What is reality

This is an update from my book, Quest beyond religion. To inject a dose of the Meitei concept of Reality I am going to start with a Meitei devotional song that I heard 5 decades ago: ‘angakpani Krishna, nanggi maya asi; kanana mapano kanana machano; kanana kanagi channaba oiriba!

This is a Hindu philosophical theme that says the world is an illusion (make-believe) created by Krishna. Translated roughly in English: O Krishna, how awe-inspiring your illusion (maya in Sanskrit) is! Who can tell if the karmic relationship between children and parents or between near and dear ones are all real!

In the Indian philosophical system of Advaita (monism) the world is a non-reality. In monism there is only the Brahma. The external body or the external world is only “Maya” (illusion). There is no such thing as objective reality.

Of course, we know who our parents or friends are. They are not illusions. There are scientific tests to prove that we are all real, but in philosophy this bit of dreamy perception is an evolving thought. Thus many philosophical ideas changed through time over the centuries.

There are different schools of thought or ideas of philosophy developed from different premises and approaches such as rationalism (theories arrived at through logic) or empiricism (theories arrived at through observation).

When I began to study philosophy and religion the word Reality or Ultimate Truth or Absolute Truth often cropped up and that was supposed to mean God. I never quite understood it. Buddhism practised by 376 million and Jain religion practised by 6 million people, do not have a God but they have an ultimate truth or reality for themselves.

If reality is not God then what is it? Nobody knows. Philosophers beginning from the ancient Greeks like Aristotle to Hegel and others kept on arguing among themselves, which has no relevance in a scientific world.

There is a scientific reality that exists. That is the essence of this article. To know what is real one must define what is meant by reality.

We imagine things as the philosophers do except that they think very deeply. The imagination is a simple form of virtual reality eg imagining that there is a God or the world is an illusion, is a virtual reality. Direct experience of the world by our five senses is another form of virtual reality such as the existence of the sun, because we do not experience anything directly. Our experience is generated for us by our unconscious minds from sensory data and the organised brain programmes how to interpret them like a computer.

Since the world woke up to the sound of the drumbeat of the discovery of the scientific universe in 1988 because of Stephen Hawkins’ book ‘A Brief History of Time’, we have witnessed the exploration of reality beyond the relationship of humanity to the Newtonian universe, which was a different reality.

A few highly intelligent ancient philosophers with a seemingly insufficient mindset have been making inquiries for eons about the nature of reality but they always had God as an anchor point, which thus influenced their culture and social construct of reality.

The difference between philosophical thinking and scientific thinking has since been taken up by scientists, from physicists to mathematicians to quantum mechanists. The entire universe, according to Quantum scientists is not real but a holographic illusion. Holography is the science of producing holograms, which allows an image to be recorded in three dimensions.

Mainstream science describes reality as ‘state of things as they actually exist’. Reality is thus simply all the things as they exist and we can observe them by our five senses rather than as they may appear (eg the Sun) or might be imagined (eg God).

Concepts of reality began to change from the time of the Polish astronomer Copernicus who observed that the earth is not the centre of the universe as was believed in the Bible, but instead it revolves around the sun. The reality of medieval insistence of a rational world created by God that shaped the view of reality by scientists and laymen alike persisted until Stephen Hawkins’ A Brief History of Time in the late 20th century. The Hubble Telescope has shown that the universe is expanding and is not static as was believed in medieval times.

The reality concept of God reached its peak when Isaac Newton in the 17th century published his book Principia Mathematica, explaining a model of a mechanical universe with a hand of God in it. The Pope Alexander applauded Newton’s view of reality: “Nature and Newton’s Laws hid in night; God said, let Newton be! And all was light.”

There are many concepts of reality beginning from the ancient notion of God as the ultimate reality or the ultimate energy to the expanding universe, the white Dwarf stars (near the end of its nuclear fuel burning stage) and supernova (the explosive death of stars when they cannot handle their nuclear energy). But broadly speaking, there are two types of reality in the 20th century.

(1) Phenomenological reality. This is based on the concept that whatever we observe is instantly real to us. For example, if you see a bomb explode at Keisampat in Imphal it is real. It is a subjective experience. It means that a spiritual experience like lucid dreams is non-reality. This theory emphasises that unreality is non-existent.

(2) Consensus reality. This is based on the interpretations and opinions of a prominent person or a group of people about an event, which then spreads across entire communities and ultimately becomes a consensual truth. For instance, the Sun was a living God was a reality.

Every human observation or interpretation is tainted by subjectivity and therefore does not constitute the truth. A psychological cataract blinds us to what is real. The proven quantum theory (by Double Split Experiment) states that the concept of reality changes with mere observation.

There are also things which we cannot observe with our eyes but they can be real eg one cannot see DNA molecules, but scientists, Watson and Creek made models of them – the Double Helix of chromosomes - and tested them to see if they successfully work out as they expected them to. If they do they are reality. I have seen a large model in California University in Berkeley.

There are also questions of love and happiness, which are abstract notions but real. You can see that somebody is in love or happy from their expressions and behaviour. But you never see a happy rock or a mountain in love.

There are many ‘realist’ philosophers as well as many ‘anti-realist’ ones. They argue among themselves. They are all abstracts that cannot be proven.

There are also ‘sceptical hypotheses’ that suggest that reality is very different from what we think it is, or at least we cannot prove it is not. It is like saying that there is a God, or at least we cannot prove his non-existence.

Descartes had his ‘Dream argument’. He supposed that reality is indistinguishable from a dream. There is also a more modern ‘simulated reality’ (Matrix hypothesis) that suggests that we might be inside a computer simulation or virtual reality.

The Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras were very intelligent people. They were a bit eccentric but not loopy. And being eccentric, they had strange, non-traditional behaviourisms. They thought and churned out non-traditional answers to dilemmas, which were often gibberish to most people including me.

How can we know something is real? We can’t. What we know is what we have experienced or what we have been told. We know that we do not fly off the face of the Earth because of gravity. This is what we have experienced and what we have been told, but we do not know it is real.

I sometimes suffer from sleep paralysis which is not an uncommon occurrence. It is a very real frightening experience. Normally, when we are asleep and dreaming, our bodies are paralysed. We can have a beautiful dream like rolling down the snowy slope of Gulmarg in Kashmir with Ashwarya Rai (while the body muscles remain paralysed not to act out our dreams; otherwise we will fall out of the bed without Ashwarya Rai). When we are awake the muscles come back to life simultaneously.

But occasionally there is a delay between our brain and our muscles coming back to life (sleep paralysis). In this state we are sort of awake and see our surroundings vividly, usually with a feeling of terrible danger as if an elephant is about to trample us under its foot, until we become fully conscious. This is very real. During sleep the world does not exist for us.

The dream reality is such that some people ‘sleep walk’ when the state of paralysis malfunctions. Something triggers the brain into arousal from deep sleep, so the person is in a transition between sleeping and walking. I had a Parsee class mate in College in Bombay whose 20-year old sister use to sleep walk, opening the latches on doors which had to be kept locked at night.

Sleep walking occurs usually in childhood and people grow out of it but it may persist in adulthood. There are reported cases of people committing murder and rape while sleep-walking.

Now we have ‘scientific realism’ ie the view of the world described by scientists, independent of what we might think or take to be reality, though there are entities that are not directly observable as discussed by scientific theories.

In this sense, reality is an unknown world surrounding us in the universe. All the reality we perceive by our senses is virtual reality, not direct reality. All that we observe is only from the vicinity of the earth in the universe.

I believe the ultimate Truth or Reality is the knowledge of reality that corresponds with the image of actual reality such as the existence of Mount Everest or the existence of the Loktak Lake.

The writer is based in the UK

Email: imsingh@onetel.com

Website: www.drimsingh.co.uk

23-Dec-2012 / 01:08 AM / Dr Irengbam Mohendra Singh / 0 Comments