Read more: "Special issue: What is reality?"
DO WE make reality, or does it make us? Probe the existence of the universe's supposed building blocks - quarks, electrons, neutrinos and the rest - and you eventually end up back in your own mind. Alternatively, discount everything human and settle for "a world without us" - a reality that might also be unknowable by us (see "Reality: The bedrock of it all").
These options are as viscerally unsettling as they are intellectually challenging. Other possibilities - that we live inside a video game, say, or a hologram - are hardly any more comfortable.
But forsaking the notion of reality is not an option, either. Quantum mechanics may be ineffable, but it still makes electronics work. Wars may not "exist", but they still kill people. The wonder of the human condition is that to us, quarks are real. And so is compassion.
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