One sometimes thinks about the marvellous structure of reality. Our world is beautifully made. It is amazing how in nature everything is significant, how everything is governed by some underlying principles and the diversity of what is in our world is awesome!
This is all great and all but what exactly is reality? Reality, according to the dictionary, is what is real or existing. Real is defined as ‘actually existing as a thing or occuring as a fact.’ Wrong answer. Wrong question.
I should have asked, what is the general concept of reality; our concept of reality? The above definition of reality surely fits snugly as an answer to this question. Or does it?
Buildings, cars, aeroplanes. Are these real? Of course they are. They are familiar marvels of human ingenuity. What about men with wings(literally) and 7 headed beasts? You would say these are not real. True. But is your (our) answer based on fact or just on the preconcieved idea that reality only includes those things that do not seem absurd; that it includes only familiar things? Final question: are the following real? Unicorns, time slowing down, people walking through walls.
They are real. Some virtual cell biologists are trying to genetically engineer mythical creatures (dragons, unicorns etc) into existence. Time does slow down(relative to observers) when you move at very high speeds. Quantum tunneling implies that if you kept walking into a wall there’s a very small and extremely minute possibility of you walking right through the wall. Had enough? Some more: the universe may have more than 4 dimensions, objects get shorter (relative to observers) when they move very fast, you can never determine the exact position and velocity of any body with certainty……………………………
It is not my aim to exhibit my rather rudimentary knowledge on any of the above. However, it is my aim to point out that what we term as unreal may be very real. In fact, I think that our concept of reality is an illusion; it is a misapprehension of the true state of affairs. Generally our concept of reality only includes things which we are familiar with and don’t term as weird. But as we have seen, you me and the majority of rest of society are mere illusionists.
Our present, misguided concept of reality must change to include even things not conventionally thought of as real but which are really as real as your monitor.
To me, it seems like our concept of reality is an attempt by someone or something (conspiracy theory?) to cover up the real reality. The good news is that this blanket over the real reality is bursting open at the seams, so to speak, as we saw in the above mentioned scientific developments. Never mind that blankets don’t usually have seems.
So, what is really real? I do not know but, as evidenced by recent developments, it looks like some spectacularly weird things could actually be real. And by extension, isn’t it reasonable to assume that some things which we take to be very real might actually not be?
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1. Please follow the links to get even more info on the science mentioned above.
2. If you’re really interested, you might want to read ‘The elegant Universe’ by Brian Greene. Here’s the link.
3. This is somewhat random and not connected in any way to this post: There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.
last comment funny!!!!!