The Fallacy of the Single Reality

I'll be the first to admit, my summer plans are a bit unorthodox. Not really all that much, but you wouldn't expect so much pleasure to be derived from what I did this summer. Sure, I went to Australia for about two weeks; but rather than beaches and kangaroos, the highlight of my trip was a visit to a small art museum (more on this later). Of course, that's not to say there were no beaches and kangaroos on this particular trip, I saw plenty of beaches and plenty of kangaroos, though oddly no kangaroos on beaches. I also went to a camp dedicated to learning everything that we could possibly hold in our heads without exploding. When I tell people outside the academic team that this was possibly the best thing I've ever done in a summer, they tend to stare at me while raising one eyebrow. So yeah, not entirely out there, but still not the typical image of summer vacation.

Don't be fooled, these things are deadly as blue ringed octopuses (octopii?)

Similarly, when summer vacation started in June, I didn't really expect that a single quote in a single summer reading book would spark a chain of thought that would radically change own personal philosophy and perceptions of art and the world around us, but c'est la vie. Unorthodox and unpredictable as it is.

I came across a quote while reading Saturday by Ian McEwan, where the protagonist Henry Perowne remarks, "They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with his finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make use of evolution.", in response to a Philip Larkin quote, "If I were called in to construct a religion, I should make use of water."

Larkin references how important and essential water is for human existence, an importance that cannot possibly be overstated. Perowne, as the character fixed in the material world as he is, prefers to make use of the theory of evolution in his belief system.

This is an interesting juxtaposition between religion and science, one that would at first glance seem almost contradictory. But what makes this juxtaposition interesting is how it is ultimately a reminder that science is a system of faith just as much as religion. Sure science deals with the observable, material, natural world, but we go to sleep every night with the faith that the natural world will remain and behave the same tomorrow as it was today. That it will hold constant and that the laws and theories we make today will be concrete. We have as much faith in that as we do when we sit in a chair, with the faith that whoever built that chair built it to be able to take our weight. We don't consciously think about it or try to prove it to ourselves that the chair will take our weight, we just know without knowing. And it's the same thing for the assumption that the world today will be the same as the world tomorrow. We know that without knowing it, and there isn't any scientific law or theory that can definitively prove that statement. Indeed, the acceptance of that statement is the prerequisite to be able to form our scientific laws and theories.

A picture of the void from my favorite video game Dishonored, how would you react if you woke to see this outside your window? The world warped like this? With matter simply floating, suspended in time and space, the laws of nature no longer applying. When we make our laws and theories, we have faith that the world won't do this, that the laws of the world will remain constant and won't disintegrate into nothingness. We have faith when we go to sleep at night that we won't wake up and find this. Source: dishonored.wikia.com

And all this goes to prove that we choose our realities, we choose the realities we live in. We chose the beliefs we subscribe to and we chose the way we see the world every second of every day. It shows that ultimately there is no one single thing called reality that we all live in. We each inhabit our own realities, each fundamentally different from another. Juxtaposed on the material world are the infinite metaphysical realities that each one of us live in, where we perceive the world. Ultimately, literature and art serves to show us realities outside our own, realities we may have not thought possible or realities that had not occurred to us before. Literature and art challenge us to challenge our beliefs to allow us to come closer to a quintessential truth, and in doing so they changes the way we perceive the world and our reality.

While in Australia, I payed a visit to the Manly Art Museum. For those that don't know, Manly is a city very close to Sydney known for its beaches. But as I said, while I saw plenty of beaches, and plenty of kangaroos, the real highlight was this art museum, and the reason was because of one particular piece on display. This piece consisted of several straw dolls covered by a blanket and raised on a plinth. A nearby plaque explained that the intention behind this piece was that a viewer would construct their own narrative to go with the piece, perhaps the scene was of children hiding under a blanket, or perhaps it was a funeral. But truly the remarkable thing was that 100 people could look at this piece, and possibly none of them could see the same thing. It is the ambiguity of the world given form, and it embodies this concept that people chose how they want to view the world and what is in it, and in doing so, they construct their own reality from the material world.

Robert Frost once said, "Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere." We could chose to see this as a reference to actual metaphors, but I see this as referencing how the world is ambiguous and open ended, much like a metaphor. And unless we can be comfortable with the ambiguity of multiple realities and accept other peoples realities as well as our own, then we will not be able to overcome the fallacy that only a single reality we all live in exists, and thus be doomed to ignorance.