Monday, January 11, 2010

Reality

What is real? Prove it. When people get into verbal debates, whether they are political fights or gossip, they talk about what is real and what is not. They get into discussions of what is the correct way to approach this and that. Yet, no one really knows what he or she is talking about.

For five minutes, forget about all of your previous ways to discern the truth. Forget about what reality means to you right now. What can you prove exists? You might think that this question is silly. Everything that you see around you exists. Everything that you ever learned exists. Right? Well, no one really knows. Reality is designed by what goes on in our head. It is defined by what our conscience “sees”. For instance, if you pick up a pen, it is defined not by what it is, but by what our brain tells us it is. The nerves on our fingertips and our eyes make the pen appear in our brain, and thus, in our reality. Here’s another example. What is red? Red is the color that you see on the Language Arts textbook, right? Well, everyone agrees that the book is red, but the red that you see might be different from the red that someone else sees. Our brains might perceive the color differently, but we do not know that. It is impossible to prove to anyone.

If a tree falls down in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? The scientific answer: of course it makes a sound. Yet, there is no proof that it does make a sound. We do not know what goes on outside of our own bubble. You cannot prove anything is happening besides what you see with your own two eyes, and even your own two eyes may be deceiving you. Anything and everything you know might be false. We might be in a whole different world, and everything that we see might be fabricated. Think of “The Matrix”. There is absolutely no way to prove anything in this world. There is no way to know what is “true”. In fact, our own methodologies might be wrong as well. The way we think might be wrong. Our search for truth may be incorrect. There is absolutely nothing that we know. There are infinite possibilities and we do not have any idea on what is the right one.

What does this mean? I don’t really know. It’s possible to sit around all day and think about this constantly. Yet, the result will be the same. In order to keep our sanity, we need to think of some sort of reality. We create a world shaped by our beliefs. Does thinking about this thing help us at all? We know that we have to cling to some form of reality, so how does it help to be reminded of the fact that we are clueless?

All I think that we should try to avoid is bigotry. Bigots are people who do not listen to anyone else’s point of view. They plug their ears and only listen to what they want to hear. These people can be members of the KKK or they might be feminists. They can be anyone. These bigots need to understand that there is nothing in this world that is provable, so they should be willing to listen to people that have a different opinion than theirs.

-Nick Jeon

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