The Reality of the UNIVERSE
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Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it. It is of course all a lot more complex than this, but in the interest of simplicity in essence the idea is that our reality cannot be verified independently as being anything other than existing in our own consciousness and perceptions, and therefore we cannot be certain of anything other than the existence of our own mind.
In this case, not only is reality not what you think it is, but there is no reality at all outside of yourself. Of course there have been many arguments against this line of thinking. For instance, if we were creating reality ourselves, then would it not be more likely that we would make one that was more comforting for us, one in which there is no sickness or punishment, or death? Why should these things happen if it is only us? Also, are we to believe that everything in all of human history and all culture, music, and art as we know it was entirely conjured up by our own mind?
In response, proponents of this philosophy argue that our dreams can often be indistinguishable from reality when we are having them.
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They can be extremely deep, persuasive, realistic, and complex, and are not always good dreams, so could reality not be one giant dream projected by us? In the end, how would we really know the difference?
Reality is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent, as opposed to that which is merely . A recent development is the mathematical universe hypothesis, the theory that only a mathematical world exists, with the finite, physical world. The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal in Natural Philosophy is a non-fiction book by the American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and the.
The idea is to consider a scenario in which, for whatever reason, you actually exist as merely a brain hovering about in a vat and hooked up to machines that feed you everything you experience through your senses, perfectly simulating the outside world as a real body would. The question proposed is this: How would you know that you are nothing more than a disembodied brain floating in a vat of liquid? If everything you experience through the world is through your five senses and a sophisticated computer is manipulating your brain through your neural pathways to have all of these sensations, then how could you reliably know that nothing as you know it is real?
If I know that P, then I know that I am not a brain in a vat 2. I do not know that I am not a brain in a vat 3. Thus, I do not know that P. This thought experiment was most famously used by the popular Matrix series of science fiction films, in which human beings are floating in pods as they live out their lives in an elaborate shared virtual reality created and controlled by our machine overlords.
This is related to another idea that not only could we be just hooked up to machines that generate our reality, but that we might actually do this on purpose. This hypothesis supposes that we are actually living in the far future or are even aliens, and that we have jacked in to this system in order to live our life in this time period and experience living in this form through a simulated avatar within an interactive virtual world, after which we wake up into our real bodies in the future or aboard some spaceship when it is over.
It has even been suggested that time could pass much more slowly within the simulation, so a full year life could pass from birth to death in the simulation, yet our real bodies will have only been hooked in for a few minutes. Speaking of computer simulated realities, another theory of reality is that all of us and everything we see is nothing more than a very advanced computer generated reality and that we are all programs living within it, which it is a topic I have covered here before.
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According to Bostrom, there will come a day when we have the technology to create a fully functional digital world, which would then progress to the point when it could feasibly create a simulation of its own within the simulation and so on ad infinitum. Since it is almost a certainty that we will one day create this virtual reality, that it could increase in sophistication to build its own computer realities, and considering it could potentially go on and on infinitely, the idea is that statistically speaking we are far more likely to be one of the simulations rather than the original biological originators.
Lee Smolin and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the early modern period 17th and 18th centuries , the system-building scope of philosophy is often linked to the rationalist method of philosophy, that is the technique of deducing the nature of the world by pure a priori reason. Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science perhaps ideal science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be. Current candidates for a theory of everything include string theory , M theory , and loop quantum gravity. Only when we understand becoming from the perspective of relational time can we subject it to a dynamics that is internal to the universe.
Indeed, the original creators could even be long extinct. It is even proposed that our simulation may be being watched and studied by either the original creators, another simulation that created us, or even aliens. As far-fetched as this may all sound the idea has caught on, and many philosophers, scientists, physicists, and technologists have at least entertained this weird possibility, with some of them having even gone about trying to scientifically investigate whether the hypothesis could have any truth to it.
One way of possibly testing the Simulation Theory is the idea that if we are indeed living in a computer simulation, then we could expect that there would be a limit to the resolution of the program. Some teams of scientists suggest that this resolution could feasibly be detected by scientific means, and have made efforts towards this, with various degrees of success so far.
In addition to the idea that everything might be a computer simulation is the idea that the universe itself is the computer. This is the rather sensational claim made by Vlatko Vedral, who is a professor of quantum information theory at Oxford. In a computer, these bits represent simple yes-or-no questions, in computers being expressed as ones and zeros.
One very odd theory is that the universe that we see is in fact all an intricate hologram. The idea was put forth by physicist Leonard Susskind in the s, who realized that many of our laws of physics seem to be mathematically described in two dimensions rather than three.
Although it is very complex and difficult to explain in simple terms, the main thrust of this idea is that our 3D reality is all contained upon a 2-dimensional outer surface, which is then projected through various processes to create our perception of reality, creating a massive and highly complex hologram. It is in its most basic terms actually very similar to how a 3D screen would work, with a 2D image manipulated to give it the illusion of having the dimension of depth. The complicated concept was explained by mathematics professor Kostas Skenderis, of the University of Southampton thus:.
Imagine that everything you see, feel and hear in three dimensions and your perception of time in fact emanates from a flat two-dimensional field. The idea is similar to that of ordinary holograms where a three-dimensional image is encoded in a two-dimensional surface, such as in the hologram on a credit card. However, this time, the entire universe is encoded! Holography is a huge leap forward in the way we think about the structure and creation of the universe.
Please visit our Video FAQ page. Downsizing the Andromeda Galaxy. The Most Distant Quasar. The Real Reality Show: Earth Is Not Flat. Astronomy Messier Flashcards Set. Mercury Globe from Astronomy magazine.
Bizarre Theories on the Nature of Reality
The Milky Way Inside and Out. Venus Globe from Astronomy magazine. Mars Globe from Astronomy magazine. Astronomy Crab Nebula Jigsaw Puzzle.
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