”How real is my reality?”
A question we seldom ask ourselves.
Today more than ever, we lived a cooked-up existence in our own “Plato’s Cave” where we prefer the interplay of shadows on the walls than to make a few steps beyond the borders of our beliefs. In truth, we are the architects of our cave and for this reason, we would never think to leave its narrow yet comforting confines.
The sense that we have a solid grasp of reality is an illusion we entertain out of the comfort of certainty. We are always given to reassure ourselves and others that our grasp on reality is firm and immutable. Then we reach a few minor certainties and a plethora of beliefs, omitting the multitude of factors that skew our perception. Thinking otherwise would leave us with a dismal anxious state gaping down into the void of our knowledge in a universe of vast unknowns.
One of the ways we manifest our reality is through the language we employ to describe our experience of the real and true, or at least what we convince ourselves of to have this quality.
And so, two years ago, I came to face the challenge of linguistic relativity within myself. When I first attempted to translate our engagement with reality from visual language to the written word, I stumbled on an odd notion that eloquently described our fragile and fluctuating relationship with reality. As far as visual language was concerned, I never bothered to reach for conceptual descriptions, but when it came to written language the ideal of conceptual solidity it aims for didn’t seem that firm when explored in an informal and organic context. Even when a body of text is formally written with thorough conceptual clarity, the reader would process it with a hyperconceptual twist.
A hyperconcept is a semiotic construct formed at the border of conscious and unconscious thought by merging a concept with an abstraction or multiple abstractions that work together to express some other concept that has not yet been defined. The process by which hyperconcepts are formed is an involuntary thought process, as the abstraction is only computationally recognized and hastily communicationally attributed to a concept. When scrutinised, the potential meaning of a hyperconcept differs from the established conceptual definition. Hyperconcepts are often set aside or dismissed as myths, superstitions, symbols, equivocations, figments of the imagination or mere nonsense when they are not hastily assimilated as accurate. However, there lies some truth behind hyperconcepts as semiotic expressions that attempt to describe various mechanical or psychological phenomena. They are raw, unpolished, introductory expressions to something we struggle to describe to ourselves and others.
”The Hyperconcept - Between Concept and Abstract” pursues the hyperconcept through various topics like the internet, psychology, dreams, ideology, fairy tales and conspiracy theories where our engagement with reality is revealed through the language we use to describe our experience of what we perceive as real.
You can find the book on Amazon in Kindle or Hardcover format.