We think this is reality

by Guest July 25th 2013, 1:39 am

We think this is reality. In philosophy that's called naive realism: 'what I perceive is reality'. And philosophers have refuted naive realism every century for the last 2500 years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and yet most people still act on the basis of naive realism.

Now the argument is 'well maybe my perceptions are inaccurate, but somewhere there is accuracy - the scientists have it with their instruments; that's how we can find out what's really real'. But relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you're using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which real reality can be seen; we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.

And when we begin to realise that we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it's much easier to understand where other people are coming from, or the ones who don't have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant or deliberately perverse or lying or hypnotised by some mad ideology. They just have a different reality tunnel, and every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world, if we're willing to listen.

Robert Anton Wilson