The way of the world is perplexing and slightly mortifying.
I have recently reached a milestone that makes me speculate a great deal — realization of goals many times can lead to unlooked for visitations by the unwanted spider monkey of reflection. In particular I consider the nature of reality. Liquidity and form are the usual pooka that whisper in the ear when that organ rightfully should be trained in a more productive direction. In particular the form that reality takes is something that would seem of immense import, yet gets very few sheckles tossed into its cup. A Cartesian view (Rene is my favorite Jonas brother) asks us to view realities primacy as dependant on perception. Well, Descartes set out to find a set of principles that are unquestionably true. Is it accurate to say that which is provable as true is synonymous with a thing that is real? I am not sure that it is. It may very well be that which is not true is more real than that which is entirely true.
Fictions have a way of forcing their own entry into reality to an extent that more cogent ideas could not. While Lambda-CDM modeling suggests that roughly 70% of the universe is ΩΛ (the cosmological constant or Dark Energy) and that percentage of heavy elements like you and me is .03%, it doesn’t do a hell of a lot for reality to know it. Yet the place of the unreal grows each day. The disjointed and muddled tenement of our memory is always over shadowed by the luxurious high-rise of imagination.
A year ago the doorbell rang. I went to the porch and found two men, both white, disheveled, and dirty, standing at the bottom steps with their back to me as if ready to run for their lives. They ask if I have seen a stray dog and I say no. With a mumbled word of thanks they flee into the streets and I, otherwise occupied as I am always am, think nothing of it until the police cars arrive. The house down the way had been broken into. The police grab two poor black teenagers on the word of a witness neighbor who swore she spoke to the men. After I explain I meet the probable thieves and spoke with them I ask when the teenagers are to be released. The answer that returns assures me that the boys are in for a rough time regardless of my testimony. The desired fiction that the black kids must be criminals creates reality. Arrest, process, questions, fear, and, ultimately, self-doubt about their own place in the world result and changed.
Phillip K. Dick says this about reality: “[R]eality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”
Albert Einstein’s view on it is: “[R]eality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
The writer and the physicist duke it out for possession of everything but it their viewpoints seem strangely reversed to expectation. How is it that Einstein’s reality is chimera and Dick’s is fixed? It is the natural conclusion of the scientist to determine the fluid or ephemeral nature of reality and the natural conclusion of the author to find it as set as ink on pages.
