Is Reality real?

You have to give credit to the human race for inventing impressive technologies and using them effectively. This has been going on for thousands of years, as our recent visit to the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum reminded me. Of course, I'm using those technologies right this moment to write this blog post.

I've always had a bit of paranoid skepticism about Reality. One cannot prove deductively that Reality is real. Our sense of reality is purely inductive- every day that we wake up and remember who we are, our belief in the idea is maintained. People who think a little more deeply know that the solidity and independent existence of objects is an illusion supported by our language systems but that doesn't change the Universe being real. Beyond that, it's possible all of this is just a very sophisticated computer game being played by a super-being of some kind and one day when the Deus Ex Machina gets bored the game will shut down. Until then, I'll keep acting as though it's a solid reality.

But our technologies provide some of the most convincing evidence. It's not just sending a spacecraft on an eight-year mission to rendezvous with Pluto and arriving within 72 seconds of the projection to beam back amazing photographs of the remote planetoid and it's moons (Pluto being so far out, even at it's closest, radio commands from Earth take 4.5 hours to reach New Horizons!).  It's being able to fact-check the information in a few seconds to make sure I'm meeting my standards of accuracy in blogging.

Wouldn't it be great if we used all our technological wizardry to cooperate and help one another?