Wednesday, 25 July 2018

The Luxuries of Art and Literature: They Help Create Imaginary Worlds!


Hiding in the Mirror: The Quest for Alternate Realities, from Plato to String Theory 
(by way of Alice in Wonderland, Einstein, and The Twilight Zone)

Author: Lawrence M. Krauss

Excerpts from Chapter One of this lovely book...

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

So begins perhaps the most famous mathematical romance ever written.

Penned in 1884, under the pseudonym “A. Square” by the Shakespearean scholar Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland was a poignant tale told by a wistful two-dimensional being who had just discovered the miraculous existence of three-dimensional space and longed to enjoy it.

The unhappy hero of this saga urged us lucky Spacelanders to recognize the beauty of the higher-dimensional universes that he thus envisaged.

At around the same time that Abbott was writing Flatland, a lonely and tragic artist on the Continent was imagining another universe beyond the realm of our perception.

Vincent Van Gogh was a tortured genius who is said to have sold but a single painting in his lifetime.

Yet you cannot walk the streets of Amsterdam today without seeing reproductions in storefront windows of his haunting self-portraits or his landscapes with yellow skies and blue earth.

In 1882, he wrote to his brother, who was his sole supporter, “I know for certain that I have a feeling for color, and shall acquire more and more.”

Through his paintings Van Gogh freed our minds from the “tyranny” of color, daring us to imagine everyday objects in a completely different way, and thereby demonstrating that exotic realities could be discovered in even the otherwise most ordinary things.

His paintings are haunting not because they are so bizarre but because they are just bizarre enough to capture the essence of reality while at the same time forcing us to reexamine what exactly reality is.

These are the luxuries of art and literature: to create imaginary worlds that cause us to reconsider our place within our own world.

Science has comparable impact. It, too, unveils different sorts of hidden worlds, but ones that we hope might also actually exist and, most importantly, can be measured.

Nevertheless, the net result is the same: In the end we gain new insights into our own standing in the universe.

All of these creative human activities reflect the essence of human imagination, the spark that raises our existence from the mundane to the extraordinary.

If we couldn’t imagine the world as it might be, it is possible that the world of our experience would become intolerable.

Such imagination almost defines what it means to be human. Fourteen thousand years ago, in what is now France, a remote Ice Age ancestor took a walk with a young child into what many of us today would think of as a dark and forbidding place.

Deep in an underground cave the adult held the child’s hand against a wall and blew pigment over it, leaving a shadowlike imprint of a tiny hand that remains to this very day.

We will never know the purpose of this adventure. Did it have some deep spiritual significance, or was it simply play?

It certainly was not an everyday activity, as our Cro-Magnon ancestors did not tend to live in the deep recesses of caves such as this.

Whatever its purpose, it represents something very special about humans that clearly differentiates us from our closest relatives on the evolutionary tree.

I am not speaking here about art per se.

Rather, I am addressing the deeper, symbolic sense of self that art reflects.

The notion that the imprint on a wall might permanently record the presence of two individuals in the cave that day implies not only a recognition of their own existence, but also their desire to preserve some aspect of it against the vicissitudes of a dangerous world.

For with a sense of self comes a sense of everything that isn’t self, or the “unknown possibilities of existence,” as the godlike alien Q on Star Trek once described it.

That even earlier humans pondered such unknown possibilities is testified to by the existence of artistic renderings that predate the French cave art by at least eighteen thousand years.

In a cave at a site called Hohlenstein-Stadel, in what is now Germany, a foot-tall figure of a standing human was discovered. No less striking than the skill of the artist who created it is the subject matter: This figure has the head of a lion, not a man.

Did this early carving represent some primal notion of a deity?

Or did it merely represent the recognition that if lions existed, and humans existed, then somewhere, some exotic combination of the two might exist?

Of course, here again we shall probably never know what motivated our ancestral carver, but whatever its purpose the figure reflects an artistic imagining of the possibilities inherent either in this world or in one beyond it.

In the three hundred centuries that have passed since this figure was created, human civilization, and human imagination, have evolved considerably.

But there remains a fundamental connection between our modern efforts and these first, tentative steps:

When we imagine the world beyond our experience, we are digging deep into our own psyches.

One such notion is: the longstanding love affair of the human intellect with the idea that there is far more “out there” than meets the eye.

Science has, of course, validated this notion. 

Whole new realms of the physical world have been exposed by the spectacular scientific developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But in the present context I mean something more literally “out there.”

Could space itself extend beyond the bounds of our experience, and can there be whole new dimensions of space just out of reach of our senses?

It is difficult to disagree with Serling that imagination adds an extra dimension to the human experience. Still, the question remains:

Is a fifth—or even an eleventh, or twenty-sixth—dimension purely imaginary?

What if extra dimensions exist but they remain hidden from even the most sophisticated detectors?

Can our imaginations alone enable us to pierce nature’s veil to discover them?

This very question drove the most famous of all philosophers in Western history to write a tale about a two-dimensional world as an allegory for our own limited understanding of reality.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, in his most famous set of Dialogues, The Republic, Plato invented the allegory of a cave to describe his belief in the possibility of uncovering hidden realities within all of the objects of our experience.

Plato envisaged our lives as being like those of individuals confined in shackles within a cave, unable to directly see the world of light beyond. These prisoners viewed all objects located outside the mouth of the cave via the shadows they cast on the cave’s back wall. To the viewers, who had no other experience, the shadows themselves represented the real objects.

Imagine, says Plato, through his interlocutor, Socrates, what it would be like to be unchained and dragged out to the light outside. First, of course, the brilliant glare would be painful, and one would crave a return to the dark familiarity of the cave. Ultimately, however, the true wonder of the world would become intoxicating—so much so that a return to one’s previous state of ignorant slavery would be unthinkable. And even if one did return, how would it be possible to communicate the truth without appearing mad to those who had no idea of it?

Plato argued, however, that this is precisely the responsibility of a true philosopher. He must be willing to forsake the comfort of his own safe vision of reality and embark on travels through frightening new terrains of the mind. But more important, he must not be content to remain in his ivory tower of learning, separate from the rest of the human race, but must be willing to return to the world of men, to attempt to educate those who govern the affairs of men in the true workings of the universe.

When Socrates was asked, in Plato’s dialogue, how one could penetrate the fog that shields us from the true workings of reality, his response was particularly telling, especially in light of our current scientific perspective. The answer involved the study of abstractions—in particular, arithmetic, the science of numbers. Or, as he put it, “Numbers, then, appear to lead towards the truth.”

The study of numbers, said Socrates, should be followed by, in successively lesser importance, the study of geometry, then astronomy—as far as it concerns the laws of motion—then perhaps harmony, the study of sound. Only through the study of abstractions of the mind—as he viewed these disciplines—could one release oneself from the chains that bind us all to the rigid world of our senses.

These are just excerpts from the book. For more, do read the book!

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