What is Reality?

8/10 - When I question things, I base my ideas on logic. But, logic is based on reality and truth. Sometimes, these are not reliable. In order to study these questions of metaphysics, we need to define the terms being used.

What is truth?

Truth is basically whatever is generally accepted. At one point, it was "true" that the earth was flat, and that the sun revolved around the earth, and that witches existed. We now have different "truths," but it is possible that they are wrong. I.e. Truth is not always correct.

What is reality?

Actual reality (or actuality) is absolute, and more reliable than truth, although we sometimes interchange the two words by mistake. Actual reality is the way things are, regardless of whether we understand them to be that way or not. It may be the case that no truth describes actuality perfectly, or it may be that we are edging closer and closer to understand the whole of it. Our reality (or our "illusion of actuality" as I like to call it) is the currently accepted model of existance that may or may not be actuality. Reality is what we can sense and "understand." Actuality may or may not include entities that we cannot sense and certainly includes things that we can sense but haven't yet. Basically, science is what we can sense, and more than likely there are many things that science hasn't found yet.

Some examples

Is our world truth/real/actual? Our world is true, as well as real. The reality that science describes is generally accepted (except for a few "wacko" philosophers. hehehe). But, as far as our world being actual, there is no way to know. Two movies that relate to this are The Truman Show and The Matrix. Both Truman and Neo had the illusion that reality was actuality, but in fact, their reality was fabricated. Maybe our reality is just a dream, how are we to know? We can't know...

Is God truth/real/actual? God is not truth, God is questionably real, and God may or not be actual (as I have defined the words). God is not truth because there is no universal acceptance that one exists. The reality of God varies from person to person. For the most part, it seems that God is not real. God does not exist in that we cannot sense Him. Some may disagree, saying that God can be sensed through emotions, or even physically and visually. I personally find these types of reality to be questionable though. Who is to say that God is present or if the placebo effect isn't happening? Finally, once again, God cannot be determined as actual, along with any other part of our existance. (This is not to say that God isn't actual, I am only describing how our reality may not be actuality).

What's the point of anything if we don't know anything?

We don't and can't know if fate is actual, or if we are living in a Matrix, movie, or dream. So why do we even bother to find any kind of truth or reality? Here's why:

Until we find some other reality, there is no reason (except to theorize) to base anything on a different concept of reality. What if fate exists? What if we are in the Matrix? Until we have some way of proving these, we might as well happily accept our illusion of actuality. Otherwise, we could end up questioning everything, concluding that there is no point in living, and paranoia will take over. But, this is the illusion that we are presented with. The only thing we can do is do the best we can, and make the most of our current state of reality.

It is definately important to theorize that maybe our truth is incorrect, because otherwise we would still believe the earth was flat for instance. As a matter of fact, I think there are a lot of fallacies that we accept as true. Most of them are based on nothingness/nonexistance, infinity, and meaninglessness/randomness/nonperfection. But, unless any of these theories can be proven, there is no reason to abandon our idea of reality.

Further reading: I have some theories of my own about what is actuality. These include: the infinite time theory, my ideas about the fourth dimension, and my theory of the soul.

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