Trapped in our cave

In his Republic, Plato suggests that we live our lives like cave dwellers who never see the "real world" outside the cave entrance, and who are required (by the hypothesis) to spend their lives facing away from the entrance. All we know of reality is the shadows of outside events that we watch flickering on the walls of our cave. We live our lives trapped in the illusion that those vague, fuzzy shadows are not shadows, but are themselves the true universe in which we live.

Psychologists also remind us that we never experience the "real world" directly. Our eyes detect certain wave lengths of light reflected from "objects." Our ears detect vibrations in the air. Our skin responds to stimuli of its nerve endings. Etc., etc. Our brain receives all these signals, and puts them together to construct a hypothetical picture of some external reality that we believe exists.

Modern physics shows us that even the reality of solid "objects" is an illusion. A solid object, in classical atomic theory, is composed of a relatively few elementary particles flitting around in a huge amount of empty space. Quantum physics shows that even these elementary "particles" are nothing but energy -- whatever "energy" is -- distributed throughout space in probability waves.

Insofar as our senses -- even aided by the finest scientific instruments -- detect anything, they detect only various probabilities of distribution among various energy concentrations. We build our world from these data and our experiences.

I had a health problem develop this past week, one that is probably inconsequential but that reminded me of how thin the ice is on which we all skate through life. Nothing original in that thought -- folks have contemplated for thousands of years how, at times, only an instant of bad luck separates life from death. But I also realized, not for the first time, how silly it is -- from the point of view of scientific method -- to attempt any conclusions regarding the meaning of death, beyond its obvious observable effects on the physical body (or the changing energy distributions for which these effects are a shorthand).

Science deals with observable data, and the conclusions that can be drawn logically from those data. I certainly question any religious attempt to prove scientifically the existence of any form of afterlife -- including reliance on testimony regarding "near death" experiences. But I also distrust any scientist who argues -- again, based on scientific methodology, rather than his own personal intuition or set of personal preferences -- that religious belief in "life after death" has been or can be proven false, or even particularly improbable.

The finest scientists in Plato's cave might have concluded that the universe had come to an end when dusk arrived outside, or the campfire outside the cave burned low, and they observed the shadows inside their cave disappear. But three-dimensional life in the outside world would have continued quite robustly, thank you, even as the walls inside the cave faded to black.