Is my definition of reality normal?

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21 Comments

If the common definition of reality is based upon what we can experience with our five main senses... Given that we accept this reality because we simply 'know' it to be true through intuition...

Then, if we 'know' something is real, yet we cannot sense it outright, is it still real?

If I can feel that something is real, true, and right... then I figure that it is real, regardless if I can see, feel, hear, taste, or smell it.

Is it normal to believe that something is reality even though you can't determine so through the five senses, but only through intuition?

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88% Normal
Based on 49 votes (43 yes)
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Comments ( 21 )
  • disthing
    11 years ago

    Our interpretation of reality is unique to us, it's subjective.

    It's a very basic philosophical idea that there is no absolute in determining what is true and what is false. It's a common theme in sci-fi (The Matrix, Inception etc.).

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    • 1000yrVampireKing
      11 years ago

      So how about people who are dreaming is the dream real? Do you consider it real if someone is hallucinating or are they just part of another reality only they can see?

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      • disthing
        11 years ago

        The experiences within dreams still happen to us - we still encounter that bizarre 5 legged chicken who's trying to tell us not to go in that grey cupboard because there's a really angry man there who wants his love back. The chicken is real, the man is real, the cupboard is real, but they sit in a space in our heads, often only briefly. They are real to the dreamer, and often only the dreamer. It's not 'alternate reality', it's simply an experience of reality individual to us. We identify dreams based on evidence; their content, the quality of sensations, the time when they are experienced, the lack of continuity afterwards etc. We determine what we saw was confined to our mind alone and that determines our response to them and how much value we lend to them.

        I think of hallucinations in exactly the same way - the only difference is they occur outside any phase of sleep. They're real to the person experiencing them, they're part of their experience of reality. But because they are ONLY part of their experience and not ours, we call them hallucinations.

        With this kind of discussion it's easy to get tied up in semantics - 'real', 'true', 'false'. It's actually quite hard to express my feelings coherently so forgive me if I make no sense :P

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        • 1000yrVampireKing
          11 years ago

          So in the type of case I presented would you find it fair to convict a person for this? If they kill a woman thinking she is a shark but in fact just a stripper on a poll is this murder justified. Since they are living with in another reality? Should they be punished or should they let this person go? If it was drugs the person chose to risk this but if some other thing was influencing can you blame them? Who do we punish at this point? Also I don't know why I did this scenario in a bar but it just turned out that way.

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          • disthing
            11 years ago

            This is why we have psychologists who work for the justice systems in various countries to determine the psychological standing of accused individuals.

            In your hypothetical scenario, the man is hallucinating - his interpretation of reality is deviating from the majority of the people around him - he sees a shark, and that's what he thinks he is killing. If psychologists evaluate the man and decide his hallucination occurred, this can change the result of the conviction.

            The man in this case shouldn't be punished, but he should be convicted (not necessarily for murder, but for manslaughter because of the extenuating circumstances). He should then receive extensive therapy in controlled conditions and if it's determined he still poses a high risk to society (i.e. there is a likelihood of recurring hallucinations and therefore violent reaction) he should be incarcerated within a psychiatric hospital where he can be supervised and cared for. This is what happens currently in many countries around the world.

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      • Anonymous Post Author
        11 years ago

        That depends on the other person's intuition. If your intuition is telling you something... (i.e. "I'm imagining this." or "This feels real/right/true." or "I'm not sure about this...") Then you ought to listen to it, I believe. If you have a "gut feeling" that what you experienced was real, then it is.

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        • 1000yrVampireKing
          11 years ago

          That was directed at dis thing. I did not mean anything was telling you it was wrong. I mean everything is telling you it is right. Like that dog in the corner eating food is a monster when its just a dog. So you chase the dog around thinking if you kill it a beautiful princess(bar tending female) will be safe and give you a kiss. When the rest of us see is you screaming madly terrorizing the dog and the bartender women screaming for you to stop! While you imagine the people in the bar to be a cheering crowd yet they are not paying attention to you really.

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          • Anonymous Post Author
            11 years ago

            Oh, pfft, sorry, I didn't see the "@: disthing" over the top. Sorry you two.

            But anyway... If you know you are imagining something, then it can't be real... But if you "know" you aren't imagining something, and you have the sense that's it's real and happening, then at least to you, it's real.

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  • DADNSCAL
    11 years ago

    You use this site to ask 1 of the basic philosophical questions of all time? Go read Sartre's "On Being and Nothingness" and check back later.

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    • Anonymous Post Author
      11 years ago

      Why not? I was looking to see what other ordinary people think about it.

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      • DADNSCAL
        11 years ago

        Hmmm This is interesting. I wouldn't call a person who thinks on such deep level ordinary. You're selling yourself short. I suspect you don't have any friends with your level of intelligence, to engage in stimulating conversation, right?

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        • Anonymous Post Author
          11 years ago

          You wouldn't? ...And to be completely truthful, I don't have many 'ordinary' friends, much less any 'extra-ordinary' ones... :(

          I have my teacher, you you could also call my friend, but I already know what his answer would be. :)

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          • DADNSCAL
            11 years ago

            Join a book club, or just audit a philosophy class for no credit, to exercise your bright mind.

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  • dom180
    11 years ago

    There are some things, like ultraviolet light, which straddle the line between the things we can sense and the things we cannot. We need instruments like special cameras to bring them within the boundaries of our senses, but they are most definitely real. In doing so, we also sometimes denature those things (ultraviolet light can never be *truly* ultraviolet if we can see it - we can only see an imprint of it modified for our own benefit).

    Emotions like happiness and sadness and love and hate and indifference are real, but we can never sense them unless you count a brain scan (which maybe you should count :P).

    There are other things which some people can perceive as real and others cannot, like God or ghosts or spirits. Those things are a third example of things that blur the line between real and not.

    What I'm trying to say is that reality is complicated, subjective and probably not limited to things that we can sense (although as technology progresses, someday maybe we will be able to see all that is real).

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    • VioletTrees
      11 years ago

      We still use our senses to detect ultraviolet light, though. We just have to do it a bit more indirectly than usual. It's not that UV light is subjective, it's that we're not particularly well equipped to sense it on our own. We didn't discover UV light (or any physical phenomenon that we can't directly detect, for that matter) by *feeling* that it was "right", we did objective scientific tests.

      If anything, our intuition is especially poor at accounting for things like UV, because our firsthand experience with it is so limited. If intuition could account for things like that on its own, people wouldn't get sunburned nearly so often.

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      • dom180
        11 years ago

        When I said reality was subjective, I was more referring to the other things I mentioned and not UV.

        I was meaning that UV isn't something we can observe with our *naked* five senses, which is what I interpreted the OP to be talking about. You have to manipulate it to the point where it isn't even UV anymore if you want to be able to observe it with our naked 5 senses. We can't observe it directly, and whether you count indirect observation or not is up to you. I know that isn't really "intuition" like the OP was talking about, which is why I said that it was straddling the line and not one or the other.

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  • Fabulous
    11 years ago

    Yes

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  • howaminotmyself
    11 years ago

    There are also subtle vibrations that we mostly ignore, but still feel. It isn't instinct that tells me I've been exposed to electromag netism, I actually feel it physically. I also feel weather patterns changing but in our high tech world we have forgotten what barometric pressure feels like.

    And unfortunately many of us are taught from an early age to ignore intuition as if it isn't real. So then we don't know how to use that "gut" feeling. But this "gut" feeling is how most animals survive in this world.

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  • juniperlei
    11 years ago

    what is reality anyways? what if this whole reality is just imagined and some day you will just wake up and realize it was all a dream or what if you die and you wake up in the true reality what if you are the only who exsists and everyone around you are just programs predesigned to repond to you and you are th eonly real person what if all the truths you know are only truth because the world your in is one of your own minds creation so therefore the reason the truths here such as gravity and having to breath and eat are just imagined by yourself who have created these limits

    this is the stuff i think about when i lay in bed O_O

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  • michaels4p5
    11 years ago

    not sure.

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  • bigguy2010
    11 years ago

    You need to lay off the drugs.

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