What is Reality??

By definition reality is; the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.

A thing that is actually experienced or seen, especially when this is grim or problematic.

A thing that exists in fact, having previously only existed in one's mind.

The quality of being lifelike or resembling an original.

The state or quality of having existence or substance

Existence that is absolute, self-sufficient, or objective, and not subject to human decisions or conventions.

"Over seven billion human brains traffic the planet today. Although we typically feel like independent operators, each of our brains operates in a rich web of interactions with one another-so much so that we can plausibly look at the accomplishments of our species as the deeds of a single, shifting, meta-organism."

Our common sense notion of reality is that our eyes, ears, nose, and fingertips puck up objective reality, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Smells, sounds, and colors do not actually exist in the outside world. The interaction between what's "out there" and our sensory organs isn't the whole picture, either. And the brain "has no direct access to the outside world. Its locked in silence and darkness inside your skull." Our brains have never seen the outside world, and yet we experience it.

The slice of our ecosystem we can detect-or biological umwelt-is created by an interaction between the outside world, our sensory organs, and our "pink computational material." But we go about our lives as though we are operating in an objective reality. "Each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entire subjective reality out there."

Yet, with a little thinking we easily recognize that the reality we experience is constructed by our biology. For example, the umwelt in which bats exist is entirely different than the umwelt in which human beings exist even when we are physically in the same space. While our reality is constrained by our sensory capabilities. "Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in it's operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine." The bat's experience of reality has "a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive."

In other words, our umwelt even constrains what we can imagine reality is like for a being with different sensorium, and, "our sensorium is enough to get by in our ecosystem, but it does not approximate the larger picture." On a deeper level the complexity and speed with which the trillions of calculations are executed by each human being's unique individual brain below the level of awareness is breathtaking. "Brains are as unique as snowflakes."

What can we know about the nature of reality? We must first confront the utter look of in-the-moment awareness regarding how our umwelt shapes and constrains what we know as reality.

The function of the brain, it turns out, is dependent upon input.

Just as blind people are able to operate in a reality devoid of the light waves in the range received by the human eye, we are all able to operate in a reality devoid of the radio waves, microwaves, x-rays and gamma rays that are passing through our bodies at all times. We are unaware of the because we are "blind" to them, our sensory receptors are incapable of receiving them. And just as we have a direct perceptual experience of the things for which we do have sensory receptors, people without certain receptors-people who are deaf-may be able to expand their umwelt to have a direct perceptual experience of sound waves without altering their existing sensory receptors.

The brain operates with electrochemical signals from which it extracts patterns and assigns meaning, creating your subjective world. The brain doesn't know or care where the data comes from, it just figures out what to do with it, and it does it efficiently.

"All these sensors that we know and love, our eyes, ears, fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug-and-play devices, you stick them in, and you're good to go. The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in."

Reality gets even harder to explain when we zoom out. Why are giggling nd yawning contagious? Why does a person who is three degrees of separation from a happy person have an increased chance of being happy? Why do volunteering and donating money cause an increase in health and happiness? "Your neurons require other people's neurons to thrive and survive. Who you are has everything to do with who we are."

As members of society, people create a form of collective reality. "We are all part of a community of minds."

Example: Money, in reality, consists of pieces of paper, yet those papers represent something much more valuable. The pieces of paper have the power of life and death, but they wouldn't be worth anything if people didn't believe in their power. Money is fiction, but its useful fiction.

Another fiction humans collectively engage in is optimism. "The Optimism Bias: people's tendency to generally overestimate the likelihood of positive events in their lives and underestimate the likelihood of negative ones.

Humans are somewhat hardwired to be optimistic. That may be because optimism "tends to have a lot of positive outcomes."

This slightly distorted view of the world can also be a weakness-a person might continue to smoke because they don't expect to get lung cancer, for example.

Physicists look beyond the human mind for external reality, but even that reality isn't absolute truth. Fundamental reality as scientists understand it is based on Quantum mechanics, a realm where a;; manner of strange things occur. An electron can behave as either a particle or a wave, depending on how one measures it. Scientists can measure either a particle's position or it's momentum at any given time, but never both.

The universe may turn out to have more dimensions than we know about, where fundamental forces behave very differently than how we perceive them.

The universe could even be a kind of hologram. The amount of information that can be stored in a region of space is proportional to the region's surface area, rather than it's volume-a property known as the holographic principle. One possible implication is that reality is actually two-dimensional, and the three-dimensional world is merely an illusion.

Reality is nothing more than a mere projection of your mind. Reality is a collection of your own thoughts. You are living inside of your mind. Your perception is your reality.

Think of it like this: What makes a "bird" a "bird?" Why do we call a "bird" a "bird?" Why do we say "bird" and associate that word with the living being we label a "bird?"

Answer: The bird doesn't exist. It only exists in your mind. The physical and living being we label as "bird" exist, but the association with the world is an illusion. That isn't a "bird." Your mind makes it a "bird."

The mind is so powerful, that it has the ability to bring things into existence.

Words, Symbols, and Trauma have an effect on our consciousness, perception and reality.