While we have seen that the current parapsychology approach does contradict science, many other models attempt to explain reality while recognising that these models cannot contradict scientific discoveries.

Many such models have been suggested throughout the generations, and there is nothing new about the three models I suggested here, which have been debated, in different guises, by theologists and philosophers since ancient times. Our modern era, however, can produce some fresh insight. The three models I will explore in the following posts are:

Model 1: What we see is what there is
Model 2: Late creation
Model 3: The world as a simulation

Model 1: what we see is what there is
For many who are neither religious nor followers of philosophy or metaphysics, the experience of reality equates reality itself. Phenomena exist independent of an observer: when we see a flower it is because there is a flower; the inside of the brick is not a model but reality, and so is the electron.

flower

This pragmatic approach does not deny that human senses do not always convey the true world, and distortions, such as optical illusions, do happen. However, advocates of this model believe that the combination of all the senses, often assisted by unbiased measurement and controlled experiments, will correct most of the biases and produce a close approximation to reality: If an illusion made us see equal lines as unequal, measuring the lines would correct this bias and provide us with a reliable description of reality.

optical illusion

According to this approach, science is an attempt to describe reality, and every new theory brings us closer to true understanding. God is considered a figment of human imagination, or if such a deity exists, irrelevant to the running of the world. Scientific theories produce the best estimate of the age of the world, and evolution, resulting from random events, is the most plausible explanation for human existence.

The limitation of this approach lies with quantum mechanics: the theory that deals with the behavior of matter and energy on the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. According to quantum mechanics, the observer affects the phenomena observed.

In the famous double-slit experiment, the setting of the experiment determined if a single electron passing through a slit behaved as a wave or a particle. Electrons shot at a screen behave as if they knew whether the person making the experiment was thinking of light as waves or particles.

For example, if a second slit, farther from the one the electron passes through, is open, electrons behave as if they were wave and will pass through both slits; if the second slit is closed, the electron will behave as if it were a particle. That is, a single electron ‘has the knowledge’ of whether a second slit is opened or not.

double slit experiment

Such experimental results violate our everyday intuitive image of a universe in which objective phenomena happen independent of an observer or observation. They raise questions about our role, as observers, in defining the world (i.e. a falling tree in the wood would make a noise even if there were no one to hear); and lead to paradoxes not only in the quantum level but also in the macro world (Schrödinger cat).

Advocates of this alternative, including many famous scientists, would normally leave such questions to philosophy, and consider them irrelevant to science and everyday reality.