I Am a Strange Loop

Although nobody planned it that way, most of us wind up emerging from adolescence with a deeply nuanced sense of what is real, with shades of gray all over the place. (However, I have known, and probably you have too, reader, a few adults for whom every issue that strikes me as subtle seems to them to be totally black-and-white — no messy shades of gray at all to deal with. That must make life easy!) Actually, to suggest that for most of us life is filled with “shades of gray” is far too simple, because that phrase conjures up the image of a straightforward one-dimensional continuum with many degrees of grayness running between white and black, while in fact the story is much more multidimensional than that.

All of this is disturbing, because the word “real”, like so many words, seems to imply a sharp, clear-cut dichotomy. Surely it ought to be the case that some things simply are real while other things simply are not real. Surely there should be nothing that is partly real — that wouldn’t make sense! And yet, though we try very hard to force the world to match this ideal black-and-white dichotomy, things unfortunately get terribly blurry.

The Many-faceted Intellectual Grounding of Reality

That marble over there in that little cardboard box on my desk is certainly real because I see the cardboard box sitting there and because I can go over and open it and can squeeze the marble, hefting it and feeling its solidity. I hope that makes sense to you.

The upper edge of that 75-foot-tall Shell sign near the freeway exit is real, I am convinced, because every road sign is a solid object and every solid object has a top; also because I can see the sign’s bottom edge and its sides and so, by analogy, I can imagine seeing its top; also because, even though I’ll certainly never touch it, I could at least theoretically climb up to it or be lowered down onto it from a helicopter. Then again, the sign could topple in an earthquake and I could rush over to it and touch what had once been its upper edge, and so forth.

Antarctica, too, is real because, although I’ve never been there and almost surely will never go there, I’ve seen hundreds of photos of it, I’ve seen photos of the whole earth from space including all of Antarctica, and also I once met someone who told me he went there, and on and on.

Why do I believe what certain people tell me more than I believe what others tell me? Why do I believe in (some) photos as evidence of reality? Why do I trust certain photos in certain books? Why do I trust certain newspapers, and why only up to a certain point? Why do I not trust all newspapers equally? Why do I not trust all book publishers equally? Why do I not trust all authors equally?

Through many types of abstraction and analogy-making and inductive reasoning, and through many long and tortuous chains of citations of all sorts of authorities (which constitute an indispensable pillar supporting every adult’s belief system, despite the insistence of high-school teachers who year after year teach that “arguments by authority” are spurious and are convinced that they ought to be believed because they are, after all, authority figures), we build up an intricate, interlocked set of beliefs as to what exists “out there” — and then, once again, that set of beliefs folds back, inevitably and seamlessly, to apply to our own selves.

Just as we believe in other peoples’ kidneys and brains (thanks almost entirely to arguments from analogy and authority), so we come to believe in our own kidneys and brains. Just as we believe in everyone else’s mortality (again, thanks primarily to arguments from analogy and authority), so we come, eventually, to believe in our own mortality, as well as in the reality of the obituary notices about us that will appear in local papers even though we know we will never be able to flip those pages and read those notices.