Reality Cannot Be Defined

By Leo Gura - June 3, 2025

Why is it that reality is so difficult to define? Notice that every time you ask the question “What is X?”, in any field, about any thing, no matter how simple or complex, a definition cannot be readily given. For example, What is computation? What is gravity? What is space? What is time? What is an apple? What is red? What is reasoning? What is light? What is a number? Etc. Definitions are notoriously problematic and elusive in all fields of science and philosophy. But why? If reality is a just a dumb clockwork, this should be easy. Everything should have a single, discrete, clean, canonical definition. Yet that isn’t the case. Definitions are plagued by problems of ambiguity, nebulosity, subjectivity, perspective, framing, relativity.

Notice that no thing in science is ever absolutely defined: not energy, not matter, not time, not space, not life, not trees, not machines. Why? My claim is that this happens because of the most fundamental existential truth about reality. It happens because reality is Infinity. Infinity is by its nature Undefined. All definitions of reality must ultimately fail because all definitions are relative, finite, and perspectival while reality as a whole is Absolute. This most fundamental aspect is not understood nor appreciated by scientists and rationalists. Science and rationalism demands and assumes that all parts of reality can be well-defined and that reality as a whole has an objective, mind-independent definition. This is false. From this one fundamental falsehood many problems and stupidities of science and philosophy stem. Things do not have clean, crisp definitions because reality is a Mind and things only exist as conceptions within this Mind. That means all things are Mind-dependent and perspectival. No thing can truly be defined because the distinctions between all things have no absolute reality. There are no things per se, there’s an Infinite Field in which all things are conceived/imagined. The boundaries between all things are porous and collapsible because the ultimate truth must be Unity. Unity precludes definition since any definition is a division.

Absolute Unity is Undefined. What does definition mean? Definition means division of reality into parts. Definition is the explication of one part of reality in terms of another part, off-loading the explanatory load from one part of reality onto another part. This allows the mind to play a shell game with itself where it feels like reality has been explained but not really because all the mind achieved was deftly shifting explanatory load from one part of reality onto another. Definitions allow the mind to keep sweeping the Unknownability of Being from under one rug to under another in an infinite chain. But this only works as long as you divided reality into parts.

Science just assumes that reality is made out of discrete objective parts (objects), but this turns out to be a false assumption. If all parts are just a matter of perspective or imagination, then in the absolute sense there are no parts because all boundaries between parts can dissolve, leaving behind a Unity. And Unity itself cannot be defined because definition requires parts. How do you define a thing which has no opposite, no parts, no other? How do you define an Absolute? Thus you can see that Absolute Unity cannot have a definition. But scientists and rationalist take this to mean that Absolute Unity therefore cannot be real — since it can’t be defined. No! It just means that science and rationalism is unreal. But this radical idea never even occurs to scientists. Yet it is true. Science is unreal. Is it any surprise that scientists cannot grasp that science is unreal? Of course they can’t, otherwise they would stop being scientists.

I just explained the core limitation of all science and rationality. Does anyone care? Nope. Business as usual.

The more profound my explanations of reality are, the less people care. That’s human-kind. How do you fix that? There’s no fix for apathy.

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