What is ‘real’? Does the scientific way of understanding the world give us the true picture of reality or is the life-world perspective more accurate?

I was asked to answer this question several months back and upon researching the answer, it got me thinking about a whole heap of things.  Id like to share with you guys what I found out :)

One thing that we as a human species can be sure about is that the world we live in and everything around us is ‘real’.  We can see it, touch it and smell it; it is a physical world, utterly real, solid and identifiable.  But, how do we know that everything we see and touch is real. How we perceive the world strongly depends on the individual and their own perceptions of what is real, however, Laws of nature based from scientific theories form the basic structure of the life world.  In order to get a true picture of reality we need to understand both the physical world and the scientific way of understanding the world.

What do we mean when we say something is real.  According to John L. Austin in (sense and sensibilia, 1962), the word real is not a word that has one single meaning or can specifically describe something, but yet we use it quite frequently. Real has many diverse uses but is used by many to describe an actually existing thing or an occurring fact about something.  The word real tends to be used when we are questioning the validity of something and can really be seen as a word used in a negative sense.  But how do we know that something is real.  What makes something real is through our own perception of the life-world we live in.

Our conscious experiences of the world around us are known to us to be intuitive and cannot be easily explained.  We all have a mental model of the world and how it should be, made up of all our beliefs, attitudes and values. What is real is very much how an individual perceives something to be real. Reality is something people are familiar with, it has substantiality, it needs a description and needs to have a meaning.  It is something we can touch and see with our own eyes, however to fully understand the psychological perceptions that we have that makes us decide what real means to us, goes beyond the scope of this essay.  To truly understand the life world, we need to have a certain open-mindedness to the possibility that what we see around us is only our own perception of what is real, and that a scientific understanding should also be taken into account when trying to understand the life world.

Science is regarded as a framework of conscious experiences through observations that are structured to be scientific explanations about how things work.  With the increasing focus on a scientific approach to nature came developments in science and technology and over the years has developed many scientific theories that are considered merely as just models that make predictions of reality, but don't necessarily describe reality.  Everything has to be based on something solid, something that can be tested through the scientific method. The underlying principles are sound and as Eddington wrote “science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience” (1933, pp. 13).  Scientists generalize things, they say how it is done but cannot tell you why, because they don’t know either. The more information we have the closer we get in understanding more about real thing.  We have to start looking at our world as a whole. Scientific knowledge is relative not absolute, but it’s the best we have to help us answer questions about the life world. If science cannot give us specific knowledge about reality then we can be sure no other method can.

The word real has many uses but its main use is to put the validity of a thing into question.  Through our own perceptions of the life-world and the scientific and mathematical approaches in trying to explain it, we can start to create an understanding of what the true picture of reality is. Information is the key, because this reality that we think is real, the matrix of it all is information.  Science has been important as a way to help us find out this information, but everything in the world cannot be measured. Reality is based on the expectation of the person who is actually looking at a thing, or it is a measurement from a scientist. Once we establish the reality we live in and the nature of the body we are in, a biological computer, and the nature of what is consciousness, then how the world is structured, it brings some clarity in why the world is structured the way it is.


By Janine Marshall

References

Austin, John L. 1962. VII: Selections. In Sense and Sensibilia, 62-77. London: Oxford University Press. Reprinted in Tomorrow Yesterday Today (FDN109) Unit Reader 2011, 11-15.  Murdoch, WA: Murdoch University.

Eddington, Arthur S. 1933. Introduction. In The Nature of the Physical World, xi – xix. London: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted in Tomorrow Yesterday Today (FDN109) Unit Reader 2011, 11-15.  Murdoch, WA: Murdoch University.