What is real? How do you define real? If real is what you can see, hear, taste, smell and feel then real is simply electrical signals being interpreted by your brain.
Morpheus: The Matrix
Welcome to The Matrix… More importantly though, as you’re reading this, reality is even more abstract than that. Electric signals are being interpreted by the computer and turned into electromagnetic radiation by the screen, which results in chemical reactions in the eyes and converted to electrical impulses in the optic nerve and only then are the signals being interpreted by your brain. THAT is your “reality”.
Did you keep up with that? Yeah, me neither. I’m assuming that you’re a human reading reality, and therefore that is how your biology works. But the reason I bring this up isn’t to do with human (or indeed non-human) biology, or physics, but more to do with psychology, perception and belief as it pertains to reality. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time and not just because of the Matrix films – although these do give me a great excuse to discuss reality.
Let’s take a step back and think logically for a moment. I’m assuming that you’d never heard of me before reading this, so I have to wonder if I even existed before you started reading today? Or do I only exist BECAUSE you’re reading this and somebody had to be the author. Maybe it sounds stupid but until you heard of me, you couldn’t know that I exist so… Did I exist? Maybe, a little like questioning whether Schrödinger’s Cat is dead or alive, perhaps I both do and don’t exist.
In my reality, until you interact with me, you don’t exist for me so… Who has the better reality? Is your reality better than mine or is mine better than yours? Are they the same perhaps? It’s a bit of an existential crisis really.
How do you reconcile these thoughts? We know that there are roughly 8 billion humans on the planet earth and that is far more than you can imagine even if you know the words. You might be able to name 500 people that you’ve met, you might even get to 1,000 if you push it. You’re not going to name 5,000 people though, and definitely not 5,000 people a million times over. That’s still not much more than half of the population of the world.
I certainly can’t get my head around that many people existing, having hopes, dreams, imaginations and thoughts – it’s so very complicated. Could we be existing in a computer?
Maybe reality is simply what we each believe, because there’s no real way to define it in a testable way. I couldn’t tell you if I was awake or dreaming at any given moment, though I would be confident about being awake after experiencing a dream.
I can’t define reality though I wish I could. Hopefully you’ve found at least found something to think about here, perhaps its thought-provoking. If you’ve got thoughts though, please lets discuss it!