Have you ever wondered, ‘What is reality?’ Reality can be defined as whatever exists independently of what we wish or believe, or our subjective experience of interacting with it. Can humans ever truly see reality as it is, without relying on abstract concepts?
The question arises because human abstract concepts highly impact how we see reality. Abstract concepts are deeper, more interesting, and play a major role in our lives than we realize. An abstract concept can be understood as a set of mental frameworks, labels, and interpretations we created for survival and understanding. For example, some abstract concepts that are widely accepted include money, time, religion, nations, borders, morality, beauty, and even love. The foundation for any of these abstract concepts is, I believe, language.
To understand abstract concepts, we need to understand the importance of LANGUAGE because that is where it all started. Language is the most important tool humans have created, and it influences our lives more than we realize. It not only enables us to communicate, move from place to place, survive, and invent, but it is also the primary tool we use to think about our thoughts. I wonder whether there is anything we can think beyond the language we know. Even if there are feelings or thoughts I experience, I cannot express them beyond the capability or limitations of language. So language not only helps us in external communication, but also acts as a basis for our internal communication, without which it would be impossible to even align our cognitive processes.
Now let us see some of the concepts that I believe can be considered abstract.
WISDOM. The last time I had a discussion with my friends, I observed that every person at the table had a different opinion on certain aspects of wisdom. That is when I realised that wisdom is one of the abstract concepts created by humans. There is no physical object in nature called “wisdom” that exists independently, and it is not directly quantifiable. Humans observe certain behaviors, patterns, and outcomes, and then create a concept to describe them. Language, as I said, compresses complex experiences into labels, and “wisdom” is one of those labels. Societies observe that certain ways of thinking or acting tend to lead to better outcomes, and then they call those patterns “wise.”
Similarly, I believe SCIENCE is also an abstract concept. There are thousands of theories that exist that have not been proved, and hundreds that have been proved. We never truly know whether they are absolutely true or false; some are simply accepted, and others are not. I once read in a book in which the author says that NASA is sending rockets into space using the theories of people who could prove their ideas using their social skills, while others with equally valuable ideas may have remained unheard because they lacked the ability to convince society. Whether this statement is entirely true or not, it raises an interesting point: human knowledge is not shaped purely by objective truth, but also by communication, influence, acceptance, and collective agreement.
When I was in school, my maths teacher always used to say, “Mathematics is not invented; it was discovered.” That sentence always felt mysterious to me. But eventually, I began to understand that mathematics is something humans discovered through the pattern-recognition, meaning-making, and dot-connecting abilities we possess. Mathematics, Physics, Biology, any subject you name, the fundamental foundation of these branches of science lies in observation, thinking, and the cognitive abilities that humans developed through the process of evolution.
Language itself is something we created, and all scientific terms are human-made constructs. We collectively agree on how the universe, the planets, and the science behind them work based on what we have discovered, but the universe is not something small enough that we can fully measure and define through evidence alone. Just because something is working does not necessarily mean it is ultimately true. Humans often imagine and create frameworks that are convenient to them and accept them as long as they are useful.
Science, in itself, is a tool that we use to understand the Universe; it is not the Universe itself. We created science for our convenience, and because it works for us, it continues to be used, but that does not automatically make it the absolute truth. We are living our lives entirely based on systems like earning, paying, and exchanging money, using it as a functional tool, but that does not necessarily mean that money is “real” in a physical sense.
Similarly, I believe Science is also not the ultimate truth. This planet and the universe are far older than the scientific models we currently have. Science is a method humans developed to model, predict, and explain observations. Scientific theories are representations, not reality itself. For example, gravity is real as an observable phenomenon, but the models explaining it have changed over time. Isaac Newton described gravity one way, and Albert Einstein later described it differently through relativity. Both models worked within certain conditions, even though one later proved more accurate than the other.
This illustrates an important point: science often progresses not by finding absolute truth, but by creating models that explain observations better than previous models. In fact, one of the foundations of modern science is the idea that any theory could potentially be wrong if better evidence appears later. So even if science appears to progressively approach objective reality, it may still remain within the limits of human interpretation and may never fully escape the subjectivity required to understand reality “as it is.” At the same time, if you step off a cliff believing gravity doesn’t exist, you’ll regret the decision. So I’d say science may not be the “absolute truth,” but it is the most reliable method we have for approximating reality.
One more interesting concept that fascinates me is CONSCIOUSNESS, and I believe this is also an abstract concept that humans have created. Consciousness is a multifaceted concept that encompasses awareness, self-reflection, and the ability to engage with the world. These are the cognitive capabilities that humans have adapted over time through evolution. We collected a set of capabilities that we got during the evolution and termed them as Consciousness, which has no physical proof or quantifiable. We analyse our own actions, like I shouldn’t have taken that decision, I made a mistake, etc., and call it consciousness, while it is simply a process in our brain. Again, isn’t it useful? Yes, of course, it is useful, so is the concept of time; it is useful to us in every possible way, but that does not make it real.
Now comes the biggest question I have had all my life. I keep asking people, and I keep thinking deeply about it: What is life? I realised that LIFE itself may also be an abstract concept without us fully realising it. For billions of years, countless organisms have existed on this planet and disappeared. All of these organisms, including us, are ultimately made of cosmic dust. We are all reactions within the larger processes of the Universe.
Our existence itself is a collection of processes: breathing, functioning, moving from one place to another, and surviving. From the micro level to the macro level, countless processes are constantly happening around us and within us every single day, including our physical capabilities and mental processes. Maybe humans simply observed this complex collection of processes and gave it a name: “Life.”
Our bodies are physical and measurable, of course, but where exactly is “life”? Is life something objectively real, or is it a conceptual framework created inside the human mind? Did humans create the concept of life as a way to understand existence and survive evolution more effectively? Life is a complex, dynamic phenomenon defined by a combination of biological functions (like metabolism, energy transformation, growth, reproduction, and responsiveness to the environment), organization, and evolutionary potential, making it both a scientific and philosophical concept.
One of my friends, during our last discussion, said that he believes we might all be part of a game or simulation created by some higher intelligence, and that we simply do not recognize it. But I personally do not believe in this concept, and the reason is this: there might definitely be a higher intelligence somewhere in the universe, and that intelligence may or may not know about our existence, but I do not think we are a simulation because I believe life is simply the ongoing process of reaction, experience, change, awareness, relation, and becoming.
These processes are just unfolding on this planet, which itself is only a tiny part of this massive universe. Humans observed these processes, gave them a structure, organized them, and eventually named them “life.” We then made life appear more certain by turning it into a socially accepted cycle: birth, education, employment or business, marriage, children, old age, and death.
But whether life is an abstract concept or not, one thing is clear: we are all here, and we know that we are here. So in the end, we seem to have only two choices: either live through it or end it. Most of us do not truly want to end it, so why not simply live it? Why not live with a little more happiness instead of constantly stressing over things that are not working out? Why spend every day crying over something that was never truly ours? Why worry endlessly about every single thing?
When we begin to understand that nothing is permanent and that life itself is a reaction, a process that will someday end on its own, many things stop feeling as heavy as they once did. Even negative emotions and thoughts begin to lose some of their power.
If we remove all these concepts, what else remains? So is it ever possible for us to see reality as it is? Maybe or maybe not.
Inkwellery by Abhi 