Physicality

Is this thing “Physicality real” or not?

In discussions about odd occurrences in our world, we often hear people speak about whether something was “really here” in the physical. Whether the thing was “solid”.

I can imagine discussing these things in a new way. A way that allows us to deal with the fact that whether something is demonstrably “solid” is not a definitive way of saying whether it is “real”.

In 100 years “science” will look back at today’s paradigm as a childish, simplistic, naive, and patently incorrect way of viewing our reality, the same as how we look at those from flat Earth times. In some ways science already knows that it is a false representation of the fundamental basis of matter to think of it as comprised of “little pieces of matter” that can be smashed in to small and smaller bits.

At its smallest scale, scientists theorize that matter is actually comprised of tiny fields of electromagnetic energy. The fact that these little suckers vibrate without needing any energy input to them seems to me to violate some fundamental laws of physics, but let’s not think about that right now.

So we have this language problem, where we use the word “particle”, we really mean a large number of vibrating electromagnetic fields arranged in such a way as to behave as a single, larger group entity, and as such act as one “object”. I’m not even going to discuss whether this object exists in a physical form as “matter” (that is a whole different topic) I'm simply saying that although it is possible to describe this particle accurately (we just did), it is difficult to carry on a conversation by using that long sentence to convey a an otherwise simple meaning: so we use the word “particle” instead.

To avoid problems, we need some agreement on the meaning of the words we use. We need to agree that the word particle does not mean a little ball of stuff. It is a much more complex and nuanced arrangement of things. When scientists have conversations about these things, I think they are in much more agreement on the precise meanings, but less technical people have greatly varying assumptions built into their language, which leads to huge mis-matches between people’s understanding of each other’s meaning. This leads to major mistakes in people’s understanding of the nature of the world.

Bottom line is this- language forms conceptual models. Consequently, incorrect understanding of the meaning of a word, can easily lead to an incorrect conceptual model of the world!

In terms of whether it generally matters if objects are comprised of “little balls” of matter or organized groups of vibrating fields of energy: I would say it does not. In normal everyday life it is of little consequence to us what comprises fundamental building blocks of our apparently physical world. The real question is: do these objects persistently, objectively and independently exist?

We need to look at these three different aspects of individually to understand the actual nature of things.

Persistence refers to whether an object will continue to be perceived in a particular place if it is not acted upon by another object.

Objectivity refers to whether other observers perceive a particular object as well.

Independence refers to whether an object continues to be perceived when particular observers come and go. A key question here is whether an object is being created by its observers or whether it exists independent of them.

Consider that: the experience of physicality does not not require the actuality of “physical” objects. It is certainly possible to experience physicality (the sense that an object is “rock solid”) in a non-physical environment. Take for example: dreams and OBEs. Given this fact, let’s not confuse the experience of physicality, with the actuality of it.

Just to be clear about our terms-

Physical experience is when we sense that something is “solid”. We can touch it, feel it, smell it etc. This experience might happen in any environment (sleeping, waking, OEB, NDE, after death, etc).

Actual physical is what I am calling having the experience of physical, but specifically while awake. This is the normal case where people describe an object as being “real”.

You can see the problem with language emerging as we are describing very different things here with very similar and possibly convoluted language.

Wording aside: the difference between these two cases is both subtle and overt.

On one hand, it may matter little to an observer whether an object appears to be physical or is actually physical. If the two scenarios are indistinguishable, then what is the difference really? It’s sort of like: who cares if the universe is made of little balls of matter or little strings of energy? Does it really change our experience? Unless we are a physicist trying to study the nature of matter itself, no it generally doesn’t.

On the other hand: if our sense of physicality is simply an experience, and not an actual fact, then it means the apparently physical external universe only exists as a concept, as data. Given that material objects seem to be persistent, objective and independent, we might say that this data is somewhat “stable”, and not created or maintained by any one entity, but rather it exists as an independent thing with which we may all interact.

In dreams and other non-awake states of awareness, we find that we can no longer perceive or interact with these material objects from our awake world. During these non-awake periods we seem to be interacting with a totally separate, perhaps personal, subjective set of objects which presumably are a reflection of a different set of data over which we have substantially more control. In this state it seems also that we have substantial control over the level of physicality of the objects. Meaning: that we seem to have an impact on the rules governing how and whether we can interact with the objects. These differences of the rule-set governing the nature of how we are able to interact with objects is closely tied to what we mean when we say that something is “physical”. The problem is: in dreams when an object behaves as “solid”, we would only consider it as “physical” in our dream mind. When we are awake we might not use that word to describe it. Confusing right?

So although the experience of matter is well known to us: whether is derived from actual physical things or is really just an experience, is the question to be considered. The implications of this one question are fabulously significant to us because it redefines the whole nature of our existence. With this one extra level of understanding, we can see that perhaps all of science and technology, (which does valuable work to help us understand and live in our world) is completely missing what underlies it all.

For hundreds of years, science has been able to get by without understanding this lower, more fundamental nature of our existence. Generally science has been able to get by perfectly well, but this blind-spot has caused problems from time to time: especially when it comes to understanding some of the more esoteric aspects of our reality, such as the paranormal and even quantum physics. Until this oversight is resolved, science will continue to deny these “weird things” because they don’t have the basic tools with which to reach an understanding of them.

I have a feeling that science eventually, will be brought, however reluctantly, (kicking and screaming in-fact) to the conclusion that this aspect of our existence is quite real, and must be considered in order to reach a more complete understanding of our true nature, and how our reality is comprised. Perhaps this progress in science will need to (as Max Planck so famously said): come "one funeral at a time”.