Reality and my insane apprehensions

by Harcharan Bains on Sunday, March 6, 2011 at 8:29pm

(This is brought on by Rajiv Mudgil's note elswhere onthis page)

Rajiv: Brilliant again, but my problem is that I am used to expecting nothing less from you. So I am denied a child's divine enthusiasm over a revelation , his joys and marvel at finding a gem for the first time is not my share any longer.

Just a minor issue again. I did not mean that biology is one of the billion trillion doors that open into reality. I meant that the present form of biology, an evolutionary outcome of the peculiar conditions existing on our planet, might itself be just one of the billion trillion forms of biologies possible - that different climatic or environmental conditions may give rise to a different stream of biologies and considering the immensity of cosmos, the number of such different biological streams may be infinite. ( This question is discussed by Sagan at some length and it both intrigues and fascinates me) What kind of intelligence, what kind of mind with what powers of understanding, what range of imagination and what perception of reality as it exists may be produced by even the minutest shift in evolutionary conditions?

I have an insane apprehension that our definitions of reality may themselves be illusory, and that what we call the presence of a logical order in the universe is nothing but our refusal to believe that logic itself is a product of our perceptions of reality, and perceptions themselves are the product of the peculiar mind produced by a peculiar line of biology. I know I totter on the bounds of the eccentric , but reality and its relations to what we think is our power of understanding could well be eccentric phenomena? Our refusal to dismiss logic as a compulsive adjustment of a pre-wired intellect to the reality that produced it is itself a part of the evolution induced problem?

I am unable to articulate logically. Therefore, perhaps I will stray into poetry -- a little later. Or just sing a song of merriment and forget "these questions/ Which with myself, I too much discuss/ Too much explain."