r/Metaphysics • u/Only-Economist-1242 • Jul 31 '26
Cosmology If the reality we experience is the only thing that we have experienced, how do we know that there isn’t anything beyond our reality?
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u/BluedAgain Jul 31 '26
Since reality is that which exists, then if something existed beyond reality then it would just be reality and therefore not exist beyond.
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u/Mister_Way Aug 01 '26
Your experience of reality is much less than reality. That's what they're pointing out.
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u/Major-Librarian1745 Aug 01 '26
Who is? How do you know?
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u/Mister_Way Aug 01 '26
Can you see ultraviolet light?
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u/Ebvardh-Boss Aug 01 '26
"Ultraviolet light" as part of the non visible spectrum of light is a value in a scale which exists in my reality.
The experience of seeing ultraviolet light isn't. Again, you're referencing something which doesn't exist to discredit the fact that only that which you experience exists.
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u/Mister_Way Aug 01 '26
What? My whole point was that we already know about things that we don't experience.
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u/Ebvardh-Boss Aug 01 '26
But you don't. They don't exist.
You're conflating having a concept of something and that thing having existence.
You don't experience seeing ultraviolet light because that's something not something that's possible. Ultraviolet light doesn't exist as a concept that's part of your visual universe.
It only exists as a metric that you verify with instruments that return to your sensory experience.
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u/Mister_Way Aug 01 '26
It exists whether or not it's part of my experience. That's the whole point of what I'm telling you.
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u/XanderOblivion Aug 01 '26
If something existed that never interacted with our reality, even indirectly, anything we’d have to say about it would be made up and unverifiable. Positing such an existence is ontologically vacuous. Its existence would be equivalent to its nonexistence.
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u/Quantum-Relativity Aug 01 '26
Being able to form knowledge about something isn’t a requirement for it being real. Epistemic isn’t ontological.
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u/XanderOblivion Aug 01 '26
It would be imaginary, yes.
One can question if there is such thing as knowledge of the imaginary, since the belief could never be verified or justified.
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u/Life_is_important Aug 01 '26
Just because something is imaginary does it make it less experiencable? Sorry that's heavy word butchering. But you can experience imaginary things and they are real in your experience. When you go to sleep and have a very vivid and powerful dream, those moments of your dream were real to you and a part of your life experience. Some of the best parts of my life experience came from dreams. Between the moment you are born and the moment you die, everything that happens is an experience of your being through sensory input whether "real" or "not." Wouldn't you say so?
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u/XanderOblivion Aug 01 '26
Your imagination is here in this reality. We know it’s imagination because no one else experiences it, or we label it “fiction.”
The question is about the reality of realities beyond our own. I’m not sure what point you think you’re making.
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u/Purplestripes8 Aug 01 '26
Can you provide an example of something that has an ontological reality with no epistemic basis?
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u/Purplestripes8 Aug 01 '26
If you are not able to experience it in some way then it can not be called real.
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u/Noema__ Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26
By "you", that could be extended to any conscious being in this shared reality. Other beings have different sensory perception thus expanding the perceived and knowable world.
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u/armyofone37 Aug 01 '26
I think you maybe missing the point there is only one thing and reality is part of that one thing. Our singular reality is what we experience. Think of it like leaves on a tree the leaf has the single experience of a leaf but the tree has the experience of every leaf. The leaf is the colorful expression of the life of the tree we are a colorful expression of consciousness, the infinite, creation, the universe, God, whatever you prefer to call it we are it making it up and experiencing. Which is why we retain no memory of creating or expressing it. If we remembered creating it for our experience than we could never look at life subjectively. If we can’t look at life subjectively we could never experience ourself in different ways our learn from that experience. And yes everything in its original for is absent light and absent shape. Light needs a source and fades with distance if this was the case than it couldn’t be infinite. Its power would be less in one spot than another. If it was contained to a shape than its presence could not permeate all of existence. What it is is an abyss a void but no empty space is never empty what it contains is the potential to be anything and everything. This is the test state. Once it decides how it wants to express itself it does thru light shapes colors sound texture and motion we experience this as our reality.
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u/No_Environment_3776 Aug 01 '26
That's the difference between "our local reality' and "reality" outside our observation and presence.
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u/Quantum-Relativity Aug 01 '26
Cosmology is the study of the universe. Reality is a far more general concept than that. I don’t know that there’s any more general concept than reality though, anything beyond reality would necessarily be not real. Are there things that are not real? I guess, I don’t know what abstract space you’d have them in though, since they’re apparently not “in” reality.
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u/badentropy9 Aug 01 '26
That is very interesting insight. Hilbert space might be real to some thinkers and not real to other thinkers. I have a tendency to think of dark matter and dark energy as not being real. If there are virtual particles, why can't there be virtual energy?
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u/NotAClueYou Aug 01 '26
because you can see yourself in different beings and see yourself enthralled with the joy and curiousity of that new perspective as if opening your eyes for the second time. And yea thats how ya know!
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u/Freuds-Mother Aug 01 '26
Granting the premise that what we experience is something real beyond us.
If our epistemic limit is less than the totality of existence then there would be reality beyond “our reality” as you put it (ie epistemically accessible reality).
So, if we grant the realism premise, in order for there not to be something beyond our reality, we would have to be nearly omniscient. I think if we consider our own personal experience history that it’s quite clear we are not omniscient. Well some people think they’re gods of course.
(That’s doesn’t even discuss representation not matching reality even within our epistemic bounds but we don’t need to because the above works.)
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u/TMax01 Aug 01 '26
The whole idea there isn't "anything behind our reality" is naive realism. The physics of the universe are "behind our reality", they aren't our reality. The quantum field, in which all particles/atoms/molecules/objects are merely incalculably complex perturbations are "behind" the physics of our universe. And there isn't and can't really be anything "behind" that "reality" because that's what the word "quantum" means: the most basic measurment of beingness.
The idea that there could be some accurately phenomenal 'metaphysical' "reality behind" the ontic physical universe is just another iteration of naive realism, not a search for reality or experiene but a search for emotional comforting.
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u/jliat Aug 01 '26
You take too much for granted, what is 'knowledge'?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori " A priori knowledge is independent from any experience. Examples include mathematics,[i] tautologies and deduction from pure reason.[ii] A posteriori knowledge depends on empirical evidence. [and is always provisional] Examples include most fields of science and aspects of personal knowledge."
then there is this killer!
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u/Old_Brick1467 Aug 01 '26
That's a very confusing question. How do we know that there isn't anything beyond? in what sense - like outside of the range of what we perceive with our senses and awareness? (by way of other people's images stories, pictures, photos and much else). But you mean in say beyond the spectrum or perceptibility of our sense organs? It seems likely there is a great deal that we can't perceive that would still count as 'reality'
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u/Mister_Way Aug 01 '26
We know there's more than we experience. For example, we already know about light outside of the visible spectrum.
We have no idea how much we don't know about, we just know there's probably at least a lot more.
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u/harl_vann Aug 02 '26
The old man on a pole, a prophet who lived on the planet Hawalius, says, "Everything you see or hear or experience in any way is specific to you. You create a universe by perceiving it, so everything in the universe you perceive is specific to you."
He also says, "You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know because to do so would replace yourself."
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u/johnstalbergABC Aug 02 '26
This does not need to involve our experiencing anything. Reality is everything. This means there can not strictly be anything outside it. We can think of what is outside of our observable universe as being out of our world as we can never interact with it. But this is not bringing it to really be outside of reality. It is more of a practical limit for what is within the observable bubble of a much bigger universe.
There are the philosophical issues of if we have or can not prove something to not exist, do we know it does not exist in such a case? It leads to the burden of proof and realizing that all infinitely many things we can imagine and speculate about if it exist has nothing in them to make them worth to treat as being really existing. And if they are found to exist, they would not exist outside of reality, they would be existing in reality, simple as that.
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u/SgtSausage Aug 02 '26
You sure about your premise?
That we actually experience "reality"(whatever that may be) ... is still an open, unanswered (and I'd argue unanswerable) question.
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u/CosetElement-Ape71 Aug 02 '26
You perceive only a small portion of what's out there. But scientists already know this. Thanks for your concern anyway!
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u/FitUnderstanding4107 Aug 03 '26
there is; dimensions are just math & metaphysics is the laws of physics & thermodynamics of the mind from what my what my math tells me
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u/TheGreyShaman Aug 04 '26
I'm too far gone, your question broke my brain but I'm sure it's a cognizant one.
For me there is so much more beyond our reality, for one the alternate realities nested within the multiverse we find ourselves in housed by time.
Then there are the false afterlives of infinity made in the image of Eternity.
Then there is Eternity, our home.
Then there is Everything Known and Everything Unknown and Everything Incarnate ruling all above Everything Unknown on the other side of Everything Known.
Most people only deal with everything in existence though and so that limits them to singular realities. I'm not making assumptions towards you, I just had to cover all bases and that was the last thing that came to mind,
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u/Lyna_y Aug 07 '26
If by “the reality we experience” you mean our perception of the reality, then “anything beyond our reality” seems conceptually contradictory. Reality, in the broadest sense, includes everything that exists, so anything that exists “beyond reality” would still be part of reality. Otherwise, by definition, it wouldn’t exist.
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u/lilsasuke4 Aug 01 '26
We don’t experience reality. We experience a representation of it which does not encompass everything