totallycai wrote:
However… I also think that there is a REAL real world, but it is just made up of energy. We all interpret this energy in different ways and try to understand it in different ways. My evidence that the real world REALLY exists is that no matter how hard I try, I just can’t walk through walls. I reckon in theory it should be possible (line up the gaps between my atoms with the gaps between the wall’s atoms and off you go), but in practice it never seems to work out. Even if you beieve with all your might that there is no wall you still bump your head!
Maybe my belief in the reality of the universe is all that is stopping me from walking through walls, instantly teleporting to the next party or communicating telepathically, but it is pretty hard-wired into my conciousness and very difficult to break free of.
But we do eventually break free of the hard wired habits – the human race has been redefining it’s place in “reality” all through our existence. Think about it:
5000 years ago, we all knew our small tribe and maybe a few nearby were all that existed – we could communicate with them (if we used the same language), and we could travel as far as our legs would let us. We had no concept of space, or worlds – everything above our heads was a mystery and ascribed to some god like force or other.
2000 years ago, and we had discovered the world was a much larger place – a flat disk in a firmament of stars (of which we were the center). Many things were still given a supernatural explanation, but we could (if very rich) send a message half way across the world. We had also discovered that previously mysterious things like diseases could be fixed with the application of science. Study of the natural world had revealed it could be manipulated given enough thought.
400 years ago, and suddenly the world had become a globe, spinning through a cosmos in which we were only a tiny part. Suddenly, great thinkers were redefining the boundaries of our reality. Laws describing physics, chemistry and biology using the rediscovered language of mathematics were invented – we could predict and design the world around us.
Between then and now – we’ve had revolution after revolution – agricultural, industrial, information. The atom has been split, and we found that there were more basic levels of matter and reality – the neutron, the photon, the quarks, neutrinos, gluons, electrons (and the hunt is still on). It’s possible to communicate with the other side of the planet almost instantly, we can FLY there in a few hours if we want to… Men have walked on the moon, and orbit the earth constantly in an orbital station… Hell, that PC you are sitting at typing is a piece of technical wizardry that surfs the edge of reality in it’s own right (how much info will that hard disk hold? How quickly can it calculate for you?)
Now imagine you are the person from 5000 years ago, coming forward to this time. Our reality has been redefined so much in that time, that you would be almost completely unable to comprehend most of it. It would all seem like some sort of magic, but the truth is that we have just remade our reality.
Walking through walls? Maybe it’s hard wired at the moment, but maybe it’s also because we haven’t found the right redefinition yet. Would you dare to predict where we will be in a hundred years time? Or what reality might be then?
And what is the possibility that Bill Hicks is right, and we really are “one conciousness experiencing itself subjectively”, and we really do create our own reality?
Just a few early morning thoughts….:wink:
