Reality, in everyday usage, means "the state of things as they actually exist". In a sense it is what is real.^[1] The term reality, in its widest sense, includes everything that is In ontology being is anything that can be said to be, either transcendentally or immanently, whether or not it is observable Observation is either an activity of a living being , consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the senses, or the recording of data using scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any datum collected during this activity or comprehensible. Reality in this sense includes being In ontology being is anything that can be said to be, either transcendentally or immanently and sometimes is considered to include nothingness Nothing is a concept that describes the absence of anything at all. Colloquially, the concept is often used to indicate the lack of anything relevant or significant, or to describe a particularly unimportant thing, event, or object. It is contrasted with something and everything. Nothingness is used more specifically as the state of nonexistence, where existence In common usage, existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses, but in philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, and is often contrasted with essence. Philosophers investigate questions such as "What exists?" "How do we know?" "To what extent are the senses a reliable guide to existence?" & is often restricted to being (compare with nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic).

The term 'reality' First appeared in the English language English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries and of the United States since the mid 20th century, it has become the lingua franca in many parts of the world. It is in 1550, originally a legal term in the sense of "fixed property Property is any physical or virtual entity that is owned by an individual or jointly by a group of individuals. An owner of property has the right to consume, sell, rent, mortgage, transfer and exchange his or her property. Important widely-recognized types of property include real property , personal property (physical possessions belonging to an. It originated from the Modern Latin term 'realitatem' which was from Late Latin Vulgar Latin is a blanket term covering the popular dialects and sociolects of the Latin language which diverged from each other in the early Middle Ages, evolving into the Romance languages by the 6th century. Vulgar Latin can also refer to vernacular speech from other periods, including the Classical period,[citation needed] in which case it may 'realis'; The meaning such as "real existence" is from 1647 onwards. ^[2]

Phenomenological reality

On a much broader and more subjective level the private experiences, curiosity, inquiry, and selectivity involved in the personal interpretation of an event shapes reality as seen by one and only one individual and hence is called phenomenological Phenomenology is a philosophical method developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from. This form of reality might be common to others as well, but at times could also be so unique to oneself as to be never experienced or agreed upon by anyone else. Much of the kind of experience deemed spiritual Spirituality is matters of the spirit, a concept often but not necessarily tied to to a spirit world, a multidimensional reality and one or more deities. Spiritual matters regard humankind's ultimate nature and purpose, not as material biological organisms, but as spirits or energy with an eternal relationship beyond the bodily senses, time and occurs on this level of reality.

Phenomenology is a philosophical method Philosophical method is the study of how to do philosophy. A common view among philosophers is that philosophy is distinguished by the methods that philosophers follow in addressing philosophical questions. There is not just one method that philosophers use to answer philosophical questions developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen Göttingen (German pronunciation: [ˈɡœtɪŋən] ; Low German: Chöttingen [ˈçœtɪŋən]) is a college town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686 and Munich Munich (German: München, pronounced [ˈmʏnçən] ; Austro-Bavarian: Minga) is the capital city of Bavaria, Germany. Munich is located on the River Isar north of the Bavarian Alps. Munich is the third largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg. There are approximately 1.36 million inhabitants within Munich in Germany Germany (pronounced /ˈdʒɜrməni/ ), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south. Subsequently, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's work.

"Phenomenology" comes from the Greek words phainómenon, meaning "that which appears", and lógos, meaning "study". In Husserl's conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness Consciousness is often used colloquially to describe being awake and aware—responsive to the environment, in contrast to being asleep or in a coma. In philosophical and scientific discussion, however, the term is restricted to the specific way in which humans are mentally aware in such a way that they distinguish clearly between themselves and, and the phenomena A phenomenon is any observable occurrence. In popular usage, a phenomenon often refers to an extraordinary event. In scientific usage, a phenomenon is any event that is observable, however commonplace it might be, even if it requires the use of instrumentation to observe it. For example, In physics, a phenomenon may be a feature of matter, energy, which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified "first person" viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide a firm basis for all human knowledge Knowledge is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject, (ii) what is known in a particular field or in total; facts and information or (iii) awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation, including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science". ^[3]

Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticised and developed not only by himself, but also by his student and assistant Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger (German pronunciation: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪ̯dɛɡɐ]) was an influential German philosopher. His best known book, Being and Time, is generally considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger remains controversial due to his involvement with Nazism, by existentialists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the, Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre , commonly known as Jean-Paul Sartre, was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, and by other philosophers, such as Paul Ricoeur Paul Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. As such, he is connected to two other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas Emmanuel Levinas (French pronunciation: [leviˈna]; 12 January 1906 - 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher and Talmudic commentator, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. ^[4]

Truth

The term truth has no single definition about which a majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories of truth continue to be debated. Metaphysical objectivism holds that truths are independent of our beliefs; except for propositions that are actually about our beliefs or sensations, what is true or false is independent of what we think is true or false. According to some trends in philosophy, such as postmodernism Postmodernism literally means 'after the modernist movement'. While "modern" itself refers to something "related to the present", the movement of modernism and the following reaction of postmodernism are defined by a set of perspectives. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature,/post-structuralism Post-structuralism encompasses the intellectual developments of certain continental philosophers, sociologists and critical theorists who wrote within the tendencies of twentieth-century French philosophy. The movement is difficult to define or summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to structuralism . Many, truth is subjective. When two or more individuals agree upon the interpretation and experience of a particular event, a consensus about an event and its experience begins to be formed. This being common to a few individuals or a larger group, then becomes the 'truth' as seen and agreed upon by a certain set of people — the consensus reality Consensus reality is an approach to answering the question "What is real?", a profound philosophical question, with answers dating back millennia; it is almost invariably used to refer to human consensus reality, though there have been mentions of feline and canine consensus reality. It gives a practical answer - reality is either what. Thus one particular group A group can be defined as two or more humans that interact with one another, accept expectations and obligations as members of the group, and share a common identity. By this definition, society can be viewed as a large group, though most social groups are considerably smaller may have a certain set of agreed truths, while another group might have a different set of consensual 'truths'. This lets different communities In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing an environment. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness and societies A society is a body of humans generally seen as a community or group of humans - or other organisms of a single species - that is outlined by the bounds of cultural identity, social solidarity, functional interdependence, or eusociality. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals that share a distinctive have varied and extremely different notions A notion in philosophy is a reflection in the mind of real objects and phenomena in their essential features and relations. Notions are usually described in terms of scope and content. This is because notions are often created in response to empirical observations of covarying trends among variables of reality and truth of the external world. The religion A religion is an organized approach to human spirituality which usually encompasses a set of narratives, symbols, beliefs and practices, often with a supernatural or transcendent quality, that give meaning to the practitioner's experiences of life through reference to a higher power, God or gods, or ultimate truth. It may be expressed through and beliefs of people or communities are a fine example of this level of socially constructed A social construction or social construct is any phenomenon "invented" or "constructed" by participants in a particular culture or society, existing because people agree to behave as if it exists or follow certain conventional rules. One example of a social construct is social status. Another example of social construction is 'reality'. Truth cannot simply be considered truth if one speaks and another hears because individual bias and fallibility challenge the idea that certainty or objectivity are easily grasped. For Anti-realists In philosophy, the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification-transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true or false. This latter construal is sometimes expressed by saying "there is no fact of the matter, the inaccessibility of any final, objective truth means that there is no truth beyond the socially-accepted consensus. (Although this means there are truths, not truth).

For realists Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief in a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Philosophers who profess realism also typically believe that truth consists in a belief's correspondence to reality. We may speak of realism with respect to other minds, the past,, the world is a set of definite facts A fact is a pragmatic truth, a statement that can, at least in theory, be checked and either confirmed or denied. Facts are often contrasted with opinions and beliefs, statements which are held to be true, but are not amenable to pragmatic confirmation or denial, which exist independently of human perceptions ("The world is all that is the case" — Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work published by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein during his lifetime. He wrote it as a soldier and a prisoner of war during World War I. First published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, it is now widely considered one of the most important), and these facts are the final arbiter of truth. Michael Dummett Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt is a leading British philosopher. He has both written on the history of analytic philosophy, and made original contributions to the subject, particularly in the areas of philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics. He also devised the Quota Borda system of expresses this in terms of the principle of bivalence^[5]: Lady Macbeth had three children or she did not; a tree falls or it does not. A statement will be true if it corresponds The correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world, and whether it accurately describes that world. The theory is opposed to the coherence theory of truth which holds that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by its relations to other statements rather to these facts — even if the correspondence cannot be established. Thus the dispute between the realist and anti-realist conception of truth hinges on reactions to the epistemic Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims accessibility (knowability, graspability) of facts.

In Hinduism Being-Awareness-Bliss (Sat-chit-ananda) is considered the reality, rest all is maya or non reality.Anything that changes, which has birth (beginning) and so death (end) is not reality. The sun, moon, solar system etc all of these things they change and undergo continuous transformation from one form to another. These things are not real.

Fact

A fact or factual entity is a phenomenon A phenomenon is any observable occurrence. In popular usage, a phenomenon often refers to an extraordinary event. In scientific usage, a phenomenon is any event that is observable, however commonplace it might be, even if it requires the use of instrumentation to observe it. For example, In physics, a phenomenon may be a feature of matter, energy, that is perceived as an elemental principle. It is rarely one that could be subject to personal interpretation. Instead, it is most often an observed phenomenon of the natural world. The proposition 'viewed from most places on Earth, the sun rises in the east', is a fact. It is a fact for people belonging to any group or nationality, regardless of which language they speak or which part of the hemisphere they come from. The Galilean Galileo Galilei was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy," proposition in support of the Copernican Nicolaus Copernicus was the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in 1543 just before he died, is often regarded as the starting point of modern theory The term theory has two broad sets of meanings, one used in the empirical sciences and the other used in philosophy, mathematics, logic, and across other fields in the humanities. There is considerable difference and even dispute across academic disciplines as to the proper usages of the term. What follows is an attempt to describe how the term is, that the sun The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. The Earth and other matter orbit the Sun, which by itself accounts for about 99.86% of the Solar System's mass. The mean distance of the Sun from the Earth is approximately 149,598,000 kilometres (92,956,000 mi), and its light travels this distance in 8 minutes and 19 seconds. But it varies is the center of the solar system The Solar System[a] consists of the Sun and those celestial objects bound to it by gravity, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The Sun's retinue of objects circle it in a nearly flat disc called the ecliptic plane, most of the mass of which is contained within eight relatively, is one that states the fact of the natural world. However, during his lifetime Galileo was ridiculed for that factual proposition, because far too few people had a consensus about it in order to accept it as a truth,^{[citation needed]} and at the time the Ptolemaic model was just as accurate a predictor. Fewer propositions are factual in content in the world, as compared to the many truths shared by various communities, which are also fewer than the innumerable individual worldviews. Much of scientific exploration, experimentation, interpretation and analysis is done on this level.

This view of reality is well expressed by Philip K. Dick's statement that "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."^[6]

What reality might not be

"Reality," the concept, is contrasted with a wide variety of other concepts, largely depending upon the intellectual discipline. It can help us to understand what we mean by "reality" to note that what we say is not real because we see it through different perspectives, therefore there is no basis for reality. But usually if there is no original and related proofs, it isn't reality.

In philosophy, reality is contrasted with nonexistence (penguins do exist; so they are real) and mere possibility (a mountain made of gold is merely possible, but is not known to be real—that is, actual rather than possible—unless one is discovered). Sometimes philosophers speak as though reality is contrasted with existence itself, though ordinary language and many other philosophers would treat these as synonyms. They have in mind the notion that there is a kind of reality — a mental or intentional reality, perhaps — that imaginary objects, such as the aforementioned golden mountain, have. Alexius Meinong is famous, or infamous, for holding that such things have so-called subsistence, and thus a kind of reality, even while they do not actually exist. Most philosophers find the very notion of "subsistence" mysterious and unnecessary, and one of the shibboleths and starting points of 20th century analytic philosophy has been the forceful rejection of the notion of subsistence — of "real" but nonexistent objects.

Some schools of Buddhism hold that reality is something void of description, the formless which forms all illusions or maya. Buddhists hold that we can only discuss objects which are not reality itself and that nothing can be said of reality which is true in any absolute sense. Discussions of a permanent self are necessarily about the reality of self which cannot be pointed to nor described in any way. Similar is the Taoist saying, that the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, or way.

It is worth saying at this point that many philosophers are not content with saying merely what reality is not — some of them have positive theories of what broad categories of objects are real, in addition. See ontology as well as philosophical realism; these topics are also briefly treated below.

In ethics, political theory, and the arts, reality is often contrasted with what is "ideal."

One of the fundamental issues in ethics is called the is-ought problem, and it can be formulated as follows: "Given our knowledge of the way the world 'is,' how can we know the way the world 'ought to be'?" Most ethical views hold that the world we live in (the real world) is not ideal — and, as such, there is room for improvement.

In the arts there was a broad movement beginning in the 19th century, realism (which led to naturalism), which sought to portray characters, scenes, and so forth, realistically. This was in contrast and reaction to romanticism, which portrayed their subjects idealistically. Commentary about these artistic movements is sometimes put in terms of the contrast between the real and the ideal: on the one hand, the average, ordinary, and natural, and on the other, the superlative, extraordinary, improbable, and sometimes even supernatural. Obviously, when speaking in this sense, "real" (or "realistic") does not have the same meaning as it does when, for example, a philosopher uses the term to distinguish, simply, what exists from what does not exist.

In the arts, and also in ordinary life, the notion of reality (or realism) is also often contrasted with illusion. A painting that precisely indicates the visually-appearing shape of a depicted object is said to be realistic in that respect; one that distorts features, as Pablo Picasso's paintings are famous for doing, are said to be unrealistic, and thus some observers will say that they are "not real." But there are also tendencies in the visual arts toward so-called realism and more recently photorealism that invite a different sort of contrast with the real. Trompe-l'œil (French, "fool the eye") paintings render their subjects so "realistically" that the casual observer might temporarily be deceived into thinking that he is seeing something, indeed, real — but in fact, it is merely an illusion, and an intentional one at that.

In psychiatry, reality, or rather the idea of being in touch with reality, is integral to the notion of schizophrenia, which has often been defined in part by reference to being "out of touch" with reality. The schizophrenic is said to have hallucinations and delusions which concern people and events that are not "real." However, there is controversy over what is considered "out of touch with reality," particularly due to the noticeable comparison of the process of forcibly institutionalising individuals for expressing their beliefs in society to reality enforcement. The practice's possible covert use as a political tool can perhaps be illustrated by the 18th century psychiatric sentences in the U.S. of black slaves for 'crazily' attempting to escape. See also anti-psychiatry and one of its prominent figures, the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.

In each of these cases, discussions of reality, or what counts as "real," take on quite different casts; indeed, what we say about reality often depends on what we say it is not.

Reality, Worldviews, and Theories of Reality

A common colloquial usage would have "reality" mean "perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes toward reality," as in "My reality is not your reality." This is often used just as a colloquialism indicating that the parties to a conversation agree, or should agree, not to quibble over deeply different conceptions of what is real. For example, in a religious discussion between friends, one might say (attempting humor), "You might disagree, but in my reality, everyone goes to heaven."

Reality can be defined in a way that links it to worldviews or parts of them (conceptual frameworks): Reality is the totality of all things, structures (actual and conceptual), events (past and present) and phenomena, whether observable or not. It is what a worldview (whether it be based on individual or shared human experience) ultimately attempts to describe or map.

Certain ideas from physics, philosophy, sociology, literary criticism, and other fields shape various theories of reality. One such belief is that there simply and literally is no reality beyond the perceptions or beliefs we each have about reality. Such attitudes are summarized in the popular statement, "Perception is reality" or "Life is how you perceive reality" or "reality is what you can get away with" (Robert Anton Wilson), and they indicate anti-realism - that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not. These topics will be discussed in greater detail below.

Many of the concepts of science and philosophy are often defined culturally and socially. This idea was well elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

Philosophical views of reality

Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality: the nature of reality itself, and the relationship between the mind (as well as language and culture) and reality.

On the one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and how they are interrelated. If — what is rarely done — a philosopher wanted to proffer a positive definition of the concept "reality", it would be done under this heading. As explained above, some philosophers draw a distinction between reality and existence. In fact, many analytic philosophers today tend to avoid the term "real" and "reality" in discussing ontological issues. But for those who would treat "is real" the same way they treat "exists", one of the leading questions of analytic philosophy has been whether existence (or reality) is a property of objects. It has been widely held by analytic philosophers that it is not a property at all, though this view has lost some ground in recent decades.

On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have feet in both metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of "reality" often concern the ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon (or, to use fashionable jargon, "constructed" out of) mental and cultural factors such as perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as cultural artifacts, such as religions and political movements, on up to the vague notion of a common cultural world view, or Weltanschauung.

The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called realism. More specifically, philosophers are given to speaking about "realism about" this and that, such as realism about universals or realism about the external world. Generally, where one can identify any class of object the existence or essential characteristics of which is said not to depend on perceptions, beliefs, language, or any other human artifact, one can speak of "realism about" that object.

One can also speak of anti-realism about the same objects. Anti-realism is the latest in a long series of terms for views opposed to realism. Perhaps the first was idealism, so called because reality was said to be in the mind, or a product of our ideas. Berkeleyan idealism is the view, propounded by the Irish empiricist George Berkeley, that the objects of perception are actually ideas in the mind. On this view, one might be tempted to say that reality is a "mental construct"; this is not quite accurate, however, since on Berkeley's view perceptual ideas are created and coordinated by God. By the 20th century, views similar to Berkeley's were called phenomenalism. Phenomenalism differs from Berkeleyan idealism primarily in that Berkeley believed that minds, or souls, are not merely ideas nor made up of ideas, whereas varieties of phenomenalism, such as that advocated by Russell, tended to go farther to say that the mind itself is merely a collection of perceptions, memories, etc., and that there is no mind or soul over and above such mental events. Finally, anti-realism became a fashionable term for any view which held that the existence of some object depends upon the mind or cultural artifacts. The view that the so-called external world is really merely a social, or cultural, artifact, called social constructionism, is one variety of anti-realism. Cultural relativism is the view that social issues such as morality are not absolute, but at least partially cultural artifact.

A Correspondence theory of knowledge about what exists claims that "true" knowledge of reality represents accurate correspondence of statements about and images of reality with the actual reality that the statements or images are attempting to represent. For example, the scientific method can verify that a statement is true based on the observable evidence that a thing exists. Many humans can point to the Rocky Mountains and say that this mountain range exists, and continues to exist even if no one is observing it or making statements about it. However, there is nothing that we can observe and name, and then say that it will exist forever. Eternal beings, if they exist, would need to be described by some method other than scientific.^{[citation needed]}

Quantum Mechanical Implications

Quantum mechanics, a branch of physics founded in the early 20th century, has established a number of highly counterintuitive experimental results. Some individuals have asserted those results are relevant to a conception of reality. In particular, the experimental data suggests two facts about the universe at very small distances (on the scale of individual protons):

1. first, that the universe is non-deterministic, and
2. second, that the concept of an objective measurement is, strictly speaking, meaningless.

These two truths are interrelated but worthy of separate attention. For those interested only in the philosophical implications, not the details of the physical theory, the following two sections may be skipped.

Non-determinism of quantum systems follows directly from the Schrodinger Equation. This equation solves only for probabilities, not for determinate values. For example: a child has $5, and wants to spend $2. The child asks his father how much of the original $5 he will have after spending $2, and the father tells him that he will have $3 remaining. The father is using the arithmetic to offer a determinate prediction, which claims that if you have $5, and you spend $2, you will have $3. It is not possible that you will have $1 remaining, it is not possible that you will have $6 remaining: the amount of the remainder is determined to be $3.

where

• is the imaginary unit
• is the wave function, which is the probability amplitude for different configurations of the system.
• is the reduced Planck's constant (often normalized to 1 in natural units).
• is the Hamiltonian operator.

By contrast, if the child asks which side a flipped quarter will land on (heads or tails), the answer is different. This answer is probabilistic, in that it is given not in the form of a specific prediction, but in the form of a general claim about the results as a whole: the coin has a 50-50 chance of landing on heads (and the same chance for tails). Practically speaking, this roughly means that the more times you throw the quarter, the closer your heads-tails results will get to being half of one, half of the other. It does not tell you the outcome for any particular coin toss.

Light is both a particle and a wave. What is waving is probability.

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. It is impossible to measure simultaneously both position and velocity of a microscopic particle with any degree of accuracy or certainty. This is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher's ability to measure particular quantities of a system, but rather about the nature of the system itself and hence it expresses a property of the universe.

There are two ways of measuring small particles: Hitting them with one kind of radiation gives more information on their position (at the time) of measurement and hitting them with another kind of radiation gives more information on their momentum. The abilities of the two measurements to describe the pre-measurement system vary inversely to one another. Furthermore, the limit cases at each end are also unattainable: we cannot get, even alone, a measurement of either, for the principle demands that such a measurement would have to 'infinitely' alter the other.

Such results have led some, such as Amit Goswami, a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon, to assume that there is no reality existing, independent of our own consciousness as observer. However, there is no clear evidence that human consciousness has any special role to play beyond the influence of instrument-settings on result. These phenomena can also be given the more cautious interpretation that quantum systems do contain properties, but not properties directly corresponding to measurements performed on the system by macroscopic instruments.^[7]

Heisenberg's Principle is often misinterpreted to mean that the human act of observing something has some magical, intangible way of changing physical objects. This is not what the principle claims. To measure something about a particle, whether it is that particle's location or its spin, a potential observer needs to hit that particle with radiation. We do this all the time in our daily lives: we need to hit objects with light radiation in order to see them; however, on very small particles, such as those that inspired Heisenberg's Principle, even the tiniest, gentlest forms of radiation have a significant effect. Like two pool balls knocking together, the radiation particle would, in hitting the particle to be measured, change the latter's position or momentum or both. In the time it would take for the observer to read the measured results, the particle being measured would have changed from its original state in some significant way.

However, it is not literally the act of observing the measured results that creates this change. Although it would be impossible to know for sure because it would require observing the results, one can assume that any particle hit with similar radiation would be altered similarly, regardless of whether the results were observed or not.

See also

Sources

1. ^ Compact Oxford English Dictionary of Current English, Oxford University Press, 2005 (Full entry for reality: "reality • noun (pl. realities) 1 the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them. 2 a thing that is actually experienced or seen. 3 the quality of being lifelike. 4 the state or quality of having existence or substance.")
2. ^ Harper, Douglas (2001). "www.etymonline.com". Archived from the original on 2009-7-23. http://web.archive.org/web/20080130032824/www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=reality. Retrieved on 2009-06-23.
3. ^ Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl, Edition 2, Purdue University Press, 1994, 1557530505, 9781557530509, pg, 311-314
4. ^ Husserl, Heidegger, and the space of meaning: paths toward transcendental phenomenology, Steven Galt Crowell, Steven Galt Crowell, Northwestern University Press, 2001, 081011805X, 9780810118058, pg. 160
5. ^ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Michael Dummett
6. ^ Greenberg, J., Koole, S. L., & Pyszczynski, T. (2004) Handbook of experimental existential psychology. New York: Guilford. pg. 355.
7. ^ Norsen, T. - Against "Realism"

External links

Textbooks from Wikibooks Quotations from Wikiquote Source texts from Wikisource Images and media from Commons News stories from Wikinews

• Video: Carl Sagan on the 4th Dimension Explanation
• Video: Animated version of the above with Dr Quantum - Flatland
• Video: Lecture on reality by Alan Watts
• Perceiving Reality : An Interesting look at the nature of existence and purpose in life.
• Phenomenology Online: Materials discussing and exemplifying phenomenological research

Categories: Reality | Philosophical terminology | Core issues in ethics | Ontology

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