Barbara asked:

Is reality something experimented by the circumstances, that is [relative to] the presence of
technology or the lack of it, or on the other hand, an absolute reality keeping the same basis
established in ancient times?

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Sometimes I just browse the old unanswered questions... Here's something for you to think about,
Barbara. I'll take an example from the philosopher Heidegger. What is a hammer? It's something to
hit nails with, right? What is a nail? Think about it. What if you'd never seen or heard of a hammer or
a nail, and someone showed you a hammer. What would you see? Would you see the "reality" of the
hammer? Or, in order to see the hammer as it "really" is, would you need to know its function, its
purpose? But that purpose is technological, isn't it.

This seems easy... the reality of a hammer must be what you see when you don'tknow what it is,
right? Ok, then what is a tree? You've never seen one before, and someone shows you a tree. What
do you see?

Or take the other classic example, the blind men and the elephant. What is an elephant? Is it what
you feel? What you feel and see? But how about its internal organs? After all, to reallyknow the
reality of an elephant, you have to know that eats plants, that it has lungs, etc., right? But then, what
about its blood? Don't you know its "reality" better if you know that its blood is made of little cells
floating in a liquid, and so forth? But this takes us back to the question of what technology lets us
know about reality... and what reality "really" is, and how we know it. Would the "reality" of an
elephant bedifferent if we only could see it with x-rays, instead of "visible" light? No, you say? But to
a being that only knewabout seeing with x-rays, an elephant's real essence would be very different
than what weunderstand its essence to be, wouldn't it? Or would it?

Steven Ravett Brown