Things

How do you know there's anything outside your own head?  The only evidence you have for the world comes from your senses, after all; nothing more than electrical signals.  What if you're the only person there is, and everything else is just in your imagination?


This is an idea which can be credited, I think, largely to philosophers' pleasure in messing with people.  It is the sort of self-justifying skepticism which dilutes and destroys knowledge, attempting to measure reality by methods applicable only to the spiritual (that is, the unreal); similar arguments pervade the political world, where misinformation is the coin of the realm.  And yet in their own minds, people know better; they know that there is such a creature as truth, that there are immaterial forms of existence, that the world is a thing beyond their own selves.  Such knowledge is born of human experience, of our interactions with the world and what those interactions produce in and around us.

But, science culture that we are, we insist on analysis, on tracing the mechanism of a thing before we admit its existence.  There is no particular harm in this; indeed, analysis is the intermediary step to developing any sort of knowledge, and so a great good.  The problem, as I see it, is one of vocabulary, as so many hindrances to understanding seem ultimately to be.  "How do you know there is a world, when you rely on your nervous system to describe it to you?"  To be sure, it makes as much sense to wonder how one can claim to walk while blithely assuming their feet do it for them.  But I get ahead of myself.

I don't suggest an independent reality, mind; the more I discover of the world, the less I am inclined to suggest an independent anything.  But neither can I bring myself to see the world as Only mind.  Consciousness pervades, yes, but it does only throughout we the conscious.  Rather, I see a reciprocal relationship between ourselves and the Out There, the world beyond our minds.  As such, I cannot begin to imagine what such a world might be like because, as that sad philosophy major with his third beer is so fond of reminding us, all we really see is light waves, not the actual things around us; what I see as green and what you see as green could be totally different and we wouldn't even know, blah blah blah.  Still, this is tripe born of sense; with only secondary effects to judge, primary causes can never be more than mystery.

It is here that science would have us stop our inquiry.  For, indeed, if secondary effects are all we have available to judge, they are in fact the things-in-themselves, as far as intents and purposes go.  This perspective fails us, however, when we begin to wonder about our relationship to those primary causes; when you say that the light wave is the thing-in-itself, you run up against such absurdities as reality changing when measured, and physics brings us full circle back to the latest in ancient Greek mental masturbation.

Mind analyzes matter, and analysis creates mind.  This is how the world, and the self, grow; few might be expected to object to the idea of a dynamic consciousness (or perhaps not; such is a staple of my own outlook, at least..), but a growing material world is a trickier notion to wrap the materialist's mind around.  It is a perspective I've found referred to as the emergent nature of reality, the tendency for characteristics of the universe to be discovered more or less in lockstep with our developing ability to analyze them.  To say that atoms, for instance, predated atomic theory is a given of the scientific outlook; it is as well to say that the depths and horizons of reality yet unknown are legion now, truly and literally existing beyond our current scope of inquiry.  To say that these truths exist independent of us the inquirers is a novel instance of an ancient problem involving sound of a tree in the forest; if a law of the universe manifests itself as apparent chaos, as all laws do to a sufficiently limited perspective, does the law yet exist?  Which came first, math or the mathematician?

I don't think a scientific perspective would have and real difficulty with the above questions, though perhaps some impatience with the flighty existential speculations; Yes, there are laws of the universe we don't know yet; Yes, those laws are still laws now; No, discovering them doesn't influence their essential existence, just our understanding of it.  Such, again, is like unto my take on reality: Yes, it's there; No, I don't know quite what it is, but I'm learning from the ways it manifests itself to me.  Where I may perhaps differ from the researcher of things concrete is my idea of the goal of research, and its limitations.  See, I don't think there can ever, in principle, be an endpoint to discovery; there may come a time when the human mind overreaches it's inherent limitations (though such is far from certain), but I believe an intelligence of theoretically infinite capacity could form new knowledge of the universe for as long as time allowed; indefinitely, if time were ever overcome as a limiting factor.  It seems absurd to me, given the progress discovery has made in human history, that there should ever be a wall around the universe that could not be dissected, or a truly "smallest" particle, though these are the white whales of scientific inquiry, itself at heart just a quest for conclusions.  No, the goal is the growing, both for us in our learning and the universe in its being.

One last point, tangent to my subject here but touched briefly in its introduction, is the fallacy of asking how one can know something exists when all evidence for it comes by way of the human nervous system.  I think this arises from accidentally doubling one's primary identity; claiming to both be and have a brain, then wailing that you can never know more than your brain tells you.  This is of course true as far as it goes, because one cannot know things without their brain to do the knowing.  We do exist as a consciousness additional to our brains, but such existence doesn't have the capacity for thought; spirit cannot remember things, cannot reflect on experiences, has no cognitive capacity whatsoever, because these are abilities which arise from the mechanism, the physical structure, of the brain.  These abilities, I suspect, are why we as spirit manifest ourself as such baggage-ridden, divided creatures, but such is one of my own outer horizons, and this is not the hour to go exploring afresh.