Multiple Reality Thinking and Decision-Making

How Important Is Reality?

How important is Reality? Most human beings are too busy, too worried or too socially ambitious to attend to this question with any sustained depth of serious inquiry. For the majority, the Reality Question is impractical and unimportant, even if there will be future catastrophe and suffering as a direct result of failure to be truly realistic. What is Practical Reality later seems like an impractical sojourn into philosophy today. Short-sighted and blinkered people are caught up in their assumptions and beliefs because they are too busy acting out those very assumptions and beliefs. Future shock will prove their assumptions and beliefs to be somewhat delusional, but as long as the majority in their society share the delusion, adhere to the social consensus reality, the socially constructed reality of the day, which is no doubt reinforced by government propaganda of those in secular power, they can put away the Reality Question until it burns them. It is left as a subject for philosophers to concern themselves about, who in turn attempt to get their students seriously engaged with it in university classrooms where the philosophers teach and lecture. By keeping the Reality Question an issue of philosophy and academia, society keeps it out of sight and out of mind.

The Reality Question thus turns into Ontology, which lately has turned into blindly scientific materialism and post-modern cynicism. Ontology once included the subject of Metaphysics, but that is now pretty much destroyed in postmodern intellectual circles. The Reality Question is now considered by almost everybody to be an archaic fixation of some old fuddy-duddy idiots who did not know any better. Too many alternative beliefs about Reality have shredded Reality into tatters, into bits and pieces that never fitted together in the first place. Each insular culture had its unique religion, culture and socially constructed reality, and now, in the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries when they could not avoid each other anymore and had to come to terms, they could not in fact come to terms, but had a mutual reality meltdown, an ontological Chernobyl, so a concrete sarcophagus has been put over the whole thing, which is now called Postmodern Philosophy, which is Philosophy with an ending, but no fresh beginning, no future. All the assumptions of Eliminative Materialistic Computational Reductionism are now the secret underlying belief system, the socially constructed reality of the New World Order, the current accepted ground on which all competing Realities are to be destroyed through cynical deconstruction. The necessary acts of Reconstruction and higher order thinking which constitute real learning as Ontology and Metaphysics are to be suspended until we have all agreed that we are nothing but biological robots who have mistakenly thought of ourselves as actual selves or souls possessing consciousness, intentionality or wills of our own. The New World Order Postmodern Consensus Reality thus becomes a virtual Borg Empire: "Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated and reduced to a servomechanism useful to the ruling elite."

What all this really means is that Ontology, Metaphysics, Philosophy and genuine, original Thinking are becoming increasingly illegal or socially unacceptable. You are not to be a conscious soul or Self beyond the body until after death. You will suspend such silly possibilities until you are in the postmodern Hell that did not prepare you for such a personal condition. Postmodern philosophy does not prepare you for postmortem experience, so you have to hope and pray that there will be no afterlife, or that if there is, it will be OK even though you never prepared yourself for it. The greater the intellectual investment in the belief system of Atheistic Soulless Eliminative Materialism, the greater the danger to anything like a soul that survives past its due date as decreed by the new scientific priesthood. If death fails to be the end of you and a Deity appears and asks you why you were following that religion of denial of the afterlife, will you say to that Deity, "Fuck you, you aren’t real and neither am I ! "? If we think carefully about the possibilities, we might begin to realize that more than one alternative Reality is a possibility and we should have contingency plans just in case we are not really a brain in a jar where even the spinal nerve-centres are irrelevant to that strange materialistic secondary effect that we call "consciousness" or "mind".

Realistic Truth As Meaningful Knowledge

The ancient Samkhya Rajayoga authority, Patanjali, once said in sutra seven (7) of his Yoga Sutra(s), "Pratyaksanumanagamah pramanani." Roughly translated this is saying that Pramana, Realistic Knowledge, is constituted by one of three factors:

1- Pratyaksha: Direct personal experience.

2- Anumana: Deductive or inductive inference.

3- Agama: Testimony of a reliable witness or authority.

Let's go into these carefully and see where it takes us.

The first Western or pre-socratic Ancient Greek philosopher was Thales according to the ancient Greeks themselves and European philosophers have agreed to this. But virtually nothing is known about his philosophy accept that he saw a prevailing liquid state in nature and believed that all entities were pervaded by invisible spirits. Because of both of these propositions, modern philosophers have denounced their first philosopher as an idiot over the liquidity thing and a deluded mystic because of his insistence about 'spirits'. So our first philosopher is a wash-out over 'water' and a fool over 'spirits' yet we are to accept him as a philosopher because these conclusions were apparently based on his own observations (however inadequate) and his own insights (however ridiculous). Our first, primordial philosopher thus gets an "E" for Effort, as the saying goes. It was the first stirring of actual 'thought' on the planet according to our superintelligent modern geniuses who have in their minds transcended the pitiful first philosophers and are now giving us the Real Thing. But Thales has a saving grace for us modern, scientific thinkers. It turns out that he was also a quite brilliant engineer in his day and he understood geometry and trigonometry. How such a deluded and mystical individual could be such a solid engineer and mathematician is of course inconceivable, but at least there was a mathematical contribution of Thales that we can use to illustrate the teaching above of the First Yoga Philosopher of Ancient India.

Thales, it turns out, was at least sane enough to be able to perform acts of accurate logical deduction. He could show, for instance, that the distance from shore of a ship at sea could be deduced if you looked at it from two different angles on shore when the distance between the two points on shore are known. This is called "anumana", right inference. We will now create a little science-fiction short story that illustrate workings of modern people trying to arrive at Pramana, Right Knowledge.

The Strange Adventure of Jim and John

One fine night on the California coast, two friends, Jim Smith and John Jones were talking on the phone with each other from their two beach houses, which lay about a mile apart along a shoreline in California. As they were talking, the children and wives both rushed indoors to excitedly tell Jim and John that there was a glowing UFO hovering just above the water out at sea and that it was "big". Now, Jim and John were both engineers and good mathematicians, just as competent in fact as poor old Thales, our first philosopher. So they both rushed out on to their front porches and took some simple measurements from which they deduced that the glowing, disc-like UFO was approximately 500 feet in diameter and hovering around a half mile off shore over the Pacific. So, now they had made two logical deductions: (1) How large and how far away the object was, and (2) that it was "unidentified" and "disc-shaped" rather than a ship or a known kind of aircraft. They wondered, but did not deduce, if it might be an ExtraTerrestrial Spacecraft, ETS, rather than a UFO, Unidentified Flying Object, so they "believed in it" as a UFO for the time being and did not "believe in it" as an ETS.

Jim and John in their respective positions, along with their wives and kids of various ages, stared in wonder at the UFO and excitedly speculated among themselves about what it was and what it might do. Suddenly the UFO began to glide in gently toward shore and landed on the beach, putting down what appeared to be landing struts. Jim and John agreed to each proceed toward the UFO and told their families to please stay put in case the object might be dangerous in some way. The families agreed and Jim and John arrived at the UFO and started talking to each other about what to do next.

They were feeling a strange sort of nervous ambivalence or cross between natural fear and intense curiosity. Their pratyaksha, direct personal experiencing, was becoming increasingly vivid and unusual.

After about five minutes standing there before the object, an opening appeared in the UFO and a ramp came out and down on to the sand. Then some rather tall beings, about eight to nine feet in height, walked peacefully down the ramp toward Jim and John in a non-threatening manner.

One of the five giant beings then spoke in good american accent English to Jim and John and said, "We are human beings from another planet that orbits another star some several light years away from your planet and your sun. This UFO is no longer a UFO for you, it is an ETS, an ExtraTerrestrial Spaceship. The intelligent thing to do is therefore to stop believing in it as a UFO and begin believing in it as an ExtraTerrestrial Spacecraft. If you want total "proof" that it is indeed an ExtraTerrestrial Spacecraft, come aboard and we will take you on a quick trip into space where you can view your planet in the manner of astronauts, and while out in space, look at various books written in our language, observe our peculiar unearthly bodies and see a quick movie of scenes from our planet and yet other planets and alternative human races to verify that we are space-travelling ExtraTerrestrials. You will not be gone long. You can trust us to bring you back within an hour, your time."

Jim and John liked the idea, went on board, took the offered trip, and were delivered back on shore about fifty minutes later. They were both wide-eyed and stunned right down to the tips of their toes. The ET's said goodbye and took off in their ETS into the night sky, which rapidly disappeared from sight.

Jim went back to his family and told them the whole story. They believed him as a reliable witness and authority, which illustrates agama. John went back to his family also and told them the whole story. His kids believed him, but his wife could not handle the information and began to berate him for what she called "making up some silly story over some obvious Experimental Government Aircraft, an EGA." She said, practically shouting, "You fool, that was no ETS nor even a UFO, it was an EGA." She said that she had heard that the government is planning a fake alien invasion to scare everybody and give even more reasons to eliminate civil liberties to create a police state. She even included that the so-called 'aliens' were undoubtedly government personnel dressed up to resemble frightening, outlandish entities like in the movies 'Signs' or 'Independence Day'. Of course, John argued back (pramana) reasonably that the entities were eight or nine feet in height, had shown all sorts of 'proof' of their extraterrestrial origin, and acted in a distinctly friendly and gentlemanly, courteous manner as befits intelligent, ethical and non-threatening people. But, on hearing this, she became even more upset that it was all a "government plot" and would not listen to reason. John, getting ever more frustrated, pointed out that he could easily believe that there is a possible government plot to fake a frightening pseudo-alien invasion and that it was no doubt for such purposes they had created propaganda movies to create a fear of alien invaders, but that his very experience confirms how disgusting and wrong such government plotting could be.

Working With Alternative Reality Models

In our little sci-fi story, we have condensed elements of many contemporary sightings and experiences of UFO's, EGA's and ETS's. In any such story or narrative, where we are suspending judgement as to the reality or unreality of any phenomenological experience or belief of any particular experiencer or thinker, we can only lay out some alternative reality models as follows:

1) The object in question was a UFO, in which case is there something we should do about it if it turns out to be the most probable reality?

2) The object in question was an EGA, in which case is there something we should do about it if turns out to be the most probable reality?

3) The object in question was an Hallucination of some competent engineers who believe in 'spirits' like Thales, the first real philosopher of the West. What to do about that, if anything?

4) The object in question is an ETS, in which case is there something we should do about if it turns out to be the most probable reality?

By keeping our belief and disbelief options open, thus 'bracketing' Reality, we are on the most firm ground of Phenomenology and thus genuinely scientific in our thinking according to Edmund Husserl, the early Twentieth Century German philosopher. This is the essence of Multiple Reality Modelling.

Alternative Realities Have Causal Texture

Alternative Realities have Causal Texture. If we take the four phenomenological alternative reality models derived from our story, the causal texture of each would tend to be assigned as follows:

1- Since many witnesses do experience direct experiential contact with ExtraTerrestrial Intelligences and reliably report friendly, highly ethical and intelligent behaviour on the part of such beings for the most part in spite of their reactions of animal fear of strange beings, we have to say that ETS as a Reality Model is probably the most reliable Causal Texture.

2- Since the American and British governments are probably quite capable of manipulating their citizenry in a nefarious and propagandistic or disinformational campaign to create further terror beyond their possibly CIA controlled Muslim 'Terrorist' alarms and possible acts of fake-terrorism to eliminate civil liberties, the EGA Reality Model is probably the most misleading Causal Texture.

3- Since some witnesses sometimes go off their heads and build up their imaginations and public claims to get attention and be regarded as socially important people, their testimony may be clearly some mixture of Fact and Fantasy as a Reality Model, which mixture gives an ambiguous Causal Texture.

4- And finally, since a UFO as a Reality Model is indeed an 'unidentified' phenomenon, it remains in a state of indeterminate Causal Texture.

When we study such Causal Texture, we are not saying, (a) there is an ETS, or (b) there is an outlandish government plot, or (c) the witnesses are deluded attention seekers, or (d) there is a UFO whose actual nature cannot ever be determined.

• I do not believe in Aliens because I am a Phenomenologist; I do not disbelieve in Aliens because I am an Ontologist or Multiple Realist.
• I do not believe in Government Conspiracies because I am a Phenomenologist; I do not disbelieve in Government Conspiracies because I am an Ontologist or Multiple Realist.
• I do not believe in Deluded Attention Seekers because I am a Phenomenologist; I do not disbelieve in Deluded Attention Seekers because I am an Ontologist or Multiple Realist.
• I do not believe in UFO's because I am a Phenomenologist; I do not disbelieve in UFO's because I am an Ontologist or Multiple Realist.

Viable Multiple Reality Modelling with Causal Texture requires that we suspend both Belief and Disbelief as we know them. Because we suspend Belief, we cannot be Folk Psychologists; because we suspend Disbelief, we cannot be Eliminative Materialists or Postmodernists. Our surrounding world of our concern, our existential sphere of anxiety and care, is filled with positive and hopeful causal elements, negative and threatening causal elements, ambiguous causal elements and indeterminate causal elements. Adequate decision-making requires the complete, intelligent and unprejudiced handling of these elements by both us as individuals and by the organisations of which we are a part, which can include the whole of our society, subject as it is to heavy propaganda, but also seemingly capable of rising up in protest against what may easily be wrong and abusive government intentions.

Multiple Reality As Learning

As we find ourselves in an increasingly tense, threatening and complex world of culture clashes and struggles between the Super-Rich of the New World Order and the common people everywhere, it is clear that something strange is happening to Reality. It is not what it used to be for any one of us, whether as an individual or a particular society, nation or culture. The human race is having a massive nervous breakdown combined with a dreadful cognitive failure. The need for mankind to learn how to learn has never been more pressing within historical knowledge. Never have the problems of the world been so totally global; never have the real solutions been so necessarily global.

Unethical leaders seem intent on endless abuse of the ignorant masses with apparent design to mis-educate and hypnotize the masses to their own detriment. Mega-Monopolies and Privatisation are being foist nefariously on all in replacement of healthy parallel business competition. Dangerous Genetically Modified crops and foods are being proliferated irresponsibly everywhere with deliberate elimination of natural, healthy organic seeds. Small businesses are being destroyed and people enslaved to the whims of gigantic, ruthless and bureaucratic organisations where creation and variety are being destroyed for routine conformity, which debilitates their managers and employees. How bad these kind of trends can become is a fit subject for both Multiple Reality Modelling and Multiple Scenario Planning. In terms of Causal Texture, the Lies, Abuses and Threats seem to be predominating. An Orwellian nightmare seems to be trying to unfold and control everyone, yet people are massively rebelling and protesting against it in increasing numbers with greater and greater energy and activism. Everything from an Orwellian Borg Empire centred in America to global and societal anarchy and chaos seem possible. Out of all this, there could still emerge a Benign Globalism as somewhat envisioned by H.G. Wells in his book, "The Open Conspiracy", which both the present New World Order and the reactive Anti-globalists have not understood.

Both people in government and business leadership positions, as well as the common people, are desperately in need of a cognitive, philosophical and evolutionary awakening to engage in a real learning process that can make use of Multiple Reality Thinking and Modelling. Can this happen? Will this happen? Or will humanity and its leaders destroy one another in an orgy of ignorance, delusion, falsehood and confusion?

If ever there was a world that needs a huge improvement in its decision-making, it is ours. The methods are available and intelligent facilitators are available, but so far there seems to be vast reluctance. There is still far too much faith in the usual mental settings of belief and disbelief, of assumptions and one-track "Reality". Articles such as this one, working along similar lines, are all over the World Wide Web and often even reach the editorial pages of the newspapers, even though many important issues and subjects are still treated as taboo or "crankish" because ineffectual, thoughtless and arrogant respectable brains in positions of great responsibility do not want to be found out as incompetent or to have their wrong plans questioned seriously. The real Armageddon is not between Evil Aliens and Hapless Earthlings, nor is it between the Bush-Blair Coalition and the Nations of Islam; it is rather the battle in human consciousness between Fixated Reality and Flexible Reality.