Of course,
all of these analyses are tinged with the latent
monotheism that pervades the
Western philosophical
paradigm. There are, in fact, many consensus realities, and
humans slip and shift between them without much
effort or
thought. Examples include
business,
family,
science,
faerie,
sex,
religion,
media,
cyberspace, and
politics. A hypothetical non-human observer would be hard-pressed to determine in which
reality a human was at any given moment based on external
evidence, but it's almost immediately
clear to us.
The modernist or materialist paradigm is that anything intangible does not exist, and, therefore, there is but one reality: the physical universe. Such people attempt to maintain this philosophical position despite the fact that the meaning of any word like "intangible" is ultimately itself intangible. These paradigms reached their peak in the 1980's, but having been under assault even in the physical sciences for nearly a century they have begun to wane.