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Imagine there’s no Yesterday
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 by admiralForget tomorrow–what if there is no yesterday? I have been reading again and you know what that does to my thinking. Vox Day’s book, “The Irrational Atheist,” mentions that man does not reason as much as he rationalizes after the fact. This fits nicely with some other random thoughts that have been hanging out with the wrong crowd in the darker parts of my mind. If our view of reality is an internal construct, then does anything around us have to be real?
Everybody on the planet has false memories. While doing some stand up philosophy in preparation for a story that I never wrote, I considered the impact of two opposing views of reality both being valid. What if both parties in an argument remembered the same event differently and were both right? Could it be that our view of reality is consistent only because we rationalize it into consistency? This can be a dangerous train of thought.
Suppose that there really was no yesterday. How would we know? Nothing says that our memory of any earlier time has to be accurate. It is not accuracy but the ability of events to fit into our worldview that determines what we will accept as real. There could have been no yesterday and nobody amongst us would know about it.
I am fond of seeing history as a large jigsaw puzzle. When one piece is wrong, it fails to fit with the pieces closest to it. Modification to the parts of the puzzle in an area to make the puzzle ‘seem right’ produces flaws further out. The truth is that our view, however broad, is always limited in scope. As long as we can rationalize the pieces into the part of the puzzle that we see in a single glance, the illusion of history will suffice.
This does not effect the original question about yesterday being a false memory that we all share. I am not arguing that yesterday is a mass hallucination either. My point is simply that we should not take ourselves so seriously. There could have been no yesterday without us knowing about it. Should we be so egotistical about our rationality when the foundation for our reasoning can only be assumed?
