Reality in Transition

Many have suggested and many more suspect that our reality is a construct, but no one has yet been able to make that idea stick. Nonetheless, it is an idea whose time will come. When that time does come we will know that we are living in the 'latter days.' It will be traumatic for us to realize that the last foundation of our existence, by being a construct, can be deconstructed. The final bastion for our security will have evaporated. To what will we then turn? It is in anticipation of and preparation for this future trauma that I seek the minimal degree of toleration necessary to initiate a continuing discussion concerning the impact of such a radical reappraisal of the world and our situation in it. It is possible that such a discussion might serve to trigger the anticipated revelation.

The real wonder of our situation is that we have honestly been able to come to believe that the world might not be a construct, that it might be an absolute and arbitrary object entirely self-sufficient, and that by some nearly unimaginable cosmic fluke we happen to find ourselves here now. This is a point of view that most of us take so much for granted that we seldom contemplate its breath-taking nature, even in comparison with all the other breath-taking schemes which humanity has ever embraced. In our defense, let it be noted that we did not come by this belief easily.

The days of science, as with every other human endeavor, are numbered. When we reflect upon the vast enterprise that science has become, it is difficult to imagine life after science, other than as a regression to some very dark age, and so we cling to it out of desperation. But our clinging and our desperation may, at best, postpone the inevitable.

The fact is that science has already deconstructed itself. Science has, after all, served an historical role as the great deconstructor of being or presence. But if science is not wise, it is at least fair, and it did not spare its own vision. That is why science is no longer spirited. We might suppose that science could last indefinitely as a well maintained machine, but who would we be deceiving, and why?

Science was supposed to have explained the world, but instead science has explained away the world, although not yet to everyone's satisfaction. What is the world without a foundation? It was no mean feat for science to demonstrate that there is no foundation. We are left with a dizzying spiral of mathematical abstractions, that could exist only in someone's mind, pace Plato.

Yet, there are many who are not being willful in believing that the stars in the sky above and the dinosaur bones in the ground below remain un-deconstructed. But those artifacts of science can retain a residual significance only as long as we forget that scientific cosmology, and any cosmology, is of a whole, and is only as strong as its weakest link, and certainly no stronger than its foundation. As we set about to construct our next world, this is a lesson that will have been well learned.

It would be folly to give up on one world when the next one may not yet even be a figment of someone's imagination. In the meantime there could be a panicky retreat to the premodern traditions. This we are already witnessing, but rest assured that those bridges were actually burnt, despite rumors to the contrary. What is left are mere shards that will now have to be reexamined and reevaluated. It is this kind of preliminary recapitulation that is now so important for us to begin. This discussion should be our global priority. That I might serve as a 'provocateur' in this regard, is all I have to offer.

Dan T. Smith, Baltimore, MD