Reality II

After some thought, I come to the conclusion that yesterday’s post on “Reality” was kinda vanilla. Suit-and-tie, tell-it-like-it-is. Two-dimensional, instead of multi. I didn’t spend much time on the nature of underlying reality, which is what interests me far more than “orientations” we take toward it. I have the feeling that underlying reality is anything but straightforward and two dimensional. It must be wonderful, fantastical, awe-inspiring (awe in the sense of dread, that is), greater in all adjectival categories than anything the human mind can conceive.

This brings to mind an appropriate question.

If reality, true reality, is greater in every way, shape, form, concept, etc, than anything we can conceive, how can we even talk about it? Describe it? Hypothesize about it in any meaningful way that’s more than a guess, a wild stab in the dark?

I believe it can be done. We’ve probed the interior of the atom, something we can’t directly observe or experience, with great success and accuracy. And this was over a hundred years ago, shucks, even before computers! This was done through experimental analysis.

Can this be applied to the study of reality?

Yes, but our tools of experimentation will necessarily have to be mental ones. Thought experiments.

Now, after rubbing my hands together, I ask, what if Reality is –
- conscious?
- an intelligence?
- a will?
- a self?
- a collection of selves?
- truthful, good, and/or beautiful? Or if not, why not?
- God?
- God’s creation? The clay in His hands?
- God’s dream?
- within time?
- beyond time?
- our own conscious creation?

What if Reality is a seamless whole, as (to my understanding) what Hindus or Buddhists believe? A seamless whole that we are intimately part of and not separated from, as taught in the Judeo-Christian religions?

What if, from a quantum mechanical point-of-view, there is no underlying Reality, just observable phenomena? Wait, that can’t be true, could it? What would observable Reality be created from? Some ghost world? Does the world we experience float on such a ghost world, a world that is not real? Or does observation create a world, a Reality, out of nothing? And speaking of observation, is consciousness a requirement?

Another weird (but now possibly trite) science fiction-ish idea that comes from quantum mechanics is the idea of parallel universes. Reality consists of an ever-increasing number of parallel universes. At every possible choice, A or B, at the subatomic level, each happens; Reality simply branches off into both futures as opposed to only one or the other. Something about this does not sit well with me – an infinite amount of universes would be created nearly an infinite amount of time every smallest interval of action. As far as I know the theory is internally consistent, though I haven’t read much non-fiction about it. But how could it ever be tested?

A few years back I constantly read Philip K. Dick, a legendary science fiction writer whose reputation seems to grow every year since he died back in 1982. It seems every year Hollywood is making a film based on one of his books (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Imposter, Paycheck, Minority Report, Through a Scanner Darkly, Next). While his storytelling skills fluctuate greatly from book to book, depending a lot I suppose on the amount of drugs he was taking at the time, all contain really cool riffs on our traditional concept of Reality.

(possible spoilers!)

I won’t mention titles, but some of the themes or backgrounds of PKD’s novels are:

- an alternate arm of history where the Axis powers have won WWII; characters from this branch inexplicably become aware of our branch of history, and maybe actually visit us;

- a group of characters encounter a Reality which seems to be crumbling; it turns out they have all died but are unaware of it;

- the contemporary world (the early 1970s) is actually AD 70; the Roman Empire still exists in shadow; the intervening 1,900 years are manufactured memory;

- and one book whose title I will mention, VALIS (1981) which is so damn weird I had no idea what was going on, what was real and what was hallucination, or even what the ultimate message was. But it was interesting, even very funny at times.

Well, the search continues …