Reality

My current view of Reality is a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces, scattered across a table of infinite size. I can see only a few nearby bits of the puzzle’s image. Pieces snap into place by some unseen cosmic hand but I only see those close to me. I am overwhelmed by the number of pieces and the impossibility of finding where each fits. But they do and, in time, a little more of the picture can be made out. And I think, “Of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.”

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality

“Proietti and co’s result suggests that objective reality does not exist. In other words, the experiment suggests that one or more of the assumptions—the idea that there is a reality we can agree on, the idea that we have freedom of choice, or the idea of locality—must be wrong.”

— Technology Review [Additional reading]

What is Reality?

“Emergence theory is a new physics model currently being developed by a Los Angeles based team of scientists. Emergence theory intricately – yet simply – weaves together quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, the standard model and other mainstream physics theories into a complete, fundamental picture of a discretized, self-actualizing universe.”

“Physics allows the possibility that all the energy of the universe can be converted into a single, conscious system that itself is a network of conscious systems. Given enough time, what can happen will eventually happen. By this axiom, universal emergent consciousness has emerged via self-organization somewhere ahead of us in 4D spacetime. And because it is possible, it is inevitable. In fact, according to the evidence of retro-causality time loops, that inevitable future is co-creating us right now just as we are co-creating it.”

Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

Interview with Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.

“Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.” — Physicist John Wheeler

Scott Adams: The user interface to reality

“The so-called ‘truth’ of the universe is irrelevant because our tiny brains aren’t equipped to understand it anyway. […] Our human understanding of reality is like describing an elephant to a space alien by saying an elephant is grey. That is not nearly enough detail. And you have no way to know if the alien perceives color the same way you do. After enduring your inadequate explanation of the elephant, the alien would understand as much about elephants as humans understand about reality. […] Today when I hear people debate the existence of God, it feels exactly like debating whether the software they are using is hosted on Amazon’s servers or Rackspace.”