Light Reading or Reflections on our Existence

On a clear day I look at the sky and say it’s blue. When you look at that same sky you will most likely agree. But how do I know that the color you call blue looks like what I call blue?

Hold on.  No need to go searching for your bag of weed!  Most of us have pondered this.  And yes, I know this conversation is often THC induced.  But potheads aren’t the only ones curious about perception.  So don’t bogart this subject, my friend.  You are going to have to share these pensive contemplations with scientists.

One day my buddy and I were headed out to a show at a local club.  I was driving.  We were on one of the busiest multi-lane streets in the entire southeast.  I was hyper-focused on the cars weaving in and out of lanes, the brake lights flashing, and the tractor-trailer that was one inch from my rear bumper! My friend was riding shotgun.  Out of nowhere he shouts, “Good God!!!”

I stomp on the brake, checking the mirror to make sure we are not about to be squashed by the tailgater!  No. He was alert and now sticking his middle finger up at me. This all happened in an instant and I said with alarm, “What???”.  My good buddy says with a grin, “Oh. I was just thinking about life, man”.

This particular friend was prone to frequent episodes of obsession with the concept of reality.  One time he discussed this so fervently at a party we had that one guest told me later that it had changed his life forever.  I too loved engaging in this type of discussion, but had always just considered them light and fun musings about subjects we had no real insight into or any means to gain insight to.

Now I know that there are real scientists who are seriously investigating reality and its interaction with our limited perception.

After college I worked on an assembly line while I pursued a post-bac education.  It turned out that the assembly line was staffed by otherwise unemployable graduate-degreed geniuses. The discussions we had, while handling sticky rolls of knitted fiberglass and folding felt padding, intellectually exceeded any experience I had at the local University.  On some days the conversations were deeply personal.  One co-worker who had a Master’s degree in English had witnessed and experienced extreme trauma while serving as a medic in the Vietnam War.  I had mentioned to him that I had a fear of death.  He said that he had a theory that everything we see is an illusion.  The more he spoke I realized that his theory was really more of a religious conviction intertwined with his unique take on Christianity.  For whatever reason, these ideas comforted me. Religion and science were no longer in opposition when you looked at it from his perspective.  They were actually integral to each other.

And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure."

You may have heard news bytes that talk about black holes, multiple universes, and debate about the nature of the cosmos.  Is the Universe expanding?  Can a black hole really be consuming information? I’m no scientist. These questions boggle my brain.  I have picked up enough bits and pieces to understand that there is conflict between quantum physics and classical physics.

Listening to NPR I have heard stories about pulses of light that exit a chamber before it finishes entering the chamber. What??  I’ve heard a theory that we are actually living in a two-dimensional space even though our perceived experience is three dimensional?  Double what????

However, through the magic of FaceBook, I came across an article that has my WHATs going off the scale of WTFs!!  This article brings us full circle back to the question of whether the blue I see is the same as your blue. The scientist being interviewed takes it many steps further though. Is my experience of a headache the same as your experience of a headache? Or do we just have a common word to describe the same variables that underlie the experience we both call a headache? He states an emphatic yes to the latter.

Yet he goes further and actually explains the nature of reality in a way that most of us only have a very recent metaphor available to understand it. You can go to the link for a more detailed description, but here is my take on it.  Imagine looking at your desktop.  You have file icons on your desktop. If you click on that file you will see its content. Correct? No.

The file icon is merely an image that we associate with specific content.  When we click on it we see words and numbers that we have painstakingly typed and organized. But what we see is far from the reality of what is really going on in the computer. We could not possibly grasp the totality of what is going on behind the symbols on the display in a meaningful way without creating these symbolic images. So, according to the scientist and backed up by some crazy math that I will never comprehend, our total experience in this world is a mental representation of what is actually going on.  Evolution does not favor those who can perceive reality, but those who can perceive symbols which enable us to react appropriately for survival.

The reality underlying our perceptions of the world are too complex for us to understand in a meaningful way without the mental images we created!

This makes sense to me from both a scientific standpoint as well as a religious one.  Granted, my religious experience is biased toward a Christian and Jewish perspective. I studied Religion in college and came within one course from having a second minor in it. My education and experience inform my opinion. 

Mythology is central to most religions. Myths are powerful stories that guide us in understanding the Devine. Loaded with symbolism and metaphors, myths are like computer code that create tangible images that help us imagine the infinite. Whenever one of the disciples would ask Jesus a very direct question about the nature of G-d or heaven, he would typically answer with a parable. Often the followers seemed frustrated by this. But Jesus understood that he could never explain the true nature of these concepts without the use of imagery.

As I have aged, I have grown. I have learned to find solace in the mystery that is our existence.

And I am more convinced than ever that even the most intelligent humans on earth have not even scratched the surface of the scratch itself to unraveling the nature of reality.