I feel my fingertips touching a keyboard. Just in front of me I see a computer. But do I? What is a keyboard? What is a computer? What I see are photons that are bouncing off the computer. The computer is really a collection of atoms, consisting mostly of empty space. The computer feels solid enough because of the repulsion of electromagnetic fields. But really it's just a sea of subatomic particles, bouncing a river of photons toward my eyes.
The 'computer' is a concept in my brain, an interpretation, an idea. A model of reality. The particles are the reality, and with quantum mechanics even their reality is a tad "fuzzy". I'm surrounded by a sea of particles and bouncing photons, and for some reason my brain interprets all these things as a computer, a room, a telephone.
I sometimes wonder if how what I see as these objects in any way resembles what others see in their mind's eye when they see the same object. Is what looks 'red' to me really appears 'blue' in another's eye, yet we all say 'red' because we recognize it as such? When we both look at a 'chair', do we really see the same image in each of our brains? Or have our brains simply been trained to recognize 'chair' based on entirely different, but individually recognizable, mental modelings of the same collection of atoms?
The thing we tend to call 'reality' or what we think of as 'reality' is just ideas, nothing more than models in our brain constructed to make sense of the raging sea of particles, photons and bosons that makes up the Universe. It's weird.
The 'computer' is a concept in my brain, an interpretation, an idea. A model of reality. The particles are the reality, and with quantum mechanics even their reality is a tad "fuzzy". I'm surrounded by a sea of particles and bouncing photons, and for some reason my brain interprets all these things as a computer, a room, a telephone.
I sometimes wonder if how what I see as these objects in any way resembles what others see in their mind's eye when they see the same object. Is what looks 'red' to me really appears 'blue' in another's eye, yet we all say 'red' because we recognize it as such? When we both look at a 'chair', do we really see the same image in each of our brains? Or have our brains simply been trained to recognize 'chair' based on entirely different, but individually recognizable, mental modelings of the same collection of atoms?
The thing we tend to call 'reality' or what we think of as 'reality' is just ideas, nothing more than models in our brain constructed to make sense of the raging sea of particles, photons and bosons that makes up the Universe. It's weird.
