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August 08, 2006
Reality is optional
You're no better than blind if you can't trust your sense of sight. So what are you when you can't trust your sense of information? Presumably a medical term exists for one deprived of all sources of sensory input (including the lesser known senses such as echo-location, gyroscopic spatiality, and so on). To a "normal" person, our sense deprived subject would be but an organic food processor which, lacking support, would soon meet its timely demise. To the subject, well, he'd have some fun crawling around within his brain for a while, and that'd be that. Far too many sub-par philosophy texts start in much the same way. They often involve such constructs as the "evil-genius." Let's not go there. Digressions we shall have. Points we shall aspire to. Achievements we shall most likely lack. And by "we" I mean "fardels." We are moving informational. We are moving digital. And by "we" I mean "we." At some point in the surprisingly non-distant future, everything will be virtual. Now, facts and data have always been in the hands of the bean counter. Or the journalist. Let's rephrase. Facts are in the hands of the fabricator. A funny thing has begun to happen to facts in the past few years. They've been falsified at far greater rates, yet they've also been clarified at far greater rates. Think of it as an increase in the overall level of factual churn. The consequences have not been in line with what either the fact finders or the fact checkers would have presupposed. The consequence has been that everyone gets their own set of facts to pick and choose from. Reality has become a moldable construct open and available to the preferential assembly by each and every consumer. In a sense, it's the ultimate accomplishment of individualized customer service. It's also the ultimate in self-deception, but then, most people are already past masters of that art anyway. Where do we wind up in the future? Where do we go from here? There's lots of answers, all of them optional. One word of advice: beware of anyone who offers to sell you the truth. Coincidentally, beware of anyone who offers you the truth for free. Man cannot live on macadamia nuts alone. Seriously. You can trust me on this one. I've tried. Or to put it differently: life is not Wikipedia. But reality is. "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." posted by Cosmic Drunk on 08.08.06 at 09:42 PM |
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