Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or may be thought to be.[1] In its widest definition, reality includes everything that is and has being Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective aspects fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living". In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it refers to a discrete life form that has properties of mind (, whether or not it is observable Observation is either an activity of a living being , consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the senses, or the recording of data using scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any data collected during this activity or comprehensible In logic, the comprehension of an object is the totality of intensions, that is, attributes, characters, marks, properties, or qualities, that the object possesses, or else the totality of intensions that are pertinent to the context of a given discussion. This is the correct technical term for the whole collection of intensions of an object, but.
Historically philosophers have sometimes considered reality to include nonexistent things such as 'gold mountains' in a sense referred to as a subsistence, as well. By contrast existence In common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity conditions for objects and properties. Philosophers is often restricted solely to being (compare with nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic).
Hand-coloured Hand-colouring refers to any of a number of methods of manually adding colour to a black-and-white photograph or other image — generally either to heighten its realism or for artistic reasons version of the anonymous wood engraving known as the Flammarion woodcut The Flammarion woodcut is an anonymous wood engraving , so named because its first documented appearance is in Camille Flammarion's 1888 book L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology") (1888).The term reality first appeared in the English language English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into South-East Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria. Following the economic, political, military, scientific, cultural, and colonial influence of Great Britain and the United Kingdom from the 18th century, and of in 1550, originally a legal term in the sense of "fixed property Property is any physical or intangible entity that is owned by a person or jointly by a group of persons. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property has the right to consume, sell, rent, mortgage, transfer, exchange or destroy their property, and/or to exclude others from doing these things. Important widely recognized types of."[2] It originated from the Modern Latin The term New Latin, or Neo-Latin, is used to describe the Latin language used in original works created between c. 1500 and c. 1900. Among other uses, Latin during this period was employed in scholarly and scientific publications. Latin vocabulary words created during this period for the purpose of expressing scientific ideas form the basis for term realitatem, which was from Late Latin Late Latin is the scholarly name for the written Latin of Late Antiquity. The English dictionary definition of Late Latin dates this period from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD. extending in Spain to the 7th. This somewhat ambiguously defined period fits between Classical Latin and Medieval Latin. Although there is no scholarly certainty when realis; the meaning of "real existence" is from 1647 onwards.[2]
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Phenomenological reality
On a much broader and more subjective level, private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and the selectivity involved in personal interpretation of events shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological Phenomenology is a philosophical movement. It was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, expanded together with a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany, and spread across to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work. While this form of reality might be common to others as well, it could at times also be so unique to oneself as to never be experienced or agreed upon by anyone else. Much of the kind of experience deemed spiritual Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of their being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop an individual's inner life; such practices often lead to an occurs on this level of reality.
Phenomenology is a philosophical method Philosophical method is the study of how to do philosophy. A common view among philosophers is that philosophy is distinguished by the methods that philosophers follow in addressing philosophical questions. There is not just one method that philosophers use to answer philosophical questions developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen Göttingen (German pronunciation: [ˈɡœtɪŋən] ; Low German: Chöttingen [ˈçœtɪŋən]) is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686 and Munich Munich (German: München, pronounced [ˈmʏnçən] ; Austro-Bavarian: Minga) is the capital city of Bavaria, Germany. It is located on the River Isar north of the Bavarian Alps. Munich is the third largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg. There are approximately 1.35 million people living within city limits, while the Munich Metropolitan in Germany A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, has been known and documented before AD 100. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted until 1806. During the 16th century, northern Germany became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. As a modern nation-state,. Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's work.
The word phenomenology comes from the Greek Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of phainómenon, meaning "that which appears", and lógos, meaning "study". In Husserl's conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness Consciousness is variously defined as subjective experience, or awareness, or wakefulness, or the executive control system of the mind. It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena. Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note :, and the phenomena A phenomenon , plural phenomena, is any observable occurrence. In popular usage, a phenomenon often refers to an extraordinary event. In scientific usage, a phenomenon is any event that is observable, however commonplace it might be, even if it requires the use of instrumentation to observe it. For example, in physics, a phenomenon may be a which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified "first person First-person narrative is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, who explicitly refers to themselves using words and phrases involving "I" and/or "We" (the first-person plural). This allows the reader or audience to see the point of view (including opinions, thoughts, and feelings) only of the" viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide a firm basis for all human knowledge Knowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject; (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information; or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation, including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science".[3]
Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticised and developed not only by himself, but also by his student and assistant Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger was an influential German philosopher. His best known book, Being and Time, is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger remains controversial due to his involvement with Nazism and statements of support for Adolf Hitler, by existentialists Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, generally held that the focus of philosophical thought should be to deal with the conditions of existence of the individual person and their emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts. The early 19th, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Merleau-Ponty (March 14, 1908 – May 3, 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (who later stated he had been "converted" to Marxism by Merleau-Ponty) and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of, Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, existentialism, and Marxism, and his work continues to influence fields such as Marxist philosophy, sociology and, and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur Paul Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such, he is connected to two other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas (French pronunciation: [leviˈna]; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a Lithuanian-born French philosopher and Talmudic commentator, and Dietrich von Hildebrand Pope John Paul II greatly admired the work of von Hildebrand, remarking once to von Hildebrand's widow, Alice von Hildebrand, "Your husband is one of the great ethicists of the twentieth century." Pope Benedict XVI has a particular admiration and regard for Dietrich von Hildebrand, whom he already knew as a young priest in Munich. In.[4]
Truth
Main article: Truth Truth can have a variety of meanings, from the state of being the case, being in accord with a particular fact or reality, being in accord with the body of real things, events, actuality, or fidelity to an original or to a standard, truth "behind" everything, the ontological truth. In archaic usage it could be fidelity, constancy orThe term truth has no single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories of truth continue to be debated. Metaphysical objectivism Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief in a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Philosophers who profess realism also typically believe that truth consists in a belief's correspondence to reality. We may speak of realism with respect to other minds, the past, holds that truths are independent of our beliefs; except for propositions that are actually about our beliefs or sensations, what is true or false is independent of what we think is true or false. According to some trends in philosophy, such as postmodernism Postmodernism is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus/post-structuralism Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of certain continental philosophers and sociologists who wrote within the tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The movement is difficult to define or summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to structuralism, which argued that some fields of, truth is subjective. When two or more individuals agree upon the interpretation and experience of a particular event, a consensus about an event and its experience begins to be formed. This being common to a few individuals or a larger group, then becomes the "truth" as seen and agreed upon by a certain set of people — the consensus reality Consensus reality is an approach to answering the question "What is real?", a philosophical question, with answers dating back millennia; it is almost invariably used to refer to human consensus reality, though there have been mentions of feline and canine consensus reality. It gives a practical answer - reality is either what exists, or. Thus one particular group In the social sciences a group can be defined as two or more humans who interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and share a common identity. By this definition, society can be viewed as a large group, though most social groups are considerably smaller may have a certain set of agreed-upon truths, while another group might have a different set. This allows different communities In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting species sharing an environment. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness and societies A Society or a human society is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations such as social status, roles and social networks. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals sharing a distinctive culture and institutions. Without an article, the term refers either to the entirety of to have very different notions A notion in philosophy is a reflection in the mind of real objects and phenomena in their essential features and relations. Notions are usually described in terms of scope and content. This is because notions are often created in response to empirical observations of covarying trends among variables of reality and truth about the external world. The religion Religion (from O.Fr. religion "religious community," from L. religionem "respect for what is sacred, reverence for the gods," "obligation, the bond between man and the gods" is the belief in and worship of a god or gods, or more in general a set of beliefs explaining the existence of and giving meaning to the universe, and beliefs of people or communities are one example of this level of socially constructed Social constructionism and social constructivism are sociological theories of knowledge that consider how social phenomena develop in social contexts. Within constructionist thought, a social construction is a concept or practice that is the creation (or artifact) of a particular group reality. Truth cannot simply be considered truth if one speaks and another hears because individual bias and fallibility challenge the idea that certainty or objectivity are easily grasped. For anti-realists In analytic philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification-transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true or false. This latter construal is sometimes expressed by saying "there is no fact of, the inaccessibility of any final, objective truth means that there is no truth beyond the socially accepted consensus. (Although this means there are many truths, not a single truth.)
For realists Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief in a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Philosophers who profess realism also typically believe that truth consists in a belief's correspondence to reality. We may speak of realism with respect to other minds, the past,, the world is a set of definite facts The word fact can refer to verified information about past or present circumstances or events which are presented as objective reality. In science, it means a provable concept., which exist independently of human perceptions ("The world is all that is the case" — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his lifetime. It was an ambitious project, to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. It is recognized as one of the most important philosophical works of the), and these facts are the final arbiter of truth. Michael Dummett Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt is a leading British philosopher. He has both written on the history of analytic philosophy, and made original contributions to the subject, particularly in the areas of philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics. He also devised the Quota Borda system of expresses this in terms of the principle of bivalence:[5] Lady Macbeth Lady Macbeth is a character in Shakespeare's Macbeth . She is the wife to the play's antagonist, Macbeth, a Scottish nobleman. After goading him into committing regicide, she becomes Queen of Scotland, and later suffers pangs of guilt for her part in the crime. She dies off-stage in the last act, an apparent suicide had three children or she did not; a tree falls or it does not. A statement will be true if it corresponds The correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes that world. The theory is opposed to the coherence theory of truth which holds that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by its relations to other statements rather to these facts — even if the correspondence cannot be established. Thus the dispute between the realist and anti-realist conception of truth hinges on reactions to the epistemic Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions: accessibility (knowability, graspability) of facts.
Fact
Refracted sun rising over Virginia Beach Virginia Beach is an independent city located in the Hampton Roads metropolitan area of Virginia, on the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Although Fairfax County is the most populous jurisdiction, Virginia Beach is the most populous city in Virginia and the 41st largest city in the United States, with an estimated population of 44 Main article: FactA fact or factual entity is a phenomenon that is perceived as an elemental principle. It is rarely one that could be subject to personal interpretation. Instead, it is most often an observed phenomenon of the natural world. The proposition that "viewed from most places on Earth, the Sun rises in the east" is a fact. It is a fact for people belonging to any group or nationality, regardless of which language they speak or which part of the hemisphere they come from. The Galilean proposition in support of the Copernican theory, that the sun is the center of the solar system, is one that states the fact of the natural world. However, during his lifetime Galileo was ridiculed for that factual proposition, because far too few people had a consensus about it in order to accept it as a truth,[citation needed] and at the time the Ptolemaic model was just as accurate a predictor. Fewer propositions are factual in content in the world, as compared to the many truths shared by various communities, which are also fewer than the innumerable individual world views. Much of scientific exploration, experimentation, interpretation and analysis is done on this level.
This view of reality is expressed in Philip K. Dick's statement that "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."[6]
What reality might not be
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"Reality," the concept, is contrasted with a wide variety of other concepts, largely depending upon the intellectual discipline. Some believe that it can help to understand what we mean by "reality" to note that what we say is not real because we see it through different perspectives, therefore there is no basis for reality. But usually, if there are no original and related proofs, it isn't reality. Others believe that reality is consistent for all people, and it would be the perceptions and interpretations of this common reality that are different. An example of this is the belief that rain is the work of gods rather than a natural occurrence that has a scientific explanation. The perception and interpretation of rain is that it involves the supernatural, but this belief does not change the fact that rain is caused by water moving from a gaseous state into a liquid state. The reality is consistent, and it is the interpretation that is different, not the cause of the event.
In philosophy, reality is contrasted with nonexistence (penguins do exist; so they are real) and mere possibility (a mountain made of gold is merely possible, but is not known to be real—that is, actual rather than possible—unless one is discovered). Sometimes philosophers speak as though reality is contrasted with existence itself, though ordinary language and many other philosophers would treat these as synonyms. They have in mind the notion that there is a kind of reality — a mental or intentional reality, perhaps — that imaginary objects, such as the aforementioned golden mountain, have. Alexius Meinong is famous, or infamous, for holding that such things have so-called subsistence, and thus a kind of reality, even while they do not actually exist. Most philosophers find the very notion of "subsistence" mysterious and unnecessary, and one of the shibboleths and starting points of 20th century analytic philosophy has been the forceful rejection of the notion of subsistence — of "real" but nonexistent objects.
Some schools of Buddhism hold that reality is something void of description, the formless which forms all illusions or maya. Buddhists hold that we can only discuss objects which are not reality itself and that nothing can be said of reality which is true in any absolute sense. Discussions of a permanent self are necessarily about the reality of self which cannot be pointed to nor described in any way. Similar is the Taoist saying, that the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, or way.
It is worth saying at this point that many philosophers are not content with saying merely what reality is not — some of them have positive theories of what broad categories of objects are real, in addition. (See Ontology as well as Philosophical realism.)
In ethics, political theory, and the arts, reality is often contrasted with what is "ideal".
One of the fundamental issues in ethics is called the is-ought problem, and it can be formulated as follows: "Given our knowledge of the way the world 'is,' how can we know the way the world 'ought to be'?" Most ethical views hold that the world we live in (the real world) is not ideal — and, as such, there is room for improvement.
In the arts there was a broad movement beginning in the 19th century, realism (which led to naturalism), which sought to portray characters, scenes, and so forth, realistically. This was in contrast and reaction to romanticism, which portrayed their subjects idealistically. Commentary about these artistic movements is sometimes put in terms of the contrast between the real and the ideal: on the one hand, the average, ordinary, and natural, and on the other, the superlative, extraordinary, improbable, and sometimes even supernatural. Obviously, when speaking in this sense, "real" (or "realistic") does not have the same meaning as it does when, for example, a philosopher uses the term to distinguish, simply, what exists from what does not exist.
In the arts, and also in ordinary life, the notion of reality (or realism) is also often contrasted with illusion. A painting that precisely indicates the visually appearing shape of a depicted object is said to be realistic in that respect; one that distorts features, as Pablo Picasso's paintings are famous for doing, are said to be unrealistic, and thus some observers will say that they are "not real." But there are also tendencies in the visual arts toward so-called realism and more recently photorealism that invite a different sort of contrast with the real. Trompe-l'œil (French, "fool the eye") paintings render their subjects so "realistically" that the casual observer might temporarily be deceived into thinking that he is seeing something, indeed, real — but is an intentional illusion.
In psychiatry, reality, or rather the idea of being in touch with reality, is integral to the notion of schizophrenia, which has often been defined in part by reference to being "out of touch" with reality. The schizophrenic is said to have hallucinations and delusions which concern people and events that are not "real." However, there is controversy over what is considered "out of touch with reality," particularly due to the noticeable comparison of the process of forcibly institutionalising individuals for expressing their beliefs in society to reality enforcement. The practice's possible covert use as a political tool can perhaps be illustrated by the 18th century psychiatric sentences in the U.S. of black slaves for "crazily" attempting to escape.[citation needed] (See also Anti-psychiatry and one of its prominent figures, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.)
In each of these cases, discussions of reality, or what counts as "real," take on quite different casts; indeed, what we say about reality often depends on what we say it is not.
Reality, world views, and theories of reality
Further information: World viewA common colloquial usage would have reality mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality," as in "My reality is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven."
Reality can be defined in a way that links it to world views or parts of them (conceptual frameworks): Reality is the totality of all things, structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what a world view (whether it be based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately attempts to describe or map.
Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such belief is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in the popular statement, "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with" (Robert Anton Wilson), and they indicate anti-realism — that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not.
Many of the concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially. This idea was elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
Philosophical views of reality
Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality.
On the one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and how they are interrelated. If — what is rarely done — a philosopher wanted to proffer a positive definition of the concept "reality", it would be done under this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw a distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat "is real" the same way they treat "exists", one of the leading questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by analytic philosophers that it is not a property at all, though this view has lost some ground in recent decades.
On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of "reality" often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon (or, to use fashionable jargon, "constructed" out of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as cultural artifacts, such as religions and political movements, on up to the vague notion of a common cultural world view, or Weltanschauung.
The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called realism. More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about "realism about" this and that, such as realism about universals or realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify any class of object, the existence or essential characteristics of which is said not to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or any other human artifact, one can speak of "realism about" that object.
One can also speak of anti-realism about the same objects. Anti-realism is the latest in a long series of terms for views opposed to realism. Perhaps the first was idealism, so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or a product of our ideas. Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. On this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since on Berkeley's view perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By the 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism. Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that advocated by Russell, tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there is no mind or soul over and above such mental events. Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for any view which held that the existence of some object depends upon the mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism, is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are not absolute, but at least partially cultural artifact.
A Correspondence theory of knowledge about what exists claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate correspondence of statements about and images of reality with the actual reality that the statements or images are attempting to represent. For example, the scientific method can verify that a statement is true based on the observable evidence that a thing exists. Many humans can point to the Rocky Mountains and say that this mountain range exists, and continues to exist even if no one is observing it or making statements about it. However, there is nothing that we can observe and name, and then say that it will exist forever. Eternal beings, if they exist, would need to be described by some method other than scientific.[citation needed]
Platonic realism
Main article: Platonic realismPlatonic realism holds that the universals of mathematics do exist in a broad, abstract sense, although not at any spatial or temporal distance from people's bodies. Thus, people cannot see or otherwise come into sensory contact with universals, but in order to conceive of universals, one must be able to conceive of these abstract forms.
Most modern Platonists avoid the possible ambiguity by not attributing material existence to universals, but merely claiming that they are.
Quantum mechanical implications
Further information: Principle of locality, Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Philosophy of physicsQuantum mechanics, a branch of physics founded in the early 20th century, has established a number of counter–intuitive experimental results. This has led some physicists to question what knowledge of reality they can, and cannot, hope to achieve through objective measurement at very small distances (on the scale of Particle physics).
Non-determinism of quantum systems follows directly from the Schrödinger Equation. This equation solves only for probabilities, not for determinate values. For example: a child has $5, and wants to spend $2. The child asks his father how much of the original $5 he will have after spending $2, and the father tells him that he will have $3 remaining. The father is using the arithmetic to offer a determinate prediction, which claims that if you have $5, and you spend $2, you will have $3. It is not possible that you will have $1 remaining, it is not possible that you will have $6 remaining: the amount of the remainder is determined to be $3.
where
-
- is the imaginary unit
- is the wave function, which is the probability amplitude for different configurations of the system.
- is the reduced Planck's constant (often normalized to 1 in natural units).
- is the Hamiltonian operator.
In contrast, if the child asks which side a flipped coin will land on (heads or tails), the answer is different. This answer is probabilistic, in that it is not a specific prediction, but a general claim about the results as a whole: the coin has a 50% chance of landing on heads, and the same chance for tails. Practically speaking, this roughly means that the more times you throw the coin, the closer your heads-tails results will get to being half of one, half of the other. It does not tell you the outcome for any particular coin toss.
Photons as well as other particles, have been shown to possess wave-particle duality, meaning that their probabilistic nature is given by an oscillating probability wave.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Heisenberg's gamma-ray microscope for locating an electron (shown in blue). The incoming gamma ray (shown in green) is scattered by the electron up into the microscope's aperture angle θ. The scattered gamma-ray is shown in red.In quantum physics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. One such pair is position and momentum; it is impossible to simultaneously measure both the position and velocity of a microscopic particle with perfect accuracy or certainty. This is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher's measuring equipment or particular techniques, but rather about the nature of any such system itself; it expresses a property of the universe.[citation needed] See Measurement in Quantum Mechanics.
There are two ways of measuring small particles. Hitting them with one kind of radiation gives more information on their position (at the time of measurement); hitting them with another kind of radiation gives more information on their momentum. The abilities of the two measurements to describe the pre-measurement system vary inversely to one another. Furthermore, the limit cases at each end are also unattainable: we cannot get a precise measurement of either property, for the principle demands that each such measurement would have to indeterminately alter the other.
Such results have led some, such as Amit Goswami, a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of the University of Oregon, to assume that there is no reality existing, independent of our own consciousness as observer. However, there is no clear evidence that human consciousness has any special role to play beyond the influence of instrument-settings on result. These phenomena can also be given the more cautious interpretation that quantum systems do contain properties, but not properties directly corresponding to measurements performed on the system by macroscopic instruments.[7]
Heisenberg's Principle is often misinterpreted as implying that the human act of observing something has some magical, intangible way of changing physical objects. This is not what the principle claims. To measure something about a particle, whether it is that particle's location or its spin, a potential observer needs that particle to be hit by radiation. We do this all the time in our daily lives: we need objects to be hit by light radiation in order to see them; however, on very small particles, such as those that inspired Heisenberg's Principle, even the tiniest, gentlest forms of radiation have a significant effect. Like two pool balls knocking together, the radiation particle would, in hitting the particle to be measured, change the latter's position or momentum or both. In the time it would take for the observer to read the measured results, the particle being measured would have changed from its original state in some significant way.
However, it is not literally the act of observing the measured results that creates this change. Although it would be impossible to know for sure because it would require observing the results, one can assume that any particle hit with similar radiation would be altered similarly, regardless of whether the results were observed or not.
See also
Sources
- ^ Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English, Oxford University Press, 2005. (Full entry for reality: "reality • noun (pl. realities) 1 the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them. 2 a thing that is actually experienced or seen. 3 the quality of being lifelike. 4 the state or quality of having existence or substance.")
- ^ a b Harper, Douglas (2001). "www.etymonline.com". Archived from the original on 2009-07-23. http://web.archive.org/web/20080130032824/www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=reality. Retrieved 2009-06-23.
- ^ Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl, Edition 2, Purdue University Press, 1994, 1557530505, 9781557530509, pg, 311-314
- ^ Husserl, Heidegger, and the space of meaning: paths toward transcendental phenomenology, Steven Galt Crowell, Steven Galt Crowell, Northwestern University Press, 2001, 081011805X, 9780810118058, pg. 160.
- ^ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Michael Dummett
- ^ Greenberg, J., Koole, S. L., & Pyszczynski, T. (2004) Handbook of experimental existential psychology. New York: Guilford. pg. 355.
- ^ Norsen, T. — Against "Realism"
External links
| Find more about Reality on Wikipedia's sister projects: | |
| Definitions from Wiktionary | |
| Textbooks from Wikibooks | |
| Quotations from Wikiquote | |
| Source texts from Wikisource | |
| Images and media from Commons | |
| News stories from Wikinews | |
| Learning resources from Wikiversity | |
- Video: Carl Sagan on the 4th Dimension Explanation
- Video: Animated version of the above with Dr Quantum - Flatland
- Video: Lecture on reality by Alan Watts
- Perceiving Reality : An Interesting look at the nature of existence and purpose in life.
- Phenomenology Online: Materials discussing and exemplifying phenomenological research
- Concept and Reality, a Meditatiion Perspective
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Categories: Reality | Philosophical terminology | Core issues in ethics | Ontology
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Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:48:18 GMT+00:00
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Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:05:19 GM
The Next Food Network Star: Serena Palumbo Elimination Interview.
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Answered by Swallow if you love me! 8==D - Wed Apr 15 21:19:49 2009


