Age-old question #346: What is real?
Corollary B: Does it even matter?
There has been a kind of continuity in my life from my wee little days to now. The nightly power-cycling of sleep chops things up a bit,. but I've experienced a reassuring progression of day to day.
However, a good minute or so is conspicuously missing. No, I'm not counting the time I passed out on a desert trip after consuming mass quantities of Jim Beam. *shudder* I'm referring to an auto accident of several years ago. One instant I was there. The next I wasn't. Luckily, I came back, but the experience gets me to thinking about question #346 from time to time.
What can we know about what is real?
One of the many things that gets in the way of our perception of reality is belief. I not strictly talking about religion. I'm talking about crafting a reality based on something other than direct empirical evidence. Communities use belief to function. We all have to believe and trust that a dollar bill holds more than intrinsic value. I believe the earth is a sphere. I've never circumnavigated it, never seen it from space, but there you are. I believe in muons and quarks, not because I've had to sweep them from my porch but because the arguments I've read for their existence are so compelling. Is reality just a snow job? People are highly capable of fashioning their own little bubbles of reality. It doesn't matter if they be a cult or a military contractor. The comet has arrived to carry us away. The tank will work because we've spent a billion dollars on it. The larger reality only becomes apparent when the cyanide Kool-AidŽ starts to kick in or when the radar-guided guns train themselves on the spectators. The Internet has changed everything. Lots of folks who believed now understand that buying pet food online is not the greatest idea.
But what about that "larger reality"? I can only see what I can see. That house across the street is yellow, but what about the other side I can't see? As egotistical as it may sound, how do I know that I'm not the center of the universe, that there aren't vast armies of world builders calculating my perspective like a first-person shooter? All the world's a stage, etc.
OK, maybe that's a little far-fetched. Maybe the world is real, but I'm not. What is life but what you can remember? We can remember it for you wholesale...
Then why go through the bother of creating the memories? Drop the analog part and go full digital. I imagine that finding out for sure that you're an AI routine in a simulation god would be much like finding out that there's a god. You had better hope that whoever is running the simulation is benign or at least in absentia. I don't blame some folks for going a little wacky believing that God is always watching you, knows your every thought, sort of like a twisted offspring of Santa Claus and Big Brother.
But could a god even begin to be described in such terms? Can thought and language even begin to be applied? People want to use pronouns like "he" or "she". Some insist on using capitals. As if something as limited, stunted, and puny as language could possibly be used as a tool to unpack such mysteries. Something is always lost in translation. like us understanding the lives of mice or they us. Douglas Adams, God rest your soul.
Maybe god is just a by product of self awareness, a bug in the system. We acquire language and it sets up situations for which we have no answer, or at least situations in which language doesn't have an answer. Maybe I should say that they are questions rather than situations, intriguing puzzles. What is "I"? It's a symbol that we've had passed on to us to represent the speaker, the origin of utterance. In a deconstructionalist sense, that's the answer. In a religious (and I think tritely tautologous) sense, god is the word and the word was god.
So far I have several options:
1. We are collectively delusional.
2. I exist in a Truman Show world.
3. I am a replicant.
4. I am an AI construct.
5. God is Santa Claus.
I used to really groove on Henley's Invictus, the same bit of poesy favored by Mr. McVeigh. I liked the idea of presenting an unbowed head to the storm, of being the master of my fate and captain of my soul. Nowadays, I'm more in tune with the idea that sometimes life generates storms that would sink even the hardiest of captains. Sometimes the captain is busy belowdecks getting shitfaced. In the meantime, I'll just enjoy the voyage.
Pakeha