Reality goes all the way down…
By Don / Date: March 29th, 2023
I love flying. I have dreamed about it since I was old enough to point up at a bird, and was hooked when I realized that there were machines that flew too with people in them. The dream was a long time coming to fruition. In my first term at University (age 18) I met someone who was into skydiving. He arranged for a group of us to travel from York, UK up to Bridlington on the North Yorkshire coast for a weekend to go and jump out of planes and drift down to the ground using a large piece of fabric. It seemed crazy enough to match up to all the changes my life was going through at the time. So began my life-long assymetry in the number of takeoffs and landings in an actual aircraft.
It was another 18 months before I flew in a jet aircraft for the first time; to Malta with my first important Girlfriend (Hey Ali!).
I spent a lot of my youth building things that flew (and crashed) and dreaming about making the leap for myself (without the crash part). When I came to Canada in 1999 the opportunity finally arose. I had a chunk of money from finishing a contract in the UK before taking up my work visa in BC. There was just enough. I felt nervous about using that money on a ‘dream’, however with support from my ex-wife I made the choice to embark on getting my private pilots’ license. In 2001, I achieved that goal – it was amazing and I loved every minute I could spend in the air. I travelled, I found excuses for renting a plane. I even managed to integrate some work-related trips although of course I could never get paid for flying without a commercial license. I did an aerobatics course and went and did loops, rolls and cuban-eights solo, a mile above Darcy island off the coast of the Saanich peninsula. I got to share the experience with my Sons, my partner, my friends. It was expensive to keep it up.
As life got businer I realized that if I wanted this to be fully a part of my life, I needed to commit to it long-term. With the end of my , money getting tight, the transitions of life, and a growing urgent realization that burning that much gasoline to look at Victoria from the air again was something I could not readily justify I decided to let it go – for a while. I still have my license – and there are a bunch of hoops to jump through to become ‘current’ again; however for now I am content to do other things. Like Sailing and Motorcycling.
The bug is still there – and I have found a way to keep the itch scratched. Flight simulators have come a long way since I first encountered a half-way decent one on a friends’ computer in 1998. Jump forwards to today and the level of realism is getting very, very good indeed. I recently upgraded my machine so that as well as supporting my Engineering work effectively (reducing a 10-minute task to a minute), I get to have an excellent gaming experience. Now I can ‘fly’ in a virtual reality at 50-frames per second, in modelled aircraft that really do feel and behave like the machines I learned to fly in actual reality. And of course, they and this simulated world are infinitely more forgiving than the real thing… And I can go places I have never been for an immeasurably small fraction of the cost of travelling there in base reality. It is not the same – but…
Which leads to the subject I wanted to write about. The thing about reality is – it goes all the way down. In a simulation, there are levels of detail. The sky outside, the control response, the buildings on the ground, the electrical and instrument systems. However in each of these they are simulated down to a level that is sufficient to sustain the illusion. Going any deeper would take expontentially more computing power. If you focus in, you can start to see the grain-size where the illusion is revealed as just that. Actual reality keeps going right down into the place where meaning gets lost in the subatomic thermal noise.
Simulation is a key problem in modern Engineering. It was realized quite a while ago that above a certain level of complexity, the only way to know if something was going to work was to build it. With the advent of fast digital computers, the drive has been to simulate reality in sufficient detail that designs could be proven before anything was built. For aircraft, cars, weather forecasting and climate prediction this has meant the world of ‘computational fluid dynamics’. Getting this right is a hard problem – and as soon as more detail is added, those exponential increases in computational requirements really start to bite. Probably the best state-of-the-art presentation I have seen of what is possible came from Space-X. Their engineering work requires the accurate modelling of many different systems – from orbital capsules re-entering the earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds to what is going on inside the combustion chamber of a rocket engine as fuel and oxidizer meet. The work that this team have done on ‘refining’ the scale of simulation to capture all the important details only where it counts, whilst allowing simulations to run on reasonable hardware in a reasonable amount of time is quite brilliant. I know they are not the only ones doing this work – just that their presentation really caught my imagination.
However, even with techniques like these that focus computing power on the detail that is seen to be important, it is simply hiding the problem. The world has clearly far more processing power than any computer can capture. To simulate, abstraction is needed. And where abstraction occurs, assumptions are made. And, well – who chooses those assumptions? How do you know they are good?
To navigate an infinitely complex world as a finite being is a challenge. Evolution has equipped us with a fantastic instrument for doing so in the form our our senses, including our inner sense of emotional state, and a seat of awareness capable of integrating information and acting on it. The Homo Sapiens Sapiens (questionable though the ‘Sapiens’ bit is at times…) has given us access to the dominant rung of life on this planet. This is only possible because of each of us standing a top a vast and individual abstraction of reality. An estimate I recall is that our senses are bombarded by 15GBits of information a second. Of these we are aware of perhaps a thousand. A massive amount of information is filtered out, abstracted away as ‘meaningless’ in the moment. What guides our perception are layers and layers of maps of the world, indicating to us what is meaningful (and thus worthy of our conscious attention). Some of these, such as our visual perception appear to be hard-wired from our earliest experiences in the world and our genetics. Other layers come from our cultural experience, our families of origin and get built as we learn to navigate the world. The ones that work well enough to have us survive, we keep and tend to keep using. Before we know it – reality is mapped out.
However, how do we know what details are actually important?
How do we know that our maps are accurate? That they are useful?
As reality goes all the way down, any map we make is a mere ink-splot colouring in imagined lines in our reality to show us where edges are, and which side we should work to land on. What is good, bad, wholesome, dangerous, will lead us where we want to go. And often all of these go unquestioned.
As well as mapping reality and providing us with a means to navigate, they are more insidious. They actually create the shape of the world we are living in. They look like reality. They change the landscape to fit themselves. These maps might make the path from where you are to where you want to be seem impossible and tortuous. It is easy to be convinced it is crazy to try and not worth the trip.
However there is a solution. Change the map. Looking into reality below the level of detail of the map you might realize it is no longer fit for purpose and you need a new one. You might decide to throw the map away completely and re-invent a new one. You might do it piece-by-piece and reclaim more and more territory of being as you do so. It helps to have a guide.
Why bother? Well, if your passion directs you to go a certain way and your map does not lead there – either you give up and decide it is not possible for you (maybe in another life…?). Or you decide you need a new map. Simple right?
Here is the kicker. Have you experienced reality without a map? Your map is what creates meaning in your world. What if you threw away all meaning. How would that experience be for you? May be better to keep you feet planted firmly on the ground of what you know and avoid all the discomfort of that step beyond it. Your mind has after all set a trap around the edge of the map; fear. Staying in what you know (even if not entirely accurate) favours survival. Not one of our ancestors died after seeing a Sabre-tooth Tiger that was not there. Plenty did because they failed to notice that change in the pattern of waving long grass in time… We are biased to stay in what we know.
So here is the human predicament. Balanced finely at the peak of a vast depth of abstraction over the abyss of naked reality, holding on to what we know.
I think enlightenment has something to do with saying ‘sod it’ and diving in anyway. Getting up the courage seems to take about 20-40 years (give or take) of sitting, witnessing and getting ready to fully let go. And a ton of support.
I think growth has a lot to do with becoming aware that our maps of reality are not reality itself; that we can choose. It is perhaps a more gradual (but occasionally dramatic) path – a path in which we remain engaged with our reality and work to expand it. Becoming friends with fear is a big part of the journey. In the worlds exposed between one map and the next, reality become disordered. Emotions show up out of knowwhere. It can feel out of control (spoiler-alert; most of it is most of the time anyway).
Here is the pitch for Coaching – especially of the ontologically-inspired variety. The company of someone who knows the territory and is willing to walk with you through yours as you recreate it – is priceless.
Reality goes all the way down.
Questions to ponder: What is impossible for you? How come? How do you know that is true? What if it was not true?
What now?
29Mar23
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I enjoyed the read, and learning about your burning curiosity to mine deeper into a clearer simulation of reality…
Reminds me of the quote, “The distance between a dream and reality is action…”