Filtering

I’ve always been curious about reality. I can accept that I am sitting in my office chair, my own hands stretched in front of me, touching hard plastic keys on a bluetooth keyboard, each touch producing a change that adds or removes squiggly marks on the screen in front of me, carefully engineered to look like a sheet of white paper suspended in portrait view. Because I’m not using full-screen mode, I can see my background wallpaper on what is called my ”desktop”. Of course, I know it’s not an actual desktop because my keyboard and my coffee cup are sitting on my ”real” desktop. If I tried to place them on the one in front of me, they’d slide off in a crash because the one with the squiggles is 90° perpendicular to my actual desktop, the wooden one that is parallel to the floor. The flat one in front of me, in 5K-retina-display-glass-and-electricity, also has some fancy hard drive icons on it. These represent physical hard drives, but they are not the ”real” hard drives, just graphical user interface (GUI — pronounced ”gooey”) representations of the ”real things.

I’m beginning to think that the ”real world” is probably a bunch of gooey icons too. See if you catch my drift.

The virtual desktop has a ”wallpaper” of nice colors on it, except I know for a fact those colors don’t really exist anywhere except in my own brain. Light is getting in through the specialized openings in my head called ”eyes”, and that light has a variety of wavelengths (all part of a spectrum called ”white light” that is human friendly) that gets interpreted in some fancy way by another part of…