Is there external reality? Of course there's an external reality. The world exists. It's just that we don't see it as it is. We can never see it as it is. In fact, it's even useful
to not see it as it is.

And the reason is because
we have no direct access to that physical world other
than through our senses. And because our senses
conflate multiple aspects of that world, we can never know whether our perceptions are in any way accurate. It's not so much do we
see the world in the way

that it really is, but do we actually even see it accurately? And the answer is no, we don't. However paradoxical it sounds, if we think of what is
visible as just what projects to the eyes, we see much
more than is visible.

Let me give you an example. I walk into a room and
there's graffiti on the wall and imagine it's graffiti
that I find really offensive. I look at it, I flush,
my heart starts to race, I'm outraged, I'm taken aback.

Of course, if I didn't know the language in which it was written,
I could have had exactly the same retinal events and the same events in
my early visual system, without any corresponding reaction. Much more shows up for us
than just what projects

into our nervous system. Our senses are also making up the tastes, odors, and colors that we experience. They're not properties
of an objective reality. They're actually properties of our senses that they're fabricating. By objective reality, I mean,

what most physicists would mean, and that is that something
is objectively real if it would continue to exist, even if there were no
creatures to perceive it. Colors, odors, tastes
and so on are not real in that sense of objective reality.

They are real in a different sense. They're real experiences. Your headache is a real experience, even though it could not exist
without you perceiving it. So it exists in a different way than the objective reality
that physicists talk about.

We always assume that our
senses are telling us the truth. So it was quite a stunning
shock to me when I realized that it's not just
tastes, odors, and colors, that are the fabrications of our senses and are not objectively real.

Space-time itself, and
everything within space-time. Objects, electrons, corks, the sun, the moon, their shapes, their
masses, their velocities, all of these physical properties
are also constructions. Sometimes it's really difficult
for people to understand

that the data that your brain is receiving is meaningless because
when they open their eyes, they look around, they say,
"Well, I see everything. What do you mean it's meaningless?" A really simple example is color. Scientific knowledge of
what light is shows us

that our natural perception
leaves a lot on the table. The human perception of
color is limited really by the principles of quantum mechanics. It's interesting to compare
the human perception of color, to the perception of sound. When you have two pure tones together,

like a C and a G, a simple
chord, that's a fifth. If you hear that, you can
hear the separate tones, even though they're played
together and you hear a chord, you can also sense the separate tones.

Whereas with colors, if you
have two different colors, say spectral green and
spectral red and mix them. What you see is not a chord
where you can see the distinct identities preserved, but
rather an intermediate color.

In fact, you'll see something
that looks like yellow. It's as if in music, when you play a C and a G together, instead of hearing a chord, you just heard the note
E, the intermediate note. So at this most basic level, 

we don't represent even the
information we're getting in any accurate way. And the reason is because it
was useful to see it this way. So what are you seeing
is the utility of the data, not the data. Evolution by natural
selection has shaped us

with perceptions that are
designed to keep us alive. So if I see a snake, don't pick it up. If I see a cliff, don't jump off. If I see a train, don't
step in front of it, 

we have to take our perceptions seriously, but that does not entitle
us to take them literally. Perception itself, a perspective on something
defined by perception is inherently a reduction of
the information of the thing. My perspective of it is going to be

a lot less total information
than the actual thing is. I can look at the object
from the east side or the west side or the
top or the north side or the inside, microscopically,
telescopically, they'll all give me different information.

None will give me the
entirety of the information about the situation. So there is no all
encompassing perspective that gives me all of the information about almost any situation. What this means is that reality itself is transperspectival.

It can't be captured in any perspective. So multiple perspectives have to be taken. All of which will have
some part of the reality, some signal. There may also be distortion. I may be looking at the
thing through a fish-eye lens

or through a colored lens
that creates some distortion. Why does this matter? The ability to take multiple perspectives, to see the partial truth in them, and then to be able to seam
them together into something that isn't a perspective, it's
a transperspective capacity

to hold the relationships
between many perspectives in a way that can inform our choice-making is fundamental to navigating reality well. How is it that we make claims of truth? And how would we begin
to know if what we think is true is actually true.

This is the beginning of
the scientific method. Let us begin with
observation, pose a question, figure out what the hypothesis would be that would answer a particular question, and then figure out how we would begin to address the hypothesis. That is a scientific approach to questions.

that could be addressed
in any number of ways. There is a kind of whispering campaign against the value of objective truth. Science's belief in objective truth works. Engineering technology
based upon the science of objective truth, achieves results. It manages to build planes
that get off the ground.

It manages to send people to the moon and explore Mars with
robotic vehicles on comets. Science works, science
produces antibiotics, vaccines that work. So anybody who chooses to say, "Oh, there's no such thing as objective truth.

It's all subjective, it's
all socially constructed." Tell that to a doctor, tell
that to a space scientist, manifestly science works, and the view that there is no such thing as objective truth doesn't. When you write down the theory,

the theory then becomes your teacher. It becomes smarter than you in a way. When Einstein wrote down the equations of general relativity, he did not know that they entailed the existence of black holes. In that sense, the equations
were smarter than Einstein.

Einstein didn't believe in
black holes for decades. The equations were very
clear that they could exist. Einstein said no. Turned out Einstein was wrong
and the equations were right. So it's very interesting. We do these theories because
we can learn from them.

When you try to address
the nature of things, you may find that asking
different questions requires different ways of processing the underlying reality. For instance, in
understanding the human mind to understand that physically requires one kind of processing. And there's every reason to think

that we already have
fundamental physical laws that are adequate to
that kind of treatment. But to understand how a person works, how thought processes,
moods, and so forth, add up to a personality and a human actor will require quite different
ways of understanding

and quite different ways of processing the underlying information structure.

Is reality real? These neuroscientists don’t think so | Big Think

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인간 인식의 한계와 현실의 본질

외부 현실은 존재하지만 우리의 감각은 그것을 정확하게 표현하지 못합니다.

우리는 현실의 여러 측면을 결합하는 감각을 통하지 않고는 물리적 세계에 직접 접근할 수 없습니다.

우리의 인식은 정확하지 않으며, 눈에 보이는 것 이상을 봅니다.

예시: 불쾌한 낙서에 대한 반응은 시각적 입력뿐만 아니라 언어에 대한 이해에 달려 있습니다.

감각은 맛, 냄새, 색을 만들어내지만 이는 객관적인 현실의 속성이 아닙니다.

객관적 현실과 주관적 현실, 그리고 감각의 역할

시공간과 물리적 속성조차도 우리 감각의 구성물이라는 충격적인 깨달음.

뇌 데이터는 맥락이 없으면 의미가 없으며, 우리의 인식은 중요한 정보를 누락합니다.

화음에서 개별 음색을 구분할 수 있는 소리 인식과 달리 색 인식은 양자역학에 의해 제한됩니다.

색상을 혼합하면 개별 톤의 고유한 정체성을 보존하는 사운드 혼합과 달리 중간 색상이 만들어집니다.

정확한 데이터보다 유용성에 초점을 맞춰 정보를 정확하게 표현하지 않습니다.

다양한 관점과 트랜스스펙티브 현실의 중요성

인식은 문자 그대로 받아들이지 말고 정보를 축소한 것으로 진지하게 받아들여야 합니다.

하나의 관점으로 모든 정보를 파악할 수는 없습니다. 현실은 다각적입니다.

각각 부분적인 진실과 왜곡이 있는 다양한 관점을 고려해야 합니다.

다양한 관점을 통합하는 능력은 현실을 탐색하는 데 매우 중요합니다.

과학적 방법에는 관찰, 질문, 가설 수립 및 테스트가 포함됩니다.

객관적인 진실은 가치가 있으며, 이를 기반으로 한 과학은 결과를 만들어냅니다(공학, 의학).

객관적 진실이 존재하지 않는다는 주장은 과학과 기술의 성공과 모순됩니다.

교사로서의 이론과 현실을 이해하기 위한 다양한 접근 방식

이론은 제작자가 처음 이해한 것 이상의 통찰력을 드러낼 수 있습니다(예: 아인슈타인과 블랙홀).

현실의 다양한 측면을 이해하려면 다양한 처리 방법이 필요합니다.

인간의 마음을 이해하려면 물리 법칙을 이해하는 것과는 다른 방법이 필요합니다.