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On the Perception of Reality.
13 years ago
General
Has anyone ever seen the film, 'The Truman Show'? Although it's a comedy starring Jim Carrey, it struck a surprising chord with me, when I saw it. The essential gist of it is that, the protagonist grew up in a world artificially constructed for the needs of a tv show, to emulate real life. Everyone he ever knew were all actors behaving according to a rehearsed script for the purposes of the produc
tion.
What struck me about it, is it reminded me of a hypothesis I once held about reality, as a child.
That I, and a few rare others on earth, were the only true humans left alive. Everyone else that appeared to be human, were all androids left behind, whose sole purpose was to raise us as though whatever had nearly exterminated our kind had never occurred. I did not yet know how I would be able to distinguish real humans from fake ones, but I suspected I would, in later years, know how.
Later on, I started to wonder if, maybe I was not in fact a genuine human, but I was unwittingly a part of this very construct. How would I know the difference? Even if there was a difference, how significant could it be? The more I understood the nature of conscience, the less I held on to the aforementioned idea. It came to a point where, I then once held a view not unlike, what Mark Twain described in his story, 'The Mysterious Stranger':
Life itself is only a vision. A dream. Nothing exists, save empty space and you. And you, are but a thought.
tion.
What struck me about it, is it reminded me of a hypothesis I once held about reality, as a child.
That I, and a few rare others on earth, were the only true humans left alive. Everyone else that appeared to be human, were all androids left behind, whose sole purpose was to raise us as though whatever had nearly exterminated our kind had never occurred. I did not yet know how I would be able to distinguish real humans from fake ones, but I suspected I would, in later years, know how.
Later on, I started to wonder if, maybe I was not in fact a genuine human, but I was unwittingly a part of this very construct. How would I know the difference? Even if there was a difference, how significant could it be? The more I understood the nature of conscience, the less I held on to the aforementioned idea. It came to a point where, I then once held a view not unlike, what Mark Twain described in his story, 'The Mysterious Stranger':
Life itself is only a vision. A dream. Nothing exists, save empty space and you. And you, are but a thought.
Descartes famously dug himself into a corner where the only certainty he could find was his famous "I think therefore I am", and acknowledged that all reality outside of awareness of your own thoughts could be a deception. Then he used some rather questionable arguments for a God (who was good simply because that's how God is assumed to be in mainstream monotheistic religion) to show that reality can't just be false.
Berkeley pretty much thought we were living in "the matrix" and things didn't exist independently of us perceiving them, but God was the computer running the program and keeping things coherent.
Reading some ancient Greek tragedies back in the day it was striking how much more sense things make when you have a bunch of beings who aren't all-powerful and downright disagree and quarrel in charge of things. Even Aphrodite does some smiting by making someone who scorns her out of anger for being a bastard and his stepmother fall in love with each other.