Ketan's Musings

This has been a long pending post from me. Thanks to Shilpa for lending me her book Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. This was an excellent read to boost up my spirits to a new high.

This is what set my mind rolling.

One evening the gulls that were not night-flying stood together on the sand, thinking. Jonathan took all his courage in hand and walked to the Elder Gull, who, it was said, was soon to be moving beyond this world.
         "Chiang …" he said, a little nervously.
         The old seagull looked at him kindly. "Yes, my son?" Instead of being enfeebled by age, the Elder had been empowered by it; he could outfly any gull in the Flock, and he had learned skills that the others were only gradually coming to know.
         "Chiang, this world isn’t heaven at all, is it?"
         The Elder smiled in the moonlight. "You are learning again, Jonathan Seagull, " he said.
         "Well, what happens from here? Where are we going? Is there no such place as heaven?"
         " No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect." He was silent for a moment. "You are a very fast flier, aren’t you? "
         "I … I enjoy speed," Jonathan said, taken aback but proud that the Elder had noticed.
         " You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there. "
        Without warning, Chiang vanished and appeared at the water’s edge fifty feet away, all in the flicker of an instant. Then he vanished again and stood, in the same millisecond, at Jonathan’s shoulder. " It’s kind of fun," he said.
        Jonathan was dazzled. He forgot to ask about heaven. "How do you do that? What does it feel like? How far can you go? "
        "You can go to any place and to any time that you wish to go," the Elder said. "I’ve gone everywhere and everywhen I can think of. " He looked across the sea. "It’s strange. The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go any-where, instantly. Remember, Jonathan, heaven isn’t a place or a time, because place and time are so very meaningless. Heaven is … "
        "Can you teach me to fly like that?" Jonathan Seagull trembled to conquer another unknown.
        "Of course, if you wish to learn. "
        "I wish. When can we start?"
        "We could start now, if you’d like."
        " I want to learn to fly like that," Jonathan said, and a strange light glowed in his eyes. "Tell me what to do."

        Chiang spoke slowly and watched the younger gull ever so carefully. " To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is," he said, "you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived …"
        The trick, according to Chiang, was for Jonathan to stop seeing himself as trapped inside a limited body that had a forty-two-inch wingspan and performance that could be plot-ted on a chart. The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.

Is there a virtual reality machine, into which we could be plugged, feeding us all sensory information. Could we know anything? Could we ever know that we were not being fed a ‘virtual’ reality?

If we assume that we have been fed all sensory input via a machine, then we must distrust everything we have ever experienced. We cannot know if this experience is a result of the machine or our own perceptions. Thus all empirical knowledge must be disregarded.

So what could we know? Mathematical or rational truths could surely remain true. The idea that this demon could simply cause us to believe that 2+3=5, and that this may not be the case. However, rational truths are by definition always true, independent of human perception or experience. Thus, rational truths remain true, although it can be argued by reasoning that what we consider to be rational truths are a product of our deception.

So we even doubt the rational truths we think we know. Surely all is lost? Let me construct an argument that may form the basis of modern philosophy, something that shall remain true even if all else was false:

That as we could doubt, and that doubt was a type of thought that we must be a ‘thinking being’; by using his mind we affirm the existence of our mind. I then conclude cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. This statement is self-affirming, since any attempt to doubt it simply proves it to be true.

Building from this firm foundation we can now attempt to answer the question by asking, what do we know about the nature of reality? What do we mean by reality? The concept reality means to each of us what we perceive, what we experience. Thus what we perceive must be reality as long as the concept remains the same. There can be no ‘virtual reality’ as whatever we experience is reality to us. Any virtual reality introduced to us simply becomes the new reality.

Following this idea we can also say that there is no one ‘true’ reality with which to compare any given perception of reality; as reality is simply what is experienced by the individual, and this perception may be different for each individual.

Therefore, although we cannot know if we are being deceived by a Cartesian demon, the question does not need to be answered as whatever we perceive is reality, and thus ‘virtual reality’ is an impossibility.