Kant and Vance, Pt IV

Okay, over the past few days I’ve rambled on dry-drunkenly about how we perceive reality. Yesterday it was how the “out-there” might influence us, our thinking. The day before I talked a bit about my superficial understanding of Kantian philosophy, the mind molding the “out-there” to make it comprehensible. I began it all with a Pascal’s Wager-esque four-by-four square. Today I want to consider the remaining two possibilities:

– Both the mind and the out-there work in tandem to create reality

– Neither mind nor the out-there are responsible (if so, what does?)

I think if you put the Wager to the average joe on the street, he’d probably select the “both” category. I see two versions of this dual-agent theory: a strong and a weak. The strong version would incorporate a vigorous interpretation of Kant with a dynamic understanding of Vance’s meddlesome timestream. Like two wrestlers grappling immediately after the ref gives the signal, the mind reaches out and grabs hold of those river currents, while the flow envelopes, overwhelms and erodes the mind to bring it to where the Something Else wants it to go. The image that comes to my mind here is the Yin-Yang symbol. I could be cool with it, and would be interested in pursuing where it may lead.

The “weak” version of this theory probably falls closest to how most of us view the way we view reality. The “hands-off” version in other words. Personally, going back to that image of the two of us gazing out my window a few days ago, I would tend to think it is the mind that holds the lens to reality. Chances are we’d both see the same scenic view, but some physiological difference between the two of us (say, the ability to discern certain wavelengths of light) may account for slight descrepancies. More serious physiological differences in the mind (such as schizophrenia) would reveal far greater descrepancies. Only extremely rare events such as miracles or visions or other transcendental experiences would I relegate to the environment, the “out-there”, reaching out to influence us. Or those wonderful synchronicities I talked about a few days back.

The most interesting question to me during this series of posts, however, is what might be responsible for the experience of reality if neither the mind or the “out-there” is capable of doing so.

On first brush, the concept of dream immediately comes to mind. Two versions of dream, both I’ve read about and neither I understand to any great depth. The first is the idea that we may be a dream that God is dreaming. What that means exactly, I don’t know, but it has a poetic beauty about it that I think is an essential quality to reality. Reality must have a poetic component, and the fact that we might be part of the dream God dreams is as close to magic as I can think of.

The second is the idea of dreamtime, especially as manifested by the aborignes of Australia. Specifically, the concept of songlines among the people of that culture comes to mind:

Any location on earth can now be labeled to absurd precision by a pair of coordinates.


Naturally, all this is a matter of convention. Australian aborigines map their land by songlines. Australia, for them, is not a one-to-one correspondence between points in the land and pairs of numbers, the coordinates of those points. Rather, their land is a set of highly twisted, multiply intersecting lines, along each of which runs a specific song. Each song relates a story that happened along that path, usually a myth involving humanized animals, contorted fables full of emotional meaning.


At once, the songlines create a complex tangle, so that a point cannot be just a unique pair of numbers; rather, it matters not only where you are (according to our conception) but also where you came from, and ultimately the whole of your previous an future path. What for us is a single point may for aborigines spawn an infinite variety of identities, because that point may be part of many different intersecting songlines. Unavoidably, this creates a sense of property and ownership that does not fit into our culture. Individuals inherit songlines, not areas of land. One cannot build a GPS that operates in songline space.

- Joao Magueijo, Faster than the Speed of Light, pg. 22

But instead of songlines as an alternate form to the traditional measurement of distance, why not “song” as an alternate interpretation of reality? Hearkening back to Tolkien’s Iluvatar from The Silmarillion, perhaps we participate in a great song – indeed we are melodies intertwining against a background of symphonic movements of which we may never even be fully aware.

Or else we’re all just part of ... oh ... I don’t know ... a computer-generated matrix?