Promises, agreements, treaties are real only so long as they can be trusted. Some plans and commitments are called unreal because we know they will come to nothing. To take the big question: is God real? We cannot prove the existence of the electron or alpha particles or even such matters as market forces, compassion or philosophy.
But we see their effects, and assuming they are real makes sense of great swathes of our experience. Our reflections on this lead us to wonder if we can know of the world beyond our perceptions — the underlying cause of our consciousness of appearances. Is reality mental — mind; or is it physical — matter and energy? If mind, is there a deeper consciousness underlying appearances that unites us all and is the source of our conscious thoughts? If matter, can we understand how the play of material objects and forces can give rise to conscious life?
If reality is mental, we might best connect with it by skillful introspection; by a pure, deep, and penetrating way of thought that would see past appearances and show reality directly to the mind. Alternatively we might passively receive, by a process of revelation, a mental image of reality. In revelation, the cosmic mind could speak directly to us, in apparitions or visions. If ultimate reality is instead composed of matter and energy, the method recommended is more empirical; that is, more reliant on the senses.
In science, these statements of laws and proposed facts are subject to criticism and testing by observation and experiment. Revelation resists and endures, because science gives scant comfort to the desire for unification with cosmic reality. But science is relentless, and facts, ultimately, are irresistible. In discussing the nature of reality, we must distinguish between physical reality and immaterial non-physical reality. Physical reality is that which is constrained by physics or physical laws.
Perhaps the best person to relegate this part of the discussion to would be a physicist, since a physicist is probably more qualified in discussing physical reality then an armchair philosopher such as myself. Are concepts such as these just the content of our brains and products of our reasoning and emotions?
If so, then it is probable these concepts are just subjective and thus non-absolute, since the contents of our beliefs is contingent and always changing. Conversely, if there is a separate and distinct non-subjective immaterial reality , and the aforementioned concepts of character, the Good, and morals etc exist as aspects of this reality, then the existence of objective, absolute concepts is possible maybe even necessary , since the nature of reality is not contingent, dependent on subjective opinion.
On the other hand, some questions now arise: if immaterial reality does exist as separate and distinct from physical reality, how would these two realities interact? And is there a distinct nature for logic and mathematics, or for the connections that exists between these realities.
These are questions for the philosopher and physicist to ponder, and perhaps answer, together. I recently uncovered the nature of reality from a man on a flaming pie, who handed me a herbal cigarette. I now know that previously I was a body in a vat being poked by a malignant demon. I was only an ape then, but after millions of years I evolved so that I could have the brain power to lasso the demon with my electrode and thus escape. I was chased by a large white balloon, but made my getaway from the Island.
Since then, I have set up my own very successful religion in the U. Definition 1. Definition 3. The nature of a reality, or of Reality, is a description or explanation of that reality, or of Reality. The nature of reality for the stone is not available to any person, since stones do not speak or understand a language any person can understand.
One way people interact with what becomes is by way of their senses. Another way is by reasoning and feeling, or perhaps by way of intuitions or revelations. An hypothesis which can entertain people is that together all the realities — for stones, for people, for whatever — form a single Reality.
One can then ask whether or not all these realities, the parts of Reality, have something in common. One answer is that they have in common interacting with what becomes.
One can ask further, what is the nature of what becomes? An answer is that what becomes is realities , ie, what becomes consists of interactions with what becomes. That is, the parts of Reality, the realities, interact with each other. Thus Reality is the interaction of realities with each other. A more difficult task would be to explain how one particular reality interacts with another reality, and with all the realities it interacts with. One can then contemplate how all the realities can or might or do or did or will interact with each other.
This is how one can contemplate the nature of Reality. One thing that everyone agrees on — idealists, materialists, dualists — is that there is sense to our question. Another thing all these views share is that we all share the same reality. For example, for Berkeley the nature of my reality and your reality is the same — it is all constructed out of mind-dependent ideas.
We should be wary of the idea that the nature of reality is relative to what someone believes. Suppose I believe that the Earth is flat and you believe it is round. Therefore, the line goes, we have two different realities. This cannot be right, for we are talking about referring to the same thing.
We just differ in our beliefs about it. We can only hope to understand questions about its nature once we admit this. Of course, this rules out solipsism, the view that reality — all of it — is a function of my private experiences.
This view is deeply mistaken, for the beliefs and other mental states the solipsist takes to be the sole furniture of his world depend on there being a shared environment. As Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Strawson have all stressed, the development of language and of thought cannot occur in isolation. With two, at least, in reality, we see that the nature of reality cannot just be how the world seems to any one individual. Read more. It is much harder to work out what it is.
Dig deep enough into the fabric of reality and you eventually hit a seam of pure mathematics, says Amanda Gefter. What we call reality might actually be the output of a program running on a cosmos-sized quantum computer, says Michael Brooks.
Some theories hold that reality and consciousness are one and the same. Is the universe really all inside your head, asks Michael Brooks. A laser beam can be twisted and move like a vortex, and for the first time researchers have made one that has different twists along the length of the beam.
The Late Heavy Bombardment may have stopped on Mars 4. On the other side of the barrier is a screen that records the arrival of the particles say, a photographic plate in the case of photons.
Common sense leads us to expect that photons should go through one slit or the other and pile up behind each slit. Rather, they go to certain parts of the screen and avoid others, creating alternating bands of light and dark. These so-called interference fringes, the kind you get when two sets of waves overlap. When the crests of one wave line up with the crests of another, you get constructive interference bright bands , and when the crests align with troughs you get destructive interference darkness.
The wave function behaves like a wave. It hits the two slits, and new waves emanate from each slit on the other side, spread and eventually interfere with each other. The combined wave function can be used to work out the probabilities of where one might find the photon.
The photon has a high probability of being found where the two wave functions constructively interfere and is unlikely to be found in regions of destructive interference. It goes from being spread out before measurement to peaking at one of those places where the photon materializes upon measurement. This apparent measurement-induced collapse of the wave function is the source of many conceptual difficulties in quantum mechanics.
The photon is not real in the sense that a plane flying from San Francisco to New York is real. In the double-slit experiment done with single photons, all one can do is verify the probabilistic predictions of the mathematics.
Also, there are other ways of interpreting the double-slit experiment. Take the de Broglie-Bohm theory , which says that reality is both wave and particle. A photon heads towards the double slit with a definite position at all times and goes through one slit or the other; so each photon has a trajectory.
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