• Unlimiter
    9
    Believing senses are what make us contact reality, or whether that's possible at all, do you believe that humans will have invented enough artificial senses some time in the near future to finally figure out how reality actually looks like?
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    I think our senses normally tell us what (external) reality is actually like, with respect to our senses. So in other words, and for example, it tells us what things actually sound like, within the frequencies, volumes, etc. we can hear.

    Technology can give us info about what external reality is like at frequencies we can't hear, electromagnetic radiation frequencies we can't see, etc.
  • Unlimiter
    9
    Some creatures can sense more than we do (light wave lengths, sound frequencies, etc). Does that mean they can experience more parts of reality than us?
  • Unlimiter
    9
    But, do you believe we can at some point experience the whole reality using technology?
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k


    Re the first question, it's just a different experience. There's no way to experience "everything, from every perspective in every regard" because some things exclude others.
  • Unlimiter
    9
    What's an example of your last statement?
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    What's an example of your last statement?Unlimiter

    For example, you can't experience a view of the Earth from the surface of the Earth, where that's your entire field of vision, and from the moon, where that's your entire field of vision, at the same time.
  • Fruitless
    68
    I think since there is no stable definition of reality, that is an unanswerable question because everything is constantly changing. Of course we could develop technology to experience everything within a given area. But what would you want to do with that?
  • SophistiCat
    2.2k
    You can expand and strengthen your contact and interaction with the rest of the world by augmenting your natural senses with technology (something that we are already doing, of course) - that's as far as I would go.

    As for your original thesis, it contains some problematic assumptions, chief of which is that there is something that "reality actually looks like." What something looks like is not just a property of the thing that is being perceived, but rather a property of perception, which involves both the perceiver and the perceived. So what "reality looks like" to the perceiver will be in part a function of the perceiver - including any technological augmentation that she employs.
  • Anthony
    197
    Technology toward reality or technology toward technological reality ? The differences which make a difference between the two are quite relevant.
  • bronson
    6
    Perception is always an abstraction of reality (unless it is a dream or hallucination). The concept of "seeing what reality really looks like" makes no sense
  • simeonz
    310

    To elaborate on the previous remarks, we don't see with our senses, but with our brains. Sensation is, for the most part, the act of altering the brain state in a manner that increases the mutual information that it shares with the external environment.

    If by "figure out how reality actually looks like", you mean to make ourselves aware of the entire state of the universe (static and dynamic), I'm afraid this is not very likely. It assumes that an arbitrary human brain, or whatever other reasoning device we use in the future, would be able to hold all the information for such comprehension. If the universe is indeed quantum, as it currently seems to be, the only way in which I imagine this could happen is to merge ourselves in a singular intelligence that subsumes the entire universe, which is very futuristic.

    If you mean to completely comprehend our immediate environment, by observing and reasoning about all processes happening on all smaller temporal and spacial scales directly around us, then this is slightly more likely. The problem is fundamentally the same - storage and processing capacity of our intellect, but if we augmented and offloaded some of it to devices in the "cloud", it is theoretically possible.

    P.S.
    I actually have to comment on something else. The universe has redundancy, which implies that the information content of its state may be stored in some strict subset of this state. Even if we assumed that this is technologically feasible, it complicates reasoning further, because in addition to prognosis, the intellect has to perform state inference to recover the redundancies that were previously compressed. Which implies a lot of concentrated processing power. If the state is not inferred, but directly perceived all the time, then the intellect is essentially merged with the universe, as previously mentioned, or at least unilaterally.
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