• Question: 1. What is reality? Can we be sure that the world we experience is not just a figment of our imaginations?

    Asked by to Nat, Nate, Roberto, Sam, Sarah on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Roberto Trotta

      Roberto Trotta answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      That’s a GREAT question. Very hard, too.

      The short answer is no, we can’t be sure that what’s out there is not “really” out there.

      In fact, some people believe that we could be all part of a giant simulation, set up by some very advanced civilization for purposes we don’t understand. According to this hypothesis, we are not “really” here, but we are all just part of this incredibly complicated virtual reality game. A bit like the Matrix.

      Why would this be true? At the heart, it’s a complicated argument about probability. Let’s say that you enter a room and find 400 coins on a table, all heads up.

      Which explanation is more probable: that they were all thrown at random and happen to land like this, or that somebody set them up like this for some reason? Clearly, the second one.

      So people argue that it’s more probable for us to be part of a giant simulation (and hence our “reality” does not really exist, nor does our consciousness) than for us to be “really real”.

      But fundamentally we don’t know — we don’t really understand why the Universe looks and behaves the way it does: why are there 3 space dimensions, and not 2, or 4? Why do we have electrons and protons in the Universe, and why do they have the properties that they do? Why are we here? (meaning, why are the laws of physics such that we can be here and talk about them in the first place). We don’t know, and it’s not even clear that those very hard questions are scientific questions in the first place.

    • Photo: Sam Connolly

      Sam Connolly answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      Reality is the world as you experience it, so you can’t really say that it doesn’t exist, because you know it’s happening! Even if we are imagining the world, that still means you must exist in some way, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to be imagining it. Even if what you see isn’t ‘real’, you’re still seeing it, so you must exist! It’s a very philosophical question though, and the fact is that we can’t tell whether what we experience is totally real or not. But the fact that we’re experiencing it at all makes it at least partly real!

    • Photo: Natasha Stephen

      Natasha Stephen answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      Reality is your world around you and everything that you experience within in! Even if we are just imagined or in some kind of ‘matrix’, that reality is still very much real because it is yours, no matter where it is or you are.

      We can’t be 100% sure that our world and our experiences are real, no. That’s part of the mystery of life though and what drives us as human beings, and more specifically scientists, to ask questions and to seek the answers to them! Not knowing where we really came from or where we are going in the future keeps us motivated; questioning the reality around us is just another part of that.

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