The Reality Hub

There are a number of posts on this site on the topic of reality. This page provides a cross reference to them.

The world's greatest philosophers, from Aristotle to the present day, have debated and wondered about reality, and tried to define it, and they continue to do so. Personally, I'm not sure there's such a thing as a totally objective reality because "reality" can depend on the mind of the observer and their perception, based on the structure of the brain. So I think theories should be considered to be models of reality and it's pointless to ask if any particular model is "real."  All we can do is test theories and verify them to ensure they provide the best models (until we find better ones!)  And ideally, those models would be mathematical because that is the best language we have that is independent of our perceptions. 

The things that we can be sure of (facts) and the things we can have some kind of confidence in (theories), make up only a tiny fraction of reality. Most of our ideas on the nature of reality are speculation. If reality is infinite, as I suspect it is, then we will never know everything about it.

Consider reality as the blue cloud shown below. This diagram is obviously not to scale because the reality cloud could be infinite. Within reality, there is a tiny amount of information which is fact (the yellow circle). We also have theories, which explain more about reality than facts, but which are not themselves facts. They are models of reality. The next widest range of information is hypothesis, and some of this information is shown outside of the reality cloud, because it could be completely wrong.  Beyond hypothesis we have speculation, which is a much bigger space than hypothesis, and again it goes beyond reality because much of what we speculate may not be real.  The space in between speculation and the boundary of reality represents ideas that human beings have yet to imagine or speculated about. 

Religious Apologists will claim reality can be explained by God somehow, but that's a problem for me, because God might not exist. So that's not much of an explanation. When Religious Apologists ask me to explain the nature of reality, I'm afraid I can't give an answer because I don't know, and I would suggest no one knows and I am guessing that no one will ever know! What I can do is provide a wide range of hypotheses and philosophical speculation....

Assumptions about reality

What is reality?

The definition of reality

Is reality made of information? [2010]

Is reality made of information? [2017]

Reality and consciousness

Is reality a simulation?

Does reality exist?

Is reality made of mathematics?

Reality - mainly nothing?