A vibration on a ripple on a wave on a tide on a sea…

I am above all else brutally skeptical, even of my own thoughts.

The physicist and philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, had a valid criticism of the process of science (and by extension, pretty much all human endeavors toward knowledge), in that we are too easily captivated by explanations grounded in a particular way of thinking, or “paradigm”.  We discover something that seems to work, and then reflexively apply it to a definition of reality that’s forced to fit within its framework… even when a more accurate interpretation may be staring us in the face.

The universe we perceive exists only in the space between our ears… the ultimate paradigm.  It’s nothing less than the very structure upon which we hang the definition of our existence.  And if our perceptions are consistent in that what one does has the same effect with regard to what one senses, then that reality is internally “correct”.

Likewise, groups will also define such perceived relationships as “correct”.  So it’s not necessary that our everyday thoughts and experiences are objectively accurate, only that they paint a consistent pattern upon the fabric of awareness.  But the human mind and its sensory apparatus needed only evolve sufficient to tilting the odds of natural selection. And so, we are easily fooled.

We are deceived by accountants and advertisers, preaching and politics, saccharin and statistics, and even by the universe itself.  But mostly, we are fooled by our own paradigms. “Reality”, at its source, isn’t anything at all like what we imagine in our heads. It’s the awareness of clear minds, from Plato to Einstein. We are but vibrations, unaware of the sea.

“I” might be nothing nothing more than some bubble of consistent enough relationships to allow for self-belief, an identity without existence… the dead-end paradigm of the solipsist. So there’s a certain comfort to be found in an acknowledgement of ignorance.

Uncertainty provides this life with curiosity and wondering.  And admitting that one does not know at least entertains the selective ignorance of searching for compassion and forgiveness in an otherwise indifferent universe… faith in purpose, if merely an indulgence in one of Pushkin’s “exalting lies”.

My mind may in fact be deceiving me into believing that I am not a zombie, or a brain-in-a-jar, or simply patterns on some unknowable curtain of nothingness.  And the amazing qualia of wind-in-my-face, the color yellow, and “love” might be little more than hormone-enhanced patterns of firing neurons, delusions of something from nothing at all.

But skepticism at least preserves a little space for the light of a few more wondrous possibilities.  Perhaps I am indeed an existential consciousness, exercising her choice to wonder how it is that we sense our ways through such darkness… or that we perceive anything at all.
Reality is probably a paradigm ready for a shift, anyway.