What IS Reality?

Paul and I love this topic, and have a variation of this conversation at least once in any given week.

Unless I stop to think about it, I tend to assume that everybody else experiences reality exactly the same way I do. That plate I'm eating from sure seems to be a solid object, even though on the atomic level it's mostly empty space between atoms. If a friend and I each took out a pencil and paper to draw the plate, I think we would each come up with a similar picture. This leads me to believe (and assume) that s/he and I perceive the plate the same way. When we have a conversation "on the same wavelength," and we don't have to work hard to make each other understood, it feels like we must experience the world in a very similar way.

It's really hard to imagine the world from any frame of reference outside the filters of my bodily senses and life experiences. Without the brain's ability to organize raw sensory data into patterns, the world out there would just be a chaotic mess of random-seeming atoms. We wouldn't be able to make sense out of any of it.

Even if someone else shared my exact sensory perceptions (doubtful), s/he would still have a totally different history of life experiences. We would perceive the same sensory experience very differently.

This reminds me of a spirited debate in my Twentieth Century (music) Analysis class in my CIM days. Our prof asked the class the following question: If you encountered an isolated group of people who had never heard Western music before and played them a Beethoven symphony, would it sound like dissonant chaos to them? A minority of the class, including me, said it would. The other side argued with conviction that Beethoven was so universally accessible that of course they would understand it, and probably love it, upon hearing it for the first time, just like we would. We must have debated it for at least half an hour.

I still stand by my conviction. When I first heard Indian music, it sounded strange and out of tune to me because the intervals in their scale are much closer together than ours. I'm sure it doesn't sound that way to them!

Since every human is unique, it follows that there are approximately 7 billion different human realities out there. It's amazing that we get along as well as we do!