What is reality?

This question has bothered me for a while. Few years back I came to know about visual illusions. Using synthetic images or streams of images, we can fool our brain into seeing something that isn't actually in the scene being viewed. I found this incredibly puzzling. For me, this meant that we have at least two realities: the underlying physical reality and the reality that our brain's perceptive machinery assigns to the former. If all of our perceptive machineries are the same, then I do not see any problem. But if our perceptive machineries are even slightly different, we have a conundrum. Different perceptive machineries would mean that each of us has their own version of reality. Is this really the case? I have no clue. But one example that points in this direction are the symptoms of schizophrenia. Schizophrenics may have a different version of reality. Even though it is commonly accepted that schizophrena is a malfunction of the brain, it doesn't violate the premise that our reality is moulded by our brain and that each of us may have a different version however small the differences may be. Another common example that I can cite here is our perception under the influence of drugs. Many of us have experienced that drugs modify our version of reality. So what actually is reality - is it the objective physical reality or the subjective perceptive reality? I absolutely have no clue but it challenges the long standing idiom "seeing is believing". Having said all this, I have to confess that in the end I am not even sure if my line of argument is sound. I nevertheless find this problem (fabricated or otherwise) beautiful. After all, this is one of my delusional encounters.

Back to blogging

It has been four years since I blogged. Decided to start it again because I enjoy doing it and more importantly to get my thoughts in order. I want to use the blog as a vehicle to explore my thoughts however stupid you might find them.

I plan to write whatever comes up in my head. I don't have any specific theme but I expect that the blogs will mostly revolve around science, philosophy and machines (especially cars and planes).