Questions of Reality

The things you see around you, the noises you hear, the textures you feel, the flavours you taste and the aromas or stenches you can smell, none of these things are exactly like that in reality. Every single person in the world experiences their own version of what that world is really like, and it might be close to what is really there but how close? The classic example involves colours: Light hits an object and then reflects into someone's eye, whose brain is keyed to respond to that frequency of light as 'blue' and so Bob sees some blue. Was the thing actually blue? Is blue even a real thing? We have no idea! 'Blue' may just be a human concept for making sense of the things all around us, just like all the colours!

If knowing reality seems difficult, then knowing another person is exponentially more difficult, a process which is far more complicated by the fact that you can never really accomplish that feat! You can get a perception and that's about it. Truly, you can observe and try to understand that perception of someone but is that actually worth anything at all? Consider the obstacles: You are trying to work out the personality of someone, based on the limited number of behaviours you've seen them exhibit, filtered through your own nervous system, and biased by whatever preconception you want to be true of them. On top of all those internal issues, the person you think you know might be pretending or hiding something, throwing even more spanners into the proverbial works and adding more complications by the moment. It's an exceedingly complex business, simplified by nothing except perhaps hiding in the library, and reading the collected works of Wilkie Collins under a giant Cone Of Silence.

That difficulty in understanding the wider world and other people is probably why television is so important to me and to the world. In a life that has been remarkably free of interpersonal reactions, how else to learn about that other world than through television? It's the microcosm that sits in almost everyone's rooms in some manner, feeding humdrum alternative lives during the daytime and larger than life dramas and comedies in the evenings, even though no-one can ever find anything to watch. Oh, what perils there are to modern existence...

Reality, that funny concept we use as a catch-all term for everything we sense around us, is a funny thing. We think we know it, but really we don't have the faintest idea what's going on. Thanks to Uncertainty, our very observation of what we perceive as reality alters it at the quantum level anyway. Is it possible that happens with people too? Of course. Talking to a person forces that person to think about something and thereby change, meaning that you then have something new to learn and so on, and so on, all the while changing yourself until the chain reaction theoretically builds up to the point of total insanity. On a more real level, we're packed full of mental safeguards so as to resist a lot of changes, but that's a whole other story, or maybe many many other stories.

For now, it's probably easier to do as we do every day, and just accept what we see as the truth. It's as close as we will ever get in any case. What you see is what you get.

O.

PS There is a pseudo-follow up to this post entitled 'Mental Safeguards'.Thank you!