What is real?
It seems, that the question: “What
is real?” is a difficult and even dangerous question and smart people carefully
“dance” around it. Parents, teachers,
politicians, etc. often explain to their charges, how to put observations together,
that the next time they “know” how to interpret events “properly”. How much could
one trust these explanations, though?
In each society there
are “norms”, defining what should be called “real”. There are “experts”, who
decide, when someone’s view of the world is not “normal”. People, who cannot
differentiate between “real” and not “real” according to these “norms”, are
“managed”.
Mathematicians and
scientists wisely do not ask: “What is real?” They deal with “experiments and
observations”, “theories”, “models” and alike. They leave applications of
theories and conclusions to those, who use their studies. They are bypassing
this question and focusing on creation and polishing of tools of mind –
theories and models.
However, when one has
to interpret own observations, this question (what is real?) seemingly cannot
be ignored. Such interpretation is a tricky task. It is well known that
everyone has difficulties recalling large deal of “observed”, while under
hypnosis the recall is much better. This selective “hiding” of information
affects what we perceive as real, existing, and what we ignore or perceive as
illusion. Which rules does our Mind use for selection of what should be hidden?
Are we born with them, or a large part of them comes with education?
Note that there are many people in
our lives, whom we accept as our “guides”, who teach us how to “frame” one’s
observations. Many of them are not entirely selfless and, more importantly,
they themselves were shaped by the society, in which they live.
From the stream of information,
which we get through our sensory organs, we select a part of the stream, which
we deem worthy our attention. This selection is affected by the society to
which we belong. It is impossible to describe the mechanism of perception and
interpretation of an individual separately from the society. Social and
individual are just different sides of one phenomenon.
No wonder that there are armies of
people eager to “educate” us that we interpret “properly”, what we perceive,
and obediently work for them or fight for them. The very way we perceive the
word on the very basic level is greatly influenced by our “education”.
People belonging to different
social groups interpret, what they perceive, differently, and it takes effort
to reconcile their interpretations.
It is so tempting to assume, that
there is some “objective reality” to which the society as a whole is adapting
through this mechanism of trying variants of education and interpretation. It
is so tempting to assume, that various interpretations gradually reconcile,
that there is some “objective reality” causing our interpretations. However,
the concept of “objective reality” was so horribly misused that it either needs
to be replaced with something less dangerous, or even removed from our thinking
all together.
The idea of “objective reality” is
presented, usually, as follows.
Our minds want to have something to
rely upon in their analysis, and starting from parents, through various
teachers, religious guides, politicians and so on, we are provided with some
sturdy images of “objective reality” independent from the way individuals or
societies perceive it at the moment. Knowledge of this “objective reality”
supposed to guide our analysis and our decisions.
Some ideologies go even further,
they dictate, what one supposed to perceive, as “objective reality”, and even
persecute those, who deviate from the prescribed perception.
All this is rigid limitation on
thinking, it is limiting possibilities to experiment, learn and guide own life.
In addition, it is dangerous, because, as life is changing, the images of
“objective reality” inevitably come in conflict with it.
Those, who took these prescribed
images too seriously, cannot make decisions, which are in their interests. This
should be a warning that one should not be too attached to the prescribed division
on “real” and “not real”.
From the other hand, we need to
remember that these “images of reality” are developed by entire Humanity in the
process of perpetual interaction. They make us what we are, able to make
conscious decisions, enjoying conscious existence. We cannot simply reject some
of them and create a few for our personal use. We must change them together.
While this sounds as a difficult task, this is what is going on all the time.
The Humanity (each member of it) perpetually revises the system of “images of
reality”. This perpetually revised system of “images of reality” is a valuable
tool, which is very useful, when applied properly, or it could be highly
dangerous, when it is used to limit freedom of thinking.
Hence, development and, especially,
application of this tool has to be consciously monitored and broadly discussed.
Since this is something Humanity does as a whole, this activity requires perpetual
“feeling of INTEGRITY” of Humanity. We do have this feeling, but we tend to
suppress it in our perpetual battle with each other.
To do this work, we need to understand
these “images of reality” better.
We understand that we get a stream
of sensory information and we make numerous attempts to fit, to reconcile it
with the huge system of patterns, which we maintain. Using these patterns, we
build some construction in our minds, which corresponds “well enough” to
“observed” stream of information. At some point, we decide that the match
between the stream of sensory information and the system of patterns, which we have
constructed to interpret it, is sufficient. Information, which does not fit
into the system of patterns, which we constructed, we declare to be “random”,
“unimportant”, “not essential to what we want to do with this stream of
information”.
Sometimes we miss. If we feel that
the cost of such mistake is high, we enrich our system of patterns through
personal analysis and discussions with others. This way, we turn our mistakes
in an excuse to develop our understanding and to connect with others. Note that
process often turns into an “avalanche”, because it brings new view into
analysis of our past experiences and new waves of revisions of the entire
system of patterns.
The situation is kind of
paradoxical: sometimes our mistakes of interpretation are more valuable, than
our “right” interpretations. In addition, we are not sure: could our “right”
interpretations actually be mistakes, which we could not catch, because of our
limited understanding.
Education and life experience
provides us with growing system of patterns and examples of its use. Actual
application of this system leads to our growth in understanding.
There is only one way to operate
inside such system. We need to grow, nonstop, all the time. We need to question
everything, need to experiment and discover. However, this perpetual questioning
of acquired from others knowledge is hard to do, because this knowledge makes
our decision-making easier.
The most difficult thing: we should
not think that we know how to distinguish between good and bad decisions, before
we go through exploration and experimentation. It is difficult, because one,
who has this knowledge, has attractive ability to sweep away all variants of
decisions, which are “bad”. We could check what happens, if we have some knowledge
of this sort, but we should not assume that we have this knowledge yet.
What is real, then? We do not know,
what is real. Understanding of this makes our decision-making more mature. We
could live with open questions quite nicely, and we should not accept deceptive
answers, which limit our ability to think.
One should not be in a hurry to
dismiss unusual observations as “not real”.
Alexander Liss 12/11/2019