I don’t like the word “reality” anymore. It’s alright when it’s used in casual conversation, but when the discourse gets serious, philosophical, or religious, then it causes my eye to twitch. It feels like the word has been overloaded so that it’s become rather meaningless.
My starting point is that I believe there are real things (whatever they may be). From there, I believe that those real things exist independently of us. They are objective; they do not rely on subjective observers or minds to exist. I would argue that abstractions such as mathematics and language do not objectively exist. We use mathematics to describe the universe, but the universe behaves mathematically in the same way that it behaves Englishly. Abstractions are extremely useful. They allow us to de-couple our ability to problem-solve from the physical world.
We’re not sure how de-coupled our experiences (qualia) are from reality. That’s a scary thought. We assume that our sensory stimuli track closely to reality. Our brains interpret different wave-lengths of light as certain colors (more or less), but is my experience of the color red the same as your experience of it? Our hardware is similar, so we assume that we are experiencing the same thing, but it’s difficult to know. Our brains are like black boxes that receive signals from the outside world, and use the sparse information that they receive to try build a picture of how it all works. So we might agree that the outside world exists, but we don’t all agree on exactly what it is made of. We call that outside world “reality”.
People have added all sorts of qualifiers to the word “reality”. All they do is muddy the water. They say things like “Ultimate Reality”, “Spiritual Reality”, “Physical Reality”, “My Reality”, “Your Reality”, “Cultural Reality”, “Shared Reality” as though there was more than one type of reality. I think it’s because those qualifiers are short-hand for different perspectives. So when someone says “Spiritual Reality” what they’re saying is something along the lines of “My perspective is that reality also includes a spiritual dimension that exists independently of us.”, and when someone says “Physical Reality” they’re saying something like “My perspective is that reality only contains a physical world with material properties”. And when someone says “Your Reality” they’re insulting you because they don’t think it exists outside of your perspective 😅. The qualifiers “My” and “Your” don’t make too much sense here because they rob the word “reality” of it’s objectiveness.
The word “reality” is preloaded with our conclusions about reality. That makes it really difficult to question the nature of reality. When I bring the word “reality” into a conversation I try to mean “whatever actually exists”, without smuggling in the things that I believe are real. In other words, reality is a box that contains a bunch of things, but I’m not sure what all of those things are. I’ve come to appreciate (and prefer) the word “Ontology”. It means ‘The study of being” or “The study of existence”.
We like to think that our experiences match reality. In fact, we interpret our experiences and form a perspective on reality. Then we conclude that reality matches the interpretation of our experiences. To make matters worse, our experiences are limited in space, time, scope, and resolution. I’m not trying to say that our experiences and interpretations are useless (they are very useful for our survival) but rather that their usefulness is severely limited. We’re not really cut out for resolving complex topics like geopolitics, ethics, religion, physics etc. It takes decades for some of us to get somewhat competent in these areas.
The nature of reality is almost certainly different from what we think it is. If, like me, you’re curious about what lies underneath it all, then question it as much as your sanity will allow. But we will certainly not get there by asserting that our experiences are how the universe works.
“Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.” - C.S. Lewis
