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Monday, 20 November 2017



A phenomenon is real when it is effective beyond its initial domain of significance. So, an object which is important in a dream narrative, where it may have perfect consensus reality in relation to other dream characters, generally has no effects outside of the dream. On the other hand the apparent colours of things in waking reality, fer example, might be explicable within an evolutionary narrative, which describes the survival advantages of colour perception and accounts for the range and acuity of such perception, but are also analysable in a consistent way according to a whole network of other narratives to do with chemistry and physics, neurology and aesthetics which have no direct link to the former, and hence are taken to refer to something real. Again, objectivities that function perfectly well within the frame of a computer interface so that we tend to forget that they are merely functional, are seen to dissolve outside of that frame, as when we experience glitches or hacks, or when we play around with changes in the code. Whatever is real is significant in different and unexpected contexts. This is a version of Samuel Johnson's refutations of Berkeley. If objectivities were no more than their functionality then we would not only experience their failures outside their frame of applicability, but we would be able to successfully speculate on those failures. The Berkeleyan rejoinder would be to expand the frame to include all possible 'reality tests', the view from God. In dreams a kind of fabulation acts at the boundary of any narrative frame so that if you search for the corroboration of some apparent fact you always find one proportioned to the quantum of doubt driving the search. But it is just here that dreams are at their most dreamlike and nonsensical. There is no evidence for such fabulation in waking reality, isn't there?     

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