HyeongJu Kim

Principles of Bioinformatics

Bioprogramming

Genomics

Transcriptomics

Proteomics

Epigenomics and Phenomics

Canceromics and Geromics

Additional Materials

What's real?

 As traditionally accepted, human beings have 5 senses - sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. All human can imagin are based on perceptional information from these sensors. We, human beings, construct our own real world by using these sensors and believe that the world is real. But if the reality is defined as the state of existence, are our senses enough to prove existence of something? I doubt it.

  Existence in here is the state of one's presence in the objective and independent way from any perception. But there are tens of examples that the reality is actually very small portion of the existence and even distorted part of it.

 The endless discussion we had in classroom was because of this disconnection between what we think real and the existence. We can see, touch or even aggressively hear, taste and smell C. elegance to justify our conception of reality about this tiny buddy. For a C. elegance in the cyber world, as far as we saw in the class, we could tell so much discrepancy between our perceptional information about a real C.elegance and the cyber one like whether we can touch or not. However, what if we cannot tell any difference between them, by the improvement of technology. Not taking any additional knowledge except our perception into account, we must admit that the cyber one is real.

  I mentioned "any additional knowledge" which some of classmates made their refutation based upon. These knowledges could be that the cyber one is made of electrical signals while the "real" one is made of atoms and molecules. But note where the knowledge is coming from. Human being's own perceptual world! Though human beings have tried to expand the range of perception using sensors like microscope, telescope, analytic methods and so on, still the constraint is remaining. For an example, can you be really sure that a water molecule is same as the one in your mind?

 In short, all of our knowledge we use to define reality are based on our perception. In addition, the knowledge is not enough evidence for the existence. Therefore, we cannot define the reality as the state of existence but the results of our perception. Then I can say that the cyber C. elegance is real if we cannot find any difference from the "real" one. However, we know the C. elegance is in the cyber space, which is different from the "real" world, so I insist that it is not real.

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