“Your assumptions are mountains”

In my original reply I made an off-the-cuff statement, “Lacking experience of reality apart from experience, there is no reality apart from experience.”

I did not mean it to be taken as an assumption that objective reality did not exist. I honestly didn’t think I’d receive the pushback I did. The purpose of the reply was a defense of free will. And, ‘there is only NOW’ is a fairly common concept anymore.

What I should have said in the original, was, ‘…lacking experience of ‘reality apart from experience,’ there is no ‘reality apart from experience’ that exists as anything other than an assumption, NOW, that it does exist.’

The point is, I’m not assuming objective reality doesn’t exist. There is no ‘mountain’ of assumption. I am stating that since all experience is NOW then objective reality is an assumption, be it a safe assumption or not.

And please, give me a little space here if you will. Some years back I read a book, NOW, The Physics of Time. The introduction starts, “Now—that enigmatic and ephemeral moment that changes its meaning every instant—has confounded priests, philosophers, and physicists, and with good reason.”

The author goes on to tell us about lightspeed, entropy, quantum physics and more. But finishing the book I had no greater understanding of NOW then when I started. It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I realized that if he’d simply followed through on his very first Chapter One sentence, “Here is a fact for you, one that very few people know—maybe no one other than you yourself: you are reading this book right now. In fact, I can be more precise: you are reading the word now right now,” he would have come much closer to an understanding of NOW.

Think about it, and to physically see the word now NOW, requires an interaction in the eyes, followed up immediately in the brain. These are subatomic particle interactions. Force events. The force event that was ‘word’ was gone by the time the force event that was now arrived.

Hearing: force events, interactions NOW in your ears. Chemicals interacting NOW in your nose. On and on. Even thoughts and memories involve interactions in your brain, NOW. I’ve come to think of them as detected interactions. NOW exists as the sum of all our detected interactions.

Thanks for the space. I merely point out what I find fascinating. Life happens NOW. All of it. (At least my life does!)

We could throw it away as an anomaly. Or we could study it. Work out the implications. Go down that rabbit hole. Maybe there is something there. Maybe there is a way to reconcile or derive objective reality from the fact of NOW. Maybe that's exactly where free will lives.

Be good!