Today I will explore the ongoing discussion on the topic of reality itself, how we experience it and how we derive knowledge from it. My choice is based on a video made by an educational YouTuber called Michael Stevens, where he explores topics such as the limits of our senses, epistemology, the science behind knowing, what is reality, and the debate between Solipsism and Realism. In summary, the video shows us that actual reality and what we experience are two separate things, as well as explaining what knowledge is in scientific terms.
This real-life situation links strongly with human and natural sciences, specifically neuroscience and the biochemical properties of our brain. This is because the reality we know is only available to us thanks to our brains, and the way this organ filters reality from our senses is crucial in understanding what is truly real and how we develop knowledge.
The video itself introduces the questions ‘Is anything real?’ and “How do we know anything?”, but it hints at a much more interesting question, ‘To what extent does our knowledge and experience of the world differ from its authentic truth?’ This question might just be one of the most important and difficult dilemmas to answer. It is our human nature to search for the “truth”, but stopping to reconsider whether anything we experience is authentic is necessary for us to really understand the universe we inhabit and to know anything with certainty.
The video makes it clear that the world we experience differs from reality itself. From this distinction we arrive at Solipsism, the belief that only you exist and everything else are figments of your mind. For a solipsist, authentic truth could be anything, from being very close to what we experience, to being just a simulation. The opposing philosophy is Realism, which consists of the belief that the real world exists independently of you. For a realist, our experience of the world might differ slightly from reality, but it would be certain that reality does exist and it is not just electrochemical signals and neurons in our brain. However, most realists admit that we can not know that Realism is true, we can only believe it. In my opinion, solipsists are the ones with a more certain answer to this question, but Realism is a more healthy and convenient philosophy to live by.
Tok journal by Stefano. Z
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