The theory of reality

No, you really need to listen to this. You've heard it before, lost in a sea of the obvious, but try it again:

We made this up.

We made time up. We made space up. We made logic up. We have forgotten that we made it up, and then forgotten this forgetting. But we did create it, and we can uncreate it and change it, if we remember.

The reason I am so emphatic about this is that I am trying to remember.

Reality is a theory. It is a theory we use to make sense of the universe. To make sense of our Self. Like any theory, it is useful, to a point. The Theory of Reality lets us share a common set of rules and bounds, of language and logic. But it is just a theory.

As with any theory, there are cracks and holes. There are things beyond it which it does not explain.

Newton's Laws are theories, too. They have been disproven, but they are still useful. They now function only in specific cases. Near the speed of light, they break down.

So it can be with us. Knowing that reality is not real does not kill it. You just expand your sense of reality. The assumptions are still there, but they are a part of you, you can turn them on and off. Some would call this insanity. Some would call it freedom.

Take any word and repeat it enough times to yourself, and it becomes meaningless. No logic is complete.

These are holes. Let's step through them. To the respond to some softlinkage: I define nothing as "unreal" in this context. Unreality presupposes reality. I'm saying: Look at your presuppositions. Not to discard them, but to realize that they are yours to interpret and reinterpret.

Last summer, walking by myself in the middle of the great state of Colorado, I had the following very silly revelation:

I have noticed that if I proceed from the assumption that the sensory world does objectively exist, that it is not merely contingent upon my conscious observation of it, then my life and, indeed, all life, seems much stranger and more curious to me than it would if the sensory world were not to exist, if the sensory world were merely another manifestation of my conscious or semi-conscious mind "observing" itself. Now, we also take as axiomatic the statement that 'Truth is stranger than fiction'; that is to say that true statements are always more weird than false ones. Then by the law of the excluded middle we say that either the sensory world exists or that it does not exist, but not both, and so then a proof by contradiction:

A. Either the sensory world has objective existence, or it does not.

B. Life is stranger if the sensory world does have objective existence than if it doesn't.

C. "Truth is stranger than fiction." (True statements are stranger than false ones).

Now, if it were true that the sensory world has no objective existence, than that reality would have to be stranger than the reality in which it does have objective existence, by proposition C above. This, however, contradicts proposition B, that the universe is stranger if the sensory world does have objective existence. So, it cannot be the truth that the sensory world does not have objective existence. Then, by proposition A, the sensory world must have objective existence.

Yaaay!

;-)