Perception
 

This morning I beat my alarm clock by about 2 hours. I hate my alarm clock it has one of the most annoying alarms ive ever heard. Well It has to go off three times before just hitting the off button works. So it had gone off twice and I was sitting at my computer waiting for it to go off a third time and I had some music playing. Suddenly I think I hear it so I go to my room and there's no alarm. I wanted so badly to turn it off its last time so I could do what I was doing without being interupted that my brain transfixed the sound of the alarm into the music i was listening to and I fooled myself into thinking it was going off. This brings up the question of how often does this happen to all of us every single day. How many things do we hear that our brain interprets differently from what the situation really is? How can we prove anything to be real.

Quantum physics is in the process of disproving reality as anything tangible, in essence what you see as real ....is real.

Could you elaborate on this a bit?

Certainly the world of quantum mechanics is very counter-intuitive, but I fail to see how, due to this, it follows that objective reality is a myth?

In essence, sub atomic particles do not behave as if they are real....no one can tell you what anything will do , instead we must suggest what the probability is of an individual outcome. One of the best examples is called the double slit experiment. In a nut shell they have proven that light is both a particle and a wave, and will not actually be either until we decide to test for one or the other. So science cannot say either exists until someone looks at it. Although from your byline It is likely you are well aware of these experiments and any elaboration on my part is more entertainment than knowledge gathering.

Well...in Quantum Mechanics...anything CAN happen.
However...there a "tendency" for things to go a certain way.
With this there is a normal probablity for the vast majority of particles/waves to be in a certain area.
This doesn't matter how you are describing it.

I would call this reality...with a little touch of gambling thrown in.

You are more than like going to have your reality be the same each time.
However there is a "chance" that this will be radically different,
This is probability...we see it everyday...but usually only in a uncontrolled situation or environment.

It will vear off a missle from a target,
but not allow you to walk through a wall (at least not within a trillion years time)
There are many factors involved.

But...there is the power of your mind to suggest.
Maybe you were thinking about it so much...you thought you heard it...that's anxiety.

However...its like I like to quote.
"Reality is what's left after you stop believing in it" ;)

The usual versions of QM do give a consistent, if odd reality. If one person measures something, everyone else trying to verify the same result will get the same answer. That answer is not be predictable beforehand, but it does stay the same once its been observed once. Of course you run into defining what (or who) exactly has the ability to measure things.

Quantum mechanics really shouldn't be interpreted too literally at macroscopic scales anyways. At least not without a lot of very careful thought (more than anyone ever does). I don't think very many people would take things like Schrodinger's cat literally.

At the risk of going a little off-topic, I have to give my rant on QM. Quantum mechanics is perfectly deterministic until a "measurement" is made (whose action is axiomatically defined). Who can make a "measurement" and how is not specified.

Now if QM were a fundamental theory, it ought to apply not just to microscopic systems, but also to the combined microscopic system+macroscopic measurer. The complexity of solving the latter problem is much more difficult, but it should be possible in principle. Solving this big messy thing should remove the measurement ambiguity... But it doesn't. The effect of a "measurement" can NEVER be exactly reproduced through the deterministic Schrodinger equation.

There's obviously a lot more to these problems, but I'm just throwing it out there as a way of saying that extrapolating quantum mechanics is very tricky, if possible at all.

This is true. The "cat in the box example is best". You put a cat in a box with mustard gas (let the precise points go please like "airtight box" and just take this for what it's worth). You close the box and until you open it again to see, the cat is both alive AND dead.

This is not really the Schrodinger experiment at all.
Not nitpicking your details, but you left out the most important part of the experiement, the radioactive-isotope, and the geiger-counter.

Further more, the Schrodinger experiment was originally intended as a reductio ad absurdum argument AGAINST the subjective, observer dependant interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Very few people actually take it seriously, and it is accepted that the cat is dead or it isn't.

Of course it isn't provable, but does a tree falling in the woods make a sound when nobody is there to hear it?
Most sensible people would say that it does, but obviously by the very nature of the question it is improvable.

Is a person on LSD actually able to fly?

Back to the original post -- reality is essentially what we know. Though reality is EVERYTHING to us, it likely isn't everything, since our concept of reality has this nasty habit or growing and expanding and changing.

It's real that you thought you heard the alarm. What's important here? If the machinery worked, or if the alarm's existence got you out of bed? Aren't they one and the same? I think that for all practical purposes, they are the same.

About QM -- I think a great part of QM is seeing reality in dimensions that for now exist only in our heads (as far as we know). It's that delicious part of science that borders on philosophy, where what we measure blends into what exists primarily in our thoughts.

How often do people twist their perception to fit their view of how the world should be?

The answer is here .

Science, including quantum mechanics and other related theories say nothing about existence. In order for them to be considered they must first assume existence exists. So physics certainly will not help this discussion.

You have sensations and perceptions, I can explain it like how when you hear your alarm clock, you associate it with waking up or trying to avoid it. BUT the perception is just that, a perception, you have to use your mind to make a choice, you have to use your conceptual consciousness to choose which action you will take. Sensations and perceptions will only report that which appears to exist, it is up to your conceptual faculty to determine if it does exist as it appears.

But when the alarm stops and you still hear it, two things are possibly happening: your senses are hypersensitive and while still in a sleeping state, you might hallucinate the sounds OR you are still sleeping. In both cases you did not question if the alarm is still on until you went and proved it was not on. So when you hear it, and it has been 7 hours since it started and you know it probably quit by know, you are using your conceptual abilities to determine what is happening.

You can prove or disprove anything you see, and anything you have as knowledge. But only with logic.

Wow, Eldaire. You make a really good point here.

Because we cannot observe the cat, we can conclude that the cat is either dead or alive, one or the other. There is a break in logic that leads to the trippy idea that the cat is both dead and alive.

Basic logic tells us that it is independantly one or the other, but not both, and it is only our failure to be able to observe it that we have no choice but to concede insufficient evidence about which state the cat is in.

Has anyone read the book, Caverns of Socrates? It is actually a fiction novel, but the whole book is based on the concept of what reality is ....or isn't....or could be. Excellent book, read it if you get a chance.

What you think of as reality is all about perception. Think of a time when something you believed to be true, something you KNEW to be true got disproven. In that instant, when you find out different, when you realize that you were wrong that whole time, and your world view shifts........reality for you has changed. Kind of like the people that used to be believe that the earth was flat. For them it was a reality. Think of what a complete brain twister that must have been when it was proved otherwise. Their entire reality changed.