Results tagged “reality”

I’m a pretty avid reader. I’m a terribly slow reader, but I still manage to read between 5 and 10 pages from a novel each night before going to sleep. I usually read another 5 to 10 pages out loud to Terri before going to sleep. I also read lots of news, blogs, tech articles, articles from various evangelicals, fundamentalists, and reformed writers. According to my Google Reader statistics, I’ve blown through about 2,400 headlines in the past 30 days with 63 of them listed as “Shared” which is a pretty good indication of how many of those entries I’ve read carefully, so about 2 a day. I read at least one chapter out of the Bible to Gabe every night, usually one or two picture books to him before bed, and I’m usually studying or searching scripture for something two or three times a day. And I haven’t even covered the amount of reading I do for work with wiki pages, articles shared by coworkers, documentation needed to solve problems, new policies, important email, etc. Reading is pretty important to me.

I really love reading novels, though. I usually wish I could read way more than 10 or 20 pages a night. However, I have one major problem with novels and fiction in general. Movies and TV shows and plays and poetry and whatever else you might mention in the category of “fiction” all have this problem. The problem with fiction is that it’s fictional. Profound, eh? Let’s just talk about novels, though, knowing that the word “novel” could be replaced with any of these other forms of fiction.

What I mean by “fiction has a problem with being fictional” is this: the world in your fiction doesn’t have to have anything to do with the real world. Given that I’m often reading science fiction, it’s really not supposed to. That said, fiction (and science fiction in particular) is almost always a work of exploration in the realm of morals, values, and human nature. What would the human condition be like if dinosaurs walked the earth? What would happen if aliens destroyed the planet? What would happen if people could perform magic? What would be the implication if we developed a truly thinking artificial intelligence? Many books have tackled these questions in various ways. At some point, for these books to be interesting, they must intersect non-fictional reality.

And therein is the problem. It is easy in fiction to present a version of humanity that does not exist. For example, imagine reading a book where a benevolent corporation rules humanity. The company is driven to generate wealth for the upper management, yet it serves all the people, no one is hungry, or sick, or unhappy. Unless there’s some extra reason I should believe this would happen or something dark and sinister lying underneath it, why would you believe that would possible? Why should you? That scenario might make good satire or a setting for some dark dystopia or horror story, but is not believable as a setting for much else.

Similarly, when Star Trek presents a world where mankind has moved past the sins of history: wars and famines and poverty and greed and all that; one must wonder which humanity Gene Roddenberry was talking about. Homo superior sounds about as believable to me as the last scenario involving the corporate oligarchy. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land or even Starship Troopers (not the movie, which barely has any similarity with the book) are similarly unbelievable in his rendering of successful communistic and militaristic libertarian societies, respectively.

I’m also a fan of Orson Scott Card, but the idea that humanity would unite so well under a common cause in Ender’s Game or that a human-built computer would really be successful as the conscience that prevents humanity from destroying itself in nuclear holocaust in the Homecoming series stretches credibility with me. Humanity has not, since the fall of the Tower of Babel, ever united in that way. Having built enough computer programs, the idea of making one capable of being a god that wouldn’t be an epic FAIL within in 6 months of being on it’s own is pretty hilarious.

All of these stories have taken a simplistic view of a system that is basically impossible to understand in a few hundred pages of text. If we were to really consider the full complexity of common systems like how all the people within a cultural area interact and how two cultures near each other meld together into a greater culture (folks in Manhattan, versus folks in Lawrence and Manhattan both being in Kansans, for example), you find a system that is fundamentally beyond human comprehension. No brain is big enough to comprehend enough of the facts involved simultaneously to understand why people work together the way they do. We can only generalize in the most vague of terms. Only great hubris allows a person to say he truly understands basic reality in any meaningful way. It’s not so much that there is no objective truth, but that without simplifying things down, we couldn’t understand even a small segment of objective truth.

Going back to the stories: these are stories that I found entertaining, interesting, and even thought-provoking. Yet, each of them failed to hold true to humanity in some important way. I won’t say I could do better because I know I couldn’t or at least I know I couldn’t on my better days. If I ever write a book, I’ll have to be sure to include in the preface, “I’m going to start by saying, I got this wrong. Humans don’t really work together this way, but they do in my head, mostly. I hate all the flaws in this book, but you have to stop editing the story sooner or later and may this be yet another monument demonstrating that human endeavors are imperfect and incomplete.”

Cheers.

An old friend of mine recently blogged on the complexities of understanding life on two levels. He describes life as being a fairy tale
, but that the greater reality of life is on the "real level" of physical and chemical processes. I disagree. The Truth is very simple, but reality has been corrupted during the Fall.

Why does the story of life have to be separate from the mundane processes and physicality that provides the foundation for the story? The primary reason I can think of for this to be necessary is that we perceive things in such general and abstract terms despite the seemingly deterministic nature of the universe. However, just because that's how we normally think, doesn't mean those are any less reality than any other generalization we make. You can say something like "most fatal accidents happen within a mile of your home" and yet the details of whether you ever have or know someone who has a fatal accident are the details that make that statistic what it is. The point of view differs, but they are both facets of the same reality.

The same goes for our perception of reality. Just because we have thoughts that are comprised of the electrical currents and chemical synapses of the brain doesn't mean that these are separate concepts. They're just different perspectives of the same realities.

On the other hand, I do agree with the idea that life is a story. As C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien understood, each person's life is just one detail of the Great Story. The Great Story is the abstract, big-picture point of view, while each individual chapter in each individual person's life, in the events of the natural universe, and in the details of the quantum dynamics of each particle make up the "mundane" elements of this Story. The Great Story is being told by the Living God who exists on the outside as the Story Teller and each of us serve as characters in this Story.

However, we each have the ability to shape our part of our story by making choices as they are presented to us. Will we be villains? Or heroes? Or just act in supporting roles for good or ill? Sometimes our roles seem to be chosen for us. Sometimes it seems we have too many choices to make. However, regardless of how we play our part, God weaves us into the Great Story and will declare The End once the story achieves the perfection He knew it would become.

Cheers.