What is Reality? Using Cognitive Surgery

Q: How does everyone else around me know that this world is real? I don't have a clue, all I see is images. But everyone in the streets knows that this world is real. What makes them know more than me?

The existential angst demonstrated in this real question I answered in another forum is common and becoming more common every day. The belief that existence exists because our consciousness creates existence takes two forms:

• the primacy of consciousness, which is, "An argument as to why the ultimate nature of reality is mental not material; http://www.peterrussell.com/SP/PrimConsc.php;
• and the primacy of perception, which is the "problematic of human subjectivity in its relationship to the body and to its world." http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/eps/PES-Yearbook/1998/albano.html
  
  

A:Those "images" you see are called "cognoscendi." Those are objects of cognition, according to multiple dictionaries of philosophy.

If you have objects of cognition, you have cognition. Why do you think they are merely images? If you mean "images" as visual sensations of things which may not be what they appear to be, you are not alone in your estimation of them. But whether they are what they appear to be, the fact that they are images of something means that something exists that is more than just the image you perceive.

Kant had this problem, and solved it by inventing what he named "noumena." Noumena (plural of noumenon), Kant thought, are the "real" reality behind the images. But why should there be something behind the curtain?

You can't have cognition of things that don't exist unless you are mentally ill, and Kant knew this, so we are not discussing mental illness. We are discussing how people evaluate the things they perceive.

You may wrongly identify them once in a while. Someone who hears voices or "sees things" is identifying the objects of his cognition wrongly. You might also mistake one thing for another. We've all done this.

Otherwise, if you have cognition, it is cognition of real objects, meaning the objects exist, that the "image" is an image of "something". As to whether or not the images are the "real reality," that is a matter of metaphysics, and you are quite free to believe the metaphysic of your choice. You can believe the metaphysics that leave you feeling insecure and fearful, and as if you know nothing, as you have suggested that you feel.

Or you can accept the metaphysics that allow you to feel that you do indeed have the faculty of knowledge, that knowledge is knowable, and that you are a person of capability who is walking through a real world.

Why should the "images" of your perception be something other than what you identify it to be? Why do you fear that there is something "behind" what you perceive? Science will break down the physics of every object in existence if man has enough time in the universe to do so. Every time physics reveals something previously unknown about any object, it is like peeling the layers of an onion.

Will you be satisfied that things are what you perceive them to be when physics finally gets to the inside layer? No, because there is no "inside layer." The more we know about anything, the more there is to discover. Every answer creates more questions. That is the nature of man's mind.

It is the nature of man's mind and not the nature of the universe, because it is man's nature to discover. There ought to be nothing to fear in the discovery that the wizard behind the curtain is merely a man. That is the purpose in the doctrine of naturalism---to prove that all things are natural, and not as Kant would have us believe, unknowable. Noumena are absolutely unknowable, and your fear is that you cannot know what "everyone in the streets" seems to know.

You already know what "everyone in the streets" knows, and that is the world is something to be known, not something that is unknowable. But you must accept that the "images" are merely man's means of dealing with the world, and that what science ultimately shows us about the inside layers of the onion do not change the fact that a table is a table, and that a rose by any other name is still a rose.

We all, everyone of us, is constantly doing "cognitive surgery" on reality; in other words, each of us is constantly re-evaluation the things we think we know--when it is appropriate to re-evaluate them. But you cannot re-evaluate what you fail to accept in the first place because you will never accept any re-evaluation. You will still consider your perceptions and your thoughts about them to be about "images" instead of about the reality of acceptance.

You can remain in existential angst, unaccepting of the metaphysics that says your mind is capable and reliable; or you breath a sigh of relief in the knowledge that the only difference between you and the average Joe is that Joe knows the world changes, that he can accept change, and that for now, the images he sees are the images that make the world go 'round.

The choice is yours.

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If A Tree Falls in The Forest--the Primacy of Existence

I originally published this blog Thursday, August 7, 2008. It has received popular reader support both here and at Scribd. I republish it today because of its popularity, but also because it answers a very common question with an unusual epitemological position: that the answer has nothing to do with the definition of either "sound" or of "noise."

If A Tree Falls In the Forest--the Primacy of Existence

We have all heard the question "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound or a noise?" We have heard it ten, hundreds, or thousands or more times.What does that question have to do with the description of Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) as "A belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the practices and institutions associated with such belief"? [See this blog dated 09.05.2008]

MN, concerned with defining such things, and with the denial of what is non-existent, and with replacing belief in the supernatural or the lack thereof with a certainty about the natural cosmology of the universe and existence itself, has an interest in addressing "The Tree in the Forest."

Every answer I have ever read misses the essential point, which is not about "sound or sound waves being heard or not heard," nor about whether sound is different from noise. Those are the excuses of metaphysicians who will not, or cannot, face the real question, or who have no idea that another question more real exists.

The question is: Does existence exist independently of consciousness? When seen in this context, it does not matter if "sound" or "noise" is used as the definition of what happens when the tree falls; it matters whether you think things happen whether or not a consciousness is there to perceive that it happens.

The belief that reality requires a consciousness is gaining in prevalence. It has been a staple of some eastern philosophies for thousands of years. Some western philosophers have advanced the idea. Many young students facing philosophy for the first time have serious existential questions about their own existence. That makes a shameful indictment of how far our "intellectual" standards have plunged since Renaissance scholars brought Jefferson and America's other Founders to an understanding of men's unalienable individual sovereignty. Those modern men and women who doubt their own existence have fallen backward in time 500 years, and can have no conception about their unalienable sovereignty, except what they are lucky enough to glean from between the lines of their teachers words, teachers who tell them their "rights" include all those things which must be provided by other men when they themselves fail to provide it--like health care.

(Deregulation of the health-care industry and extended patent lengths on pharmacuticals would considerably alter the high cost of care and drugs. But that is better left for another blog or two or three.)

To believe that consciousness gives reality to reality, e.g., that "perception is reality," is fallacious logic called the Primacy of Consciousness. (The Primacy of Perception is also a fallacy. ["...perception [as] the causal product of atomic sensations," again e.g., "perception is reality." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty

The Primacy of Existence states that existence exists. http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/primacyofexistence.html

http://www.geocities.com/katholon/poe.htm et al.

Existence exists. Period. There can be no requirement for the conscious perception of a "thing" to make that "thing" real. In this case the thing is whether or not a noise or a sound is generated.

If A Tree Falls, Does It Make a Sound?--the Primacy of Existence continued

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Existence Exists; W. E. Messamore; ACT For America

What “Exists” And Has "Existence"?

Note: Do NOT Click on the Footnote Reference Numbers--They will take you away from this page. Just use them to reference the footnotes.

“Existence” is often referred to as the "Universal Truth.” Sadly, not everyone who asks questions about universal truths knows that they are asking about existence, nor are they always aware of what a “universal” is, nor what “truth” (or “fact” or “reality”) means. It is not uncommon for people to ask, “What is truth?” or “What is reality?” It is not uncommon for them to ask, "Do I exist?"

Often when asking about the “universal truth” it is with the expectation that a secret and mystic explanation will be given, and that perhaps it will be years before they can “divine” what the wise man told them is “the answer to life.”

But more than likely they harbor the wish that they, too, will comprehend this secret, divine, or mystic explanation in one single lecture, in a moment of revelation. Cartoons depict people climbing to the top of a mountain to consult a “wise man.” The comic strip B.C.1 integrated the “wise man” right into the prehistoric era of man, where the “wise men of mysticism,” Socrates and Plato, belong, for those two men are the modern stereotype of the "wise man on the mountain" in Western culture, though both were better thinkers, than to offer the silliness for which they are portrayed.

People who ask about “reality” or “facts” don't always understand that they, too, are asking about existence. Existence is the universal preoccupation of our intellectual lives, because we want to know, “Where did it come from?”

When it is not phrased as "What is reality?" or "How do I know I exist?" or "Isn't the whole world subjective?", or “What exists and what does not?”--then it is provoked of us in the angry, defiant tone of the statement "Prove that I exist!" More often than not it is stated, “Prove God does not exist.”

Knowledge of what exists and what does not has become smudged and greyed, when “existence” has come to be seen merely as the reality of one's “perceptions”; the lines have been blurred, sometimes erased altogether. A person can be convinced that the ego is necessarily egotistical; that nothing one does in life can have any meaning because “in the end we all die”; and that being “dust in the wind” is more significant to the life one leads, than is a statement such as "I rise in the morning to the work of a Man," where "Man" has greater, not less, meaning.

What is the purpose of following a principled life if in the end you just wind up dead? We will get to the answer. more

And What Irony To Find This Blog

After Writing About "Existence"

"Before the scientific community came to a consensus on the Big Bang theory following the discovery of the cosmic radiation echo predicted by Big Bang theorists, many scientists believed in the Steady State theory. In short, they believed that the universe had no definite beginning and that hydrogen atoms were randomly popping into existence somewhere in the universe, supplying the material for all the physical phenomena like stars and planets. Atheists were generally rooting for this theory, understanding that a definite beginning for the physical universe implies its contingency- that it has a cause which is outside itself. As it turned out, the Big Bang has been confirmed in great measure by scientific findings...

"How the atheists managed to adopt the Big Bang theory as evidence for their position confounds me. If there is any interesting history behind this, I’d be curious to know it.

"To elaborate further on why this is a philosophical defeat for atheism: The contemporary atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen is frequently quoted by Christian apologists as saying about causation: “Suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang and you ask me, ‘What made that bang?’ and I reply ‘Nothing, it just happened.’ You would not accept that - in fact you would find my reply quite unintelligible.” Nielsen is quite right on this account. Bangs must have causes because they are finite, contingent events that have a definite beginning."

W. E. Messamore[blog @] http://www.slaying-dragons.com/

A Reply

My reply is taken partially from the top article, and partially from If A Tree Falls In the Forest--the Primacy of Existence and The Loss of Secularism in Naturalism, Part 2: Unjustified True Beliefs:

"If one thing exists in existence, it becomes the proof of the existence of existence," I wrote, above.

This refutes Messamore on his contention that "hydrogen atoms were randomly popping into existence." The theory of "ex nihilo" has long since been abandoned by Christian theologians; things in existence do not just spontaneously appear. If hydrogen atoms actually were randomly popping into existence, they were caused by something else already in existence. What that is may remain unknown for a long time, if in fact "popping hydrogen atoms" turns out to be a justified theory sometime in the future.

Saying that it was God who caused the popping of hydrogen atoms begs two questions: 1) for what purpose God would cause such a thing, or admitting that no human could ever know that answer; and 2) how can this discussion continue between us if God is the automatic answer to everything? more

CAIR Files FEC Complaint

from "Act for America"

The commentary below, from Jihad Watch, discusses the Federal Election Commission complaint that has been filed by CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations). CAIR has filed the complaint alleging that the national distribution this month of the film “Obsession” is an Israeli plot to help get John McCain elected president. In other words, CAIR is using a government agency to try to punish the free speech rights of those who would distribute this must-see film. As far as we can gather, there is no “vote for McCain” messages, either explicitly or implicitly, attached or connected to the distribution. Given the timing of the distribution, it would appear that it was intended to coincide with the 7th anniversary of 9/11. This is not the first action CAIR has taken in its ongoing efforts to suppress our cherished right to free speech. What is most telling is CAIR’s “obsession” with shutting down any speech that would let the American people see the truth about radical Islam. from Act for America" more

actforamerica@donationnet.net

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Necessary Concomitants; The Argument from Animalism

Determinism Alone is Nonsense; Determinism and Free Will
are Necessary Concomitants.
Steve Berthiaume wrote in Atheists Parents.Org http://www.atheistparents.org/pages.php?sc=001&pg=0187 the same kind of thing we read in most "naturalistic" essays these days. He even sounded as if he had lifted the words right out of Naturalism.Org when he said naturalism "is the idea that humans are fully included in the natural world."

I am not a determinist, I am a "free will-ist." I admit the factors which are called "determiners" exist, but not that we have no free will. I am "fully included in the natural world," and if anyone can explain how anything in existence could not be fully included, I'd like the explanation, please. Aside from that, I'd like to know what in existence is only partially included in the natural world. There is no other world. The supernatural world does not exist except as an idea within consciousness that we can talk about. As a concept, even that concept is fully included, but it is not reified.

"Every action has a cause, and nothing we do occurs outside of the causal chain," writes Berthiaume. "There is no 'free' will in the classical, Cartesian dualist sense, as every choice we make is based on myriad factors such as environment, upbringing, genetic inheritance, etc.

"[S]ince our actions are determined by something other than our "free" will, [ ] how can we hold people responsible if they were not the ultimate originators of their behavior, if their action was the not result of their own free choice?"

Well, we can hold them responsible if we admit of free will. But Berthiaume tries to explain how we can hold people responsible even when all their actions are "necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy But Berthiaume goes on to attempt to explain how we can hold people responsible even when they have no choices.

"Since everything has a cause and is, in turn, a cause of something else, holding someone accountable for his actions plays a part in determining future actions. For example, if I know I could be punished for an action, the threat of punishment will influence my decision whether to act."

Isn't this an act of free will even in the face of determinism? As I stated in yesterday's blog http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/09/natural-capitalism-determinism.html determinism and free will are necessary concomitants. "It is precisely the world around us that give us choices in the first place!" I wrote. "No world; no choices. No choices; no consciousness." I reminded my readers that even Ayn Rand said, "man does not create reality and can achieve his values only by making his decisions consonant with the facts of reality." Those "facts of reality" sound to me like genetics, environment, upbringing, and anything else that may be a "deterministic" factor, such as "it is raining, so I must use my umbrella."

Well, duh! Them's the "facts of reality," sir, about which your actions must be consonant.

"There are also social benefits to being held responsible for one's actions," he continues, "a primary one being a peaceful society. If no one felt they would be held accountable for their actions, society would break down. By the same token, our basic desires for self-preservation and for the safety of those we care about cause us to hold our fellow citizens responsible for their actions. We institute deterrent sanctions which can cause people to think twice before they hurt us or our loved ones."

So, 1) we have no free will, but 2) we can be held accountable for our actions because such things as "threats to freedom" (or a spanking) might "influence" our decisions. But what if, deterministically speaking, those threats were not great enough to overcome the other determinants? And since determinants are the cause of all our choices made without free will, do you have the right to decide that your threat is morally good enough to be a punishable offence when in the mind of the offender your deterrents are not deterministic enough to overcome the other determinants?

If you want to claim determinants are the cause, and claim Man has no free will, then who are you to make the decision that man-made threats used as deterrents are good enough as written? It wouldn't be your call; it wouldn't be your decision whether or not the deterrent is strong enough because you are not the one making the deterministic decision.

Now let's go back to the "social benefits" of holding people responsible for their actions. The same problem comes up: in a world without free will, who are you do to decide what is morally of "social benefit?" Anything you choose is going to be artificial, "determined" by society's own determinants. If you choose something like "the greater good," then it must be asked why the determinants that belong to the "greater" portion of society take precedent over the determinants of the minority.

Determinism is not objectionable, morally speaking, when it is objectively admitted that without determinants there would be no choices at all, and nothing to be conscious of; and that without existents of determinism, and free will absolutely could not exist, but neither could determinism, and no things could be "fully included in the natural world" because there would be no things. Determinism and free will are necessary concomitants.

The Argument from Animalism:
Excerpt from "The Search for the Single Intelligible Object"
In "Moby Dick," Ishmael says, "Man in the ideal, is so noble and sparkling, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes."

Hear! Hear! We can achieve throwing our costliest robes over each others' ignominious blemishes, if we can quit being philosophical skeptics and, as a culture, ignore men's faults instead of being the "paparazzi" and the journalists of all our blemishes. Being an advocate of Man at his best is achievable, because "Man at his best" is an achievable ideal. Jerry Springer is apparently a very decent person; but his "reality" show gives us not blemishes, but indecency. It is the indecency of exposing men and women at their worst,to the world, for the purposes of entertainment. It is the height of naturalism in the arts.

Naturalism in the arts is the opposite of Romanticism, wherein literature and music advocate the highest standards of Man, in the context of his hierarchical metaphysical stature of "qua Man." And Man qua Man means this and only this: the ability of Man to act in accordance with those highest of standards whether or not he succeeds in his attempt. Naturalism in the arts journalises man's ability to forget standards, or to dispense with them, or to compromise them. Anyone who does not care about the effects of his actions can forget, dispense with, or compromise standards that have been identified as being better than the ones he uses.

Many men have not had this ideal of Man's in mind when they added their opinions to the collected opinions of Mankind. Some, such as naturalism, have denied any form of ideality is available to Man, or is within his capacity to achieve. This defies logic, and it denies reason.

Socrates, for example, drew a line between ignorance and "ideal" knowledge. He said his wisdom was in his knowledge of his ignorance. "Ideal" knowledge was out of bounds for men and available only to the gods.

Kant wrote an entire systematic "investigation" of "pure" knowledge, idealizing it, yet admitted that is was beyond men's capacity to use it to discover all truths.

Montaign wrote of Man as an un-ideal being, no greater than a worm or a sacrifice to existence nailed to the place men found least desirable to live, "lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and riveted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and most remote from the heavenly arch." "Apologie de Raimond Sebond"" from "Essais," considered by many to be the ideal example of skepticism.

It makes one wonder if anyone living now who had a similar skeptical world view of his species, would not have a desire to find himself transported to Wonderland or Disneyland or Oz—and would he find anywhere in the universe a livable place? There was a reason for such a world view, if you wanted to subscribe to it: "[I]t was believed by ancient and medieval Arabic, Jewish, and Christian thought that the center [of the universe] was the worst part of the universe, the basement, the sump, where all the muck was collected, so being at the center was not worn as a badge of pride." Mano Singham's Web Journal April 20, 2005

Dante, reaching the Empyrean, wrote that the counsel he approves as best is that “which holds [the] mean semblance [of Earth] of least account.” In other words, Earth is the least important of concerns.

Vile, hideous, disgusting world views often come from the result of viewing man in the light of his animalism, in the “tragedy” of being animal, of having an animal’s limitations both in not being an omnipotent creature, and in being limited in ability to comprehend the universe, i.e., being not-omniscient.
“The tragedy of being both rational and animal,” says the “Syntopicon of the Great Ideas of the Western World,” “seems to be in having to choose…” That choice is between the evasion of admitting man's animal nature is the only cause of his cognitive abilities, and what Ayn Rand, in "The Virtue of Selfishness," called, “the fullest perception of reality within one’s power.” It is hard to admit one is an animal when he/she blames the limits of being an animal on all his/her woes and conditions, or upon the fact that "determinism" only works on animals; if one were not animal, if one were a spirit in heaven, for example, animalism would not be a condition you would have to apply your "fullest perception of reality" toward.

The "tragedy of having to choose" between the evasion of human (i.e. animal) sensory cognition as the cause of Man's knowledge of reality, and the recognition that no matter where rationality comes from physiologically, one possesses rationality and must not make “animal” metaphysically more important than reason.

To do so would be to claim that it would be acceptable to be animal without reason, though this is definitely not what skeptics of this ilk mean. What they mean is: Reason is incapable of saving the human animal species from being little more than the animals who live without it. Decrying our animalism in this way denies the almost universally accepted definition of the essence of Man as being a "rational animal." Reason cannot exist without a life form for it to reside in.

And that is the virtue of being animal. When I was in the second or third grade, our music teacher taught us the song written to a poem by Joyce Kilmer. I hated—immediately—that song's words which began: "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree." I knew at that early age that poetry was more important than the most beautiful tree, because poetry speaks of what makes us capable of appreciating that tree in the first place. I despised the music teacher for teaching a song that denigrated my powers of conception over a "thing" that did nothing except look pretty and "that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair."

Anything, for Kilmer and other naturalists, is better than being animal. The human animal, in the ideal "over [which] any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes," is greater morally than any tree.

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If A Tree Falls In the Forest--the Primacy of Existence

We have all heard the question "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound or a noise?" We have heard it ten, hundreds, or thousands or more times.

What does that question have to do with the description of Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) as "A belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the practices and institutions associated with such belief"? [See this blog dated 09.05.2008] MN, concerned with defining such things, and with the denial of what is non-existent, and with replacing belief in the supernatural or the lack thereof with a certainty about the natural cosmology of the universe and existence itself, has an interest in addressing "The Tree in the Forest."

Every answer I have ever read misses the essential point, which is not about "sound or sound waves being heard or not heard," nor about whether sound is different from noise. Those are the excuses of metaphysicians who will not, or cannot, face the real question, or who have no idea that another question more real exists.

The question is: Does existence exist independently of consciousness? When seen in this context, it does not matter if "sound" or "noise" is used as the definition of what happens when the tree falls; it matters whether you think things happen whether or not a consciousness is there to perceive that it happens.

The belief that reality requires a consciousness is gaining in prevalence. It has been a staple of some eastern philosophies for thousands of years. Some western philosophers have advanced the idea. Many young students facing philosophy for the first time have serious existential questions about their own existence. That makes a shameful indictment of how far our "intellectual" standards have plunged since Renaissance scholars brought Jefferson and America's other Founders to an understanding of men's unalienable individual sovereignty.

Those modern men and women who doubt their own existence have fallen backward in time 500 years, and can have no conception about their unalienable sovereignty, except what they are lucky enough to glean from between the lines of their teachers words, teachers who tell them their "rights" include all those things which must be provided by other men when they themselves fail to provide it--like health care.

(Deregulation of the health-care industry and extended patent lengths on pharmacuticals would considerably alter the high cost of care and drugs. But that is better left for another blog or two or three.)

To believe that consciousness gives reality to reality, e.g., that "perception is reality," is fallacious logic called the Primacy of Consciousness. (The Primacy of Perception is also a fallacy. ["...perception [as] the causal product of atomic sensations," again e.g., "perception is reality." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty ]

The Primacy of Existence states that existence exists. http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/primacyofexistence.html
http://www.geocities.com/katholon/poe.htm et al.

Existence exists. Period. There can be no requirement for the conscious perception of a "thing" to make that "thing" real. In this case the thing is whether or not a noise or a sound is generated.

If A Tree Falls, Does It Make a Sound?--the Primacy of Existence continued

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