Is There A Truth To Reality?

What is truth? What defines truth? Or does anything define it? Leo Tolstoy said, “Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.” Walt Whitman said, “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.” Tolstoy and Whitman both had their own perceptions of truth, but what gives them that validity to say their truth is the real one. The truth that trumps all other truths, the one that defines the reality we live in, the one that people can depend on. Is there a way of knowing what universal truth is? The only way to understand real truth is to strip it down to its core principles, the truth of reality and the truth of society’s reality, and then maybe we can know some concept of what truth is.

Each person in this world has their perception of what reality is, and they believe that their reality is the truth. Each individual’s perspective of reality differs based on how they perceive things in the world. One physical element that people perceive differently is color. Looking out the window, you might see colors such as emerald green and burnt orange, while the person next to you might see turquoise green and peach orange. This is because of the effect that light has on our perception of color. Beau Lotto, a researcher who studies the effects light has on our perception of color, says, “The sky isn't actually colored at all (not blue or yellow or red or green). Rather, it's your mind that's colored. The world around us is physics devoid of meaning, whereas our perception of the world is meaning devoid of physics,” (Huffington Post). I like to think of our perception as a filter of reality. There is the universal reality that no one really knows, and then there is each individual’s reality, which is formed by looking at the universal reality through his or her personal filter. Each individual’s filter is based on the core elements of that particular person, what makes that person an individual and gives them their unique point of view. 

There is no technical way to understand the truth about universal reality, because reality can only be perceived through our personal filters, but that doesn’t mean people don’t try to understand the expansive idea of it. There are lots of people who try to have an objective view of reality and the truth, but there are also people who try to manipulate the naïve individuals who don’t have a clear understanding of the difference between personal reality and universal reality. These people use the media, as a manipulative tool to temporarily control what people think is universal reality. This includes news, social media, and entertainment, which people watch and use everyday. Before recently, people understood media as the truth, as a means of communication, but nowadays people understand the biased opinions that media portrays based on political points of views and specific audiences.

Even though the concept of reality is quite broad and unknowing, there are some ways in which we can recognize what reality is, but can we still define it? The way I see it is, how can one define truth of reality if our society is made up of people who define truth with their own opinions? If we use our society as the people to shape what is true or what is not, that is saying we are having mixed opinions dictate the truth, which will never result in a consensus.