Nonsensical ramblings

On the subject of Reality

Now, I've spent a lot of time with myself over the past few years. That, for me, and a lot of people I've personally talked to, is a very hard thing to do. We all want ourselves to be the hero of our own stories. We all have our own lives, and it's hard to imagine that there's more out there than what pertains to us because we simply can't experience it.

Sonder is what it all boils down to. Sonder, in layman's terms, is the realization that every person you see, every person you drive by as you go to work, every person you pass on the street, each and every single person on the entire planet, has a life that is just as real, just as vivid as yours.

They too want to be the heroes of their stories. And they have different lives, but the fact is that their lives are just like yours. Complicated. Messy. They can be happy and joyous, or sad and bleak. It's every bit as real as your life, yet you can't possibly understand because all you can understand is you. Your reality, your life, and your experiences. Nothing else at all in the entire universe is real, because all you know is what you perceive.

Our brains are working fast. Incredibly fast, in fact. To understand just how fast, to put all of this into perspective, and to try and make any of what I'm saying make any sense to anyone other than myself, we need to comprehend this speed.

Each of our brains has about 100 billion neurons. Now, that's not an exact number, some may have slightly more or less, but either way take away one or two and it really doesn't do much. It's still like 100 billion or so. Each one fires at about 200 times per second, and each neuron connects to about 1000 other neurons.

So, I'll save you the mental math, but if we multiply all that out, we get about 200 million billion bits of information traveling around each of our brains every second. Now, don't quote me on that, I looked it up online, but I checked multiple sources and they all said about the same thing, so it's safe to say that's a pretty ok ballpark estimate.

Each of these bits of information are used in different ways, but many of them are used to translate your senses to your brain so that it can make a educated guess about your surroundings. This, in turn, makes up your world, your reality per se.

It's not a bad guess, your brain is very complicated and smart. That's its purpose, it's to keep you alive. But even some of the most simple tricks, hallucinations and illusions and the like, show that our brain works so fast that it makes mistakes.

Take the whole "Yanny or laurel" debate or "what color is the dress?" Your brain is stumped in both instances, and makes a judgement based on what you see and hear. If you heard yanny, or saw a gold and white dress, your brain was trying to take a shortcut. It was wrong, showing us that we can't always trust our senses or instincts.

This brings us back to the subject of reality. It's all about our perspective. Nothing you or I think can be proven 100% true, because truth is created for each and every one of us, by a machine that runs so fast that even the simplest audio or visual illusions will cause it to make split second judgements and craft a reality for us, even if it is not necessarily the true reality.

Now, this isn't to say that there isn't a true reality. There is, but the problem is none of us can ever grasp it. We can begin to try and comprehend it. We can grasp at straws, scratch the surface of all the infinite knowledge in the universe, but we will never truly know everything. It's impossible, there's too much to know, and as much as we want to think we've got everything figured out, as much as we want to think of ourselves as the heroes of our own stories, we aren't.

There is so much out there yet to be discovered, so much out there that can't and won't be discovered. Humans are innately flawed creatures. We look for order, meaning, and purpose in a universe that is chaotic, meaningless, and quite frankly doesn't care about whether or not we live or die.

Now, you can fill in that hole, that desire for purpose, with anything. God, religion, activism, humanitarian efforts. On the flip side you could accept the chaos and be an anarchist, actively tearing down the order society creates in an chaotic word. You can throw bricks through windows, lie, cheat, steal, anything you want to really, and say it's because that's what you've chosen as your meaning.

It's the basis of all crimes, all the wrongdoings. In a way it's almost poetic, because here you have this society of people taming the world, almost succeeding, but at every turn being torn at by the most animalistic tendencies that a select few choose to act upon.

The world was not meant to be tamed. That's why you have rides and falls of empires throughout history. Wars, poverty, racism, sexism, all of it can be traced back to the fact that we as a species are a paradox. We're smart enough to look at our reflection and say "hey, that's me," but not smart enough to outsmart the instincts that are inside us all.

Now, all of this is of course relative. It's what I believe, it's what makes sense to me. But that's my brain, pulling together my reality, and making sense of it my own way. Your views could be, and should be, different, because you are your own person, and at the end of the day, you and only you, are the only one in control of your reality.