by Richard Sprigg

Created on: May 26, 2009

Reality is perhaps the most widely used and at the same time least considered concept in human thought: It is the touchstone for most of our ongoing interactions with the world around us.

It is obvious that we can only be aware of the phenomena that surround us every day through the use of our senses; at best these are extremely limited.

Further, the impressions that we receive from these senses, limited as they may be, is filtered through the mind. There is, therefore, no truly objective evidence available to us that these phenomena actually exist outside our mind.

We are, therefore, completely and utterly alone within our mind, and it is only by a stupendous act of faith that we manage to carry on a day-to-day life without bothering to consider the possibility that anything that seems to be outside the self may be illusion.

The starting point for any attempt to define reality is duality, the acceptance that the apprehension of phenomena requires the Knower and the Known. In other words, there is the self (the Knower) and phenomena apparently external to the self (the Known) that the self becomes aware of by some form of interaction with the senses.

The well-known proposition of Descartes, "Cogito ergo Sum", defines the Knower as "I". This elegantly simple statement makes clear the first principle of defining reality: That the intellect attempting that definition is itself real.

The next step in defining reality is to decide upon those qualities that are necessary for an apprehended reality to exist discretely. The first quality that must needs be defined is truth, since if a perception is not true it must by definition be false and therefore cannot possess objective reality no matter what the evidence of the senses may be.

Truth is a rather slippery customer to pin down; that which is true in certain conditions may not be true in other conditions. Thus some laws of Physics which are true at the scale of human perception are inaccurate at the Nanoscience level. Truth, then, at our current level of understanding requires conditional statements. It follows therefore that any attempt to define reality requires a universally applicable statement.

Further, any attempt to define reality must include the point from which the definition is being made, since the definition must be as universal as possible.

"The circumference is nowhere and the center everywhere"

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