Think

The "Real" Question

Is our universe real?

This is another fundamental question that the philosophers say we will never find an answer.

Real. This adjective commonly defines the actual existence of a thing or of an occurring fact; we say that something is real if it is not imagined or supposed.

At a first glance questioning whether our universe is real seems pointless. Humans as most of the animals are endowed with five senses which are supposed to give us thorough information about the reality that surrounds us.

Of course that without our senses, we would be completely cut out from what is "outside". We will be unable to see, hear, smell, touch or taste anything. Without our senses we would not even know that we are alive, that we exist.

Our perception of our own existence is our brain making conscious interpretation of the information we first acquire and then exchange with the outside.
Kept in a dark, quiet and senseless state, our brain would be like a sophisticated computer with an empty memory.
Even when turned on, it would be no smarter than an amorphous light bulb.

Our consciousness depends on our senses. Without them we will not be able to feel even our heart beat.

We can conclude that our senses are a bless; they are our "windows" to "reality". Through our senses we can exist, we can know who we are, where we are and so on.

We can sense what is real and what is not.

Having all our senses operational is how we define our normality. A normal stable individual is the one who can hear, see, touch, taste or feel properly.

And consequently we trust the readings of our normally functioning set of senses as indisputable proofs of a concrete reality.

Nevertheless, are they?

How does our sensorial system work? What is the essence of our senses?
This is a question we rarely ask ourselves because we tend the extend the limit of our selves right to the very border of the organs through which we perceive the reality outside our body.
We believe that we sense with our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skins and that is an undeniable fact.

Though it is common knowledge, we cannot fathom the implications of the fact that actually everything that comes from reality to our conscience is conveyed exclusively through a stream of electrical impulses.

More puzzling is another fact: as there is no other "physical" way to convey information from reality to ourselves, we have absolutely no way to double-check the information we receive through our senses.

Our senses are not to much different from a TV or a radio two-way broadcast. We can receive and send information, but never "directly". Every bit of information has to be coded and decoded into a stream of electrical signals.

But how can we tell that what we receive as information about reality is really ... "real"?

How can we be sure that what we receive is the reality? At the end of the day a TV show can be anything; from a "live" transmission, to a recording of a product of someone's imagination. Like a movie or an interactive media such as a computer simulation.

We have no way to know what is at the other end of the "wires" connected to our conscience. And it is very probable that we will never know for sure.

There can very well be exactly what we receive through our senses, but can as well be a sensorial "show" put up by a "production" of crew we may never be able to see.

Therefore we may be trapped behind a sensorial barrier where we can never be sure that what we perceive is real and not the product of a complicated manipulation - a simulation.

Not an new idea! The belief that our universe/world may be a mere simulation has been around for a long time and it is the most common scenario of "unreality" of our world.

As far back in time as the 17th century, the great philosopher Rene Descartes was one of the first to attempt to seek a fundamental set of truths regarding our human mind and the world we perceive around us.

"Never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such" stated Descartes in his writings about his daring quest.

Later, in his book published in Latin, "Meditations on First Philosophy" or "Méditations Metaphysiques" as it was later translated into French, Decartes writes that there is only one thing of which existence we can be sure: the thought. He then summarize his conclusion into one quote which remain famous through history:

Cogito ergo sum! - I think therefore I am!

Taking his conclusion further, Descartes explores the mind-body dualism. The French philosopher questioned whether our perception of the body was the result of an illusion or dream created by a malefic power and concludes:

"The mind is a substance distinct from the body, a substance whose essence is thought."

After Descartes, the Simulation Hypothesis continue to occupy later thinkers minds. Immanuel Kant advocated a doctrine called Transcendental Idealism according to which our understanding is limited and that the reality we see is merely how things appear to us not as they really are.

In his work "Critique of Pure Reason", Kant states that all the objects of a possible experience which can be perceived or intuited in space and in time is a mere representation with no independent, self-subsistent existence other than our thoughts.

Over the ages, the most brilliant thinkers could only conclude that the only certain element of our perception is our reasoning within our minds and that the true nature of the reality can only be speculated.

The classic definition we give to the concept of reality is "as the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them." or "the state or quality of having existence or substance."

But what if we could reconsider the fundamental understanding of the key element of reality. Which is the ... definition of reality itself.

David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher of the 20th century who is best know for his theory he called Modal Realism.

The term "modal" is defined as relating to mode or form as opposed to substance. in logic, modality involves the affirmation of possibility, impossibility, necessity or contingency.

Modal realism offers a different view on "Possible World Realism", a theory of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher of the 18th century who regarded the actual world as merely one among an infinite set of logically possible worlds, some "nearer" to the actual world and some more remote.

David Lewis and later other modal realists argued that if the universe around us seems rational (as opposed to it being dreamy, incoherent, or lawless), then we have no choice but to declare it as being real and genuine.

Moreover, the theory states that everything that's possible is also real and that there are no fundamental differences between actual and non-actual things such as our universe being an actual world and possible universes which are non-actual worlds.

Though not satisfactory to many philosophers, the modal realism theory proposed a solution to the understanding the nature of our universe by redefining the mere concept of reality.

Lewis says that everything that is sustained by reasoning, is real. To support his theory, he draws interesting parallels between the existence of the worlds and the abstract existence of the mathematical constructs. He gives the example of the mathematical sets which, though they were conceived recently in the 19th century, they are now considered objects in their own rights.

And again, while we contemplate the findings of yet another theory attempting to define reality, we realize that the only certain real "thing" amidst the vanishing concreteness of our world is our consciousness which is construct of our power of reason.

Can consciousness be the basis of reality?

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End of The "Real" Question