Reality "in here" vs reality "out there"

"Many people think that there must be something more to the fabric of reality than what science can explain," said The Economist in a recent review of a book about the philosopher Henri Bergson, who once said of Einstein's theory of relativity that "it is not science, it is a metaphysics grafted upon science."

Bergson obviously understood nothing about relativity, and The Economist is often surprisingly prone to magical thinking for a paper devoted to the dismal science, but the comment happened to coincide with this interesting post by "A Motley Fool" on Substack and the above video by Grim Jim Desborough, both dealing with the question of the mystical vs the material.

It isn't a contest, and only non-scientists imagine that faith in science puts the two in conflict. (A point that Grim makes in his video.) I am a rationalist. I believe that the universe is simply a set of processes, "mechanical" if you like. But I also believe that we live in a mental model of the universe, and our mental model includes mystical phenomena. Those things are not real outside the world of ideas, as Alan Moore puts it, but in that that world they matter.

In other words, both gravity and love are real and important, but they are not real and important in the same way. To think so, and to try to insist that mystical ideas are also important to the universe -- that they're part of the fabric of reality, as The Economist insists -- is a category error. We're apes, and apes with clever little brains that imagine all sorts of art and feelings, but the universe doesn't give a stuff about that -- unless you can believe in an immanent deity that thinks like an ape. Einstein would have had no need to refute Andrew Marvell's statement of time

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

because, unlike Bergson, Marvell wasn't Dunning-Kruger (or even Donneing-Kruger) in thinking he was saying something fundamental about the objective nature of time.

It's the 21st century. We should have got past human exceptionalism by now, and also past the clomping kind of philosophy that still thinks science and intuition are describing the same kind of reality. For us they exist as a superposition, but that only matters on this tiny blip of matter in this tiny sliver of time to this one primate species. When humans are gone, the universe will still have red shift and black holes and gravitational waves but the notions of Bergson will be gone forever in the abyss of time.

Seasonal scientific silliness

It hasn't been easy coming up with a seasonal present for the blog this year. My gaming group had no Christmas adventure run by the polymathic Tim Harford, and I've been pretty busy for most of 2021 writing and editing the Vulcanverse books. So here's one I made about thirty years earlier -- a lighthearted little boardgame called Genius. You can get the rules here and the board here. Just don't expect Settlers of Catan.

Should you be thinking of running a Yule special, there are some sound tips on how to do that on the How Heavy This Axe blog. Amongst other suggestions, I agree that ideally it should be part of an ongoing campaign (I can never get into characters designed to throw away) even if, as in our case, that campaign only occurs once or twice a year.

If you've enjoyed anything on the blog and you'd like to get me and Jamie a Yule gift, reviewing one of our books online is always a welcome surprise. (Obviously, more welcome if you actually liked the book, but don't let me influence you.)

Have a happy solstice, Yule, Christmas, or whatever other winter festival you choose to celebrate. And after the uncanned nuttiness of the last few years, may 2022 bring a season of reason.