it hasn't. That is a question for a different discussion.
What I'd like to bring to your attention now are the two things I described as
'problematic' earlier: our senses do not process all the information in the world,
and the information they do process is not all sent along to the brain for
translating.

One of the things we claim to know is that the electro-magnetic spectrum exists.
We claim that a certain segment of that spectrum contains energy oscillating at
a particular wave-length which we call infra-red. We know this because we have
built instruments to measure the oscillations of electro-magnetic energy, and the
reason we had to build instruments is because our sense organs do not do
anything with electro-magnetic energy in the infra-red range. They ignore it, or
more accurately, it is outside the bounds of things they can be aware of. We
can't see infra-red without mechanical assistance, just as we can't hear sounds
at very low or very high frequencies. There are countless similar examples. Think
of your sense organs as a bucket in a rainstorm. The bucket only collects rain
falling straight into the bucket. All other rain falls outside the bucket.

It is an incontrovertible fact that information exists in the world which our sense
organs ignore (or, in the passive voice, which our sense organs are incapable of
'capturing'). Obviously we do not know the severity of this problem. We know
some information exists in the world that we don't pay any attention to;
consequently, there may be an enormous amount of information in the world
that we don't pay any attention to. There may be - arbitrarily - a million billion
times more information in the world that we don't pay attention to than
information that we do pay attention to. That's problem one.

Problem two is that, of the information that our sense organs are able to
assimilate (which is possibly a tiny fraction of all the information available), only
a small amount is passed along to the brain for translation. I don't have the
precise facts to hand, but you can look them up or read Tor Norretranders'
excellent book ‘The User Illusion’, which contains relevant research and
references; if my memory serves me correctly, our sense organs gather about
1.1 gigabits of information every second, of which merely hundreds of bits are
passed along to the brain.

I speculate that this is partially because the brain thinks it "knows what's going
on". I speculate that a good analogy is video compression, so let me digress a bit
to explain how that works (at a very high level).

Let's say you are watching a piece of video depicting a man sitting on a chair in
an otherwise empty room, speaking to the camera. The camera position remains
fixed. The only thing that changes throughout the clip is the man's face, and
occasionally his body position. The chair does not move, and it goes without
saying that the walls behind him, and the floor, remain unchanged throughout in
every respect including texture, colour, position, etc. Now, video is basically a
series of still pictures played very fast, typically around 25 to 30 pictures per
second. Without getting into a stupid amount of detail, suffice to say that each
picture of a digital video consists of a certain number of tiny rectangular blocks
called pixels, and that a certain amount of information is required to populate
each pixel with its piece of the image. Let's say that each pixel consists of 1
byte, or 8 bits (this is no longer a widespread truth in practise, but it's okay for
illustrating things). And let's say that the size of the picture (in pixels) is 640
wide by 480 high. That means that each picture in the series consists of 307,200
bytes of information, or 300 kilobytes. If the clip is filmed at 25 frames per
second and lasts for 1 minute, the size of the clip should be (leaving out audio)
450,000 kilobytes, or 450 megabytes. Most of you will know that if you
downloaded a 450 megabyte video file and it turned out to last for one minute
and consist of only a man sitting on a chair in an empty room talking, you would
be super surprised and probably pissed off. In reality, this piece of video would
be much, much smaller in file size, because of the magic of video compression.
Basically, video compression works by determining only the things that change
from frame to frame. If 90% of the frame doesn't change throughout the clip,
then the video compression algorithm records that information once, giving it a
file size of 270 kilobytes, plus whatever other information it needs to track about
the changes. For the clip described, this could probably give us a total file size of
under a megabyte. The compression algorithm already knows, from the first
frame, what 90% of every other frame is going to consist of and so it doesn't
have to record that information again.

I speculate that something analogous to video compression governs the


relationship between our brain and our sense organs. Part of the reason why only
a small amount of sensory information ends up in the conscious mind may be
because the brain thinks it "knows what's going on" in the same way the video
compression algorithm knows 90% of what's in the frames of the video clip. The
brain doesn't need every single piece of sensory information because it's capable
of filling in the gaps based on previous sensory information. I can almost
guarantee this is true because of the existence in our field of vision of a gigantic
blind spot which all of us appear not to be troubled by. Your visual field is a
composite of information received from each of your eyes. Because of the way
your eyes are mounted in your head, and because of the shape and the
mechanics of eyesight, there is a portion of the field of vision that is not covered
by either eye. This portion occurs directly in front of your nose when you're
looking straight ahead, and it's basically a gigantic dark spot. You don't see this
dark spot because your brain inserts the stuff it thinks is in the dark spot. This is
one of the many mysteries of perception I was alluding to earlier. This, and a
number of other anomalies, illustrate that our visual perception is flawed, and
the existence of optical illusions illustrates that our visual perception can be
fooled (really quite easily). The problem is that the brain sometimes does without
information that it thinks it doesn't need, when in fact it would be better off with
the actual information (like those weird glitches you get in digital video
sometimes). A facile definition is that optical illusions happen when the brain
thinks it knows what's going on, but is mistaken. The brain suffers from a
deficiency of accurate sensory information because it tries to fill in the gaps. The
brain is playing fast and loose with reality. That's problem two.

The problems I have described are very serious. There may be immensities of
reality that we simply are incapable of perceiving, and even the parts we do
perceive and become conscious of may represent only a small, highly modified
and 'massaged' version of the total world we are able to perceive. The problem
this raises for science should be obvious. All our science, everything we claim to
know about chemistry and physics and therefore everything else, is based on
this small, highly modified and 'massaged' version of the total world. Couple this
with the previously stated problem, that we simply do not know how sensations
are translated into perceptions, or what this even means, and you have a very
unsettling situation. Speaking in the sense of the objective truth, all our science
might as well be based on a belief in fairy dust.

As I said earlier, I am surprised that other scientists aren't perturbed by any of


this. I know that cognitive scientists exist (I think) and are exploring the
mechanics of perception. But scientists in other disciplines appear unbothered,
despite the fact that, in my opinion, this is the single most serious problem
facing science, even perhaps facing humanity. Until the mechanics of perception
are understood, along with all the consequences of those mechanics, everything
that we think we know about the world - everything - is subject to serious doubt.
It might be, indeed probably is, all bullshit.

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