What is Causation? How does Philosophy Illuminate the Physical World? Part 2. What Exists? Part 3. What Things are Real? TV Episode. Part 1. What Things Really Exist? What Are the Things of Existence? No consciousness needed. Conceptually, the idea is to not just put a photon into a superposition of going through two slits at once, but to also put one of the slits in a superposition of being in two locations at once.
According to Penrose, the displaced slit will either stay in superposition or collapse while the photon is in flight, leading to different types of interference patterns. The collapse will depend on the mass of the slits. If nothing else, these experiments are showing that we cannot yet make any claims about the nature of reality, even if the claims are well-motivated mathematically or philosophically. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Credit: Nick Higgins. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. 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. While this is not a full answer to our question, it is a fact we cannot ignore. At the very least, we can now say something of what the nature of reality is not. Reality is the independent nature and existence of everything knowable, whether it is knowable by logical inference, empirical observation, or some other form of experience.
Furthermore, Thomas Aquinas pointed out that our perceptions of the world around us cannot be knowledge , since perceptions can logically contradict each other. Therefore, genuine knowledge of reality would have to be direct knowledge of the object itself. At best, perceptions are not that which we know; rather, perceptions are that by which we know.
While much of reality is a shared conceptualization, a great deal of it is personal to the individual, for reality is how we describe the world: it is how the world seems to us to be. Therefore the foundation of our reality is our language use. We must resist the tendency to think of reality as a fixed state of affairs that language merely identifies or labels.
Reality is the product of language. The concepts we have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world. What we know of the world we can only know through language, and as our language is subject to change, so too is our reality.
The world will not change in the sense that physical objects may come into existence as a result of language use, but our comprehension of our impressions of the world our experiences often change as a result of language.
When Harvey discovered that blood circulates he did not discover red and white corpuscles or plasma. But though corpuscles and plasma existed as part of the perceived world they were not realized. They held no place as conceptual elements of reality. Realization is an act of discovery governed by language use. In this sense, cultural differences in language use often create cultural differences in realities.
New Guinea tribesmen who have only two basic colour words light and dark have a different apprehension of reality to us. They live in the same world we do and they are capable of receiving the same impressions, but their reality is different from Europeans as their language use obliges them to divide the world into different categories.
How does reality appear to us? Dig deep enough into the fabric of reality and you eventually hit a seam of pure mathematics, says Amanda Gefter Read more. Reality: A universe of information What we call reality might actually be the output of a program running on a cosmos-sized quantum computer, says Michael Brooks Read more.
Reality: How does consciousness fit in? Is the universe really all inside your head, asks Michael Brooks Read more. Reality: How can we know it exists? Proving whether or not reality is an illusion is surprisingly difficult Read more.
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