Future Hi: Reality

April 14, 2004

Reality

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
- Philip K. Dick

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.

That would exclude, oh, how about governments and countries? If we don't believe in boundaries and in the power of certain groups of people to govern us, then there really isn't anything there. There are continents and land and people. But no borders and no power over us. No laws either. They aren't really real. People are real. What they do is real. Their thoughts and feelings and actions are real.

Goodbye to religions too. If you don't believe in them, there's really not much there. A lot of church buildings and some books. Good deeds are real.

Scientific laws and theories go away as well when we stop believing in them. Nature and life doesn't go away. The flowers keep blooming and the planets keep rotating around their stars. And there's a system to that, which keeps working. But it is the theoretical models of how we think that works that drop away.

There's a lot of things our theories say don't exist or can't exist. If we stop believing in those theories, those things will still be there. Extraterrestrials, other dimensions, paranormal perceptions, miraculous events. Except that they won't be miraculous or paranormal unless you have some kind of belief about how unlikely they're supposed to be.

Dreams exist whether you believe in them or not. You'll be zipping around in fantastic realities every day, at least when you sleep.

Failure and success, loyalty and betrayal, mistakes, lies, obligations, promises, "shoulds" - none of it means much if one stops believing. What matters is what is there, and what you actually do. Good constructive actions last longer than desctructive actions. They're more real. Good and bad feelings exist. The reasons for them do not.

Life exists. Consciousness exists. I exist. I'm probably more real the more I get over my beliefs about why and how.

Posted by Flemming at April 14, 2004 11:30 AM | TrackBack

Comments

I've always liked Bucky Fuller's perspective when it comes to wealth, real wealth. If money, all money were to disappear tommorow, the planes would not suddenly fall from the sky, the lights would still work, cars would still drive, food would still be grown, buildings, people, computers would all still be there.

Of course it would be immensely disruptive, simply because we all have this "agreed consensus" that it means something, and without it we would panic, and be unable to exhange things in any smooth way, because our universal abstraction standard, money, no longer exists.

This has always made me wonder, if the financial world could be rebooted. On the surface it seems it would solve so many problems, but then again, I'm not an expert on finance.

Posted by: Paul at April 14, 2004 07:58 PM

Hm, I would say that the things you call real are merely "immediately tangible relative to the Homo sapiens cognitive reference frame". To a certain type of nonhuman mind, scientific theories might be "obvious" and tangible, to another, ungraspably complex. This is actually part of the somewhat existential situation we find ourselves in; although there may or may not be a final physical reality, beings can have a wide variety of possible interpretations of physical information, most of which we would not consider philosophically consistent or even comprehensible. How do we know which interpretations are "right"? Only by deferring to the reference frame of our preexisting brainware.

Posted by: Michael Anissimov at April 15, 2004 04:17 PM

Good points. Where I might consider some things theoretical guesswork and others immediately tangible, other types of beings might have very different dividing lines. Maybe because they have very different perceptions. If I could see the radio spectrum with my own, eh, antennas, then it would certainly be in a different category than if it is merely a rather workable theory that allows me to make radios.

And of course we always have the problem that our perceptions are also several levels of abstraction removed from the "real thing", no matter how sure we are about them. I mean, "seeing" is that some light hits some receptors and the results are interpreted based on some previously entrained neural patterns. Messy affair. It is often better than merely guessing or hallucinating, but not always.

Posted by: Flemming Funch at April 15, 2004 05:43 PM