"Lead me from the unreal to the real !
Lead me from darkness to light !
Lead me from death to immortality !"Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad, c. 800-400 BCE, 1.3.28
"In the East, look deep into your Self and discover Nature,
In the West, look deep into Nature and discover your Self."Anon.
We take a look here at an aspect of life that most people ignore, the structure of what is unreal. Our assumptions that we live in what we call reality are questioned and we reposition ourselves, using complexity thinking, into a new form of living, a world so much deeper and richer than normality as to be Godlike. Tomorrow's world.
When we look out of a window what do we see ? Is this reality or not ? Imagine looking out through the eyes of a spider, what reality is visible now ? An infra-red camera view is again different. This reality thing is a tricky concept, are all these views real, and if not what could reality actually mean ?
Bishop Berkeley, and other anti-realists, took the view that reality only existed when someone looked at it, but if we turn away does a tree then still exist ? To solve this problem we need a universal looker, someone always observing, someone (in the Zen style) "listening to the sound of one hand clapping in an empty forest", that 'person' being of course God. Being omniscient means that all possible views are contained in that world view, whilst we rather limited beings can only sample them through our puny senses, we are thus no better than the spider. But if we call what we see reality, then what we can't see must be unreality, and thus the real 'real' world, what is actually out there, must be largely unreal !
If we can't look at this unreal world then we must find other ways of detecting it, we must unlook it. Rather than tying metaphysical knots however, let us branch out in another direction, one that has rather more in common with complexity theory. The unreal is really another word for the possible, the future real, since with every advance in technology we see more in our reality than we did before, we advance into the world of God.
But even God can't see what is not yet present, what has not come into existence. He, she or it could, in theory, imagine all the possibilities, all the vast combinations of parts that could occur. We may even allow that God could determine which of these options comes to fruition. Such divine power is however resident in us also. Leaving aside the common views that we are part of God or made in the image of God, we shall merely say that our powers of abstraction coupled with our powers of planning give us the ability to imagine the unreal and then to construct or invent it. We play God daily...
Given our ability to imagine the impossible, it should prove pretty easy to imagine the merely possible, those options that already can exist within the limits of our current understanding. Yet this seems not to be the case. Most people seem to have imaginations that operate in the same manner as railway lines, if the scenery is mostly the same as a mile back it can be imagined, if not it appears quite beyond comprehension, unthinkable. Their views are canalized, restricted to well worn directions and concepts.
The contrast between this common state of mind and that of the genius, the creative innovator, is large and may relate to the position on the continuum between order and chaos they each inhabit. If the person has stabilised in a state more ordered than at the edge of chaos, then their options, their attractor basins, will be fewer and larger (more stable) than those at EOC. Such people could be described as static people. If however they are over in the other extreme they will 'suffer' many smaller attractors, less stable states, poor attention to reality and all the strange states we associate with madmen (and genius !). These we can call chaotic people. It is in the balance between these states that innovation seems to lie, people not stable enough to be boring but still operating sufficiently in the 'real world' to apply their new ideas. We can call these the dynamic people.
Most of human history has been characterised by sub-cultures that have used strange drugs to go beyond their culture's reality into alternative states of unreality, to transcend their normal state. This movement along the continuum involves a shift to a more chaotic state, a lowering of the thresholds between neurons, an increase in connectivity and chaos. The most common of these drugs is alcohol, and we see the reductions of inhibitions, the lowering of cultural barriers, associated with its use in all cultures, together with attempts to ban or restrict usage (and that of more powerful alternatives) in cultures that fear such freedoms.
Yet these sort of substances also have side effects, by interfering with the natural operation of the brain we can cause irreversible shifts in function, even fatalities (as in the misuse of drugs like ecstasy). A better way to move ourselves naturally towards creativity and freedom is by knowledge and experience. Each new experience adds connectivity to our brain, each time we contemplate the barriers within us we lower their effectiveness. Over time we can re-engineer our brain states to conform to a better, richer, view of unreality but we need to be aware also that often society is trying to brainwash us in the other direction, towards larger barriers, restricted information and less flexible prejudiced behaviour...
Given that we have developed a wish to see the unreal, then let us start with what is already there, the world in a grain of sand. Sand may appear one of the most boring of substances, after all every grain seems the same as the last, but it does have several characteristics of interest to complexity thinkers. Firstly it is the basis of the sand pile, one of the first practical demonstrations of self-organization in action. Once a pile reaches a critical state avalanches will occur. The size distribution of these show the power law behaviour that is common to self-organizing systems everywhere - but we are getting ahead of ourselves here.
Sand is also silicon, and this is the substance by which we make computer chips. Computer chips are the finest example of static unreality. Designed often by other computers their layout and complexity is not known to any human in detail, only their functionality is real to a human view. This concept of knowing function but not knowing operation applies to much of nature. Our ignorance about cells, organs, organisms, personality and society is vast. All these plainly existing objects are real in one sense but not in another, we see only a single-dimensional slice through their unreality, just one aspect of their being, which we then label as our reality.
If we now add in the concept of time, and allow our world to evolve, another set of patterns appears, that of changes. These are crucial to the unreal and represent the difference between the potential and the actual. Any organism, and let us take ourselves as an example, has at any one time many options. These are our potential unrealities, often depicted in complexity studies by a fitness landscape, wherein our current position (a mere dot, our grain of sand) encapsulates the whole of our universe, the entirety of static reality (and by implication static unreality also). The adjacent positions are alternative future realities, those choices available to us as we flow through the river of life.
The ability to see all these adjacent states distinguishes the creative person from the merely average. We must recall however that, despite the simplifications of theorists, our fitness landscape is not a Boolean hypercube, we are not restricted to one-dimensional steps within a static landscape. We are multidimensional creatures operating in a multidimensional co-evolutionary universe. Given such a virtual landscape we could be forgiven for thinking that evaluation is impossible, for how can we possibly see the 'correct' choice when we don't know how our actions will affect others and thus how our own landscape will change by tomorrow (we can't even see properly how it looks today !) ?
We must give up any idea that we can calculate the fitnesses of the options around us, in other words that we can plan intellectually what will or will not occur. Life is too rich and has too many options for that, our attempts to plan involve only the artificial simplification of multiple options down to one dimension. We see this everywhere around us, the obsession of some with money, regardless of any other consideration, of others with 'animal rights' regardless of those of humans, of the short-sighted selfishness that cuts off the nose to spite the face, the hypocrisy and self-delusion.
Small mindedness is the opposite of complexity thinking, but if we cannot effectively plan in one-dimension then how do we handle the many ? Here we need to adopt a more relaxed attitude to life. If we are overloaded by stimulations we cannot adopt any subtlety, we over-react, trying always to solve each problem instantly so as to be ready for the one that will be along in a minute. But these 'solutions' actually cause the next problem ! By perturbing our world in such coarse ways we cause ripples that adversely affect those around us, their reactions (with the same coarseness as ours) then adversely affect us in return - generating the next problem ! The karma of our actions returns to haunt us...
Before we act we should consider what is the least reaction we can make to whatever has provoked the action. In many cases this will be to do nothing. Nothing is, in new thinking, a powerful action. It is not, in any sense, a failure to act (as is often thought in small minded philosophies, where the bigger the response, however disastrous, the more powerful the actor is regarded !). But it is the action least likely to have adverse consequences. In some sense this relates to the Christian concept of 'turn the other cheek' but in fact derives originally from Taoist thinking.
This is not always possible of course, some situations do need to be corrected and not just left, but we can usually steer a course to a solution without crashing through the nearest wall. Subtlety is all here, achieving a gradual progression through the options, the patterns around us, by being sensitive to all the dimensions involved. This is best done by intuition, our natural parallel processing mode, and not by using intellect, which we should reserve for less time critical decisions, for planning in a more socially effective and forward thinking way
The unreal is as real as anything we trip over. Asking if the sun will rise tomorrow is a question in unreality, in possibility, in probability. The answer does not yet form part of static reality (the actual). Most of our lives we make assumptions about the real world, we replace it by a mental fabrication, an idealisation based on what we remember, what we assume will happen. We live in unreality, not reality, and each of us has their own version. If this matches that of another person it will be a considerable coincidence, our fitness landscapes are different, our experiences are different, our aspirations are different.
Seeing common patterns in the world is hard, seeing the world through the eyes of others is harder still, but the hardest thing of all is to see the extent of the effects of our actions on others. Only by doing this (imperfectly as we must) can we be sure that our decisions are not making things worst for ourselves overall. Patterns of unreality are all around us, they are the paths available through life, the new discoveries that can be made, the alternative routes to any goal. Choosing the right pattern, the right way to achieve, separates enlightened behaviour from the more primitive animal kind.