Apple’s Force Touch Trackpad and Our Perception of Reality

“Everything is relative.”
“Absolutely!”

If you don’t know what a Force Touch Trackpad is, you should go to an Apple Store, or some place where there are new MacBooks, and find both a new MacBook Pro with Retina Screen and a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air. The Retina has the Force Touch Trackpad, the other ones do not. If you have doubts, just open System Preferences and got to the Trackpad pane, it will have special settings for the Force Touch Trackpad. I had to do it, several times. The thing is you can press on those two very different trackpads and they will click, pretty much the same way. I don’t think I could distinguish between them just by touch. What’s the big deal? Well, shutdown, if you can, both computers. Now, the old trackpad in the Air or the Pro will act exactly the same way as before, while the new Force Touch Trackpad will not move at all. It doesn’t click! It’s as solid as the table the MacBooks are on. Apple is using subtle vibration and electronics to trick your brain into thinking that the trackpad is moving, cut the electricity and reality settles in. Or does it?

Our brain doesn’t see things, it doesn’t touch them, nor smell them, neither taste them, nor hear them. Our brain receives and reinterprets the signals sent by the corresponding receptor and reinterprets them all in conjuction to create a consistent picture of the world around us. The Germans have a word for it, of course, Umwelt. Our brain creates that picture to help us. Apple’s Force Touch Trackpad proves it can be tricked into the wrong picture. This proves that there is no way to know if there is even a relation between what the brain perceives and what reality is really like.

One answer could be to say that we can use instruments and measurement to show that the new trackpad is not actually moving, but that just transports the problem to the instruments: How can we be sure they are doing what we think? The only reasonable answer is that we learn how each trackpad works, how each instrument works and convince ourselves that what we perceive is reality. Notice that I am not saying prove to ourselves, I am, very emphatically, saying convince ourselves. We have to make a deal with ourselves and others that what one perceives has a relation with what the other perceives. There are many interpretations of the world, many possible explanations. Some of them, lead us nowhere. For example, nobody can prove that the world wasn’t created 5 seconds before you read this sentence with all the memories and stuff in it, even you remembering reading the words of this article before that sentence. The reason we don’t argue that way is because it will lead us nowhere. There are millions of possible explanations that lead nowhere, that couldn’t even start a conversation. There are just a few that start or advance the conversation. That’s the reason we agree and convince ourselves that the world you perceive has a relation with the one I perceive.

In the case of the Trackpad I can think of only two possible perceptions that would advance the conversation. We either say the new trackpad is moving or we say it isn’t. The experiment of turning it off contradicts the former, so we must accept the latter.