What is Real?
Life is constant learning. We confront new challenges from birth to death and must constantly adapt along the way. Thankfully, human beings are capable of both creativity and imagination. We can learn things by reading them in books, hearing stories told by someone else, or simply watching and imitating more experienced or skilled peers. But how do we know the things we know? And more importantly, how do we know that we know the things we know? It may seem daunting to consider the roots of knowledge and the reality our knowledge is based on, but it’s not as complex as you might think.
What does it mean for something to be real? For something to be real, it must exist and be true. For example, a large rock or boulder plainly exists and when we push on it, run into it, or smash other rocks against it, we find it to be very real, immovable, and undeniable in its existence. The rock is a true, genuine, and authentic rock. The rock’s existence is an objective truth of an objective existence. We may wish the rock wasn’t in our way or wasn’t so hard or so heavy, but we can’t deny that it exists. If we want to move it, we have to expend considerable effort and energy to do so. The rock’s existence is a cold, hard fact we cannot rationally deny.
Reality is just a collection of rocks—the simple, hard facts and tangible truths of our world. Reality is the things we know to be real and truly exist. Reality is the essence of existence. Philosophy describes this idea as “Existence exists” or “What is, is.” It may seem elementary to begin this discussion by simply acknowledging reality. In practice, however, there are entire belief systems based on denying reality. These arguments typically rely on subjectivity or a ‘defect of the senses’ to dismiss reality as unimportant to human existence. These arguments are widespread and often persuasive, but they are wrong and rely on asking us to deny the evidence of our senses.
The inherent flaw in the idea of a subjective reality is easily proven false by returning to our rock example. We just ask someone that believes reality is subjective and unknowable to us through a defect of the senses to close their eyes and run through the rock. They will obviously run straight into a very hard objective reality. It will be difficult to deny the rock’s existence once they have smashed their head into it. But if our senses are ‘defective’ and reality is only a subjective image of what we believe we see, then closing our eyes should negate the rock’s existence. The blind and deaf should also be free from the cruel reality the rest of us suffer by seeing and hearing a distortion of existence. The truth, of course, is that the blind and deaf must deal with objective existence the same way the rest do, but with one less tool to understand it.
We should also consider what is not real. Humans love fantasies and imaginary stories. Creativity and imagination are both incredible capabilities of the human mind. We often use our ability to imagine new things as a way to make them real. This is called invention! Sometimes our inventions are entirely new ways of doing things. Sometimes they are simply using existing things in a creative and more effective way. Imagination is useful, but it is not real. The true power of imagination is bringing our dreams to life, to make ideas a reality.
Making our dreams come true has limitations. Those limitations are reality! It takes more than pure will to make something real. We have to take the knowledge, raw materials, and resources available to us and find ways to put them together to make something real. This can be incredibly difficult, even when what we want to do has been done many times before. Even the biggest dreamers have to confront hard facts. Reality always wins.
