TO BE AND NOT TO BE...( Selena Reflects On The Nature Of Being While Doing Aerobics And Wearing A Leotard)

“Reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere
else. You are deluding yourself believing that the nature of reality is
self-evident. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we
often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that
the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you
suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be
near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians
are unequal to that?”

Thus O’Brian, the Party Indoctrinator in George Orwell’s 1984.

To him there is but one crime: the Truth. He believes that one can
prove almost anything from an astute deployment of scientific principles. He
states his case with the dispassionate simplicity of the true professional,
arguing with perfect accuracy that ‘Reality is not external.’ Of course, if one
took the simple view of things, and interpreted observations in terms of basic
principles, then the sum of the three angles of a triangle is always 180
degrees. No single fact is more clearly established. If, however, we pass from
Euclidean geometry into either Riemannian or hyperbolic space, we find that the
angles, by a kind of conceptual unreason, will each amount to more - or less -
than 180 degrees. By a somewhat similar ‘anomaly’, the geometry of the
three-dimensional universe, taken literally, may be flat and Euclidean, or in
terms of Einstein’s four-dimensional geometrical arrangement, be either bounded
or unbounded. But because we have no experience directly relevant to a
four-dimensional continuum, the conventional distinction between time and space cannot be literally taken out of one frame of reference and translated into another, without a formal breach of three-dimensional obligations to structure, motion and balance.

A sufficient condition for the reality of a physical quantity, it has been said, is the possibility of predicting it with certainty, without disturbing it. Without, in a word, creating events that are properly speaking contingent only. We see not the thing itself, but merely associations. Indeed, for the sake of an easy generalization it has become possible to say that describing the electron is but a description of our knowledge. Expressed in still more rarefied language, the predominant quality implied by quantum theory is that of non-locality. Due to the curious mechanism whereby the application of knowledge alters the state of matter, the wave function only indicates the relative probability of finding a particle at some particular point in space. It would seem uneconomic, therefore, not to take advantage of this and merely state that when matter is abstracted from our psychological experience, the world as perceived by the eye and the ear is a figment of the imagination.

It may well be a source of wonder, therefore, that this figment
represents a whole knowable universe, its moving parts beautifully conceived and
designed, endowed with meaning and capable, therefore, of providing purpose and
inspiration of every possible kind. This is a development such as the Classics
would have understood. Spinoza’s was an agnostic universe, of course, but men
were united with one another, and with God, by the measure of their common
experience. A sort of double indemnity between God and Nature, in which one was
a variation of the other. If the matrix itself was neutral, it was also endowed
with divine characteristics, both accommodating and detached. Hence, it is with
absolute fidelity to the same inspiration that man’s sense of his modern
identity compensates for this detachment and imposes structure on chaos and
disorder, while it is a valuable corrective to orthodox uses of the word God,
that the properties required to pass the test of divinity are not one’s own
experience and perception but, on the contrary, their requisite omission.

Dreamy