Related papers: Do We Perceive Reality?
Objective reality and its relation to our perception have been an important topic of debate in philosophy and cognitive science. Hoffman's "interface theory of perception," which asserts that our perception has no congruency with reality,…
This article explores the constraints of perception and cognition in relativistic physics. Describing reality as a cognitive representation of our sensory inputs, the article shows how the limitations in perception translate to the…
The fundamental physical theories that interpret and explain behaviour of matter in nature are dependent on several unobservables and insensibles in their construction. While a rigorous natural philosophy cannot take them for granted, there…
We take our world to be an objective reality, but is it? The assumption that the physical world exists in and of itself has struggled to assimilate the findings of modern physics for some time now. For example, an objective space and time…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Our notions of what is physically 'real' have long been based on the idea that the real is what is immediately apprehended, that is the local or observable, the physically tangible, though there has always been an alternative philosophical…
As illustrated by Schrodingers cat, there are often several macroscopically different versions of reality simultaneously existing in the wave function. On the face of it, this would seem to imply that an observer could perceive a…
Feynman's light microscope invites us to reconsider what we thought we knew about quantum reality. Rather than invoking wavefunction collapse to predict the loss of fringes in a monitored interferometer, Feynman analyzes the problem in…
We revisit the classic signal-to-symbol barrier in light of the remarkable ability of deep neural networks to generate realistic synthetic data. DeepFakes and spoofing highlight the feebleness of the link between physical reality and its…
In this essay, dedicated to the one hundredth anniversary of Hermann Minkowski's talk "Space and Time", I argue that physicists should face the issue of the reality of spacetime and worldtubes of physical objects for two reasons. First,…
Since its emergence, quantum mechanics has been a challenge for an understanding of reality which is based on our intuition in a classical world. Nevertheless, it has often been tried to impose this understanding of reality on quantum…
An investigation of Einstein's ``physical'' reality and the concept of quantum reality in terms of information theory suggests a solution to quantum paradoxes such as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) and the Schroedinger-cat paradoxes.…
This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us…
Humans are able to conceive physical reality by jointly learning different facets thereof. To every pair of notions related to a perceived reality may correspond a mutual relation, which is a notion on its own, but one-level higher. Thus,…
Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
The talk centers around the question: Can general-relativistic description of physical reality be considered complete? On the way I argue how -- unknown to many a physicists, even today -- the ``forty orders of magnitude argument'' against…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
On a scientific meta-level, it is discussed how an overall understanding of the physical universe can be built on the basis of well-proven theories, observations, and recent experiments. In the light of almost a century of struggle to make…
Over the past 25 years, I have been involved in some intriguing developments in the foundations of physics, exploring the quantum reality problem, the relationship between quantum theory and gravity and the interplay between consciousness…