With the emergence of generative software like Suno to generate music for texts and lyrics, I’ve become taken with songwriting. Ideas for stories and essays that have never seen the light of day have now found expression. Because I tend to obsess over every word, the more limited word count makes songs more attainable; and, without the need for links and formatting, editing on the bus and train is easier while commuting. Finally, it’s just fun to listen to all the iterations Suno’s algorithms spit out on the way to the final version. So, thanks to a couple millennia of music makers that provided the training data; and, thanks to the developers who formulated the math to derive new songs from that deep sonic well. This song, “Run Into Reality”, is inspired by Dallas Willard’s potent observation that “reality is what you run into when you’re wrong”. The philosophical and pop cultural references are legion, so notes are appended.
There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.
Four important revisions to my own definition of worldview were in order. First was a recognition that a worldview is not just a set of basic concepts but a fundamental orientation of the heart. Second was an explicit insistence that at the deepest root of a worldview is its commitment to and understanding of the “really real.” Third was a consideration of behavior in the determination of what one’s own or another’s worldview really is. Fourth was a broader understanding of how worldviews are grasped as story, not just as abstract propositions.