05. Notion of reality

http://www.nonbit.com/05.html

Let us imagine a man looking at a valley. He sees a forest, mountains, a river, hears their sounds, senses odours that reach him and feels a fresh wind. Does everything exist only in his consciousness or constitutes the objective reality? An interminable controversy of idealists who believe that everything is produced by consciousness, and materialists who claim that the valley exists on its own without taking into account whether anybody is looking at it or not.

In fact both approaches are wrong. Their falsity is conditional upon the clichés of our thinking. How and for whom the valley can exist when the man is looking at it? The valley is a collective image. Different animals, birds, fish, micro-organisms live in it which reproduce it in their consciousness in their own way. The format of their sense organs is different. In their perception it is real as well, but is quite different than for the man. Nobody perceives the valley in the same way as the man. The valley itself consists of parts - mountains, rivers, trees. The mountain is a collective image too. It is ground and rocks the physical existence of which perceives only pressure and temperature. Without it the perception by the matter of itself and the outside impact the rocks would simply pass through one another. Water in the river can be considered both in a comprehensive way as an environment impacting the valley shores, flora or climate, and discretely in form of molecules. The whole valley can be split into elementary particles which perceive one another too, by determining the charge, energy, weight, distance and other parameters. They form various systems - physical, chemical, biological, geological, ecological, climatic, spatial, mental and so on.

Each system has its own existence, its own reality differing from other systems. There is no existence and reality “in general”. Reality exists only at the moment of interaction, and the interaction is impossible without mutual perception of the interacting parts. The attributes of one system do not exist for other systems. In the nature radiation is a reality, but we do not sense it directly with our sense organs. For our perception real are: the blue color, a thought, or the sense of hunger. But immediately for the physical world these notions do not exist.

The whole existence can be split into virtual, potential and real which is expressed at the present moment. Any really existing physical phenomenon occurs at the present time and is due to the energy exchange. The complexity and the combinations of this exchange create emergence when in the system additional subjective attributes and effects appear which the constituent parts of the system do not have and which exist only for the system as a whole. The systems can have a different nesting and hierarchy. The attributes of the higher level system will be objective for its constituent systems, and the attributes of two systems of the same level will be subjective.

Such approach can also wash out the border between the “animate” and the “inanimate” world. The perception by a rock of another rock is of the same nature as the perception of one neuron by another, which subsequently ties into a complex systemic effect of our sensations. But in the inanimate nature there can be enough systems in which complex subjective relations emerge – from chemical substances with complex relations between electronic clouds, to stellar systems in which complex overflows of gravity fields may appear. Both resemble neural networks, which however do not have a certain standard, memory, habitat and other necessary conditions.

The understanding of reality in the systems will enable us to simulate not only sensations really existing for the consciousness, but also artificial worlds. As such world any subjective system can be considered having its individual, emergent properties which can be called real for one another, i.e. existing spontaneously and not requiring information processing. These models may look similar to our world, or use instead of space and time different degrees of freedom, have different characteristics, dimensions, complexity