I’ve taken on a big subject this week – it’s a big week, it’s a year since I started working for Laundry this week – hooray a year of blue bag krazee times – ah the memories. So to celebrate I thought I would debate the nature of reality. I’ve had two quite brilliant oh-my-gosh-are-we-students-again? conversations about the subject this week.

Here are some of our conclusions and some more people’s…Debate one –Our five senses are unreliable, they don’t detect every physical possibility of the world. Perception is biased – eg you are much more likely to pay attention if you overhear someone say your name (it’s called the cocktail party affect). Plus memory is unreliable. Fourthly one can only interpret new information in terms of the things you have experienced in the past and so interpretations of information are extremely biased and subjective. For all these reasons we can never directly know reality, but only our interpretation of facts. We did agree that an objective reality can exist, but we will never know it…because the alternative is too far fetched…We also moaned about there never being a chance to have original thoughts (see below), but if you fail to be original in philosophy you can sometimes achieve it in art and telling jokes…maybe.

Like tidal jam, jam that is affected by the moon – (that is ex-Laundry Jess’s original moment)

Debate two – how much of how we behave and what we perceive to be true based on genes and how much on culture and parenting. Sigh – proper student nature nurture debate. Let me ask you this – is there a gene for writing Laundry emails…?

Here are some far out quotes – groovy.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Albert Einstein

“I want you to understand that there are no colours in the real world. That there are no textures in the real world. There are no fragrances in the real world. There is no beauty, there is no ugliness. Nothing of the sort. Out there is a chaos of energy soup and energy fields. Literally. We take that and somewhere inside ourselves we create a world. Somewhere inside ourselves it all happens.” Sir John Eckles Nobel prize winner in physiology and medicine

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet. Woody Allen

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their entrances and exits; and one man in his time has many parts. William Shakespeare

Perhaps I’m old and tired,” he continued, “but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.” -The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. Arthur Schopenhauer

There is no truth beyond magic… reality is strange. Many people think reality is prosaic. I don’t. We don’t explain things away in science. We get closer to the mystery. Brian Goodwin

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a “realist,” he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing. -Sydney Harris

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. -T. S. Eliot

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through? -C. S. Lewis

Things like that only happen in comic books, Robin. This is real life! — Batman

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