Several hundreds years ago people used to believe that the Sun went around the Earth, not vice-versa, as we all know nowadays. Does that mean that they were uneducated fools who looked at the same sunsets and same sunrises as we are looking at today and still couldn’t figure out what was really going on? Actually, I think that if the Sun did go around the Earth – the sunsets and sunrises would pretty much look the same. By the way, they are not called Earth-backs and Earth-fronts. So, when it was finally discovered that it’s the Earth that travels around, not the Sun, it was a major revelation, a day when the universe changed. But did it really?
You see what your knowledge tells you to see. What you think the universe is like depends on what you know about it; once your knowledge changes – the universe changes for you as well. I like this little example: someone you know walks by you and doesn’t say hi. What do you think? You think he/she is rude and impolite? You think he/she is mad at you for some reason? You think he/she doesn’t want to admit that you know each other in public? You think that he/she didn’t notice you? Or maybe he/she did say hi, but you weren’t looking at him/her at that moment? We can come up with tons of explanations like that. Most probably, we will try to match what we already know about this person with his/her current behavior, and the result of this matching will become our explanation. But will it be the explanation? I doubt it. However, it will become our reality at the moment.
As Plato points out in “Meno”, things are not good or bad by nature; it’s we who make them such. It’s we who construct our own little realities, and it’s our knowledge and us ourselves that influence this ‘construction’. Reality can probably be defined as something that can be justified by facts and supported by empirical evidence. But what are facts? They are something that people, just like us, come up with, thus, they are also in a way subjective. Even...