Author: philosophyalive

Black sheep

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We are good at countenancing the ridiculous.  Indeed it may be necessary to do so in order to test the boundaries of the feasible, plus our own sanity.  So consider this question:  If it were possible for birds to build things other than nests, would they become other than birds?  In other words, are the birds the cause of the nests or is there more to it – are both explicable by changes at a deeper genetic level, so that birds are birds because of their genes and nests are really extensions of these genes into the world – the nests being organic extensions of biological processes in the same sense as the birds themselves, as proved by the fact that the birds are just behaving instinctively and not really designing anything?   But is it still possible to say that the birds are behaving intentionally, and what does this mean for the explanation of intentional action in the human case?    

 

What about our abilities to design things?  Did the opposable thumb, upright gait, forward vision, large brain etc enable tool use because this was nature’s scheme, or did our schemes take over to shape evolution in that direction with non-natural intentions – because nature does not act intentionally.   Now consider this ridiculous scenario:  You wake up one day and find you have been transformed into a sheep, but you retain all your human faculties.  You can’t talk because you don’t retain a human larynx.  What do you do?  What would you want to do?  You could try to communicate by scratching symbols in the dust, but would they be seen for what they are?  Other attempts to act hyper-intelligently are likely to be seen as simply odd, especially amongst sheep, just as it is amongst humans.  Also, as a ruminant, you need to spend most of your time eating and the farmer might not like the idea of you starting to eat meat in order to buy more time for clever pursuits like playing with fire.  

 

It is generally concluded that your best survival strategy would be to behave as a sheep.   So shape is the designer and the environment is the architect of change, itself changed by the unintended morphologies of life.  Then does this extend to our intentions, which we must accept as not really existing as free choices?  Is the idea that we can make up our minds for ourselves to be seen as the ridiculous conclusion of those who can’t think for themselves, but think they can?  Alternatively is the wild freedom of intentionality a new environment in which nature and climate need to adapt? 

 

Mike Laidler.

 

 

Brain-Waverings

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Does the brain live in a world of ideas or does the world of ideas live in the brain? Does it make sense to say that ideas are really brain processes making sense of themselves?

Can we begin to explain the way things are by saying that ideas belong to the brain in the same way that we belong to nature – to an unthinking nature? In other words, are the physical processes doing everything – so thought is not as it appears, because thinking is really a physical process? Does the brain show us what to see – so we are not as we seem to ourselves – so we are able see the reality more ‘clearly and distinctly’ in terms of the physical process that ‘make us real’?

Is this how to come to terms with the nature of thought and ‘our’ thoughts about its reality? Do we equate thought with the nature of the brain because we can think of nothing better, thereby confirming the idea that the brain doesn’t allow us to do anything else? Is there but one reality, one nature? Are we merely entertaining fantasies and illusions by thinking otherwise? What does it mean to say that ‘we entertain thoughts’? Is it true that our ideas cannot exist in a ‘world of their own’, or stand as evidence for an ethereal mind, because they are really something else, belonging to the sole reality of brain function? And how do we come to see this as a deeper truth?

Does the wider truth belong to a deeper truth? Does the idea of the ‘I’ doing the seeing belong to the eye doing the seeing? Or is the brain really doing ‘our’ seeing as the ‘eye’ behind every perceptible idea? How are we to countenance a further reality, beyond the seeming, by presuming to see that things prove to be more or less real when we discover that they are or are not as they seem? Where is the reality of presumption in nature, or indeed in the brain? And who is asking – who is the entity wanting to know? Indeed, how did the idea of reality escape from its ‘rightful’ place in nature – in a reality apart from ideas?

Mike Laidler

Cogito ergo est

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I think about thinking and find that it is more than all I can think about.

Thinking represents a bigger change for the universe than it does for us – because we represent that change.  The big changes for us come of what we think.  In any case, there is something unique about thinking, something that we know about uniquely from the inside.

That we think locates thought, not as a subjective retreat but as a substantive presence in existence; and if we are to assume anything about a universe that is bigger than us, it is that it begins for us in the presence of thought – a presence of which we are a part – a thinking presence that is more than all we can think about by reference to ourselves alone.  We are internal to all that is not confined to us

And the clearest view of ‘external reality’ is not by the assumption of an extended physical realm as a matter of primary necessity, but by way of a wider reality that embraces us as a fact of inevitable distinction – a facilitating mental realm.  For we do not awaken to the panoply of a sentient universe in the belief that it has merely awakened in us, or as something that is secondary to a ‘real’ universe that is devoid.

Mike Laidler

The ‘dark matter’ of science

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There is more to existence than can be captured by that part of it called explanation, because explanation is merely a part of it.  Accordingly, there is a dark matter in science that science attributes to the ‘dark matter’ of the universe – the 95% of the ‘known’ universe that remains inexplicable.  This inexplicability is currently described as the problem of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’, as if the problem lies with the facts of nature.  However, the problem of explanation does not rest with the facts of nature, for science’s inability to explain is actually explanation’s inability to explain.

Explanation is a selective statement of fact that reveals, upon reflection, a fact about itself – that there are many ways to look at reality, but no way to see it as a whole.  And the selectivity in explanation creates the parameters of the inexplicable – in terms of what is necessarily excluded.  It doesn’t matter whether this is intentional or unintentional, the result is the same – explanation carries a cost that we accept as a fair trade, a price that we are willing to pay to find out what we want to know.  And so long as the knowledge we glean accords with the facts we know about, we are content to claim that the facts can’t be wrong, as if the facts are the source of their explanation, indeed as if knowledge belongs to those facts.  Factual knowledge becomes the agency of its own ignorance.

The relative nature of explanation highlights a longstanding problem of what it actually explains, for explanation has to be more than a matter of faith or acceptance, indeed it purports to be more.  But the whole basis of explanation sits on a point of faith – that one thing explains another – so the universe owes its explanation to something else – facts that we deem ourselves privileged to know from a position of neutrality.  However nothing is altogether neutral, not even the ‘nothingness’ of dark matter, and especially the urge to know.  Everything known is relative to a point of reference.  We tentatively proceed to commission explanations as ‘objective’ observers of reality, but objectivity is a subtle version of subjectivity, for there can be no objective point of view without a point of view – objectivity owes its existence to a subjective presence.

All knowledge attests to a fact that objectivity tries to preclude – the inexplicable nature of subjectivity in the fact of the known, in the nature of existence itself.  Explanation has much to do with what is said to be the fact of the matter, on the premise that it is the ‘objective’ facts that are saying something about themselves.  We like to think that the fact of a mental entity sitting in the midst of the universe has no relevance to the place or form of explanation, so we believe that the place of explanation is outside us, thereby giving credibility to explanation – and to make doubly sure that our explanations are not misunderstood as belonging to us, we claim that they belong to science, as if science is out there waiting to explain things for us.

Unfortunately this view of explanation is a myth and its fault lines are evident once we stop keeping faith.   The myth is built on a false belief in what causality explains.  We believe that everything has a cause and that causes explain how things change.  But there is a problem; whereas we can see how this works in reality, in our perceptions of reality, it fails as an explanation of how ‘existence got here’ – that is, in the realities outside our participation as subjective entities, where the explanation of the universe and existence is meant to be found.  Our view on causality represents our predilection toward the idea of what comes first – first being a fact of elevated psychological significance in our partial viewpoint on reality.

Explanation doesn’t work as an explanation of existence if explanation implies that everything owes its existence to something else – for the evidence we uncover as a validation of that paradigm merely pushes the problem back one stage, into the realms of dark explanation, currently manifesting as the ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ of science.  And the problem gathers momentum with the observation that everything has a definitive cause – as if the change, of which causality is the vehicle, is explained by hitching a ride.

Paradoxically, the energy invested in the elevated status of explanation is the true dark matter awaiting its enlightenment in the realisation that explanation neither explains things for us nor ourselves in the bargain.  Science sees the problem otherwise, in terms of a shortage of facts, in terms of the dark matter out there in nature, on the premise that matter is a conversion of energy explicable by the fact that it happens.  But how are we to calculate a conversion of energy, such as we are, to exist in the midst of the universe in a form that is animated to explain itself and the rest of existence in the process?   Are we not deluding ourselves that existence is inherently explicable because it happens, in the same way that our explanations are intrinsically viable because they ‘explain’.

 

Mike Laidler

The paradox of the real

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Reality is a confluence of the is, the was and the will be. We live in a universe that is going somewhere in the process of becoming more than it was.

(Starting points)

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Everything is subject to change: we change, nature diversifies, the universe evolves, and in the process something ‘impossible’ happens – things become more than they were – and the same thing happens to the nature of nature.

(Strong personality)

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The facts we illuminate and explain in nature don’t reason or find things out about themselves.

(Where is reason?)

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In the light of the universe becoming of its prior absence, ‘absence’ denotes the fact of a reality to redefine the bounds of ‘reality’.

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Every thing amounts to less than everything in a universe that begins as ‘nothing’.

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Change is the paradox of things becoming what whey were not.

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Reality exceeds explanation – things are simultaneously one thing and another.

(Where is reason?)

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To see that the reason we find in nature is the reason we give to nature is to know of a nature beyond.

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The fact of sentient existence opened up a new reality in the universe that could be predicted only retrospectively.

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In a paradoxical world, belief is the possibility inviting us to entertain impossibilities that just might be true.

(Believing in belief).

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Our realisations are the founders of realities yet to be.

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The contradictions of paradox serve to show us that there is more to truth and reality than the dictates of reason and experience.

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The ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ share an uncertain boundary between what is and what can be.

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There is now a mindfulness in the midst of the universe’s physicality whereby nature now incorporates features of rational activity quite unlike the properties of nature as it was.

(Tidings of reason).

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The mind in nature sees something nature cannot – itself.

(Where is reason?)

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Everything has a cause, including causality.  Causality is a statement of reason that the mind projects upon the world.

(Where is reason?)

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The question about what is truth converts into an issue over what may stand as proof – as if proof is the unequivocal imparter of knowledge that remains independent of what we believe.

(Believing in belief).

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In reality, proof is relative to the mind that considers something proved according to the principles it brings to the equation.

(Where is reason?)

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The universe expands into a new reality by the change to awareness and nature acquires a new nature quite unlike itself.

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No fact does our thinking for us, not even in the brain.

(Where is reason?)

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Paradoxes serve to remind us of the limits of the ‘real’ as paradigms of reality.

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The something else by which we explain our existence ‘as’ shows that we are something else to the ‘as’ as it is.

 Mike Laidler

Where is reason?

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The mind in nature sees something nature cannot – itself.  It introduces unique faculties into nature, such as intention, design and reason.  Reason is regarded as our ‘highest’ faculty – a fact seen as a part of nature and apart from nature.  We observe that the facts we illuminate and explain in nature don’t reason or find things out about themselves; nevertheless, we conclude that everything belongs to something else that causes it to be the way it is.  We use our unique faculty of reason to tell ourselves that we are not alone, adducing that our perception of the world as it is, is caused by the world as it is.

Everything has a cause, including causality.  Causality is a statement of reason that the mind projects upon the world.  We impute powers to causes by identifying with them the fact of change – as if the cause holds the answer – as if nature explains life or the brain explains thought and reason.  But causality isn’t the whole story.  We create explanations in reason by identifying one fact with another, cause with effect, now said to be ‘the reason’ that the facts have given us.    But reason is a fact of mind that is unlike any other fact that other facts ‘alone’ can supply – in the body, brain, nature, number, pattern, process, structure, order or evolution.  The mind is a fact in addition, a reality uniquely placed to recognise a change in reality, beginning with itself – a change that is then ‘explained’ by causes acting mindlessly, without will or reason, leading some thinkers to deduce that the mind is an illusion.

Explanation is not all it seems.  Causality ‘explains’ one thing in terms of another, and we think that the same applies to our thinking because the mind cannot be fundamental.  But reality exceeds explanation – things are simultaneously one thing and another – perception does and does not mirror the world, the molecular world is and is not alive, nature does and does not comprise and compose our intentions.  Reason pursues the fact of the ‘must be’, but paradoxical facts defy reason and rob us of the conclusiveness we try to invest in an objective world, nevertheless we proceed to draw conclusions by ignoring their paradoxical nature, and our own – we consider that the mind may be prone to illusion but reason cannot be – so paradox is resolvable by the ‘hard’ facts upon which our reasoning rests because fact is definitive and paradox poses but a temporary contradiction in terms.

In explanation, the terms are everything.  We begin by naming things, then proceed to draw connections.  We call it reasoning.  Reasoning seeks to explain itself by referencing its terms to a world outside, but ‘outsides’ are facts relative to ‘insides’.  We project our reasoning onto the world, to find it there – thereby to attribute our reasons to the facts.  We distil from our findings the principles that are ‘there to be discovered’ from all our observations, thereby to construe a fact that pre-empts proof – that things are not alone.  Proof requires the equation of one thing with another, so our reasons are seen to gain their authority from principles that are bigger than us, in reasons that equate to the facts of an outside world, in facts acting without reason or intention.

Likewise, science is an application of reasoning to a world outside.  We see the world as filled with science; but we don’t really find ‘science’ there, except that we create the fact of science in the world.  In reality, proof is relative to the mind that considers something proved according to the principles it brings to the equation.  Furthermore, because reality is bigger than science, we find that the ‘facts of science’ amount to no more than our interim conclusions.  Undaunted, we conclude that science belongs to the outside world, as if our reasoning can now be validated as a fact of science, in facts that can be discovered to speak for themselves.   But however conclusive we may find the facts to be, the fact remains that only minds draw conclusions.

No fact does our thinking for us, not even in the brain.  Finding the cause of thought in the brain does not explain the change to thought in the nature of a physical world, neither does attributing that change to evolution.  Meanwhile, we continue to invest our reasoning in the facts by seeking to confirm a match, thereby to conclude that there is an ultimate conclusiveness to be found ‘out there’, in the facts of the external world.  But our humility veils our hubris; for in deducing that the mind also owes its source to those same externals, we give ourselves the authority to claim that there is nothing better to conclude, since the facts must select our conclusions – facts telling us that reason is grounded – confirming the fact of what is there, as if what is the case is better known from the nature of something else, as if reason resolves the paradox of change by proving that things change without really changing.

© Mike Laidler

Starting Points

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Reality is a confluence of the is, the was and the will be. We live in a universe that is going somewhere in the process of becoming more than it was. We see ourselves in two worlds – the mental and the physical. Our mental world is characterised by thoughts and feelings, but it is not a world we can easily ascribe to a physical world outside. Yet we readily explain mentality in terms of its dependence on the physical, believing there can be no other source of its existence. This is because there is a part of the physical world that we claim as ours and identify with in our thoughts, namely the brain.

So we bear witness to an externality that merges with our subjective internality; but this is not an explanation because we also know that these two realities are worlds apart, unless we mean to claim that the physical world already incorporates a primitive form of consciousness. However, no explanation has ever done justice to our perspective on the difference, a perspective that occurs only because we have crossed the threshold into subjectivity.

Then is it not feasible to take our ideas off in another direction, beginning with the idea that subjectivity is a distinct property of existence that manifests in the physical under specific conditions, an example being ourselves? But still we are left with unsolved puzzles – of the origins of subjectivity in particular and physical existence in general, which remain unexplained, yet which we temporarily believe to be explained, at least in our case, by their observable association.
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Perhaps we confound ourselves in thinking that change is explicable by tracing it to the point from which it is first observed. This is a rational notion so far as the observation of starting-points allows, but it soon becomes dubious when we try to hang onto the idea that change is explicable as a property of the things changing, as if change itself can be explained by those things as they were, unchanged and insensible – as if everything has to be the one thing, of the one nature, because it all has to have the same starting point.

© Mike Laidler 2015

Believing in Belief

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What is truth?  How do we know that we know?  Is it all a collection of beliefs?  Even science may say one thing today and another tomorrow, so an individual who follows yesterday’s precepts might now seem ridiculous – as if today’s explanations are closer to the truth.   Then does that make the truth, even factual truths, belong indefinitely to tomorrow’s understandings?

Then how do we truly know that we know?  Should we stick to our senses, or is there more to know?  We live and learn, and form opinions based upon experiences that lead to differences of opinion, even among experts.  Facts can be inconclusive, but they can’t make our decisions for us in any event.  Experiences are far from simple and those we take to be conclusive are usually filtered through tacit decisions about what counts, the primary filter being belief.  Our confidence in the facts is really a confidence placed in our tacit beliefs about the facts, certainty playing second fiddle to these beliefs.  Hence belief enables us to make decisions when we don’t know any better, the belief supplying the feeling of knowing better.

Knowing anything strikes a balance between the knowing and the knowing otherwise. The balance point is determined by belief.  Beliefs fabricate our certainties based upon images of reality.  Beliefs are the active mental screen on which those images are projected, together with the elaborated images of our senses.   Sometimes we recognise our beliefs, seeing belief as a form of thinking for tidying-up our thinking.  But if belief is a power we exert over our own minds, it is also a power exerted over us by the collective mind of our culture.   Often we can’t tell the difference or don’t bother to try.

We see as we believe, believing we see as we see.  Believing in belief flourishes amidst the urgency to know.   In a paradoxical world, belief is the possibility inviting us to entertain impossibilities that just might be true.  Not knowing is the only restraint we can exercise, but the exigencies of decision making may not allow us the scope for this luxury.  And the various forms of disbelief, non-believing and unbelieving all function as forms of belief serving as alternative social co-ordinates bearing an aura of superior neutrality.  Meanwhile the question about what is truth converts into an issue over what may stand as proof – as if proof is the unequivocal imparter of knowledge that remains independent of what we believe.

If it is ‘true’ to say that belief is the last refuge of the individual, then knowing that we believe is the last refuge of our integrity as individuals.  Then what of truth?  Perhaps belief affords a more pragmatic approach to truth – in accepting that truth is greater than our knowledge, and that the truths we make do with reveal more about our tacit systems of belief than we can ever discover by looking to the facts as absolutes, as decisive matters of fact.  But the same applies to the truth about our beliefs, for we cannot find an absolute in their content simply by believing in our beliefs.

Thus it may be true to say that knowledge is power, especially within our various spheres of influence and cultures of belief, including the religious, the political, the economic and the ‘factual’, but who can say that knowledge is truth?  Alternatively it might be more prudent to consider a more basic truth about knowledge:  knowing that we believe is the safest form of knowledge, believing that we know the most dangerous.

© Mike Laidler 2015

Strong Personality

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It is said that science tells us who we are and how we got here, but there is also something about us that tells us what science is and where it is going.

Science teaches us there is something about personality that we overlook in treating it as a personal possession.  Personality is not a fact locked-away inside us, or a thing fixed in ‘the self’; it is also a property of nature, culture and the universe at large.  But as a property of nature, it changes the nature of nature – the nature of change being a moot point that we tend to overlook both personally and scientifically.

Everything is subject to change: we change, nature diversifies, the universe evolves, and in the process something ‘impossible’ happens – things become more than they were – and the same thing happens to the nature of nature.  Likewise, personal existence is embedded in nature yet marks a dramatic shift in the nature of nature.  It opens up new boundaries of possibility with planned designs and purposes that defy scientific definitions of what nature is and does.

Personality is a strong force for change, a power in the universe, which we treat as a weak force, mirroring our weaknesses to the extent that we regard it as belonging to us as a property confined to our nature.  However the very thing we strive to possess on our terms is the very thing we are bound to lose; whereas personal existence, as a property of the universe, endures in the nature of change as it shapes, transforms, and elevates.

Everything ‘got here’ through powers of change and everything is subject to changes that herald further expansions of power.  ‘Impossibilities’ are overcome, evincing the magnitude of change in realities and realisations newly transformed.  Staying as we are defines our incompletes and defies nature in a reality we try to make of ourselves and keep for ourselves.  Change invites us to become something more, to grow into life by leaving something behind, thereby to gain capacities and faculties we never had – as did nature ‘in itself’.

Mike Laidler

Tidings of reason

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It appears that we know more about reason as a cause than as an effect.  Reason is neither recognisable nor explicable as a physical fact in the world until we locate it there through our thoughts, deeds and explanations.  Thereafter, we see a world filled with the relics of reasoned activity; and it is by those representations that we are able to discern its effectiveness in changing the face of reality, even to determine whether it exists anywhere else in the universe.

Before this exchange between reason and reality, the physical world is pictured as subsisting alone, albeit charged with potentials, prospects and possibilities for the future.  Nevertheless, the template for rationality is hardly explicable in terms of the nature of something else, wherein it is absent.  And without a natural cause, we are left to wonder about the origins of something seen as mapping onto the reality, even as it changes the map of reality; for it is one thing to observe nature changing, but it is quite another to observe it changing itself in the acquisition reason for no reason.

Furthermore, just as reason can be depicted within the reality of physical, so the physical can also be depicted within the reality of reason, bearing in mind there is now a mindfulness in the midst of the universe’s physicality whereby nature now incorporates features of rational activity quite unlike the properties of nature as it was.  So we find ourselves returning to the thinking of the ancients to ask: is there reason in the universe because nature establishes it, or is it established in nature because of a higher power of reason?

Mike Laidler