Reality

I'll be the first to admit that some of the stuff I write about on this blog isn't very understandable. Partly that's due to my limitations as a writer. Partly it's because of often esoteric subject matter. 

Whatever the reason, I sympathized with a comment sant64 left on my previous post, "Why we'll never agree about what is real, and what isn't." 

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. "Reality" is far too broad a term.

Well, I disagreed with the notion that reality is far too broad a term. Seems pretty simple to me: reality is what we humans consider to be real, whether that be a personal experience or a collective understanding.

But since my post sort of nibbled around the edges of what I was trying to get at, I took a stab at being more direct in my comment reply.

sant64, as I noted in this post, reality isn't something that is beamed directly into our mind/brain. It is a simulation of one sort or another, because the mind/brain is locked inside the dark confines of our head with no direct connection to the outside world that constitutes our shared reality.

Without our senses — sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell — there's no knowledge of the world for us, so no reality.

The Matrix provides an extreme thought experiment along this line. People's bodies are in a warehouse, while powerful computers manufacture reality for them that seems real, except it is a virtual simulation. So this is an example of living in an immersive spatial reality where experienced reality is disconnected from a separate aspect of reality that produces a simulated reality.

That disconnect, as noted in the post, makes it impossible to determine where that separate aspect of reality, in this case a warehouse with stored bodies, exists, or even if it exists. The reason is that reality isn't connected between all of its parts. The creators of the Matrix have the full picture, but the people experiencing the virtual reality don't, because the simulation doesn't contain knowledge of how the simulation is being produced.

Maybe I could have been clearer about this, but I tried to relate Ron's comment about not being attracted to the offerings in metaphysical sections of bookstores, where he said that the "final conclusion" about reality probably is simply our ordinary life — that which we're experiencing now via our senses.

This is different from how most religions view reality, which supposedly has an extra unperceived dimension akin to the Matrix having a secret: experienced reality is being produced by a un-experienced reality that only a red pill can divulge.

Religions, mystical practices, spiritual paths… they all claim, pretty much, that they possess a red pill that, if taken through a certain discipline, will reveal the hidden truth about reality: God, heaven, spirit, soul, enlightenment, whatever. But they all differ in what the discipline consists of, and what supposedly will be revealed.

So since most people believe in some sort of hidden reality separate from what is perceived by the bodily senses, this creates a situation where humans are assuming different realities that can't be proven to be real, because part of the assumption is that the hidden reality can only be known by those who take the "red pill."

For example, abortion would be much easier to discuss and form policies about if everybody focused on the physical characteristics of an embryo or fetus. When does it have a nervous system that can feel pain? What sorts of congenital abnormalities make it impossible for the unborn child to survive after birth? Among other questions.

But assuming that a soul is part of the embryo at the moment of conception complicates matters. This introduces an unprovable assumption about reality, as does the assumption that God opposes abortion because only He/She can decide whether an embryo grows to maturity and is born alive.

Basically I tried to argue that it would be better if we all agreed that reality is what can be known via the senses (which naturally includes scientific observations that amplify what our senses can perceive), because then we'd just have to deal with the thorny, but more resolvable, problem of how different people "simulate" physical reality through their unique mind/brain.

Hope this further explanation helps to get across my point.

Put even more simply, but echoing what I said above, if the universe truly is one, a single spatial reality where there are connections between everything that exists within it (for example, physics says that quantum fields are present in every corner of the universe), then the sort of disconnectedness posited by the Matrix, or by religions that posit a supernatural realm separate from materiality, isn't an aspect of reality.

I find this inspiring. Also, reassuring. 

Because even though it may seem impossible that we can be affected by, or affect, galaxies billions of light years distant from us, or goings-on at the exceedingly miniscule level of the Planck scale, in principle both the extremely large and the extremely small are part of our human reality, because there is no division anywhere in the universe that inescapably walls some of it off.

(Black holes might seem to be an exception, but matter obviously is drawn into black holes, and Stephen Hawking demonstrated mathematically that black holes radiate matter/energy.)

If all this is still too abstract, or irrelevant, for you, here's an easier-to-read essay by Joan Tollifson that popped into my email inbox recently. I really like both her message and her style. One of her paragraphs is right in line with what I've been trying to say in my previous two posts.

For me, the most liberating realization has been that nothing can be other than how it is, that everything is one undivided and indivisible whole that can never be grasped, pinned down or pulled apart, and that each of us is a unique and unrepeatable movement of the whole.

I'll share her essay as a continuation to this post.