Quotes About Reality

Concretely, two people can be in the same existential situation but experience two very, very different reality-tunnels.

1) We cannot make meaningful statements about some assumed real universe, or some deep reality underlying this universe, or some true reality, etc., apart from ourselves and our nervous systems and other instruments.

2) Any meaningful scientific or existential or phenomenological statement reports on how our nervous systems or other instruments have recorded some event or events in space-time.

And there are, findable by me, four and only four theories in philosophy about the relationship of mind and matter: 1.Mind is an epiphenomenon of matter. 2.Matter is an epiphenomenon of mind. 3.Mind and matter are both equally real, but separate, and work in predetermined harmony with each other. 4.Mind and matter are human metaphors.

Even if you tied yourself to the ceiling with ropes and looked down, you would not see what the architecturally correct blueprint shows. You would see some degree of perspective (three dimensionality), and the perspective would vary depending on what part of the ceiling you looked down from. If the whole class tied themselves to the ceiling, their drawings would have as many different perspectives as the drawings made from ground level.

In short, one deep reality seems, to this view, as absurd as one correct instrument, or the medieval one true religion; and preferring, say, the wave model of matter to the particle model seems as silly as claiming the thermometer tells more of the truth than the barometer.

That's why Einstein had to remind us, Common sense tells us the earth is flat.

Thus, radical psychologists ask us: does not the reality of schizophrenia or art remain real to those in schizophrenic or artistic states, however senseless these states appear to the non-schizophrenic or non-artistic? Anthropologists even ask: do not the emic realities of other cultures remain existentially real to those living in those cultures, however bizarre they may seem to the Geriatric White Male hierarchy that defines official reality in our culture?

Sigismundo Celine, in the woods of Ohio, meditated. To him all phenomena were real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

We do not all live in the same universe. Millions live in a Moslem universe and find it very hard to understand persons living in a Christian universe. Millions of others live in a Marxist universe. Most Americans seem quite happy in a mixed 19th Century Capitalist and 13th Century Christian universe, but the literary intelligentsia lives in an early 20th Century Freudian/Marxist universe, and a few well-informed scientists evidently actually live in a 1997 universe. Etc.

So far the "hard evidence" doesn't seem to prove much . . . But to avoid any suggestion of the weird, you have to hold a really dogmatic faith that (a) the "normal" really exists, and (b) you know all of its contents . . .

In Standard English we may discuss all sorts of metaphysical and spooky matters, often without noticing that we have entered the realms of theology and demonology, whereas in English Prime we can only discuss actual experiences (or transactions) in the space-time continuum. English Prime may not automatically transfer us into a scientific universe, in all cases, but it at least transfers us into existential or experiential modes, and takes us out of medieval theology.

is both amusing and frightening. It reminds us that each of us sees the world through perceptual structures (biochemical- neurological) which were laid down accidentally in our earliest moments. It raises the uneasy suspicion that...we may be simply chasing the particular Ping-Pong balls which, at those sensitive shutter moments, had been imprinted on our cortical film.

Personally, I don't trust mystic experiences, including my own — although I seek them and enjoy them. I think Altered Consciousness offers new ways of perceiving/conceiving and should start philosophical investigation, not stop it.

But, if we have a variety of potential selves rather than the one block-like essential self of Aristotelian philosophy, and, if each self acts as an observer who creates a reality-tunnel which appears as a whole universe (to those unaware of Transactional and Quantum Psychology), then: Each time an internal or external trigger causes us to quantum jump from one self' to another, the whole world around us appears to change also.

Every person lives in a different umwelt (emic reality) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.

Rewriting in English Prime we find John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office and John appears bright and cheerful on holiday at the beach. We have left the realm of spooks and re-entered the existential or phenomenological world of actual experiences in space-time. And, lo and behold, another metaphysical contradiction has disappeared in the process.

The number of universes perceived by human beings does not equal the population of the planet, but several times the population of the planet. It thus appears some sort of miracle that we sometimes find it possible to communicate with each other at all, at all.

Quantum Mechanics says an electron has a different essence every time we measure it (or, more clearly, it has no essence at all). Neuroscience reveals, similarly, that the Mary we meet on Tuesday may have a different self than the Mary we met Monday (or, as the Buddhists said long before neuroscience, Mary has no essence at all).

This may surprise many, including the physicists who claim that quantum uncertainty only applies to the subatomic world and that in ordinary affairs we still live in a Newtonian universe. This book dares to disagree with that accepted wisdom; I take exactly the opposite position. My endeavor here will attempt to show that the celebrated problems and paradoxes and the general philosophical enigmas of the quantum world appear also in daily life.

It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. — Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

It seems to me that existence — at this point I have doubts about the universe — is a lot like a Rorschach ink-blot. Everybody looks at it and sees their own favorite reality-tunnel.

Even Aristotle, despite the abuse he has suffered in these pages, had enough common sense to point out, once, that I see always contains fallacy; we should say I have seen. Time always elapses between the impact of energy on the eye and the creation of an image (and associated name and ideas) in the brain, which explains why three eyewitnesses to a hit-and-run such as we postulate here may report, not just the blue Ford of the first speaker, but a blue VW or maybe even a green Toyota.

Don't fool around with the masks of reality until you can handle the reality of masks.