Reality

Most of us must have heard this story about Rama when he was a child. One day he cried for the moon in the sky. Then, his mother Kausalya showed him the reflection of the moon in the mirror, to make him smile. Rama was happy that he got the moon in his hand.

Now, thinking back, I am very amused. Our perception of reality is very different from a child's perspective. Indeed, ignorance is bliss. But what is reality and what exactly constitutes reality? In its usual sense, that which exists objectively is what we call reality. This essentially means that what most people agree upon is what is called reality.

If a random individual in the group sees things which others don't see, then that individual is said to be hallucinating or he is diagnosed mentally ill. Now, is it possible that a whole group could be hypnotized to believe something which is not real (to members outside the group!) ? Ofcourse, it's possible. Widespread longheld superstitions (which aren't superstitions to the believers themselves until they were told about them) until the advent of science and reason are glaring examples.

Now, if a small group can be made to believe somethings to be real, perhaps the whole world could be made to believe that somethings are real and we wouldn't know. Ofcourse, we are not told or hypnotized by anyone to think somethings are real and some are not. We all came into this world with an innate sense of what is real and since we all independently arrive at the same conclusions about what constitutes reality, we might argue that what we perceive is real (not just to members on our planet earth, but to any neutral observer outside our group).

But can we be sure? Since we all are within the group, within the system, we can't know. For all we know, right from the birth, we might have been conditioned to the same objective reality as everyone else.

"What we perceive as reality is a tiny detail from the field of possibilities surging around us which our nervous system has realized through computation. If all reality is a computation from possibilities, then "reality" is a threshold value." - www.equivalence.com/labor/lab_vf_glo_e.shtml