000what is the nature of reality_ _ issue 61 _ philosophy now

7/24/2019 000What is the Nature of Reality_ _ Issue 61 _ Philosophy Now

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3/21/2015 What Is The Nature Of Reality? | Issue 61 | Philosophy Now

https://philosophynow.org/issues/61/What_Is_The_Nature_Of_Reality

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1. What Is TheMeaning Of Life?

2. A students guide toJean-Paul SartresExistentialism and

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3. Newtons FlamingLaser Sword

4. The Death ofPostmodernism AndBeyond

5. Critical Reasoning

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Question of the Month

What Is The Nature Of Reality?The following readers answers to this central philosophical question eachwin a random book.

Whats the problem? Isnt it enough that things are as they are? No, because weare sometimes deceived. We need to tell the difference between hard ground andmarsh that only looks hard. We need to know whether something is a bear or onlya child with a bearskin rug over its head. We have evolved to tell the real from thefalse. Injure the brain and the victim may lose their sense of reality. When youhave flu the familiar world can seem unreal. You might as well ask What is thenature of upright?

The real is the genuine, the reliable, what I can safely lean on. It is akin totruthful, valuable, even delightful. Its opposite is not illusion, but the fake, thecounterfeit, that which cant be trusted, has no cash value. Theatre, television,

paintings, literature deal in illusion but can be real in the sense that they nurtureand enlarge us, help to make sense of experience. When they fail in this, they feelunreal, they dont ring true. They are false, they fail as art. Theatre and everydaylife overlap although the murderer in the play is not prosecuted. Psychotherapistsknow how people act out scripts which they can rewrite to invent a new reality. Itmay not matter if the story of my life is real or invented, until a lawyer asks if Iam reallythe person mentioned in my long-lost uncles will.

Electrons, energy, valency, spin are real in so far as the scientific structure theyform part of explains what we experience. Phlogiston no longer makes sense, so i thas lost its claim to reality, as a banknote which goes out of circulation becomes apiece of paper. Promises, agreements, treaties are real only so long as they canbe trusted. Some plans and commitments are called unreal because we know theywill come to nothing.

To take the big question: is Godreal? Real I find more meaningful than theexistence question. We cannot prove the existence of the electron or alpha

particles or even such matters as market forces, compassion or philosophy. But wesee their effects, and assuming they are real makes sense of great swathes of ourexperience. God is at least as real as an idea like compassion.

Tom Chamberlain, Maplebeck, Notts

The problem what is reali ty? arises from a consciousness of ourselves as living ina world which seems to be outside of, and yet is the cause of, our conscious life.Our reflections on this lead us to wonder if we can know of the world beyond ourperceptions the underlying cause of our consciousness of appearances. Thisworld of the underlying cause we cal l reality.

Is reality mental mind; or is itphysical matter and energy? If mind, is there adeeper consciousness underlying appearances that unites us all and is the sourceof our conscious thoughts? If matter, can we understand how the play of materialobjects and forces can give rise to conscious life?

If reality is mental, we might best connect with it by ski llful introspection; by apure, deep, and penetrating way of thought that would see past appearances andshow reality directly to the mind. Alternatively we might passively receive, by aprocess of revelation, a mental image of reality. In revelation, the cosmic mindcould speak directly to us, in apparitions or visions.

If ultimate reality is instead composed of matter and energy, the methodrecommended is more empirical; that is, more reliant on the senses. This method,which we call science, involves the formulation of statements of proposed facts(observable truths) about the physical, along with statements about relationshipsbetween the facts, in the form of physical laws. In science, these statements oflaws and proposed facts are subject to criticism and testing by observation andexperiment. The statements that at any time best convince, after testing andcriticism, are given the status of actual fact, or i f you wish, reality.

Revelation resists and endures, because science gives scant comfort to the desire


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for unification with cosmic reality. But science is relentless, and facts, ultimately, are irresistible.

Greg Studen, Novelty, Ohio

In discussing the nature of reality, we must distinguish between physical reality and immaterial (non-physical) reality. Physical reality is that which is constrained by physics or physical laws. Perhaps the bestperson to relegate this part of the discussion to would be a physicist, since a physicist is probably morequalified in discussing physical reali ty then an armchair philosopher such as myself.

Immaterial reality then pertains to what is not constrained by physical laws, eg concepts such ascharacter and the mind, Platos Forms, the realm of God and spirits. If physical reali ty is all that is real ,then what is the relationship of immaterial concepts, such as character, the Good, and morals, to this

physical reality? Are concepts such as these just the content of our brains and products of our reasoningand emotions? If so, then it is probable these concepts are just subjective and thus non-absolute, since thecontents of our beliefs is contingent and always changing. Conversely, if there is a separate and distinct(non-subjective) immaterial reality, and the aforementioned concepts of character, the Good, and moralsetc exist as aspects of this reali ty, then the existence of objective, absolute concepts is possible (maybeeven necessary), since the nature of reality is not contingent, dependent on subjective opinion.

On the other hand, some questions now arise: if immaterial reality does exist as separate and distinctfrom physical reali ty, how would these two realities interact? Is there a distinct location for an immaterialconcept (or a form, or spirit) in somewhere such as heaven, Platos perfect realm, or perhaps a morelocal area in the universe? And is there a distinct nature for logic and mathematics, or for the connectionsthat exists between these realities. These are questions for the philosopher and physicist to ponder, andperhaps answer, together.

Joe Moore, Woodland Hills, CA.

I recently uncovered the nature of reality from a man on a flaming pie, who handed me a herbalcigarette. I now know that previously I was a body in a vat being poked by a malignant demon. I was onlyan ape then, but after millions of years I evolved so that I could have the brain power to lasso the demonwith my electrode and thus escape. I was chased by a large white balloon, but made my getaway fromthe Island. Since then, I have set up my own very successful religion in the U.S. So, all in all, make sureyou always trust your senses, never question organised religion, and dont engage in any philosophybeyond Matrix1-3.

Simon Maltman, Bangor

Definition 1.A reali tyconsists of the interactions of a particular thing with what becomes for that thing.

Definition 2. Reality(with a capital R) consists of all realities.

Definition 3. The nature of a reality, or of Reality, is a description or explanation of that reality, or ofReality.

A reality for a particular stone or person consists of that stones or persons interactions with changingenvironments ie with what becomes for them. The nature of reality for the stone is not available to anyperson, since stones do not speak or understand a language any person can understand. However, thenature of a stones reality can be imagined or inferred by people. Geologists do this, so do poets likeShakespeare (sermons in stones), and so could you if you try. People infer that a persons reality isdifferent in kind from a stones reality since, for example, people infer as a result of their interactionswith what becomes that they can have more elaborate interactions with environments than stones can.One way people interact with what becomes is by way of their senses. Another way is by reasoning andfeeling, or perhaps by way of intuitions or revelations. Stones dont have these capabilities.

An hypothesis which can entertain people is that together all the realities for stones, for people, forwhatever form a single Reality. One can then ask whether or not all these realities, the parts of Reality,have something in common. One answer is that they have in common interacting with what becomes. Onecan ask further, what is the nature of what becomes? An answer is that what becomes is realities, ie,what becomes consists of interactions with what becomes. That is, the parts of Reality, the realities,interact with each other. Thus Reality is the interaction of realities with each other.

A more diffi cult task would be to explain how one particular reality interacts with another reality, and withall the realities it interacts with. One can then contemplate how all the realities can or might or do or didor will interact with each other. This is how one can contemplate the nature of Reality.

Gordon Fisher, South Salem, NY

One thing that everyone agrees on idealists, materialists, dualists is that there is sense to ourquestion. Another thing all these views share is that we all share the same reality. For example, forBerkeley the nature of my reality and your reality is the same it is all constructed out of mind-dependent ideas.

We should be wary of the idea that the nature of reality is relative to what someone believes. Suppose Ibelieve that the Earth is flat and you believe it is round. Therefore, the line goes, we have two differentrealities. This cannot be right, for we are talking about (referring to) the same thing. We just differ in ourbeliefs about it. But whatever the nature of reality is, it cannot be hostage to anyones view of it. It must


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be independent of any individuals mind. We can only hope to understand questions about its nature oncewe admit this. Of course, this rules out solipsism, the view that reality all of it is a function of myprivate experiences. This view is deeply mistaken, for the beliefs and other mental states the solipsisttakes to be the sole furniture of his world depend on there being a shared environment. As Wittgenstein,Davidson, and Strawson have all stressed, the development of language and of thought cannot occur inisolation. So, there must be someone else on the scene for the solipsist to have the beliefs he does, evenif i t is only Descartes evil demon. With two, at least, in reality, we see that the nature of reality cannot

just be how the world seems to any (one) individual. While this is not a full answer to our question, i t is afact we cannot ignore. At the very least, we can now say something of what the nature of reality is not.

Casey Woodling, Gainesville, FL

Reality is the independent nature and existence of everything knowable, whether it is knowable by logicalinference, empirical observation, or some other form of experience. Realitys existence and nature areindependent because reality does not depend on our minds apprehension of it to continue to exist or tomaintain its character.

Consider Kants idea of the thing in itself: that aspect of existence always outside of our perceptions of it.In Kants view, we can never truly know reality in itself, what he called the noumenal world, because weare limited to our minds imposition of fixed categories of knowledge upon our perceptions of it (thisgiving us what Kant called phenomenal knowledge). So it would seem we are forever cut off from realityas it is in itself, that is, distinct from our minds apprehension of it.

Furthermore, Thomas Aquinas pointed out that our perceptions of the world around us cannot beknowledge, since perceptions can logically contradict each other. For example, I may say, This chair isbrown, while another may say, No, this chair is not brown, its white. Since these perceptionscontradict, perception cannot produce genuine knowledge, since truthful knowledge cannot contradictitself.

Therefore, genuine knowledge of reality would have to be direct knowledge of the object itself. And soreality itself, comprising the independent nature and existence of everything knowable, existsindependently of our minds apprehension of it. At best, perceptions are not that which we know; rather,perceptions are that by which we know.

Craig Payne, Ottumwa, IA USA

While much of reality is a shared conceptualization, a great deal of i t is personal to the individual, forreality is how we describe the world: it is how the world seems to us to be. Therefore the foundation ofour reality is our language use.

We must resist the tendency to think of reality as a fixed state of affairs that language merely identifiesor labels. Reality is theproductof language. The impressions that flood our mind provide food forthinking, and the language we use provides us with the means to cook up a reality. Peter Winch states itclearly: Our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use. Theconcepts we have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world. (The Idea of Social

Science, Humanities Press, p15.)

What we know of the world we can only know through language, and as our language is subject to change,so too is our reality. The world will not change in the sense that physical objects may come into existenceas a result of language use, but our comprehension of our impressionsof the world (our experiences)often change as a result of language. When Harvey discovered that blood circulates he did not discoverred and white corpuscles or plasma. But though corpuscles and plasma existed as part of the perceivedworld they were not realized. They held no place as conceptual elements of reali ty. Realization is an act ofdiscovery governed by language use. In this sense, cultural differences in language use often createcultural differences in realities. New Guinea tribesmen who have only two basic colour words (light anddark) have a different apprehension of reality to us. They live in the same world we do and they arecapable of receiving the same impressions, but their reality is different from Europeans as their languageuse obliges them to divide the world into different categories.

Launt Thompson, Armidale, NSW

How does reality appear to us? What are the circumstances that could cause ones reality to be differentfrom anothers?

Our perception of reality is a generation of sensations caused by our minds, and the sense that they makeof the inputs to the brain, be they aural, visual, tactile, taste or smell. These sensations, particularly thevisual, wil l give us a sense of our surroundings and their dimensions. It is very easy to distort thisperception, and this can be done through mind-altering drugs or through the loss of one of the senses.

People who have never seen can have their own sense of reality, which may be vastly different to that ofa sighted person. They may have an internal non-visual visualisation of bodily form for example, which ifdrawn or created could be completely different from what is normally visually perceived.

Questions have been raised whether one persons sense of reality may be basically different to the nextpersons. However, as we are made of essentially the same genetic material and receive essentially thesame sensory inputs, this seems unlikely.

How different would an insect or animals perception of reality be to ours? A fly for example will have a


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distorted (to us) representation of its visual stimuli, caused by the need for the fly to be aware ofdifferent aspects of its surroundings.

In a dream state, situations often occur which seem absurd when awake. Therefore, we seem to have adual existence; one conscious and the other subconscious. The subconscious state can seem as real as thewaking state to a person who is dreaming or having a nightmare. How often is it that you wake, and thengo over your dream to realise that some of the things you were doing are impossible. Or arethey?

Alternate realities can now be induced by wearing computerised headsets, which can place a person insidea virtual reali ty. As graphics become more sophisticated, will this visualisation always be distinguishablefrom actual reality?

Simon Scates, Kalamunda, Western Australia

Reality is a simulation. In a very real way we live in a reality like that portrayed by the Matrix. I canprove it to you, right now.

Take the sensors you call your eyes. They transform light energy into an electrical, essentially digital,signal, which is sent to your brain. The same with all your other senses. All the sensory information youhave about the world, according to our best scientific understanding, comes to you as electrical pulses.Your brain uses this information to produce a highly elaborate simulation. It produces a 3D colouredrepresentation of something thats almost certainly not coloured in itself, and may not even be 3D. Itbears somerelationship to reality, sure.

This may seem a bit worrying. All these science fiction ideas about being a brain in a vat are essentiallytrue. We are just that. The vat your brain is in is your head. Worse, we are a consciousness, in a brain, ina vat. However a simulation is not necessarily less real than an unsimulated world, just a different typeofreality. To paraphrase Kant, there is reality and reality, and we need to be sure which we are talkingabout.

Take a fighter pilot as an example. If she looks out the window at 700mph, all she may see is a mist ofdarkness-obscured blur whizzing past her window. If she looks down at her instruments however, she isprovided with a much more useful reality simulation. A radar screen tells her where she is in the worldand what is coming up far beyond her real vision. A topographical display and night-vision goggles helpher see the ground she is flying over. Our normal simulation of reality aids us in the same way. Colourtells us information about the surfaces of objects we would otherwise not have (and how else could thisinformation be displayed?). Three dimensionality helps us make our way in a world of solid objects.Psychologists can tell you how much this all relies on brain processes.

We live in a simulation, yes; but it is not a lesser reali ty, it is an enhanced reality. Problems only comeabout if we, as the pilot, start to think the radar screen or the night-vision goggles are the only true wayto see the world, and confuse our representation of reality wi th reality itself.

Justin Holme, Surrey

The Y-Monster of Reality

Gazing upon a beer bottle I hold in my hand, I consider that I am not seeing the beer bottle as it exists,out there, in reality. Instead, I am looking at a picture of it as produced in my brain via my sensoryperceptions. That is, my senses provide data about the object of my perception (a beer bottle), and usingthe sensory data my brain assembles a picture for me to see. At any rate, i t is the picture in my brainthat I see and not the bottle of beer I hold in my hand. But because the picture in my brain is not theobject itself, one may come to doubt the very existence of the object out there, in reality. How can weever know whether objects really exist externally, if all we have to look at are images of them in ourheads? Is ours a world of ideas, or is our world really real? The answer is, Both. Reality is at once a worldof ideas, and an objective world of empirical reality.

Although one may never perceive physical objects apart from our perceptions of them, we can safelyconclude that the objects out there really are there, and so really are real, because there is generalconsensus about them. People agree, generally, as to what objects are. If I were to throw my beer bottleand hit a passer-by on the head with it, that person would tell the police I threw a beer bottle at him asopposed to having been kicked in the head by a flying blue unicorn, for instance. If there were no such

consensus about the perceived external world, then the fact of ones experiences would be all one couldbe sure of, with little by way of meaningful discourse with others. Yet, there isconsensus about theperceived external world. Like moviegoers in a theater, we all see the same movie.

Indeed, there is some consensus even concerning the world beyond our senses. Niels Bohr & Co exploredan invisible world on the basis of theory. Yet the world they thus observed and described is real, ascorroborated by subsequent discoveries and common experiences (well, sort of, at least to some extent).So, how can the empirical world, about which there is general consensus, and the world that exists in ourindividual heads, be reconciled? Behold: the Y-Monster of Reality.

The nature of reality is that it has two perceptual realms, or two heads, like a Y-monster albeit with aslight qualification. Unlike a Y-monster with two heads perched separately on two torsos joined to onespine, the Y-monster of reality has two heads, but one is inside the other. On the one hand [head], wehave our individual, subjective perceptions, individual to our own heads. On the other hand, however,there is also a giant, external head which encompasses all empirical reality, including our individualheads. It is science-based culture.

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This metaphorical outer head encompasses the empirical world of our common consensus. It is by way ofthis consensus that we experience reality. Any individuals perception is made within the context of amuch larger shared perception. To use a crude analogy, moviegoers at a cinema each perceive the moviein their minds, but what they perceive is in the movie theater, and their perceptions are determined bythe same objective data, as depicted on the silver screen. If, as quantum physicists say, our perceptionsplay a role in selecting reality by freezing a wave of quanta upon perception, then the world is alsosubject to our collective perception. Thus we form our world together, from one infinite moment to thenext.

Raul Casso, Laredo, Texas

Bishop Berkeleys Friday teas attract philosophers, whose most imminent reality is an empty purse. His

rock cakes have to be seen to be believed.Time is a human construct, reflected Cornbow. One cannot say that Reality is, or was. One can only saythat humans reflect on Reality as a defence against the mental trash unloaded upon us by the media.Those dire Reality shows especially.

I heard that the cosmos is shaped like a r ing doughnut, suggested Dr Shambollix, whose ultimate real itywould be abundant with doughnuts. Dark matter may be much like raspberry jam. There followed a longdebate about the meaning of like, and, fearing indigestion among his guests, the Bishop intervened: StPaul told the Corinthians that he could see Reality only through a dim reflection. However, he also thoughtthat Reality understood him. Young Amy, inclined to charismatic utterance, said that like Paul she hadascended into the Third Heaven, and it was both spacious and comfortable. Not like railway travel, sheadded.

There was a time, sighed the Bishop, when Bradshaws Railway Timetable sustained public belief in thereliability of religion.

The last word, and the final cake, fell to Sam Socrates, the New Yorker, who saw Pragmatism in allphenomena, including the Bishops cakes: When we arrive at the gates of Heaven, we are clad only in thewisdom weve garnered in this life. But we dont mention it much on Capitol Hill. A tear dropped on theBishops cheek. It is easier to sense Reality within the human spirit than to say much about it. Hepronounced the benediction before distributing the washing-up rota. There are some, he said, whobelieve that God is bound up with the spiritual evolution thrust upon mankind. All is in the process ofbecoming Real, but is not yet. Washing Up, not Cosmic Reality, is the Categorical Imperative for ourFriday afternoons. As for Spiral Dynamics, look at the icing pattern on the soft sponge...

David Lazell, East Leake, Loughborough

From the perspective of modern physics, the chairs we use are not solid at all but are comprised mostlyof space. In consequence we not only sit down rather more cautiously, but have become really quiterelaxed with the notion that our day-to-day constructions of reality may be largely illusory, varying notonly from person to person but from one era and culture to another, and most notably between species.

Platos Cave allegory would not get him onto any chat shows today; it may not even have been big newsway back in 400BC. The trouble is he fudged the issue, because the reflections in the cave weredistortions of realpeople, carrying their various burdens past the mouth of the cave.

By contrast, Heraclitus a couple of centuries earlier was making the more challenging suggestion thateverything is flux nothing permanently is. There are no beings at the cave mouth. What we think of asthings as stable objects are really in constant transition: they are processes. Our selves are the same.

Well, this is more like it: far better box office stuff, like the Matrix, where were fed a stream of data. Ifwe take on board the notion that the raw material on which our limited senses feed comprises a shifting,shapeless field of energy or data, like a sort of thin gruel in constant motion, then the questionemerges: What conditions within this constant flux yield boundaries? Without boundaries, the thing-medium distinction that so taxed ecologist Roger Barker cannot exist, and our varied experiences implysuch a distinction. Further, without any boundaries, any awareness must of necessity be ubiquitous andremain undifferentiated from other focuses of awareness. I, in consequence, become positivelygodlike.Well, I can live with that if you can.

Martin Lunghi, Scottish Borders

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