What makes things real? What separates the mundane and proven from the uncertain and fantastic? Is it the majority that decides; the viewpoint shared by the most people declared true? Would that make a delusion real, then, to the population of an asylum?
Who decides what is real, and how can you tell if they actually exist or not?
Senses, logic, faith? They don’t prove a thing. There’s no way of being certain if what you see, along with everyone else, is true. Still, there is a point to be made. If I—along with everyone else— “saw” a chair where there was none, it wouldn’t matter. Yes, we could smell it, touch it, taste it, hear it—presumably…and I would still fall down if I tried to sit in it.
There’s got to be something that can be taken for granted, some given information in the proof. Without it, you can’t ground the assumptions; you can’t ever hope to find a true solution…
So are we all drifting, then, since we don’t know exactly what the given information is? Even the ideas of gravity and the ideas behind the stars are still theories—there just hasn’t been anything to disprove them yet. All we have is mist that we’ve been able to cup in our hands, separating it from the fog around us. Until something more solid comes along, that’s it.
What am I trying to say here? I honestly don’t know; I’ve forgotten, or maybe I didn’t know where this was going to begin with. But what I keep thinking is…you can’t be certain what you see is what everyone else sees. Even if it’s real to you—even if you’re the only sane one and the rest of the world is sharing the same madness, it can’t be real.
If we do give in to another reality, though, we lose. Isn’t that what MNU has done for all these years? Created a world populated by humans and bizarre, violent monsters called prawns? That isn’t true—not to me, since I am a “prawn” and I would never harm someone—but goddamnit! How am I right either? Both ideas could be madness, just a different delusion masking a truth we can’t understand. The Truth…the given information, the perfect, undeniable facts that give sense to all the ethereal worlds out there. If we are to find ‘real”, we must find truth then! Yes, yes we must…but can we?
That’s for another day, I guess. Another wild jag of thought and doubt…this post is too long already and I have other things to do; the “real” world and all its responsibilities are beckoning and I have no choice but to answer the call. If I didn’t--haha!--I’d be considered insane.
It’s true that we can’t live in our own dream worlds, I know that, but we can’t sunder our thoughts and observations from our interactions with the outside world. Without madness, I believe, there wouldn’t be insight—there wouldn’t be those jolts of understanding and creativity that provide for advancement and change. There’s got to be some kind of diffusion between worlds—perhaps not equilibrium, not even a dynamic one, but some form of balance.
We can dream, we can ponder, we can doubt and ask for other opinions, but there’s still got to be a happy medium.