Arman Sidhu - Between You and the Universe: How Science, Symbols, and Experience Create (Your) Reality

The universe is very huge.

To understand its colossal scale, here are some interesting estimates. The universe contains trillions of galaxies of course. Although our collective knowledge about reality ranges from the enormous scale of galaxies all the way down to the microscopic scale of atoms, our human understanding of reality today is still an infinitesimal fraction of what it could be.

So, what is reality?

Everything that you know to be real makes up your real -ity. This definition is admittedly very expansive because it encompasses everything that you experience, ranging from your knowledge, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, events, and even imaginations. This wide area of things (and motions), however, is the scope that were discussing in this book. Reality is everything.

Questioning reality is the hallmark of being human. No other living thing has this capacity as far as we know. Just browse through the nonfiction aisle in your local or online bookstore and youll find a wide variety of knowledge on the shelves that seeks to explain reality. Books on consciousness, science, history, quantum physics, the mind, language, behavior, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience are just a few topics discussed in detail, each book containing diverse examinations of reality. Although we all live in the same world, we examine our realities in countless ways.

Instead of diving deep into only one topic, well explore the entire concept of reality and the overarching framework that creates it. Well take a multidisciplinary approach collecting bits of information from various disciplines and arranging them in such a way to explain everything around and within you.

To begin, we divide the explanation of reality into three parts, or, as we shall refer to them as the scientific world , symbolic world , and experiential world . Consider these worlds as if you're wearing three pairs of glasses, each with a unique set of lenses. Each pair adjusts your perspective towards either the scientific, symbolic, or experiential aspects of your reality so you can see each world, and their fragments, distinctly.

Seeing reality through the scientific lens allows you to focus on the rules that govern the universe as postulated by science. Akin to baking a cake with the correct recipe of ingredients and instructions, the universe bakes itself using its own recipe, with its own ingredients and instructions. This recipe makes the totality of reality from the scientific perspective.

Over millennia, humans distilled the recipe of the universe to its fundamental principles, equations, laws, theories, etc. The byproduct of our endeavors was not only to know simply for fun, but primarily to advance our survival knowledge; we learned how to start fires, kill mammoths, build houses, create towns, invent computers, and so on. The mechanistic patterns we determined through trial and error save us from reinventing the wheel each time we need something that rolls. Knowing the nuts and bolts of how things work allows us to function just like a well-oiled machine. If you take the scientific knowledge as it stands today, reality emerges from the ingredients of subatomic particles, which combine via forces to create larger structures that you see everywhere: atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, plants, animals, people, perceptions, landscapes, planets, galaxies, and everything else.

Viewing reality through the symbolic lens shows you that symbols represent and connect everything around you in all their entirety. In the same way that a scientific world has a recipe (i.e., subatomic particles as the ingredients, forces as the instructions), so does the symbolic world. The ingredients for the symbolic world are the symbols, or literally anything that you can identify. And the instructions are the mental associations, or the connections, you make between these things . With just this recipe, you create an entire web of connections for any conceivable thing in your universe.

Language best demonstrates this symbolic recipe. It is the prime subset of ingredients representing anything from thoughts, ideas, feelings, things, behaviors, imaginations, or anything; you can embody practically everything in words and sentences, which symbolize the associations among all those things. Language is an exercise of mapping pieces of reality into communicable symbols, eventually becoming an emulation of raw experience itself. You can use languages symbolic map to communicate your inner worlds to others. But taking a step back away from language and examining the entire symbolic domain, symbols can be any identifiable object or behavior. Simply, symbols enable us to conjoin everything we believe to be relevant. Symbols in the symbolic world are analogous to atoms in the scientific world, as they are the building blocks that construct reality.

Lastly, through your experiential lens, your distinct feelings emerging from your perceptions like sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, emotion, imaginations, etc., make up all the ingredients, figuratively speaking, of your experiential world. Your attention then provides the instructions on how to channel your feelings into practical actions and cogent ideas.

Suppose you imagine your experiential world by itself without symbols or science. Youd experience a purely sensory world filled with sensations and thoughts. This reality would be inexpressible, felt only by you. Youd require a tool, such as language, to explain it. Certainly, you remember a time when you were unable to explain your feelings or thoughts accurately. Maybe it was an intricate song stuck in your head but could not, for the life of you, sing it correctly to a friend? Or, did you have a vivid dream but didnt know how to explain how you felt flying through the air in your dream world? Or, for that matter, had any particular feelings or imaginations that you could not describe in full vividness? If you said yes to any of these, you intuitively know that even though we may fail to communicate our sensory experiences, we definitely feel them. And, they definitely exist independent of the symbols used to describe them.

Ironically, even though each world has unique recipes, these three worlds make the same reality. The scientific world cannot exist without experience nor the symbols used to express experience. The symbolic world could not exist if you did not experience it. And you can only understand the mechanics of the experiential world through symbols and science (and/or your belief system). The scientific, symbolic, and experiential worlds work together synergistically.

Aside from diving deeper into these worlds and how they create reality, this book shares a tiny and implicit lesson. Late in his life, pioneering psychologist Carl Jung wrote one of his most famous books, Man and His Symbols.