Imagine that we are watching this amazing play. Then you study it too long and you realize that behind the curtains it's all gears and animatronics, which is depressing. It's all contrived and trivial, you say. Engineered, conditional, material. Love is chemicals, you say, it isn't real, it isn't spiritual or fated or anything bigger than ourselves.
But then you see: the gears are a play in and of itself. The beauty! The complexity! Accept yourself small and you see the bigness in all things.
You take this further. You realize that both these perspectives, the appearances of the play, the appearances of the gears and automata in your mind -- are, well, appearances we constructed in your mind. Love is fate, love is statistical, love is biological and mechanical and spiritual. Love is unconditional and conditional all at the same time.
What is this "objective" "reality" we construct in our minds? This idea of things existing, of molecules and stuff? It's just another convenient way of seeing things, like gears and automata. If you look at the stage like a play, then the play exists, for you. If you look at the stage like a bunch of gears, then it's a bunch of gears -- but good luck getting anything profound from that interpretation. The beautiful thing is that the world is complex enough that reductionism can never work too well, leaving us room to imagine. The very mathematics we use to compress the universe show us the beautiful conundrum at every turn: inexhaustibility (Godel) in logic, entropy in thermodynamics, chaos in dynamical systems, emergent phenomena in complexity theory.
I've realized this more and more. Happiness, fulfillment are more about your ruler than it is about how big your slice of pie is. I know it's trite. Not too long ago I would balk and cringe: temper my expectations? -- disgusting! But I find it's less about tempering than it is about the gratitude that comes naturally when you truly, truly come to peace with the circumstances before you. You just have to ask yourself: is it worth being driven to "success" by anxiety and fears? Or would you rather be driven by a genuine will to change things -- curiosity, motivation, future-facing energies which come only when you've accepted the present? We should remember that accepting reality does not preclude you from changing it.
Map and Territory
I revisit this concept of subjectivity over and over again from different lenses and analogies. Here: how do we communicate with someone who speaks an entirely different language than us? How does a person of science speak to a witch doctor who literally "sees" danger in the form of demons -- but it turns out to actually work? Granting that we haven't yet entirely reduced their system into neuroscientific minutiae, how do both realities coexist? But you'd only pose this problem if you're an objectivist.
Another few analogies while we're at it:
- There's map and there's territory. But all we have are maps. Is there really a territory, or are we conceptualizing that, creating a map of mapping itself? Does it even matter? Who does it matter to?
- There's a manifold, and there's a smooth atlas on it. Need the manifold exist, then, if the atlas is smooth and our coordinate charts agree? If the witch doctor and the scientist have a transition map, we're all good!
A story
In the old days our parents spoke many different languages and thought many different things. But in the pursuit of "development" they indexed on a single transition map, a shared bridge between their many different worlds. But this "bridge" crept into their daily lives, expanded its territory. What they once had their own words for, they spoke the new terms. And soon what was once intended to be a protocol for translation became large enough to be its own reality, and our children were born into it -- speaking only of logic and engineering but losing the individual magics carried within their parents' minds. We no longer see fairies, only misfiring neurons.
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