What is
REALITY?
What is reality? Why don't we understand the world's true nature and can we ever come up with a theory of everything?
It’s the ultimate scientific quest – to understand everything that there is. But the closer we get, the further away it seems. Can we ever get to grips with the true nature of reality? New Scientist 29 January 2020
This project was started in the autum of 2022, to bring together ideas in order to work towards understadning the very nature of reality and how we fit into it.
We experience reality all of the time, but struggle to define reality, let alone understand it.
The Self
Reality seems so solid and yet, when we examine it closely, it melts away like a mirage. We don’t know when it began, how big it is, where it came from and where it is going, and we certainly have no clue why it exists.
The Universe
This project looks at the latest ideas about reality, from our own everyday experience to the fundamental physics that seeks to describe the true nature of the cosmos. The ideas can be dizzying, but there is no greater intellectual challenge than trying to grasp the meaning of everything.
The Theory of Everything
Topics
In the first instsance the three areas of focus will be the nature of conciousness, free will, (do we truly have it?), and physics with respect to understading the nature of reality.
Conciousness
What is it?
Consciousness: (noun) fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world. "consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain"
“Human consciousness is just a tiny region in a vast space of possible consciousnesses.”
“We're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality".
“It may seem as though the self—your self—is the “thing” that does the perceiving. But this is not how things are. The self is another perception, another controlled hallucination, though of a very special kind.”
― Anil Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Free Will
Do we have it?
Free Will: (noun) the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. Similar: Volition, Self-Determinism.
“I was once at an event where my friend and meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein was asked if he believed we have free will. He answered the question with arresting clarity when he said that he couldn’t even figure out what the term could possibly mean. What does it mean to have a will that is free from the cause-and-effect relationships of the universe? As he gestured with his hands dancing above him in the air, trying to point to this imaginary free will, he asked, “How can we even try to picture such a will floating about?”
― Annaka Harris, Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
Physics
What it tells us about reality
Physics: (noun) the branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of matter and energy. The physical properties and phenomena of something. "the physics of plasmas"
"We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.”
― Roger Penrose, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
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