Concept of Reality
Is internet a reality or a virtual world? Its hardwares are certainly the real things, like keyboards, CRTs,LCDs,etc.But what is virtual about it? The virtual part of the game is in our heads. What we percieve to be is not what it is sometimes.
Let's imagine that if we all scale down to the size of a half of a particle, can we perceive anything like what we see know? A bird may look like a flying universe,a rock looks like galaxy. Now we are perceiving inside a structure of universe, much much smaller than the structure itself. What about his perception of reality? Can we continue the process of scaling down to the root truth or reality? Or we got to stop somewhere? Or can we do the opposite,scaling up to the size of a galaxy and stand outside the universe, then how dose it feel?
Then what is reality? "Real" is the opposite of "virtual". Reality has nothing to do with perception. When a camera took a picture it only recorded the light history of the object,but leave out its tast, texture,etc. Is the picture real or partially real? What if we are only allowed to live in complete darkness? Surppose we got no sensors whatsoever, what dose reality mean to such a creature? Color is an illusion because changing the light source will change the color.
Are thoughts real? We don't know if what we perceive is the same as God perceiving the same object, even we don't know if he exist or not and how he workes, but we can assume that if what we percieve collectively is the same as any one individually,and the process of perception can be repeated and the result remain stable to our detection capability, then we can comfort ourselves that we find out the reality or something representing the reality,or something correlating to the reality, anyway it can help us live better or worse if we achieve this, it help us make changes to the world.
So the definition of reality is: independently existing objects or structures of objects. It is the opposite of perception and regarded as objective, that is independent of perception,or having stable properties for perception.
Independance means the existence and fundamental properties of an object is not influenced directly by other objects.
By the above definition,virtual things are not reality. The meaning of word is not a reality, dreams are not realities. Because they only exist on minds. The virtual things have two parts separated,the information or meaning and the structure associated with the meaning. The structure associated with given meaning is formed by objects in reality.A word can be written in many ways using different materials but the meaning is the same because the basic structure paralleled to the meaning remains.
The vital difference between real and virtual is that you can say and do whatever you want like "two apples are three pearls", "putting a man's brain into a weman's head, but these can not happen in reality. Virtual world only cosists of part of the real world or the appearance of real objects but not the essence of formation and structure, a picture only resembles the color arrangement, not the whole physical structure.
首页/Home 文心目录/Article Categories
