I believe that “reality” is what we experience through our consciousness. Consciousness is the living entity inside us, it makes us a person and not just a body. We think we feel, and we do what we want because of this consciousness. What I think we can control is our own reality and that too to a certain extent. But what exactly is reality? Because what we think and what reality is can differ. Look at this picture,
You would think, what does this picture tell? It’s just a normal chessboard with black and white boxes. And you would say that A and B are different shades of gray but look closely, they are exactly the same.
“The brain is using its prior expectations built deeply into the circuits of the visual cortex that a cast shadow dims the appearance of a surface so that we see B as lighter than it really is.” – Anil seth, TED Talk (Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality ) , July 18, 2017. Why do we still see it as different shades of gray? The brain uses it’s past experiences to guess what a new object or a substance might be. This way, the brain is also able to create what we consciously experience. So, the reality might differ from what we experience.
Since consciousness is something no science or rational thinking could explain, I don’t think Reality can be either. Therefore, different people have different views of reality. Some think only the scientific doings and facts are reality and others think whatever is there in front of their eyes is reality. I personally believe the latter one.
Now comes the question of how much control we have. There has been a consideration among the scientists that we are a simulation, that we are not ‘creators’ but ‘creations’. The human race evolved somewhere around six million years ago and have evolved rapidly. We now have super computers and advanced technologies that we are even starting to develop AI (Artificial Intelligence ) so that non-living objects may have a sliver of their own consciousness. We are able to create small simulations of our own. So why can’t we be the simulation of a much more advanced civilization. What if each of our realities are created in a computer? What if we are created in a computer? Then there was a contradiction, there can be creations of finite entities from a computer of finite power, but we are aware that there is a unit of infinity. Parallel lines meet in infinity, value of Tan 90 degree is infinity etc. How can computers create such things?
Maybe they can, considering the speed at which we are advancing, there may be a time where infinite value can be calculated on computer.
This was just a hypothetical example. But in real life, we can only control a small amount of our reality. We can change our clothes, we can buy a house, we can run-over a person on the street ( thus also changing the other person’s reality ) but we cannot decide when a building collapses on us or an earthquake. So, we should always be mindful of other realities and make sure that our perfect reality doesn’t disturb others.
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