Category: Philosophy

During my undergrad, I spent a lot of my free time trying to write a novel. At the time, the project meant a lot to me, but it was a doomed endeavour from the start; I’m just not good at writing characters. The novel was less a coherent story and more a random collection of scenes that I desperately tried to stitch together into a coherent narrative. One of the scenes took place on board a space station orbiting Jupiter. Humanity had progressed to the point where we were spread out across the solar system, but had not yet learned to exist meaningful in space. Jupiter was an important source of minerals for the wider human civilization, but was otherwise a miserable place to be.

In order to cope, the residence of Jupiter Station had voluntarily enclosed themselves in a self created meta-verse. A virtual existence wholly separate from the physical realities of living on a space station; like the Matrix, only not a secret. This meta-verse existed more like Star Trek’s Holodeck than the simulacrum of real life portrayed in the movie. The residence of Jupiter Station needed only to image something, and they would have it: Sex in as much abundance and variety as they wished, drugs of any potency without any side effects, food of any variety and in any quantity, and most importantly power over anything they desired. The fantasy they could create for themselves would be as unique or mundane as they wanted it to be; a paradise of human desire, free of any troubles or issues that may come up in day to day living. A reasonable surface level end point if we assume infinite technological progression.

The story includes a religious group who reject the fantasy that is presented to them. They view the meta-verse as a great evil and work to undermine it. Unfortunately, they are successful and manage to permanently disable the computers that generate the illusions, forcing the residence to face reality, and causing the society to collapse. Some residence killed themselves unable to part with the loss of their personal universe, others, who had the means, left, and those left behind all died trapped inside a man made metal monstrosity without the means, knowledge, or even ability to sustain themselves. Even the religious organization that wanted this world died because they too vastly underestimated their own reliance on the very system they hated.

As a novel it never panned out, but as a philosophical experiment it lives on in my head. If technology continues to advance, and we keep solving problems to make life better for ourselves, why is the end result so fragile? What are the consequences of a world devoid of nature, yet optimized for human value?

Optimization

The first and most important lesson one must learn when dealing with any applied mathematics is that it is impossible to optimize two variables at the same time. A good example of this is traffic.

Say we want to minimize a car’s travel distance between two points. On the surface, this seems like an easy problem; we increase the speed limit, pave the road as straight as possible, and finish our job under budget. However, things change when we add a second car to the road. No longer can we just let them both drive as fast as possible down a straight highway because these two cars may interact with each other, and we need to account for these interactions. The faster these cars are going, the more catastrophic it will be if they collide, preventing either from reaching their destination and blocking further traffic until the debris is cleared. We could prevent such an accident by imposing speed limits, thereby limiting the severity of the crash, but doing so would conflict with our initial goal of reducing travel time.

In reality, any real road project is trying to optimize way more variables than just two cars: budget, land use, environmental impact, impact on neighbouring landowners, and of course the thousands if not millions of people who will be using it every day. All of these variables are important, and no solution can universally optimize on all of them at once; every decision has a cost. Some costs are explicit, like the road’s price tag. Some are understood but accepted; such as the resulting noise and air pollution caused by traffic. Others are external and not allowed into the accounting to begin with; such as the impact on the area’s wildlife. We can work around some of these issues by coming up with mathematical or social models that convert some variables into others. Instead of dealing with individual drive times, we can work with statistical measures: How can we ‘minimize’ the ‘average’ travel time on a road for all users? What is the ‘longest trip’ someone will have to make? How can we reduce the ‘probability’ that a collision will occur? Likewise, we can pick social models to reduce the variables. We can optimize for ‘safety’ by slowing everyone down in order to reduce the risk of accident, or we can optimize for ‘choice’ by creating different lanes with different rules and allow users to choose their level of risk. Of course, all of these models make some assumptions about what we humans value and are nothing more than statistical tricks to reduce the problem to a single measurable variable.

Once we have selected our model, or target as it is commonly referred, the act of optimization itself can be thought of as a game¹. The singular variable we are optimizing on being the game’s goal, and all the variables we can manipulate being its structure. Regardless of how many players are playing the game, the winner is the person who develops the best strategy to optimizes the desired target. Alan Turing² used such a game to argue that computers can think, and at the same time created the framework of target generation that all modern artificial intelligence systems employ. He called this game the Imitation Game.

The Imitation Game

Imagine a game with three players: one human, one computer, and the third an interrogator with no knowledge of the other two. Both the human and the computer are trying to convince the interrogator that they are the human, and the interrogator is tasked with determining who is telling the truth. The optimal strategy for the computer (which Turing referred to as A) is to impersonate a human as best as possible, while the human (which Turing referred to as B) is trying to reveal this deception. Turing’s goal in introducing this game was to reduce a complicated question like, “can computers think” into a single model we could then theorize about: can the computer win?

We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this…? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?”

Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (pp 50)³

To Turing, the question of “can machines think?” was ambiguous because ‘thinking’ had no non-subjective definition. What it meant to ‘think’ was, and remains, a very philosophical concept that is warped by whatever linguistic context it is used in. This objection is further reinforced in the second half of his paper, where he addresses the ‘argument from various disabilities’. This argument being a generalized version of the claim that a ‘computer can never do X’, where X is any number of activities from ‘being friendly’, to ‘enjoying strawberries’, to ‘being the subject of its own thought’. To Turing, this entire class of objections really boils down to the objection of consciousness. The objection John Searle brings up with his ‘Chinese room argument’ where he argues that a computer may be able to transform text perfectly, but that doesn’t mean it has an internal understanding or experience of its actions⁴. Turing rejects this:

Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe “A thinks but B does not” whilst B believes “B thinks but A does not.” Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.

Alan Turing (pp 57)

The only reason we believe others think, is because they act in such a way that makes me believe they think. Thus, thinking is already an imitation game played between humans, and why should we exclude the non-human from playing it as well?

Yet, this line of thinking is not without consequences. By arguing that imitation can replace the need for a definition, he is also arguing against the need for a definition at all. It is not necessary to understand how humans think or why humans think, it is only necessary to accept that thinking is a social construct that can be assigned to everything and anyone so long as they adhere to the social contract. A human is only what is perceived to be human, nothing else. In terms of optimization, Turing removes the need for a theoretical target completely. To reduce a multivariate problem to a single variable, we only need to double down on human intuition. In terms of our original problem, the best, most efficient road system is the one that humans like: the mathematical properties of such a system are irrelevant.

Importantly, Turing didn’t introduce the imitation game using a computer, his opening paragraph introduces it as a game between a man and a woman. The man was trying to convince the interrogator that he was the woman. Turing moved away from this version of the game before the introduction to his lengthy paper had concluded, but its existence is, in my opinion, more important than the rest of the paper because it implies that the definition of the imitation game is not limited to computers, but is intended to be broadly applied. The imitation is available to be used to define anything that humans intuitively understand but is otherwise hard to define. It is the equivalent of Judge Potter Stewart’s, “I know it when I see it” when discussing what is and is not pornography: except applied to everything. What is justice if not something that is perceived as being just? What is ethics if not something that is perceived as being ethical? What is a woman if not something that is perceived as being a woman? What is truth if not something that is convincing. The imitation game is a rejection of philosophy, an admittance that the Greek sophists were right. It’s not important that something exist in the real world, it is only important that it acts convincingly.

It is a meta-verse. A universe of our own creation, and the imitation game gives computer scientists a way to drag this fantasy into their mathematical models.

Machine Learning

Computer intelligence is simultaneously the easiest thing on the planet to explain, and so difficult that even those who study it have no idea how it works. At its core, the entire field of AI is a very complicated imitation game. To create an AI, we begin with a ‘Data Scientist’ who decides how the question ‘What is convincing?’ can be programmed into a computer. Usually this is done by asking billions of humans questions like “Does this picture look like a bird?” then storing the answers in enormous datasets⁵. The actual training is itself a game computers play against themselves. It begins when the Data Scientist makes guesses about which algorithms will best separates the correct answers from the wrong ones. The algorithms are pitted against each other, with the better performing ones moving on in the training.

A machine learning algorithm is an algorithm that can assess its own performance, and suggest improvements. Training happens in stages, the algorithm is trained, it suggests an improvement, the improvement is applied, and the model is retrained. Training generally ends when the suggested improvements no longer result in better models. However, there are hundreds of such algorithms and choosing the best one is time-consuming. So we create algorithms that train these algorithms, and compete them against each other, for us. This cycle has no end, there are algorithms that create algorithms that create algorithms with as many layers as the available computing power can handle. The data scientist knows what the top level target is, and a lot about the top level architecture that encourages the parameters and methods below it to get in line, but the inner workings of the system itself is a complete black box. It is notoriously difficult to explain in any human way why one image may be classified as containing a bear and another not. Likewise, these systems tell us nothing about how human cognition actually works beyond the simple, unprovable, hypothesis that the winning algorithm might be similar to what the human brain actually uses.

Turing’s hypothesis, that the perception of an object can replace the existence of an object, sits at the heart of all of this. At not point in the generation of AI is a philosophical definition of its target necessary; in fact the opposite is true, experiments show it is better to know nothing. The first version of Alpha Go, the algorithm that first beat human masters at the board game Go, had real human games of Go included in its training dataset. The second version, Alpha Zero, only used games that it itself generated through self play. Alpha Zero became the better Go player, demonstrating that trying to insert current human understanding of such a game is actually detrimental to its performance. Or at least that’s the argument that I keep hearing.

Go is a combinatorial board game, meaning that it can be fully modelled mathematically. Anyone who studies games can be easily persuaded that winning at Go more mathematical than social. We don’t need the imitation game to create a target for go because it already has one built into its rules. There is no ambiguity about what it means to win at go, we don’t even need a physical board to play the game. Go is not an image of its social norms, the mythology surrounding the game is itself the image; so of course the AI will do better when that image is removed, as training on the singular variable we care about will always be better than a simulacrum of that variable. This is why Alpha Zero is not, in my opinion, a good example of why computers will eventually be better at everything than humans. Yet, that doesn’t stop people from believing that winning at Go is a natural step in the computer’s evolution towards personhood⁶.

1. I’m using the definition of game I developed in this blog post.[↩]
2. Creator of the mathematics of ‘computable numbers’, code breaker instrumental in breaking Nazi encryption during World War 2, and one of the founding father’s of modern computing[↩]
3. Turing, Alan. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. In The New Media Reader (pp 50-64).[↩]
4. I discuss this in an earlier blog post here.[↩]
5. Google has been doing this with captchas for years. To decide if someone is human, they show them a bunch of pictures and ask them if they contain traffic signs. Some of these pictures they already know the answer to, others they don’t. If you answered similarly to other humans on the known images you will be declared a human, the rest of the pictures are your unpaid contribution to their dataset.[↩]
6. I’ve been working on this blog post for a really long time. I started before ChatGPT blew up the internet. I will admit it is a different beast than Alpha Zero, but I’m still not convinced it is a good argument towards the inevitability of superior AI. The argument below is not about ChatGPT, but should be easy to reorganize into why I believe this.[↩]

My family had a play structure in our back yard that my brothers and I would use to defend against real and imagined invaders. The structure had two floors. The ground floor was a converted sandbox with with four walls and old carpet for flooring. The upper floor had walls on two sides, a ladder on the third, and a slide on the fourth. I spent a lot of time thinking about how one might defend this structure. The ground floor was a deathtrap; while one of the outer walls was chest high and could be used as cover while lobbing water balloons at invaders, it only had one exit which was easy for larger kids to block and force surrender out of smaller kids through liberal use of the garden hose. The top floor; however, was different. The slide was difficult to get up, especially when wet, but easy to go down, and the ladder required whoever was trying to traverse it to drop their weapons momentarily in order to climb. Even better both the ladder and slide were easy escape routes and even the walls could be vaulted over in case of emergency. Thus it was perfectly defensible.

I have a memory of a game we played once using this structure. My brothers and I were defending the fort against aliens, zombies, or possibly something in between, who were attacking us on all sides. One of us covered the slide while another lobbed invisible explosives indiscriminately over the wall into the yard below. I was responsible for protecting the ladder. Now ammunition, even pretend ammunition, is a limited resource, and if the invaders were going to break into our stronghold it was definitely going to be at the ladder. So, just as the mindless slaughtering of unidentifiable alien zombies was about to get boring, something grabbed my leg. I tried as hard as I could to shake it off, but my Super Soaker was out of both real and pretend ammunition and I eventually succumbed to my injuries. The brother on the slide tried to help, but that only gave the zombie aliens an opportunity to scale the slide and take him out as well. My final brother made a valiant last stand before he too succumbed and declared the game over. There was much fun to be had, but also loss. The joy in an activity like this comes from the interaction with others, and thus that joy ends when your older brother goes inside to clean up. That’s how one losses a game of Calvinball. ¹

I am a gamer. That means that I choose to dedicate a large portion of my time to both playing and thinking about games. Games to me are a pastime, a means of taking in story, and also a lens through which I can see and understand the world around me. Likewise, my relationship with games has grown and changed as I myself have grown and changed. As a child, games were an avenue of wonder; a way to experience things I couldn’t normally experience. As a teen, games were a convenient distraction; a way to establish limited control over my otherwise uncontrollable life. As a young adult games were a way of measuring personal growth; a lens through which I could see my skills develop and improve. Today, games are just a part of who I am and an important lens through which I understand the world around me.

It’s not easy to talk about what a game is because the word means different things to different people. Games are a thing that children play and adults are supposed to grow out of. Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the term “language-game”² as a way of characterizing how we use language. Countries frequently engage in “war games” to train and ready their troops even as other commentaries on the subject explicitly exclude war itself from being a game. ³ I operate primarily in the world of technology and under that umbrella games are primarily a business; they are things, products, nouns, something that one entity designs for other entities to consume. There is a lot of literature around what exactly a game is, especially in the world of commercial video games; however, there is no easy consensus to point to as to what games actually are. If we consider the perspective of a game designer, or games as object, we could come up with a list of attributes that distinguishes a game from some other consumer object like a movie. Jesper Juul in his work “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness”⁴ summarizes some of this rhetoric by compiling a general list of qualities that appear in most game definitions: rules, variable outcomes, player effort, players attachment to the outcome, negotiable consequences of outcome, etc. However, I believe this approach fails to convey any real insight into what a game truly is, and worse tends to draw the discussion into pointless debates about what is and isn’t a game. As an example, if games must be voluntary and unproductive as Roger Caillois⁵ asserts then Warfare must not be a game. However true this statement might be, it uselessly offers no insight into mathematical game theories fascination with warfare, the game industries obsession with warfare, or the simple fact that we simulate and analysis warfare as if it were a game. Likewise, Juul refers to simulation games like Sim City as being “borderline cases” because they contain no predefined objectives; the game never unambiguously declares the player a winner. However, these simulations are still sold, unambiguously, as computer games in computer game markets and are reviewed as if they were games.

The following definition of a game was given by Bernard Suits in his book “The Grasshopper”:

“…to play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.”

This definition defines two primary components along with one observation. A game, in Suits eyes, requires two things: rules and a desired state of affairs. A player desires a certain outcome, and the rules limit how that player may bring about that outcome. It is important to suits that the rules prohibit the most efficient means of bringing about this outcome. The fastest way to get to the top of a mountain would be to take a helicopter but the sport of mountain climbing prohibits such an act in favour of the less efficient method of climbing via ones own power. A mountain climber engages in the game of mountain climbing if they wish to arrive at the top of the mountain without using a helicopter. The observation Suits makes is that it is this restriction of the most efficient means that makes the game possible. If one wanted to climb a mountain using only ones own power then using a helicopter would not fulfill that desire, so the game of mountain climbing is invented in order to create a structure that encourages one to engage in the activity they wanted to engage in. As another example, the most efficient means of getting a ball into a hole would be to use ones hands to put the ball into the hole, but this is not what the game of golf is all about. Instead we choose to use a stick to hit a ball from a fixed distance away into the hole. Thus we have voluntarily chosen to use less efficient means, the stick, to bring about a desired state of affairs, balls in a hole. In reality, golf is not about getting balls into holes, it is about getting certain balls into certain holes starting from a fixed distance and using only regulation sticks. Thus, we can’t play golf unless we follow the rules of golf and therefore ‘playing golf’ is only made possible by adherence to its rules.

To Suits, “efficient means” implies that a player can use any means available to bring about their desired state of affairs. If two players simply wanted to overpower each other using any and all means at their disposal, then their struggle wouldn’t be a game. However, Suits explores such a scenario and discovers that the simple act of agreeing on a start time qualifies as an agreement to inefficient means and therefore makes it a game. Under this definition suits would have a hard time disqualifying any human activity from being a game because of the pervasiveness of unwritten social norms acting as a limitation of efficient means.

One way to think of the structure of a game is as being an alternate physics. Chess is a good example of this. Chess pieces are only able to move about the board in set ways. An invisible force, the rules of the game, prevent the bishop from moving in any direction except diagonally in much the same way that gravity prevents us from walking anywhere except along the surface of a large object. The thing that separates the physics of chess from the physics of the real world is that we created the rules of chess, we have to enforce them, and we can change them if we so desire; we did not create the laws of gravity and have no say in its enforcement. Assuming inefficient means, all other games contain some form of alternate physics. Softer game systems, like mountain climbing, are subject to both enforceable rules, like the prohibition of flying, and physical rules, like gravity. The allowed ‘moves’ in a game of mountain climbing are governed primarily by the physical world with some restrictions on technologies that we impose on ourselves. The outcomes of the game are a mix of physical results, “Did the player reach the top of the mountain?”, as well as results requiring a human judge, “Did they use only legal means to do so?” Any particular instance of a game is also impossible to reproduce exactly but some formal record of the event, like a recording or an entry in log book, may stick around. The softest game structures are those of make belief and includes the game of Calvinball I detailed in the introduction. These games exist primarily within the human mind and contain no normalized rule systems whatsoever. One might argue that such games have no structure as the rules, dictated by the mind of a child, can change suddenly and without warning. However, a child always knows when an adult has made an illegal move and thus, at least to their own subjective experience, the structure exists even if it can’t be communicated. The outcome of the game is entirely up to the humans, and, much the dismay of my inner child, an instance of a game is impossible to repeat in any form. Once fun has been had once, it can never happen exactly the same way again.

In all these cases the rules of a game act as a sort of simulation running on some sort of medium: a chessboard, physics, or the mind of a child. Video games fit into this model quite well. They are a simulation somewhere between the chess board and the mountain. Video games are simulations that run on the medium of computer hardware. Computer software is a mathematical structure and thus chess can be represented as a video game. However, most computer simulations are complex enough that unintended side effects are common. In chess it is impossible to make an illegal move; however, bugs and exploits that allow the player to act in unintended ways are nearly unavoidable in all sufficiently complex video games or real life simulations. Thus, like the mountain climber, in competitive video games we generally defer to the computer simulation to determine what actions are allowed, and step in sometimes with human judges when the need arises.

The structure of a game exists to moderate our interaction with the game and with each other through the game. However, a structure alone does not make a game. It is possible to follow all of the rules of golf and still not be playing golf. They rules of golf explicitly state that whoever completes every hole with the least number of strokes is the winner, it has no way of enforcing this goal if the player has no interest in winning. There is nothing in the rules that forbid a player from purposefully hitting a ball away from the goal. Worse, the game has no way of forcing a player to even progress through the game short of skipping the remainder of a hole after a set amount of strokes.

Juul attempts to get around this by by claiming that “Player attachment to the outcome” is a necessary part of the game. Suits definition requires a player to want to “bring about a specific state of affairs”. While superficially similar, these two requirements are not the same. Juul is coming at it from the perspective of a game developer. He wants his players to be attached to the outcomes as dictated by the rules of the game, and by extension the game developer. If a game has a celebratory ending sequence, then the player needs to be attracted by the possibility of experiencing it. However, in Suits definition the player themselves dictates the desired state of affairs. The mountain climber wants to reach the top of the mountain, but they might not care if they get there first. So even though the rules state that the winner is the one who gets there first the player may only be attached to the physical act of making it to the top and care substantially less about their placement.

Suits uses the example of ping pong to explore this point. If two professional ping pong players square off against each other in a competitive match, but mutually decide that winning isn’t important they could instead choose to attempt a long rally and hit the ball back and forth indefinitely. If their purpose is to generate the longest rally possible, we might still call what they are doing a game, just not the game the spectators expected them to play. However, it is important to note that this new game, the ping pong rally, exists within the exact same structure as the ping pong match the spectators expected. There is even a judge trying his best to enforce the rules of a game not being played. The thing that makes it a new game is the players expectations, not the structure.

Juul’s definition requires that, “As a player you agree to be happy if you win the game, unhappy if you loose the game.” The ping pong rally could exist under Juul’s definition, but only if we switched the referee out for one who is actively measuring the length of the rally. Juul assumes that a game can only be a game if there is agreement between the game designers and the game player. This is why under his definition simulation games like Sim City are not fully games because the game designer doesn’t prescribe an outcome for the player to valorize.

How a player approaches a game structure dramatically changes how they experience the game. A player could be “playing to win” meaning that they only take actions that purposefully maximizing the probability of achieving an outcome prescribed by the game. They could be “playing for fun” or “playing casually” meaning that they seek to achieve some sort of experience facilitated by, but separate to, the rules of the game itself. I am reminded of a friend in high school who proudly showed me their Elder Scrolls Morrowind save file in which they were in the process of murdering every NPC in the game; a state of affairs certainly allowed by the rules of the game, but not necessarily intended by the developers.

In my view, the separation between Chess which has a goal enshrined in the rules and Sim City which doesn’t isn’t philosophically important. Both are systems of rules, or alternate physics, through which humans can generate a wide variety of experiences. Commercial games, in whatever medium they appear in, are just game structures, and even though these structures may or may not include some prescribed end state, it is only when a player approaches these game structures with purpose do they actually become games. Indeed if we only look at a game in the way rules intend it to be played we frequently miss out on most of what the game becomes as a social phenomenon. Does the rules of chess say anything about chess grand-masters? About chess tournaments? Or chess clocks? Or the social phenomenon of cheating? No. If one wishes to know anything about chess, pure knowledge of its mathematical structure is only partial knowledge of the game itself. If we start by assuming that a game can only be played by people who’s purpose is to play the game as it is designed, then the only knowledge we will ever achieve is of the machines we designed to play them.

So then, what is a game? Well as mentioned above, no single definition will ever suffice. I fully admit that Juul’s and Suits’s definitions are useful when talking about games in their respective fields but fail as a general definition. However, I have nothing definitive to add. The definition I find most useful for my purposes is that games are a metaphor. Games are an attempt to section off some small portion of our lived experience into a much more understandable reality. We limit means because we have no other way of shrinking the enormity of the real world into something we can understand. We humans create games and define the boundary between what is and is not our game, and we do this to fulfill some purpose that is both uniquely personal and uniquely human.

In short games are small worlds; they are miniature universes that humans create and inhabit whenever the real world becomes to large and complex to understand.

1. Bill Waterson, “Calvin and Hobbes”[↩]
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophical Investigations”, (1953)[↩]
3. “I will assume that… traffic, war, hypertext fiction, free-form play and ring-a-ring-a-roses are not games.”

   Jesper Juul, “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness”, 2003[↩]

4. https://www.jesperjuul.net/text/gameplayerworld/[↩]
5. ”…. to be defined as an activity which is essentially:
   • Free: in which playing is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its attractive and joyous quality as diversion; …
   • Unproductive: creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevail­ing at the beginning of the game;”

   Roger Caillois, “Man, Play, and Games”, 2001[↩]

In Michio Kaku’s book “hyperspace: a scientific odyssey through parallel universes, time warps, and the 10^th dimension” Kaku describes a moment that inspired his intellectual journey. “When I was 8 years old, I heard a story that would stay with me for the rest of my life. I remember my schoolteachers telling the class about a great scientist who had just died. They talked about him with great reverence, calling him one of the greatest scientists in all history… I didn’t understand much of what they were trying to tell us, but what most intrigued me about this man was that he died before he could complete his greatest discovery. They said he spent years on this theory, but he died with his unfinished papers still sitting on his desk.” Kaku credits this mystery as contributing to his desire to pursue physics and a deeper understanding of the world. The man in the story was Albert Einstein and the theory was a unified theory of physics.

Einstein is a household name in physics for good reason. Through the simple act of asking questions, and exploring the logical ramifications of those questions no matter how unusual, Einstein was able to reason his way into a new theory of gravity: relativity. The problem was that relativity, regardless of how successful it was as a theory, only explained gravity; the other fundamental forces, electromagnetism and the nuclear forces, were not addressed. Einstein’s final task, which he never completed, was to unify gravity with these other fundamental forces. To create a theory that accounted for all of the fundamental forces in physics. However, Einstein did not succeed and the search for such a unifying “theory of everything” inspired a generation of physicists, Kaku among them.

Thinking in higher dimensions

We humans exist in a three-dimensional world. Objects have height, width and breadth, and to identify an object’s location on our planet we would need to identify three numbers: a latitude, a longitude, and an altitude. We could think of time existing as a fourth dimension, duration, but we can only do that if we accept that it is a different type of dimension as we experience it differently. I can rotate an object in three spatial dimensions, but I can’t rotate something in time. The dominant theory of time prior to Einstein’s relativity was Newton’s mechanics. Newton viewed time as an immutable quantity. Time moved forward at the same pace regardless of who, or what, was measuring it. To Newton, time was a universal constant that, unlike space, could not be changed. Relativity changed this. In relativity, time isn’t fixed but can bend. Einstein’s theory of special relativity postulates that the experience of time is ‘relative’ to how fast an observer is moving. As my speed, compared to an observer, increases both our experiences of time and space also change. Time for fast moving travellers will be observed to be passing slower to their stationary friends; this is known as time dilation. As well, the perceived size of a fast moving traveller will also appear to contract: length contraction. General relativity takes this idea one step further by recognizing that our experience of acceleration and our experience of gravity is fundamentally the same thing. Large masses bend both space and time in a similar fashion. Relativity insists that space and time are not two separate entities that follow two separate sets of rules. Instead, they are a single object, spacetime, following a unified set of rules. Thus Einstein simplified physics by adding a higher dimension

Kaku’s book introduces this idea from Einstein and follows it through a number of logical expansions. If adding a fourth dimension allows us to explain gravity through geometry then maybe we can add even more dimensions to help us to explain the other fundamental forces. Hyperspace is ultimately a book about string theory and all of the various false starts and dead ends physicists took in order to expand Einstein’s four dimensions into the ten that the theory requires. Fundamentally, Kaku is arguing that the laws of physics simplify when viewed from higher dimensions.

Hyperspace was an important early inspiration for my own intellectual journey. The book was my first introduction to physical theory and Kaku’s main argument has stuck with me to this day. Of course, I was a child when I first read it and my underdeveloped brain didn’t understand anything about the physics or mathematics Kaku was arguing for, instead, I connected to the simpler explanations of how higher dimensions can make possible the seemingly impossible.

Imagine a two dimensional creature whose entire world is a single piece of paper. From the perspective of this creature, we humans can do the impossible. We can bend the paper in on itself causing two ends to touch and allowing the creature to instantly ‘warp’ from one edge of their universe to another. We could also remove this creature from their paper world, ‘turn them over’, and magically transform right into left. Through a simple act of geometry, we can permanently disfigure the creature because it is unable to flip itself back due to that act requiring a third dimension. Likewise, if two such creatures saw each other, they would only be able to describe the exterior shell or outline of each other, but we can easily describe their internals by looking at them from above the page. This knowledge is trivially gained by us but is functionally unknowable to the two dimensional creatures.

It seems almost trivial now, but the simple idea of higher dimensions beyond the three that we live in changed everything for me. It opened up the possibility of two simple truths. The first is that there are things in this world that I am physically incapable of experiencing, like extra dimensions, that exist, and effects me. The second is that even though such a reality is physically beyond me, I can still come to understand it. In a single chapter Kaku taught me a single unknowable truth, how to visualize a four dimensional cube, and in doing so convinced me that there is no reason why I couldn’t be made to understand the unknowable truth of the universe as well; even those parts I couldn’t experience for myself.

Yet, Kaku’s higher dimensions are in themselves a bit of a trap. Even though Einstein unified the three dimensions into four dimensions, time still stands alone. Imagine the second hand on the face of a clock. When the hand points to the twelve it points straight up and all of its length is along the vertical dimension. As time passes, and the hand rotates, the length becomes less vertical and more horizontal. Slowly all of its vertical orientation will be transformed into a horizontal orientation. Rotation in space merely transforms vertical orientation into horizontal orientation, an objects true length never gets bigger. Time works opposite to this. As an object speeds up, other observers will notice that time for them appears to slow down thus growing larger. As an object approaches the speed of light, its maximum rotation, it will appear to have an infinite length. The shortest possible measurement of time will always come from the person who is experiencing it, everyone else will measure something larger with no upper bound. Thus rotation in time can expand sizes from their true size all the way to infinity. Time is still special because it works backwards to space.

The equations of relativity are written in a mathematical framework called ‘Riemann geometry’ which is a system for expressing a multitude of such exotic, or ‘non-spacial’, geometries using the same common language. Both space and time fit within this paradigm and thus are equally expressible as a four dimensional Riemann manifold. However, ‘dimension’ in this context suddenly becomes a distinctly mathematical term and losses a lot of context that the English word ‘dimension’ might imply. When Kaku says that the laws of physics simplify at higher dimensions, he is referring to a distinctly mathematical definition of the term ‘simple’ that merely implies that these two different things can be expressed using the same terminology. Time and space still follow different rules as they are still different, the formula that describes spacetime as a single unified entity still needs to place a negative sign in front of the temporal coordinate to set it apart from the other spacial dimensions. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to jump to the conclusion that just because some things can be expressed within the same framework all things eventually will be as well. String theory begins with this assumption, and twenty years later it has yet to produce anything from this claim. If the other fundamental forces are just an extension of spacetime, then we have yet to discover what symbols need to be placed in front of them to make them work.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras was an ancient Greek philosopher whose name will be familiar to anyone who has studied dimensions. The very formula that describes rotation in a spatial dimension carries his name. The Pythagorean theorem states that the three sides of a right-angle triangle are related. That the square of the hypotenuse, the side opposite the right angle, is equal to the sum of the squares on both additional sides: A^2 + B^2 = c^2. As the second hand rotates its experience of the vertical and horizontal dimensions changes according to that formula. If the vertical dimension says that the hand is three centimetres long and the horizontal says it is four then the Pythagorean theorem tells us that its true length is five centimetres. Unfortunately, apart from this theorem very little in modern mathematics is attributed to that man. In fact, very little about Pythagoras’s actual beliefs and teachings are known or even can be known for certain today. This is because he wrote nothing down and everything we do know comes to us through other sources; most of which were written hundreds or even thousands of years after his death. Worse, even his theorem likely did not come from him. Modern archaeology supplies plenty of evidence that the Pythagorean theorem was known in some form or another in ancient Egypt, a place where folklore states Pythagoras studied. At best he only rediscovered or popularized the theorem. At worst had nothing to do with it. However, what we do know is that Pythagoras, or the Pythagoreans, believed that deep down at its core the universe was made out of numbers.

Legends have it that Pythagoras also had a Eureka moment that formed the foundation of his view of the universe. Kitty Furgeson in her book, “Life of Pythagoras” describes this moment as such. While experimenting with the strings of a lyre Pythagoras, “(or someone inspired by Pythagoras) discovered that the connections between lyre string length and the human ears are not arbitrary or accidental. The ratios that underlie musical harmony make sense in a remarkably simple way. In a flash of extraordinary clarity, the Pythagorean found that there is pattern and order hidden behind the apparent variety and confusion of nature, and that it is possible to understand it through numbers.” The details of this statement are of course up for debate. Iamblicus, an important early biographer of Pythagoras, claims that Pythagoras came to this understanding while listening to the sounds of a hammer striking an anvil not while playing with a lyre. As well, the modern reader won’t find much enlightenment in what fragments we do have of Pythagoras’ metaphysics. Most of it sounds like numerology. The Pythagoreans believed in a theory of music that governed the heavens. The strings on a Lyre could be tuned in an unlimited number of ways, but it was only when they were tuned to the integer ratios that it could generate harmony, the same is true for the heavens. Pythagoras believed that each celestial body orbited a “central fire” and produced a sound as it travelled. Each heavenly body produced a different sound and together produced harmony. Ten was an important number to Pythagoras because it represented perfection in his system. One can create a perfect triangle by starting with a base of four round balls and stacking three, then two, and finally a single ball on top of it for a total of ten balls. Likewise, Pythagoras needed for there to be exactly ten celestial objects orbiting the ‘inner fire’: the sun, the moon, the earth, five planets, the stars, and a mysterious counter earth that was never visible because it was always hidden on the other side of the inner fire. This counter earth existed not because he had observed it, but because his model wouldn’t make sense without it.

The details of what Pythagoras actually believed are eternally up for debate; we can’t really know anything for certain. But his impact was undoubtedly profound. Plato, inspired by his conversations with Pythagorean followers, included a detailed geometric view of the cosmos in his Timaeus. In his model, the world was literally geometry and made up of atomic triangles. Each of the four basic elements, water, earth, fire, and air, gain their properties through the configuration of the triangles within them, and the world as a whole comes out of the interaction of these elements. Modern readers might see this construction as nonsense, but if we remember that the foundation of modern mathematics, Euclid’s elements, had not yet been written it’s much easier to see that the geometric view of the universe in Plato’s Timaeus is at least an attempt to explore the ramifications of a mathematical universe. As mathematics has developed so too have the mathematical models that describe our universe. There is no shortage of such models we could explore. Some are absurd, like Kepler’s early model of the solar system which used platonic solids to describe the orbits of the planets, some are useful, like Brahe’s geocentric model which did accurately predict how certain planets moved but was ultimately proven to be false, and some would fundamentally alter how generations of scientists view the universe, like Einstein’s relativity. So the question remains, is there a correct fundamental model of the universe?

Conclusion

Physicist Max Tegmark takes this idea to its ultimate extreme in his book, “Our Mathematical Universe” where he argues that the universe isn’t just described by a mathematical model, it is a mathematical object. He calls this the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis. “If the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is correct, then our Universe is a mathematical structure, and from its description, an infinitly intelligent mathematician should be able to derive all these physical theories.”

Fundamentally, this is the question that stuck with me into adulthood. Does such a theory exist? I don’t mean does a unified theory of the fundamental physical forces exist? For all I know, Tegmark’s confidence that we will be printing t-shirts with the equations of a unified theory of physics in our lifetime could be correct, but that question doesn’t interest me. Instead, what I’m asking is something more profound. Is there a unified theory of everything? Can a sufficiently powerful, infinite-dimensional, creature derive our universe, everything inside it, and everything it is capable of becoming from a single framework. Thinking back to my childhood both myself and Pythagoras had a similar moment. Reading Kaku gave me a brief moment of enlightenment where I realized that part of the world isn’t random. However, unlike Pythagoras, my religious background prevented me from taking the next step. Just because something is understandable doesn’t imply that everything is. Just because two fundamental forces can be unified in geometry doesn’t mean that all of them can either.

The problem with the mathematical universe hypothesis and the search for a “unified theory of everything” is that neither of them is falsifiable. Sure Pythagorus’ model containing exactly ten celestial bodies is wrong, Newton’s theory describing a static and universal time is wrong, Einstein’s failure to account for electromagnetism and the nuclear forces implies that his theory is at best incomplete, and string theory’s inability to predict any experimental outcome implies that it probably isn’t the final theory either. Yet, none of these precludes the idea that a correct and perfect mathematical model of the universe doesn’t exist. There’s just no way of proving a negative. Worse, the fact that each of these models improves on the previous model implies some sort of forward momentum. Each scientific breakthrough doesn’t invalidate the knowledge gained from the previous model, it merely casts that knowledge from a new perspective, a higher dimension, that lets us see old knowledge along with new knowledge in a common framework. So how do we account for the success of the mathematical sciences without admitting that at some level the universe is mathematical?

What is mathematics if not the language of structure? If I say that 1 + 1 = 2, I am asserting a relationship between these two objects that offer clues as to the structure these objects live in. If this statement is only true sometimes, or in some contexts, then that implies that the rules governing these objects still dictate that 1 + 1 = 2 in such contexts. Thus our knowledge might not be universal, but it still hints at a fundamental nature we still know something about. To begin searching for knowledge we must first admit that such a thing, a stable foundation, exists at all. If the universe exists then it must be true to its own nature. If the universe changes it is not because the nature of the universe has changed, it is because the nature of the universe is to change. If we assume that the universe is true to its own nature and that it follows its own rules then mathematics inevitably leaks out.

At this juncture, we have not built a foundation strong enough to even explore that assumption in full. However, what we can do is explore what it means for something to follow its own rules and to be mathematical. This is where my own personal journey began. If mathematics can generate truth, then what does a mathematical universe look like? What, if anything, can maths tell us about itself.

I discovered physics at a relatively young age and fondly remember reading every book I could find on the subject at the local library; quantum physics, higher dimensions, multiple worlds: this stuff fascinated me to an extent I still can’t fully communicate. I will admit that I didn’t understand the vast majority of what I read; although, at the time understanding wasn’t the point. Instead, I was simply enamoured with the idea of a deeper truth to the universe. The very idea that the world was understandable and that some people held access to it was appealing. I wished more than anything else to be one of those people someday.

I entered my undergraduate degree with the goal of becoming a physicist, but I didn’t make it very far. I got to the third year before finally failing a course and giving up. I can see now that I didn’t really fit into the physics world for two primary reasons. The first was that I misunderstood what physics was about. I thought it would be an opportunity to explore and understand the deeper realities of our world; instead, I found myself involved with a community interested only in creating rigorous mathematical models, concocting experiments to test those models, and modifying the models based on experimental feedback. The entire undergraduate degree being nothing more than a desperate attempt to catch the student up on hundreds of years of mathematical models. No explanation about why these models are important beyond ‘it accurately predicts the outcome of experiments’ was offered or required.

This is not a point of criticism. I accept that teaching is hard and I have no interest in starting a conversation on how to do it better as it really was the second problem that prevented me from working through the first. The year was 2008 and a man by the name of Christopher Hitchens had only the previous year published an influential book by the name of “God is not great”. That book, along with others published around that time, created a movement I would come to know as ‘new atheism’ that was founded on the idea that humans must evolve beyond the need for religion in order to progress. These ideas circulated wildly among the undergraduate physics society during my degree and created a problem for me specifically because I was still working through my own beliefs as a person who identified as an Evangelical Christian.

Clash of Worldviews

My father would later describe the church I attended growing up as a “church people came to when they were fed up with their other churches”. Because of this, it is difficult to categorize the exact theology I was taught. I was exposed to a wide variety of theologies and they all competed equally for my attention. I remember honest conversations about the nature of God, the question of evil, and actual struggles to understand the tragedies that the bible chronicles. Likewise, I also remember being brought into a dark room and solemnly taught the ‘truth’ of revelation while having the entire timeline of the apocalypse laid out before me. I had conversations about determinism, creation, eschatology and the many different ways Christians around the world express their belief. Even though I was immersed in fundamentalist doctrine, I never really fully became a fundamentalist, and indeed never viewed my religion as set in stone, unchanging, or inerrant in any way. If anything, this variety of Christian religious experiences only reinforced in me the idea that God is mysterious; that humans are flawed beings trying in vain to express something that they can’t fully comprehend. I wasn’t blind to the evils in my religion; there were plenty of false prophets, hypocrites, and manipulators. Yet, those too only demonstrated what I now believe to be the bible’s strongest and most consistent message: that whenever humans believed themselves to be closest to God they were instead farthest from him. I was well aware of the crimes of the church and had already spent most of my life passively taking in conversations about the relationship between these crimes, humanity, and religion as a whole. So it was a little jarring being thrust into a social scene who, having had none of these conversations, viewed religion as at best ridiculous and at worst an intellectual disease from which humanity needed saving.

So what was the replacement supposed to be? Well it was science of course, and in the physics world science is just another word for mathematics. Over the course of three years in an undergraduate physics degree I took five courses in calculus, two courses in linear algebra, two courses in complex numbers, and several others I don’t care to list out. The physics courses made even less sense because they were also mathematical courses; they just didn’t begin with a list of axioms and were therefore more confused about what transformations were valid and which were not. We had one token experimental course where we actually ran some of the experiments that physics claimed as their source of truth, but the labs we used were so underfunded and the technicians, us, so poorly trained that our data never aligned with accepted theory. The reports were always a desperate attempt to derive a plausible-sounding narrative out of the random data our experiments generated. All in an attempt to impress whoever marked our work.

The worst part for me was that everything seemed so familiar. Classes didn’t feel all that different from the preachers I grew up with. They would sit in front of the class giving long lectures justifying a conclusion I didn’t understand out of a data source I couldn’t understand. The only difference was that lecturers had whiteboards and preachers had pulpits. These people seemed just as certain in the inerrancy of mathematics to speak the truth about the universe, as my religious friends were in the inerrancy of the bible to do the same. So when I saw my peers talking about the ‘obviousness’ of the nonexistence of God, I couldn’t help but compare them to the other side who talked about the ‘obviousness’ of his existence. It was a debate between people who were so certain that they themselves were correct that they couldn’t possibly see the world through each other’s eyes. Indeed, their certainty required that they never try.

Enter Hitchens

Reading Hitchens today only reinforced my suspicions back then. ‘God is not great’ is a damning catalogue of religion’s many crimes, but its argument against religion relies heavily on the reader’s predisposition to hate religion. He describes in great detail how religion has been, and continues to be, a contributor to warfare, a tool of political control, and a shield protecting history’s most disgusting criminals. Yet, the conclusion implied in the book’s subtitle “how religion ruins everything” that we would be better off without religion isn’t really argued so much as assumed. For example when describing the barbaric practice of female circumcision Hitchens points out that, “No society would tolerate such an insult to its womanhood and therefore to its survival if the foul practice was not holy and sanctified.” Here the subtext is obvious, if religion couldn’t be used as a justification for this horrific attack on women, then the act wouldn’t have happened. He doesn’t go into detail, but the whole statement hinges on a deeply evolutionary argument. Women are necessary for our species to reproduce, so therefore an attack on women is in essence an attack on our ability to reproduce. This behaviour cannot come from an evolutionary standpoint and is therefore not natural. So such an attack can only be possible if something else, something evil, was overriding our fundamentally good nature.

But is this really true? Does removing the justification for a horrific act suddenly prevent the act itself? Unfortunately, Hitchens makes an assumption here that is prevalent in western philosophy; that humans are rational animals, and by rational I mean that we are always acting in such a way as to maximize some internal good. We have an internal model of how we think the world works, we use that model to weigh actions, and then we act on the results. If humans worked this way then yes it would be logical to conclude that getting rid of an incorrect model would force us to seek out a better model, and by extension act better. However, what if the opposite is true? What if our nature is not rational and we instead act first and only search for justification later. If this were the case then getting rid of religion accomplishes nothing. The act would still happen and the culprit would simply corrupt something else to act as justification for the action. This is a point that Hichens all but concedes when he tries to explain away the horrors of the ‘secular’ totalitarian government in Soviet Russia, “Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it.”

What about culture? The line between religion, culture, and ethnicity is something Hitchens never even bothers to address. If we accept that religion is evil then how do we excise it without stripping away a people’s cultural identity? While discussing the ethnic and religious violence in Yugoslavia he comments that “Elsewhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina, especially along the river Drina, whole towns were pillaged and massacred in what the Serbs themselves termed “ethnic cleansing.” In point of fact, “religious cleansing” would have been nearer the mark.” The distinction between ethnicity and religion is of fundamental importance to his argument and yet he fails to elaborate beyond this snide remark. Yet, just as easily as Hitchens can turn the word ethnic into religious the opposite is also true. When discussing Martin Luther King he says that “the examples King gave from the books of Moses were, fortunately for all of us, metaphors and allegories. His most imperative preaching was that of nonviolence. In his version of the story, there are no savage punishments and genocidal bloodlettings. Nor are there cruel commandments about the stoning of children and the burning of witches… If the population had been raised from its mother’s knee to hear the story of Xenophon’s Anabasis, and the long wearying dangerous journey of the Greeks to their triumphant view of the sea, that allegory might have done just as well. As it was, though, the “Good Book” was the only point of reference that everybody had in common.”

Hitchens has already concluded that religion is evil, and so the very fact that King ignored the problematic parts of the passage somehow saves him from being ‘religious’. Instead, any goodness that originated from King must have come from something else. In this case that something else is language and folktales, an important component of what we would call ‘ethnicity’. The people King was talking to were ethnically Christian. The Bible is something they all knew, and when King attached his ideas to something his audience understood he had a better chance of getting those ideas across. In essence, King’s message wasn’t important because of its religious affiliation, it was important because of its ethnic affiliation.

This type of slipper definition is precisely what stood out to me in undergrad, even though I didn’t have the vocabulary to express it at the time. These definitions begin with an absolute statement, “Religion ruins everything”, and when faced with a situation where religion is not ruining everything they must immediately explain why the religion is in fact not a religion. Once again, this is all too familiar because this style of argument is the very glue that holds fundamentalist Christianity together. This is the logic that creates what Hitchens is so desperately trying to destroy.

Negative Morality

Evangelicalism specifically focuses on the gospel of the ‘good news’. It is important that a Christian spread the good news of Christ because we are actively making the lives of those who hear it better. Books like, “Run Baby Run” by Nicky Cruz reinforce this message by painting the secular world as dark and grim. That world is full of gangs, drugs, unfulfilling sex, and extreme and grotesque forms of violence. The way out of this world is through the message of Jesus Christ. Likewise, by definition, none of these things can exist within the Evangelical church as Christians leading better lives is core to the doctrine. We are then stuck in a situation where there is a fundamental disagreement about who gets to be religious. Hitchens argues that good Christians are actually humanists, and Evangelicals argue that bad Christians aren’t actually Christian. Of course, nobody agrees on what is good and what is bad and so nothing is ever decided. Both sides are in effect the same. The argument is simply western thought fighting over its own details. Concepts important to this discussion, such as the distinction between religion and ethnicity or whether God exists in a literal sense, just don’t mean as much in any other context.

All of this leads one way or another to a kind of negative morality. A position where we are focused entirely on the eradication of evil in order to allow good to flourish. If religion ruins everything then by getting rid of it we allow ourselves to return to the rational state it removed us from. If God is good and has rescued us from our sins, then we must destroy these sins so that they can’t capture us again. In both cases, any violence that erupts is a necessary evil that transitions us into a better world. Another important idea in western thought is the inevitable triumph of good over evil. The trope of ‘saving the world’ in one heroic act of justified violence powers a majority of our popular media. The good guy always defeats the villain. The problem though is that the fight between ‘good and evil’ never ends. Once the evil bad is destroyed there is always an eviler bad to follow. Sooner or later the ‘war to end all wars’ simply becomes the ‘previous war to end all wars’. There has never been any scientific evidence that goodness is inevitable.

Atheism was never an alternative to my own religion. I may have had my doubts about my own religion, but it was still obvious to me that jumping from one to the other only replaced one idol with another. I was taught that Christ and his word are truth, and Hitchens believes that science is truth. Yet, what truth was to both didn’t differ, it was a system founded on a single inerrant principle that denied the existence of anything not demonstrable through that system. Yet, here I was seeing both systems and finding both to be equally fascinating and equally flawed. I do not disagree with those who question religion. God doesn’t have to exist, science is a better explanation as to how we got here, and holding a thousand-year-old document as a source of inerrant truth is hard to defend. Yet, it wasn’t any triumph of human rationality that got me to doubt my own religious convictions, instead, it was the idea of negative morality. Why was it that a religion founded on the ‘good news’ of Christ rescuing us from our own corruption was so focused on categorizing said corruption? If God is so powerful, why are we so afraid of evil? Why must the fear of hell power more of my decisions than the love of God? If someone is happy and content with their lives, why must I conclude that they are faking it if they aren’t ashamed of what I am personally labelling as their sin? And the same argument works against people like Hitchens. Why is he so focused on destroying something that he argues does not exist? Why must he continue to believe that religion holds no value when there are clearly billions of people worldwide who are continually attracted to it?

Conclusion

What does it mean for a belief to be true? For that matter what does it even mean for anything to be true? Looking back on all those physics books I read as a child I cannot deny that what drew me to them is the promise of objective reality. There was something out there, independent of me, it had structure, it had order, and it was beautiful. Back then, as today, I believed in objective reality, in objective truth. I believed that truth wasn’t a personal matter, it wasn’t unique to me and didn’t change from person to person. I believed this because it had to be true in order for my own experiences to make sense. If I were somehow capable of making something true for myself then the world would be a fundamentally different place: it would be one where I understood why the people around me reacted to me the way that they did.

One thing both physics and religion had in common was that they both, at least in their teachings, actively encouraged me to seek the truth on my own. The preachers implored me to read the bible and pray to God for wisdom, while the scientists encouraged experimentation as those were repeatable and not beholden to the whims of an individual. What does one do when their personal truth is suspect, but the alternatives are no better? How does one rectify a belief in an objective absolute truth with the realization that my own understanding of that objective reality is clouded by the things that one believes?

Well, I didn’t have an answer back then, and I won’t pretend to have one now. However, the journey I’ve been on since has been an adventure and I’d like to share it with anybody willing to listen.