“That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”

― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One ―

(Warning: this is not a review)

In Ready Player One, most of the story took place in the future virtual reality world call Oasis. The Unreal world that most people use in order to escape from the cruel reality. and one line just hit me right in the face “Because reality is real”.

A little phrase that stuck in my head since I heard it and make me think, “But do our reality actually real?”

First of all, we must know what reality is?

Do you see anything?

A thing that is actually experienced or seen having previously only existed in one’s mind, etc.

Do you notice something relate to all of that definition? This piece of organ below.

Yes, our piece of an organ with a weird looking with a lot of wrinkles and folds we so-called brain. This thing is the one responsible for all of our feeling, sending everything through our body whether it’s a thought, sensation or anything you think you feel, see, or hear all come from this. And doesn’t that make all of our reality singulars? Afterall our brain only attaches to one body.

All of the picture, sound, smell, and taste are what our brain telling us to feel about it. Like a hallucination to the person that sees it, it is real to them because their brain tells them it’s real.

After reading to this, you may think.

“No, you can’t use hallucination as an example because it’s not real, only that one person can see it.”

Well…maybe, but what makes you certain that the thing you currently feeling right now is also real? After all, you only feel and think what your brain wants you to.

Let’s think about it if we cut off the part that feeling pain off of our brain we won’t feel anything if someone just shot you in the gut with a shotgun right? Maybe you don’t even know you’re dying. Everything we feel is what our brain told us to feel.

And that’s lead to one of the questions humanity can’t seem to answer it yet.

Dream

The world of endless imagination that you can be anyone and do anything it starts when you enter and end when you leave. Sound like something from the movie?

 

But what is Dream?

Isn’t it also just another thing that our brain told us? That’s why it feels so real in the dream, right? But if it’s just a thing that our brain told us isn’t that make it qualify as real as the reality? And what will make us certain that our dream is just a dream and not the opposite side of reality that switches up whenever you asleep?

Like I said, we still don’t know the answer yet.

Actually maybe right now you’re in a vegetative state somewhere, and all of this is just a thing that your brain makeup all by itself.

Or maybe you just a lonely something that floating alone in a vast space of nothingness, trying to create a world in your my so that you don’t feel lonely.

Maybe all of this wasn’t even real, your friends that you just talk to, this article you reading right now, all of this is just a thing that happens to you and for you alone.

What do you think?

Do you think you live in a real-world or in the prison of illusion and fantasy that your brain makes up for you?