Feel of living

BIMBO CABIDOG

Is the future upon us? New game formats in computers seem to suggest. In these models, you already forego with the joystick or mouse. You are ushered into the action. You are absorbed by the computer program and interact like you are in it.

Indeed, the shape of tomorrow is here. Exponentially more powerful computers than the 1980s desktop PC, packed with a new breed of software, are creating digital environments that are much the same in feel and texture as the world real people live in.

It is called virtual reality, and it is becoming the new reality. You don’t handle it. You are in it.

New software programs have made it possible for an artist to simulate reality in multimedia consoles that appear already indistinct from the real. A click triggers digital scenarios that are just like you are living them.

Because of the reach of the internet now encompassing all climes, the uneven development of societies does not keep experiences from being common throughout the globe anymore. Digital applications are creating a world of new conventions and universality that may just in the next spiral already blur the difference between virtual and actual as it used to be.

The futuristic world even cyberspace in the first blush of invention did not dream of is no longer science fiction. It is the feel of the present. Artificial intelligence has sewn together a prodigious revolution in information that can sooner than later replace a lot of the old reality.

What does this explosion augur? One is a reconceptualization of the Age of Man. Has thought created it? Or is it still the evolution of the species governed by changing genetics and molecular configurations? Is man trying to fool himself by believing in the opposition between objective and subjective states?

The questions are past contemporary. They are the arrival of the future. It says that humankind should no longer debate the truth from the two standpoints of idealism and materialism. Computer revolution has led to making them one.

Science has always seemed to favor matter over mind, the demiurge versus the spirit. But isn’t the materialist construct coming into full circle with the creations of artificial intelligence? Isn’t so-called concrete reality the mind of it? What determines or abstracts the natural laws of motion, and the relationships that reveal phenomena or being.

Now, generating worlds of dream, artificial intelligence is designing phenomena that defy gravity and other laws that man has come to learn about his world. Anti-matter and paranormal existences do not run counter to rationality anymore as philosophers and the man-on-the-street would hold. They construct a higher level of rationality, the acceptance of concreteness beyond physical being, metaphysical phenomena as relatable and livable.

Is reality a product of thought processes? Is knowledge about a state that is in here, not out there?

Concepts, like concreteness, do also change over time. When man became a space traveler, he knew for sure with the confirmation of a camera shot that the earth is round. But this was not how it used to be, and until now folks still use the more convenient portrait of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, instead of the earth turning on an axis to produce the phenomenon of one half of it experiencing day, the other half experiencing night.

Hardness can be nothing but awareness of the mutual resistance of two forces impacting against each other. It can be but the thought of gravity being repealed by energy in mass.

Solidity is a suggestion that is not buttressed by what lies at the core of matter, the atom. There is nothing solid in an atomic particle that has one principle moving around a nuclear center defying shape and weight. While solidity seems to characterize matter, constant motion characterizes its basic building block: the proton-and-electron affair.

Consciousness lights that corner up, bringing the reality of atom whirling in empty space into the idea of matter. So, whether it is reality out there, or idea in the mind, no longer matters.

What does so is the feel. Without feeling there is no consciousness, and without consciousness there is no reality. Feeling signifies life, and life is the truth. Both concrete and imagined realities strike the same chord. And that chord produces the rhythm of living.

Ah, an esoteric abstraction to laugh at! Is love something to dismiss? Is the height of all feeling also the height of negation? But feeling is true, as the stab of hunger is true. Matter feels nothing. It is the mind that does. And mind feels even nothing.

Do you deny mind? Then you absurdly deny your very existence. You are, because you think. And what you think of is what you feel. Things are true because you feel them.

When you no longer feel, you do not exist anymore. Even death is felt. It is felt because it is a part of life.

People go through living trying to deny reality by shutting out one feeling for another. But what is shut out is also real, because it is felt. That’s why there is the word about shutting out.

The affirmation and negation, the thesis and antithesis, are all of living in an inescapable sense.

Futuristic digital world is the world more and more folks live today. In days ahead, will they already dwell in it? Live in it? Such is so if it gets the feel of living.

To feel is to be real, whether you are a butterfly dreaming of being a man, or a man dreaming of being a butterfly.