Terry: reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined.
You always seem to introduce interesting and thought-provoking topics. Kudos! For me, I would have to alter your statement to read: "Reality is the perceived state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined."
The reason is that I find individual reality regarding the same events or things differs, sometimes in imperceptible ways and other times in significant ways. This may be due to our unique point of view (either physical or attitudinal or both). This is demonstrated in the classic eye-witness experiments that show how poor our perception can be when describing a crime scene. http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php, http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/apl/71/2/291/,
Above and beyond the everyday events we experience, there seems to be a fundamental problem with reality even in the quantum world where the position of a speck of nanoscopic matter is reduced to a statistical probability and where another particle can exist in two places at the same time. How do we reconcile that?
So, what is reality, really? I really, really want to know (insert X-Files theme song). Even as a Jehovah's Witness, I thought about what was becoming a more certain cruelty of life, the one that deceived us into thinking we really had a choice about the big things in life. For me, the emerging reality was that my past environment, my physical limitations, my emotional make up and my present situation set me up for failure in so many ways.
It's not that there's absolutely no way to surpass one's shortcomings. The problem is that our perception of what is possible (reality) is often distorted. Early on, my religious and personal experiences let me to zig instead of zag and I ended up with the wittlesses. A different experience or maybe a defiance of my up-to-then reality would have led to an entirely different path.
Perhaps as you say " Reality doesn't require you to know anything. " But it seems to me that reality does provide knowledge. When I wake up in the morning or any other time from a dream or sleep, my brain tries to assess where I am. It's mostly an unconscious reaction for my brain to acknowledge my bedroom surroundings and not question whether I live there or not. But that's not always the case. There are times when I wake up totally disoriented. One thing seems true: we take cues from our environment via our senses. How we deal with those cues is a totally different matter.
In the case of what you're proposing regarding the witlesses being unwitting zero-personality criminals, I tend to disagree. The fact that you made it out is an example of triumph on the part of your personality. Otherwise, you, me and many others would have continued on like lemmings. Rather than the suppression of our personalities, it is the occasional jolt of a different realization that wakes us up to the inconsistencies that gnaw at us and finally cause us to break free.
I can recall a very specific moment when my reality or what I perceived the world to be came to a profound change. I was about 4 or 5 years old. I was accustomed to sit on the stoop of my front door (with strict supervision) and watch people and cars go by. On that one particular day, while looking to the left and then to the right of our one-way street, as if the skies suddenly opened, I realize that around the corner from my block there was another street and even more streets beyond that. I had visited those places before with my dad and other people. But up to that point, my world consisted of what was in front of me. I was for the first time able to conceptualize that the place in front of me was somehow connected to every other place I'd been to.
I've seen experiments where a 7 year old (I believe they can count from 1 to 10 at that point) will tell you that there are more marbles in a glass tube with 10 marbles than in a plate with 10 marbles, even if you have them count the marbles over and over again. The problem is that most children at that age are not yet able to abstract the "quantity" aspect of things and only work with the "volume" aspect of things. So, the "stacked" marble container has more marbles. There are discrete states of perception associated with growing up. Unfortunately, some of us, for whatever reason, develop less keenly and perhaps end up lacking the sophistication to make determinations of reality, especially in moral and psychological instances. I think that the best we can do to is keep questioning and testing if our reality is going to hold up.
