On Living Our Explanations

About the Book

People have always tried to explain whatever they want to talk about or have to deal with in their worlds. To explain something to oneself or to others makes it comprehensible. If the explanation becomes socially tenable, it provides a person or a tribe with a perspective on their world, a way of knowing it. That perspective becomes their reality. It is a virtual reality, created by people for the use of those people. Virtual realities are products of our talk and our minds, which archive and channel the meaning of things. First, our minds get created, and then our minds create us—personally and collectively. All human worlds (that we know anything about) function as they do based upon the meaning of their worlds and them in it. Most of the other animals on earth don’t have much to say about their pasts or their future. People do because they invented the concept of the past and the concept of the future in order to think and talk about them. Those who superseded us in our particular cultures invented explanations to give virtual reality to everything they wanted to talk about or do something about. We live in and through those explanations, as we understand them. We invent our explanations on top of those we inherit, and that we and our progenies will grow up living in and through. This counter-intuitive premise is that we do not live in any natural world. We live consciously (and even subconsciously) in our worlds as we have explained them—or could explain them. Physiological or biological events certainly do occur. But we deal with them according to what they mean—to us. Random events like accidents do occur. But we can explain them before they occur and after they occur. There is nothing that occurs in our worlds that we cannot explain or justify in some way. Whether or not it rains is something we do not control. But to talk about it or think about it, we have to do so in and through our explanations. Your lover may be dumping you for his or her own a priori explanations. How you deal with it depends upon how you explain it to yourself. We live—and we die—in accordance with our explanations of our worlds and of us in them. We live our explanations.

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