I am reminded of David Foster Wallace’s speech: https://youtube/watch?v=PhhC_N6Bm_s In his speech, Wallace talks about a couple of fish. They are in water and have no idea. He alludes to the idea that the medium in which we are immersed ceases to be an objective truth for us humans. And that further, our objective reality, at least insofar as we describe it to ourselves, is predicated on the absence of the medium in which we do our things. I think that an essentially limiting factor in ability to form cognizance of anything, is our essential nature. We, being oriented, for example, to goal seeking, see whatever we see in terms of time, cause, and effect. If there is a reality that exists beyond time and cause and effect, we either translate it into cause and effect or are unable to see it. In fact, one might go so far as to say that if we cannot see it then it represents a dangerous place to be. After all, why seek or even accept a material reality that threatens our entire way of seeing things. We wouldn’t even really be able to describe it since all our descriptive tools lay inside the realm of that which we understand. The stuff of truth then, is rendered truer as it becomes more abstract, (2+2=4). The stuff on the periphery of our capacity to know, which is for all purposes not useful information, is subject to constant questions of truth. In fact, what is actually true becomes untrue. Truth, or existence, is therefore the result of continuity with our temporal agenda combined with pre-existing presumptive statements posited as true that form a foundational structure we might call shared reality. If this is all the case, then we essentially build the world we live within and at the same time are navigating a world of which we have only limited grasp. There is a story of an explorer landing on a shore in the “New World”. It has various guises and may be nothing more than a myth. In it, the explorer picks up a native and teaches them how to speak whatever language the ship people are speaking. Later on, they anchor in a bay along Brazil’s shore and approach in their small boats. When they make the beach, they find natives who they speak to through their on-board native. The natives ask where the explorers came from and they say, through their own native, that they came from far across the sea in that large ship anchored out there, pointing at it. The natives, not being able to see the ship, ask what the explorers are talking about. The natives cannot see the ship. It is a thing that, for them, is not. amasci/weird/wseeing.html It is quite possible that we humans live in a world incredibly narrow; that the realms of what is actually true outside our capacity to know is so vast, so unimaginable, that we simply cannot see much less understand it. We, if this is true, are like ants walking along in our single file. Attenuated socially, and personally habituated to an entirely self-referential reality that has almost nothing to do with truth.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 08:39:54 +0000
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