The comedian Lily Tomlin said that reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs. Some philosophers also have a low opinion of reality, seeing it as a mere construction of people's minds or social contexts. In contrast, this chapter argues that the things investigated by science exist independently of our minds, construed as brains. Using perception and inference, brains can develop objective knowledge of reality, including knowledge relevant to assessing the meaning of life.
The previous chapter's conclusion that minds are brains has major implications for two central philosophical questions: what is reality, and how do we know it? These questions are interrelated, as consideration of what things exist needs to fit with discussion of I think that lions and mountains are real, and so are clouds and electrons. But the hypothesis that minds are brains does not support a kind of naive realism according to which things are just as we perceive or conceive them to be. We know enough about how brains work to show that both perceiving and theorizing are highly constructive processes involving complex inferences. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to believe that, when the brain is working well, it achieves knowledge about the reality of both everyday objects like mountains and theoretical scientific entities like electrons. This chapter shows how brain science and philosophical reflection together support a kind of constructive realism, the view that reality exists independently of minds, but that our knowledge of it is constructed by brain processes.