The invisible background of reality

Early morning. I am sitting in the front window of a fashionable café. In front of me there’s an empty espresso cup and a copy of The Decline of the West. I look out the window at a sky full of huge snowflakes and consider the illusion of reality, and the real objective reality we are blind to -the one that lies, theoretically at least, beyond physical form and time.

Time itself, like the colors of the rainbow and the sound of rain, only exists in the human mind. The sense of minutes and hours flowing, the notion of one event coming before or after another, even the idea of individual events in the first place, all belong to the mind, and not to any objective reality. We can theorize an objective reality of energy and mathematics, but we can’t experience it directly.

So let’s theorize now.

Let’s say I have just tossed a brick through a window and the shattered glass went everywhere. You will tend to say that the window was broken because I threw the brick into it. But from a perspective that’s one step more objective, it is equally true that I was caused to throw the brick because the window broke.

I say this because in a determined universe every event and transaction of forces interlocks with every other like a huge long string of mathematical equations, each one implying the next ad infinitum. Everything causes everything, precisely.

But as I have said, the very notion of anything causing anything is a fallacy because everything causes everything. We can now go a step further and say that the airborne brick causes the window to break no more than the broken window causes the brick to be thrown. They cause each other. Or else nothing causes or is caused by anything. Now here is a weird and eerie aspect of reality if I have ever seen one. The real question here is: what, if anything, causes the both of them in their simultaneity. Here we scrape the bottom of what reasoning can apprehend. Here is the base of reality and it’s weirdly invisible structure.

We have here a universe of effects all causing one another, with no visible prime mover. When we look for causes we enter an infinite regress, like standing between two mirrors and seeing the tunnel of reflections.

Hmmm. Best not to think too hard about this. It could drive you to insanity –maybe even Christianity.

City O’ City, Denver
12/08/09