What kind of ideas do you have about the unreality of reality
Sorry for the slow response. Sometimes I just need a little time to contemplate my reply. I’ve found from experience that it’s often better to give no reply at all, rather than a weak or contrived one. Although some may argue that it would always be better if I went with the no reply option. Also I would like to apologize at the outset if the subject of evolution should occasionally trickle into this reply. I bring it up more as a point of illustration than as a subject for debate. But bear with me if I commit an obvious forum indiscretion.
I do indeed have my own opinions as to the “unreality of reality”, which the fact that it says “solipsist” in the upper right hand corner of this post would no doubt have alerted the observant reader to. And yes, I do tend toward the idea that reality exists solely in the mind of the observer. I realize that most readers will find such a position inherently moronic. But I hope to show that it’s not as ludicrous as it may at first appear.
In order to even begin to accept the idea that I might not be a complete idiot one must first consider the premise raised in the OP, that reality isn’t what we perceive it to be. When you look at the things around you, like your computer for example, you see a solid, substantial physical object. But through the course of history, evermore detailed examination has shown us that things aren’t nearly as solid and substantial as they appear to be. Your mind creates a sense of solidity out of a world that’s really quite ethereal. In fact it’s debatable as to the sense in which reality has any meaningful physical aspects at all. Whether you choose to believe that reality is made up of pointlike particles, or strings, or quantum fields, reality is at its simplest, quite immaterial. In fact quantum theory suggests that reality coalesces out of potentiality only in the presence of an observer. It’s up for debate as to what exactly constitutes an observer, but none-the-less reality emerges from potentiality to become what we perceive to be a solid, tangible physical world. But is it?
Well you might say, so what if reality isn’t exactly as palpable as we perceive it to be, it still functions in the same predictable manner that we’ve come to rely upon. Cause and effect, past, present, and future, everything behaves as if the world is made up of real physical objects, so why should we belabor the point? The world is real. Just accept it. This is a perfectly legitimate argument. The world is the way it is, deal with it. The problem is that people being the inquisitive sort of beings that they are, aren’t satisfied with simply understanding the way things are, they want to know why things are the way they are. They want to know if there’s a God. They want to know whether the universe really was created in a big bang fourteen billion years ago, and if so, what caused the big bang. We’re human, we want to know, and so it matters. Faith alone is a very noble characteristic, and yet still we look for answers, because that’s what we do.
And so we look at the world around us and ask why it is the way it is, and we come up with answers that fall into two basic categories: It just naturally evolved this way, or God created it this way. Neither of these two answers actually settles the debate into why or where the world came from, but they give us differing positions from which to argue the point, and that seems to be something which we humans find oddly satisfying. The scientists and evolutionists argue that the universe came into being in a big bang fourteen or so billions years ago, and then slowly evolved over time into matter, and then galaxies, and stars, and planets, and life, and intelligence, and us, the inquisitive beings who sit here now and ponder why. In essence, some unknown process gave rise to stuff, and the stuff gave rise to us.
But wait a minute, why is it necessarily the case that the stuff gave rise to us, couldn’t we have given rise to the stuff? This is the point at which I usually begin to lose people, because they’ll ask the logical question of…huh! Perhaps if we look at it a little differently it might not seem so preposterous. Current theory proposes that from the big bang evolved a complex and intricate web of what we refer to as, stuff, and through a perfectly natural and predictable process of evolution that stuff created consciousness, us. We’re the product of what Carl Sagan would call, “Star stuff”. But isn’t it at least possible that what emerged from that complex and intricate web wasn’t stuff at all, but rather consciousness, and then through a perfectly natural and predictable process of evolution, that consciousness gave rise to stuff. But how, you might ask, could consciousness create a coherent universe of stuff out of whole cloth, out of nothing. That seems a bit far-fetched. You can’t just dream up a coherent reality. Or can you?
(Cont.)
