Against Sincerity: Measuring Experience Free From Expectations
Truman Show – Sharing epistemology or converging epistemologically rarely means sharing all knowledge. Knowledge is hedged. We all live a Truman Show life, eventually. Where we don’t know for sure what everyone else knows but we know what they expect of us and we know what we expect of them.
In every act, we experience the world looking at us in anticipation. The world as we perceive it. A recursive stitching of Reality where our interaction with the world solidifies what the world is. On one side of the stitching, a universal interpretation that is exposed to every other act within the universe. The other side of the stitch is the interpretation that allows us to experience understanding. Even if we experience understanding from various points of view, we experience the same understanding. The world is always already made by the time we arrive at it. The question is can we change our destination? Can we change what we arrive to?
When we challenge our understanding and reach a new conclusion, a conclusion that replaces the old understanding with new understanding, it feels as if the world has changed. In an instant, there is something new everywhere. The universe adjusts to your new understanding because your new understanding creates a new universe. Our understanding of new is a further understanding. Our understanding of understanding is an understanding.
What does it mean to have a further, meta-understanding of our biological experience? An understanding of understanding. Does “I know not” mean the same as “I know I know not”?
In the Truman Show, Truman enters the meta-understanding phase of Reality, a glimpse at the other side of the fabric, at the end of the movie. When he walks off stage. First going out to open waters looking for a door he has no reason to expect, Truman eventually hits a wall with some stairs attached. Getting out, climbing up, opening the door, saying goodbye, Truman goes through the fabric, stitching together a new understanding, going into a new self, a new universe.
Truman won’t know how to act in this new world but he will learn to act again. He’ll probably need professional psychological help. Regardless, if we assume Truman will try to fizzle out of the spotlight and lead a normal life, he’ll probably have a change in personality from living in the real world. The world you and I live in. But is this the real world? There is no real world until we act and stitch together Reality.
The moment Truman is opening the door, the moment we impose our interpretation of Reality onto Reality, we’re not opening the door to an already made Reality. The Reality is already made when we step in. Before stepping in, we live in the world that never comes.
The world that never comes in this example is Truman’s old personality that expects to live in a cookie cutter world, everyone is nice to him, he’s protected. As soon as Truman tries to integrate to real life (and the reason he’ll probably need psychological help) he’ll feel like he’s stepping through into the old world. The world that never comes. Yet he has to act in the world that is already made (already made in part by his own anticipation). In psychological terms, Truman may be traumatized and have to learn how to deal with unmet expectations and forming new reaction to deal with those expectations. He would form new expectations with or without psychological help but the professional help will help him understand how expectations are structures we build, doors we ourselves construct with the resources we have. Once built, these are the doors we open and walk through to meet the already made.
The evidence of the door is present when we walk through it and encounter a world that can be measured and touched and interacted with. This gives us clues into where we come from.
Each door we step through, each door we look for, is based on our understanding of the world that never comes. The world we come from. We’re reminded of this alienation when we face puzzlement and confusion. Our puzzlement is way more real than our memories but our memories are more important for our anticipation. We rather anticipate without worry or with ecstasy than anticipate in puzzlement, in the world that is already made.
We rather anticipate the world we come from, a memory of home. We’re forced to walk out the door because the world we come from is not a world that can host us. In the already made, we try to make home.
The problem is when we confuse the already made with our home and our anticipation becomes numb to what cannot be fought. Doors stay shut. We become young Truman again. Using sincere dogma as a truth to based on emotional response; our emotional response being a stitch in Reality.
When Truman is about to open the door for the first time, he’s warned by a voice coming from the sky that through the door there are no truths. Truman will not depend on the world he came from to navigate the world he came from. Truman, opening the door, will depend on the world he came from to interpret and bring into being the ready made. Not depending on truth to navigate but on interpretation, interpretation reciprocally creating the already made. In this creativity, we can re-shape the ready made and make it more homely.
