The Nature Of Reality
The Nature Of Reality
Thoughts on the fabric of the universe
Existential questions like the eternal question of the nature of reality are a black hole of thought and imagination. I am writing these thoughts down simply to organise an incoherent stream of logic that I have been thinking about for years now. While there are many theories that have piqued my interest over time, I have condensed them into the following three broad ideas to bring structure to what may seem like a dim constellation of related thoughts at best.
The Physical And The Immaterial
We often categorise reality as a monolithic construct but what if it was the product of the intersection of two different kinds of realities. The Physical Reality and Immaterial reality. Physical reality refers to reality contained by physics. Immaterial reality refers to reality unconstrained by physics, formless concepts like consciousness and the mind. If physical reality is all that is real then where does the immaterial reality come from? Are the products of reasoning and emotion from our brains detached from physical reality or are they real simply because they are the products of something that is real (our brains)?
What connects the physical and the immaterial? One answer to this question may be Plato’s Realm of Forms. Plato’s forms are the ideals that are abstract, perfect, unchanging concepts that transcend reality. According to Plato, these forms are the perfect versions of their physical counterparts and that physical reality is simply a poor reflection of this realm or what I call immaterial reality. This reality houses concepts like good, bad and morals while the physical reality consists of everything that is observable.
Appearances Can Be Deceiving
Theseus was the mythical king who founded Athens. One of the most famous Greek legends described the story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur in Crete. He returned to Athens from Crete on his ship but over the years after many adventures, the ship had become worn. It required repair that would entail replacing all the wood on the ship one plank at a time. This is where the famous thought experiment ‘Ship of Theseus’ was born. It goes something like this
If every part of the ship was replaced one part at a time, is it the same ship?.
Does what we see with our eyes, hear with our ears, smell with our nose, and taste with our tongue dictate reality? If so, how do we know that what we perceive with our senses is reality and not the easily deceived biological translation of our sensory organs? If we theoretically could observe the repair process from end to end, does the ship of Theseus remain the same ship because we saw it being repaired even though physically not a single part of the ship is the same as the old ship? There is no proof that what we perceive as reality is reality itself since we are reliant on how our sensory organs process the information being provided to them by our surroundings. Two questions arise here, what if the way we process this information is imperfect and not representative of the true nature of reality? and how do we discern if what we perceive as real is actually real other than following blind belief?
An Elaborate Ruse
The Matrix trilogy is really what initiated this train of thought in my mind a decade ago. The thought of reality being an illusion we were being fed while our physical bodies slept in vats seemed horrifying and intriguing at the same time. However, would we really know if we were in a simulation if we are part of the simulation itself?
Due to Moore’s law (Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.), we have observed an astonishing amount of progress in computing power over the past few decades. Today, we have supercomputers powerful enough to compute trillions of operations in a second. The Fugaku Supercomputer in Japan can compute at 442 PetaFLOPS currently which converts to roughly 4.42*10^17 FLOPS (floating-point operations per second). Disregarding the space and energy requirements to compute reality, it is estimated that it would take 10^206 FLOPS to compute all of reality while accounting for spacetime, energy, quantum effects and particles. This means that while the difference in computing power is an incomprehensible 10^189 FLOPS, our progress towards achieving it is non-zero and entirely in the realm of the possible rather than the impossible. If we humans have achieved this much in just a few decades then over a long enough time period(probably millions of years) we may be able to simulate reality itself. And If we humans, creatures who have shed their Neanderthal-like origins relatively recently (in the grand scheme of things) can achieve this so quickly then its safe to assume that a sufficiently advanced civilization beyond the realms of our reality will be able to do the same and we are just a by-product of the very same simulation that allows me to ponder these questions.
One interesting thought to add here is that simulations are always built with constraints in place to keep it contained. If we were indeed living in a simulation then the laws of physics would represent the set of rules that govern our simulated reality. I have always wondered why the fastest known particle in our universe, light, was something we cannot go beyond. From a cosmic perspective, light is awfully slow. The unobservable universe(galaxies whose light hasn’t reached us yet) is estimated to be at least 250 times larger than the observable universe. This means that at any given point in time we can only observe 0.4% of the universe.
Why does such a constraint exist other than to keep us from reaching the boundaries of this perceived reality?
This question or some variation of it has always been the keystone of philosophical thought for centuries. The likes of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle long pondered an answer to this question and came up with their unique solutions to this idea but no one answer has been able to definitively provide the proof of the nature of reality. There exist so many theories, proofs and ideas that attempt to solve this dilemma but none have succeeded so far. The collection of thoughts that I have listed above only serves to explore possible theories that have intrigued me for quite some time. Perhaps it is impossible to arrive at a solution when you exist within the reality you are trying to understand.