Q&A: Understanding Reality in Light of Modern Science
Understanding Reality in Light of Modern Science
Question
With God's help
Hello Rabbi,
As is well known, there is a natural gap between me as a subject and reality itself, which is external to me.
And I wanted to know: does the Rabbi think we have any way to claim that our understanding of objective reality is correct?
For example, based on the sense of sight we understand that material bodies are built in three dimensions, and with the sense of touch we understand that they have a certain mass. But on the other hand, modern science has shown that the elementary particles of matter make up almost none of the volume and mass of matter itself. So in practice, what we define as matter is mostly empty space. Einstein showed that time is relative, and so on.
1. So if concepts that are so basic from everyone's point of view turned out for the most part to be an optical illusion, how can we understand reality itself? And even more so, how can we *define* concepts in order to derive insights from them by observing the world, when the definitions themselves turned out to be wrong…? On the other hand, it's impossible to ignore the many successes we have had; seemingly, according to what I'm saying, we should have been acting like people walking in the dark and not seeing a great light.
2. Also, I wanted to ask: as is well known, the Rabbi supports the informativist approach to understanding the laws of nature, and in your article on Occam's Razor you went so far as to argue that the proof in the discussion is very simple because of Occam's Razor.
But on the other hand, don't you think that the refutation of that claim is also very simple? After all, for many years Occam's Razor proved the correctness of Newton's laws. So much so that people wrote poems about how this was the ultimate and most correct theory of reality. But modern physics showed that they are wrong, and are only an approximation.
If so, how can the informativist remain indifferent when he is shown, regarding every theory he already "proved" to be correct, that in fact there is a new theory that fits better…
Doesn't that show that human understanding can only get close to understanding what is going on in reality, but never really know? And to what extent can Newton's laws be called a correct theory if they are not really correct…?
Answer
- I think you are mixing together two different planes here. There is no gap at all between our cognition and reality itself. Our cognition simply presents reality in the terms of cognition. It's like translation from Hebrew to English, except that here it can be completely precise. An incorrect perception of reality would mean that we see a yellow light but in truth the light is red. That is not the case with our cognition. We see a yellow light, but in reality itself there is no light, only an electromagnetic wave. The yellow light is a translation of the physical phenomenon into the concepts of our cognition. There is nothing skeptical here, and no concern that perhaps we are not perceiving things correctly.
The scientific discoveries are not relevant to the discussion. No one disputes that we can make mistakes and that it has become clear in the past that we indeed erred. But the skeptical claim says that the error is built into our perceptions, meaning that they cannot be accepted at all as a description of reality. That does not follow from any of this.
As you wrote, the successes of science and its ability to explain and predict phenomena show that we do perceive reality correctly (just in our own concepts. Every perception is within the framework of a certain conceptual world, and there is no problem and no flaw in that).
2. Science only proves my claim. Newton's laws are correct laws. No one is claiming that we did not grasp things properly. What is being claimed is that we did not look at all of reality, only at part of it (low speeds). But the part we observed was described completely correctly. And again I will say that no one claims certainty or full trust in science and in our perceptions. But your leap from this to the conclusion that these are shots in the dark (meaning that we should have no trust at all in any of this) has no basis whatsoever.
Discussion on Answer
I don't understand the difficulty. I already answered it, and I'll repeat briefly. The fact is that science predicts correctly in most cases, and from that it follows that we do indeed grasp reality correctly (of course not with certainty and not always).
We also discover our mistakes by our own means. So what's the problem? That there is no certainty? Of course there isn't.
And the laws are indeed correct in reality itself, just not with certainty, and sometimes there are mistakes and corrections, and then we get even closer to understanding reality and its laws.
1. I agree with the simple distinctions you mentioned.
But there are many basic concepts that are so intuitive for us and ultimately turned out not to be correct, such as time not being the same at every speed, so it is reasonable to say that the error is built into our perceptions.
And the question is that a significant part of our power of inference is derived through the use of basic concepts that it relies on. But if those concepts turned out to be mistaken, how did we ultimately succeed in building an entire structure on shaky foundations?
2.
Of course I agree that Newton's laws correspond to reality, but I am asking the Rabbi, in light of his approach, that Newton's laws are not only a simple way of organizing and predicting how events around us will occur, but that there is also a dimension of *correctness*/*truth* in them; that is, such a law exists in the world in itself, so that the world operates according to it.
And as I understand it, were it not for the findings of modern science, you would argue this on the basis of Occam's Razor, and use the predictive power of Newton's laws to show that it is also really true (otherwise the odds of it hitting the mark would be one in infinity).
But then modern science comes and shows that this is not true, so how can you claim that we have the ability to infer, on the basis of Occam's Razor, the correctness of the laws themselves?
That there really is some book in heaven, or in every atom, in which it is written "in black fire on white fire" that the world is governed by Newton's laws? And not say only that from his point of view the world is revealed through Newton's laws (as subjective laws), but without speaking about the world in itself.