The Big Question—What Dictates Reality?

While waiting at a train station, you hear the shouts of incoming passengers aboard a trolley. With broken breaks, they barrel ahead. Suddenly, you notice five pedestrians tied down onto the tracks. If nothing changes, the trolley will kill them. You see a lever that would divert the trolley onto another path in the station, one that would turn them away from the five people stuck on the tracks. Unfortunately, another pedestrian walks onto that set, and the trolley will kill them if the track is diverted. What would you do?

There are two worlds of results. In one, five people die. In the other, one person dies. The answer should be clear, but it’s not. 

This stands as an unsolvable scenario. For some, the burden of consciously killing the one man outweighs the bystander effect of not doing anything. For others, the lives of five are more important than the life of one. 

 Although the situation is inherently objective, nobody sees it as such. The problem was designed never to have a right answer and relates to our individual perspectives’ uniqueness. While we may base our reactions on the same objective reality and truth, the way we interact with something comes down to an interpretation from our brains, and those tend to vary. 

If a large group of people were given a choice between two things, expecting a unanimous favorite would be an impossible task. Examples of this can be seen across the globe! Between presidential elections, sports betting, even picking a favorite food, a common theme arises. Although our objective realities are the same, we frequently make different choices. If you were to ask a recent voter about the reasoning behind their ballot, they’d almost certainly give you an answer that relates to their set of values. One may vote for a candidate who prioritizes social issues because those ideas are more important to them, while another may prefer the candidate who focuses on other areas.

The question becomes “why?”. If we all see the same thing, how can we look at it differently? What controls our interpretation? 

I don’t like grapefruit because I’m not a fan of bitter foods, but suppose that I was to do a taste test alongside someone who happens to be a fan of those pink abominations. When asked about whether the food was enjoyable, our answers-although based on the same objective truth-would differ. The grapefruit is a grapefruit regardless of whether I am interested in it. Still, my conscience decides how the truth of a grapefruit’s existence appears to me and how I interact with it. If I enjoyed bitterness, I’d say that the grapefruit was one of my favorite foods. If not, I probably wouldn’t go back for seconds. 

Two people can quickly look at the same information and interpret it in differing ways, proving that our reality is certainly not dictated by empirics. Even though the objective truth may function as a framework for us to analyze, our perceptions and verdicts come down to standards, preferences, and values. 

Although we can’t bend matter, create it and destroy it at our own accord, one’s experienced reality is shaped by one individual interpretation of what objective truths bring about. 

When presented with identical scenarios, the difference in decision making between you and me comes down to what each of us chooses to value, shifting the influence away from a situation’s objectivity and onto a subjective individual preference.