The YELLOW BUS

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     Your Worldview will be the things you believe are true, which means “real.” Your Worldview will be the content of ideas used by your brain to guide your life. To help bring the next “true” observation about reality into focus, consider the following story:

     You are out for a walk on a rural country road. There is little traffic, so you walk in the roadway, enjoying the beautiful scenery as you go around a sharp bend in the road. Your cell phone “dings,” so you stop and pull it out and begin reading the lengthy text message. At this point, you are focused on your smartphone unaware that a yellow bus is barreling down the road behind you and coming around the curve. The driver on the bus is distracted by some unruly kids.

     So, here is a question—does reality physically exist independent of you? Aristotle said it does. Plato and other philosophers, from ancient Greece through to today, say it does not. Some say it is just created in your mind or some other consciousness’s mind. 

Here is another question—are your senses and consciousness capable of grasping reality and guiding your actions for survival? Aristotle says they are. Plato says you cannot grasp actual reality, only a “virtual” one, a supernatural dimension of essences. Eighteenth-century philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and his followers, said you could not be sure of anything. They said your mind subjectively creates your ideas independent of external facts. Plato and Kant’s viewpoints sever man’s tool of cognition, his conceptual faculty, from reality, undercutting his mind.

     Suppose your subconscious mind detects the approaching vehicle’s sound pattern and causes you to turn and look. And your conscious mind recognizes the entity and concept of a “bus” and recalls its nature and the nature of your body, and then projects the probable outcome if the bus hits you. And you step off the roadway. Then Aristotle was right.

     On the other hand, if the bus does not really exist, or if the reality in your mind is a kind of virtual reality rather than an “unknowable” real one, then you have nothing to worry about—right? Or, if the bus does exist but you cannot trust your senses and mind, then you would have no reason to move—right?

     If you, deep down inside, believe that reality is not real and does not exist independent of you, or you cannot trust your senses and mind, then stand there and see what happens. One thing you can know for sure—in a few seconds, your senses will grasp the actual reality of the bus, and then a few seconds later, you will not exist in that reality! 

     For centuries, philosophers have proposed anti-reality or anti-reason ideas to explain our existence and our functioning in this world. Phrases you hear daily in our society are evidence of their influence. Phrases such as—“You can’t know anything for sure.” and “Follow your heart, not your head.” We need to decide whether we believe ideas promoted by anti-reality, anti-reason philosophers or we believe Aristotle.

     We will see the yellow bus again later.

[Excerpt from the book, "INTELLOPY: Survival and Happiness in a Collapsing Society with Advancing Technology" by JJ Kelly  https://intellopy.com/ ]