Related papers: Do We Perceive Reality?
Physical colors, i.e. reflected or emitted lights entering the eyes from a visual environment, are converted into perceived colors sensed by humans by neurophysiological mechanisms. These processes involve both three types of…
The question of what ontological message (if any) is encoded in the formalism of contemporary physics is, to say the least, controversial. The reasons for this state of affairs are psychological and neurobiological. The processes by which…
Richard Feynman famously declared, "I think that I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics." Sean Carroll lamented the persistence of this sentiment in a recent opinion piece entitled, "Even Physicists Don't…
In this article I aim to provide an intuitive and non-technical introduction to decoherence and quantum Darwinism. Together these theories explain how our classical reality emerges from an underlying quantum mechanical description. Here I…
From the premise that an observable is real after it is measured, we envisage a tomography-based protocol that allows us to propose a quantifier for the degree of indefiniteness of an observable given a quantum state. Then, we find that the…
We discuss the nature of reality in the ontological context of Penrose's math-matter-mind triangle. The triangle suggests the circularity of the widespread view that math arises from the mind, the mind arises out of matter, and that matter…
This paper links the conjecture that the physical world is a virtual reality to the findings of modern physics. What is usually the subject of science fiction is here proposed as a scientific theory open to empirical evaluation. We know…
Some unique source -- the world, W -- must underlie all the information realized in the universe throughout time. Perceived reality, R, is a progressively emerging representation of W in the form of the geometrical universe. Time…
The concept of "reality" is often raised in the context of philosophical foundations of physics or interpretations of quantum mechanics. When this term is so raised, it is a warning to me that I am about to be led down a rabbit hole. Such…
The question whether quantum measurements reflect some underlying objective reality has no generally accepted answer. We show that description of such reality is possible under natural conditions such as linearity and causality, although in…
Several new physics experiments in 1998 were performed and analyzed to show the subtlety of quantum theory, including the "wave-particle duality" and the non-separability of two-particle entangled state. Here it is shown that the…
A proper knowledge of the reality of a physical theory is important to get an understanding of empirical phenomena. Despite its extraordinary predictive successes, the orthodox (also known as the Copenhagen) theory provides an indigestible…
Humans possess an intricate and powerful visual system in order to perceive and understand the environing world. Human perception can effortlessly detect and correctly group features in visual data and can even interpret random-dot videos…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
Quantum mechanics is an outstandingly successful description of nature, underpinning fields from biology through chemistry to physics. At its heart is the quantum wavefunction, the central tool for describing quantum systems. Yet it is…
The words: determinism, hidden variables, subjectivism, information, objectivism, informational-theoretic axioms,observers have some connection with physical reality? What we mean with "description" of physical reality? When we say that we…
Despite the extraordinary successes the two great bastions of $20^{th}$ century science (Quantum Theory and General Relativity) are troubled with serious conceptual and mathematical difficulties. As a result, further growth of fundamental…
What exists at the fundamental level of reality? On the standard picture, the fundamental reality contains (among other things) fundamental matter, such as particles, fields, or even the quantum state. Non-fundamental facts are explained by…
It is argued that quantum mechanics follows naturally from the assumptions that there are no fundamental causal laws but only probabilities for physical processes that are constrained by symmetries, and reality is relational in the sense…
Human beings do not observe the world from the outside, but rather are fully embedded in it. The sciences, however, often give the observer both a "god's eye" perspective and substantial a~priori knowledge. Motivated by W. Ross Ashby's…