THE ROSE REVIEW: Best

I'll Shun Illusion: Cunningly Shunning, or Running From The Stunning Truth?

by Dr. Don Rose

I used to think it was bad to live in a world of illusion. Always reading science fiction, watching TV, playing games, playing music, writing, inventing, living so totally in the world of ideas -- those created by my mind or others -- escaping from my mind in various ways via various media.

What about the real me, spending some time getting to know him?
Should I pay a visit in there, get back to reality?
Maybe time to get real, make it real?
People say they want to do that all the time, or feel they should.

Never mind.

I am questioning that view now.
Think about this thought: maybe there IS no reality that we can ever really know.
Maybe all we EVER have is an illusion to live in, based somewhat on the so-called reality we inhabit.
If so, why quest for the impossible by trying to "get real"?

Marvelous mind maven Marvin Minsky, in his fine thought-provoking afterword to the Vernor Vinge story "True Names", notes that when we humans brag of being self-aware, we might want to think again. Are we really so aware? What are we aware of? In most cases, not that much. There is a lot we dont understand about how parts of us work, we just operate the machine -- like how we drive a car without needing to know how it all works in every detail.

Minsky is right. There is a seemingly infinite assortment of facts and details about how we operate that we don't know, yet don't need to know in order to live our lives. We don't know that much about the many processes going on subconsciously inside us, most of that stuff operates on autopilot.

(Of course, doctors or biologists do know a lot more than most mortal men about such things, yes, perhaps one can say they are more selfaware. But even they don't know everything of what is going on at a deeper level ---- that is for physicists to know, but they don't know everything about the biological level like doctors, and so on).

We are only really aware that we sort of know our beliefs and the sensory data we are gathering and that we seem to have continuity of thoughts from day to day --- we only know the tip of the iceberg of our potential self knowledge.

On top of all this, our data is often skewed, incorrect, or processed poorly (think drunk, or don't pay attention due to thinking of something else, and the data we take in can be altered on the way to our mind, or even ignored --- have you ever driven to work and then pondered how you didn't pay attention the entire way, like you were driving on autopilot?).

My point is that we are always living in an illusion.
Reality is abstracted in our minds so we can deal with it; we would be overwhelmed if we had to consciously process every little thing every day -- hence, abstraction plays a useful, even vital, role.

But if we can admit our world is an abstraction we create in order to survive and thrive, is it really so bad, or unnatural, to simply live a little more in the abstract? And then a little more?
Will a fully-VR world eventually prove to be a perfectly fine place to live, as long as the dirtywork of reality is taken care of by our bodily autopilots --- plus, perhaps, software or machines?

There I go again. Living in the world of ideas.

Just like you.

We are all abstraction-making goal-creating problem-solving dealing-with-skewed-imperfect-data biomachines.

Reality? That is out there, or in here, somewhere, maybe.
Something for our bodies to figure out and deal with (and we will develop more and more ways of helping our bodies deal with it, so we can more and more live in the mental realm).
This may be our future, for those who want to continue on the curve of increasingly living in the pure abstract, not pure fact -- assuming facts even really exist.

For those who just want to "keep it real",
good luck finding and proving absolute reality.
I think it will prove absolutely impossible.
Really.

# posted by Don @ 10:30 AM 0 comments