Calculators, protractors and slide rules

Reality? Is it real and if it is, what is it? Discuss. (No calculators, but protractors and slide rules may be used. Do not write on both sides of the paper at once.) And thanks to Sellars and Yeatman for that. If you haven't read '1066 and all that', do! It tells you everything you will ever need to know about the Brits!

Now this is one of those questions that always comes up after half a dozen beers on a Friday night. Do I exist? Do you exist? And if we do, how do we prove it etc etc? Usually after another half a dozen beers everyone concludes: "Does it matter? And whose round is it anyway?" Then everyone slides gracelessly under the table. End of discussion.


It is a question that has occupied idle philosophers for centuries. From Plato and the shadows on the wall through Descartes and 'cogito ergo sum' (the Latin roughly translates as 'I'm pink therefore I'm Spam'. Or is it 'I'm pink therefore iPod'? Or 'I'm Pink therefore I sing (badly)'? Well it's one of those, it probably doesn't matter which), Leibnitz and his monads, the phenomenologists. Existence and the proof of it seems to be one of the roots of human speculation.

A small digression. Descartes, in the 'Discours sur la methode' did manage to argue from first principles and prove in a logical and consistent manner the existence of Big Macs, iPod nanos, neo-Conservative politics, capitalism, Taco Bell, sliced white bread and Bill Gates. Alright, I made the last one up. Bill Gates does not exist. He is merely a Jungian manifestation of the collective screams of Windoze Pizza users as Pizza crashes for the umpteenth time and destroys your hard won collection of jpegs of Russian porno starlets! Steve Ballmer does however keep a cardboard cut out of a realisation of that manifestation in his office to frighten visitors (made by Willem de Kooning in 1989). End of digression.



So existence and its proof. What's the big deal? Why should it matter whether you can prove the existence of an objective reality that is somehow seperate and distinct from you? A reality that doesn't depend on you and what you think? A reality that would be there even if you were not? But it quite clearly does matter to you as a species, otherwise you wouldn't spend so much time fretting over it in long, boring philosophical treatises (and endless discussions in bars), would you?

You see for a penguin, wondering whether the seal half a metre from your tail has any objective reality doesn't come into the equation. If you, once, decide that maybe it isn't really real because you cannot 'prove' its existence in a logically consistent manner then you, my dear friend, are DEAD! If once you decide that there is no antarctic winter because you cannot prove in a logically consistent manner that the wind really is blowing at 270kph and it isn't just 'inside your head' and you wander off for 'walkabout' then you are, as I have said, DEAD!

Now I am quite happy to concede that ultimately knowledge of the world is rooted in your perception, ie it IS inside your head. That all of the things you experience are simply that. Random, non random firings of neurons in your brain. The world does exist, for you, for me, only inside your head. Someone else's view may be of a different world, but it's a world nonetheless. But can you, or any of us, afford the luxury of a wager? In truth, it matters not a jot whether I exist, or you exist, in any real way. All that matters is that pragmatically you must exist as must I. Thinking in any other way leads only to non-survival. Only by 'believing' that there is a reality out there, WHICH CAN HURT YOU, can you possibly hope to survive.

And yes, I am aware that I am defending a position that I decry throughout these blogs. A 'blind' faith in something. I wouldn't if I didn't have to but how can I exist if I don't defend it. I can, and do, argue for the non existence of God, or Krishna, or Buddha, or Zarathustra, or Allah but to deny that 'reality' is real, denies me, and 'me' KNOWS I exist without any doubt whatsoever. I just will always be unable to convince you of that! But then perhaps I don't have to?

Do I?