[Book Sip] "The World We Perceive Differs from Objective Reality"

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Taking its title from Borges' novel, this book argues that the reality we experience is not governed by the "strictness of angels" but is instead influenced by our limited human perspective. William Egginton, a humanities scholar, literary critic, and philosopher, uniquely connects the lives and works of three figures?Argentine poet and novelist Borges, physicist Heisenberg who proposed the uncertainty principle, and modern Enlightenment philosopher Kant?to explore the nature of reality. Their arguments focus on the difference between "objectively existing" reality and the world we perceive. They conclude that our way of projecting our thinking onto the world can never truly grasp its essence, and that everything exists only as "relations."

According to Borges' premise, the greatest magician was one who cast such powerful spells that he deceived even himself into believing illusions were real. He asked, "Isn't that exactly what we do?"... "We have dreamed the world. We have dreamed that the world is spatially fixed, mysterious, visible, everywhere present, and temporally enduring." p.22-23

According to Kant’s realization, our perception is not of objects existing in the world. Rather, it is a phenomenal form constructed in our minds by giving those objects spatiotemporal shape. p.24

Knowledge is man-made and is the way we understand reality, but the ultimate nature of reality may not correspond to our ideas about it. p.27

What we must truly guard against is the prejudice about how reality ought to be, which blocks the ever-expanding discoveries of the future and thus creates that very wall ourselves. p.60

We always end up speaking not about what nature itself does, but about what we know of nature. The reason we see the electron’s path inside a cloud chamber is that our theory tells us particles move continuously through time and space. But that continuity may not be part of the electron’s reality; it may be part of our reality. p.252

The reason why results like Achilles never catching the tortoise or a quantum pot not boiling when observed seem paradoxical is simple. We project our expectations about reality?expecting it to be singular, continuous, and stable?onto observations that merely connect different points in spacetime. p.256

Our freedom and the responsibility for our choices are neither to be found within our material existence nor are they ghostly entities unbound by that existence. Freedom and responsibility are essential assumptions of a being capable of imagining alternative choices and conditions that allow us to understand this life as one path chosen among many. p.367

Our surroundings overflow with unconscious biases. One example is what Rovelli calls metaphysical prejudice: the belief that reality exists outside and independently of us, and that its mode of existence corresponds to human life as we experience it on Earth. That it is spatially extended and temporally continuous. This belief?and the desire for the world to match our expectations?is so strong that any conceptual construction that supports it is considered reasonable. p.372

The Strictness of Angels | William Egginton | Translated by Kim Han-young | Kkachi | 420 pages | 23,000 KRW