OK, moving on.
the next step is to connect.
One of the Greek’s questions was, what is reality? You have two ways (so far) to approach
this question. One way is the Platonic way, which is to say, there is an objective universe.
This way is shorten by the saying, God is the measure of all things. There is an objective universe
that exists regardless of whether it is recognized by humans or not. The other way is the subjective
universe which says, man is the measure of all things. Humans give context to the universe.
Let us take a rather famous event. Newton and his apple. He sees the apple fall, thus suggesting
the idea of gravity. Now gravity is a major, if not the major force in the universe and we can see its
effects all the time, thus suggesting it is objective, but not so fast sports fans.
Let us rethink the apple idea.
We are sitting there and the apple falls. So this show us gravity exists? Uh, NO.
It is simply an apple falling without context until we link up the idea of the apple falling
with the other effects of gravity, the planets revolving around the sun and the like.
In other words, without some context or some explanation of the apple falling, gravity
is just a random event. The falling apple for a dog is just an apple falling.
it has no other significance. It says nothing about gravity because the apple has no context
beyond falling. It takes a human putting the falling apple into context that creates the idea
of gravity. Thus man is the measure of all things because it takes humans to create context
for such things as apples falling and gravity.
so what is reality? It takes humans putting events into context that creates reality.
I see a chair, a TV, a fan, my wife, a stove. There is no reality here until I put these things
into context. My wife is making breakfast, getting ready to leave for work while watching those
hideous early morning shows like “Good morning brain dead Americans”.
Now this ability we have to create context in our environment.
Around this point lies a whole lot of philosophy. Kant’s and Plato for example
for example laid waste to a lot of ink trying to explain how we create context by
their idea of categories. We have internal categories which help us create context in the
universe. So how do we have internal categories? The bottom line for both Kant and Plato
was in so many words, GOD, he created the categories in our head that creates context.
it is just as easy and without all the mess to imagine the categories being an evolutionary
carryover. Babies have three instinctive fears, of snakes, of the dark and of falling. those
three fears are a product of millions of years of evolution. the creation of categories needed
to create context in the universe is also the product of millions of years of evolution. And what
of something like the soul? The soul is simply in some combination therein, of evolution (heredity) / chemical
processes and environment. The soul exists like some sort of event like the falling apple until it is
placed into some sort of context.
So what is reality? we create reality by creating context of events in time and space.
Kropotkin