The Desire to Understand Reality.

As long as I can remember, there was reality all around me. In my bedroom, outside of it, up in the sky, under the tree in the shade. The whole world is teeming with reality. Some (looking at you, Guatama) might even say burning with it. What is reality? Why is reality? These are common questions that some people go to Chinese restaurants to answer (by reading their fortune cookie).

There are several important requirements to meet to understand reality. The first is to catch reality. Nets won’t work: they’re made out of reality! Traps? What are you going to bait the trap with? More reality? So to catch reality we need some trap that isn’t itself real. For that we turn to imagination.

Imagination is the greatest weapon ever invented. It isn’t entirely real, but it’s also not completely artificial. It represents an interface. It is where the possible and the real and several other non-real things like the impossible, the past, the future, and oblivion can congress. After drink-orders and arguing about seating arrangements, your own imagination may decide to get on with it, grab hold of reality, and show it to you.

It’s huge and tiny. It’s completely dark and full of the most wonderful shades of all hues, so you kind of have to squint and peek through the cracks between your fingers when you look at it. But there it is. You have it at your disposal, for interrogation. Don’t rush. No sudden moves.

Once you get a hold of reality, the second piece needed to understand it is a translator. Reality speaks its own language. It doesn’t have one tongue, you understand. It has a very large number of tongues and no tongues at all. It is the product of many waves that interfere with one another all the time. It hums. So you probably need some Fourier transform and a lot of other maths. Easier to hire a translator than try to figure out all that sampling window and squiggly curves business. Imagination is the best translator ever invented.

Now that you both have reality ready to be questioned and a way to understand its answers, you are ready for the third step: split yourself into an infinite number of copies of yourself and ask every possible question at once. Reality is quantum, so you cannot simply ask one question and get one answer. You will get one answer, but the different questions make the answer’s meaning change, so you must ask every question.

The trouble is that getting the answer back out from imagination into your regular brain warps it back into reality. You cannot hold it, it slips back into the cracks in the road and seeps back into the earth. There is only one solution. You must each day return into your imagination, and put reality back under the lamp to ask it all the questions anew.