What is Real?

 A response to Curt Jaimungal's "Do You Exist? What Exactly Is Existence?"

Curt's recent article begins with a wonderfully unsettling observation. We all feel quite confident that we exist, yet the moment we try to explain what exactly that means, things start falling apart.

His example of Batman is perfect. We confidently say "Batman doesn't exist," yet somehow we all know exactly who we're talking about. Russell, Kripke, Meinong and a century of philosophers then arrive with increasingly sophisticated explanations for how we can successfully refer to something that supposedly doesn't exist.

Reading the article, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps the problem is not Batman at all.

Perhaps the problem is the word exist.

We use the same word for rocks, dreams, numbers, nations, scientific theories, memories, people, stories and mathematical truths. Then we wonder why paradoxes appear. It is a bit like using the same word for water, steam and ice and then being surprised when we get confused about their properties.

Three Worlds

This is where Roger Penrose's famous "Three Worlds" picture becomes helpful.

Penrose argues that reality presents itself in three irreducible domains. There is the physical world of matter, energy and spacetime. There is the mental world of conscious experience. And there is the Platonic world of mathematical truths, abstract structures and objective patterns. The remarkable thing about Penrose's diagram is not merely that these three worlds exist, but that each appears to depend upon the others.

Conscious minds somehow gain access to mathematical truths.
Mathematical truths somehow govern the physical world.
The physical world somehow gives rise to conscious minds.

Round and round the arrows go.

Roger Penrose's three-worlds diagram: the mental world, the Platonic mathematical world, and the physical world, each giving rise to the next in a cycle nobody fully understands.

As Penrose himself puts it in the video below, as physicists try to close in on what reality is at a fundamental level, "reality itself is slipping away, and the theories are becoming less concrete and more abstract."

Roger Penrose introduces his three-worlds picture. The video weaves Penrose's interview with Karl Popper's parallel framework and imagery from The Matrix (mash up I made years ago...).

Popper, The Orb, and the Noosphere

What fascinates me is that this picture appears repeatedly throughout culture, often emerging independently in very different contexts.

Karl Popper described something remarkably similar when he spoke of three worlds: the objective physical world, the subjective world of conscious experience, and a third world consisting of objective contents of thought. Scientific theories, mathematical discoveries, languages, stories, works of art, institutions and ideas all inhabit this strange domain. They are not merely physical objects, yet neither are they private mental experiences.

One of my favourite samples from The Orb captures the idea perfectly:

"There's a third world, the world of objective contents of thought…
Teilhard de Chardin called this third world the Noosphere,
the world of mind."

That sentence lodged itself in my imagination years ago.

The Noosphere. The world of objective contents of thought.

The phrase sounds mystical until you stop and think about it. Shakespeare is dead, yet Hamlet continues to shape minds. Euclid is dead, yet geometry still governs architecture. Nations rise and fall, yet ideas survive them. The Pythagorean theorem existed before Pythagoras discovered it and remains true after every mathematician who studies it has died.

These things are not physical objects in the ordinary sense, but they are certainly not nothing.

Batman Belongs Here

Batman belongs here too.

This is why I think Curt's paradox dissolves once we stop treating physical existence as the only kind of existence. Batman does not exist as a biological organism wandering around Gotham City. But Batman certainly exists as an objective pattern. Millions of minds can refer to him because there is genuinely something there to refer to. Not a physical person, but a stable informational structure inhabiting Popper's World Three.

This also softens the need for Russell's elaborate logical machinery. Russell wanted to avoid referring to nonexistent entities by treating existence as a second-order property. But perhaps the reason he felt compelled to perform this logical surgery is that he assumed there were only two possibilities: either something exists in physical reality or it is nothing at all. Once we admit multiple modes of existence, the pressure eases considerably. Batman is not a flesh-and-blood individual, but neither is he an empty linguistic accident.

Likewise, Meinong begins to appear less eccentric than generations of analytic philosophers have portrayed him. His intuition was that objects need not exist in order to be objects. Stripped of some of its more extravagant consequences, this seems remarkably close to ordinary experience. The number seven is not a physical object. A perfect circle does not appear anywhere in nature. The Pythagorean theorem existed long before human beings discovered it. These things are not physical, yet they are not fictional in the same sense as Batman, and neither are they reducible to nothing. Penrose's Platonic realm offers a natural home for such entities.

Even Kripke's famous problem of rigid designation looks different through this lens. If names are direct references rather than disguised descriptions, what exactly does "Batman" refer to? Kripke's account seems to leave the laser pointer aimed at empty space. But perhaps the pointer is not aimed at empty space at all. Perhaps it points to an abstract object or "code" — a stable informational structure that persists across different media and different minds. The reference succeeds because there is genuinely something there to refer to, even though it is not physically instantiated in the way Bruce Wayne would be if he stepped onto a stage tomorrow.

What Is Real? Ask Morpheus.

At this point The Matrix becomes a surprisingly useful metaphor.

The Matrix triptych mapped onto Penrose's three worlds. Neo's body in the real world, his pattern in the code and his avatar in the Matrix (sorry, can't depict a first person view!), represent the physical, Platonic, and mental modes of being - three ways of existing that no single image can fully capture, which is exactly the point.

The genius of Morpheus’s famous question is that it exposes the hidden assumption beneath most discussions of reality.

“What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

Look closely at the triptych. On the left stands Neo in the real world - the body, the physical thing that can be unplugged, weighed, touched. In the centre, rendered in cascading green code, is his pattern of being: the information structure, the Platonic self that the Matrix is running. But on the right is the strangest and most important panel: Neo as he appears inside the Matrix, the avatar, representing the first-person experiential presence - what it is like to be Neo from the inside. It’s like looking at a photo of yourself - the memory generated is the experience you were having, not the picture 'from the outside'. Here's the paradox. Everyone inside the Matrix can see the avatar. But they are not actually seeing Neo's inner experience at all. They are, as Morpheus tells us, receiving electrical signals interpreted by their brains. 

The avatar is not the soul - it is the soul's shadow on the wall. Neo's actual first-person presence, his mental world, cannot be painted, photographed or rendered. It can only be pointed at. This is precisely the problem Catholic artists faced when they tried to represent the Father in Trinitarian iconography. Everyone knows the Father is unseen - the tradition insists on it - yet the icon still shows an elderly figure, because the painting is not attempting a portrait.

It is mapping relationships: Son, Spirit, Father, and the bonds between them.

The Neo triptych works the same way. Body, pattern, presence. Physical world, Platonic world, Mental world. The three panels are not three photographs of the same man. They are an attempt to hold together three modes of being that normally escape any single frame.

If reality is merely what you can touch, taste, smell and see, then reality reduces to electrical signals interpreted by the brain. Yet those signals themselves are not what we directly experience. What we experience is a conscious reality generated from them.

The Matrix was never really about computer simulations. It was about epistemology. It was about the disturbing realisation that our access to reality is always mediated.

The green code functions almost as a modern icon for Penrose’s Platonic realm. Not because reality is literally computer code, but because code serves as a useful metaphor for intelligible structure. Behind appearances lies pattern. Behind pattern lies meaning.

The Map Generating the Territory

The same point is true of mathematics, and mathematics may be the strongest example we have.

As the Penrose interview makes clear, modern physics keeps discovering that reality becomes increasingly abstract as we dig deeper. The solid world dissolves into atoms. Atoms dissolve into quantum fields. Physical objects become mathematical descriptions. The closer we move toward the foundations of reality, the less concrete things appear and the more mathematical they become.

This creates a strange inversion of the materialist story.

Materialism often imagines mathematics as something produced by brains. Yet physics increasingly discovers that brains themselves appear to be produced by mathematical structures. The map seems to be generating the territory.

That is why Penrose takes mathematics so seriously. He is not saying mathematics is useful. He is saying mathematics is discovered. The truths of mathematics seem to possess a reality that transcends both the physical world and the minds that apprehend them.

The Horrid Doubt

The deeper question is why human beings can access these patterns at all.

This is where the evolutionary argument raised in the video becomes so interesting. If our cognitive faculties evolved merely to survive in the Pleistocene, why should we trust them when they wander into quantum mechanics, higher mathematics, cosmology or infinity? As Darwin himself admitted, there is a certain “horrid doubt” lurking here. Why should minds selected for survival possess such astonishing access to abstract truth?

The materialist answer is often that this is simply a fortunate byproduct. Perhaps. But it is worth noticing how extraordinary the coincidence is.

A species evolved to hunt antelope and avoid predators somehow discovers tensor calculus, non-Euclidean geometry and quantum field theory. The universe appears strangely comprehensible. As Einstein observed, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

Do You Exist?

This brings us back to Curt’s original question.

Your examples expose the inadequacy of simplistic answers. We survive the replacement of body parts. We survive interruptions in consciousness such as sleep. The self appears more persistent than any particular collection of atoms and more stable than any uninterrupted stream of awareness.

Penrose’s framework is suggestive here. Human beings seem to participate simultaneously in all three worlds. We possess physical embodiment. We possess conscious experience. And we possess enduring informational and mathematical structure. Our identity is not reducible to any one of these alone.

The question “Do you exist?” turns out to be underdetermined. Before answering it, we must first ask what sort of existence we mean. Physical existence? Mental existence? Abstract existence? The word itself conceals multiple categories beneath a single grammatical form.

Perhaps rocks exist physically.

Thoughts exist mentally.

Mathematical truths exist platonically and stories exist informationally.

And human beings participate in all three.

Body.  Spirit.  Soul.

Matter.  Meaning.  Mind.

A Map of the Mystery

From this perspective, much of the century-long dispute surveyed in Curt’s article appears less like a disagreement about existence and more like a disagreement about ontology. Russell, Kripke, Meinong, and the abstract realists may all be describing different regions of reality while attempting to force them into a single conceptual box labelled “existence.”

The paradoxes emerge not because reference is broken, but because the map is incomplete.

The most interesting thing about Penrose’s diagram is that it never quite closes the mystery. The arrows connect the worlds, but nobody fully understands why the connections exist. Why should mathematics describe reality? Why should brains generate consciousness? Why should conscious minds discover eternal truths?

The diagram is not an explanation. It is a map of the mystery.

Yet for me, it points toward something even deeper. The more we investigate reality, the less it resembles a collection of disconnected objects and the more it resembles a unified act of intelligibility. Physical reality emerges from mathematical order. Consciousness emerges from physical reality. Consciousness discovers mathematical order. The circle closes upon itself.

Do you exist? Of course you do. The more interesting question is:

in which world?

In the next post I want to push further: if reality divides into these three domains, what holds them together? And does the necessity we find in the Platonic world - the sense that truth cannot not be true - point beyond itself toward something personal?

Malthus, Turchin and Societal Collapse

Malthus, Turchin, and the Maths of Collapse  -  Is It Inevitable?

There is a recurring pattern in history that keeps reasserting itself, even when we think we’ve escaped it. Civilisations rise, grow complex, overreach, and then - often quite suddenly - come apart. Moses names this pattern with disarming honesty. After warning Israel of exile and collapse, he offers an extraordinary reopening of the future: “When all these things come upon you… and you return to the Lord your God… then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes” (Deut. 30:1–3). Conditional hope could hardly be stated more clearly. And then, almost in the same breath, he adds: “I know that after my death you will surely act corruptly… and evil will befall you in the latter days.” Hope is real; confidence in human behaviour is not. At this point, history starts to resemble The Princess Bride’s Fire Swamp - sudden bursts of flame, hidden dangers, and no obvious safe route through. When Buttercup despairs, “We’ll never survive,” Westley (the dread pirate Roberts!) replies with perfect understatement: “Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.” The joke lands because the record is merciless. No civilisation has yet made it through unscathed. That absence is not evidence against the pattern; it is the data set. What remains open is not whether societies collapse, but whether foresight, repentance, and reform can alter the trajectory enough to delay, soften, or redirect what otherwise keeps happening. It is precisely this tension - between conditional hope and overwhelming historical regularity - that modern mathematical models of growth and collapse try to capture.Two thinkers help frame the problem clearly: Thomas Malthus and Peter Turchin. They approach the same terrain from different angles, and together they give us a powerful - if incomplete - map of growth and collapse.

Malthus: constraints before comforts

Malthus was doing something unfashionable and necessary: he treated population and resources as constrained systems. His core claim was simple. Population tends to grow faster than food supply unless checked. Not because people are wicked, but because biology pushes reproduction and land productivity has limits.

Malthus was wrong about how fixed those limits were. He did not anticipate fertilisers, mechanisation, global trade, or the productivity explosions that followed. But he was right about the deeper point: constraints matter. Growth cannot be assumed; it must be earned.

Turchin: when maths meets history

Turchin takes this intuition and formalises it. In books like Historical Dynamics, Ages of Discord, and End Times, he models societies as coupled systems: population, resources, elites, and the state, all linked by feedback loops and time lags.

This YouTube discussion does a good job explaining the mathematics without mystifying it.

Start with simple growth. Add resource limits. Add extraction by the state. Add elite competition. Introduce delays. What you get - almost regardless of starting conditions - are oscillations: long periods of stability followed by sharp breakdowns. Things change slowly… until they don’t.

Turchin’s models capture something undeniably real. Overshoot happens. Lag matters. Elite overproduction fuels instability. And collapse, when it comes, is often abrupt.

But here is the critical question I keep coming back to:

If we can see the cliff coming, are we really obliged to drive off it?

Where Marx goes wrong

This is where Karl Marx enters the story - not as a useful corrective, but as a cautionary tale.

Marx did not merely critique capitalism; he tried to override economics altogether. Scarcity, incentives, prices, and subjective preference were moralised away. Value was treated as intrinsic. Production was assumed to persist once profit, prices, and ownership were abolished.

History’s verdict has been grimly consistent. Where Marxist ideas were implemented at scale, reality reasserted itself in the same way: shortages, black markets, coercion - and often mass starvation. Not because planners were uniquely evil, but because the system denied the informational and motivational machinery that production requires.

In other words, Marx didn’t discover economic laws. He tried to cancel them with moral outrage and historical determinism. Economics won.

How capitalism delayed Malthus (without disproving him)

Capitalism, by contrast, didn’t abolish scarcity; it used it. Prices became signals. Profit became a lure for innovation. Scarcity pointed effort to where it mattered most.

This is why capitalism repeatedly took production beyond what Malthus expected. Food output rose faster than population for long stretches. Living standards climbed. Famines receded where markets functioned and institutions held.

But capitalism is not magic. It extends the ceiling; it doesn’t remove it. It can overshoot, externalise costs, hollow out families, and concentrate power. Left morally untended, it creates its own fragilities - demographic collapse among them.

The missing dimension in the maths

This is where I part company - gently - with a purely mathematical reading of Turchin. The equations map aggregate behaviour well, but they flatten human diversity. They don’t differentiate how different human strategies respond under pressure. They don’t fully account for culture, religion, or moral renewal. And they tend to treat foresight as negligible.

History suggests otherwise - and England around 1789 is the clearest counterexample I know.

If you had applied Peter Turchin’s predictors of societal collapse to late-18th-century Britain, the diagnosis would have looked ominous. Rapid urbanisation had torn people from village life and traditional moral constraints. Inequality was stark: a small landed and commercial elite sat above an expanding, precarious urban poor. Elite competition was intense, with growing numbers of educated men seeking status, office, and influence. Food prices were volatile, wages lagged, and the political system was widely perceived as corrupt and unrepresentative. Add to this the shock of industrial change, and Britain looked structurally primed for the same kind of revolutionary explosion that had just erupted across the Channel.

And in France, the explosion came exactly as the models would predict.

The French Revolution followed the classic collapse script: fiscal crisis after decades of debt, elite infighting, popular resentment, ideological radicalisation, and finally violence. Scarcity met moral outrage. Institutions lost legitimacy. Once the centre failed, events cascaded rapidly - from reformist hopes to terror, mass executions, and civil war. If anything, France became the textbook example of what ought to happen when Turchin’s variables align.

From a purely structural point of view, England should have followed.

Yet it didn’t.

That divergence is the part the mathematics alone cannot explain.

What changed in England was not that the pressures disappeared, but that the parameters shifted mid-flight - and crucially, many of those shifts seem to have been catalysed by watching France burn.

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The shock of France and the English moral awakening

Contemporaries were under no illusions about how close Britain might be to the same fate. Riots, machine-breaking, and unrest were already present. What the French Revolution supplied was not inspiration, but warning.

This is where the Evangelical Revival matters - not as a pious footnote, but as a civilisational intervention. Figures like John Wesley and George Whitefield had, for decades before 1789, been preaching to precisely the populations most vulnerable to revolutionary mobilisation: the urban poor, miners, factory workers, and the newly uprooted.

Wesley was explicit about the social stakes. He repeatedly warned that moral decay, cruelty to the poor, and elite indifference would invite catastrophe. In one oft-quoted line, he wrote that he feared England would face “the same desolations as France” if it did not repent of pride, luxury, and injustice. The revival framed social breakdown not primarily as a class struggle, but as a moral failure shared across society - a subtle but crucial reframing.

Here's a fuller quote with Wesley’s warning, his words seem as relevant today as they were in his time:

"I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore do I not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.

Is there no way to prevent this? There is one way, and there is no other under heaven. If those who ‘gain all they can’ and ‘save all they can’ will likewise ‘give all they can,’ then, the more they gain, the more they will grow in grace, and the more treasure they will lay up in heaven. But this, it seems, is a draught which no man can drink. I fear the generality of Methodists have already ‘turned back from the holy commandment.’

What remedy is there for this? You know none, nor I; but God has one. He is able to roll away the reproach of His people; and He will do this when they ‘sanctify a fast, and call a solemn assembly,’ and turn to Him with fasting, and weeping, and mourning, and prayer.

What, then, can be done in order to a revival of religion? I am, I confess, in pain for you, and for the nation. I see the cloud gathering more and more. Many of you are increasing more and more in goods; and, consequently (unless you ‘give all you can,’) in pride, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. Thus, you are laying up treasures upon earth; and, what is the inevitable consequence? Your heart is with your treasure; you are ‘laying up for yourselves treasures in heaven;’ and, unless you ‘give all you can,’ you are of all men most miserable!

How then can we recover the revival of religion? I fear, only by a general repentance, and a return to our first works. This is the only way to avert the judgment of God, which otherwise will come upon us as a nation. And if we do not repent, I am persuaded that God will visit us for these things, and that we shall see the same desolations here which we have seen in France; and the more so, because we have sinned against more light, and greater mercies.”

– From Wesley’s journal entry for August 17, 1773 (often cited as his “Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity” sermon note). Published in The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 4 (Journal from Nov. 1, 1766, to Sept. 28, 1773), 521-522.

Instead of channelling resentment upward into revolutionary violence, Methodism and related movements channelled it inward and outward into self-discipline, mutual aid, literacy, and restraint. Drinking fell. Savings clubs, friendly societies, and schools proliferated. People learned to read - not to digest radical pamphlets alone, but Scripture, tracts, and practical manuals. This mattered economically as much as spiritually.

In Turchin’s terms, the revival reduced internal violence and increased cooperation, buying time.

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Reform instead of rupture: Parliament responds

The French Revolution also shocked Britain’s ruling class into reform. Fear concentrated elite attention in a way complacency never does.

Parliament did not democratise overnight, but it began to adjust extraction and legitimacy rather than defend every privilege to the end. Over the next decades came:

• incremental electoral reforms,
• the gradual dismantling of the most egregious forms of corruption,
• early factory legislation,
• and eventually the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself.

These were not altruistic gestures alone; they were stability-preserving adaptations. Elites had seen what happened when legitimacy evaporated completely.

Importantly, many reformers - Wilberforce being the obvious example - sat at the intersection of Evangelical morality and elite power. The revival didn’t overthrow elites; it re-moralised them.

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Industrialisation as a release valve, not a guillotine

At the same time, industrialisation transformed the resource equation. This is where Malthus would have expected pressure to intensify - and initially, it did. But markets, technology, and institutional flexibility altered the outcome.

Factories created appalling conditions early on, but they also:

• expanded total output,
• generated employment faster than population growth,
• and, crucially, created new pathways for upward mobility.

Here again, moral reform mattered. A purely extractive industrial capitalism could have driven England toward the same resentment spiral as France. Instead, new norms - often driven by religious conviction - emerged around:

• paternalistic factory practices,
• education for workers’ children,
• limits on child labour,
• and the idea (radical at the time) that employers had moral obligations beyond wages.

These were early, uneven, and imperfect - but they mattered. They softened the sharpest edges of transition long enough for productivity gains to accumulate.

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Why this breaks the “inevitability” narrative (ontological hope)

From the outside, France and England looked structurally similar. But their moral and cultural responses diverged.

France:

• framed crisis as class war,
• delegitimised institutions wholesale,
• replaced moral reform with ideological purification,
• and burned social capital faster than it could be replenished.

England:

• interpreted France as a warning, not a model,
• combined industrial innovation with moral restraint,
• reformed institutions without annihilating them,
• and redirected revolutionary energy into social renewal.

In the language of systems theory, England changed the feedback loops. Violence did not become self-reinforcing. Elite competition was tempered by reform. Popular grievance was absorbed by religious, social, and economic channels rather than detonated.

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The deeper lesson

This is why I resist reading Turchin - or Malthus - as prophets of doom. They describe real dynamics, but history shows that human foresight, repentance, and reform can bend the curve.

England did not escape pressure. It escaped (delayed?) catastrophe.

And it did so not by denying economics (as Marx would later attempt), nor by suppressing unrest with brute force alone, but by aligning:

• technological expansion (industrialisation),
• institutional adaptation (reform),
• and moral renewal (revival).

The parameters changed mid-flight - precisely because people were watching a neighbour plunge into revolutionary hell and decided, consciously, to do something different.

That possibility - seeing the crash coming and choosing another path - is the element history rarely rewards and the equations therefore struggle to model. It is not randomness, but the fragile space where human foresight might still interrupt what almost always happens.

So where does that leave us?

Malthus teaches us to respect constraints. Turchin shows how feedbacks and lags turn pressure into cycles of rise and collapse. Marx demonstrates what happens when economics is denied altogether. Capitalism shows how incentives and technology can extend production and delay the reckoning - sometimes dramatically. Taken together, the lesson is sobering rather than reassuring. Nothing in the historical or mathematical record suggests that human societies reliably learn in time. Moses’ realism still stands: hope can be stated clearly, even beautifully, while despair about what people will actually do remains entirely justified.

And yet, this is not the same thing as fate. The maths does not prove collapse is metaphysically sealed; it shows what happens when behaviour remains unchanged. The models trace where the path leads, not that it must be walked. Human societies are not closed systems, even if they behave like them for long stretches. Technology can raise carrying capacity. Markets can coordinate effort. Institutions can be reformed. Moral frameworks can still reshape incentives and behaviour at scale. None of this guarantees survival - but it does preserve uncertainty.

Which brings us back to where we started. Faced with the pattern, despair feels honest. History offers no comforting counterexample. When someone says, “We’ll never survive,” the only reply available is Westley’s dry, almost irritating calm: “You’re only saying that because no one ever has.” It isn’t optimism. It isn’t reassurance. It is simply a refusal to confuse overwhelming historical evidence with ontological finality. The pattern warns us where we are heading; whether that warning changes anything remains, as it always has, unresolved.

In the next post, I want to add the layer the equations cannot see: the different strategies humans deploy under pressure, and how those strategies interact with economics to amplify collapse - or, occasionally, to open a narrow path to renewal. The maths matters. But so do the people inside it.

Seeing History through a Clear Lens: Lessons from Vision

In many fields, including perception, cognition, and information processing, researchers refer to "bottom-up" and "top-down" processes. These terms refer to the direction in which information flows during processing.

Bottom-up processing refers to an approach that starts with the most basic, low-level information and builds up to more complex high-level representations. It is driven by the data itself, with no influence from higher-level knowledge.

In vision, bottom-up processing starts with raw sensory input from receptors in the eyes. This visual data is built up into increasingly complex representations, detecting simple features like edges, combining these to identify shapes and objects, and incrementally constructing a full perceptual interpretation. Bottom-up vision is data-driven and does not utilise top-down guidance.

In contrast, top-down processing refers to an approach that starts with higher-level knowledge, expectations, or context and uses this to guide lower-level processing. Top-down information flows from complex to simple representations.

In vision, top-down processing utilises prior knowledge, memories, and schemas to interpret sensory data. For example, recognizing that a particular constellation of features represents a dog involves matching the visual input to a stored mental representation of what a dog looks like. Top-down vision is concept-driven and shaped by pre-existing knowledge.

In summary, bottom-up processing builds up complexity from basic building blocks while top-down processing contextualises lower levels using higher-level knowledge and guidance. Real-world perception and cognition typically involve an interplay between both types of processing.

In vision science and historiography alike, distorted sources or limited perspectives lead to mistaken views, correct understanding requires upping the resolution or integrating patchy details with contextual knowledge. Bottom-up and top-down information processing are both important for understanding.

Consider the classic image of a Dalmatian dog effectively hidden in the background of a high contrast photo. It has sometimes been used as an example of how people will create meaning even if there is none there. Wishful thinking projected onto a picture of random dots. However, in this instance, it is indeed from a genuine photo and, with a bit of further manipulation of the image, it can be shown that there are important bottom-up details encoded in the picture that give our visual systems clues about the original scene.

This paper argues for the importance of bottom-up cues when processing the meaning of an image. 

Bottom–Up Clues in Target Finding: Why a Dalmatian May Be Mistaken for an Elephant

The paper found that manipulating the image by rotating texture elements reduced subjects' ability to locate a body, indicating bottom-up surface interpolation features are important. In a survey, most naive subjects could quickly locate a bulging shape overlapping the dog's body, suggesting bottom-up processing guides attention. However, as shown below, they then assigned incorrect heads/limbs, indicating top-down identification failed.

The authors computed two bottom-up features that overlap with the dog's body - texture compression and affine distortion of texture elements (the rotated blobs in Fig 1b). Small distortions in the image lead to mistaken interpretations when using bottom-up clues alone. People construct an incorrect bigger picture, like seeing a lion cub instead of a dog.

The results suggest bottom-up processing plays a bigger role than traditionally thought in locating targets like the Dalmatian, guiding top-down identification mechanisms to target regions. The paper argues the role of top-down processing in target detection is overstated in classical examples like the Dalmatian image.

However, the paper’s ‘correct’ interpretation (above) can interestingly be used as a counter example. We can demonstrate the importance of top down processing if we go the other way with the image and remove as much distortion as possible by getting as close to the original image as possible. As far as I can tell the first appearance of the image was in Life Magazine in 1965:

We can get a much clearer top-down understanding of the scene and then on looking back at the bottom-up paper’s ‘correct’ image we can clearly see where they have made some incorrect inferences - particularly with the Dalmation’s back and the placement of its hind left leg. Other interesting details also emerge; the dappled background was caused by melting spots in the snow, the dog was called Woody and the park was in East Lansing, Michigan!

We have just demonstrated that top-down features are still important! Or, as another paper puts it “Prior object-knowledge sharpens properties of early visual feature-detectors”.

This visual perception study found what we have just demonstrated here, that prior knowledge of an object's form helps people more accurately detect features consistent with that object. Top-down knowledge guides low-level perception.

Summary of the key points from "Prior object-knowledge" paper

The paper investigates whether high-level knowledge about objects interacts with and influences basic visual feature processing in the human brain. It utilises two-tone images, which initially look like random black and white patches. However, after a person gains prior knowledge about what object is hidden in the image, they suddenly perceive it as a coherent, meaningful object.

The researchers embedded faint line elements in these two-tone images. They then measured people's ability to detect the contrast and orientation of these lines before and after giving them object knowledge about what the image represents.

In two experiments, they found that people's sensitivity to the embedded lines improved specifically for lines aligned with invisible object contours, after the researchers provided object knowledge about what was in the image. This suggests that high-level knowledge about object form serves to sharpen and enhance early visual feature detectors that are tuned to detect features consistent with that object.

Importantly, this top-down influence of learned object representations on early vision occurred independently of any effects of visual attention. The results provide clear behavioural evidence that early visual processing is shaped by dynamic interactions with high-level object knowledge stored in the brain. This context-dependent top-down tuning optimises low-level vision to suit the current perceptual interpretation.

In summary, the study demonstrates that prior conceptual knowledge about objects interacts with and adaptively adjusts basic visual feature processing to support perception of that object.

Integrating Visual Cognition and Historical Analysis

In both visual cognition and historical analysis, optimal interpretation requires integrating bottom-up signals from limited sources with top-down frameworks to perceive reality accurately. A complete picture emerges from the interplay between clues and context. Integrating limited clues with contextual knowledge parallels optimal visual processing. The brain combines patchy sensory data with learned schemas to build meaningful perceptions. Historians need all available signals, from granular sources to big pictures, for coherent understanding. For example those familiar with the context of the 17th century and Catholic theology can more accurately interpret fragmentary details about Galileo's trial. Their prior conceptual knowledge shapes perception of the fine-grained evidence.

The Galileo affair remains a classic example of distorted historical vision. Persistent myths cast Galileo as a martyr opposing church dogma, propagating a narrative of inherent conflict between science and religion. But this perspective often derives more from modern biases than 17th century realities. The way Galileo has been perceived historically reveals issues similar to those of visual and cognitive perception, much like interpreting the famous image of the hidden Dalmatian dog. How we perceive history mirrors how we visually interpret images.

Misconstruing history resembles visual illusions. We fill in gaps with assumptions that seem reasonable but actually derive from habitual biases. Testing interpretations against multiple perspectives provides a reality check. In vision science and historiography alike, limited bottom-up signals without contextual framing propagate distortion and falsehood. But weaving together disparate clues within matured generative conceptual frameworks enables clearer-sighted understanding. 

Of course, no historical account will ever be perfect. But carefully gathering clues, accessing earlier sources, and leveraging conceptual knowledge sharpens vision. Gaining a clear, accurate understanding of history is similar to achieving accurate visual perception - it requires being open to diverse clues and contextual frameworks. Our default tendency is to cling to established historical narratives, distorting how we interpret the past to match our pre-existing beliefs and assumptions. However, if we can move beyond defensively dismissing or downplaying evidence that contradicts our entrenched perspectives, a more integrative insight can emerge from synthesising multiple clues and viewpoints.

When studying history, we need to be willing to challenge the assumptions and biases inherent in our own perspective. This means not just seeking out evidence that fits our existing narrative, but actively looking for contradictory clues that disconfirm our current understanding. By carefully integrating these divergent clues within broader contextual frameworks, we can achieve a clearer, more objective historical vision without forcing the evidence to match ingrained beliefs. Just as accurate visual perception requires integrating ambiguous sensory data, clear-eyed history requires flexibility to incorporate diverse clues into expansive contextual understanding, even if they clash with our default view.

Attributed to Galileo:

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

Choose your own adventure:

Paradigm Shift        or        ?

Physics and human meaning - is there a conflict?

 

"If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living, -then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy." - Johannes Kepler

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless”

- Steven Weinberg

As I explored in my previous post on metanarratives in physics, stories shape our scientific understanding. In the ancient world, many cosmic narratives have competed, survived, merged or disappeared over the aeons. Worldviews that have emerged to frame the cosmos with meaning or meaninglessness. From our own point in time reading the narratives of history and science it is inevitable that authors (including me obviously!) also have a worldview that frames and colours every paragraph. There is no such thing as a human source of raw, unfiltered truth. 

The story of Galileo Galilei has become a focal point for examining the evolving relationship between science and religion. In our modern world the ascendant narratives have been of progress in our scientific understanding since the Enlightenment. There can be a tendency among some modern writers to use selective depictions of Galileo's trial and punishment to propagate myths of inherent conflict between science and faith. Examining accounts of Galileo provides an illuminating window into the stories we tell about the past and how those stories in turn shape our present-day perspectives. How an author frames the famous Galileo controversy reveals their own metanarrative biases as much as shedding light on the more distant past. The legend reveals as much about constellations of meaning in our time as in the 17th century.

In his 1992 Allocution on Galileo the Pope optimistically declared that misunderstandings surrounding the affair could finally be laid to rest:

“From the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment down to our own day, the Galileo case has been a sort of "myth", in which the image fabricated out of the events was quite far removed from reality. In this perspective, the Galileo case was the symbol of the Church's supposed rejection of scientific progress, or of "dogmatic" obscurantism opposed to the free search for truth. This myth has played a considerable cultural role. It has helped to anchor a number of scientists of good faith in the idea that there was an incompatibility between the spirit of science and its rules of research on the one hand and the Christian faith on the other. A tragic mutual incomprehension has been interpreted as the reflection of a fundamental opposition between science and faith. The clarifications furnished by recent historical studies enable us to state that this sad misunderstanding now belongs to the past.”

Historical studies may have clarified many of the complexities around the Galileo affair (it is certainly the case that extreme claims of Galileo being tortured seem to have now been put to rest).

However, it now seems that the Pope’s hope that misunderstanding has been relegated to the past was over optimistic. The tendency to cast Galileo as a martyr for science opposing church dogma persists in popular accounts. Even statements aimed at reconciliation have been misconstrued through the lens of entrenched narratives. For example, Simon Singh when talking about the Pope’s speech in his 2004 book “Big Bang” claimed that “the Vatican even admitted that it had been wrong to persecute Galileo” (pg 485). 

Reading the Pope’s speech closely it is clear that there is no admission of “persecution”. The careful address resists oversimplifications, aiming to move beyond seeing the case as mere emblematic conflict. The main reason that there is no “admission” is simple - Galileo was not persecuted: To say Galileo was persecuted seems to imply he was a victim of the Inquisition. As devout Catholic, he himself believed that the Church had jurisdiction over him in moral or religious matters. After persistent disobedience and ill-advised impudence he was finally sanctioned. Even then his house arrest was quite unusual; it was really a paid retirement during which he wrote his most important physics work, "The Two New Sciences" (1638).

quote from a lecture by Ronald L. Numbers, May 2006

(author of “Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion”):

"In contrast to the frequently repeated stories about the torture and imprisonment of Galileo,

we now know that he was apparently never physically tortured – he may have experienced a fair amount of mental anguish, but never physically tortured. He left Florence for Rome in 1633. When he arrived in Rome – this was for his trial – he stayed initially at the Tuscan Embassy, rather than in prison or at the offices of the Inquisition. The few days that he spent inside the Vatican during his trial were not passed in a cell but in a special three-room apartment made available for him as an honoured guest by one of the priests there with the Inquisition, and to make life as comfortable as possible they allowed him to get his meals prepared by the chef at the Italian Embassy and brought over to this “non-cell”. After his condemnation he was not incarcerated but placed under house arrest, first at the Villa Medici in Rome, then at the Palace of the Archbishop in Sienna where he stayed for quite a while, and then finally in his own villa outside of Florence. I don’t think any one of us would love to be under house arrest for any period of time, although that was far from the fate that befell him according to so many popular studies of Galileo."

If you're interested in delving into the myths surrounding the Copernican Revolution and the complex relationship between science and religion, I highly recommend reading the article titled "The Copernican Myths" by Mano Singham. This well-researched and thought-provoking piece dispels common misconceptions about Copernicus's heliocentric model and its reception by the Church. Singham's writing is both accessible and scholarly, providing valuable insights into the historical context and the nuanced interactions between scientific ideas and religious beliefs. Whether you're a historian, a scientist, or simply curious about the intersection of science and faith, this article offers a compelling and enlightening perspective. You can find the article here: The real story of how the scientific and religious establishments greeted the Copernican revolution is quite different from the folklore. And it's a lot more interesting. Mano Singham Physics Today 60 (12), 48–52 (2007); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2825071 The persistent myths around Galileo reveal our propensity to craft history into parables that reflect current concerns. They illuminate modern divides more than past truths. Rather than exemplars of conflict, figures like Galileo were enmeshed in nuanced human dynamics between emerging science, theology, philosophy, and politics. If science and religion are both pursuits of truth, their relationship will be complex, just as truth itself is complex. No single narrative encapsulates that richness. By acknowledging diverse perspectives, we gain insight into the stories science and faith tell about our place in the cosmos. Their interplay continues, but irreducible to simple tropes of progress. Ultimately, our shared journey towards truth matters more than ideologies. Like Galileo, we struggle to reconcile new understandings with received traditions under the same heavens. Discerning truth through open and humble inquiry remains the common ground.

Choose your own adventure:

Seeing History through a Clear Lens        or        Syzygy