Solipsism and the Nature of Reality

The Opinion section of my school's newspaper makes for pretty good reading between classes on Thursdays. Today's edition had a really excellent article, entitled Having a One-track Mind in Education is Ineffective, written by Michael Faber, the Jewish chaplain on campus. I can definitely agree with him on a lot of the points made in the article, especially the fact that your perception of reality is influenced by your past experience of it, although I'm not sure about the conclusions he draws about reaching beyond our tainted perception of reality.

Granted, unless we are having our perceptions channeled into us by something other than reality, be it a god or the Matrix, or unless we're all completely insane and are making up our own perceptions (which may not be entirely far from the truth), then there must be some sort of objective basis to what is "real." And yet in a world where the mere act of observation can change a phenomenon, how can we expect to observe the real? Faber suggests that it is in fact possible to "discover that other domain of knowledge called ultimate truth," and while never explicitly stating it, I think the implication he's making is that one needs to understand the source of the universe (God) in order to understand the universe itself.

He curiously turns the essay back on itself after proposing what I thought would be a religious solution to the question of objectivity. He ends with the idea that "one must learn to look inward" to enjoy true reconciliation between the self and the world, as seeking satisfaction from outside yourself will not yield lasting gratification. Although if we only experience reality through the lens of the self, which has been almost entirely constructed by the very reality it observes, then turning back to the self to reconcile with reality seems like a futile, ever-cyclical exercise. Then again, perhaps his closing is an acknowledgement of that very futility- a recognition that this is all just a big, fancy version of whether the chicken or the egg came first.

All in all, a very provoking essay.