We first analyze the transdisciplinary model of Reality and its key-concept of "Levels of Reality". We then compare this model with the one elaborated by Werner Heisenberg in 1942.
It is appropriate in this year, when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of quantum mechanics, and during which we have been saddened by the death of one of its leading founders, Werner Heisenberg, to reminisce about the formative years of the new mechanics. At the time when the foundations of physics were being replaced with totally new concepts I was a student of physics. I sat in the colloquium audience when Peter Debye made the suggestions to Erwin Schrödinger that started him on the study of de Broglie waves and the search for their wave equation. It was from Heisenberg, as his first doctorate student, that I caught the spirit of research, and that I received the encouragement to make my own contributions.
In this chapter, I offer some personal reflections about the nature of reality, shaped by my work as a quantum physicist, my experimentation with psychedelic drugs during the 1960s, and my more recent studies of modern cognitive science. Traditionally, questions about the essential nature of reality are asked by philosophers. In the twentieth century, these questions were asked for the first time by scientists as well. During the first three decades of the century, the exploration of the atomic and subatomic world brought physicists in contact with a strange and unexpected reality that shattered the foundations of their worldview and forced them to think in entirely new ways. Quantum physics showed scientists “a new reality,” and from that time on, the nature of reality became a popular subject of discussion not only in philosophy but also in science. In recent decades, cognitive scientists took another radical step in the scientific conception of the nature of reality. They asserted that the features of our ordinary, everyday reality are not features of an independently existing world, but are created in the very process of perception. In a way this generalizes the influence of the act of perception on the perceived object, which was famously analyzed in quantum physics by Werner Heisenberg, to everyday perception. In other words, even our everyday reality is just one of many alternate realities.
In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of phenomena but only to track down as far as possible relations between the multifold aspects of our experience." -Niels Bohr (1934, p.18) "The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has evaporated not into the cloud of some new reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of the particles but our knowledge of this behavior." -Werner Heisenberg (1958, p. 95.) "In short, orthodox quantum mechanics is Cartesian dualistic at the pragmatic/operational level, but mentalistic on the ontological level." -Henry Stapp (2009, p. 8).