Before we can distinguish between objective reality and illusions we must first understand how human beings use knowledge to create the ideas or concepts associated with them.
For the mind to create an illusion it first must obtain knowledge from a reality or environment outside of it because it cannot create something out of nothing. In other words before one can have an illusion their must exist a reality upon which to based it.
This means there must be an objective reality outside of the mind which must be the same for all individuals because if each illusion was supported by a different physical reality it would take an infinite amount of energy to support the infinite number of realities that can be created by the human mind.
In other words a single objective reality must exist. The problem them becomes how can we identify it.
As mentioned earlier to create an illusion the mind requires an input form an external environment.
For example many people in the middle ages had the illusion that the earth was flat based on the observation that they could not see a physical curvature in its surface.
However by the 15 hundreds many had the illusion that the earth was round based in part on the fact that Magellan had circumnavigated it.
More recently we have what many believe is the objective reality that the earth is pare shaped because it is the only way one can explain the knowledge we have gained from modern technology.
Yet we cannot be sure that that our understanding of its shape will not be altered in the future by new knowledge making us realize that what we now believe is an objective reality is only an illusion.
This suggests that one can only define or derive objective reality in terms of the knowledge associate with it. However, because knowledge changes so can the reality we associate with it.
For this reason scientists have what appears to be an insurmountable paradox because they are tasked with finding the single objective reality for the environments containing it. However this can only be done in terms of knowledge. Yet as was just shown the knowledge of an environment can charge. Therefore, our understanding of the “objective reality” we associated with an environment can also change which would seem to contract the earlier statement that there can only be one objective reality.
However we may be able to find solution to this conundrum by examining how we as humans use knowledge of our environment to create the ideas or concepts associated with its reality.
Humans build realties by first looking outward towards an environment and integrate any new knowledge gained from that into them.
For example the illusion that the earth was flat was created when the mind extrapolated the observation that locally the surface of the earth appeared to flat to its entire surface. However, this reality was replaced by one that involves a spherical earth in part when the knowledge the one could sail around it became available.
In other words science is the process of creating new “more perfect realities” by integrating new knowledge gained though observation into the illusions that existed before those observations were made.
This defines how we can distinguish objective reality from illusions because as mentioned earlier there can only one. As each new observation integrated into the current illusion that we have about our environment brings us a bit close to defining its true “reality”. We can be sure that we have found it only when we look out at it and do not observe anything that disagrees with the ideas and concepts we have about it.
There can be no doubt of the existence of a single objective reality. Our job as scientists is to use knowledge to create the illusions that will eventfully identify it.
Later Jeff
Copyright Jeffrey O’Callaghan 2011