On the Plurality Of The Reality
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Reality is not something objective lying out there independent of our consciousness. It is a property that originates in our mind and is ascribed to our experiences, for what is the universe save our own experiences coming from various sense organs and arranged according to our form of consciousness!
No, it's not a gambit on my part to play physics versus philosophy but a clarification of what I meant by drawing a parallelism between the interpretations of quantum physics that forced us to adopt a new paradigm to answer the question "what is reality" and the answers provided to us of the same question in a diffrent mode of thinking dubbed as philosophy or to be precise metaphysics.
I opine that Reality is not something objective lying out there, but it's a subjective property which is ascribed to our experiences given we have a schema to explain our experiences and provide them a coherency.
Further I get amazed by the recurrence of the same results, though diffrent in their forms only, irrespective of the mode of thinking we adopt to contemplate on the nature of reality.
The meaning of the word Reality is very illusive and thus very hard to grasp. This nature of reality is aptly stated by Madhwacharya when he says, 'No sooner than we begin contemplating on realty, it collapses"
We need to understand the meaning and import of his statement rather than treating it as a bombastic nonsense as Bertrand Russel would have treated it.
Why do we measure the quantum objects and phenomena? Is this measurement not a part of contemplation on reality?
Contemplation, does only mean armchair thinking and reaching to a hasty result without going 'out there'?
The physics of rocks and mountains, steam and transformers and lifts and planes and rockets painted us the picture of reality where there existed an objective world independent of our observation. But, then came the physics of atoms and of the subatomic realm and henceforth the world would not exist independent of our observation but in a dialectic interaction of the objective and the subjective; the subjective creating it's own reality out of the realities and the reality creating the subjective.
Bertrand Russel writes, "Science seems to be at war with itself.... Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naive realism to be false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false."
We are a curious being. Our curiosity might be entwined into our very being as the condition of our existence as a species or it might be guided by some supernatural element leading us to our predestined teleological end. Whatever might be the case, we begin our journey by taking the world as we find it, naively and uncritically, but only a few steps and our naive realism, our common sense is contradicted leaving us confounded.
This stage reoccures time and again irrespective of our paradigm adopted to study the reality. The statement "no sooner than we begin contemplating on reality, the reality collapses" should be taken in this context.
Untill the advent of modern physics the naive realism reigned unchallenged leading us to believe that there existed an external world independent of our observation. The implication of such a belief is that there is but a single reality. Then the likes of Feynman opined that at fundamental level the systems have all the possible histories and all the possible states.
The consequences of such statements was to replace our old notion of a single reality with the idea of multiple realities out of which one 'Reality' emerges depending upon our mode of observation.
Stephen Hawking writes, 'the naive view of reality is not compatible with modern physics. To deal with such paradoxes we shall adopt an approach that we call Model Dependent Realism. It is based on the idea that our brain interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of Reality or the Absolute truth. But there may be diffrent ways in which one could model the same physical situstion, with each employing different fundamental concepts and elements. If two such physical theories or models accurately predict the same event, one cannot be said to be more real than other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient."
In our endeavor to understand reality there emerges a pattern. This pattern is present in all modes of thinking, all the models we have adopted so far to understand the reality. The pattern goes like this:
Stage one: A sharp distinction between the subject and the object, between the knower and the known.
At this stage we believe in a single reality; the objects are known by the subjects as they are. This is the stage of Pure Realism.
Classical physics is the example of the Pure Realism.
Gary Zukov writes, "Classical physics means any physics that attempts to explain reality in such a manner that for every element of physical reality there is a corresponding element in the theory."
Stage two: The stage two arises in the backdrop of the inconsistencies found in the stage one. The quintessence of this stage is the establishment of the prominency of the subjective to a little degree over the objective. This is the stage where the importance of our consciousness actively comes to play in the context of ascertaining the nature and character of the Reality. This is the stage at which our investigating discipline begins to adopt the character of Psychology.
The transition of naive realism into representative realism in western philosophical tradition and the criticism of Vaibhsaka school of Buddhism by the Sautrantik school could be taken as the example.
Physics presently is in this second stage otherwise what does the statements like "physics presupposes mind (Rupart Sheldrake)", "--physics becomes psychology (Gary Zukov) and the new paradigm "Model Dependent Realism" mean?
Hawking's model dependent realism logically culminates into denial of realism, the anti-realism.
If we accept the "Model Dependent Realism" of Hawking, that may be the case with reality, we are subscribing to the idea of multiple models of the reality besides our brain actively organising the inputs from the sense organs according to a predetermined plan or the form of our consciousness. The model dependent realism implies that reality is a property that we ascribe to the model or the models of the world given the model or the models satisfactorily accounts for our experiences. This implies that the same phenomena can be described in more than one coherent model.
If more than one model can satisfactorily explain the same phenomena as the model dependent realism suggests then we are left to treat the various physical entities like electron, protron, charge, spin, quarks, gluons, bosons etc only an instrument created by our mind or consciousness through which a model of the physical phenomena is formed. Logically it would mean the end of realism which holds that there lies an external world independent of our consciousness.
The model dependent realism itself in its logical conclusion goes against the very tenants of realism and proves the various entities to be mere an instrument constructed mentally.
But, one may ask that why our brain organises the data that it gets from the sense organs or for that matter can't this process or the brain-sense-
organ complex be explained in terms of the concepts of electron, protron, quraks, spins etc which according to our anti realist position are mere the instruments?
How strange that we are a complex of the instruments we are creating; we really are missing something!
