Reality

Reality is

What has been; is; or can be.

The ultimate nature of things considered as a philosophical question. The universe consists of the whole spacetime continuum in which we find ourselves, together with all the matter and energy within it. Science is said to be the study of the universe. See knowledge.

The more or less naive world view of a person which is internalized from one's parents and peers. One's reality includes one's culture, social status and sense of what is right and wrong. For example, during a debate on teaching creationism in the public schools in the United States a gentlemen stated, "To deny there is a God is to stand on a building and deny there is a building."

Reality is socially constructed. Every individual does not sui generis internalize the external world but absorbs from others the social constructs which make up a culture. One's sense of what is "real" may at times differ from what acually is which is sure to make life interesting. In some mental states such as psychosis or delirium, the subject's perception of the world may be strikingly at odds with the social consensus. In some surrealist, idealist and other theoretical writing this is called "consensus reality".

The physiological creation of reality

It is arguable that none of us directly perceives reality (even if a single physical reality can be demonstrated to exist). (Direct realism, however, questions this assertion.) The following account represents the current beliefs of cognitive scientists.

The brain receives information from a variety of channels, all of which are more limited that they appear, as is demonstrated by the existence of optical and other sensory illusions. Standard models of human perception estimate our information-processing capacity for the external world at a few hundred bits per second of conscious information.

Vision: an example of the creation of reality

In spite of this, we live with an illusion of a hi-fi 360-degree full-colour full-motion sharp-focus external visual reality (that would take several gigabits per second to represent) that is assembled from a series of gazes and fixations of a very limited foveal visual field, combined with blurry low-resolution surrounding vision and peripheral motion-detection.

The rest, as many experiments in human vision have shown, is supplied by the imagination. Indeed, it is reasonable to describe the whole human visual field as a hallucination -- albeit an active hallucination that is kept up-to-date and consistent with reality wherever information is available. When this checking mechanism fails, the phenomenon of unreal hallucinations is generated by the same mechanism that generates the "real" ones as optical illusions.

Illusionists manipulate these mechanisms to generate their illusions, by generating misleading and distracting stimuli designed to spoof the visual and perceptual systems into generating the impression of unreal events.

The social construction of reality

All cultures admit of alternate realities, some quite esoteric. Listening to the disputes of groups with widely separated points of view, it is clear that they actually have different points of view about what is self-evident -- that is, "real". Often, they reveal their biases by describing their viewpoint as the "real world" or their views as those of "real people" or "ordinary people", showing that they consider the beliefs of their opponents to be disordered and unreal.

Some commonplace examples are Israeli reality versus Palestinian reality; Democratic Party reality versus Republican Party reality; and male reality versus female reality. Surrealist beliefs about the nature of reality are radically different from those of most people. There are also semi-real virtual realities such as within a MUD.

more is needed on this topic, including the social dimensions of acceptable behavior and manifestations of mental illness

Psychoactive drugs and the perception of reality

stuff to go here on the effect of psychoactive drugs on perception of reality

Reality, sanity, and mental illness

to be written

Religious views of reality

to be written

Platonic forms and the philosophy of reality

we need a bit here about Plato, Platonic realism / Platonism, Platonic forms and mathematical realism

Reality and quantum physics

stuff to be written on the Copenhagen interpretation and Everett many-worlds interpretations of quantum physics, including the concept of the Multiverse

Reality in fiction

stuff to be written on Philip K. Dick, Jorge Luis Borges and other authors whose work involves themes of reality and perception