Reality: what a concept.
If you follow this column, you know that Marcelo and I are deeply interested in what science — especially physics — tells us about the nature of reality. Does science give us perfect access to a perfectly objective reality that exists somewhere out there, independent of us? Or is there something about the nature of being human that colors everything? This question hit me especially hard two weeks ago as I attended a fantastic three-day meeting at the University of California, Berkeley, called “Buddhism, Physics, and Philosophy Redux.” I wrote a little about the meeting just before it happened. (You can read about it here.) Today, I want to reflect on something I was reminded of during the talks that has always struck me as weird.
Throughout the meeting, the notion of realism kept popping up. Was this or that Buddhist philosopher a realist? Is this or that interpretation of quantum mechanics anti-realist? These terms were tossed around casually, but I always felt we were using them in the exact opposite sense of what they should mean. That requires an explanation.
A classical divide
In philosophy, the term realism refers to the position that there is a world out there independent of us. The world is made of stuff with its own inherent properties that can be known in and of themselves. Science offers the means for determining those properties. The term is often contrasted with idealism, which states that only some version of “mind” really exists — however you want to construe that. True reality, according to idealism, corresponds to pure ideal abstractions. One example of this is Plato’s idea that only the mathematical form of circles really exists, not the crappy versions of circles we apprehend through our crappy senses. This battle between realism and idealism has been going on for a long time. (Plato formalizes it in Western Philosophy.) This creates a duality where if you are an idealist, you are also an anti-realist.
Now, I am a scientist, and I am also not an idealist, so I do not take kindly to being called an anti-realist. (If I was a cowboy at a saloon in the Old West, calling me an anti-realist would be fightin’ words.) However, the way realism plays out in modern debates about frontiers in science leaves me cold. I think it misses the boat. There are other ways to confront reality than the usual realist/idealist split.
