What Is The Nature Of Reality?

Gazing upon a beer bottle I hold in my hand, I consider that I am not seeing the beer bottle as it exists, out there, in ‘reality’. Instead, I am looking at a picture of it as produced in my brain via my sensory perceptions. That is, my senses provide data about the object of my perception (a beer bottle), and using the sensory data my brain assembles a picture for me to see. At any rate, it is the picture in my brain that I see and not the bottle of beer I hold in my hand. But because the picture in my brain is not the object itself, one may come to doubt the very existence of the object out there, in reality. How can we ever know whether objects really exist externally, if all we have to look at are images of them in our heads? Is ours a world of ideas, or is our world really real? The answer is, both. Reality is at once a world of ideas, and an objective world of empirical reality.

Although one may never perceive physical objects apart from our perceptions of them, we can safely conclude that the objects out there really are there, and so really are real, because there is general consensus about them. People agree, generally, as to what objects are. If I were to throw my beer bottle and hit a passer-by on the head with it, that person would tell the police I threw a beer bottle at him – as opposed to having been kicked in the head by a flying blue unicorn, for instance. If there were no such consensus about the perceived external world, then the fact of one’s experiences would be all one could be sure of, with little by way of meaningful discourse with others. Yet, there is consensus about the perceived external world. Like moviegoers in a theater, we all see the same movie.

I look forward to your comments