My girlfriend, “Emily,” often tells me her dreams, and I, less often, tell her mine, which are usually too murky and disjointed to share. We try to make sense of our dreams, to find meaning in them. What do they reveal about our fears and desires?
Interpreting dreams is an imperfect, highly subjective art, as Sigmund Freud, in his rare moments of humility, would surely have granted. Dreams are entirely private, first-person experiences, that leave no traces beyond the dreamer’s fallible memory.
And yet making sense of dreams, it occurs to me lately, is not wholly dissimilar from making sense of “reality,” whatever that is. Yes, we all live in the same world. We can compare notes on what is happening, and draw inferences, in a way impossible with dreams.
And yet your experience of the world is unique to you. So is your interpretation of it, which depends on your prior beliefs, yearnings and aversions, and on what matters to you. No wonder we often disagree vehemently, violently, on what has happened and what it means.
Science offers our best hope for achieving consensus. Scientists accumulate and analyze bits of evidence, like carbon dioxide trapped in ancient ice cores, or blood extracted from hospitalized patients. After much haggling and second-guessing, scientists converge on a plausible narrative. Fossil-fuel combustion is boosting atmospheric carbon dioxide to dangerous levels. A novel, deadly coronavirus is spreading across the world.
But subjectivity is hard to expunge even in physics, the foundation on which science rests. Quantum mechanics, a mathematical model of matter at very small scales, is science’s most rigorously tested theory. Countless experiments have confirmed it, as do computer chips, lasers and other technologies that exploit quantum effects.
Unfortunately, quantum mechanics defies common sense. The Schrodinger equation describes an electron behaving in many possible ways. Only when we observe the electron does it behave in one particular way; our observation seems to determine the behavior. This so-called measurement problem undermines objectivity, which assumes that physical reality is what it is, regardless of how we view it.
An interpretation of quantum mechanics called QBism (pronounced “Cubism,” like the art movement) embraces subjectivity, making it the bedrock of knowledge and reality itself. According to QBism, each of us constructs a picture of the world, a set of beliefs about it, based on our interactions with it. We constantly, implicitly, assign probabilities to our beliefs. The big reality in which we all live emerges from the collisions of all our subjective mini-realities.
QBism’s core message, science writer Amanda Gefter says, is that the idea of “a single objective reality is an illusion.” A dream, you might say. That, at any rate, is my understanding of QBism. Proponents bicker over definitions, and physicists and philosophers fond of objectivity reject QBism entirely. All this squabbling, ironically, seems to confirm that QBism’s premise that there is no absolute objectivity; there are only subjective, first-person viewpoints.
Physicists have more in common than most would like to admit with artists, who try to turn the chaos of things into a meaningful narrative. Some artists thwart our desire for meaning. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is an anti-narrative, a grab-bag of images that pop in and out of the void. The poem resembles a dream, or nightmare. Its meaning is that there is no meaning, no plot or plan, no master narrative. Life is a joke, and the joke is on you if you believe otherwise.
Those of us who reject that nihilistic outlook can be forgiven for wondering, now and then, whether we’ll ever comprehend existence. Maybe an objectively true account of reality exists out there, in the Platonic ether, but we humans, with our apish brains, front-loaded with biases bred into us by natural selection, can’t understand it. But even if our efforts are futile, we can never stop trying to figure out what our communal dream really means.
Scientific Curmudgeon is an Opinion column written by CAL Professor and Director of the Stevens Center for Science Writings, John Horgan. Columns are adapted from ones originally published on ScientificAmerican.com.
Be First to Comment