What is reality?

[atrib]

Reality; something that is fundamentally detectable by means of sensors (natural or manufactured), etc.

I agree, and I note that you included the distinction between natural or manufactured. Sometimes that line gets very blurred.

I see reality like a "movie" that is always playing in our head, complete with sight, sound, smell, touch and hearing. Starting at birth, our brains learn how to interpret the constant flow of data from our senses to build this "movie". And we get help from our parents and teachers, who tell us the names of things and describe how they work, so our "movie" matches up with the "movies" playing in other people's heads and we have a common frame of reference to communicate our experiences.

Based on what we know today, the actual universe looks nothing like the movie. The movie is just a crude translation that allows us to function within the universe, to defy the arrow of time for a short period of time so we can make copies of ourselves.

To get poetic again (with apologies to Steve), the movies in our head is how the universe becomes conscious of itself, and tries to comprehend its own existence.

 

[fast]

In the everyday, ordinary sense, reality is whatever we can perceive with our sense. This would include anything we can detect with our nervous system, and anything that we can detect with instruments, which are extensions of our nervous system.

When you use, "is" when you say, "reality is whatever we can perceive [...]," you speak as if you're identifying reality (or using the 'is' of identify), but you're not. You are merely saying something about it. A cat is a feline, but there's more to being a cat than that. Yes, between our biological senses and technological detection devices, we perceive reality. I have no qualms with that slice of truth. My issue is that it falls short of the whole shebang.

There are things that we cannot sense that are nevertheless apart of reality. Of course, we cannot sense things that are not apart of reality. The question becomes, if we cannot sense something, where does the inability lay? Is it because of limited sensory ability or simply because it's not apart of reality? There may be things that are most certainly apart of reality that our senses are ill-equipped to perceive.

 

[steve_bank]

Atrib says reality is what we perceive it to be, assuming perception includes science models like electrons. We have no way of knowing otherwise. That would seem to answer my question.

One thing that does bug me is cosmology that assumes the limits of our observational capacity is the 'universe'.

 

[fast]

There's a play (of sorts) going on with the word, "observable." Things a light year beyond a point on the edge of our observable universe would be observable to an alien race situated a light year closer to the point than us. So, our observable universe is more like a field of view. What's unobservable to us is observable to them. Our knowledge of reality beyond our field of view may be effected, but reality in its truest form remains uneffected by our myopia.

 

[atrib]

There's a play (of sorts) going on with the word, "observable." Things a light year beyond a point on the edge of our observable universe would be observable to an alien race situated a light year closer to the point than us. So, our observable universe is more like a field of view. What's unobservable to us is observable to them. Our knowledge of reality beyond our field of view may be effected, but reality in its truest form remains uneffected by our myopia.

Correct. The universe is what it is, irrespective of whether we can sense it or not. This is why in my first post I made a distinction between our individual realities and the actual reality that is the universe.

Reality is the emergent universe that is developed and perceived by our senses. At the highest level of abstraction, it is the cumulative sum of the responses developed in our brains to stimuli received by our senses, and how these stimuli are interpreted by our nervous system.

At a deeper level of abstraction, reality is the product of the interaction of fields that permeate our universe. Some or many of these interactions can be quantified in predictable ways using the laws of nature, which are models we have developed to describe how the universe works.

 

[steve_bank]

There's a play (of sorts) going on with the word, "observable." Things a light year beyond a point on the edge of our observable universe would be observable to an alien race situated a light year closer to the point than us. So, our observable universe is more like a field of view. What's unobservable to us is observable to them. Our knowledge of reality beyond our field of view may be effected, but reality in its truest form remains uneffected by our myopia.

A cosmology book I read destinguishes between univsere that is observable, and Universe as all that exists.

 

[atrib]

Atrib says reality is what we perceive it to be, assuming perception includes science models like electrons. We have no way of knowing otherwise. That would seem to answer my question.

One thing that does bug me is cosmology that assumes the limits of our observational capacity is the 'universe'.

What we can see with our telescopes makes up our reality. And we can speculate on what we cannot see. Inflationary cosmology predicts the existence of a multiverse which is constantly spawning off bubble universes (of which our visible universe is just one), and propagating in fractal patterns. So we may be dealing with 2 levels of reality that we cannot observe:

1. The part of our own universe that we cannot see because spacetime is expanding and more and more of it is moving beyond our observable horizon, and
2. Other universes, perhaps like our own or perhaps very different, that are forming outside our own little bubble universe in the multiverse.

We have no experiments to verify what the extents of our own universe might be, or confirm the existence of other universes at this time.

 

[atrib]

In the everyday, ordinary sense, reality is whatever we can perceive with our sense. This would include anything we can detect with our nervous system, and anything that we can detect with instruments, which are extensions of our nervous system.

When you use, "is" when you say, "reality is whatever we can perceive [...]," you speak as if you're identifying reality (or using the 'is' of identify), but you're not. You are merely saying something about it. A cat is a feline, but there's more to being a cat than that. Yes, between our biological senses and technological detection devices, we perceive reality. I have no qualms with that slice of truth. My issue is that it falls short of the whole shebang.

I am stating how I define my personal reality in the emergent universe that we experience. Other people are free to define it in their own way. I believe that consciousness is an emergent property of our brains, and that our consciousness allows us to build a "movie" in our heads that simulates the emergent realities we experience. But I don't understand how our brains work at a fundamental level to create this "movie".

There are things that we cannot sense that are nevertheless apart of reality. Of course, we cannot sense things that are not apart of reality. The question becomes, if we cannot sense something, where does the inability lay? Is it because of limited sensory ability or simply because it's not apart of reality? There may be things that are most certainly apart of reality that our senses are ill-equipped to perceive.

I think it is because our sensory abilities are limited, by physics (boundary of the observable universe, inability to travel in time etc), by our evolutionary development, and by the fact that our instruments/experiments are limited in their abilities.

 

[fast]

There's that "my" rearing its head. That we perceive reality is itself apart of reality, but reality as a whole encompasses far more. As I travel up the sanddune and just before I clip the crest of the hill, what awaits me on the other side may not be apart of "my reality" in the sense that I have not perceived what I'm about to, but if what awaits me on the other side of that dune would not be immeniently discovered if it were not already apart of reality as it is.

You talk about "your personal reality." That has no meaningful bearing on reality, which is itself an objective phenomena. Sure, your personal reality is apart of reality, but that's like saying your perception of reality is apart of reality. Yes, it is, but reality (again) is far far more than our perceptions of what is. Reality is, what is. It's all (all) of what is. So, reality is far more (far far more) than our perceptions but also what our perceptions are perceptions of.