Ian Nelson

Mr. Howard
Intermediate Writing
Feb. 1, 2016
What is Reality?
If a piano is existent is the music it can make also existent? What is
reality? In the act of questioning what to concern ourselves with we have
occasionally questioned what exists and what does not exist. It would not
make sense to endeavor after something non-existent right? I would say its
wrong. In my view, endeavoring after things that are non-existent is the
greatest form of creativity there is. I believe reality is everything physical and
malleable while everything non-existent consists of thoughts, ideology and
concepts which are in no way physical.
Things that are real are made of atoms. Anything physical that can be
held in ones hand or gazed upon is malleable and permeable because it
consists of atoms. Imagine an argument between a priest and a blind man.
Both the priest and the blind man are walking one day and come across an
object unknown. The priest contends that an object is blocking the path and
they cannot pass through. The blind man however replies that the object
must be non-existent because he cannot see it, while the priest argues that
it is there because he can see it. Suppose that the priest were to lead the

blind man to feel the object. If the blind man could feel the object he would
certainly have enough evidence to decide that indeed the object does exist;
right? Likewise if the man were not able to feel the object he could still
assume that the object was non-existent. Now consider the object to
represent everything existent and us to be the blind man. We could only
consider any object to be real if we could sense it in some way with our five
senses (sight, hearing, tasting, smelling, or feeling). Thus it can stand to
reason that everything that has some sort of physicality is made up of atoms
and therefore does exist.
Things that are not physical can exist as thoughts. Can you imagine
anything that does not exist? Of course you can. We visualize them all the
time; however I contend that the underlining idea does not exist because it is
not malleable. Take for example a man who has just gone for a run. He is
now tired and must sit down to rest. If he were to imagine a chair in front of
him would he be able to sit down in it? No, if he did try he would fall to the
ground. Likewise when we formulate ideas, theories and visualizations that
do not have matter they do not exist. This is not to deny matter in the mind
but rather the ideas thoughts represent do not.
Through imagination come the creative arts. While ideas do not exist they
lead to inventions and actions that can become reality. Take for example the
musician about to plot out a musical idea on a viola. He imagines his
outcome to be marvelous and indeed it will be however the music that is

only imagined does not yet exist until the musician puts the bow to the
string. Likewise the mathematics we use every day do not exist physically
but rather are formulations we can use to calculate the things around us that
do exist. For example a liter does not exist however a liter of water does. The
measurement could not exist without something to measure like we could
not formulate thoughts without something physical to formulate about.
Intuition and imagination of the things that are real are very important to
the way we live today. No doubt we would have never come as far as we
have as a species without our unique ability to image and become intuitive.
Without the ability to formulate thoughts regarding our surroundings we
would have never invented the wheel, shoes, the guitar or the lightbulb. We
would be helpless masses of cells simply responding to changes in the
environment, such as temperature and light.