• What is reality
• Objective and subjective reality
• Reality in philosophy
• Social reality
• Augmented reality and virtual reality

We explain what reality is, its digital versions, the philosophical vision and social reality. Also, objective and subjective reality.

There is an external and shared reality but also another internal and subjective one.

What is reality

This is probably one of the most fundamental and therefore complex questions to answer in the history of the humanity. It is true that we all intuitively know what we mean by reality: that which has verifiable existence, that is effective or that actually occurs, as defined in the dictionary.

To begin with, reality is an abstract concept, more or less equivalent to the philosophical formulation of "the real." This would be everything "outside" of the individual, that is, the world outside our people, opposed to the inner world that we understand as the "I".

This difference between the outer world, accessible through the senses, and the inner world of the thought and the reason, was approached early by the philosophers of antiquity, who proposed different ways of calling each one and of understanding their differences. Thus originated the various classical philosophical aspects.

A good example of them is the myth from Plato's cave, who illustrated our relationship with reality through the allegory of a group of slaves, born inside a cave from which they cannot leave or move, with their backs turned towards the exit.

Light from outside (or from a bonfire) filters inwards, casting the shadows of different objects that another group of people carry over their heads. The slaves confuse the shadows with the real, taking them for true, since they are unable to observe what happens behind their backs.

On the other hand, the nature of the real was also explored by mystical or religious traditions, such as Taoism, or different traditions metaphysical Similar.

Therefore, there is no single concept or a unique way of understanding or defining reality, of which we are and are not part at the same time, and that we live through reality. experience. Is reality what we perceive of it, or something that underlies it? Is reality what we can say about it?

Objective and subjective reality

Returning to the separation between the inside and the outside of the individual, it is possible to distinguish and differentiate between two forms of reality, which would be the following:

• Objective reality. That which is linked to tangible objects endowed with verifiable material existence, which continue to exist despite the fact that we do not perceive them or that we ignore them. Objective reality belongs to a space and a weather, and can be perceived by persons very different from each other, at different times from each other. It can also be measured, verified and tested, regardless of the inner reality of individuals.
• Subjective reality That, on the contrary, which depends on the perception individual of each one, and that is part of the inner world of each one. Subjective evaluations, opinions, desires, thoughts, are objects that are part of subjective reality, so it is possible that the same objective event is subjectively interpreted in different ways by two or more different people.

Reality in philosophy

As we said before, the philosophy he has been busy thinking and understanding reality since ancient times. It has been joined in recent times by other disciplines, as the psychology.

One of the main thinkers of the real in the Western tradition was the German Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant distinguished the phenomenon from the noumenon: the phenomenon is subject to subjective conditions of sensitivity, to knowledge and a priori considerations proper to the human mind; while the noumenon would be the thing-in-itself, stripped of any type of representation.

Much later thinkers proposed to understand reality and reality separately, for example the contemporary French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). According to this approach, reality would be what the subject perceives or understands of the real, that is, something very close to common sense and public opinion. While the real would be that remnant of the world that cannot be understood, that is, symbolized or represented.

For contemporary thought, reality is always a complex system that is constantly updated, and within which both the subject and the object of traditional philosophy come to life.

Social reality

By social reality is understood a phenomenological level of reality created by the social life of the human being, different from his biological reality or his inner cognitive reality. It is a form of subjective reality, which is sociologically constructed through the dialogue human. It involves community social considerations, social representations and laws stable governing conduct group.

Some thinkers such as the English Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), the French Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), the Austrian Alfred Schütz (1899-1959) tried to define it as the "social world" of the human being. They appealed to terms like "super-organic" to distinguish it from the biological and psychological world.

However, there is much debate as to whether social reality exists apart from the participation of individuals in it, or whether it emerges from human interactions within society. society.

Augmented reality and virtual reality

In virtual reality the user can experience a simulated world.

These last two terms belong more to the realm of technology and the computing than to the philosophical and sociological, although they also raise debates and ideas of metaphysical interest.

First, virtual reality encompasses certain digital environments generated through software computer science, in which a Username He enters thanks to a set of cybernetic glasses or helmet, being able to experience a simulated world more or less as if it were the real one.

This type of technology has educational, psychotherapeutic and even medical uses, but where it has been most widely developed is in the field of video games. Its origins date back to the mid-20th century, when the first military training simulators were created, but it has been thanks to the development of computing that has shown its enormous potential.

For its part, augmented reality encompasses a set of more recent computer technologies, which pursue an effect similar to the above. The difference is that they modify the perception of the real world through different devices: Smartphones, Tablets, etc.

In this way, the perceived reality can be enriched with simulated digital elements, with which it is possible to interact through the device, as if they were part of the real. Again, it is a technology widely used in video games, but it has enormous educational, scientific, informational and tourism potential.