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Kant's position, is an example of the reality of a very pessimistic, this is probably the expression say this: the sensory equipment and the evolution of intelligence in the context of the major concerns of the survival and reproduction of human beings. Power, such intelligent animals may not have the whole picture the reality itself, is a command, goes well beyond domestic concerns. On the other hand, the reality of an optimistic bent on the view that since human beings are part of nature, natural deep at the core, nothing will prevent us from experiencing the reality itself. In fact, we have some experience and / or some of our ideas may have contact with reality at the bottom of the rock wall.

 

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Approaches to Reality

 

 

Physicists are interested in how the world is put together—out of what sorts of basic objects, interacting via what sorts of basic forces...

 

In the seventeenth century Galileo, Newton and other natural philosophers discovered that an enormous body of physical facts could be encompassed in a few mathematical formulas. For instance, with only three mathematical laws Newton could explain all motion in heaven and on Earth. Why should mathematics, developed primarily to keep track of human business transactions, have anything at all to do with the way the nonhuman world operates? Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner refers to this magical match between human mathematics and nonhuman facts as "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences." "This unreasonable effectiveness," writes Wigner, "is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."

 

Although mathematics originates in the human mind, its remarkable effectiveness in explaining the world does not extend to the mind itself. Psychology has proved unusually resistant to the mathematization that works so well in physics.

 

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant was deeply impressed by Newton's mathematical method and sought to explain its success as well as to understand its limitations. Kant began his analysis by dividing knowledge into three parts: appearance, reality, and theory. Appearance is the content of our direct sensory experience of natural phenomena. Reality (Kant called it the "thing-in-itself") is what lies behind all phenomena. Theory consists of human concepts that attempt to mirror both appearance and reality.

 

Kant believed that the world's appearances were deeply conditioned by human sensory and intellectual apparatus. Other beings no doubt experience the same world in radically different ways. Scientific facts—the appearances themselves—are as much a product of the observer's human nature as they are of an underlying reality. We see the world through particularly human goggles. Kant felt that the participation of human nature in the creation of appearances explained both the remarkable ability of human concepts to fit the facts and the natural limits of such abilities.

 

Our concepts appear to match the facts, according to Kant, because both facts and concepts have a common origin—the human condition. Insofar as human nature is entwined with the appearances, human concepts will be successful in explaining those appearances. Because we can only explain those aspects of the world which we ourselves bring to it, the nature of deep reality must remain forever inaccessible. Man is fated to know, either directly or through conceptualization, merely the world's appearances and of these appearances only that part which is of human origin.  

 

Kant's position is an example of the pessimistic pole of reality research, which might be expressed this way: human senses and intellectual equipment evolved in a biological context concerned mainly with survival and reproduction of humankind. The powers that such clever animals may possess are wholly inadequate to picture reality itself, which belongs to an order that utterly transcends our domestic concerns.

 

On the other hand, reality researches of an optimistic bent argue that since humans are part of nature, deeply natural to the core, nothing prevents us from experiencing reality itself. Indeed some of our experiences and/or some of our ideas may already be making contact with rock-bottom reality.

 

Besides the optimism/pessimism split, another difference separates researchers into the nature of reality: the pragmatist/realist division. A pragmatist believes only in facts and mathematics and refuses in principle to speculate concerning deep reality, such questions being meaningless from his point of view. Sir James Jeans, the distinguished physicist and astronomer, sums up this pragmatic orientation: "The final truth about a phenomenon resides in the mathematical description of it; so long as there is no imperfection in this, our knowledge of the phenomenon is complete... The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulas and the phenomena they describe is not a step towards, but a step away from, reality; it is like making graven images of a spirit."

 

A realist, on the other hand, believes that a good theory explains the facts because it makes contact with a reality behind those facts. The major purpose of science, according to the realists, is to go beyond both fact and theory to the reality underneath. As Einstein, the most famous realist of them all, put it, "Reality is the real business of physics."

 

The pragmatist treats his theory like a cookbook full of recipes which are useful for ordering and manipulating the facts. The realist sees theory as a guidebook which lays out for the traveler the highlights of the invisible landscape that lies just beneath the facts.

 

Most physicists are complex mixtures of pragmatist and realist, at once both optimistic and pessimistic about their chances for making solid contact with deep reality.

 

 

 

 

 

— Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics: An Excursion in to Metaphysics and the Meaning of Reality

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indexes/13

 

 

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O truth of the earth,
O truth of things,
I am determined to press my way toward you;
Sound your voice!

I scale mountains,
or dive in the sea after you.

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