Yes, you've demonstrated how we were "created by the creator to create". (That came from a song on the radio.). I like making patterns with colors. I like to make patterns with yarn. My mind says "Ooo Ooo I want to see these colors together!" And then, second after second, stitch after stitch, I crochet a granny square. My sister loves these colors too. So I make more granny squares, filling each with love, knowing my sister will love what I'm making for her. And this is how my mind, which has no physical dimensions, no physical attributes, uses my brain and fingers to create an afghan full of love. I put the afghan into a box and send my love thousands of miles away so my sister can wrap her body in the colors I brought together with her in my mind. She can feel my love. I'm grateful my body made it possible to share loving feelings with my sister. Wow, the elements cooperated and love grew. Thank you for sharing your art of word slinging John. I like your story arch work.
I have actually played this exact game* with myself a lot, and with my more philosophical friends. It's why humans have culture, history and heritage, and we need communication to survive as a species. When we conquered the most basic of our needs, it gave us time to start thinking and dreaming beyond food and safety and shelter, and thereby invent and create art and other wondrous things.
Wait But Why has a fantastic series exploring this very idea in great depth, which is bundled up in a book, "What's Our Problem? (a self-help book for societies)", available here: https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem
I had the privilege of reading the bits going live as Tim Urban was writing it and posting it to his website, so I retain whatever my memory has chosen to let me keep, but at the moment, you need to pay to gain access to a preferred version of your choice, minus the website which might be still being worked on with a tentative deadline of sometime this year.
But as to my own thoughts, I've come to the conclusion that there is no way humans can experience objective reality, exactly because we make sense of the world through stories based off our memories of things that have happened to us in the past, and decisions we make in the present to try to strive towards a future we want to have. How wild is THAT? Temporally, we live in three different places at once, because the past informs our present which puts us on certain paths so when the future becomes our present, you can't go backwards or change to a different road.
I'm definitely game to go down this rabbit hole with you! Do you have any questions about how I see it?
--
Footnotes!
* I call it a game because humans often use games as a vehicle for understanding or testing out ideas, which feels more accurate than "exercise" because I only do it for things that really interest me.
This article and the discussion around it has exhausted me! It’s so much easier for me to get my intended meanings into words when they’re cloaked in fiction. :)
Have to say, I SO look forward you your emails!! Never boring, and always, ALWAYS, daring...nay,...challenging, me to explore stuff that one doesn't ever think about! Not "woo-woo" at all; wish those that really SHOULD open their minds, would! There is no "one way" (my way or the highway).
Yup, the hologram is one thing I've heard that I really like. I'm no scientist (I missed my chance at that), but I do enjoy pretending to play one on TV.
I think you are right and wrong. The reason why you are wrong is that objects or things existing are not based on colors shapes or sizes. It's like saying air does not exist because we can't see it. All object aren't made up of shapes size or colors but atoms which made up matter and matter can be solid, liquid or gas. Car is a solid matter which can have a definite shape which means it's a combination of different atoms. The reason why we perceive things differently is because of adaptation and survival . A dog can smell better because it's nose is adapted to do, a bat uses echolocation to 'see' because that is what its body does to survive and your friend that see a dog as harmful is because his brain is trying protect him from any potential harm. And we don't only use our eyes to see. Sometimes we can judge the things we see based on touch, the sound they make and what we've learnt about them. But hey everyone sees things differently.
I actually had a similar discussion with another commenter in this thread. I'm actually not arguing that things don't LITERALLY exist based on colors or whatever. What I'm saying is we tend to take raw sensory input -- whatever that input may be -- and then add a bunch of stuff to it. There's only so much that's objectively true about an apple I see five feet away from me, but if you asked me about that apple, I'd tell you all sorts of things about it that I don't actually have present-moment evidence to believe. Those "extra" things are the stories I've come to believe about apples, not facts.
To be clear, no part of this article is meant to argue for the literal non-existence of anything. I'm defining "our individual world" as the set of data we take in and then use to inform our decisions and beliefs. It's a storyteller's definition of "what's real." It's that extra stuff -- the elements of belief that form the world that each of us lives in, and is subtly different for everyone because they all learned different ways of looking at things growing up -- that varies and isn't fixed and true.
Hmm. I now see what you are trying to achieve with the article. It now clear to me. Funny I thought of something like this and read a book saying the same thing you are trying to achieve with your article. I now understand. Great concept by the way.
Thank you! It's dangerous, though, when storytellers talk philosophy outside of the protective confines of a fictional story. As you'll see if you read my comments discussion with our resident philosophy expert, my rigorous academic argument skills aren't up to par, and I don't have the background to support what ultimately are lay thoughts on philosophy rather than formal, defensible, professor-level thoughts.
This is an interesting and thought-provoking post, which makes it a shame that the argument and most if its assumptions are fundamentally wrong and probably contradictory. 😉
You deserve a better and less-flip response than that. I'll type one up shortly.
If you're commenting from a formal philosophical standpoint, I'll go ahead and surrender and admit I'm outmatched. Although I did take some philosophy in college, I'm nowhere near steeped in it. I'm writing from an experiential point of view, nowhere near making a cogent logical argument. It's mostly musing. Whatever failures I've made come at least in part from an inability to articulate something that strikes me as nearly un-articulatable.
Yeah, it's hard to be constructive in bite-sized comments. Your article isn't silly and it does a good job of articulating a certain intuition that a lot of people have.
Where I'm dubious is exactly about the character of experience. Do we really experience reality as broken up into pieces? We *can*, of course, but I'm not convinced that this is a natural and unchanging fact about how things appear to us in perception.
For example, I don't know anyone who *experiences* their visual field as photons. Even if physics shows us that's what light "really is", we still had to learn that -- it's not a fact of the appearance itself. What looks to be a given "ground floor" of perception in fact takes a *lot* of heavy-duty thinking and abstract reasoning.
Oh, you're Matt? I didn't realize. It makes sense now that I'd have two responses (a comment and a writeup) that say similar things. That's cool to know.
I haven't read your post yet, but I skimmed it and got the character of it. I DO see that you're trying to be constructive despite some disagreement over there, which I very much appreciate. I already made a note to check it out later today or tomorrow (it's going to take me some time to digest). I anticipate my response being a little like my response to your first comment: holding my hands up, saying that I surrender my formal agreement when faced with a trained opponent. I can't argue this on traditional philosophical grounds. It's just a feeling I can't shake, not unlike the feeling that got Neo looking for the Matrix.
Again, I'm not prepped to debate just yet, but my suspicion is that I've overstated the idea that "the world doesn't exist" because fiction writers like me tend to be hyperbolic. I was going for an interesting headline, not literal fact. I then tried to recharacterize the idea that "the world doesn't exist" (technically, I ASKED if it existed rather than stating it didn't, lol) in the body of the post, but the translation may have been lost.
I don't actually think the world doesn't exist (well, we'll see, but that's not the message of THIS article). This isn't solipsism or some weird existential vacuum argument. It's more that I don't feel that THE WORLD AS WE NORMALLY THINK OF IT EXISTS, but that's the key phrase: "The world as we normally think of it." The intended message was more about how much we assume without questioning. I was trying to poke holes in THE STORIES OUR BRAIN TELLS, which we usually just take to be OBJECTIVE FACTS when they aren't.
I'm looking forward to reading your post, but mostly I want to thank you for writing it either way. I joined Substack to engender intelligent discussion with interesting people, and this interaction has been the first big one. I'm just finding my feet on Substack. I appreciate anyone who comes my way, then takes the time to discuss.
Yeah same here man. This kind of exchange is fun and rewarding and nobody ever solves anything, which is all the fun of it.
If you're interested in going down the skeptical/world-is-story rabbit hole, I can point you at all kinds of stuff on that (some of it won't even be boring self-indulgent and unreadable philosophy).
You know, I think I know what’s going on here. I’m nowhere as steeped in philosophy as you are, but I did take a bunch of philosophy in college. That means I know about the phenomenon called “annoying guy who doesn’t follow the rules of philosophy.” There’s one in every class, and all the other students wish he’d go away because he does things like rebutting extreme, to-make-a-point thought experiments by saying, “Well, sure … but that would never happen!”
In this example, I am that guy. Your arguments are totally sound. Still, I can’t shake a feeling that what I’m trying to articulate has merit in ways I’m completely ill-equipped to articulate with language. I could try, but I’m sure you’d run well-researched laps around my responses. That basically means that my answer is, “Yes, but because of something, I still believe what I’m saying even though I can’t defend it, basically meaning that I’m taking myself on faith because *I* know what I mean even if I can’t explain it to you.” That’s the dumbest thing that Guy Who Doesn’t Follow the Rules of Philosophy can say, and I’d be annoyed with me for it, too. Basically, I think that my failings in the formal philosophical debate of this will come from an inability to explain myself more than anything else.
😆 I taught a few of "those guys" back in grad school and I promise you're nowhere near that level.
You are on to a point which right and important IMO. Humans do bring a lot of ourselves to the reality we find. The trouble, and I believe the reason that you're finding it hard to articulate, is that the line between _what is made_ and _what is found_ is always moving. It's a literal, actual paradox, and language has a hard time with those.
I think that the angle you want is to push into *story* and meaning-making, which has a lot going for it, rather than going whole-hog on the skepticism and unreality of the world element.
Rather than seeing story and reality as opposed, I think there's a lot more mileage in going beyond the opposition. Story partly creates the world, and the world contains our stories of it.
That's probably a few layers deeper than you wanted to go to make a point about the significance of narrative, but that's what blogging and commenting is for innit?
Yes, you've demonstrated how we were "created by the creator to create". (That came from a song on the radio.). I like making patterns with colors. I like to make patterns with yarn. My mind says "Ooo Ooo I want to see these colors together!" And then, second after second, stitch after stitch, I crochet a granny square. My sister loves these colors too. So I make more granny squares, filling each with love, knowing my sister will love what I'm making for her. And this is how my mind, which has no physical dimensions, no physical attributes, uses my brain and fingers to create an afghan full of love. I put the afghan into a box and send my love thousands of miles away so my sister can wrap her body in the colors I brought together with her in my mind. She can feel my love. I'm grateful my body made it possible to share loving feelings with my sister. Wow, the elements cooperated and love grew. Thank you for sharing your art of word slinging John. I like your story arch work.
I have actually played this exact game* with myself a lot, and with my more philosophical friends. It's why humans have culture, history and heritage, and we need communication to survive as a species. When we conquered the most basic of our needs, it gave us time to start thinking and dreaming beyond food and safety and shelter, and thereby invent and create art and other wondrous things.
Wait But Why has a fantastic series exploring this very idea in great depth, which is bundled up in a book, "What's Our Problem? (a self-help book for societies)", available here: https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem
I had the privilege of reading the bits going live as Tim Urban was writing it and posting it to his website, so I retain whatever my memory has chosen to let me keep, but at the moment, you need to pay to gain access to a preferred version of your choice, minus the website which might be still being worked on with a tentative deadline of sometime this year.
But as to my own thoughts, I've come to the conclusion that there is no way humans can experience objective reality, exactly because we make sense of the world through stories based off our memories of things that have happened to us in the past, and decisions we make in the present to try to strive towards a future we want to have. How wild is THAT? Temporally, we live in three different places at once, because the past informs our present which puts us on certain paths so when the future becomes our present, you can't go backwards or change to a different road.
I'm definitely game to go down this rabbit hole with you! Do you have any questions about how I see it?
--
Footnotes!
* I call it a game because humans often use games as a vehicle for understanding or testing out ideas, which feels more accurate than "exercise" because I only do it for things that really interest me.
This article and the discussion around it has exhausted me! It’s so much easier for me to get my intended meanings into words when they’re cloaked in fiction. :)
I feel you! But I love that you're making this space and tackling the discussion with 100% Johnny energy.
Now I'm wondering if you'll get a story seed from this where we get to follow a protagonist who grapples with stories that change reality.
Oh, that shit's already happened. :)
I am excited to find out which story this is or will be! :D
I wrote this poem years ago. I think it is on point to your post:
Scientific Method on I-90
Along the road ahead there were foxes
or coyotes, we couldn’t tell which,
but we thought they were foxes.
They sat beside the shoulder,
alert, heads tilted,
bright-eyed.
When we reached them (to see
once and for all whether
they were foxes
or coyotes) they turned
into fenceposts. But down the road,
clear as sunlight, sat
another fox, grinning.
All the way across Montana
there were foxes.
The data proves it: In Montana
foxes (or maybe coyotes) can turn themselves into fenceposts
at will.
Ha. Spot on!
Have to say, I SO look forward you your emails!! Never boring, and always, ALWAYS, daring...nay,...challenging, me to explore stuff that one doesn't ever think about! Not "woo-woo" at all; wish those that really SHOULD open their minds, would! There is no "one way" (my way or the highway).
Love the way your mind works! 😁
Thank you, Robin!
Very thought provoking. In our present political climate we see the world so differently from the same input.
That right there is what I hope came across, even if the science and philosophy of it was incredibly difficult to put down in words!
Keep it coming. After all, we might all be living in a hologram. See: https://www.cnet.com/science/holographic-universe-hologram-reality-big-bang-physics/
Yup, the hologram is one thing I've heard that I really like. I'm no scientist (I missed my chance at that), but I do enjoy pretending to play one on TV.
I think you are right and wrong. The reason why you are wrong is that objects or things existing are not based on colors shapes or sizes. It's like saying air does not exist because we can't see it. All object aren't made up of shapes size or colors but atoms which made up matter and matter can be solid, liquid or gas. Car is a solid matter which can have a definite shape which means it's a combination of different atoms. The reason why we perceive things differently is because of adaptation and survival . A dog can smell better because it's nose is adapted to do, a bat uses echolocation to 'see' because that is what its body does to survive and your friend that see a dog as harmful is because his brain is trying protect him from any potential harm. And we don't only use our eyes to see. Sometimes we can judge the things we see based on touch, the sound they make and what we've learnt about them. But hey everyone sees things differently.
I actually had a similar discussion with another commenter in this thread. I'm actually not arguing that things don't LITERALLY exist based on colors or whatever. What I'm saying is we tend to take raw sensory input -- whatever that input may be -- and then add a bunch of stuff to it. There's only so much that's objectively true about an apple I see five feet away from me, but if you asked me about that apple, I'd tell you all sorts of things about it that I don't actually have present-moment evidence to believe. Those "extra" things are the stories I've come to believe about apples, not facts.
To be clear, no part of this article is meant to argue for the literal non-existence of anything. I'm defining "our individual world" as the set of data we take in and then use to inform our decisions and beliefs. It's a storyteller's definition of "what's real." It's that extra stuff -- the elements of belief that form the world that each of us lives in, and is subtly different for everyone because they all learned different ways of looking at things growing up -- that varies and isn't fixed and true.
Hmm. I now see what you are trying to achieve with the article. It now clear to me. Funny I thought of something like this and read a book saying the same thing you are trying to achieve with your article. I now understand. Great concept by the way.
Thank you! It's dangerous, though, when storytellers talk philosophy outside of the protective confines of a fictional story. As you'll see if you read my comments discussion with our resident philosophy expert, my rigorous academic argument skills aren't up to par, and I don't have the background to support what ultimately are lay thoughts on philosophy rather than formal, defensible, professor-level thoughts.
Hmm I see.
This is an interesting and thought-provoking post, which makes it a shame that the argument and most if its assumptions are fundamentally wrong and probably contradictory. 😉
You deserve a better and less-flip response than that. I'll type one up shortly.
Not terribly constructive there, Demonax!
If you're commenting from a formal philosophical standpoint, I'll go ahead and surrender and admit I'm outmatched. Although I did take some philosophy in college, I'm nowhere near steeped in it. I'm writing from an experiential point of view, nowhere near making a cogent logical argument. It's mostly musing. Whatever failures I've made come at least in part from an inability to articulate something that strikes me as nearly un-articulatable.
Yeah, it's hard to be constructive in bite-sized comments. Your article isn't silly and it does a good job of articulating a certain intuition that a lot of people have.
Where I'm dubious is exactly about the character of experience. Do we really experience reality as broken up into pieces? We *can*, of course, but I'm not convinced that this is a natural and unchanging fact about how things appear to us in perception.
For example, I don't know anyone who *experiences* their visual field as photons. Even if physics shows us that's what light "really is", we still had to learn that -- it's not a fact of the appearance itself. What looks to be a given "ground floor" of perception in fact takes a *lot* of heavy-duty thinking and abstract reasoning.
Here's the extended treatment that does raise some of the more "official" questions, including that problem of what is really experienced vs. what the mind adds: https://mattpmn.substack.com/p/why-the-world-has-to-exist
Oh, you're Matt? I didn't realize. It makes sense now that I'd have two responses (a comment and a writeup) that say similar things. That's cool to know.
I haven't read your post yet, but I skimmed it and got the character of it. I DO see that you're trying to be constructive despite some disagreement over there, which I very much appreciate. I already made a note to check it out later today or tomorrow (it's going to take me some time to digest). I anticipate my response being a little like my response to your first comment: holding my hands up, saying that I surrender my formal agreement when faced with a trained opponent. I can't argue this on traditional philosophical grounds. It's just a feeling I can't shake, not unlike the feeling that got Neo looking for the Matrix.
Again, I'm not prepped to debate just yet, but my suspicion is that I've overstated the idea that "the world doesn't exist" because fiction writers like me tend to be hyperbolic. I was going for an interesting headline, not literal fact. I then tried to recharacterize the idea that "the world doesn't exist" (technically, I ASKED if it existed rather than stating it didn't, lol) in the body of the post, but the translation may have been lost.
I don't actually think the world doesn't exist (well, we'll see, but that's not the message of THIS article). This isn't solipsism or some weird existential vacuum argument. It's more that I don't feel that THE WORLD AS WE NORMALLY THINK OF IT EXISTS, but that's the key phrase: "The world as we normally think of it." The intended message was more about how much we assume without questioning. I was trying to poke holes in THE STORIES OUR BRAIN TELLS, which we usually just take to be OBJECTIVE FACTS when they aren't.
I'm looking forward to reading your post, but mostly I want to thank you for writing it either way. I joined Substack to engender intelligent discussion with interesting people, and this interaction has been the first big one. I'm just finding my feet on Substack. I appreciate anyone who comes my way, then takes the time to discuss.
Yeah same here man. This kind of exchange is fun and rewarding and nobody ever solves anything, which is all the fun of it.
If you're interested in going down the skeptical/world-is-story rabbit hole, I can point you at all kinds of stuff on that (some of it won't even be boring self-indulgent and unreadable philosophy).
You know, I think I know what’s going on here. I’m nowhere as steeped in philosophy as you are, but I did take a bunch of philosophy in college. That means I know about the phenomenon called “annoying guy who doesn’t follow the rules of philosophy.” There’s one in every class, and all the other students wish he’d go away because he does things like rebutting extreme, to-make-a-point thought experiments by saying, “Well, sure … but that would never happen!”
In this example, I am that guy. Your arguments are totally sound. Still, I can’t shake a feeling that what I’m trying to articulate has merit in ways I’m completely ill-equipped to articulate with language. I could try, but I’m sure you’d run well-researched laps around my responses. That basically means that my answer is, “Yes, but because of something, I still believe what I’m saying even though I can’t defend it, basically meaning that I’m taking myself on faith because *I* know what I mean even if I can’t explain it to you.” That’s the dumbest thing that Guy Who Doesn’t Follow the Rules of Philosophy can say, and I’d be annoyed with me for it, too. Basically, I think that my failings in the formal philosophical debate of this will come from an inability to explain myself more than anything else.
(* Said with much good humor)
😆 I taught a few of "those guys" back in grad school and I promise you're nowhere near that level.
You are on to a point which right and important IMO. Humans do bring a lot of ourselves to the reality we find. The trouble, and I believe the reason that you're finding it hard to articulate, is that the line between _what is made_ and _what is found_ is always moving. It's a literal, actual paradox, and language has a hard time with those.
I think that the angle you want is to push into *story* and meaning-making, which has a lot going for it, rather than going whole-hog on the skepticism and unreality of the world element.
Rather than seeing story and reality as opposed, I think there's a lot more mileage in going beyond the opposition. Story partly creates the world, and the world contains our stories of it.
That's probably a few layers deeper than you wanted to go to make a point about the significance of narrative, but that's what blogging and commenting is for innit?
I mean, I try to be intelligent and interesting. And entertaining, hopefully.