Reality: the way I see it
By: Adryka S Vats
Tags: Insights, Perspective, Philosophy

One night, my mind sunk deep into a riveting topic. Reality and our existence. The evolution of our earth and mind is outstanding. If you just take a moment and look back, you realise how far we’ve come mentally and physically. It’s simply startling.

The future is all that occupies our minds these days, but I find it necessary to look back and dissect how we’ve reached where we are. Something that’s always fascinated me is simply the way we and our earth is. How everything is so interconnected yet so distinct. How everything is timed to perfection and has a purpose. It’s hard not to wonder about what or who shaped it all.

Everything around us has a name, a purpose and function which we humans have formed. There has to be an individual or individuals who defined those notions. So essentially, the way I see it, reality is just a perspective. A perspective a person or persons had about what they saw. This was adopted and passed on to generations which we now follow. Hence my statement, reality is a universal perspective.

Basically, everything we understand to be true is just a perspective that fits in. We can truly never know what’s real and what’s not. There have been many people who have challenged perspectives or had new ones. Scientists do just that. They try to understand what they see. The key word here is ‘they’. Some perspectives fit in better than others do.

Reality is a very broad and ambiguous term. My definition would be everything we see, sense and believe in. Let’s take beauty as a concept to breakdown. Initially, beauty was defined by a set of standards. If you ticked all the boxes, you were ‘beautiful’. It’s only now that those standards are being changed. Beauty is merely an individual perceptive on what appeals their eyes. It is subjective.

Steering away from vague concepts that do not have definite definitions, recently I came across a very interesting article on elements. It was based on how scientists are proposing a new way of arranging the elements. Mendeleev’s version included arranging them according to atomic numbers. This new one however, is based on a Mendeleev number which is based on an element’s atomic radius and electronegativity. The arrangement of elements is again, a perspective of an individual — the way that seems most logical to them. Another example would be the notion of gravity and time. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein had completely different explanations for both of these things. Isaac assumed gravity is the acceleration objects experienced once dropped whereas Einstein saw it as all objects are already accelerating. According to him, the earth and all objects are in motion in a curved spacetime induced by the mass and energy of those objects. Moreover, Isaac Newton saw time and space as absolute and constant things whereas Einstein suggested they are one identity, space time, and are personal to each individual based on where they are and what they are doing.

Every day, we figure out new things and new ways to do old things. This is simply because with 7.8 billion people, we have 7.8 billion perspectives that come into play. That to me, is extremely invigorating and fascinating. It’s thrilling to know that everything around me is still bursting with possibility. We could be living a fib, you never know. Either way, I think looking at it this way provides great motivation. The idea that not everything is the way we see it is exhorting as it pushes us to expand our vision and look out of the narrow spectrum created. Just because something has been discovered doesn’t mean it has been discovered the right way.

This was my perspective on how reality is a perspective, what’s yours?