Other Philosophy

The premise of truth

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Who can say there is no such thing as truth without professing the truth of the denial?  It may be that we don’t see the contradictions locked into our truth narratives because they are mediated by something much closer to our hearts, something that serves as a subjective antidote to internal conflict and contradiction – belief.  Few people notice the contradictions within their own beliefs, because they believe otherwise.  Indeed, some believe that we now live in a ‘post-truth’ era, which they justify by appealing to the facts seen to verify ‘the truth’ of their claim.  Yet even ‘the plain truth’ is open to conjecture because the naming and telling reflects a subjective outlook striving to show that the facts are speaking for themselves when they are not.   It seems that we have always had a rocky relationship with ‘the truth’, which may be due to the unsettling fact that our objectivity is a state of mind – essentially, a creation of the imagination.

Most of us deal with truths in situ, believing that we obtain our understandings from what is ‘out there’ – from matters of fact that become understandable in terms of what they mean.  However, meanings, understandings and beliefs are facts we put into circulation, and no truth is evident without the accord granted of our recognition.  Likewise, the world is and is not imbued with meaning, only we would rather be at the nurtured end of the nurturing, which is why so much pathos gets attached to the ‘quest for meaning’ or the lament that we can ‘find no meaning to life’.  And we continue to wonder about the truth behind the compelling belief that there is something more ‘out there’ – a belief shrouded in the paradoxical truth that there is no ‘out there’ until there is an ‘in here’.  Hence we might need to explore the question of a wider reality by taking a converse look – to look at what we mean by ‘in here’ in order to ask: is subjectivity a greater or a lesser fact of existence – in the recognisable order of its becoming.

On the whole, belief augments the understanding of things we don’t understand.  Collectively, we exist in a peculiar reality, as a feature of existence trying to understand itself.  Arguably, ‘reality’ is not a fixed state of existence and just as realities change and grow, so can ‘the truth’.  For instance, life did not previously feature in the chemistry that now includes it – so what are we to believe about the nature of life?  What if there is more to reality than the here and now – that everything is in a state of becoming more than it was, including ‘the truth’ – including ourselves?  Perhaps there is more to existence than the ‘external’ facts by which we behold it – because the beholder, unwittingly or not, introduces a new reality of observation into a world that never before observed itself.  So the perception of truth is fraught with the same difficulties as the perception of ourselves – the problem of gaining an inclusive point of view – the problem of understanding the subject by way of the meanings we express through the glimpses we obtain as a part of something bigger than the focus of our attention – even as that focus rests upon ourselves.

Mike Laidler

 

To be a Philosopher

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What is philosophy?  The answer lies in the question itself, because philosophy is all about asking questions.  Philosophy is not in the business of dictating answers, so an appropriate philosophical non-answer to the question is that philosophy examines the foundations on which we can claim to know anything.  Not surprisingly, this philosophical position challenges the credibility of all those who profess to know, and philosophy gains a well-deserved reputation for effrontery when it pitches the wisdom of not knowing against the authority of those who claim to know better.  The rest is history, but as philosophers we remain interested in what comes next, knowing that one of the obstacles to ‘getting to know’ is the belief that we know already.   This issue raises the philosophical paradox of knowing that we don’t know, which sits at the heart of knowledge like a ‘black hole’ sitting at the heart of the universe, apparently gobbling up its substance.  But perhaps the ‘dark matter’ of paradox is the gateway to another universe of understanding – beyond the confines of certainty.

A ‘certain fact’ is more a reflection of our psychology than the nature of an external world, for there is no fact in mind that has not been elevated to prominence by our selective thinking.  So our certainties may amount to no more than psychological inflexibilities concerning ideas we want to uphold, or myths we don’t want to relinquish.  Such is the case with our ideas of causality and nature as the cause of existence.  Meanwhile, our ideas about the special nature of life remain unshaken by all the explanations reducing it to unliving processes.  And though we might deem to explain consciousness as an outgrowth of unconscious functions, we know that much only because we already know consciousness to be something much more than that. Nonetheless, the facts continue to inform and it is tempting to think that they are selecting and refining our explanations and conclusions – that the ‘weight of evidence’ will eventually iron out any anomalies and contradictions.  But what if the facts are not straightforward in themselves?  What if the cumulative factual data remains inherently contradictory?

Despite knowing that life is made of some cheap chemicals that become organised, we still don’t know what makes the difference that makes them ‘come to life’ – knowing, as we do, that life marks a difference we cannot ignore by claiming there is no real difference.  Likewise, there are some important questions we can ask only ourselves, such as: by what property of thought are we able to think that a thought is just a brain process and in what state of knowledge do we conclude that it can’t be anything else?  Then what if facts are no more than markers of changes that can’t be explained adequately in terms of things as they were?  What if nature is a plurality of natures to be understood not as one thing or another, but as one thing and another?   In other words, there may be more to reality than the objective facts can reveal about a natural reality that has no cause to think about itself.

What is the law of nature that says everything is really something else or that knowledge owes to this form of explanation?  Perhaps we need to acknowledge the limits of explanation and look to the knowledge that comes with a re-awakening to ourselves as subjective entities, with subjectivity serving as a prerequisite to knowing anything.  Even in science we like to show that we know we know, but to truly know is to realise its limits – back to the paradox!  Then what can we know?  We know that knowledge is impossible without a reference to the facts, but it would be a big mistake to conclude that the facts are the drivers of knowing and wholesale repositories of certainty.  And whereas it seems quite logical to think that more and more facts are the answer to our factual conundrums and theoretical shortcomings, it is wholly unreasonable to think that the facts draw their own conclusions and can explain for us the nature of thought, reason, consciousness and understanding, as if there is nothing more to knowledge than a body of fact, and more to the better when it belongs to an objective state of reality that remains inherently unknowing – as if there is nothing more to reality, or for that matter, being realistic.

Mike Laidler

Heartstrings

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Does nature give us a heart or do we give a heart to nature?  Does a genetic basis to our being mean that the genes can show us what we are like?  If we can find a genetic cause for the things we do, does it mean that the genes are doing it for us and the ‘doer’ doesn’t really change anything?  Is the fact of change identifiable beforehand in its precursors?  Does the attribution of change to its causes allow us to equate new facts to old?  Does a physical foundation to everything show us everything there is to see, or do we live in a universe of parallel realities – of planets and persons, objects and subjects, bodies and minds, causes and effects – in a universe becoming more than it was?

Then what about hearts and stones – what about the emergence of compassion amidst the consolidations of dust that makes up the fabric of ‘things in existence’?  How do the impersonal facts of nature become personal?  Are we compassionate because of our biological make-up, because it features first in biology, as biology – and does this explain the anomalous fact of compassion in nature?  Is nature pulling our heartstrings, or has a change come about through the person of the doer – a change that gives the push-pull of genes and environments something to work on – a change that becomes evident in the accompanying facts and causes, but only because they are accompanied, because the doer must first occasion the fact of the doing, seeing or feeling.

Mike Laidler

Grey matters

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We may feel that we can get to know a thing better by explaining it in terms of something else, indeed science depends upon this philosophy, but there is also a sense in which it doesn’t make sense – and the best example is ourselves.

Consider the perceived difference between our thoughts and the brain.  First we must recognise a difference in order to talk about a cause, otherwise there is nothing to talk about.  Then we suppose that the cause must explain things – especially if there is nothing else to see.  Yet something else remains evident in the change, now perceived as an effect.  However, saying that the cause has changed to create that difference leaves the fact of the change unexplained and renders the effect redundant.  Typically, we diminish the reality of the difference in order to explain it by attributing the emergent properties of the effect to the cause – as if ‘causality shows us’ that change doesn’t really occasion a shift in reality.  Thereby we conclude that new events, such as thought or consciousness, are really superficialities that cannot amount to changes in the nature of nature.  In other words, we concede, for the sake of explanation, that change is not all it seems – as if a talking nature is really not so different in kind from one that never did, now seen as the cause.

Moreover, the mind and the body amount to differences in reality which we can’t explain by supposing that reality must be a singular ‘thing’.  Indeed we are no more able to explain reality in terms of ‘things real’ than we can explain the existence of existence.  In fact, we can’t pin the ‘it’ down.  And perhaps reality is a fact we cannot define because it can also be seen to define us – in more ways than one.  So when people say that mind and body are one and the same thing, they are calling them the same in the name of an incomplete explanation – as if causality is a thing in existence that explains the origin of things in existence and automatically clears-up the problem of change.  Also, we are looking at ‘the reality’ retrospectively by leaving out of the analysis the significance of the looking – as if the change to observation can be seen as a subsidiary effect.  But we have yet to explain the change to perception, together with the evidence, of itself, of the effect that occupies an additional reality to the cause – a difference that cannot be accounted for by saying that there is no real change, as if the fact of change is subsidiary to the cause instead of the other way round.

Mike Laidler

 

Goldilocks retold

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Once upon a time Goldilocks chanced upon a baby bear’s bowl of porridge that was just right for the eating.  Sometime later, scientists took a fresh look at the fact of a universe that happened to be just right for the emergence of life, and recognised that the necessary fine tuning of the manifold preconditions, the ‘physical constants’, seems more like a contrivance than a coincidence – a conspiracy of coincidences – so named the ‘Goldilocks enigma’ because there is no settled evidence for it beginning other than by chance.  But what if both scenarios are true: chance and non-chance – the evidence for the co-existence of chance and non-chance possibilities being everywhere in the world that surrounds us?  Then perhaps the enigma is actually a paradox which reflects the true state of existence – something we cannot reduce to our logical truths by which we demarcate the facts as either right or wrong, true or false, possible or impossible.  Paradoxically, there is more to the fact of existence than the prerequisite of an explanation that requires itself to be logical.  And it is logic, not truth, that requires the facts to be logical.  Perhaps our belief in logic is holding us back – believing that logic gives us exclusive access to the ultimate truth – a truth to withstand all contradiction.

Perhaps paradox is nearer to ‘the truth’ than the logic that demands its resolution.  So let’s begin with three truisms: ‘the universe’ is vast, ‘everything’ and ‘contains’ life.  Given the scale and scope of it all, together with the potential diversity of planetary environments, then the right conditions for life on more than one of these planets becomes a loaded possibility.  And though we see life as a novel possibility, it is explained as an effect of causes that subsist within existing boundaries of possibility.  Yet the effect causes profound changes.  It looks like non-living causes determine the mix of possible preconditions, but, ultimately, it is the potential for life that sets the limits.  Furthermore, that potential remains a defiant mystery, regardless of how much we learn about the preconditions for life on earth, or indeed the preconditions for different types of life on different kinds of planet.  Moreover, no amount of causal analysis explains how effects ratchet up the course of change, beginning in the observable differences between cause and effect.  Indeed the paradox at the heart of existence is the pre-existence of its possibilities, despite their probable absence in certain forms at certain times – subsequently to ‘emerge’ in the times and events an observer chances upon, in the form of co-incidence called ‘reality’.

Mike Laidler

Factualities

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Explanation is not all it seems.  Explanations owe more to matters of language than fact.  They echo the voice of authority, partly borrowed from the facts, but crucially sponsored by the credibility of who says what.  For most purposes they serve as rarefied beliefs – vouching for the way things ‘must be’.  At the cutting edge they take the form of specialised communications between like-minded thinkers claiming to speak for the truth – assuring us that facts dispel uncertainties, and truth is furthered by the elimination of contradiction.  Contradiction showcases opposing statements of fact.  Either way, the facts are neither disposed to tell us anything, nor explain themselves.  In most cases the facts have been selected to suit the explanation, though their proponents gain rhetorical advantage in pretending it is the other way round.   Politicians are particularly adept at this – the fuzziness of language being the politician’s weapon of choice and first line of defence.

Scientific explanation tackles the problem by putting its explanations on trial – as if the facts will decide.  Scientists acknowledge known unknowns, but it is the unknown unknowns that weaken their conclusions, which harbour a persisting hiatus that outstrips all progress in working towards an ultimate truth.  The strange thing about scientific explanation is that it can seem right, because it works, yet still be wrong – being ‘right’ for the wrong reasons.  Nevertheless, for scientists, it is the explanation that counts, and they soldier on without knowing whether their findings will ever have a practical application.   In the meantime the whole of explanation comes down to tentative theories which remain fallible because of the ever vacant space for the unknown.  But the greater fallacy is due to our precepts of what we need and don’t need to know, given the fact of what we take to know already – prescribing that whereof we cannot know, thereof we must ignore.

Mike Laidler

Horizons

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Whatever else we can know about the beginnings and becomings of the universe, we know it hosts, in us, a reality quite unlike the nature we can find by looking to a universe without – that reality being the fact of our awareness. It is as if the universe has evolved to incorporate something extra, through us, which we know to be real enough simply because we are aware of the fact of awareness in existence – a fact that now seems to exist in addition to everything else. And if that fact only seems to be the case, then the fact of that seeming is still enough to make the case.

Mike Laidler

Towering Foundations

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We can’t pretend not to care much about the nature of belief, or who believes what, when everything we know and care about is entwined with our beliefs. Belief is ubiquitous; nothing is immune from its influence, indeed it forges our understandings of reality and recognisance of the facts since it provides the frame of reference in which we turn to fact and reason. But if we are to glean anything from the observation of one another – about the interplay of belief and reason – it is that belief is more accomplished at making its way without reason than is reason without belief. And in this world of beliefs, if we are to discern anything about the basis of knowledge that forms opinion, it is that there is no such thing as a neutral fact.

Mike Laidler