Pseudo-reality bites

Stop for a moment and take a look around at your surroundings. What do you see?

It doesn't matter. It's not real.

Okay, that's not quite true. It is real. It's just not really real. Let me attempt to explain.

As some of you may recall, I'm (still) reading Bryan Magee's "Confessions of a Philosopher" and in today's small segment the subject under discussion was reality and what we mean when we say 'reality'. Think of a scene, any scene, say the one in front of you now. Think of all the ways there are to portray it; e.g. a drawing, a photograph, a painting in oil, a painting in watercolour. Nobody would argue that these are anything but representations of the scene, not the scene itself. These are all, if you will, different textures of the same thing.

Now here's the key thing: the same logic can also be extended to cover all the sensory data your brain receives. It's another texture-layer we lay on top of reality which enables us to interact with it; the chair you see in front of you is in no way the real chair any more than is the photograph of the chair that you can hold in your hand. It's just another level removed, perceptually, from the (for want of a better term) chairness of the chair itself.

That's not to say that we create our own reality and that nothing is real. It just means that we can never see reality as it really is. In fact, I'm not even sure that is a meaningful statement.

I'd welcome your thoughts.

Really.