Often, the conscious thoughts observed in my mind do not correlate directly to emotions- apprehension, doubt, etc. Also, with all the postulates observed in science and math areas, my definition of 'reality' is skewing. What's the point of performing experiments or learning postulates if, a hundred or less years down the line, everything that anybody knows can be proven wrong by one person, event or idea? And, assuming that postulates and theorems are reality- if someone on a deserted island is struck on the head and experiences a short-term coma, while no one remembers that person and that person is knocked out with amnesiac complications, does the world cease to exist for that person until he or she regains consciousness and loses his or her amnesia?

-- Eve Wrand (dreamwriterinaretainer@hotmail.com), May 01, 2003

Answers

Many different questions, most difficult to answer.

To take just one, the point of continuing to learn despite some of what we think you know turning out to be false later on depends on your point of view. For some, your own understanding of reality is for you, your time, your culture. What other people understand at other times and in other cultures does not undermine your own understanding. Another less pluralistic, relativistic line is that although we are always wrong in an absolute sense, we are continually getting closer to the truth. Pick the one that suits you best.

As for your last question, you undermine it yourself with the words "for that person." The important question not whether the world ceases to exist *for that person* (which is just a poetic way of saying that the person is unaware of the world), but whether or not the world actually ceases to exist if we, or someone, is not aware of it; that is, is the world actually constituted in some important sense by someone's awareness of it? Some idealists have answered "yes." Almost everyone else answers "no."

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), May 01, 2003.

I've found it helpful, as have such writers as the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan and the psychologist Paul Johnson, to start by dividing reality into four separate spheres or levels or phases: the intrapersonal (intrapsychic), the interpersonal, the impersonal, and the transpersonal. Questions about each type of reality are answered in quite different ways. Paul Johnson works this scheme out quite elegantly in his book Psychology and Religion (1957). It is also used quite nicely by Os Guinness in The Dust of Death, where he speaks of alienation in each of the four spheres. Whatever the releveance of post-modernism, psychologists have not done a very good job in delineating these four realities and speaking to the special nature of each in terms of asking what is real and how we can know it.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), May 02, 2003.

Perception is defined as the act of perceiving, which is "to become aware of directly through any of the senses, especially sight or hearing." On the other hand, reality is defined as "the quality or state of being actual or true".

An analogy may help: the earth was "perceived" to be flat which influenced peoples understanding, beliefs, and behaviors. The "reality" turned out to be something significantly different.

Therefore, it seems to me a more accurate statement is to say "perception may be reality" or "perception is perception of reality" rather than the more common "perception is reality".

-- Stephen Carman (scarman@ministryweaver.org), May 09, 2003.

In short the question is , wether perception is reality or something as reality does exsist ?

What is reality ? The way your brain interprets or something else then that ? Simply speaking whatever your eyes see and your mind precives is the reality for you and those things which are precieved simmilarly by majority are claimed reality . World is an imagination , reality being what you believe .

-- Shoaib (shoaibidris@hotmail.com), September 16, 2004.