So what is Reality, really ?

Recently I have come to know that we can’t see our nose, as our brains ignore it using the process called unconscious selective attention.

We all have been meaning to understand the meaning of life but to me it does not seem to get any better, now I come to know, all these years my own brain has been fooling me.

I mean who knows what all we are not seeing/experiencing , what all our brain does not want us to see/experience ? What is really a reality is, if there is one ? Or it’s just all illusion, some 3d game we are living in where we feel everything yet have no control over and going to become and merge into dirt after a while. Simple and always a fixed outcome.

My Nani is going through her old stage and she kinda wobbled the reality as we all know it. She claims some things which she thinks are real, like I am married, which I am not yet and like other things.

Now this seems a very simple case but if you understand it closely is it really? Isn’t we all assume something because our brain tells us, whatever it tells us to believe. ( Now I am not sure who tells who, because you are pretty much your brain, your conciseness. Rest everything else is just a support part for it, so maybe here one part of the brain to another.)

Like if I am in a dream my brain tells me something imaginary and I believe it until I wake up and see it’s not the reality as I know it, even though as by property of dream itself it’s not detailed but feels so real, isn’t it ?

But just a wake up call, that’s it and all I believe in dream time comes down to nothing.

When I say I know it, it’s more general censuses really. When a group believes it, it becomes reality for us. no matter if it’s really a fact or not. does not matter really, like Nasim Taleb explained in black swan, there was no black swan until one saw it and the consensus was there are only white swans, and that was pretty much one’s reality.

I recently learned that your mind knows no difference between fact and fantasy. you still feel the same emotions and it’s exactly the same to you.

When I first learned it, my response was the same as yours. What a bogus idea, this is the most bizarre and ill-scientific thing i have ever heard. this can’t be true, i know the difference between what is real and what is fake, you knucklehead, this is rubbish.

But hang on a second, I can counter this again with a dream example but let’s try something else, And to do that I am assuming you have watched a horror movie or read/listened to a horror story. Now when you watched/listened to this horror movie, did you feel terrified at moments where it was scary ? you did right ? a sane person would.

Why is that ?

• You already know, it’s fake.
• Those actors are just acting, nobody died.
• Even the ghost is an actor and you can start following him on his social media.

Then why is that ? Why do you feel the same emotions as you would have experienced the same kind of horror in real life ?

Well that’s because your mind knows no difference between what is fact and what is not in the very moment. And that’s the whole idea behind the placebo effect.

To an extent it knows what it, itself creates, because it knows it’s origin. Which is called efferent information. but what we receive from our senses, it’s all the same afferent information to it.

So let’s come back to reality once again, so technically if I see a book, you see a book and other people see the same book, we will call it a book. because to all of us, our senses are telling us the same thing, right ? so it’s a collective or shared (if you will) reality for us.

But one person comes and he/she says it’s a glass of water not a book. now it’s against the collective reality so we would say, it not true but then again, is it really? Humans can’t see UV lights but butterflies can, does that mean UV doesn’t exist? (We know by other means it does.)

So with that, To me it seems like there is no absolute reality or at least something we know for sure. It’s just a collective or shared reality you and I know and experience, and that’s pretty much the reality for the whole human species.