The Nature of the World Around Us

(The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live. - Victor Hugo)


Premise -

My premise for this work is based on some common sense that seems to be missing in much of the philosophical theory I have read dealing with human nature and the nature of knowledge. (Oddly enough I have found that much of these writings deal less with the nature of people and more with the status of reality and what we can perceive and know from reality.) My premise is that there is a real world of objects and other intelligent / sentient beings we call people. Some philosophers state that we cannot know if there is a real world outside of our minds and that we can only know that which we perceive to know. To them, the only reality is the reality that exists within our minds. The most obvious retort to this is that if this is true then we really don’t need to eat or breathe since these are merely stimuli for our minds to perceive and these things do not necessarily exist. In short, all objects in the “real” world exist independent of what we think, believe or call them, and even regardless of whether we know they exist or not. If your great Uncle Albert lives in Wichita Kansas, and you never knew he existed, he still exists, and you will learn this when he come to visit you for this next summer. (Just because you don’t know he exists doesn’t mean that he doesn’t know you exist.)

This gets me to an obvious result of reality: The common reality. In short, real reality is a shared reality. While everyone may perceive and sense things somewhat differently, a common reality exists for us all. Contrast this with our dream realities and you should have a pretty good understanding of what I mean. People don’t share the same dream when they sleep at night. My wife may dream about going shopping in a mall while I dream of being in a forest full of falling trees. The worlds of dreams are not shared worlds.

And this gets me to a pet peeve I have, the preverbal tree in the forest. The question is phrased like this: If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound. From the above point of view, the physical manifestation of sound waves occurs when the tree falls. Whether you call that sound or not is purely a matter of semantics not true philosophical enquiry as some would like to believe.

Proofs -

The first and easiest proof of the existence of a true and real reality is the simple test I gave above: If a person stops eating and drinking he or she will die. In short we as human beings need to interact with our environment (or our environment needs to interact with us in the case of someone who is comatose) for our very existence.

If reality existed only in our minds then we would only be able to perceive those things we had knowledge of or could imagine. Experience shows us otherwise and we are occasionally surprised by what the world presents to us, like the visit from Uncle Albert. In addition we often conceive of things that could not possibly exist in real reality. This is commonplace in the realm of dreams. There are rules that exist in the real world that do not necessarily exist within the imaginary worlds within our minds. Such things like the law of gravity must be observed in the real world, and can be studies helping to make up our sciences. When we study these sciences we learn new and sometimes unusual things. In the worlds of the mind, the law of gravity need not apply.

As I stated earlier, objects in the real world exist independent of what we think or believe about them. They can often, however, be altered by our will through the force of action. If I want a chair, for instance, to become a pile or rubble, I can simply pick up the chair and smash it into the floor until it becomes the pile of rubble I want. (I can then note the surprise, and anger, on my wife’s face as she finds the broken chair in the middle of the living room.) In the imaginary realm I can simply think of the chair transforming into a pile of rubble and it is magically transformed as my mind wills it. I no longer have to take an action to transform it; it just transforms itself. In this realm my wife might even be happy about the chair’s destruction… But not in the real world.

I will be covering the realm of the mind in greater depth in my “The Reality We Know”.

What does this mean and why does it mater -

The ramifications of an actual, real, common and shared world are far reaching. Knowing that your actions and inactions, attitudes and beliefs have real and substantial effect on the world and people within it gives greater importance to ethics, the study of the world, and the things within it. No longer can we simply say that we don’t mater, that our actions are futile. Through the ethical use of our actions we can impact the world around us and make it a better place.