Reality? Consensus? Perception?

From Scripting News:

the consensus isn't always correct

That's a philosophical can o' worms. It's Michael Dummett opening up George Berkeley's Pandora's box. Each person perceives an event or object differently. Now, if you are one way on the spectrum of thought, you say that there is a state p that is the actual state, and then there are the states q₀, q₁, q₂,...q_n
Which represent the states of all of the different persons perceiving the event or object. Then, there is r_0..n which represent the difference between p, the "real," and q_n, the "perceived." So, r₃ represents the difference between p and q₃.

But, that's if you are one way. There's the other way. The other way, there is no p and, thus, there are no r_0..n's. There is just our perceptions. There is just q_0..n.

Now, I just broke down two of the most major schools of Philosophy into about a dozen sentences. But, if I had gone to greater length, people tend to get bored, stop reading, and just believe that it is being over-thought^†.
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"Just believe that it is being over-thought"... And, that's the paradox. People are being affected by their own perceptions when reading anything discussing reality/perception. When discussing reality/perception, you're limited by and affected by the very rules you are trying to define... (oh, I'm going to say it) the meta-reality is recursively being applied and may be discounting everything you are saying (if you buy into this).

And, there, those 3 or 4 statements just attempted to break down another 198,655,211 pages of philosophical discourse into an easily digestable chunk on the topic of "what is real?"

Soooo, Dave, it may be that the "consensus is correct"... by definition.

Or, it may be that I have issues.

^†Subtle nod to Post-modernists.