A Study in Applied Spirituality

We know things are a bit unreal. The stars we see in the night sky, for instance, are not really there. They may have moved or even died by the time we get to see them. This delay is due to the time it takes for light from the distant stars and galaxies to reach us. We know of this delay.

The same delay in seeing has a lesser known manifestation in the way we perceive moving objects. It distorts our perception such that something coming towards us would look as though it is coming in faster. Strange as it may sound, this effect has been observed in astrophysical studies. Some of the heavenly bodies do look as though they are moving several times the speed of light, while their "real" speed is probably a lot lower.

Now, this effect raises an interesting question--what is the "real" speed? If seeing is believing, the speed we see should be the real speed. Then again, we know of the light travel time effect. So we should correct the speed we see before believing it. What then does "seeing" mean? When we say we see something, what do we really mean? Cognitive neuroscience (which studies the biological mechanisms behind cognition) answers these questions, and these answers may surprise you.

From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, everything we see, sense, feel and think is the result of the neuronal interconnections in our brain and the tiny electrical signals in them. This view must be right. What else is there? All our thoughts and worries, knowledge and beliefs, ego and reality, life and death--everything is merely neuronal firings in the one and half kilograms of gooey, grey material that we call our brain. There is nothing else. Nothing!

Like everything else, space and time are also cognitive constructs in our brain. They are mental pictures created out of the sensory inputs that our senses receive. Generated by our sensory perception and fabricated by our cognitive process, the space-time continuum is the arena of physics. Of all our senses, sight is by far the dominant one. The sensory input to sight is light. In a space created by the brain out of the light falling on our retinas (or the Hubble telescope), is it a surprise that nothing can travel faster than light?

This philosophical stance is the basis of my book The Unreal Universe, which explores the common threads binding physics and philosophy. Such philosophical musings usually get a bad rap from us physicists. To physicists, philosophy is an entirely different field, another silo of knowledge. We need to change this belief and appreciate the overlap among different knowledge silos. It is in this overlap that we can expect to find breakthroughs in human thought.

This philosophical grand-standing may sound presumptuous and the veiled self-admonition of physicists understandably unwelcome; but I am holding a trump card. Based on this philosophical stance, I have come up with a radically new model for two astrophysical phenomena in an article titled, "Are Radio Sources and Gamma Ray Bursts Luminal Booms?", which appeared in the June edition of a well known physics journal. (Journal ref: International Journal of Modern Physics D, Vol. 16, No. 6 (2007) 983-1000, which soon became one of the top articles of IJMP–D by Jan 2008.) This article is a direct application of the view that the finite speed of light distorts the way we perceive motion. Because of these distortions, the way we see things is a far cry from the way they are.

We may be tempted to think that we can escape such perceptual constraints by using technological extensions to our senses such as radio telescopes, electron microscopes or spectroscopic speed measurements. After all, these instruments do not have "perception" per se and should be immune to the human weaknesses we suffer from. But it can be shown that all these soulless instruments also measure our universe using information carriers limited to the speed of light.

We, therefore, cannot escape the basic constraints of our perception even when we use modern instruments. In other words, the Hubble telescope may see a billion light years farther than our naked eyes, but what it sees is still a billion years older than what our eyes see. Our reality, whether technologically enhanced or built upon direct sensory inputs, is the end result of our perceptual process. To the extent that our long range perception is based on light (and is therefore limited to its speed), we get only a distorted picture of the universe.

Let's turn the question around a little. What if there were no light? Of course, light is only a label we attach to a sensory experience. Therefore, to be more accurate, we have to ask a different question: what if we did not have any senses that responded to what we call light?

The immediate answer from any normal (that is, non-philosophical) person is that it is obvious. If everybody is blind, everybody is blind. But the existence of the universe is independent of whether a bunch of human beings can see it or not. Is it though? What does it mean to say the universe exists if we cannot sense it? Ah... the age-old conundrum of the falling tree in a deserted forest. Remember, the universe is a cognitive construct or a mental representation of the light input to our eyes. It is not "out there," but in the neurons of our brain, as everything else is. In the absence of light in our eyes, there is no input to be represented, ergo no universe.

The twist to this story is that we seem to have known all this for a long time. The role of light in creating our reality or universe is at the heart of Western religious thinking. A universe devoid of light is not simply a world where you have switched off the lights. It is indeed a universe devoid of itself, a universe that doesn't exist. It is in this context that we have to understand the wisdom behind the statement that "the earth was without form, and void" until God caused light to be, by saying "Let there be light."

The Quran also says, "Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth," which is echoed in one of the ancient Hindu writings: "Lead me from darkness to light." The role of light in taking us from the void (the nothingness) to a reality was understood for a long, long time. Is it possible that the ancient saints and prophets knew things that we are only now beginning to uncover with all our supposed advances in knowledge?

The fact that our perception is distorted because of the finite speed of light should hardly come as a surprise because we do know that things are not what they seem to be. The sun that we see is already eight minutes old by the time we see it. This delay is not a big deal; if we want to know what is going on at the sun now, all we have to do is to wait for eight minutes.

What is surprising (and seldom highlighted) is that when it comes to sensing motion, we cannot back-calculate this way. If we see a celestial body moving at an improbably high speed, we cannot figure out how fast and in what direction it is "really" moving without making further assumptions. One acceptable way of handling this difficulty is to ascribe the distortions in our perception to the fundamental properties of space and time. Another course of action is to accept the disconnection between our perception and the "reality" and deal with it in some way.

This complete disconnection between what is out there and the way we see it ties in nicely with the notion of Brahman in the Bhagavat Gita and Advaita from the ancient Indian philosophy.

The reinterpretation of scripture is a dangerous game, for such foreign interpretations are seldom welcome. I know I may be rushing in where angels fear to tread. But I seek refuge in the fact that I am looking for concurrence in the metaphysical views of spiritual philosophies, without diminishing their mystical or divine value.

This time-tested wisdom on the nature of reality is now mirrored in modern neuroscience, which treats reality as a cognitive representation created by the brain. The brain uses the sensory inputs, memory, consciousness, and even language as ingredients in concocting our sense of reality. This view of reality, however, is something physics is yet to come to terms with. But to the extent that its arena (space and time) is a part of reality, physics is not immune to philosophy.

Ultimately, there is only one true wisdom. There can be but one because we have only one question "of life, the universe and everything." What is the meaning of it all? What are we doing here? All our spiritual and intellectual endeavours (including physics) are our feeble attempts to arrive at an answer. They are likely to have commonalities, especially as we get closer to the ultimate answer.

Besides, how can our silos of knowledge be independent of each other when all our knowledge resides in our brain? Recognizing and making use of the interconnections among the different domains of human endeavour may be the catalyst for the next breakthrough in our collective wisdom that we have been waiting for.