Perception is reality. What you see/subjectively experience is what is fact/true. Shades of George Berkeley and the role of consciousness on the ‘inner’ side/experience of perception. For the individual, it exists if you can perceive it.
Trump’s “alternate reality” crapola. He is right in that he sees the world as he wants it to be: an alternate world, not verifiable by objective fact and empirical evidence. One not corresponding to most people’s sense and understanding of the world/their reality.
About these two, I say that we know and interpret the world as we see it, largely on personal experience and knowledge. That is the world each of us holds within us, even when we see it changing and disappearing externally as we age, for instance.
Reality, as such, is largely subjective experience–a world within us that we carry from birth to death. Once in a while, someone else pierces our shells/exteriors and finds out/learns what we see, feel, know, and think. Those are often moments of higher communication and higher, truer connection.
But the worlds we know and are inside change and diminish with aging. We may have less contact and connection, especially in a pandemic that makes our external world smaller for starters. But our inner worlds change and diminish over time in any case.
Finally, memory plays the key role in maintaining our inner worlds/lives and who we basically are. Without memory, there is total isolation and the end of authentic individuality. Ourselves and personal worlds cease to exist for most or all people and they certainly cease to exist for us when we no longer can remember, think about or conjure them up anymore.
I have spent many days and moments staying connected to the past and sharing this information with others (family and friends) through my blog and e-mail, for instance. “Only connect!” as E.M. Forster wisely stated. In that way, I and my world, as I know it, remains connected with others for the time being.
But all this requires a conscious mind–which is what I have spent most of my time/life in developing during my adult years and life-long learning. This blog, for example, has been an exercise in memory and consciousness, and entries have been shared with family and friends since it started back in 2012. Otherwise, I would have lost a lot of memories and original thinking and creation which has appeared here. And, as always, I have to express and write myself into existence.
I would just make one final point and that is to be true to oneself (much in the spirit of this blog’s title) and to how one sees the world. Regardless of mistakes and bad choices, how we see the world is simply who we are: our attitudes, views, and bank of basic beliefs.
We are born as separate beings and remain separate entities largely unknown to others, even to those closest to us. It is no wonder that we hear the tree that falls in the forest even if others don’t or never do. Our worlds are and remain, largely, are our own inner ephemeral experience regardless of how many external social-media ‘Friends’ we may have.