I’ve mentioned before I am reading “Spares” by Michael Marshall Smith. I am at a point in the novel where the hero is about to enter “The Gap”, a sort of alternate reality/cyberspace construct to attempt to rescue the spares (clones) and the nature of reality is very slippery. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the book so it came as no surprise to me at all that I tossed and turned most of the night dreaming about the nature of reality.
Let me paint the scene for you. In my bedroom I have minimal furniture – I have a bed, two little night stands, a lamp, a hamper and a ceiling fan/lamp. There is a sizable window on the east wall of the bedroom and the window is shaded with both blinds and curtains. Because of the heat I have the window open and a small fan in the window and because of the light that streams in from outside I have the blinds lowered and the curtains pulled, all except the very small portion where the fan fits. Both the window fan and the ceiling fan are on, slowly turning, to keep the room nice and cool while I sleep.
I am laying there in bed, tossing fitfully, dreaming that the very nature of reality in the room is shifting. There isn’t a specific shift going on – it is just that everything is very amorphous, very fluid. Each time I sleep, reality shifts. Each time I wake, I anchor my thoughts on certain things and reality settles back into place. Somewhere in the middle of the night I realize that I can hold reality constant as long as I limit my thoughts to about seven or eight different items. It is only when my thoughts go above that number of items that reality begins to shift. Half-awake, half-asleep I anchor the room in my mind consciously by counting the objects in the room and placing them each in their proper position.
Then, finally, I am able to fall asleep and sleep soundly through the remainder of the night.
As a result of this nocturnal exploration I woke up this morning with my thoughts slowly maneuvering around the question of what is real. I think there was an interesting insight wrapped inside the dream. The human mind can hold, on average, four objects in our minds simultaneously (two in each hemisphere). When we cross that threshold, we begin a process of rapid switching objects in and out. The more objects we attempt to comprehend simultaneously, the more likely we are to make a mistake in our comprehension of the objects and by extension our interpretation and perception of reality becomes increasingly inaccurate.
Reality (based on our perceptions) is a fragile place. The more complex reality is the more fragile it becomes. I think that is a lot of the power that lies in any of the approaches to reality that stress simplicity and being “in the moment”. The fewer items we attempt to comprehend in any given moment, the more likely it is that our comprehension of those items will be accurate. By pulling ourselves into the moment, by focusing on a few simple things, we are better able to accurately perceive reality. It’s not that the complex nature of reality becomes any less fragile, but rather that we are more accurate in our interpretation of reality at the given moment.
