On Physics, Delirium, and the Mind’s Eye
We imagine that we're seeing the world but we are only seeing what we absolutely must in order to survive and reproduce
I love theoretical physics and cosmology. Who doesn’t? Just look around at all the TikTok dance crazes named after early 20th century quantum theorists or the Kardashians endlessly posting about the merits of the Copenhagen vs. the Many Worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics. Instagram influencers WISH they had the sway and adoration lavished upon working cosmologists (who routinely exceed the engagement numbers of the former online) by an adoring public. Who wants to scroll through thinly veiled product placements for workout supplements and bikini photos when you can ponder mathematically abstract theories of reality? How many friendships have imploded over disagreements about the Holographic Universe concept and how many times have you been at a party and been accosted by some stranger who wants to drone on about inflatons and Plank Era energy levels? We’ve all been there. Physics is a field awash with money and sex appeal, and emotions run high.
An extended Penrose Diagram, doodled by children in notebooks and spay-painted on city walls all over the world. Isn’t it lovely?
Like everyone else, I suppose, I spend hours each week watching PBS Space Time and History of the Universe YouTube videos. Political commenters are obviously fascinating to me on a different level but their constant aggravation of social divisions doesn’t feel psychologically healthy to me (and I think the data bears that out). While political science is a subject foremost among my list of interests and concerns it is prioritized lower in my personal rankings of content viewed. Young women, fight & fitness videos, and (especially) capybaras and guinea pigs all predominate… but none so much as theoretical physics and cosmology.
There are a few reasons for this. I enjoy the feeling of ideas ‘at play’ in my mind and no ideas are as arresting as those which seek to describe all time, space, and energy in existence. Contemplating these questions gives me a feeling of religious awe as well which seems stronger and more genuine than the awe I felt as a child considering the lessons and stories of the Bible. There was always a strong background element of abhorrent bronze age morality and unrealism in many of those, like everyone was supposed to understand (but never acknowledge) that these were fantastical and deeply weird fables more than descriptions of actual events. The theories of our universe have no such limitations. To consider that the universe increased in size 10^78 times during its first second of existence (after which it was still + 1 trillion degrees Kelvin) is a wonderful experience for me. I’m enjoying it right now as a I write this! Before this second the entire observable universe (all galaxies and space and energy of our ~93 billion light year sphere of visibility) was smaller than a single atom is today. The UNIVERSE universe (as in the whole shebang and not just the parts we can theoretically see from our vantage point) is infinite and topologically flat and expanding at an accelerating rate, although what expansion means in an endless space is pretty esoteric. Don’t you get a thrill of (almost transgressive) wonder at the inscrutably bizarre majesty of creation? Doesn’t your brain feel stimulated and serene all at once when you contemplate such impossibly scaled quantities and time scales? Mine does.
Physics is also math-based and is therefore a subject upon which I have no interest in working. These questions are simply ideas to me – the purest and strangest and grandest ideas on offer. I’m also obviously far from intellectually capable of intimately grasping the concepts at play here. I had to watch about 20 Youtube videos about the double slit experiment before I could fully explain its methodology and implications to others and that is not my normal experience. History and psychology and social science are subjects in which I consider competent and well informed. Physics is a kind of koan, an engaging meditative exercise. It HAS to be math based at anything above the most elementary level of course, because probably no human can visualize infinite space or calabi yau manifolds or the extra spatial dimensions of string theory (folded into complicated and absurdly tiny loops and packets all around us) because our minds are designed to operate at terrestrial scales. Physics is a reminder of the pathetic intellectual limitation of humans as a species but it’s also a personal reminder of my own cognitive deficiencies and there’s something about that aspect which I find useful and good.
When I was younger I was prone to delirium during periods of fever. I had maybe 10 of these episodes during my life before adulthood and, like many altered states, they’re only distantly apprehensible during the normal state of waking consciousness. Delirium, as I experienced it, was a subjectively endless loop of terror and struggle. Dark forces seemed to be at work and I was trapped in dreams of urgent existential purpose which demanded my attention. I would find myself in an endless desert of nothing but sky above and finely grained sand below and KNOW that I needed to move each grain in some finite period or all existence would end. I would contemplate my task with feverish despair and set to work, knowing that it was both absolutely necessary and totally hopeless and then I would be granted some psychological reprieve in the understanding that the entire situation was absurd, whereupon I would encounter some terrifying entity and be brought to a new place: an… endless desert. I would somehow begin to understand that I was required to move every tiny piece of sand, or disaster would ensue. I would begin my work with a growing feeling of horror… and so on. These iterations would last for hours at night but they seemed like weeks to me at the time and as my body’s thermal equilibrium veered out of and into a normal range my visions would become more frantic and apocalyptic and then more soothing and reasonable in a cycle of tormented subjectivity.
(One particularly trying night came during the winter of my fourth grade year. I missed two weeks of school due to bronchitis and pneumonia and was spending my days in bed, reading and re-reading Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The characters and themes of that story were particularly well-suited to urgent apocalyptic visions and I spent the night moaning and tossing and turning, mentally confronting dark lords and ringwraiths and doing my best to forestall the annihilation of everything with the puny resources at my disposal.)
During these periods, though, I had an interesting faculty of “enhanced mental visualization”. It’s impossible to describe except in the most general terms (just as synesthesia is impossible to convey verbally beyond ‘tasting colors’ or ‘seeing sounds’). I could simultaneously apprehend vast and tiny mental spaces and turn them into one another and back again, repeatedly. I could ALMOST picture how an additional spatial dimension at our scale might appear. I could consider endless piles of objects and know where each one was and imagine the unlimited pile’s limits. This was far from wondrous or pleasant: it merely operated as a kind of informational punishment. I understood the enormity of my tasks perfectly, not in a general sense but with hopeless and total precision.
I have had times since then (on the edges of fever or something like it) when I could picture these vast and counterintuitive spaces and then mentally turn them into tiny blocs, and then back again. Mostly, though, the faculties are a shadow of a memory, like the vestige of a strongly felt emotion in a dream. I remember this uncomfortable expansion of my ability to visualize but I can’t picture what I was seeing then. If I could, I would obviously still have those faculties. They were just a strange warping of my mind’s eye caused by sickness but those experiences and different (but related) experiences, like synesthesia, are reminders that our capabilities for ‘picturing’ the world are very narrowly tailored for our survival at the level of large mammals. We can’t imagine what it would be like to sense the earth’s magnetosphere (as sharks are able to) or see infrared light but it there ARE experiences of those things. There’s a zoological debate about whether birds use ion structures in their beaks or electrically charged fluid in their eyes or some organ system with quantum sensitivity to see (or at least sense) the Earth’s magnetosphere. Considering the possible range of conscious (at any level) experience is necessarily vague and general. If we could fully apprehend what it was like to perceive reality in these ways we would be able to do it.
There’s a wonderful passage in Oliver Sacks’ The Forest People in which one of the forest people is on a car ride with the scientists. He sees buffalo grazing on the plains a mile out and mistakes them for insects. As the vehicle draws closer the buffalo increase in visible size and he is spooked and remains in denial that they are buffalo. He refuses to leave the vehicle. His world is so visually constricted (being a tropical forest) that open vistas and objects-at-distance are literally unimaginable to him.
There’s a 2015 film called Room in which Brie Larson (it’s a great film and she’s amazing in it-a reminder that even mediocre people of petty character can be insanely talented) lives with her son in a backyard shed. She was taken some decade before and imprisoned in this secure structure and repeatedly visited (and raped) by her abductor. Her son asks her about the world and she tries to describe the sky and whales, etc. but it is all gibberish to him. Towards the end of the film he escapes and lies in the bed of a pickup truck as it pulls away, under a cloudy and wintry sky as bare tree branches whiz by overhead. His look of stunned, ecstatic awe is a sublime moment in an otherwise dark and uncomfortable (but excellent) film.
This is just a friendly reminder that we perceive, what we can perceive of reality, is incredibly limited. It’s a skeletal view of a vast and energetic cosmos which our minds could never apprehend, even minimally.
Have a great day.