REALITY CHECK

For most people it’s not at all difficult to tell what’s real and what’s not. Dreams, for instance, aren’t real while what happens while we’re awake is. But is it all that simple? How do we know, for instance, that we’re not dreaming everything we’re aware of? ‘Well it’s obvious’ you may say, "what a silly question!" People under the influence of various drugs, or who are suffering from some mental illnesses can be wide awake and experience hallucinations that have no ‘reality’. So the question, ‘How do I know what’s real?’ is not so silly after all.

This is a question that has occupied Western philosophers for hundreds of years. If I can show what’s real and what’s not real, then perhaps I can find out whether God is real or not and perhaps understand the limits of what can be known as fact. This is all known as the problem of duality, how to connect my conscious being with everything I experience as ‘real’.

One of the tests for reality is to get a second opinion. “Did you see that too?” is the classic reality check. If the other person says “Yes”, then it’s probably real. Except that the other person could also be a figment of your imagination. So, while the second opinion is a good everyday tool for checking up on reality, it isn’t absolutely beyond question. If you really want to get picky you can take this all a step further and ask “How do I know I’m real?” Well, if you want to define reality, perhaps it’s not such a bad place to start. If we can prove the reality of our own person, then we can see how that proof might be extended.

It was a very clever guy called Rene Descartes that came up with the answer. He said “I think, therefore I am.” The very fact that I’m asking the question proves I must be real. It’s a very neat answer and hard to argue with. The next step is to take that proof of our own reality and make the next step which is to prove things outside us actually do exist. That’s a lot more difficult. Descartes came up with an ingenious answer and he needed God’s help to do it.

This is how his argument went. I think of a thing called God. God is, by definition, all seeing, all knowing, the creator of everything and (also by definition) perfect. As God is perfect he must exist, as something that doesn’t exist is less than perfect. Therefore God exists. God created everything, so everything must exist, therefore the universe must be real. Oh dear! That’s a string off assumptions based on an idea we’ve simply created in our mind. It’s not exactly a satisfactory proof of reality. Western philosophers have been tossing this one around for centuries and I’ve yet to see a proof of reality.

It’s interesting to note that this is a question only asked in Western thinking. Eastern philosophers have never bothered with ‘Dualism’ as we call the problem. They don’t even worry about ‘reality’ as any kind of a problem. That’s probably because they’ve never recognised anything as real or unreal.

The word we use for defining reality is the word ‘is’. When we say something ‘is’ we mean it’s real. But what does saying something ‘is’ add to our understanding? ‘The car ‘is’ black’ tells us nothing more than to say ‘black car’. All the word ‘is’ does is connect other words or ideas together. You can take any sentence that uses ‘is’, take the word 'is' out, and no meaning is lost.

So is there any such thing as ‘reality’? The purely objective answer has to be ‘probably not’. Does this amount to a hill of beans in the way we live our lives? Certainly not. If something is real to you, then it’s real enough for all practical purposes.

So whether or not things are real doesn’t really matter? If you find a large lump of yellow metal that looks like gold, asking if it’s ‘real’ isn’t so silly.