TT #13 – HOW TO EXPLAIN REALITY

Featuring Thursday Thirteen. Have you had a go yet?

13. What we’re told is reality invariably isn’t. Consider ‘reality television’. Nothing can be further from the truth. It’s a lie. Unless you believe it. Then it’s a psychosis.
12. Television also gives us the ‘celebrity’. The ‘reality’ of this is that they are robots. This is the only explanation I can think of for such stupidity. Except …
11. The urge to be famous is such that they are so adaptable to image that the ‘person’ disappears. Hence delete ‘robot’, insert ‘zombie’.

10. So, ‘non-existence’ of celebrities as real people?

This would be understood by the sociologist, Baudrillard. He argued that media is now ‘infotainment’, merging reality and fantasy to such an extent that we no longer know which is which.
9. Mind and culture conspire to increase un-reality. The world is full of ‘signs’ that guide us, but lie. A soup can makes us salivate. Yet do you know it doesn’t contain worms?
8. We also have a societal understanding of what is ‘normal’. This defines what is ‘abnormal’, and to be marginalized as ‘different’. But is anyone normal?
7. We have our own view of ‘reality’. Philosophers have theorized we each have a ‘mind filter’ that views the world in our own particular way. So how can there be a definite reality when we each have our own?
6. Your mind is even in conflict over what is ‘reality’. We have a left and right brain, one looking at things emotionally, the other rationally. Who’s to say which is right? Argue this one out with yourself!

5. We also hallucinate ‘reality’.

Now, people think this way madness lies. But the mind constantly interprets sensory expression. And if our attention isn’t on the world, it makes up its own mind. Spooky!
4. Science complicates it further. The properties of the subatomic particle are such that we can never know its true state. The world is fundamentally a matter of probability.
3. But if this is so, how can we ‘see’ a definite reality? Well, the theory is that a definite reality is created by our ‘observation’ of it. Before we see it, it isn’t.
2. This makes us our own magicians. The world we create is as much about our perception of it as the actual existence of it. If it exists at all.
1. Confused? Come now, haven’t you seen The Matrix? Maybe not an exact reality (pun), but there is a theory that God is a baseball capped computer geek, and he’s playing a video game called ‘us’.

© Anthony North, May 2008

Fiction Xtra – TOO MUCH REALITY – A tale of life

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Reality sucks. I always knew that, but today I just feel it all the more.
He was stood in front of me, I remember. ‘So you DID do it,’ he said.
‘Well,’ I countered, ‘I suppose that depends on your view of reality.’
‘How’s that work, then?’
‘Well, its relative, you know. What you think happened, and what you think may have happened can often get confused.’
‘So you didn’t do it?’
‘Well, I suppose in some parallel universe I must have. And it just COULD have been this one.’
‘So you DID do it?’
‘As long as we don’t take the probability of quantum theory into account.’
‘A real wise guy, huh.’
‘In a relative kind of way … ‘
I never got to finish the rest. Reality hit me all at once. And then Dad sent me to my room. And I’m just not gonna listen to them wise-ass teachers any more.

© Anthony North, May 2008

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