What is reality?

[[Aeora]]

every1lafs

A person is enclosed in a sparse room. Outside it's windy, and a little frightening. The temp inside is reasonable, food is made available, and everything one needs to survive is furnished.

Whether our subject is an inmate, a devoted monk, or perhaps a grateful refugee, is his reality to tell us. It's all one's perspective, and subject to change. He could be any of those things this morning, and a different one tonight.

Reality isn't objective or definable by an independent observer. Neither is it the agreement of the "real world" and one's model of this real world. One's reality is just that, one's own. Don't believe me? Ask a schizophrenic who has gone off his meds. A benevolent, loving family can be viewed as conspiratory and backstabbing. To say "If I had my very own reality, I'd be a millionaire married to a model", is a glib simplification, certainly. One doesn't get to *pick* their reality, it forms like the layers of an onion's skin (in the mind of the mentally stable). You cannot go from what you "know" to be real to how you would like it to be just because you'd like it that way. We are each a product of who we were one second ago, conditioned by new stimuli. Each thought is formed by the previous thousand, plus one's experiences.

Don't ya think it's rather contrary to the *process* of philosophy to simply label the sum of the physical state of the universe as reality? Maybe it's silly semantics, but I don't see it as productive, in a forum ostensibly created around Philosophy, to use this term, which has a unique nature in the field of thinking, searching, examining, reflecting, questioning, etc. as a dead-end. Use the word "reality" to symbolize that in a forum on physics, or astronomy, or another scientific discipline, but not here in one of the humanities. It may be the same word, but it has a radically different intent among philosophers than scientists.

I agree that reality is subjective to each person. For a schizophrenic that thinks he is in a room where the walls are made of play-doh, that certainly is "real" to him, but you cannot deny the objective, "real" truth that he is in a normal room. The subjective is 100% correct, or the objective is 100% correct, but they cannot coexist together; therefore neither of them are at all correct. Just try and tell me there isn't any yinyang s**t goin' on there xd  

[every1lafs]

Yay! You figured out my puzzle!! biggrin

Now, about that "reality"... Maybe its just a failing of our language. I took a cultural anthropology class YEARS ago, and one of the most fun assignments I ever had was the day we came up with ways to say "drunk". Smashed, bombed, blitzed, s***faced, f***ed up, we covered a whole blackboard! Now consider the word "love". Even though there are countless and dissimilar varieties of love (the love I feel toward my mate, toward my parents, toward pizza, toward my cat...), English only has one stinkin' word. At least in Spanish, you can choose from "Te quiero" or "Te amo" depending on how you mean it, but we are just *stuck* with one word. Kinda sucks. Same with "Reality". One's own reality can be different from the physical reality of things. It's all in how you mean it. My original point, a bunch of posts ago, is based on (I keep saying this phrase, like it means something to anyone) higher context communication. If I tell Sister Margaret Mary, "I love you", I do it from the context of that relationship. She knows (or she bloody well Oughtta know) that I do NOT want to jump her bones! From the context of a PHILOSOPHICAL discussion (I did, after all, find this thread in the PHILOSOPHY forum), reality has a different meaning. It ain't the same word on this planet.

The esteemed philosopher Vilém Flusser uses this definition:

Reality: What we perceive as reality is a tiny detail from the field of possibilities surging around us which our nervous system has realized through computation. If all reality is a computation from possibilities, then "reality" is a threshold value.  

[Big J THUG]

in my opinion reality is the vey existence of life.
however reality could just be an illusion and there is no point in it being there.
the fact is reality is what it is, even if we dont know what.  

[bluecherry]

If something is an illusion, can it in fact be called "reality" though? You may try to argue for "reality AS WE KNOW IT," implying people in general, or at least whoever is reading the post, have made a mistake in what they think is reality versus what actually is and that being an illusion, but just "reality" being an illusion seems a straight contradiction in terms. If you want to argue for the "reality as we know it" one being an illusion, I'd like to hear what kind of evidence you have to support such a belief or even cause for concern beyond just "what if?" and "but I can't prove it isn't so."

 

[Elvis presley123]

reality for me is a True Happenings, being as it's subject  

[bluecherry]

That is very vague. Could you please explain more, such as defining what you mean by "true happenings"?

 

[ricochet64]

Reality is empty space, I don't think it's tottaly infinite though. It's suspended in the non existency, which is bassically darkness. Let's say that reality's a box, and everything else is..... nothing. And in the box is it's own finite world, again I don't think reality's infinite. Reality could really be a box suspended in the infinite world of unused non existency.  

[retow101]

Reality to humans is what you can see, taste, hear, smell, and feel. Although this is a reality it is not necincerly the true or only reality. The Theory set in plave thousands of years ago states that reality is only that what your can "read" from your senven scences (at the time they included thought and rationality). This is the reality we are usually forced to live in, due to the fact it is the only one we can see.Although the String Theory does completely disppose of this theory and puts things into new perspective. According to String theory: All things are connected. All actions will have a re-action enless a whole in the current is formed. This could easily be refered to as a "worm whole". But that it's self is another topic. According to it, reality is anything that exists in the universe. Since the Universe is always growning and shifting, there is no one absolute reality. The one most of us come to know is the reality which i have previously stated; the reality you can scence. The other reality that can easily be distinguished, and supported is called the "omnic" reality. It is a theory that states that what we see is not the true nature of the sight. It was the first Theory that states the truth: That what our eyes see is just the bending and moving of light. What we hear is just irregular bends and ripples of air and paricles that we presume are sound. What we feel is not that which is truely or certainly the actual feel of the object, that what what we feel is just a pre-consuption made by our nerves and brain. That also states that what we smell is nothing more than an accompument of taste, and both those scences are told by what the brain says it it. If this is true, then the reality we know could be all an illusion set and told to us by our brain. Science already can prove this theory correct, the eye does take what it sees only from the light. And everything else stated is proven as well. All of this leads to the conclusion that our scences are just a way for us to calm our selves and let us have A reality. But what truely is Real is completely unknow to people. Mainly all animals see things differently, Bees are blind to white, cats see only four colors and dogs see in black and white. For all we know, another animal could see what is truely there, even if we can not. What is truely there is not we can scence. If this is true then the things we see could very well realy be just basic partilces that bend light in a way to make them seem like one solid mass, or have a specific color, feel, taste, smeel and even a sound. Another scence of reality could be time and space. But this is clearly disproven, and proven in different cases. Since time travles at different rates in different parts of the Universe, and in different dimensions, there is not certain time. Since space is constantly expanding and warping, there is no absolute existance of either space or time, which proves a reality could be based around that and that ours could not due to that. well after stating ALL of this i think you now see what reality is. There is NO reality, after all, our thought themselves very well could be a whole other reality in themselves.  

[bluecherry]

It sounds to me like your objection to sensory evidence as a way to come to know actual information about reality is that it is a method, a process. You object to any WAY of ANYTHING trying to find out ANYTHING about ANYTHING aside from something observing its own thoughts, because those are the only things we perceive directly so to speak. This just sounds like an absurd complaint to me where nothing would satisfy you as a way to come to know anything.

However, you later claim science has proven sensory evidence to be unreliable. But if sensory evidence is unreliable, then how did science really prove it? They had to use sensory evidence in the process of science. If sensory evidence doesn't count as reliable at all, then none of their scientific inquiries and experiments and observations are reliable to prove anything either. You cannot consistently claim sensory evidence doesn't prove anything about reality and we can't know reality AND that that through using this unreliable stuff, we have found out any reliable facts about reality.

Just because not everybody and everything has the same senses doesn't mean sensory information can't be counted on to tell anything about reality. A blind man may not be able to see, but he can still utilize his other senses to realize that a dog is there in front of him just like anybody else. A colorblind man may not see colors like you or I can, but they can still make out objects just like anybody watching black and white TV could. Both the blind man and the simply color blind man can still get reliable information about reality utilizing what senses they have and to figure out some of their missing information the same way you or I may indirectly discover UV rays of light which we can't detect with our eyes directly like red or blue light.

Also, next time you want to bring up a lot of technical scientific things that are not exactly common knowledge, I suggest including sources for the information.