Does reality exist?

Does reality exist? Carlo Rovelli (a famous theoretical physicist) doesn't think so and he cites Nagarjuna as believing the same: > Rovelli has a different idea. **He says reality doesn’t exist.** The > reason physicists have been led astray by bonkers theories in the 100 > years since Helgoland is because they can’t bear the thought of not > being real. > > It was at this point — a third of the way through the book — that I > mimicked Heisenberg and took my first long, befuddled walk. Reality > doesn’t exist? What on earth does that mean? Rovelli’s favourite > example is a red chair. ‘Red’ doesn’t exist, for sure — everyone knows > that philosophical chestnut: it’s just the way our brains make sense > of light of a certain wavelength. But Rovelli also insists that > nothing else about the chair exists either — its weight, its shape — > except in its relationship to the person looking at it. And you can > keep banging away at this type of argument until you get to the level > of the atoms forming the chair. Insisting that anything about this red > chair needs to exist outside of relationships is metaphysical > neediness. > > Part of the fun of Rovelli’s book is that your immediate reaction to > his ideas — repugnance or delight — isn’t meaningless. Without > mathematics or experiment, by page 81 your thoughts are at the > frontier of quantum theory, and it’s time for your second > brain-cudgeling walk. If things exist only by virtue of their > interaction with other things, what happens to them between times? Do > they vanish? Do instants of time also not exist? Does it even make > sense to talk this way? Oh dear, oh dear. > > Rovelli devotes a precious chapter to the work of the second-century > **Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, who also insists there is no ultimate > layer of real things.** Emphasis mine. These ideas form the heart of his well regarded Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and are discussed extensively in his new book Helgoland. Other questions on this forum have asked whether physical reality exists, but the highest rated answers have mostly danced around the question. They argue that it is our "attitude" about such questions that is relevant... In other places, the assertion is that this question is one of the "thickets" or is somehow unanswerable or is somehow not amenable to logic. I find all of these quite flaccid in the face of this prominent theoretical physicist coming out quite explicitly saying that our current best known laws of the universe (properly interpreted) indicate that reality itself doesn't exist and that the unwillingness to acknowledge this by other physicists is "metaphysical neediness!" He is arguing that we can talk about this meaningfully and use our reason to arrive at this conclusion with mathematics, logic and empiricism. I'd also say that it is quite obvious **the answer to this question has vast soteriological consequences that are very deeply relevant to Buddhism** and should not just be ignored or danced around. So, is he right?