Definitely thinking too much
I got home last night to see my family watching the 1998 Jim Carrey film “The Truman Show”. The movie is about a man (Truman) who is adopted as an infant and spends his whole life in a manufactured environment. He is filmed on live, unedited television 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. He lives his entire life not knowing that he is being filmed for the whole world to see. I was fortunate enough to walk in to hear what is, in my opinion, the most important line in the whole film. Christof, the director of the fictional show, explains why Truman lives in this world (mostly) without question. “We accept the reality with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.”
Naturally, this spurred alot of existential thoughts. How much of what we perceive as real is manufactured? How much is defined and absolute? Is everything subject to be twisted by our perception? There is little kids’ game where they try and pass a phrase by whispering it to each other to see how distorted it gets. Are all ‘truths’ open to interpretation like that? Instead of just sitting there thinking, I went out looking for other things to compare to this. I found an article from my past English class written by Jean Baudrillard (I’ve included it on my widget if anyone wants to read it) . In “Disneyland”, (Baudrillards article) Baudrillard mentions how things are falsely represented by our ideologies in order to hide the more unpleasant reality from ourselves. He talks about the ‘real’ is no longer real because it is hidden “a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is society in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral.” Baudrillard opens the train of thought that we hide and reveal things in our mind and the world to create a ‘reality’ that is easier to handle, or simply more believable.
The immensely popular movie “The Matrix” opens the concept that reality is manufactured for us. In the film it is done by a ‘race’ of machines, but those machines could be replaced by almost anything and the concept would still work. You could say God shapes our reality, or Allah, or any other deity religion has named for us. This is a more frightening concept to me. Likely because I’m uncomfortable with the idea of having no control over the various aspects of my life. In “The Matrix” a ‘perfect’ reality is built for people to live in. They are left with no knowledge of the real world, and (for the most part) can’t tell the difference.
I’m left wondering about all the ins and outs of reality. The most frustrating thing being that there are so many theories in existence that are just that, theories. If any one of them could be proved irrefutably true, it would be the most widely accepted theory and, in actuality, no longer be a theory.
I may blabber about this topic some more in the future, but for now, TTFN. Tata for now
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Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors —the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
-Ayn Rand
Ben,
How wonderful! Ayn Rand has visted your weblog. All is well with the internet. I have a theory that Rand’s books, like “Atlas Shrugged,” are “gateway books.” Like gateway drugs, gateway books turn you on to thinking. Fortunately, Rand’s version of philosophy (if you can even call it that) tends to lead one in more interesting (“harder”) directions.
-Andrew