[Acting Like Godot]

Originally Posted by Cantando

If I believe the moon is made of cheese, does it turn into cheese? If I then change my mind and decide it's made of chocolate, does it turn into chocolate?

My answer to that is in Post 125.

A few hundred years ago, most people in the Western world believed the world was flat. Did the world literally become flat as a result of that belief?

And then later, when more and more people believed it was actually round, did the world start changing shape, from being flat to being round?

These are all very good questions, and the funny thing is that I can answer them in so many good, different ways. However, you've probably heard then all before. Eg Steve might say: "All those many people with different beliefs don't really exist. They are merely just part of my consciousness. Same goes for the world."

But today I will offer you a somewhat different answer. Perhaps it will offer you some new food for thought. And the answer goes like this:

1. Reality is very rich, very complex, way beyond our capacity to grasp its richness and complexity. We only grasp reality to the extent that we are able to grasp it, and the extent that we grasp reality is merely a function of our senses and intelligence. And the very act of grasping reality (sensing it, perceiving it, understanding it, interpreting it) is the act of creating it.

2. The above point applies equally, if you were a cockroach; or a dolphin; or a bat; or an ordinary human being; or a super psychic; or an angel; or a ghost. In all seven cases, our reality would be whatever we make of it. The reality of a cockroach is no less "valid" than the reality of a human being, notwithstanding that the cockroach cannot understand what a TV set, a country or the global economy is (at least not in the way we understand these things).

3. Reality is so rich and complex that it is capable of supporting an infinite variety of interpretations of reality. This is quite easy to understand, in my inter-species illustration. Now, what about intra-species, eg among human beings alone?

4. Again, the same applies. Reality is STILL so rich and complex that it is capable of supporting an infinite variety of interpretations of reality. So for instance, some people may interpret the world to be round, and some people may interpret to be flat, and from some people's perspectives, the other people are simply wrong, or maybe everyone is right at the same time.

5. Now you can say that objectively, the world is like this or like that, and anyone who thinks differently is just wrong. But it really isn't that simple. These are the kinds of question that Nobel Prize winning physicist David Bohm tackles in his work "Wholeness and the Implicate Order"

Implicate and Explicate Order according to David Bohm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and if you try to just grasp some of the stuff that he's tackling, you'll see that standard notions of objective reality are really quite shaky.

Or you could watch this video - I think that it's in this particular video where he discusses whether a round object is really round. (He wasn't discussing the planet, but close enough),

YouTube - David Bohm on perception

Just to tell you a little more about "Wholeness and the Implicate Order". Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia about this work:

In proposing this new notion of order, Bohm explicitly challenged a number of tenets that are fundamental to much scientific work. The tenets challenged by Bohm include:


That phenomena are reducible to fundamental particles and laws describing the behaviour of particles, or more generally to any static (i.e. unchanging) entities, whether separate events in space-time, quantum states, or static entities of some other nature.

Related to (1), that human knowledge is most fundamentally concerned with mathematical prediction of statistical aggregates of particles.

That an analysis or description of any aspect of reality (e.g. quantum theory, the speed of light) can be unlimited in its domain of relevance.

That the Cartesian coordinate system, or its extension to a curvilinear system, is the deepest conception of underlying order as a basis for analysis and description of the world.

That there is ultimately a sustainable distinction between reality and thought, and that there is a corresponding distinction between the observer and observed in an experiment or any other situation (other than a distinction between relatively separate entities valid in the sense of explicate order).

That it is, in principle, possible to formulate a final notion concerning the nature of reality; e.g. a Theory of Everything.