Reality
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Reality page (the first building block)
This is the first item of the first building block.
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Key takeaways
- On the biggest level the relationship between space and time creates reality
- Also at the most minor level, relationships are decisive
- One step further, energy flow from low entropy to high(er) entropy
- Relationships and flow create systems that are more or less inward or outward-looking
- Systems need higher order systems to ensure their own existence
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Core ideas
Several contemporary areas of research have begun to blur the boundary between our theories of reality and reality itself. One clear example of this is the recent pedagogy in the social sciences, where it is often difficult to disentangle “social reality” from a model or theory of society. For example, does bounded rationality game theory describe strategic interactions in markets, or does bounded rationality game theory actually constitute the “social reality” of markets? A clear distinction between theory and the reality that the theory describes extends far below the social sciences to encompass deep, and by now, widely held disciplinary positions, from the anthropic principle or cosmological inflation, to the idea of generalized observers in adaptive systems (from natural selection to cultural evolution).
| Content source |
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| Santa Fe Institute - Investigating Reality – A Philosophical, Mathematical, and Scientific Exploration |
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| Master Jack |
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| It's a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack
You taught me all I know, and I'll never look back It's a very strange world, and I thank you, Master Jack |
| You took a coloured ribbon from out of the sky
And taught me how to use it as the years went by To tie up all your problems and make them look neat And then to sell them to the people in the street |
| You taught me all those things the way you'd like them to be
But I'd like to see if other people agree It's all very int'resting the way you disguise But I'd like to see the world through my own eyes |
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Dive deeper
Reality (and the self)
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| Eric Jannazzo - The question therapy doesn’t answer: who are we really, really? - Psyche - 15 JUNE 2022 |
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| Imagine a dramatically sped-up film of Earth’s history. In the beginning, there is no sign of life. Earth is covered by a vast, salty ocean, containing an array of elements and molecules. Zooming in on this primordial soup, we witness a chain of simple chemical reactions, some of which give rise to basic nucleotides. As time passes we witness more and more complex chemical processes, and emerging from this world in fits and starts are the first single-cell organisms. Over the aeons these organisms bubble into various kinds of tiny creatures, then there are fish, little mammals, bigger ones, untold species living and dying in a split second, until we get to something called Marjorie.
As anyone who has visited this mental space can attest, it becomes apparent that the notion of one’s self as a thing, distinct from everything else that exists, is simply an idea. The question that we explored together – ‘Who are you, really?’ – is hugely important, and it must be answered coherently if one is to find a way through this relational world. |
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| George Ellis - A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so - Aeon - 09 June 2020 |
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| Consider, then, that everything we see around us – rocks and planets, frogs and trees, your body and brain – is made up of nothing but protons, electrons and neutrons put together in very complex ways. In the case of your body, they make many kinds of cells; in turn, these cells make tissues, such as muscle and skin; these tissues make systems, such as the heart, lungs and brain; and these systems make the body as a whole. It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating beneath them.
At very small scales, quantum theory underlies what’s happening in the world. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle introduces an unavoidable fuzziness and an irreducible uncertainty in quantum outcomes. You might know the value of one variable, such as a particle’s momentum, but that means you can’t accurately detect another, such as its position. One of the most astounding discoveries of the previous century was that biological activity at the micro level is literally grounded in the physical shape of biological molecules, particularly DNA, RNA and proteins. The structure of these molecules is truly the secret of life, as Francis Crick and James Watson exclaimed when they discovered the double helix structure of DNA, helped by the work of Rosalind Franklin.However, it is the structure of other molecules – proteins and associated messenger molecules – that in fact makes things happen at the cellular level. This means that, to link physics and biology, we need to look at the theory that underlies molecular shape. And that theory is quantum chemistry, based in the fundamental equation of quantum physics: the Schrödinger equation. In quantum theory, the state of a system is described by what’s known as its wave function, which determines the probabilities of different outcomes when events take place. |
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| SFI President David Krakauer |
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| "What we learn from by studying the history of the creative imagination is that the individual mind lives within a collective intelligence largely expressed through material objects." |
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