Your mind is boss. The instruments are your window on reality, and you desperately need to understand the data they provide. The only power that can grasp and integrate this evidence correctly is reason, which evaluates experience by logic. The truth exists in a context, not as a commandment carved in stone from some authority. If, for example, the artificial horizon indicates that you re flying with the nose well above the horizon, and at the same time the airspeed indicator reveals a high speed with the engine at idle, and the altimeter and vertical-speed indicators reveal a dive, then the artificial horizon is clearly broken.
Reality is contextually absolute.
The pilot s task, no less than everyone else s, is to grasp reality, not to invent it, and we do this by applying reason to the evidence of our experience. But to a pilot asking whether he can get away with cheating the reality of poor or rusty skills in the face of overwhelming weather conditions, reality should be as evidently threatening as if one were contemplating a leap off the Empire State Building, and wondering if flapping one s arms could allow a gentle touchdown on 34th Street. I take this relationship between instruments and mind as a metaphor for the wider question of the relationship between reality, broadly understood, the human faculty of reason, and the senses and emotions that also inform the mind. Reality is not relative, as the cultural relativists would have you believe when they tell you that your mind creates your reality. The uniquely human problem is how to grasp it correctly.