Reality

We all know a chair is a chair because since we were born everybody tells us that thing we sit on is a chair. Now what if I were born in a family where a chair wasn't called that.. but 'boat'? I would refer to the chair as 'boat' and everyone would think I was retarded or at least had some other mental problem since I obviously can't tell a boat from a chair. That I know what the 'boat' is for doesn't change that perception. If I were speaking another language though, this wouldn't be a problem. People would accept that I call the chair 'boat' because that's what it is called in my language.

This doesn't apply to reality though, whatever language I speak, reality seems to be something universal. And if my reality differs from yours... well then I'll just simply will have to believe your reality. And if I don't want to, history shows we are ready and able to beat our reality into you. We will kill others to make them believe our reality.

"Reality consists of what we know to be true or what others have told us to be true". I once asked my science teacher why Newtons law was true, could he explain that to me. And he told me I just needed to accept that some things are the way they are because well.... they just are. A couple of hundred years ago everybody thought the world was flat and if you sailed across the seas... you would simply drop off the face of the world. That was their reality and someone saying otherwise was just crazy. But it turned out that they were mistaken. So how real is reality? Is reality real when 200 people believe it is? Is it real when 4 million people believe it is? There are millions of people who believe in a higher power, but the consensus still is that they are all mistaken, unfortunate ones that have a need to believe in something coz the world is too hard a place if they don't. That's weird isn't it?

Someone told me reality is what we can prove to be true. But doesn't every method we use to prove something rely on other methods we choose to believe are right? We can tell how old something is by carbon dating it. Now what if the half time of something after a million years doubles? We don't know that, there's no way to find out, and yet we all agree that carbon dating is a precise way of dating something. What if in a hundred years everybody laughs and says "can't believe they believed that to be true!"? And what if someone can prove their reality by using their methods, but we consider those methods to be wrong? Then what they believe in to us simply isn't true. So isn't reality just what we chose to believe is true and not what we can prove is true?

Reality seems to be nothing but a set of conventions that we all accept to be true. Reality is subjective, so does reality exist at all?