At what point does one's perception cease to be reality?

Question

I have a friend who is extremely talented in Fine Arts. Likewise she is of above average intelligence. About a year ago she was terminated mutally from her father's business where she was the vice president. Anyway, after this happened she was telling me that all of the other employees were critical of her methods and ethics. She said, "You know, for some people perception is reality." I said yes and it works both ways. I'm not sure she liked my response. So when does perception cease to be reality? Is it when it's convenient for a party feeling scorned or unjustly accused is saying it? Is it when government tell us it's so or when a social worker says so? Or for that matter anyone who might have appointed authority for instance a crooked judge or cop? I look forward to any thoughtful responses.

Dazed & Confused,
Regarding the perception of truth, if pain equals truth and I hit my thumb with a hammer causing pain then am I not perceiving the truth in the form of pain? Not to be argumentative for arguments sake I'm merely replying to a phrase in your reply about perception of truth.

Answer 1

what she meant was this:
some believe that reality exists outside and independent of our senses and we are bound by our own perception of reality believing it is the truth, when in fact reality can be something completely different. other opinions state that it doesn't really matter if reality exists or not when we cannot perceive the truth to begin with.
your friend was just referring to this. so at what point does one's perception cease to be reality- the answer is that one's perception never really is reality..it's just the way our senses interpret the world

hope I helped

Answer 2

Dazed and confused is correct. Your question touches on an important notion. Many people mistakenly assume there is only one objective view of "reality", when in fact each of us have our own perceptions of reality.

As to your question: "at what point does one's perception cease to be reality?", that is up to the individual. If everybody starts thinking differently than I do, I might want to start rethinking my assumptions, or not (think slavery, Nazi Germany, bell bottoms....)

That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.
— Paul Valéry, (1871-1945)

It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?
— Frank Zappa, quoted from The Real Frank Zappa Book

If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing
— Anatole France

Commander Lock: “Not everyone believes what you believe.”
Morpheus: “My beliefs do not require that they do.”
— From the movie: “The Matrix Reloaded” (5/15/03)

Et si omnes ego non -- Even if all, not me.

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
— Galileo Galilei

Back to your question of reality, people falsely assume that they are in touch with reality in its true form, what they don’t realize is that the very process of interpreting reality alters it in some way.

“Each person paints their picture of reality with a brush dipped in the pigments of the past.”
— Jerry Andrus

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are
— Old Talmudic saying

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
— William James

All the time we are aware of millions of things around us--these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road--aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
— Robert Pirsig, (Zen & Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance; p.69)

There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.
— The movie: “Adaptations”

The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.
— Jon Wynne-Tyson (1924)

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble across a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it representative of a whole class.
— Walter Lippman

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them.
— Edward R Murrow

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
— Albert Einstein

We must train ourselves not to see the world only through our own eyes.
— Michael Levine

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
— Albert Einstein

Enlightenment is illusion-free reality.
— Buddha, [Siddhartha Gautama] (?563-?483 B.C.E.)

Answer 3

At the point of death.