Question by Mikey: what exactly is reality and how is it distinguished from illusion?
i can’t make sense of this concept, reality vs. illusion. everything feels like an illusion to me. what is reality, really?
Best answer:
Answer by TRAPPED
reality–“i think therefore i am” Descartes
What do you think? Answer below!
Reality is substantive, an illusion is not. That is reality has concrete shape, form and presecence, whereas illusions has nothing concrete about it.
Reality is a place on an established set of evaluation criteria, arranged in some number of dimensions. One example is a physical object.
Physical existence of an object in three dimensions is determined by how our brains process the signals our senses provide when focused on the object. We believe that we share a common set of evaluation criteria with other humans and some animals, because we all interact in a predictable way with the object. This doesn’t mean that the properties we common observe about the object are its only properties. They are just the ones we have observed.
So to me, reality is the common observation against a set of criteria, of something that results in agreement among everyone we consider to share our frame of reference.
Illusion is the perception of something that varies between observers with whom we share common interpretations about many other things. It’s essentially a measure of variance from the norm. If only a few of us report seeing dead people walking in their former homes at night, and despite repeated attempts by others, only a very few, or perhaps only one person sees the dead people, the rest of us label the perception an illusion, because it is not shared by everyone else.
HAHA I have this problem too! Have you heard the story of the man who dreamed he was a butterfly? Well the gist of it is one day a man has a dream that he is a butterfly and he flies around happily and carefree until he see’s a man. The butterfly flies over and looks at the mans face. The man then wakes up to see a butterfly fluttering in front of him. This makes him wonder “Am I man that dreamed I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I’m a man?
The point here is it’s really hard to tell what is real and what is an illusion. Rene Descartes almost went insane thinking whether or not everything including himself really exists or is it just one huge illusion. He came up with “I think therefore I am”. With this he knows for sure, as long as he is thinking or even doubting his thinking, he is thinking. There must be something existing(REAL) to doubt it. In other terms, to himself, he is self evident. This only proves that you yourself are somewhat real.
I like to think everything is paradoxical. So we have established that you are real. So what YOU process with your mind as an illusion must be real or it is unestablishable. Real but intangible like your dreams. in other terms. a REAL Illusion. An illusion that exists within reality for the existent mind to process. But then that in itself could also be an illusion within a larger scale reality and so on.
Let the inception-ness begin.
Reality is something which stays there, without changing its presence, but it might change its physical form
illustration is something which stays for sometime, and disappears as soon as you touch it.
Reality is relative and personal.
100 billions of animals and men have 100 billions different realities. Each one of the living creature is a close universe which founded upon separated life events and evolving consciousness. This uniqueness of perception to each of us, has created different value system and behavior pattern. Its totality become the foundation of the whole- collective mentality.
Hence, individual perception is the ‘real’, the projection of the whole to the mind is an illusion, since the separation is impenetrable.
what is the practicality of such an inquiry to the mind? the key is, ever since the mind is capable to discern ‘reality’ isn’t ‘solid’ as it was thought, it begins to criticise, analyze and reevaluate his belief system. That is revolutionary.
Reality is when we can see, feel, and touch something and there is substance behind it. Illusion is when we can see, feel and touch something, but there is no substance behind it (like a magician’s trick). There is a difference.
If you want to go deeper, I have heard the substance behind what we see, feel and touch may actually not be there until we perceive it. While that sounds insane, there is some physics proof that shows it may be true. In this case, everything would be illusion and nothing reality.
Reality and illusion are words used to categorize the totality of our perception into two parts. All words do this, they simple organize what we know in raw sensory form. Imagine being given a telescope. This is you being born and perceiving the world from a wordless point of view. Then a digital mapping guide is installed and when ever you look at a star a name pops up which allows you to identify it and also share it with others via it’s name. This is language. Reality would be like a formula more than a label. It would be everything minus illusion or in the telescope metaphor it would be a star minus the distortion and diffraction of light etc, etc. By now you should be getting close to the understanding that word reality points to something relative. Ultimately you see that everything is real and an illusion at the same time. Everything perceived is everything perceived. Everything unknown is everything unknown. Everything that is, is. Everything that isn’t is not. Everything… is everything. And eventually you don’t need words to classify and categorize what is perceived except for the purpose of certain trains of thought and communication.
The short answer: Reality is a word and so is illusion. Everything whether real or not is seen through the mind. There is nothing that you know other than your own mind whether you like it or not.
Reality and illusion on a more gross level than that needs no explanation here, thats what the dictionaries are for.
Reality hits you in the face. <}:-})
We are created beings. That doesn’t comes under natural way of life. We are not natural but unnatural beings. I mean we are just robots made of different materials (flesh, bones, tissues etc.,). There are ever existing eternal beings which knew neither death nor birth and God is the chief of these eternal beings. In fact this is the real ever existing phenomena. Some ask “Who created God?” Human beings think from the state what they are. That’s why they are unable to understand the truth.
Is reality real or are we models from a computer system? Are our feeling an Imagination or true?