Quantum theory describes a world of which Bohr said we must not speak, but some still wonder what the universe is like in the unmeasured state, when it isn’t being observed:
“Little has been said about the character of the unmeasured state. Since most of reality most of the time dwells in this unmeasured condition …the lack of such a description leaves the majority of the universe … shrouded in mystery.” (Herbert, 1985), p194.
The unmeasured universe is rarely discussed because it is considered unreal, but if the quantum ground generates physical events, it shouldn’t be. Quantum waves spread at light-speed until they overload the network of space in a physical event restart that lets them observe each other. Physical events are then few and far between amidst a constant press of quantum events, so by what logic are they the real universe? Surely reality is what is there most of the time? If the quantum flux is real, the events we see are like bubbles that occasionally appear and disappear.
It also follows that in-between physical events, there is no thing that continues, so the theory that matter is a constantly existing substance is false. The Buddhist statement that physical reality is empty, with no permanence existence in or of itself, is then valid even today.
Why then don’t most people, or scientists at least, see the world that way? One reason is that the gaps between physical events are too fast to observe, or were until recently. For example, we now know that molecules vibrate a million, billion times a second, faster than the eye can see. This is incredibly fast to us but very slow compared to the 1045 quantum events a second that Planck time implies, so what we assume constantly exists is actually a flickering display. The quantum ground flashes visible events faster than we can observe, but relative to itself, they are still rare.
Essentially, the physical world is an ultra-fast 3D hologram, but it still reflects the reality around us, and so satisfies the requirements of a local reality (1.2.6). When you kick a stone, it hurts because the result damages our body. We don’t need to know how this happens to respond to it, so evolution probably primed our species to perceive what we need to survive rather than the truth:
“You may want the truth, but you don’t need the truth. Perceiving truth would drive our species extinct. You need simple icons that show you how to act to stay alive. Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.” (Hoffman, 2020).
Hoffman’s interface theory is that our perceptions are like desktop icons, useful but not true. For example, a blue email icon on a screen doesn’t mean the program causing it is blue, so seeing an object icon on the screen of space doesn’t mean it is caused by objects. Indeed the opposite is expected, as icons protect users from unnecessary details, so if our perceptions are useful icons, they will hide reality from us, as they have for millennia.
Evolution as the struggle to survive then focuses us on the veil of perceptions not the search for truth that is science. Hence humans acquired an intellect to survive in groups, not to understand reality, and the history of science reflects this. For example, we didn’t accept that unseen bacteria cause disease until microscopes let us see them, and when atoms were proposed, Mach opposed them because they couldn’t be seen. Yet today, science accepts atoms, quarks, black holes, and dark matter that no-one can see, so why not quantum waves?
We have come a long way in accepting the unseen but quantum theory is the ultimate frontier, so when it presented scientists with what can never be seen, they turned away. How can physical certainties come from quantum probabilities? Is the answer to life, the universe, and everything just a set of numbers? That the unmanifest causes the manifest is a step too far for physics based on physicalism, so after two thousand years of scientific struggle, it denies its best theory! The failure isn’t intellectual, as physicists calculate quantum equations to many decimal points, but creative, as they can’t comprehend a cause that isn’t physical. The remedy is quantum realism, that quantum events are real, and it has an unlikely precedent, as long ago some of us conceived what most of us today find inconceivable.