Many a great men have spent their entire lives contemplating about the nature of reality. We have been doing this since times unknown and it seems like each time we venture inside this rabbit hole, we come out with more questions than we began.
The lives of several great philosophers stand testament to just how elusive the understanding of reality can be. It is like the fountain of youth that just doesn’t want to be found.
Now, you might be thinking to yourself what in the heck’s name I am going on about. After all, you have to but open a dictionary to know the meaning of reality which is ‘the state of things as they actually exist.’ Therefore, you would not be wrong in saying that the pursuit of its understanding is meaningless.
But I want to ask you something. Does knowing the meaning of something equate its understanding? I know the meaning of electricity, and yet I do not understand its workings. The same goes for reality.
One might also argue that this is something that we are merely being too philosophical about when there is no need to be as we can literally see, smell, hear and touch everything around us. If reality wasn’t real, how could we even do that?
But again, I would like to ask you. Are you sure you can see, smell, hear everything? Isn’t anything outside of your perception? Well, let me shift from philosophy to science for a bit.
Our Perception of Reality Is Limited By Our Sensory Organs
Did you know that the entirety of what we see (all the colours) forms only a small portion of the infinite vibrational frequency spectrum? That means we can’t even see most of the ‘light’.
There are gamma rays, x-rays, radio waves, UV rays, infrared and microwaves, that form a major portion of reality and yet we simply can’t perceive them.
If it was not for science, we would be looking at the universe through only a very small keyhole and our understanding would be much less than what it is (which is not too much anyways).
Then there are sound waves. We can only hear the world between 20 to 20,000 Hz. Anything above or below that range is inaudible. Hence, we are missing out on another large portion of reality.
The same goes for our other senses.
We Know Only 4% The Universe
Dark matter and dark energy have been in the news a lot recently which is quite natural as we have just intensified our efforts to understand them. What is dark matter and energy, you ask?
Why, it is the stuff 96% of the universe is made of and we have absolutely no way of seeing them, detecting them or even comprehending them.
That’s correct. All the galaxies in the universe, all the stars, planets, moons, every single atom form only 4% of the universe that is actually there. The rest of it is made up of something that our feeble minds have not been able to even begin to understand yet.
So, I think I can safely say that reality is not all that it seems.
What If We Are Inside Someone's Game?
Have you played an open world game? Some of my favourites are Minecraft, GTA San Andreas and others. Open world games have worlds much like ours where there are countless people just roaming around doing what they are programmed to do.
What if our real world was an open world game in some higher intelligent being’s computer? What if we are merely ‘characters’ in a program that exists on a hard disk.
This is not something to talk about when we are ‘feeling philosophical’ and want to talk about something with greater meaning over a beer with a friend. This is an actual hypothesis known as the Simulation Hypothesis. In fact, this theory is at the heart of Hinduism which says “everything is Maya” meaning, “everything is an illusion.”
Some of the smartest people today think that this is true including the likes of Elon Musk and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. And if this theory was actually correct, our whole concept of reality would be shattered.
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The point I am trying to make in this article is that the reality that we have come to understand as real is either completely or partially not real at all, or it is an incomplete reality.
I haven’t even talked about other dimensions and how we can’t perceive them and how atoms (that make up everything) are mostly empty space or how consciousness can effect reality.
I don’t know whether I am right or wrong. I don’t know even if that matters. But one thing is for sure. We know next to nothing as far as the infinite knowledge is concerned. We might all be Jon Snows, knowing nothing!