Set a New Course Cap'n!

I’m sorry; I forgot myself.

But that’s a good thing, because now I remember!

What the heck am I talking about?

All around me, as I write this, are books, dozens of books, most old, a few new, some in boxes, some in towering Pisa-like stacks, and nearly a hundred on the shelf behind me. A good chunk could be categorized as philosophy books. A couple of textbooks, a half-dozen standards (Descartes, Hume, Aristotle, etc), some heavy tomes of biblical length (Being And Time, Matter and Memory, and an assortment of anthologized writings). Perhaps I’ve read through a third. And in an attempt at humility, with a dash of generosity, though, I’ve probably understand and retained less than half of that.

So I have a long, long way to go.

Why do I do this? I ask myself often. But I think it boils down to this. I am very, very curious about “what is really out there.” * This – meaning, as I turn my head to the right, scanning the pile of bills and receipts and tax returns and blah blah blah – this can’t be “real.” I hear my daughter listening to television upstairs, through the ceiling (hopefully she’s not being bombarded with realistic dramatizations of businessmen committing murders). I know that ain’t “real.” Not even the news, I suspect, no matter what channel you’re watching. With a couple of clicks I can be online and go on, say, Facebook. Is that “real”? Something deep inside tells me no.

What is real?

Face-to-face interaction? Depends. We’re all masks and shades of personality, are we not? Is that “real”? I know I was never “real” at work, a place where I spent forty-plus-hours-a-week, over two-thousand hours a year, more time than with my family. Nor am I truly “real” with my family. Before you balk, admit it, you are not “truly real” with yours, either.

So, this leads me to thinking about philosophy. Metaphysics, which literally means something like “beyond the natural world.” I’m searching for some kind of underlying layer of “realness.” Whatever that means, but I know it ain’t what I’m seeing or experiencing. It calls to mind a thorny issue in philosophy, one I fully understand: I have no idea how to define “reality.” It’s like pornography or obscenity, I suppose; I’d know it when I see it, just don’t ask me to define it.

The problem is, after reading huge chunks of Hegel, some of Heidegger, a bit of Bergson, some James, and the summarized thought of a couple dozen others, is that I’m not finding what I’m looking for. Baudrillard sort of entered the ballpark for me, with his concept of hyperreality, but after reading a slim book of his (Simulacra and Simulation), I left dissatisfied. What is reality?

Then, stupid me, I finally got round to reading a book I found while browsing in the library one day. The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene. I am floored. As I always am, when I read cutting-edge physics stuff. Now I remember: This stuff is amazing! I’ve been into my physics for ages, and it always fires my imagination and excites me, but for some reason, I forgot about it. For a couple of years. After some digging through boxes in the garage, I now have a dozen books right now in front of me, books I own, on relativity, string theory, the Big Bang, quantum physics, black holes, particle physics, plus two of my college textbooks, and I’m salivating to get to them.** Most are geared to the interested intelligent amateur, but some actually have equations in them.

I slap myself on the forehead because I forgot all this. Because, quite frankly, that’s where reality is. Not nineteenth-century German idealism. Not French post-modernism. Twenty-first century physics is where the rules for the game of reality are discovered.

So, the quest continues, from a different tack this time around. And of course, should I come across anything suitably weird or just open-jawed amazing, I’ll blog about it.


* Also, I’m always on the hunt for some cool motifs and hooks for my SF writings.

** Caveat: If you are reading this and don’t know me, understand that I have a layman’s knowledge of physics. I took intro college level physics courses, an intro to modern physics class, electronics 101, and mathematics up to calculus III. Something like twenty or twenty-four college credits. I aced all my classes – eventually, in the case of Calc III. But most of this was ten to fifteen years ago, so I’m quite rusty. Also, sadly, no classes in differential equations, wave mechanics, or other higher math. However, supplement that with a healthy dose of (what I hope is) intelligent science fiction, and you have … me, the poor-autodidact-amateur-physicist.]