What is reality?
Hey Reader,
hope you're having a slow Sunday.
Yesterday I published The Rise of Men - an essay on where we are, how we got here, and what comes next. It came out of a need to think through these questions on my own, without relying on news portals and social media for answers.
All right, onto the (weird) letter now.
The Slow Letter #57
What is reality?
What a mind boggling question. Go ahead, try answering it and I'll try with you. What is reality?
It is what is. Ok. Good start. But what is? Or, for that matter, what is? Maybe it’s everything we perceive, everything we register through our senses. What about the differences in our perception? A blind person hears differently than a hearing one. Which of those experiences is reality? Both? Neither? Is reality limited to individual perception? What about everything we can’t perceive?
Animals hear better than we do, see better, taste, smell, even touch better. Do they perceive reality better than we do? Should we ask them? Is reality separate from our perception? It is?
Ok, then let’s go back to the original question. You’ve answered that it’s separate, independent of our individual perception, but not what it is.
Don’t berate yourself, though. Philosophers, since time immemorial, have pondered this question.
Parmenides said that reality is a single, unchanging Being, but that’s cheating. It’s like saying reality is an unchanging potato. It doesn’t say anything about anything. With all due respect, Parmenides, we’ll move on.
Heraclitus, by contrast, claimed that all things flow. Interesting. All things (i.e. reality) flow. I can digest that, since everything I’m aware of is in a constant state of flux. Everything changes. Still, Heraclitus didn’t answer what reality is, only what it does.
But, we are getting somewhere. Earlier, we concluded that reality is separate from our individual perception. Now, we hypothesize that reality is in a constant state of flux. That’s two characteristics we can take for granted… wait. I take that back. Examine my earlier sentence:
… constant state of flux.
If reality always changes, does that mean that it never changes its tendency to change?
How can it always change if it never stops changing?
I'll stop before I cause a collective headache on this fine Sunday. It is so very easy to get to the edge of human knowledge. To peer into the dark and return empty handed. But, still, we try.
I can think of no greater compliment to humanity than that.
We try.
One Quote
"We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance." - John Archibald Wheeler
One Question
Why do you pretend to know more than you do?
Stay slow,
Marin
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Marin Mikulic
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