1.2.1 Appearances, Reality and Doubt

Version 1.0 July 2016                                    (Previous Version)

We cannot conclude that we know what is real simply because we can see it right in front of us.  All over the world, and all through history, people have spent a lot of effort considering what is really real, but people still came up with very different explanations of what reality is like. 

●   The Vedas, from India perhaps 1500 BCE, tell us the world is not as it seems to be; what we experience as a table doesn’t reflect its true nature, and they call this illusion maya. 

●   The Buddha taught us that even the notion of our personal selves, our egos, is an illusion. 

●   About 400 BCE the Greek philosopher Plato taught that everything we see, each chair or table, is only an approximate reflection of the ideal chair or ideal table which exists in some other world. 

●   The French philosopher Descartes in the 1600s concluded that everything could be doubted, except his own existence: even the table he sat at might not exist. 

●   Modern physics, the strangest of all, tells us that the table is mostly empty space, at one level consisting of vibrating atoms and molecules of the wood it is made from, but at a deeper level a set of fundamental particles which are really just probability clouds that sometimes and somehow collapse out of a myriad of quantum mechanical wave functions when we look at them.  So there!

Despite all these historical differences, we can come to reasonable conclusions about the nature of reality.  In this section we discuss the reasons for doubting what we know and what is real.

We look appearances, reality and doubt under the following topic headings:

We summarize the conclusions we can reasonably come to on these issues as follows:

First we look at examples of the ways in which we perceive things is confusing.