"In Reality!"
Most ordinary people would say that reality is what is perceived to be. Whether we are wrong in our perceptions makes little difference to us in the way we live our lives, and in reality we don't want to think about it. The illusion of absolute knowledge accomplishes little in terms of the way we live; i.e. the way we perceive of what is and what is not. We tend to use the term absolute to strongly affirm that we truly believe what we are saying. Someone may ask us in a matter of choice, "Are you sure?" and we say, "absolutely!" That statement is most often an affirmation not a matter of established fact.
For the most part we live out of what we believe to be reality. The behaviorist B. F. Skinner said that, "We behave as we do because we think as we do." I think it would be more realistic to say, "We behave as we do because we believe as we do." Our lives are filled with beliefs. Belief that the sun will come up, belief that the cereal we feed our children won't poison them, especially if it comes in a great looking box, belief that the car coming toward us on a two lane highway will stay in its lane.
Beliefs can be wonderful things, especially beliefs that lead to the benevolent treatment of others. That’s the reality Jesus of Nazareth talked so much about and it always had something to do with people behaving in consistency with what they profess to believe. Can behavior be called reality? Ill will toward others or the mistreatment of others is not usually called a reality in philosophic discussion, but to those on the receiving end of our behavior, it's very real, whether good or bad behavior. We can easily identify ill will or mistreatment when we see it or receive it. Most cultures of the world of the 21st century know well what mistreatment is and it usually is the result of a misplaced sense of values on the part of someone or a group in power who are driven by selfish ambition and don't care what their behavior is called. Selfishness is a monster when allowed to run uncontrolled with no thought of the consequence of the behavior associated with it. In America we live in a culture that appears to be out of control in terms of the run of malevolent behavior, and those who are a part of this wave of evil in our country are fed a continuous diet of themes endorsing malevolent behavior: sexual immorality, violent brutality, and its little wonder given what they are told to believe by the media and street gangs who have their attention.
Self-satisfaction appears to be the theme of every advertisement or commercial we see on television. Self-service or satisfaction out of control is the classic definition of "selfishness," and our world seems to be mesmerized by it. The movies that gross the greatest profits are those that portray ill will and violence resulting from one selfish person or persons trying to kill another person because he or she behaved in a way that crossed them; especially in a way that betrayed one person in some self-serving way, and we watch ninety minutes of special effects in a hide and seek game of two or more people (one of which is usually an attractive girl) to see who kills who (e.g. the Bourne Identity, James Bond, the Hunter). I don't go to the movies any more, not because it's too expensive, but because it's too depressing to watch dramatic special effects of blood spurting all over the place or teeth, hair, or eyeballs flying everywhere when someone punches another person in the face or someone shoots another person with a very powerful gun designed to kill elephants and the blood and body parts go everywhere. Why would we spend good money to see that? Is that reality? I refuse to feed my mind with the kind of stuff that portrays life as nothing but a bloody dog fight, with the actors having lots of sex along the way to place the things of greatest value to our society in the mix.. A person in the book business told me that my books would sell much better if I would work a little sex in somewhere. I'm not going to do that, guess I'll die a starving writer.
Just sit and think about the power of our beliefs for a minute. Beliefs that lead to the benevolent treatment of others are the most fulfilling beliefs in our lives. These are the beliefs that make us happy, and our beliefs are usually what make us happy or unhappy. Happiness is the goal of every person who has ever walked the Earth, and happiness is best defined as having a sense of well-being. How could something so easy to define be so hard for people accomplish?
Reality is a mix of what we experience in this world in a very multicolored way, it is not as much black and white as it is presented to be by the scientific, philosophic, religious, political communities or the advertising industry, especially the advertising industry. Have you heard what advertisers pay for a commercial at the Super Bowl? Why do you think they are willing to do that? We define what we think of as reality and that's the reality we live out of, and whether what we call reality is absolutely real or not doesn't really affect our thinking or decision making very much. What more influences our exercise of free choice is "certitude of mind;" i.e. that which we have a feeling of certainty about in terms of possibility or probability, not absolute certainty. We don't have to be functional in Aristotelian logic to have certitude of mind, and even Aristotelian logicians don't allow their discipline to determine what they do and say. I'm not saying all this as a dogmatic affirmation, I'm "just sayin'!"
