In science, especially in physics, psychology and philosophy, researchers have always been concerned with describing our reality.
Mankind in general has been searching for omni-present & consistent laws to understand and explain the world around them, which implies the thought, that the outside world we subjectively perceive is static and consistent. It’s objective, it is real. This is not a simulation, Neo.
But still, the philosophical question has to be asked:
What do we mean when we speak about the word ‘reality’?
What does real even mean?
We subjectively measure the objective world.
We normally refert to things being real, when we can measure them in some way. For a normal human, this means that we need to see, hear, smell or perceive it in some other sense.
Scientists prove realness by coming up with some sort of design (operationalisation), to measure the existence of ‘some-thing’ and its characteristics.
„[…] we have to remember, that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg, 1989, S. 46).
objective and subjective
These uncertainties may be called objective in so far as they are simply a consequence of the description in terms of classical physics and do not depend on any observer.
They may be called subjective in so far as they refer to our incomplete knowledge of the world. (Heisenberg et al. (1958)
This is a Draft / messy copypasta from my notes
In classical physics, objective reality is considered both local and real, a concept known as local realism.
However, quantum mechanics revolutionized this view, demonstrating that measurement can alter reality. And that reality is not just objective and static – it is not local.
Even Einstein resisted the idea of a indeterministic universe, famously critiquing it in his EPR paper.1
But bell equations changed everything.
If we stick to QM & indeterminism and following the implications of bell equations, we have to give up either locality or realism (with locality being the choice we’d probably want to give up over realism).
This implies that reality is neither purely objective nor static and is fundamentally non-local. Before a system is collapsed it behaves like a probability wave and therefore has many possibilities for realisation.
sources
- Heisenberg, W., & Northrop, F. S. C. (1958). Physics and philosophy: The revolution in modern science (p. 256). New York: Harper.
- Heisenberg, W. (1989). Physics & philosophy. Penguin.
Footnotes
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Read more about in: The most common arguments against QM. ↩