Here's an idea for a very simple experiment to disprove the idea that reality is just something that we create in our minds (or the idea that reality is significantly different from what we see and detect as the world around us) ... it's so simple that others have probably suggested something similar before, and maybe it does not hold-up anyway, but lets see -
- take a camera (an old film camera may be better, since it's not introducing any extra complexity from digital processing or computerised effects), and go to some clear high ground where we are looking down at a large historic building (it could be anything though, not just a detailed structure/building). First we draw a coloured sketch or painting of the building (assume you are an excellent artist, so your painting is of a high detailed standard) … and after you've finished your painting, you take a photograph of the building from the same observation point (so that your photo will show the same view as the one you just painted).
Now compare your painting with the photograph.
Are they in effect identical?
How can you explain that result if reality is not what you were seeing with your eyes?
Point being – the camera recorded the scene without any use of your eyes or your brain. The photo is independent of your senses. But the image in the photo is exactly the same as the one you produced in the painting where you were relying entirely on your senses and your brain.
How is it possible to produce exactly the same image, unless the scene you create using your eyes & brain is indeed precisely the same “reality” that was recorded independently by the camera?
Just off-hand, I don't see any credible explanation except to conclude that although the camera is acting independently of your brain and your senses, it is recording exactly the same view of reality.
Of course it's true that when you view the photo you are again using your eyes and brain (just as you did to create your painting), so philosophical solipsists might try to claim that the photo is not fully independent of your eyes and brain. But I don't think that can be a valid objection as if to suggest that every time you look at a photo your mind changes what is actually in the photo, to make it just like your painting (that would be a whole new level of different and even more fanciful un-evidenced solipsist-type claims).
Someone actually interested in the topic? I’ve been wrong before but let's give it a try.
You have misunderstood the notion that our model of reality does not reflect actual reality. There are two points you're not getting, one peripheral and one fundamental.
Instead of a camera, imagine a robot such as is widely available today. The robot can navigate terrain, avoid objects, identify colours, process sounds and register touch. Just like us, its own model of reality reflects the external world to an extent comparable to our own. We can see this by the fact it doesn’t bump into walls or fall over cliffs. Yet its internal model of reality is nothing remotely like our own. It has no coherent, internal, conscious vision of a three dimensional, sensory world, yet what it does have is sufficient to navigate reality just like we do.
Imagine if instead of hearing sounds, you saw shapes. Imagine if instead of seeing colours, you smelled aromas. Some people experience this, it is called synaesthesia. Synaesthetics experience a model of reality markedly different to yours and mine, yet it is no less worthy of being said to represent what is 'out there'. It’s no onerous task to imagine the existence of an alien brain, vastly different to a human one and with a model of reality unrecognisable to us, but which also offers a no less a valid model of reality than ours. These models are equally credible whilst being completely different, so logically no single one can lay claim to the ability to mirror reality.
The portion of electromagnetic spectrum detectable by the human eye is around 0.003%. This means that 99.997% of information potentially available to human vision is not even a candidate for processing by the brain. Of the remaining 0.003%, most of that is filtered out by the brain for one reason or another, leaving us with a perception barely exceeding zero in terms of the totality of what is out there.
Imagine we could expand our vision into the infrared and ultraviolet, and beyond. We would now be able to see heat signatures, radiation, radio waves and more, and we would see all this in colours we literally cannot conceive of. In fact, there's no reason why we should see them as colours. Experiencing them as form or sound or indeed using senses we don't currently possess would be equally valid. Our internal model of the world would then be completely different to our current model, yet external reality has not changed one iota. We 'see' light and dark and assume that's what is 'out there'. It is not, it's simply the stimulation to which we are sensitive and what our brains re-model and highlight for our attention.
And this is before we even touch on other non-electromagnetic aspects of reality that we cannot perceive, such as gravity and space-time itself. The model we build in our heads is simply one of an infinite number of potential models, constructed from a staggeringly small subset of the information ‘out there’, that allows us to experience our macro world sufficiently to function effectively in our daily lives. Each of these models is equally valid regardless of their objective differences, and thus they cannot possibly be reflections of that reality. We have evolved to notice the deep pool up ahead so we don’t walk into it and drown, but we haven’t evolved to detect the radiation given out by a lump of plutonium, which could kill us just as effectively as the pool. One is real and we can't detect it, one is real and we can, so how can we claim to see reality?
What is not intuitive, and needs to be understood, is that the 3D visual and sensory experience in your head is created ENTIRELY by your brain. This seems obvious but I’ve found academic acceptance of the principle rarely results in an understanding of what it implies. Every external input is deconstructed to an electrical impulse and it is those electrical impulses alone that are processed by the brain and used to create that incredible 3D visual surround-sound tactile panorama you think of as 'the world'. Everything you experience has been created from scratch inside your own head. We say we ‘see’ light, but there is no light in our brain. The same goes for all our senses. It is not woo to state that our conscious experience is an illusion (using the definition of ‘deceptive’ as opposed to ‘false’), it’s scientific fact. That illusion informs us of a broader reality, yes, but it interprets that reality as opposed to reflecting it.
Google Image the term "actual human brain" (I’m serious, actually do this now). Now look around the room in which you’re sitting, and out the window if possible, and realise that your entire experience, the 3D world you see, hear and sense is someone created and maintained inside that gob of greasy meat. Most people understand this academically but they don’t grasp the implications, what it really means. They intuitively imagine that our sensory organs are somehow ‘transmitting’ reality directly to the brain where it plays out on some internal cinema screen for us to observe. Some people will never get it, despite being fully conversant with the relevant scientific and philosophical principles. For others it will click and when it does it’s a revelation. If you haven’t experienced a sudden shock then you don’t get it, no matter how much you think you do.
So that is point one, the peripheral point. The key issue is that of the nature of reality itself, before it even reaches our sensory organs.
Quantum mechanics offers a description of reality that is far and away the best description science has ever come up with. Experiment after experiment proves it correct to amazingly high degrees of accuracy. And what quantum physics tells us, unequivocally and indisputably, is that at a fundamental level, reality is not what it appears to our macro senses. Whilst it’s not scientific to describe quantum processes in language it’s broadly true to say that reality comprises energy and probability and not much else. At a fundamental level there are no objects, there are no ‘things’, there is no notion of ‘travel’, there is not even cause and effect. Regardless of the fact we cannot consciously experience the quantum world, regardless how much we protest that it “doesn’t matter because it’s really small and we’re not”, it does constitute reality at the most elementary level (as far as we know).
At a macro level the lunacy of the quantum world is kept in check by the laws of probability. A single subatomic particle has no problem appearing from nothing for no reason, disappearing into nothing, being in two places at once, moving from A to B without crossing the distance in between and taking an infinite number of paths from A to B at the same time, and doing all this in a manner that is completely unpredictable (that is, unpredictable in theory, not just in practice). Every single particle that goes to form our macro world behaves in accordance with quantum laws but because we are only able to perceive gross groupings of these particles, the probabilities associated with each particle aggregate to a state of stability, creating the solid and dependable world we take for granted. There is a chance that your computer will spontaneously relocate itself to Mars, based on quantum probability, but the simultaneous alignment of probabilities of so many particles is so unlikely that it is only relevant to us as an academic exercise. (We could go into waveform collapse and the observer effect and cats in boxes here, and reinforce the idea that what we see is not really what is occurring, but I don’t think there’s a need).
This solid and dependable world is not the actual world. Intuitively we believe it is because there is every evolutionary advantage to doing so, and millions of years of evolution has crystalised our thinking, and our organs of perception are vastly limited. We experience the world through an arbitrary model we create in our brains. That model is largely consistent between individual humans and allows us to lives our lives and share verifiable information about our environment with other humans, but it is still an illusion. A helpful illusion, a persistent illusion, a structured illusion, but an illusion all the same.
! Our main tv is actually a Samsung, but it is 6yo and very basic. I doubt that it can be used that way.