what is reality ?

Question

How can I tell whats real from not for certain ? I mean for ex the table in front of me right now ? What makes it real ? Is seeing , feeling or even ppl telling me that its real enough to make it real for certain a 100% real ! 

Answer 1

This is one of the fundamental questions of philosophy--metaphysics in particular, and more specifically ontology. Ontology is the study of the nature of reality, existence, being, and becoming. Epistemology likewise is the study of the nature of knowledge.

Your question could be stated, "How does one know that the external world is real?" Alternately, "Are external objects real?"

Plato's Socrates denies the reality of the external world. For him, reality is not something perceived by the senses. The material world, ever changing, is merely an image or copy of the real world--the unseen and unchanging world of forms.

Berkeley and other subjective idealists assert that reality is immaterial, fundamentally mental in nature. Familiar objects such as tables are only ideas in the minds of observers, and cannot exist without being perceived.

Naïve realism (direct realism, common sense realism) theorizes that we perceive objects as they really are, we have direct awareness of the external world, and our claims of knowledge are justified.

Locke's scientific realism asserts a distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities of objects. Primary qualities such as solidity, extension, motion, number, and figure are independent of any observer. Primary qualities exist and can be determined with certainty. Secondary qualities such as color, taste, smell, and sound are properties that produce sensation in observers but do not provide knowledge of objective facts about things.

Here is my short answer: We cannot be certain that the table is real.

Answer 2

The world that each of us experiences is actually a representation of reality as created by our brain based on sensory inputs and past experience.  That mental representation or model is called "subjective reality" - reality as experienced by the subject - you or me.  The actual universe itself is called "objective reality" - the object separate from the subject.  Our subjective reality is a small subset of objective reality - we cannot directly sense or experience all of objective reality.  For instance, we can't see radio waves or molecules, or hear sounds above a certain frequency.  And sometimes our subjective model of reality is wrong - we think we sense something that isn't there in the objective world.  Yet our subjective mental model of the world needs to be an accurate enough representation of objective reality or we would not survive.  We don't walk off of a cliff because we know that if we do, we will fall.  If you walk into that table you see, you know you will bump your leg and it will hurt.  When you push on objective reality, it tends to push back.  That's how you can tell what's "objectively real."

 

That's just my view of it - other people may have a different view.