…Is the title of a book I have yet to read, but that I’d like to read when I finally get over the monumental beast that is Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which in turn was a follow-up from Homi K Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, which I decided to read upon being inspired by Shahril Hamdan.
The words ring out to me today though, because they are a nice reminder that reality is a process that unfolds over time – whatever the temporality of that time apart from its objective and lived out experience, it is certainly an unfolding that I experience each minute and second; each of these seconds that I experience are my own, and I cannot experience that of another within the lives of other human beings, whom I can only surmise are as cognitively and texturally rich as my own to the extent that I conclude that others are, in fact, like me.
It is interesting for me to think about this because I am now recalling a conversation with someone who is now a Rhodes Scholar (congratulations! Ok a bit weird to congratulate via blog post sry bro but it just happened that way), who talked to me about solipsism as we ate RM350 hamburgers in a hotel that we had come to only after long walking and near death from starvation – there is a long conversation to be had about that and a story that may well be lost to time except in this brief reflection – but he effectively described to me the common realization we had that in fact, it was not really possible to disconfirm the possibility that everyone outside ourselves were actually just figments of our imagination – even each other.
I suspect he remembers this conversation, but I will do myself and the both of us the needed thing of not sharing names, haha.
Anyway, it is interesting to me to think about people who may abide by solipsistic ideals who may read this post and then think to themselves:”Oh, how interesting! These figments of imagination are so creative nowadays! The universe sure is coming up with some unique theater for me in this weird life game! Haha! Haha! HAHAHAHAHA!”
…Which gives you a small picture of how I think about people who hold this frame of reference.
Anyway, that was a nice little aside that completely sidesteps the reflection I was having earlier, which yields in its completion the following realization:
I (we) experience reality as a process unfolding – directing, being directed, images, reality, predicting, being predicted, with multiple knobs and timelines and impacts of causal shock in a dynamically propagating system whose initial conditions often have very little to do with the final results, but whose possibilities over which determine the entire lodespan of our observable qualia as we progress through time.
It has taken everything I have to resist using the word “diachronic” or to start going into terminologies that are useful only for telling myself I am very bright and I like understanding the deeper things, though, and I observe this to make a simple comment: It is easy to privilege yourself, to treat yourself as unique, special, a fragment of the Imperial cauldron, the Universe consciousness, a snowflake melting in cosmic rays and thus dying by cosmic significance.
Anyway, it is not really the purpose of this blog post to unpack all of reality – whether that is possible I don’t even know, but it will certainly not be done by someone who is here throwing out shower thoughts before going to the gym.
More soon.
Ciao.
