How do we know what is real? I practice “radical constructivism”: a mind invents its reality, because it works. And because our brain works that way. Our brain relates to the environment, what is “real” and uses the relationships – the “ship” refers to construct – to create reality. It uses the context as a map. We do not have a picture of reality in our head or in our body, we have procedures, processes to interpret what we experience as “real”. The better we’re attuned to “what works”, the better it works.
Real doesn’t depend on what i call real. real = real, regardless of its name. Our mind imagines realities, a kind of “world pictures”, which are constructed by our mind. These exists only in our mind and relate to reality – that’s why we call it real, reality, rela-tionship. They are useful constructs, as they support us through life; useful habits. We live (in-habit) in our constructs, but they should not be confused – use of con-fused is intentionally – with attributes of reality (or, to put it otherwise, we attribute the attributes to reality, because it work for us. In Dutch – as in German – reality is called werkelijkheid (Wirklichkeit), The Works – to quote Byron Katie).
We have a four fold way to construct our maps. We can carve out reality through actions, using our body; we can think about reality in terms of models, principles, laws and truths using our brains. We can imagine worlds, dream about what we want, using our intuition, our visioning. And we can relate to our feelings, our fellow men and all the other living and not living entities that matter for us (# I pity inanimate things. I pity them all # a song by Coldley and Cream). The only thing we cannot do, is do these all at the same time.
Our world is inherently paradoxical because we relate to it. As Gödel proved: the paradoxes are in the relationships. Spencer Brown – Laws of Form – reverses it to its most simple form: making distinctions creates paradox.
The problem – if any – is not in the model or the system on reality; it is in our tendency to create models in order to understand and by understanding change reality and thus our relationships. We do, we can, it works, but up to a point, the point where reality kicks in and shows us that she is also irrational.
