Reality is what you see

At college I used to talk to Philip Hussey, our course tutor about reality. This grew from a project we had. We were required to design and make a piece of furniture in homage to an artist of our choice. Of course most chose other furniture designers and did a piece in their style.

Seeing the crapness in this I decided to design a piece based on the work of the writer Philip K Dick.

Dick is perhaps best known by the uncultured as the guy who wrote the book that Blade Runner was developed from. If you have read the book you will know much of it could never be transfered in to a mainstream film. Mercerism, the empathic religion was dropped altogether and the script followed a line of questioning what is human. 

Philip K Dicks' two main questions were 'what is human?'and 'what is real?'. I followed the latter for my piece which was a cabinet that had a surface reality of wood that stripped away to reveal a robotic interior, like the bionic mans arm. Beneath this was a third depth of reality represented  by organic fur. Essentially I was trying to get at the sense of reality being tacky and veneer thin, that we could scratch at the surface of it and finds it was not real at all.

I have been a life long fan of his books and still return to reread one every so often. As time goes by the essence of future reality seems like it will be more like a Dick dystopia than any others sci fi dreams. Robotic rats scuttling about in the litter in the gutter, God available in an aerosol advertised on TV.

I put it to Phil that reality is what you perceive. My theory was based on experiments from my teens and early twenties with halucinogenic drugs. We all see the world in a different way and construct it ourselves. 

Phil was well versed in philosophy and heald the view, which I think was then the consensus that reality was fixed and we were party to the truth to a greater or lesser degree dependent on our inteligence and headstate.

Now, I agree we are all different but can't we both be right? If as we keep being told by followers of Einstein that time itself is not linear as we see it but somehow different altogether. That his theory that time and space bend when affected by gravity. That our perception is a relative one.

Or, as I am beginning to think, all this bunkum about black holes etc. is quite wrong. 

Either we are not sufficiently developed to see these things or they are wrong.

It is borderline heretic to question Einstein but I'm starting to.