From deep digital forgery (deep fake) to the digital spread and popularity of “conspiracy theories”; from pathological attachment/addiction to personal remote controls (smart phones) to machine-to-machine communication: the parameters of the wonderful new world intersect in the liquefaction of reality. The belief that “everything is relative” may not be entirely new; what is new are the processes that produce social, perceptual relativity; and those who benefit from it.
Long before “alternative realities” began to be mass-produced, uncertainty was established at the heart of the science that is the matrix and ideal model of all sciences, the science that had previously secured certainty for the one and only reality: physics. Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (1927) and Erwin Schrödinger’s Cat (1935) concerned, of course, the material microscale that emerging quantum physics was trying to understand. However, the view that the observer influences the observed (and consequently, that we cannot assume that anything exists “in itself,” without the influence of our observation) entered the heart of a physics that, since then, began to tend toward metaphysics, despite its increasing technological applications.
In 1950, when the living on the planet were still mourning their dead from the second world war, living with the strong probability of a third thermonuclear one, Einstein, who was not at all friendly with basic principles of quantum physics, wrote to Schrödinger:
…You are the only contemporary physicist, beyond Lowe, who can see that someone cannot simply bypass the issue of reality if they wish to be honest. Most people do not see the dangerous game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established. Their interpretation, however, is contradicted so elegantly by your own system of the radioactive atom + amplifier + Geiger counter + cat in the box, in which the wave function of the system contains both the live cat and the dismembered one. No one can doubt that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the observer’s act…
However, the journey of social beliefs and ideologies in relation to reality and truth in the second half of the 20th century did not follow developments in quantum theory, nor was it inspired by them…
In the brief tribute that follows, we partially trace the genealogy and partially examine the social consequences of the Paradigm Shift, as far as the notions of the “real” are concerned – up to their commodification.
The first text, reality in decline (and in sales), begins in the distant past, when reflection on reality was still a philosophical (or even religious) pursuit.
The second, neuromechanics as generator of reality, focuses on the era of the Second Industrial Revolution, the 20th century, and its dynamic evolution into the 21st.