What is the nature of reality?

When you woke up this morning, you found the world largely as you left it. You were still you; the room in which you awoke was the same one you went to sleep in. The outside world had not been rearranged. For most people, history was unchanged and the future remained unknowable. In other words, you woke up to reality. But what is reality? The more we probe it, the harder it becomes to comprehend. One thing though that both scientist and philosophers agree upon is that whatever reality is, it isn’t what it seems.

What do we actually mean by reality? A straightforward answer is that it means everything that appears to our five senses everything that we can see, smell, touch and so forth. Yet this answer ignores such problematic entities as electrons, which we cannot sense but which are very real. It also ignores phantom limbs and illusory smells. Both can appear vividly real, but we would like to say that these are not part of reality.

Another possible mark of reality we could focus on is the resistance it puts up: as the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick 24 put it, ‘reality is that which, if you stop believing in it, does not go away.’ But even these objective views of reality are being called into question. The core idea that none of that which we see or touch or experience is real in any sense, and that we are basically living in a dream of some sorts, is a concept that has been considered across time by scientist and philosophers alike. One of the earlier ideas pertaining to this is a philosophical concept 12 referred to as “Solipsism 63,” which in essence states that nothing in our reality can be absolutely confirmed to exist except our own mind, with the reality of the material world we see all around us and interact with impossible to be reliably verified as real beyond our own experience of it. In this sense, all other minds besides your own and everything you experience externally could very well be a dream or illusion, with the only real, absolute certainty being that you are you, you are thinking, and indeed the very universe itself may not even exist outside of your own mind. In short, all of reality as you know it and everything and everyone in it, the whole universe, is potentially a projection of your own mind, an elaborate dream which you have created and which only you perceive and experience. This basic idea was first contemplated by Greek philosopher Gorgias 14 (c. 483–375 BC), who came to the conclusion that any objective knowledge outside of our own personal experience was effectively impossible. He is recorded as having stated “Nothing exists. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it. Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.” This egocentric concept would be picked up on by other philosophers over the centuries in one variant or another, including Descartes 9 and George Berkeley 12, and it has become intertwined with many different areas of philosophy and hypotheses on reality. It is, of course, all a lot more complex than this, but in the interest of simplicity, in essence, the idea is that our reality cannot be verified independently as being anything other than existing in our own consciousness and perceptions, and therefore we cannot be certain of anything other than the existence of our own mind. In this case, not only is a reality not what you think it is, but there is no reality at all outside of yourself.

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