The Trouble with Reality | Meghan O’Gieblyn
updated 2mo ago
The Trouble with Reality | Meghan O’Gieblyn
What Borges’s stories, Heisenberg’s discovery, and Kant’s system all reveal is that the assumption underlying this fantasy, the full coincidence of knowing and being, self-destructs on closer examination.
from The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton
Debbie Foster added
perhaps our vision of an ultimately knowable human path through space and time isn’t merely problematic because it is incomplete. Perhaps it is per se impossible.
from The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton
Debbie Foster added
The trouble comes when we take our common and perfectly acceptable image of reality as an independent space-time in which things are happening in blissful disregard of our knowledge and start applying it where it doesn’t belong: below the limits of observability or beyond the very borders of existence itself; between the links of the mechanistic ca
... See morefrom The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton
Debbie Foster added
- That is the predicate of the slender, poetic 1993 novel Einstein's Dreams by physicist Alan Lightman — a book about time and the tricks we play on ourselves to bear our transience, a book that does for time what Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love does for love: punctuating a fictional world with philosophical quickenings, th... See more
from Einstein’s Dreams: Physicist Alan Lightman’s Poetic Exploration of Time and the Antidote to the Anxiety of Aliveness – The Marginalian by The Marginalian
Jay Matthews and added
he realized that mixing the two realms—treating, that is, intellectual ideas as if they had extension in space and duration in time or taking mere sensory impressions for inexhaustible and incontrovertible truths—would inexorably lead thinkers to untenable contradictions.
from The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton
Debbie Foster added
