« "Reality" is Just a Fetish »
Sunday, July 24, 2011 As I see it, it is impossible to build a worldview or a cosmology without at least one reification, without at least one empirically-unverifiable construct. What is this magic-variable for you? What is this miracle-keystone that holds the arc of your mind? For some it's a concept of "god." For some, it's a concept of "fact" or "objective truth." For me, it's the word "reality" [in the connotation of Dao]. But whatever this mystery-word is for you, it is a variable of divinity - whether you are formally a believer or not.
How come? Well, believer or not, to believe in an unverifiable principle, is... to believe. Each mind - in sum, - has its own religion (whether you are the Pope or Sam Harris). Now, when I say "its own religion" I don't mean "its own school of spirituality." I mean a "system of beliefs" (or, if it feels more comfortable for you, a system of assumptions or opinions). So, I am not talking about religious beliefs here. I am talking about the inevitably religiosity of subjectivity. Each human mind - epistemologically - is its own church, its own dogma, its own province of subjectivity, its own thought-school, i.e. its own source of unverifiable truth.
Understand: subjectivity is when you believe that such-and-such is such-and-such but you don't actually know. Just because I don't believe in "god," it doesn't mean I don't believe in "reality." What I believe in is ultimately irrelevant. What is relevant - to the point of this writing - is that we cannot not believe. Truth - if it exists - is fundamentally outside the epistemological event-horizon.
"Reality" is just a fetish. I'll leave it up to you to discern the meaning of these quotation marks.