V: Reality: draft notes

[I’ve received back the writing-book I left at my sister’s place. Forgive me for simply copying out my scribbles before turning it into a proper essay. But I’m so excited to have it back!

Note that it is recorded verbatim, except for edits indicated thus:
-- strikethrough was in manuscript, now to be ignored
-- text in square brackets is replacement or additional text for clarification]

Sunday 14th August 2011 Still @ Mary’s
7am in bed.
[Para deleted here, unconnected with the topic]

I think my essay on Reality will be a key to my contribution to the book with Bryan. I think that if we can clarify Reality (which means above all clarifying unreality) then we are on the way to clarifying Belief and unbelief. Once we have done that, we are in a position to unravel the confusions about Reason.

The steps I have outlined are not mere philosophy—not a mere hobby for the philosophically-minded, so to speak. Clarity brings with it not perhaps agreement, but a cessation of conflict. Which is in itself a good. Which is in itself a point where we could call in our roulette chips & leave the casino with our winnings, well satisfied.

But to me it would be merely a prelude. Merely a way to prevent the leakage of energy, the leakage of philosophical attention and the fuelling of conflict. Goods in themselves, as I said. But not the thing which truly interests me. [In hindsight I want to say “But not the thing which fascinated me in the first place.”]

That is the business of paradox. I suspect it is no different from that which Albert Camus calls the Absurd. Not that he even invented the concept. As he explains in The Myth of Sisyphus, others had already identified it, written about it. He merely started where they left off. Whether in the present investigation we take the matter forward, beyond where Camus reached, is almost immaterial, because the ground he covered is worthy of infinite exploration, covering as it does the whole of human experience, & broad enough to encompass a panoply of viewpoints.

But for a start, it will be enough to have a clear view of reality.

Reality
The only satisfactory method, I suggest, for getting a grip on this slippery topic is to take the totality of everything, and subtract from it all that is unreal, and see what we have left.

Or there is another way of doing it. We could deny a single absolute meaning to the word “reality”. We could acknowledge that like most words, perhaps all, it can mean different things in different contexts. Along these lines, we might acknowledge that the main usefulness of the word “reality” is to make distinctions. It is useful, sometimes, to pause in what we are doing, and say “meanwhile, back in the real world ...” Or we may say “Get real”.

So with either approach, we arrive back at the same point, the acknowledgement of unreality ... (to be continued)

Schema
|

___________________
past (unreal, because only approached through thought, memory, documents, video etc)

___________________
present: is REAL!?
--sensual - but how does that work? - Reaches consciousness and then interpreted/processed (e.g. flavour = combination of different sense inputs)
--feelings - emotional
--reason
--fantasy

___________________
Future
--unreal, because it might not be so - only consists in the form of thoughts plans, models [afterthought: machine settings!] etc

So it's hard to choose amongst all this. It's hard to establish anything that’s indubitably real, for there are opportunities at every turn for unreality to creep in and taint reality.

Somewhere at the back of our minds [we know that] the question “Does God exist?” is a false one and we know it?. Does what exist? We are forced to define God first, to know whether God exists or not. It doesn’t make sense. [If we can define what it is that doesn’t exist, then that thing must exist. Does a unicorn exist? Yes, in myth. So we know what a unicorn is. Are unicorns real? No. So] I prefer the question “Is God real?”

For we are familiar with reality and unreality. We know that a world in which pigs can fly is an unreal world, a fairy-tale world. There will always be those who disagree, those who say that the fairy-tale world is real. But we will [can] deal with that. We say that they are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. They believe in the reality of that which is not.

The notion of consensus. [So now we have arrived at a way to define reality in a sensible way. Take all that there is, out in the world and in the consciousness of its entire population, and subtract the unreal. But ultimately we rely on consensus to agree what is real. If I’m on a lonely footpath under a bright starry sky, when a UFO lands, and little green men climb out and ask me to take them to my leader, it’s unreal. If a hundred people are on the scene and eighty-three of them, say, more or less confirm what I claim to have seen, it’s real. Not because it’s proof. Not because we have laboratory conditions to back up the claim. It’s simply the way we do things, the way we as non-scientists use the word real.]