Indivisible
Don commented,–“One of the main problems in discussing reality is that humans have the tendency to separate themselves from the rest of the universe, we feel we are an ‘I’ and everything else is ‘out there”.
That word I thought is worth a great deal. Don points to the impossibility of achieving the distance necessary in order to comment upon “Reality” as if what we mean can be described, encompassed by words. The speaker, I who contemplate and write these words are a feature of Reality. This is easily forgotten as the words which are required for thought are “freeze-frame components of sense experience” which we have used since we learned them. Language objectifies. To speak is to entertain the illusion of a world, a reality out there. There is no there. There is only here.
Don, thank you for the reminder.
Consider this poem, which uses the example of a bird to illustrate Reality.
II.
You can divide a bird from its life,
your blade passing perfectly between.
But what you have then is not a life
and a bird. You have a dead bird
whose life is now nowhere you know.
After the passage of the blade, your study
of life has become a study of death.
Life cannot be stopped, its particles
divided and studied. Though life is
the part of a creature that causes it
to live, it seems in itself not a part
but rather a whole in which parts
of the world for a while participate.Sabbaths 2015 by Wendell Berry
6 thoughts on “Indivisible”
We are indeed narcissists at heart for what we perceive, what we experience, touch, how we emote, how we formulate is all done from the black hole we call our brain (or perhaps the unconscious manipulator of our psyches otherwise known as Id). Blind synapses hungry for input are ready to digest neurological impulses yet completely reliant on the senses to provide that stream of information. And our senses detect but a fraction of what surrounds us, so reality is cherry picked by our physicals selves and processed by millions of blind hapless cells struggling to make sense of a nonsensical environment. How we are able to function at all appears to be a miracle. How we continue to function in a reality of our own making is problematic for we have clearly separated ourselves from the world at large and continue to hunker down deeper and deeper into the individual bubble where we have encased ourselves. The future does not look particularly bright.
It has been a long time since any of us lived on the veld. Our instincts remain as developed for our survival as that mammal with intelligence, but weak and without claws or incisors for defending ourselves. Like you I suspect that this ancient instinct of fight or flight is becoming a serious liability in the artificial environment in which many of us now live. We are terribly vulnerable to seduction or to the primal fears within to achieve someone else’s objective. Bottom line for me is to focus locally, invest time in friends,– and break the addiction to media induced adrenaline. “The future” is by definition, undefinable.
While human’s may give expression to their ideas of what reality is, there has been a reality long before we became a reality.
“The Trouble with Physics” by Lee Smolin p.7
We are accidental descendants of an ancient primate, who appeared only very recently in the history of the world. It cannot be that reality depends on our existence.
Gary, no question that we may assume that the stars existed before man. We have ample evidence of that. But before man was able to cast his eye to the dome of the sky and formulate terms for purposes of communication and all that is realized when one has words and mathematics……. what was all of that before the words came into the scene? Without the words, especially the word “Reality” you and I are stuck with silence, and the complete inability to even think on or about any of the elements to which you refer. All that we mean by reality depends on mind. “Reality” is the product of the meeting of a mind and the impact of external. Reality emerges, is born of mind and the external pre-existing stuff.
STUFF + MIND = REALITY
The anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson wrote a book titled, “Steps to the Ecology of Mind.” In his book he discusses much of what has been touched on here. In one of the premises of his work he discusses the way we humans have broken down our environment into sections so we can more easily identify and discuss the world around us. Bateson suggests that by doing so we limit our own perception by labeling, for instance, an object a “Green Leaf” yet each leaf is unique and each iteration of “green” is nuanced with infinite variations. By creating words to categorize our world we limit our ability to achieve a true connection and an encompassing grasp of the world around us. I’m not sure how else we communicate with each one another other than by this categorization process, but it’s certainly not perfect and leaves us all with a less than true version of reality (however one wants to interpret that word). I would also suggest reading The Mysterious Stranger by Twain. Another interesting take on reality.
Language is the “code” by which we have interface with other rational humans. It is a representation of experience, a symbol which fails to do justice to the rich dimension to which it refers. Seems to me that a major objective of education is to continually urge the student to attend to the advantage and the limitation of language. A liberal arts based education does this by default. We can dis-enthrall ourselves, becoming mindful users of language with the right kind of help.