Yes it is! And again this is long—apologies!—but I find myself in the midst of writing a frustratingly difficult chapter, in a fiction book, defending and explaining just that, non-objective reality. Forgive me for subjecting you to it!
The book takes place at an unspecified far future date on Earth, in a low-tech civilization vastly different from our own, as told from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old boy, Olony. In this excerpt, much to the amusement of Olony, his fiery young friend, Zoby, has mocked their new teacher about his views on reality:
“Quite a decision you’ve made, apprentice,” the instructor finally said.
Olony, expecting an instant retort from Zoby, glanced over his shoulder but, surprise surprise, Zoby seemed suddenly less than completely sure of himself, and remained silent.
“It is a decision you’ve made, isn’t it?” the instructor continued, “that there is a single reality and that it is objective? Or is this a conclusion taken for granted? Unexamined.”
The instructor paused, but again Zoby didn’t reply. Olony had never seen Zoby give up the fight so quickly! Not even a word! Disappointing!
“Reality can seem displaced from awareness. Removed from it. It’s a by-product of our habit of freezing experience, of solidifying it in our heads as a ‘thing’ and defining it as ‘real.’ Vigorously he pointed at objects around the room as he named them, “a cup, a chair, a wall, a hand!”
A vague smile appeared on the instructor’s face. No longer addressing Zoby alone, but the whole class, Zoby’s outburst seemed forgotten.
“Corralled by definitions that we assign…objects become, in our head, independent of each other, seemingly apart, seemingly their own things. And not just objects, but people, events, places, times, connections…each become their own defined, corralled, bordered, lassoed, even incarcerated—jailed— ‘thing,’ unable to escape being anything other than what we say ‘they’ are.
“But consider another perspective, class,” the instructor said. “Take the diagonal.” The vague smile vaguely broadened as he made a chopping motion with his arm, in line with their now diagonally arranged desks.
“Consider that the definition is not contained in the ‘cup,’” pointing at the cup on a desk, “or the ‘hand,’” pointing at his own hand, “but,” touching his temple, “in the head.” Vague smile still etched on his face, he paused briefly. “The definition exists here,” tapping his temple.
The black round moons of his eyes appeared to hover over them, surveilling them, inspecting them, querying them…
This guy was intense!
“If the definition of ‘cup’ didn’t exist for us, if we weren’t aware of the definition, would we be aware of the ‘cup’?”
A long pause now. Silence in the classroom.
Olony glanced back at Zoby. Zoby saw him, but he was clearly deep in thought.
“No!” The instructor answered his own question. “We can’t be aware of that which does not exist! No ‘cup’ in our head equals no cup at all!”
The girl beside him spoke up, a little loudly and insistently, surprising Olony. “But there is still something on the desk!”
The instructor didn’t skip a beat. “We might discern a shape. Yes! But remember the parable of the portrait mirror? You’ve all heard that? The seemingly magic mirror that, the first time you—or anyone—sees themselves in it, the mirror somehow freezes that image as a portrait, so that forever after the only image anyone who has ever once gazed in the mirror sees is the portrait of themselves as they looked the first time they gazed in it?
“The same thing, class, the portrait mirror, somehow presents differently for everyone who experiences it. And isn’t that a lot like life, apprentices? We might all call it ‘our shared world,’ and define ‘our shared world’ the same way, but we all see ‘our shared world’ in our own way. We respond to it in our own way. In that sense it is indeed a different ‘thing’ for each of us.
“And as we share our experiences, communicating them to each other, comparing and contrasting our experiences, we work out differences in experience, establish conformities, define and name elements, share reactions, develop standards, discover nuances, stitching them together to form a reality quilt, a mosaic of shared experience, and those things that we all, or nearly all, agree on, and only those things we nearly all agree on, become established as reality, as objectively real for all.
“It's called consensus,” he added, looking straight at Zoby.
“And, importantly, like the magic mirror, once you’ve established for yourself what your world is, it can be difficult to amend that world view to see it differently. Not because the world isn’t changing, but because you aren’t. You’ve frozen your internal definition of what the world is, and until you change that definition that’s what, to you, it is.”
