Reality and Uselessness

Useless to whom?

Humans can’t get much reality. We’re not built for it.

Being a tool using, tool creating species, we don’t see things as they are, we more-or-less automatically see them as they could be when used for our purposes. If something has no perceived utility, we don’t generally register its existence as significant - worthy of thought.

Watch someone pick up a rock. They’ll weigh it in their hand. “What can I use this for? How far could I throw it?” Aside from those qualities of the rock, the rest of it, it’s shape, its color, its history, how it came to be there will generally not even occur to them, unless they are a geologist, in which case the question will be, “How can I use this to do some geology?” If no utility comes to mind, they will eventually drop the rock, or casually throw it away.

The usefulness of a thing - or a person - to any given individual is shaped by their assumptions, their goals and their training. Note that none of these things are qualities of the thing or person being observed and evaluated. They are qualities of the observer. If you are the thing being evaluated, your qualities are just the material that the evaluator, with all their complex filters and installed protocols work upon to produce their evaluation.

Their conclusions are not your fault. Or, really, your virtues either.

Consider a small, simple table. Five different people observe the table. One is a wealthy person, with cultivated taste. One is a furniture maker. One is a wedding planner. One is an economist. One is an artist. Another is someone who wandered in at the last second. I don’t know what he’s doing here.

The first observer, wealthy, sophisticated, is not impressed with the simple, mass produced table. They cannot see how this unimpressive table could be of any use in their artisan, finely crafted decor. The furniture maker is not particularly taken with the design, but notices that this sort of table can be quickly produced, inexpensively and could create some sales in certain markets. The wedding planner thinks the table is too small to be useful in the banquets they plan, maybe as a utility table, if covered with a nice tablecloth. The economist sees it as industrial output - a product with a particular niche, probably belonging to a working class family. The artist sees how the table fills space, how the light lays across its top, how the perspective would be reproduced in a two-dimensional form, like a drawing.

The 5+1 fellow who just wandered in sees the table as an imaginary construct created for purposes of a philosophical demonstration. It exists only within the argument, and isn’t really a table at all. Pardon me while I throw him out.

There now. All these people are seeing the same table. But they aren’t understanding the fact of the table in the same way. Each of them comes to an almost immediate conclusion as to what the table is for, not what it is in itself.

The artist’s perspective is not particularly useful to the furniture maker, even though they are both human, both looking at the same object. So which of them are “right?” which is “reality?”

They all are. And none of them are. And “reality” is all those things, and far more - the composition of the wood, the glue, the weight, the space occupied, the time in which it exists, its history, its future, all of these things are a part of the reality of the table.

And we get only a bit of that, filtered through who we are, and the habits of observation that operate between our senses and our conscious minds.

All the conclusions that a human draws about anything - including other humans - are based in incomplete data, usually reductive, reduced by the habits of utility and the limitations of sense data. We will be right in some sense, wrong in some sense, and ignorant of the majority of traits and factors. A verdict of “useless” is, well, not particularly useful, since the question is immediately called forth, “Useless to whom and for what?”

Mister 5+1 just took the table. He didn’t say what he’s going to use it for.

Embrace uselessness.