Reality

How we perceive our world has a lot to do with how the world actually is. That may seem to be an unnecessary statement of the obvious, but not if you consider separately the two components of the statement. There's our perception of the world and then there's the world itself. Which is the real thing?

The first and most famous philosopher to work at understanding the question of reality was Aristotle. He beleived that our perception of the world was the world. In other words, because we can see things around us, they exist.

This approach has its limits, of course. Take for instance the tree falling in the forest question; Eastern thinkers question Aristotle's point of view by asking the supposedly unanswerable proposition, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well of course it does, we think. But how can we ever know for certain? Budhdists have pondered this for centuries.

My friend Alan believes he knows. He was camping alone a few weekends ago in a very secluded area and a tree fell about 20 yards away from his campsite. He quickly looked around and there was no one there to hear the tree at all. But according to Alan the tree not only made a sound it scared the crap out of him. He was so excited by this that he packed up all his new Coleman gear and rushed back to town.

We met for a drink downtown. Alan was behaving smugly; he believed that because of his great luck in the forest he had answered the age-old question that had stymied eastern philosophers for centuries. Our waitress was Asian and every time she visited our table Alan smiled slyly up at her and chuckled in a very self-satisfied way. She left our table confused so I told Alan that just because she was Asian didn't mean she knew about the tree falling in the forest question. He didn’t care, though.