If reality only exists on the level of perception....?

Question

then how did many different people with different realities create a computer? I mean, since they all perceive different things how did all those different things end up being a working computer that we all seem to perceive and use as a computer?

What about the space shuttle. Did the people working on that all perceive it as completely different things? How could they work together as a team? How are teams possible if reality is subjective?

Why don't I see people walking through walls if I perceive a wall and they don't? How do we all drive on roads together while having different perceptions of reality? Why do we all manage to stay on the roads since my perception of roads and where they are is different than yours??

Are poison mushrooms only poison to the people that perceive them as poison?

Why do we get educations since each of us has a different perception of reality? Teachers are useless, right?

Why do we all use the same letters to spell words?

Answer 1

The answer is: Reality does *not* exist on perceptual level. As Ayn Rand, author and philosopher, would say: Check your premises. Now, take a look at all your questions with that in mind. Reality exists. How someone perceives it is another story but that doesn't change the fact that it's real. Those people who think they can walk through walls will most likely break their nose, the drivers on the wrong side of the road will eventually be involved in a head-on collision, and if one eats poison mushrooms, they will surely get sick. Your comment about education is interesting... because students are now taught that there is no reality. The joke is on the educators. If they really believed it, what would make them think there are actually students in their classrooms? Reality exists. You can choose to evade it but you can not avoid its consequences. Disavowal of reality is called mental illness.

Answer 2

Annie,
That's a 4000 year old question that is still raging in Asia and here. The Inuit and the Lacota probably solved it directly.
There is a concept called the middle way. It is not a compromise, but a fusion.
The schools that think only reality dominates and perception is not relevant, and the consciousness only schools are both wrong because the moon doesn't care how you perceive it. It will still be there. On the other hand, how you perceive the moon definitely affects your life. So both schools are right in the splinter, and wrong in the whole.

Besides that, the bell curve still dominates and allows most of us to agree enough to get things done. The getting done is made more difficult because the ability to accept and understand alternate perspectives is rare. Most people live in a box. It would be best to dissolve the box.Many top executives of serious companies have agreed to that. That is why the teamwork building industry is so large and so mostly ineffectual. For an illustrated take on multiple perspectives, see http://www.erhardsculpt.net

Answer 3

I think you may be talking about Idealist vs. Realist? Idealists must depend ultimately on an idea of God or an absolute to provide the glue that becomes necessity. An idealist would answer your question by simply pointing out that we perceive the same necessary connections between ideas and so arrive at the same conclusions. That is the price of being an idealist, like Berkeley or Kant. There are idealists who simply think that the universe itself is the absolute that provides these necessary connections.

Realists however have different problems. They must suppose that a real object exists that exactly corresponds to the perception of each individual. How many tables are in a room with seven people observing it? Yet, each person sees the table from a different angle and a realist must explain how one real table can have so many different shapes at the same time. Another problem for the realist is that it takes light a certain amount of time to reach the eye of the perceiver and therefore you are always seeing the object in the past, not the object as it is in a supposed real present. Some of these problems were enough to convince Bertrand Russell to change sides. That doesn't prove realism is wrong, but it does indicate it is not as simple as people think.

Answer 4

I believe Berkeley would wonder how it is that you think you know these various things.

For example, people working together. I'm sure you have seen many things that looked like people collaborate on a task and produce a result... but how do you KNOW that those things that looked separate really were? If you were in a house of mirrors, one person might have many images. Perhaps most of the supposed teams you see are actually just instances of single individuals that also look like separate people.

And don't forget how many teams fail to communicate even the most simple ideas among themselves and fail miserably at tasks that any member might have done by themselves... does this not support a kind of subjective idealism rather well?

As for walking through walls... try to imagine what it would take for you to NOT perceive a wall: you would not only have to not-see it, you would have to not-hear sounds coming off it, not-feel temperature or texture or hardness, not to mention not-sensing barriers to your muscular action. If someone can wave their hand around and not detect anything, I'd have to agree with Berkeley that in fact there is probably no wall there, whether -I- see it or not.

For that matter, are you SURE you've never seen someone walk through walls? I've seen magicians perform far more unbelievable tricks than that. If you don't KNOW there's a trapdoor in their equipment, is it really all that reasonable to ASSUME that it's there?

Teachers, books, and all other forms of communication MAY be useless... but then again they may not. On a practical level, if they seem to produce satisfactory results to each of the students in class, does it matter if each of the students are hearing the same lecture or not? Perhaps it is possible for me to live in a world where invisible hamsters hold people down to the ground while you live simultaneously on a world where it is gravity that does that. If we have no direct interaction, but only sense-filtered ones, isn't it possible that each of us could go about in our activities that operate under completely different rules and see nothing awry?

Don't get me wrong though... I think subjective idealism such as you refer to is a load of bunk. But it is not so easily DE-bunked as all that.

Answer 5

Reality can mean two different things.

Like for example, human cannot live forever. It is a fact. No matter how you perceive life or how heroic and powerful you think you are, one day you are going to die, and leave all your riches behind. Now that's reality.

But on the other hand, reality can also be based on the way we see things. For example, how many of us here thinks that school dropouts can hardly become a millionaire? I believe many of us think that way, because this is reality. No qualifications, no job. No job, no money. But how many of us realise that when we tell ourselves that this is ''reality'', we are actually limiting ourselves? Bill Gates is a millionaire who is also a school dropout. It is because he didnt perceive a school dropout as a definite failure, so he doesn't have to conform to the ''realistic point of view''.

This saying is basically talking about the reality we can control. Many of us come from poor family backgrounds, but why do some people become successful in life while some remain poor? Because reality lies in the level of perception. What you cannot control, you cannot control. But if you view it in a different manner, you can change reality.

Answer 6

One could argue that a computer is a collaboration of knowledge and perspectives and does not exist as a single perceived reality.



The answer to this question it either “is” or “it is not”. It is either possible for things to be created despite a difference or perception or it is not. Look in front of you an observe what we have created. Given this evidence can one not conclude that we in fact can create working technology from the collaboration of many perspectives? What you know is what is real. A computer is or is not real.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism



The philosophy of positivism provides an interesting perspective of knowledge and reality.

Answer 7

Interesting question!

I don't subscribed that reality only exist on the level of perception. Indeed you are correct with your answer when one of the asker assume it to be when infact it is a wrong assumption. A thing is merely a bundle of perceptions - i.e., classified and interpreted sensations. You protest that your breakfast is much more substantial than a bundle of perceptions; and that a hammer that teaches you carpentry through your thumb has a most magnificent materiality. But your breakfast is at first nothing but a congeries of sensations of sight and smeel and touch; and then of taste; and then the internal comfort and warmth. Likewise the hammer is a bundle of sensations of color, size, shape, weight, touch, etc.; its reality for you is not materiality, but in the sensations that come into your thumb. If you had no senses, the hammer would not exist for you at all. It might struck your dead thumb forever and yet win from you not the slightest attention. It is only a bundle of sensations, or a bundle of memories; it is a condition of the mind. All matter, so far as we know it, is a mental condition; and the only reality that we know directly in the mind.

Thanks for asking. Have a great day, Annie!

Answer 8

You are confusing perception with culture.

Perception is a collection of sensory data which creates a picture of the organisms environment.
Culture is the collection of names, ideas, customs, goals,etc. which creates the perspective that it's members view the environment around their body with their ego/imagined self.

You are pointing to culture with these examples.
The human being / organism really has no need for any of it but is now in the habit of using culture for survival.

We are all the same thing, literally. The 'perception' you may be talking about is learned and created by your culture.
Your body and brain, like every other, senses stimulus and, based on need, responds appropriately.

You have learned to separate from your environment and use a 'you' to interact with the world. That 'you' uses cultural ideas, names and values to establish it's view of the 'world' which 'you' are referring to as perception.

Answer 9

This is because you see yourself and others as separate entity's.

This too is a perceptual quirk.


This is more easily understandable if one considers the actual scale of the components of an atom. If one takes into account the fact that the neutrons, protons and electrons of an atom actually have huge spaces between them it becomes clear that the atoms that make up seemingly solid objects are made up of 99+ percent empty space.

This alone does not seem too important till you add the idea that the atoms that make up seemingly solid objects are more of a loose conglomeration that share a similar attraction but never really touch each other.

At first glance this does not really seem relevant, but closer analysis reveals that this adds a tremendous amount of empty space to solid objects that are already made up of atoms that are 99 percent space. When so-called solid objects are seen in this light it becomes apparent that they can in no way be the seemingly solid objects they appear to be.

We ourselves are not exceptions to this phenomenon.

These seemingly solid objects are more like ghostly images that we interpret as solid objects based on our perceptual conclusions.

From this we must conclude that Perception is some sort of a trick that helps us to take these ghostly images and turn them into a world we can associate and interact with. This clever device seems to be a creation of our intellect that enables us to interact with each other as though we were separate individuals in what appears to be a three dimensional reality.

I hope that helps to answered your question.

Love and blessings Don

Answer 10

Can you begin to imagine if reality did only exist as perception? This is all so screwed up now, imagine if every ones perceptions lived beyond physical laws. Our brains often live on many levels at the same time, which results in questions like this. Keep on dreaming.