The World Is My Representation. Never was a more profound thought brought into existence by the human mind. Never did the tongue speak the truth with such grace. Never did five words, strung together as they are in nine syllables, spell out the human condition with such ease. The world is my representation - and he who understands this understands much. A man achieves a sort of awakening from the deep slumber of life when he suddenly realises that The World is his Representation.
This is a profound truth that many never get a sniff or inkling of - destined, as they are, to live their lives in deep slothful sleep on earth. The heavy footprints of sleep walkers trample the road of history. The vast majority of those that have ever lived, and who do currently live, and will live - are destined to be ignorant of the greatest feat of armchair philosophy. A few though wake up from the turgid sleep of life; the cycle of everyday circadian rhythms; the morose trudge to work; the stupid and pointless chat-chat with brain-numbed folk; the evenings spent in front of a screen watching images run around, and look abouts themselves anew and say: "Wow! Look at the world. What a marvelous thing it is. I think I shall try and gets-a-grips with it!'.
And a lucky few do get a-grips with it. And it is they who then utter the immortal wisdom laced words: the world is my representation. What does it mean to say that the world is my representation? - what is this profundity of which I speak? What is this sentence I continuously jabber about like a demented ape? Well let me explain:
What are you doing right now?
You are reading this.
Through what are you reading it?
Through your skull.
What are you using to view this?
Your eyes.
What do your eyes do?
They absorb electromagnetic radiation of particular limited frequencies and channel the data to the brain.
What does the brain do?
The brain sorts the data so that different frequencies appear different to us.
How do they appear different to us?
In the form of colours.
Do you think colours actually exist out there in the world outside of our bodies? Get real! Leaves are not really green. The sky is not really blue. Those flowers are not really pink. The sun is not really yellow. Summer is not really hot and there is no such thing as winter cold. None of these things in the form of the sensations in which we experience them actually exist out there independently of us. The sensations of colour, heat, cold, time, space, causality, are all formed, nay constructed, within our heads by our brain. In short what we see and experience of life doesn't actually exist out there independently of us.
Take heat for example - what is it? When we say something is hot what do we mean? We mean it feels hot. Yes, but the feeling of hotness is created by the brain. What is heat? When is one thing hotter than another? When its molecules are moving about faster. For example the water molecules in a glass of boiling water are moving about faster then those at room temperature. Our skin detects this change or difference in rate of movement, passes the data to the brain, which then 'creates' the sensation of hotness which we all experience and are familiar with. The only thing that distinguishes summertime from wintertime is that in the former the molecules in the air are moving about faster. They are moving about faster because they have more energy. They have more energy because more infra-red radiation reaches them. More infra-red radiation reaches them because the earth is tilted towards the sun in summer and away from the sun in winter. In short: everything you love about summer doesn't actually exist out there!
So what does exist out there in itself? What is the reality - the thing in itself - independent of our subjective sensation, that exists out there? There is no way to know. To know means to pass it through our senses and our brains - and as I've just said, our senses and brains interpret the data, put a spin on it (like spin doctors). The truth is that independently of our brains and senses there simply is no way of knowing what lies out there as a thing in itself. Hence, why I began this blog entry with: the world is my representation.
The world is my representation. And the world is your representation. Indeed the world is our representation. The world as I (and you see it) is constructed within our heads. The representation is not what's really out there. Nor is everything out there represented. The representation is different for every species. Dogs, for example, have a much more sensitive 'smell' gamut then we do. We can't smell emotions like fear, trepidation, happiness. But dogs can. Bats 'see' through ultrasound. Bees see ultraviolet. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Time, matter, causality, space - all are constructs of the brain. Yes there is something out there. There must be something out there because raw data from this something passes into our eyes, ears, noses, tongues and skin. But what this something is - this thing in itself - we can never know. Because to know, to think, to interpret, is to pass it through our subjective selves. Objectively we can never know the world as it is. Because 'as it is' is a meaningless concept outside of our subjective selves as sensing beings. As sensing - seeing beings we bring the world we experience into existence. It doesn't exist 'ready made' out there waiting for us to just come along and view it.
The world is my representation. Welcome to the real world! Welcome to my world!
[To be continued...in small little doses the brain can swallow]
