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Sure it's not that often that you utter the words "Snooki", "Science" and "Plato" in the same breath. And hopefully you'll never have to again. But each can illuminate a thing or two about this concept that we call "reality". I'll explain. The Jersey Shore, in all of its tan-in-a-can, embrace your inner-guido vulgarity, has become a national phenomenon-the hair-gelled shining pinnacle (nadir?) of the reality TV craze.
But "Reality TV" was always a tricky proposition; yes, we innocently laughed at the youthful going-ons of MTV's The Real World during the early days of Reality TV; sure, we were entertained by the back-stabbing "reality" of Survivor and we cheered when small town singers with big hearts and even bigger voices championed on despite the harsh judgements of an imperious Simon Cowell during our American Idol infatuation. But, really, did any of us honestly think that what became known as "Reality TV" had anything remotely to do with reality?
At best, one might say that "Reality TV" represented a staged and garish misrepresentation of day-to-day reality; a scripted, air-brushed and digitally enhanced perversion of what some TV executives have snake-oiled as reality. Pro Wrestling is more real.
Ok, enough of Snooki and her ilk; what about science and reality? Surely science can lead us to the promised land of "real" reality? It does if you agree with the notion that all of reality lends itself towards sensorial observation; that "real" reality can be readily measured, quantified and observed. And if you agree with that premise, then the empirical sciences can certainly be wonderful tools for deconstructing aspects of reality - at least those aspects that can be operationalized into repeatable experimental format.
The problem is that not everything fits into that neat little box. How does a researcher operationalize what philosopher Bertrand Russell called the "insoluble" questions of existence? Questions like "Do I have a soul? Is there a purpose to the universe? What happens to a person after they die?" Those questions simply don't lend themselves to observation under a microscope.
Yet despite that fact, people like molecular biologist Dean Hamer claimed to have indeed found some pretty heavy things while looking under a microscope. In his 2004 controversial book entitled The God Gene, Hamer reduced God - or the gene that leads to the pursuit of God or other types of spiritual experience - down to a variation on an otherwise unremarkable gene known as VMAT2. Now, some more cynical than I might argue that in searching for God, Dr. Hamer might have been looking through the wrong end of the telescope - or, in his case, the microscope.
But even if we were to agree that the empirical sciences can actually fully illuminate physical reality, is that the end of the reality story? Plato sure didn't think so. That's because Plato was a metaphysical philosopher - as in beyond the physical. In fact, he posited a cosmogony where the realm of "Ideal Forms" was primary and the physical world was just a sort of imperfect shadow or copy of that perfect "idea" realm. Quick example: the idea of a sphere is perfect and exists beyond space and time; but my basketball is a scuffed and imperfect copy of that transcendent and perfect sphere.
The philosopher Pythagoras went even further; he believed that reality was essentially mathematical, harmonic and vibrational - in a way, very similar to today's string theory. In fact, not only did Plato and Pythagoras reject that the material world was the end-all be-all of reality, they in turn felt that our senses couldn't be trusted because they would trick us into believing that the physical world was all that there was. Instead, they felt that our minds via reason and contemplative mediations on mathematics and philosophy could expand our level of awareness to apprehend this larger non-material reality.
An analogy that I discuss in my book to illustrate the ancient Greeks' view of the relationship between the reality of the material world and the un-seen metaphysical realm is that of an iceberg; all that we can see via our senses is the 10% that's floating above the water - but there's much more to that reality iceberg lurking beneath the surface...kind of like we wish Snooki would do.
