In the context of reality, people face the difficulty of telling whether the world we are living in is virtual or real. Such a confusion leads people to investigate the possibility that we are living in a simulation.

Whether are we living in a simulated reality or a real one may be indistinguishable in principle. The relativity principle in physics, which is mainly about the relativity of motion, states that motion has no absolute meaning. To say if something is in motion or rest one must have some reference frame. Without a reference frame, one cannot tell the state of being in rest or in uniform motion.

Similar things happen for reality, meaning that without a reference world, one cannot tell the world one is living in is real or not. Therefore, there is no absolute meaning for reality. The principle of relativity of reality is a generalization of the principle in special relativity, and may be called ‘super relativity principle’. Similar to the situation in special relativity or general relativity, there are two fundamental principles for the relativity of reality:

• All worlds are the same real.
• Simulated events and simulating events coexist.

The first principle says that the reality is relative and thus observer dependent. For a world, one calls it reality or virtuality depending on whether one lives in it. One calls the world one lives in reality, and other worlds virtuality. For example, if one lives in world A, one calls it reality and the other is world B virtuality. However if one’s consciousness is transferred from world A into world B, then, one shall call world B reality and world A virtuality.

The second principle states a fact sometimes known as a coexistence principle. Nowadays, there are mainly two kinds of simulators available, computers and human brains. For computers, suppose there is a glinting ball in the simulated world of a computer. The counterpart of it in the simulating world is the combination of zeros and ones (high and low electrical levels) of the running computer’s circuits. In fact, for anything in the simulated world, there is its counterpart in the simulating world.

For human brains, suppose there is an apple in someone’s imagination, the counterpart of it in the material world is the biochemical reactions in one’s brain. In fact, for anything in one’s imagination, there is its counterpart as a biochemical reaction in the material world. Essentially, simulated events and simulating events coexist, but that doesn’t mean that simulated events and simulating events exist in the same form. Actually, they can be quite different in existence form. Taking the above-mentioned apple in someone’s imagination as an example, its existing form in the simulated world is a apple, while the existing form of its counterpart in the simulating world is biochemical reactions in someone’s brain.

The relationship between belief and knowledge is subtle. Believers in a claim typically say that they know that claim. For instance, those who believe that the Sun is a god will often report that they know that the Sun is a god. However, the terms belief and knowledge are used differently by philosophers. It is a telling point concerning the nature of belief that most people distinguish between what they know and what they believe, even though they consider both kinds of statements to be true.

Mainstream psychology and related disciplines have traditionally treated belief as if it were the simplest form of mental representation and therefore one of the building blocks of conscious thought. Philosophers have tended to be more abstract in their analysis and much of the work examining the viability of the belief concept stems from philosophical analysis.

Beliefs are sometimes divided into core beliefs (those which you may be actively thinking about) and dispositional beliefs (those which you may ascribe to but have never previously thought about). For example, if asked “do you believe tigers wear pink pajamas?’” a person might answer that they do not, despite the fact they may never have thought about this situation before.

That a belief is a mental state has been seen by some as contentious. While some philosophers have argued that beliefs are represented in the mind as sentence-like constructs, others have gone as far as arguing that there is no consistent or coherent mental representation that underlies our common use of the belief concept and that it is therefore obsolete and should be rejected.

Beliefs form in a variety of ways. We tend to internalize the beliefs of the people around us. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” Political beliefs depend most strongly on the political beliefs common in the community where we live. Most individuals believe the religion they were taught in childhood.

People may adopt the beliefs of a charismatic leader, even if those beliefs fly in the face of all previous beliefs and produce actions that are clearly not in their own self-interest. Rational individuals need to reconcile their direct reality with any said belief. Therefore, if belief is not present or possible, it reflects the fact that contradictions were necessarily overcome using cognitive dissonance.

The primary thrust of the advertising industry is that repetition forms beliefs, as do associations of beliefs with images of sex, love, and other strong positive emotions. Physical trauma, especially to the head, can also radically alter a person’s beliefs.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen says, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” This is often quoted in mockery of the common ability of people to entertain beliefs contrary to fact.

Ronald David Laing was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness, in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing’s views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, he himself rejected the label as such, as did certain others critical of conventional psychiatry at the time. He wanted to challenge the core values of a psychiatry which considers mental illness as primarily a biological phenomenon of no social, intellectual or political significance.

Laing was a critic of psychiatric diagnosis, arguing that diagnosis of a mental disorder contradicted accepted medical procedure. Diagnosis was made on the basis of behavior or conduct, and examination and ancillary tests that traditionally precede diagnosis of viable pathologies like broken bones or pneumonia occurred after the diagnosis of mental disorder. Hence, according to Laing, psychiatry was founded on a false epistemology of illness diagnosed by conduct but treated biologically.

The fact that medical doctors had annexed mental disorders did not mean they were practicing medicine. Hence, the popular term “medical model of mental illness” is oxymoronic, since, according to Laing, diagnosis of mental illness did not follow the traditional medical model. The notion that biological psychiatry is a real science or a genuine branch of medicine has been challenged by other critics as well.

He never denied the existence of mental illness, but viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, mental illness could be a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights, and may have become a wiser and more grounded person as a result. This was consistent with the critique of the alleged dubious validity of “value judgements” prevalent in Western society, which was common among academics in the 1960s and 1970s.

Laing argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of madness. He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their peers, leading to a “lose-lose situation” and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned. The perceived symptoms of schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience.

A false awakening is an event in which someone dreams they have awoken from sleep. This illusion of having awakened is very convincing to the person. After a false awakening, people will often dream of performing daily morning rituals, believing they have truly awakened. A dream in which a false awakening takes place is sometimes colloquially referred to as a double dream, or a dream within a dream.

It may occur either following an ordinary dream or following a lucid dream, one in which the dreamer has been aware of dreaming. Particularly if the false awakening follows a lucid dream, the false awakening may turn into a pre-lucid dream, in which the dreamer may start to wonder if they are really awake and may or may not come to the correct conclusion.

A false awakening has significance to the simulation hypothesis which states that what we perceive as true reality is in fact an illusion as evidenced by our minds’ inability to distinguish between reality and dreams. Therefore, advocates of the simulation hypothesis argue that the probability of our true reality being a simulated reality is affected by the prevalence of false awakenings.

Certain aspects of life may be dramatized or out of place in false awakenings. Details like being able to see a painting on a wall, not being able to talk or difficulty reading are common. In some experiences, the human senses are heightened or changed. For instance, one may be able to see things in greater detail, or lesser detail, or one may feel an intense burst of fear and anxiety, or possibly pleasure.

Because the dreamer is still dreaming after a false awakening, it is possible for there to be more than one false awakening in a single dream. Often, dreamers will seem to have awakened, begin eating breakfast, brushing teeth, and so on and then find themselves back in bed, begin daily morning rituals, believe that they have awakened again, and so forth. The French psychologist Yves Delage reported an experience of his own of this kind, in which he experienced four successive false awakenings. The philosopher Bertrand Russell claimed to have experienced about a hundred false awakenings in succession while coming round from a general anaesthetic.

The dream argument is the postulation that the act of dreaming provides preliminary evidence that the senses we trust to distinguish reality from illusion should not be fully trusted, and therefore any state that is dependent on our senses should at the very least be carefully examined and rigorously tested to determine if it is in fact reality.

While people dream, they usually do not realize they are dreaming. This has led philosophers to wonder whether one could actually be dreaming constantly, instead of being in waking reality (or at least that one can’t be certain that he or she is not dreaming). Having received serious attention in René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, the dream argument has become one of the most popular skeptical hypotheses.

Dreaming provides a springboard for those who question whether our own reality may be an illusion. The ability of the brain to trick itself into believing a neuronally generated world is the real world means at least one variety of simulated reality is a common, even nightly event.

Those who argue that the world is not simulated must concede that the mind, at least the sleeping mind, is not itself an entirely reliable mechanism for attempting to differentiate reality from illusion.

This could be seen as a challenge to those who claim a simulated reality requires highly advanced scientific technology, since, if dreaming really is a form of virtual reality, the only apparatus needed to construct a simulated reality capable of fooling the unconscious mind is a human brain.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice finds the Red King asleep in the grass. Tweedledum and Tweedledee tell her that the Red King is dreaming about her, and that if he were to wake up she would “go out—bang!—just like a candle.”

Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts reality is best understood as an organic whole. It is also a biological doctrine that stresses the organization rather than the composition of organisms.

As a doctrine it rejects mechanism and reductionism, the doctrines that claim the smallest parts by themselves explain the behavior of larger organized systems of which they are a part. However, organicism also rejects vitalism, the doctrine that there is a vital force different from physical forces that accounts for living things.

A number of biologists in the early to mid-twentieth century embraced organicism. They wished to reject earlier vitalisms but to stress that whole organism biology was not fully explainable by atomic mechanism. The larger organization of an organic system has features that must be taken into account to explain its behavior.

Organicism is distinguished from holism to avoid what is seen as the vitalistic of spritualistic connotations of holism. Holism contains a continuum of degrees of top-down control of an organization. With holism there is monism, the doctrine that the only complete object is the whole universe, or that there is only one entity, the universe. Organicism allows relatively more independence of the parts from the whole, despite the whole being more than the sum of the parts, or the whole exerting some control on the behavior of the parts.

More independence is present in relational holism. This doctrine does not assert top-down control of the whole over its parts, but does claim that the relations of the parts are essential to explanation of behavior of the system. Aristotle and early modern philosophers and scientists tended to describe reality as made of substances and their qualities, and to neglect relations. Twentieth century philosophy has been characterized by the introduction of and emphasis on the importance of relations,whether in symbolic logic or in metaphysics.

Organicism has some intellectually and politically controversial associations. Holism, the doctrine that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, is often used synonymously with organicism or as a broader category under which organicism falls, and has been coopted in recent decades by holistic medicine and by New Age Thought. 

It has also been used to characterize notions put forth by various late 19th-century social scientists who considered human society to be analogous to an organism, and individual humans to be analogous to the cells of an organism.

Teleology is the philosophical study of design and purpose. A teleological school of thought is one that holds all things to be designed for or directed toward a final result, that there is an inherent purpose or final cause for all that exists.

As a school of thought it can be contrasted with metaphysical naturalism, which views nature as having no design or purpose. Teleology would say that a person has eyes because he has the need of eyesight, while naturalism would say that a person has sight because he has eyes.

Individual human consciousness, in the process of reaching for autonomy and freedom, has no choice but to deal with an obvious reality in the collective identities which divide the human race and which set different groups in violent conflict with each other. The totality of mutually antagonistic world views and life forms in history has been observed as being goal driven, that is, oriented towards an end-point in history. The objective contradiction of subject and object would eventually sublate into a form of life which leaves violent conflict behind. This goal oriented, teleological notion of the historical process as a whole is present in a variety of 20th Century writing.

It has been argued that a narrative understanding of oneself, of one’s capacity as an independent reasoner, one’s dependence on others and on the social practices and traditions in which one participates, all tend towards an ultimate good of liberation. Social practices may themselves be understood as teleologically orientated to internal goods, for example practices of philosophical and scientific enquiry are teleologically ordered to the elaboration of a true understanding of their objects.

Science concerns itself with physical causality and is well able to function within the bounds of naturalism, indeed, it has frequently to counter appeals to undemonstrable modes of causality. Yet teleological ideas still find refuge in the unpenetrated beginnings and endings of things. It has been claimed that within the framework of thermodynamics, the irreversibility of macroscopic processes is explained in a teleological way.

Teleological arguments in the field of chemistry have once again often centred around the fitness of materials to form the complex molecular bonds of life. Biology has always been susceptible to teleological thought, even after Darwin proposed survival as the only observable final good.

Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, coined the term cybernetics to denote the study of teleological mechanisms. Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback both in living beings and machines, and in combinations of the two.

A cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from a Greek term meaning order and is the opposite of chaos. Today the word is generally used as a synonym of the word universe. The words cosmetics and cosmetology originate from the same root. In Russian, the word cosmos simply means space. The cosmos as originated by Pythagoras is parallel to the Zoroastrian term asa, the concept of a divine order, or divinely ordered creation.

In philosophy and metaphysics, cosmology deals with the world as the totality of space, time and all phenomena. Historically, it has had quite a broad scope, and in many cases was founded in religion. The ancient Greeks did not draw a distinction between this use and their model for the cosmos. However, in modern use it addresses questions about the Universe which are beyond the scope of science. 

Cosmology is study of the universe in its totality, and by extension, humanity’s place in it. In recent times, physics and astrophysics have to play a central role in shaping the understanding of the universe through scientific observation and experiment. What is known as physical cosmology shaped through both mathematics and observation in the analysis of the whole universe. In other words, in this discipline, which focuses on the universe as it exists on the largest scale and at the earliest moments, is generally understood to begin with an expansion of space from which the universe itself is thought to have emerged.

Metaphysical cosmology has also been observed as the placing of man in the universe in relationship to all other entities. This is demonstrated by the observation made by Marcus Aurelius of a man’s place in that relationship when he states, “He who does not know what the world is does not know where he is, and he who does not know for what purpose the world exists, does not know who he is, nor what the world is.”

It is distinguished from religious cosmology in that it approaches these questions using philosophical methods. Modern metaphysical cosmology tries to address questions such as: What is the origin of the Universe? What is its first cause? Is its existence necessary? What is the ultimate reason for the existence of the Universe? Does it have a purpose?

From its violent beginnings and until its various speculative ends, cosmologists propose that the history of the universe has been governed entirely by physical laws. Between the domains of religion and science, stands the philosophical perspective of metaphysical cosmology. This ancient field of study seeks to draw intuitive conclusions about the nature of the universe, man, god and their relationships based on the extension of presumed facts borrowed from spiritual experience and observation.

Cosmology is often an important aspect of the creation myths of religions that seek to explain the existence and nature of reality. In some cases, views about the creation and destruction of the universe play a central role in shaping a framework of religious cosmology for understanding humanity’s role in the universe.

A more contemporary distinction between religion and philosophy, esoteric cosmology is distinguished from religion in its less tradition bound construction and reliance on modern intellectual understanding rather than faith, and from philosophy in its emphasis on spirituality as a formative concept.

The philosopher Ken Wilber uses the term kosmos to refer to all of manifest existence, including various realms of consciousness. The term kosmos distinguishes a nondual universe which, in his view, includes both noetic and physical aspects, from the strictly physical universe that is the concern of the traditional sciences.