WHAT IS REALITY MADE OF: ABOUT THE KITCHEN OF THE WORLD

A reflection that the world is more than just the visible and material world has certainly occurred to many. That there are entities that are immaterial yet objectively real is not difficult to discover. For example, the rules of gravity, which certainly objectively exist and operate. Or mathematics, which also exists in some very solid sense, but not in material form. Numbers are not made up of atoms, you can't tap the "+" or find it in the periodic table of elements. Mathematics does not consist of matter, even though matter behaves according to it everywhere.

Another example is ideas, words, agreements, laws, and even money, and even this article, which is unfolding in your head right now through the symbols of letters. In your head and nowhere else. It weighs nothing in itself. Sure, the paper on which the ink is printed weighs something, but the idea is neither paper nor ink.

For example, your mobile phone is more intangible than tangible. Your phone may weigh about a hundred grams of matter, but your phone would not be a phone without software, without a contract with a power supplier, without a network connection, without contacts, without memory contents, and most importantly, without the way that hundred grams of matter is arranged down to the nanometer. If you were to disassemble your mobile phone into its individual components (and "take out" the organisation of the matter that makes it a phone) and take this unorganised matter to a collection centre, you would get less than one euro for it. That is the value of the phone's mass. The rest of its value, which could easily beover one thousand euros i.e. more than 99.99 percent, is the immaterial component. So that tangible mobile phone that you carry in your pocket is just the tip of the intangible iceberg that makes a mobile phone a mobile phone.

And so it is with our whole world. Matter is "just" a condensed manifestation of immaterial laws. Without gravity, neither our planet, nor the sun, nor the stars would exist. Without the weak and strong nuclear force, even the nuclei of atoms would not exist. The changing material world, all that celestial dance around and around and forward in which we all dance together at breakneck speeds, is "only" a manifestation, a consequence of immutable laws that are neither seen nor heard, have no material form nor weigh anything. And we discover these immutable, rock-solid entities, possessing incredible and unimaginable power (held together by gravity or subatomic forces by billions of tons), only and only through their material manifestations. We do not see gravity directly, we see only its manifestations in matter.

The question is whether it ends there. If we look behind the veil of that changing matter, we see the unchanging laws that govern matter. If we were able to see the invisible, we could thus look behind the veil of appearances (Comenius would say impermanence), we would see into the "kitchen of reality". We would see where things are made, we would see that immaterial iceberg that appears, that pro-appears in your material mobile phone. This is how, for example, Comenius' pilgrim saw things, who saw directly beyond the appearance of things, or perhaps better still, Neo, when he saw through the Matrix and no longer saw matter, but mathematical patterns that once "only" appeared to him as matter.

But is this kitchen the ultimate core of existence, the real thing beyond which one can no longer go, because there is simply nothing beyond it? If we are able to take that first step beyond material reality into the objectively existing immaterial world, why end up there?

What if there is another, deeper plan behind the laws?

This, after all, was the dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees. They argued that the world is made up of rules. They saw them ethically, as ethical rules; we see them today as physical or economic rules. But the basic argument remains the same. Our role, the role of science and human thoughtfulness, is to try to understand these rules, to behave according to them, and to change and manipulate reality (to land on the moon or to get rich) through our knowledge of them. But Jesus argued with them like this: yes, it seems at first glance that reality, this whole material world, consists of rules. But if you go further and deeper, you will see that the rules are made up of something even deeper. Something that can't be analysed, studied, dissected or frozen, something that can't even be talked about properly. Perhaps that's why he spoke so often about love, meaning, forgiveness, mercy, the relationship between father and children. None of these "things" can be properly put into rules. And yet this is the real matter, the real bottom of reality, beyond which it is impossible to go, from which the invisible and visible world is made.

#philosophy #economics