Reality?

So, how do we determine that what we are experiencing at this very moment is not, itself, a vision? How do we define reality from illusion? It can't be by our senses because a schizophrenic cannot tell the difference from the fiction of his mind and reality. Hallucinations are sensed just as easily as matter.

It can't be experience. How many times have we dreamed in our beds of winning the lottery and only to wake up depressed to see out empty wallets? We believed we had just had the experience of winning the lottery.

We can't even trust our minds. "I think therefore I am." This quote is often thought to be one of the most profound epistemological statements. Perhaps the ability to reason and other cognative processes prove our existence. But don't the imagined people a schizophrenic percieves seen to have the same processes? So how do we know they are not imagined or if we are even imagined?

Perhaps the ability to doubt one's existance proves their existance. Illusions don't doubt their own existance. But that leaves us alone in the world with only philosophers left. What a dull world that would be.

My friend Catherine and I were discussing this very subject yesterday over a Big Mac and a McFlurry. One of the conclusions that we came to was that, in this lifetime, we either accept that though our perception is flawed, we must accept experience and our senses as a tool to obtain truth, or we can not, end up not really sure why we opperate in this world as if we knew truth was really truth (that bus will really kill me if I walk in front of it), or we can accept nihilism and have no real reason to live (walk in front of the bus because no one really knows if it exists). So either we replace our doubts about our perception with faith or we have no real reason to want to keep living because this may not even be living.