What Does Niels Bohr Mean When He Says: "Everything We Call Real Is Made Of Things That Cannot Be Regarded As Real"

 

Neils Bohr

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Lynne Jaffe: It is ALL "real" in relative terms...

Alan Archibald: I do not disagree with you. 

And since I never studied physics, I'm a lousy guide to Bohr's intended meaning.

But I think Bohr, in part, is referring to the indeterminateness of "Shrodinger's Cat." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjaAxUO6-Uw 

I also speculate that the "un-reality" of time -- as distinct from "The Eternal Now" -- comes into play.

Or, as Einstein put it: https://www.npr.org/2013/05/17/184775924/resetting-the-theory-of-time 

And since time and space are different "facets" of the same thing, "as time goes, so goes space."  

Neither of them are the real things we assume they are.

Rather they are "persistent illusions" - the "conventional understandings" on which we build our consensus understanding of the world. 

They are extraordinarily useful -- even indispensable -- for navigating "reality as we know it." 

But "really," what is the "it" that we assume we know?  

Ever since I was a kid, I liked Alan Watts (?) observation that 'the human mind can no more understand itself than we humans can bite our own teeth.'

Of course, there's lots of room for navel-gazing here.

But my working hypothesis is that these rarefied concepts are more or less true - at least as true as our "common sense understanding" where perhaps the word "sense" is key "in the sense" of "sensory" perception. 

"What has come to an end is the distinction between the sensual and the supersensual, together with the notion, at least as old as Parmenides, that whatever is not given to the senses... is more real, more truthful, more meaningful than what appears; that it is not just beyond sense perception but above the world of the senses... In increasingly strident voices, the few defenders of metaphysics have warned us of the danger of nihilsim inherent in this development. The sensual... cannot survive the death of the supersensual."  Hannah Arendt

Then there's the Hindhu concept of "lila" or "divine play" in which "deity" (ground of being) is a conjurer fundamentally interested in creating illusions so that "his" sentient beings can delight in the conjuring show, where "show" may be the key word as in what "shows" itself to our senses. https://www.britannica.com/topic/lila 

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." Einstein

Albert Einstein

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