Science has long challenged our human tendency to make ourselves the center of things, so:
“Since our earliest ancestors admired the stars, our human egos have suffered a series of blows.” (Tegmark, 2007).
The human ego is the idea we have of ourselves, the set of core beliefs we mean by I, it naturally prefers to be important, but science ignores that.
For example, we once thought we were at the center of the universe and the sun and stars moved around us, so the question “Where are we?” didn’t arise because we already knew the answer. That we were at the center of everything made us feel important, so when Galileo and Copernicus challenged geocentrism, they also challenged the ego idea that things revolve around us. Science now tells us that humanity lives on a little planet, circling a medium star, in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars, in a universe of at least that many galaxies, so we are like a colony of bacteria on one leaf on a tree in a vast forest. Yet this ego blow was the price we paid to understand astronomy.
Human beings also thought they were the center of life on earth and animals and plants were put there just for us, so the question “When did we begin?” didn’t arise because we already knew the answer. That we had always been there made us feel important, so when Darwin challenged creationism, he also challenged our ego idea that life revolves around us. Science now tells us that humans only evolved from animals a few million years ago, after dinosaurs had ruled the earth for two-hundred million years until a meteor wiped them out, so we are just another species, and bacteria, insects, and plants all exceed us in biomass. Yet this ego blow was the price we paid to understand biology.
Today, people often see themselves as being at the center of a brain that controls the body, so the question “Who am I?” doesn’t arise because we already know the answer. That we are a mind that observes and chooses what the body does makes us feel important, so when neuroscientists challenge the dualism that a mind controls the body, they also challenge the ego idea that our bodies revolve around us. Science now tells us that our brain has no central processing unit as a computer does, but is just a set of neural assemblies that coordinate somehow (Chapter 6), so the brain doesn’t support a mental self. Yet this ego blow is the price we are paying to understand the brain.
The trend is clear; our ego assumes that we are central but science repeatedly finds that we aren’t. We aren’t the center of the universe, of life on earth, or even our brain, but old habits die hard. We still think that what we observe is real because we observe it, so the question “What is real?” doesn’t arise because we already know the answer. That we are the knower of reality makes us feel important, so when quantum theory challenges physicalism, it also challenges the ego idea that we know reality. Science is now telling us that the physical world isn’t real because the quantum world causes it, so we are living in a virtual reality. Yet this ego blow is the price we have to pay to understand quantum reality.
These challenges to our illusion of superiority don’t affect what we are but what we think we are, the ego. For example, the illusion of scientific omniscience (Sheldrake, 2012) is the egoism that we already know everything, or soon will. Hence, instead of a theory of everything, which is impossible by Gödel’s proof that all theories are incomplete (Gödel, 1962), science suggests a query of everything that explores the quantum ground underlying the images we see.
Table 1.1 (see Next) compares physical realism and quantum realism, for the reader to compare.