# Tagore – Einstein Conversations – Truth is Dependent or Independent of Human Beings

## A Critical Evaluation

(Image Credits: Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute)

## A Different Approach

Anybody can independently determine that $541$ is prime. Even people who never met can rightly agree on mathematical truth. It is possible to know for absolute certainty that the square root of two is irrational. Since you can’t even know for sure if your best friend is really self-aware, or if you are just a brain in a vat, *these* are the beliefs. People still argue that the Earth is flat, but nobody can deny that $2+2=4$

The illusions that are fed to you via your senses might be a reasonable basis for a belief that you can be somewhat confident in if you wish, but that’s all it is — belief. Everything and anything that you think you know about the “real” world is demonstrably built on pure faith.

On the other hand, even if you destroy or erase all light and matter in the universe, $541$ will still be a prime number. Tangible or not — nothing has a more indelible existence than numbers!

The real truth is the domain of mathematics and only mathematics.

The second law of thermodynamics, evolving through a system, inadvertently involves the concept of the arrow of time, also does the Schrödinger equation. In this case, we will consider the first one. Simply, the second law states:

$\frac{dS}{dT}\geqslant 0$

This law shows that phenomenon observed at the macroscopic level is different from that of the microscopic one. As mentioned by F.Alexander Bais, J.Doyne Farmer in The Physics of Information, 2008, the pressure and entropy of gas can be written as:

$P=(\frac{\partial F }{\partial V})_{T}$

$S=(\frac{\partial F }{\partial T})_{V}$

Their paper proves that a system in thermal equilibrium in the entropy is a state variable, which implies that if you travel in a closed path you can return to the same value.
Entropy increases when we move from one state of equilibrium to another, which defines the concept of irreversibility.

Thus, the concept of movement of time depends on the direction of the complexity. Coming back to Einstein’s question: was it that the moon only existed once we defined the moon as a moon? What if we may ask the question, do the Atlantic ocean exist? The obvious answer is a yes. But the question would be doing it exist independent of an observer?

The answer would be no. The observer observes the object and assigns a name, a shape – a material existence to it. A mountain or a ship is composed of atoms and molecules, which, to an observer give the shape of an object. So, a ship, in reality, is not a ship unless to an observer it gives the image of a ship.

The notion of naming and labeling an object here plays a very important role. We find much more details in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein where his sole objective has been language and its connection to reality.