Have you ever seen yourself in one of those video screens hanging in a drugstore or other retail store? You look up and see a woman walking into the store. You're surprised. It's you. We don't see ourselves from that perspective or angle very often. From above, a woman, pushing open a door, looking up. I've always found it strange but now I stop and stare for a moment at that woman and her child entering Duane Reade. "There I am."
Last week I finished the Hawking book and tried to wrap my mind around the model-dependent realism with which he explains the origin of our universe...where "one can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration." In the chapter entitled, "What is Reality?" I find familiarity when he quotes the view of philosopher David Hume, "who wrote that although we have no rational grounds for believing in an objective reality, we also have no choice but to act as if it is true."
This is where I am at: as if observing myself as I go about daily tasks on a small screen from a foreign angle. Pushing myself forward in a reality that I can not comprehend or believe but have no choice but to act as if it's true. Everyone else is, and then there is the fact that I have not seen you in almost sixteen months. So I watch: There I am. I have no choice.