What is reality? (Part Two)
(continued from Part One: WHAT IS REALITY? (Part One) | pauladkin (wordpress.com) )
Human beings as sapiens entities are an integral and essential part of any ontological process involved in the actual nature of things, for it is through sentient beings like humanity that the otherwise chaotic Universe can make itself manifest.
Traditionally, religious-minded philosophy, and indeed Berkeley, who was a bishop himself, while passionately defending the necessary relationship between perception and existence, undermined the importance of humanity in its relationship with the Universe by placing the entire manifesting process in the hands (or eyes) of God. Leibniz, for example, who had brilliant intuitions concerning the quantum nature of the Universe, argued that the reality of a thing must come from something that itself has a reality, which, if we look at this idea through the prism of quantum physics, means that a perceiving entity is needed to make the chaos manifest as form, and that once sentient organisms had been created, either through accident or through a quantum type of will – quantum mechanics tells us that quantum particles or wave forms carry awareness of each other and even memory – then through the perception of these sentient organisms a process of unfolding takes place, allowing for the steady unfolding of universal manifestation which is still ongoing; a process now generated not by God, but by the perceptions of finite minds.
What this means is that the Universe is always in a constant state of becoming – or at least as long as sentient beings exist in the Universe – but also that the Universe as we perceive it may be radically different in form to that experienced by other kinds of extra-terrestrial beings that have understood the Universe by perceiving it with different types of sensorial organs or through different kinds of environments. Even on Earth, the reality manifest to an octopus is undoubtedly radically different to that experienced by humans. This indicates that the Universe’s manifestation is by no means a singularity and that it is in fact a manifestation on multiple levels that co-exist with each other, but which are invisible or unperceived by different kinds of sentient beings immersed in that co-existence.
This enormous relativity of ontological manifestations, which we will never be wholly aware of, does not diminish the purposefulness of humanity’s own role within the Universe, or at least as long as our own relationship with ourselves does not drift us so far into nihilistic projects of purposelessness that the Universe we make manifest becomes as useless as the chaos from which it is derived. If the elementary, authentic chaotic quantum form of the Universe can possess a will, it would be for the order that its own chaos lacks. And in this sense, Leibniz may well have been unwittingly describing a quantum condition when he spoke of the different points of view of his own elementary particles called monads, as a ‘means of obtaining as much variety as possible, but with the greatest order possible.’[i] By making itself manifest through the perceptions of rational, finite minds, the Universe also realises what it so desperately lacks – the great variety of forms coexisting in an orderly fashion.
[i] Leibniz, Monadology, #58
