I think I said I'd do a post on reality, didn't I?
Yeah. I'd been wanting to write this post for a long time, ever since I read Sam's post about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (what an amazing title, by the way, right?) and it reminded me of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I love that story so much. If you've never read it, boy you're missing out. I studied it in ninth grade Acadec (Academic Decathalon, which I would have loved to continue with if the school's here offered it when I moved) and although I'm no Plato, I'll try to sum it up for you real quick.
Basically there's these prisoners chained to a wall in a cave and the only things they see are shadows passing from the outside world. For instance, they never see an actual flower, just the shadow of one. They can't see each other and they never see other people, only the shadows of people. So to them, the shadows are reality. To them, a flower is just a shadow of a flower and a person is just the shadow of a person.
After we read the allegory in Acadec there was a lot of time spent talking about "chairness". Mrs. Petersen tried to explain it to us this way: the image we all have in our head of a chair isn't an actual, tangible chair. It's just an outline of what we've come to know a chair as. And if something in the real world is close enough to that intangible outline, it becomes, to us, a chair.
What Plato was saying is that reality is subjective. Reality is all in our perceptions.
So I guess you could argue that really, reality doesn't even exist. That it's all in our heads.