your eyes deceive you
what you see is not the truth
it’s all illusion
The sun rises in the East. The sun sets in the West.
In a deeply divided, highly politicized culture these might be the only statements that garner universal agreement.
Which would be great, except for one challenge:
They’re not true.
Bear with me here. I’m not about to argue that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
It’s actually more elementary than that.
The sun doesn’t rise or set at all.
In the solar system, the sun is fixed. Everything else is moving. Earth and the other planets are orbiting around the sun, at various rates. Earth’s moon orbits around Earth.
We perceive the sun to be rising and setting because Earth is spinning on its own axis as it revolves around the sun.
Sunrise and sunset are illusions.
This is not a secret, obviously. We know this. And yet it’s easy to forget.
First, because it doesn’t feel like we are spinning. Your house doesn’t appear to be moving. Your street looks the same. From your perspective the sun rises and sets.
Second, because nobody questions the narrative. We are all parties to an unwritten social contract to agree to this false representation of what is happening.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Speaking about sunrise and sunset is easy.
It’s a little mind-bending to wrap our heads around the fact that we are sitting on a rock that is spinning around itself while rotating around a big fireball. It’s certainly easier to speak about sunrises and sunsets. Those words are essentially heuristics for what is actually happening.
So it’s all fine, because we have all agreed to this. And because we all share the same perspective on this.
But every so often, it’s important to remind ourselves that the sun does not rise or set.
This narrative is false.
In this remembering, we are prompted to examine other narratives we accept as true simply because they emerge from a shared perspective.
Just because everyone seems to agree on the narrative, and just because what we see seems to match the story, doesn’t mean it’s true.
It’s all an illusion.
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