René Magritte (1898-1967) was a Belgian ‘surrealistic’ artist, whose paintings often stimulated 

feeling of surprise, required careful consideration and often challenged the viewers’ contradictory  notions about reality.One of the many thought-provoking visual artworks by Magritte is his famous  painting of a (smoker’s) ‘pipe’ — with a caption: ‘this is not a pipe’.  

It makes you wonder — how come an artist draws a particular ‘thing’ and says it’s not the ‘thing’?  

Although — the message is clear (and profound): However realistic a painting of a pipe maybe, it is  NOT the actual pipe — a ‘painting’ of a thing is not the same as that ‘actual thing’. 

In general, a ‘model’, say in the form of an expression or a description or a depiction of any part of  the reality, [be it visual-artistic or poetic or literary or musical or kinaesthetic (through dance) or  even mathematical] is not the same as that actual part of the reality.  

Here, by ‘reality’ I mean ‘natural process’ involving anything or everything happening — as a part  or as the whole of universe — leading to the assertion that there’s nothing we can exclude and  categorize as a “non-natural happening”.  

Furthermore, it can also be asserted that such a ‘model’ of a part of reality can never express or  describe that part ‘completely’. However realistic a model may appear, there always remains some  

or the other aspect of the ‘thing’ or the ‘process’ to be taken into account in its description. In other  words, the reality can never be exhausted by its model based on our conception or interpretation of  it.  

An immediate consequence of this assertion is that there will always be ‘more’ to the reality than its  description. This consequence implies the attribute of ‘objectivity’ associated with reality.  

The notion of reality can be expanded further by considering one more painting by Magritte, in  which he delivers a portrait of an artist portraying a bird.  

As discussed above, the artist’s act of “portraying a bird” can be interpreted as the act of modelling  (‘depicting’) reality (in which there exists a ‘bird’) — and, Magritte’s act of portraying represents  the act of modelling (‘depicting’) another reality, in which there exists is ‘an artist portraying a  bird’.  

This is nothing but depicting “a depiction of reality”, expressing “an expression of reality”,  imaging “an image of reality” — modelling a “model of reality”!S  

uch an example leads to a somewhat elusive conclusion, though it brings the notion of reality at a  higher level of consistency: the ‘description’ or ‘depiction’ or ‘expression’ or ‘image’ of a part of  reality is ‘yet another part’ of the reality.  

Thus, in general, the act of “modelling a natural process” is yet another natural process — in  consistency with the assertion made above that nothing can be excluded from ‘nature’, nothing can  be categorized as a ‘non-natural process’. 

Here, a few remarks related to the term ‘artificial’ are necessary: We come across this term quite  often, especially, in the context of ‘artificial intelligence’. Its dictionary meaning is: “made or  produced by human beings, rather than occurring naturally”. This meaning implies a separation or  distinction between the process of ‘human beings creating or producing something’ and the process  of ‘something occurring naturally’.  

I think such a distinction is just a matter of ‘convenience’.  

A careful consideration implies that it is unjustifiable — due to the lack of any fundamentally  physics-based criterion that could be used for categorizing the process of “humans making  something” as a non-naturally occurring process.  

The occurrence of the process of ‘human beings creating or producing something’ is very much  ‘within the universe’, very much within the wholeness of the reality and hence it is very much a  natural process. (Such a conviction has profound implications, which will be explored later.)  

Nevertheless, one can talk about the sub-categories of reality within its wholeness — a physics based perspective implies three broad categories: sensory experiential reality, beyond-sensory  experiential reality and seemingly transcendent reality.  

These categories might help us in answering the questions I raised at the end of my last post —  Does the limit of asking ‘how and why’ reach when we arrive at ‘a law nature’? Or Is it just a  tentative halt?  

But before that — What is the meaning of each of those categories of reality? Are those separated  by clear-cut borders?  

Exploration continues…

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-vikram-athalye/recent-activity/articles