What is Reality?

Interesting Wikipedia entry. Some excerpts:

1. "Some schools of buddhism hold that reality is something void of description, the formless which gives birth to all forms which are seen as mental illusions or maya. Buddhists hold that we can only point to things and discuss things which are not reality itself and that nothing can be said of reality which is true in any absolute sense ...... ."

2. "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."

3. "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" ...., and they indicate anti-realism, that is, the view that there is no objective reality, whether acknowledged explicitly or not."

4. "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 .... From a phenomenological perspective, reality is that which is phenomenally real and unreality is nonexistent. Individual perception can be based upon an individual's personality, focus and style of attribution, causing him or her to see only what he or she wants to see or believes to be true."

5. "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."

6. "Quantum mechanics (QM) has kept physicists and philosophers in debate on the nature of reality since its invention .... Primarily, one cannot measure the location and velocity of sub-atomic elements such as an electron precisely because the more one looks for the former the less accuracy one can achieve for the latter. This imprecision introduces an uncertainty into the overall state of the system and the necessity of a choice on the part of the one making the measurement, namely which aspect will he find accurately at the cost of the other. This decision on the part of the measurer has created no small problem for objectivists who insist that at its core reality is objectively present whether anyone notices or not. Several experiments such as the double slit and Bell's have confirmed that the simple act of observing does impact the system's state in a noticeable way; since the detector itself has to be changed to detect anything at all, there is necessarily a change in the observed particle because of quantum entanglement. But also the state of correlating particles which have not been measured appears to be affected. Even the notion of cause and effect is brought into question in the quantum world where irreducible randomness cannot currently be avoided as a basic assumption. In theory large numbers of random quantum elements seen as a group from a very great distance can seem like cause and effect which is why our level of experience appears to function almost completely deterministically.

It has led some people to assume that there is no reality existing, independent of our own consciousness as observer."

I like the last part, heheh.

On a separate note, I've been investigating the unusual friendship between David Bohm (the world-famous quantum physicist who contributed to the invention of the world's atomic bomb) and the Indian spiritual guru J Krishnamurti, who was believed by many to be an incarnation of the Maitreya Buddha.

A seemingly unlikely pair, but Bohm and Krishnamurti maintained their friendship over 25 years. Bohm and Krishnamurti exchanged many ideas about the nature of reality. Specifically, the nature of space and time, and ... consciousness. Yeah, as one related package.

I'm still digesting, so I shall not comment too much. Still it is really not that unusual as you might think, for spiritual leaders to end up investigating quantum physics, and for quantum physicists to end up investigating religion. The Dalai Lama and Professor Fred Alan Wolf are two living examples.