This world of the underlying cause we call ‘reality’. Our reflections on this lead us to wonder if we can know of the world beyond our perceptions – the underlying cause of our consciousness of appearances. The problem ‘what is reality?’ arises from a consciousness of ourselves as living in a world which seems to be outside of, and yet is the cause of, our conscious life. God is at least as real as an idea like ‘compassion’. But we see their effects, and assuming they are real makes sense of great swathes of our experience. We cannot prove the existence of the electron or alpha particles or even such matters as market forces, compassion or philosophy. To take the big question: is God real? ‘Real’ I find more meaningful than the ‘existence’ question. Some plans and commitments are called unreal because we know they will come to nothing. Promises, agreements, treaties are real only so long as they can be trusted. Phlogiston no longer makes sense, so it has lost its claim to reality, as a banknote which goes out of circulation becomes a piece of paper. It may not matter if the story of my life is real or invented, until a lawyer asks if I am really the person mentioned in my long-lost uncle’s will.Įlectrons, energy, valency, spin are real in so far as the scientific structure they form part of explains what we experience. Psychotherapists know how people act out ‘scripts’ which they can rewrite to invent a new reality. Theatre and everyday life overlap – although the murderer in the play is not prosecuted. When they fail in this, they feel unreal, they don’t ring true. Theatre, television, paintings, literature deal in illusion but can be real in the sense that they nurture and enlarge us, help to make sense of experience. Its opposite is not illusion, but the fake, the counterfeit, that which can’t be trusted, has no cash value. It is akin to truthful, valuable, even delightful. The real is the genuine, the reliable, what I can safely lean on. You might as well ask “What is the nature of ‘upright’?” When you have flu the familiar world can seem unreal. Injure the brain and the victim may lose their sense of reality. We have evolved to tell the real from the false. We need to know whether something is a bear or only a child with a bearskin rug over its head. We need to tell the difference between hard ground and marsh that only looks hard. What’s the problem? Isn’t it enough that things are as they are? No, because we are sometimes deceived. SUBSCRIBE NOW Question of the Month What Is The Nature Of Reality? The following readers’ answers to this central philosophical question each win a random book.
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