I often wondered whether my friends and I saw the math problems, for example, in the same way. And I often saw that their approach to solving problems was different from mine. Thus, how different can we be? Throughout the years I got to study the concept of reality and I understood that things are much more complicated than they seem. So, I invite you to a reflection on the concept of reality.
In order to understand reality, many philosophers such as Descartes, Aristotle, Plato, and many others chose to focus on studying the human being, that’s why many of the discussions about reality bring the human being to the fore.
Why is this happening? And why do we need to know the human being to understand reality?
Many of you probably know the image with the two people looking at a structure hanging from a ceiling from different sides. One said it was a circle, another said it was a square, while the figure shows us that it was neither a circle nor a square, but a gathering of old rusty things.
What the author of the image wants to tell us is that everyone will have an opinion about reality, that will seem to be as real as possible, but it is nowhere near reality.
This perspective, however, illustrates at a superficial level the ability of people to understand, know and penetrate objective reality, that is, physical reality (the real one, if you wish).
Individually, our perspectives about reality are built by ourselves by considering the totality of knowledge we have about the things around us.
A simple example is a case of some people from African tribes. When these people see planes in the sky, they start praying and talking about Gods. In their opinion, the planes are Gods or the Gods’ transportation; and this from the simple fact that these people have no knowledge and have never seen an airplane. And there is more, these people judge things through the prism of their powers, and they assume that airplanes are Gods or creations of the Gods for the simple fact that they don’t believe that such a thing can be made by humans, because they have never seen a human doing it.
Another example would be the magic tricks. A few centuries ago, magic tricks were considered to be acts that only people with certain divine gifts could do, or on the contrary, actions that had behind them the power of curses. And this is because people did not know the tricks behind them, and those who performed tricks preferred to make the public believe these things because they were profitable, they made money from this.
Thus, people believed they saw an act of magic, while it was a simple trick based on math and attention. Consequently, people judged the events and believed in magic just because they had no knowledge about tricks.
But how different can these perspectives be?
You can find an answer in my book “The new social reality of the Europeans: a constructivist view over Europeanization”, which you can find on Amazon at the following link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2KT5DQY
However, the answer to this question we will give in another post, where we will try to understand the differences between us and the importance of personal experience in building a perception of reality.
You can find the current topic in a podcast at the link below: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/WupvCr9Kfsb