Reality is an Illusion

Is reality... real? What does that even mean? Will this show answer those questions? probably not, but it'lll still be fun. Enjoy.. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome to the God's I View Podcast, the companion podcast
for the book God's I View. That's my book. I'm
Trevor clinical neuroscience researcher by day, and I don't know
what I really am by night. I'm certainly certainly exploring
the fringes, the fringe stuff, the things I can't really

(00:34):
write about or publish or talk about at work. So
the book God's I View explores reality, consciousness, God, the universe,
quantum mechanics, and the strange history of the last two
hundred years of science. It's not what you've been led
to believe. Most likely, it's pretty strange. It's pretty mystical,

(00:59):
it's pretty meta physical. You know, one hundred years ago
scientists were at least some of these physicists were like philosophers.
There are philosophers who were really good at math. That's
how I describe most of them, and many of them
are theologians. They were deeply religious. It's not really what
we think about when we think about Bore and Plank

(01:20):
and Heisenberg and Einstein, but it's true they were, and
the theories they put forward one hundred years ago kind
of bigger belief. They've more or less been ignored by
pop culture until recently, until we've started talking about the
simulated universe and the many worlds theory and quantum fields.

(01:44):
The book God's I View tries to take a little
bit humbler approach, and it tries to find the similarities
between some ideas that were written down thousands of years
ago and modern science, and that maybe we're not discovering something.

(02:07):
Maybe we're just coming up with new words to describe
something that has been known for a real long time. Anyway,
So this is episode three of the podcast, and it's
been a little while. I cannot, for the life of me,
think of a topic. I mean, there's a million things
in the book I could talk about, but I've been
talking about them a lot, been going on interviews and stuff,

(02:30):
and I don't know, I just couldn't pick something succinct.
All these topics are so intertwined and they build on
each other. So I was listening to this Tucker Sean
Ryan interviewed today, and it may it gave me an idea.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
But you know, I just when I do do it,
I lean into I mean I lean into God, and
I really just consider myself kind of a conduit not
kind of a conduit. I consider myself a conduit and
whatever comes to me, they're supposed to happen. Yes, and
with the like for example. You know, I'm pretty new

(03:08):
with this. I haven't completed the Bible or anything. But
the more that I dig into just everything in the world,
I think that I just think that everything, everything is
a lie.

Speaker 1 (03:21):
Everything is a lie. Man, doesn't that ring true? I
know Tucker and Sean are kind of politically divisive, so
I'm not playing them to make any political points. I
just I just I just find it interesting. How calmon
this viewpoint is everything is a lie? Because there was

(03:45):
an experiment we did two hundred years ago called the
double slit experiment. I'm sure lots of I'm sure you've
heard of it. There's all sorts of different interpretations and implications,
but one of them is that everything is literally a lie.
And maybe lies too harsh of a word. I think
a better way of saying it is that maybe reality

(04:08):
is an illusion, or at the very least, maybe reality
isn't what we think it is. So in five minutes,
I'm going to try to explain the experiment. Hopefully I
don't burge you to tears. Imagine a light source. In
this case, it's typically like almost a monochromatical laser. But

(04:28):
just picture a light source of a certain color shining
a light at a sheet of metal with two vertical
slits in it. It's almost like a stencil. If you
were to spray paint through this stencil, it will leave
two vertical bars on a wall. But in this case,
that screen with two slits in it is in the
middle of a room with a light pointed at it,

(04:51):
and we look at the shadow it casts on a wall,
let's say, at the other side of the office, or
on like a film screen or a type of reactive
film that picks up light like you might use take
a photograph. We allow the light from the laser to
pass through the two slits so that we can observe

(05:13):
the pattern it creates after it passes through these two
vertical openings. And because a light is a wave, what
we see is that the laser, the single light source,
as it hits the two slits, becomes two new light
sources and emerges out of each slit, and those two
wavefronts interfere with each other and they leave a ripply,

(05:36):
fringy pattern on the film. Just like if you drop
two rocks in a pond, the ripples from the two
rocks and in the water would interfere with one another. It'd
get shoppy, you'd get big cress and low troughs. And
so that's what you see when you shine a light
through a double slit. You see what it's called an

(05:58):
interference pattern. No big deal until the sky came along,
you know, one hundred years after the first double slit
experiment at eighteen oh one, and he was able to
shoot individual photons at the double slit. Now, what's weird
about this is photons are discrete particles of light, and

(06:20):
so they should n't act like a wave. You know,
they're conceptualized as like a paintball. Like imagine you're shooting
paintballs at a double slit. Some of the paintballs would
hit the metal, but some of them would go through
the slit, and you'd expect to see kind of similar
to what you'd see with the spray paint can, two
vertical bars where the paintballs that made it through hit

(06:42):
the back wall. But that's not what you see. You
still see an interference pattern, and that doesn't really make
sense because we're again we're shooting paintballs, So in order
to see an interference pattern, that paintball would need to
split in two, pass through both slits simultaneously, and then
interfere with itself. Either that or go through the right slit,

(07:06):
travel back in time, and then go through the left slit. Somehow,
it just none of none of the answers made any sense,
so it was more or less ignored for a while.
People just said, oh, well, light has properties of both
the wave and a particle. Problem solved until somebody did
the experiment with electrons. Gi Taylor. I think, and electrons

(07:30):
are mass. They're not energy like a photon. They have
an actual mass. We have always conceptualized them as existing
in a fixed time and place, and so they shouldn't
act like a wave. Yet when we fire electrons at
a double slit, it acts like a wave. We see

(07:51):
an interference pattern. Whether we send a million at a
time or one at a time, this little bit of
matter acts like a wave. Very odd. So naturally we say, well,
let's actually observe the electron so we can see which
slit it passes through, or if it somehow magically splits
in half or time travels et cetera. Right, and so

(08:13):
they put the sensor on the slits. They repeat the experiment,
The interference pattern disappears, and the electron behaves like a particle. Now,
what we actually see on the screen is somewhat complicated,
So for the sake of our illustration, let's just imagine
we see those two bars. We see like a stencil pattern,

(08:38):
two vertical bars where the photons have passed through the
slits one at a time, either left or right, never both.
When we fire an electron and watch it, it acts
like a particle and it goes through one slit. If
we don't watch it, it acts like a wave and
it goes through both simultaneously. So the electron acts like

(09:03):
energy when unobserved and like matter when observed. The truth
is maybe a little bit more complicated at first, so
sort of rejected as experimental air. The experiment has been
repeated many different ways. It's been repeated with the sensors
placed a great distance after the slit so that it

(09:27):
couldn't be said that we're interfering with the electron prior
to it passing through the slit or immediately after, causing
it to act differently. Then there were some thoughts that
maybe the way we measured it caused it to collapse,
But we've measured it many different ways now, using like
magnetic field distortions and all different sort of passive sensors

(09:51):
to make sure we're not deliberately causing this. Somehow, it
really does seem like consciousness observation causes matter to collapse
into a physical time and place. Still, this was pretty
much dismissed because, hey, it's an electron. What the hell's

(10:12):
an electron? You know, like, what is it? Your chemistry
teacher tells you it's a little negatively charged ball. But
talk to high end physicists and they're a lot less confident.
It has certain properties of a particle. It might have

(10:33):
a charge, but there's a lot of theories that that's
not exactly the case. So it's easy to dismiss this
finding because we don't even really know what an electron is,
except we can do the experiment with molecules, big molecules,
even amino acids, you know, amino acids that are kind

(10:57):
of the building block of our bodies. By logical molecules,
large biological molecules, they act like a wave when unobserved
they act like a particle when observed. So what do
we make of that? Well, I like the video game analogy.

(11:20):
There's lots of different analogies for conceptualizing this, but I
like to think of you know, think of a video
game Halo, Call of Duty, Zelda, Right, I don't know.
These are the games I played. And so imagine you've
got your video game character looking at something, a castle,

(11:40):
a city on a hill. It's real, you can see it.
You turn around so that your back is to the city.
Where did it go? Well, you can just simply turn
around and reassure yourself that it's right there behind you.
It's always been there. Except if there's no video game

(12:04):
character observing the city, then the city isn't really there.
It's in a different state. It's in an information state
coded in binary magnetic polarization stored on your hard drive
in your computer. When your character looks at it, it's

(12:28):
rendered into a form that your character or you can understand.
It's rendered into a pixel color map, and you can
see it. Now you can imagine life is like this.
Life is like a massively multiplayer online game where we

(12:49):
live in this shared reality. It's real, except when we're
not looking at it, or listening to it, or touching it,
It's not really there. And again you might say, well,
this table is real, you can knock on it. It's here.
But that's exactly how you might expect your video game

(13:10):
character to feel when he sits down in a chair
and touches a table. But you and I both know
when that video game character leaves that room, it ceases
to exist in any form that you or the character
could possibly understand. It's a trip. And it's no wonder

(13:31):
why this has led to some crazy ideas in physics,
the many world's theory, the simulated universe theory. We're all
living in a simulation. You know what's the simulation, right,
It's just a created universe, and created universes have creators.

(13:55):
It's just that, for whatever reason, scientists or culture or
society pop science, we don't like using words like that,
so we've just come up with new words to describe
the exact same thing. And my book, that's you know,
my book. The main point is maybe, you know, maybe
some of these modern scientific theories are correct. It's just

(14:16):
sad they're too afraid to use the right terminology. So
I'll end with a quote not a quote Scripture Hebrews
eleven three. By faith, we understand that the universe was
formed at God's command, so that what is seen was
not made out of what was visible. Thanks for listening, everybody.

(14:37):
Please buy the book. I'll post the link in the
episode description, or just search God's i View on Amazon.
Check out my other podcast, Happy Fools. Just search Happy
Fools in your podcast app. And if you would like
to ask me a question about the book, please email
God's iView Book at gmail dot com. Thanks everybody,