“We arise as human beings in the experience of observing ourselves observing.”
Humberto Maturana, The Origin and Conservation of Self-Consciousness, 2005
Thinkers are divided when it comes to ‘reality’.
Some of them, the self styled ‘scientists’, study reality as if it was an ‘exterior’ fact.
At the other end of the spectrum, other people are convinced reality is nothing but a projection/illusion.
To me, this whole thing is yet another example of ‘which came first’, only simpler. Way simpler…
You need a chicken to lay an egg to hatch a chicken. This is indeed complicated…
‘Reality’, on the other hand, is, first and foremost, a human concept!
There was no such ‘thing’ as ‘reality’ until one of our forepersons had come up with the word/concept!
‘And where did that foreperson came ‘in’ from, huh?!?’
Have you noticed the scare marks?
The ‘thing’ we identify as being ‘reality’ had existed since… the Big Bang… I don’t know….
But I do know that nobody called it that – or thought of it in that manner, until somebody did!
And until the peers of that person agreed to use the term and to think about ‘it’ – the ‘thing’, not the word – in that manner.
‘Does this mean that we made ‘reality’?
No, not exactly made it… more about this later…
Only ‘found’ it and ‘measured’ it.
Named it, to put it in a simpler form.
As for who made it… this is another good question.
God?
I argued, in my last post, that ‘God’ – the concept, is yet another human artifact.
The only bridge we could trust to take us to the future.
I don’t know, with absolute certainty, whether the whole thing we call ‘reality’ has been made (is constantly being made, as according to the Ash-Arite tradition) by an ‘outside’ agent or it had evolved naturally. But I do know that if our ‘reality’ had been made by somebody then a ‘small’ question begs to be asked.
Who made that somebody’s reality?
I can accept the notion that we are lab rats. Playing in a pen made by some experimenter. Just as we do with/to our lab rats. But exactly as I’m trying to find an answer to ‘how did we come about’, the moment I’ll accept that we’ve been made by some agent will be the moment I’ll start wondering about ‘who pulled this creative agent out of the proverbial hat!’.
Let’s stick with the naturally evolving reality! The alternative is far too complicated…
‘But if it had evolved naturally, then nobody made it… right???!’
…No…, not exactly, anyway!
It may have evolved naturally but that doesn’t preclude any factors – and even agents, from chipping away at it!
‘What?!?
Are you gonna make up your mind?
As in once and for all???’
No, I can’t promise you anything like that!
My mind will never be ‘made up’.
My understanding is a work in progress.
I’m constantly adjusting my opinions according to the evidence ‘presented’ to me by ‘reality’.
‘And what about this constantly evolving reality? What/who drives this ‘evolution’?’
What do you see here?
A ‘Nature Made’, volcano whose flanks had been eroded by naturally occurring factors.
The debris had been transported to lower altitudes, by other naturally occurring factors and then transformed into fertile soil by a different class of equally naturally occurring factors.
The factors belonging to the first class had been rain, freeze, wind and gravity while in the second class we point out algae, microbes, plants and animals.
On top, literally, of these natural occurrences we find the consequences of our own actions. Of our own agency.
Of our own choices!
The buildings you see, the farms you know are there, the roads people take when going from their houses to their farms… and so on, up to the top of the mountain. Where we find snow full of other ‘evidence’ of our own existence. Soot, various industrial dust, etc., etc.,…
So. We live at the intersection between the natural evolution of things and the consequences of our previous existence/choices.
We live in a reality increasingly influenced by our own existence.
Are we truly aware of this?
Are we conscient enough?
Enough to realize how much of our reality is of our own doing?
nicichiarasa 