So there I was, sitting in the car parked outside the shop
that sells nearly everything cheaper than anywhere else, eating my meagre but
inexpensive fare, when my mind drifted to one of my favourite topics. I’ve done
it in depth on the blog before, but briefly:
It can be argued logically that there is no such thing as a
point – either on a physical surface, or in space, or in time.
Ergo, since everything we perceive as reality is made up of
zillions and zillions of points, nothing we perceive as reality actually
exists.
We counter this apparent absurdity by saying that things
must exist because we perceive them and interact with them, but maybe that’s
where we get things the wrong way round. Maybe our perceptive faculty is
somehow conditioned to generate the illusion of reality at the universal level,
and thus a loop is created beyond which we are not mentally equipped to see. It’s
at this point, for want of a better term, that we step tentatively into the
realm of laughing monks, the Buddhist concept of phenomenal reality, and the
things the quantum physicists seem to be saying.
So that’s how I spend my lunch breaks on shopping trips, in
between getting the paint, the seeds, the new 1” paintbrush, the chocolate
biscuits, the cheap-but-good Italian coffee, the cheap oats for the birds, and
the special offer beer from the shop that sells nearly everything cheaper than
anywhere else. Sad, isn’t it?
The beer, by the way, is German Krombacher Dark again, and
here’s what’s odd. It’s similar in style to London porter, but it has nothing of the
heavy taste one expects of a dark beer. The taste is light and subtle, and that’s not
very Wagnerian, is it? But then it says on the bottle that it’s ‘brewed according
to the German Purity Law of 1516.’ Well, Wagner hadn’t introduced the world to
Brunnhilde by then, so maybe that’s the reason.
2 comments:
Points confused me when i first started to 'learn' about them in math classes. Kept me up at night wondering if 'things could me infinitely small. Seemed to me as a kid they can be infinitely big, meaning larger and larger and larger things as long as there is space in the universe/mulitverse to hold them or contain them, or where they can exist. Points had me questioning whether or not there could be smaller and smaller things on and on and on down tinier and tinier and no end to how tiny something could get and still exist without disappering. I hope this makes sense. ;)
Then there was the question of what existed before every thing began to exist, like what was the space that contained space, and so on... I think these questions are what started my actual feelings of panic that i would get sometimes as a kid. My imagination would get carried away with me, and for some reason when i would try to visualize some sort of explanation or seek a way to gain even a little bit of an understanding i'd start to think about how strange it was that even i actually existed and it would all get a bit scary, for whatever reason. The unknown i guess?
Which is why you're so precious, Andrea, and why I respect you. Fellow fruitcakes are hard to come by.
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