Reality is an Illusion

One sometimes thinks about the marvellous structure of reality. Our world is beautifully made. It is amazing how in nature everything is significant, how everything is governed by some underlying principles and the diversity of what is in our world is awesome!

This is all great and all but what exactly is reality? Reality, according to the dictionary, is what is real or existing. Real is defined as 'actually existing as a thing or occuring as a fact.' Wrong answer. Wrong question.

I should have asked, what is the general concept of reality; our concept of reality? The above definition of reality surely fits snugly as an answer to this question. Or does it?

Buildings, cars, aeroplanes. Are these real? Of course they are. They are familiar marvels of human ingenuity. What about men with wings(literally) and 7 headed beasts? You would say these are not real. True. But is your (our) answer based on fact or just on the preconcieved idea that reality only includes those things that do not seem absurd; that it includes only familiar things? Final question: are the following real? Unicorns, time slowing down, people walking through walls.

They are real. Some virtual cell biologists are trying to genetically engineer mythical creatures (dragons, unicorns etc) into existence. Time does slow down(relative to observers) when you move at very high speeds. Quantum tunneling implies that if you kept walking into a wall there's a very small and extremely minute possibility of you walking right through the wall. Had enough? Some more: the universe may have more than 4 dimensions, objects get shorter (relative to observers) when they move very fast, you can never determine the exact position and velocity of any body with certainty.................................

It is not my aim to exhibit my rather rudimentary knowledge on any of the above. However, it is my aim to point out that what we term as unreal may be very real. In fact, I think that our concept of reality is an illusion; it is a misapprehension of the true state of affairs. Generally our concept of reality only includes things which we are familiar with and don't term as weird. But as we have seen, you me and the majority of rest of society are mere illusionists.

Our present, misguided concept of reality must change to include even things not conventionally thought of as real but which are really as real as your monitor.

To me, it seems like our concept of reality is an attempt by someone or something (conspiracy theory?) to cover up the real reality. The good news is that this blanket over the real reality is bursting open at the seams, so to speak, as we saw in the above mentioned scientific developments. Never mind that blankets don't usually have seems.

So, what is really real? I do not know but, as evidenced by recent developments, it looks like some spectacularly weird things could actually be real. And by extension, isn't it reasonable to assume that some things which we take to be very real might actually not be?

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1. Please follow the links to get even more info on the science mentioned above.
2. If you're really interested, you might want to read 'The elegant Universe' by Brian Greene. Here's the link.


3. This is somewhat random and not connected in any way to this post: There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

Tricool rocks!

Hello.
did you miss me?
I've been away for a couple of months...weeks?
but kayliz is now back and on the drag.
I'll be sure to post a lot very soon.

I just wanted to bring something to your attention.
Tricool is ranked 9th (when 'tricool' is the search word) on google.
Think about it, our very own tricool.
It just goes to show what you're missing if you dont know
what (our) tricool is.
quite an achievment[for people who dont have constant connection to the net], eh?

Tricool #7

Yeah, we're back after a long time and we're better. Lets get right into it!
Shall, we?

1. Freenet. Freenet is free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.

2. Facade. A very cool gaming project. Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama
"This is the future of video games."- The New York Times Arts Section, June 7, 2005
"Façade takes character to a new depth...trying to push the boundaries of both gaming and AI,"- Newsweek, Oct. 17,2005, and Oct. 3, 2005 int'l edition
"A genre-defining leap forward in artificial intelligence,"- The Boston Phoenix, July 2005

3.Summer of Code 2006 is a program that offers student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period. The inaugural instance of the program, which took place last summer, brought together 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations from 49 countries. We'd like to include even more organizations and participants this year.

Just in case you forgot, about tricool.

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GOOGLE BOMB!
In support of this google bomb campaign, I'd like to tell you that the egyptian pyramidas are found in egypt.