Other Philosophy

The God of fact

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Belief is our consolation in the face of uncertainty.  It is nice to believe that the truth is out there and that the facts can move us along towards its realisation, yet the path is long and tortuous and fraught with uncertainties, and dogma can easily intervene with the answer that requires us to look no further.   It is in the realms of dogma that belief comes face to face with disbelief; and though it might seem that disbelief has freed itself from a particular delusion, the disbelief upholds nothing more than an alternative belief about an issue that continues to test our understanding – a fact that passes unnoticed by those who continue to believe otherwise.  The resultant disgregation of beliefs occurs because ‘the truth’ remains the most unbelievable uncertainty of all – a bastion of contradictions accommodating panjandrums of belief – only it is the dogma of professing to have possession of the definitive facts that prevents us from knowing it.

  • We are given to believe things when we do not know, we take to know things when we don’t see the belief.
  • We like to believe that the truth is out there, but it remains a belief, and we can know it only as our version of truth, based upon what we are prepared to believe.
  • If disbelief is a form of belief, then we can’t disbelieve in belief, despite believing otherwise.
  • There is more of dogma than fact in the belief that truth will rid us of contradiction.
  • Dogma exchanges the realistic anxiety of uncertainty for an unrealistic illusion of certainty.

Belief is bigger than religion.  We don’t need religions in order to believe in God,  except that shared beliefs give people an increased feeling of being right.  The same is true of atheism, despite its focus on a form of disbelief; and the fact that atheism is no antidote to religion is evident in the influence of Buddhism as a renowned atheist religion.   In fact, belief is the common denominator in all things we profess to know, and despite all the shared dialogue we continue to perceive the truth as a dichotomy between right and wrong, which we then resolve to our own personal and cultural satisfaction in terms of what we happen to believe, aided by the facts we recruit to our cause.   Meanwhile science holds on to its own belief that the facts will tell us what to know and show us the way – as if factual knowledge is sufficient to do away with belief.

  • Whereas an ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’, we have nowhere to look in the absence of a frame of reference in what to believe?
  • We can’t avoid belief by not believing in it.
  • Belief sustains the image of factual certainty that the fact cannot supply.
  • Belief is the God we worship in the name of fact.
  • Knowing that we know is more a fact of belief than knowledge.

Mike Laidler

The Silent Truth

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There is a simple truth that defies all explanation because it forms the basis of all explanation. It towers over our philosophies, religions and sciences, dwarfing the edifices of knowledge by which we claim to know. It can’t be magnified by theory, refined by belief, or preserved in tablets of stone. Neither is the ratification of discovery or reification in fact sufficient to define its boundaries. Nor can it be captured by the finesse of the artist, or the subtleties of scholarship, or the trappings of authority. Indeed, it empowers knowledge by stripping away all authority in what we can claim to know – for the knowledge that needs to be bolstered by authority is not true knowledge. And history shows that it is not with the mouth of truth that the facts are said to speak for themselves.

In the name of reason, we reject the possibility of a knowledge beyond the reach of our understanding, except as we allow it to be held in trust for us by others believed to know better. Thus we entertain proxy truths in relying upon the edicts of appointed authorities to tell us what we can and cannot know – as if personal knowledge is a recipe for ignorance, contradiction and delusion – as if reason can resolve the paradox of existence – as if paradox is the antithesis of truth. So we try to overrule the simple truth, believing that it must give way to the necessity of explanation. Yet the more we come to know, the more we come to realise the sheer scale of what we don’t know. Meanwhile, the fact of existence remains a mystery and the simple truth remains silent within the paradoxical pre-existence of possibility.

Mike Laidler

The way things are

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Realists say that they respond to the facts as they are and reality as it is; however, truth, reality, fact and possibility can outdo all our expectations and logical understandings.  For instance, scientific explanations of life raise as many questions as answers; nevertheless, we tend to presume the kind of answer we are looking for by regarding life as a minor rather than a major part of an expanding universe.  On the other hand, a universe without life is conceptually less than one that is imbued, and the same applies to a living universe without the power of conceptualisation.  That being so, it is up to us to ask ourselves whether, in the fullness of possibility, reality is potentially bigger again than us and our powers of conceptualisation – just as we happen to be by comparison to the insentient fabric of the universe that subsists ‘apart from’ us.  Even so, the questions keep on stacking up, such as: is the universe expanding within different dimensions of possibility; does the power to be encompass more than one reality, and if so, are we qualified to define that power and pronounce upon the way things must be or should be according to our parochial ideas and ideals?  In short, to what extent can we get to know the nature of existence, its limits and possibilities, on the basis of the way it is for us?

We like to think that logic entreats us be realistic, whereas, in fact, logic takes its starting point from our initial presumptions about the facts.  So what can we presume about this thing called reality?  We take for granted the fact that we live in a world of things that come to be, which also suggests that things are subject to change.  Yet does it mean that things can change radically?  Is reality itself subject to change?  Is everything necessarily the same at one level yet different at another?  Can things be one thing and another?  Is reality a plurality of realities?  Must all possibilities conform to logic?  Not surprisingly, there remain fundamental questions about the nature of change that the facts as they were and are cannot answer for us, and which science struggles to explain by filling-in the gaps with a logic that states what must be the case in order for the explanation to remain logical – that is, in order to preserve the logic.  But what if it is possible for ‘the real’ to be transformed by facts to come?  What if things that are impossible in one context become possible in another – because of change – as when the chemicals that make up our bodies become a part of a knowing reality that thinks, perceives and wonders about itself?  What if change builds on chemistry, extending it into the reality of thought wherein the chemicals in our brains are and are not the cause of our capacity to consider the nature of reality, truth and logic?

The rational mind draws on logic as an absolute truth in a world it struggles to understand.  So is truth the servant of logic or logic the servant of truth?  If the latter, it would be wrong to conclude that the truth must conform to logic in order to be true – as if to restrict the nature of truth to our logical conceptualisations of what must be the case.  However, if the truth is indeed something grander and stranger than we can make it out to be, might this not alert us to the limits of logic for resolving the factual contradictions of a universe that is grander and stranger than the imagination?  For instance, it may be perfectly true to say that the space-dust of which we are constituted is and is not the cause of the living mindful panoply that is known to us and occupied by us – since the evidence shows the physical world achieving sentience rather than supplying it.  But logic continues to nag at us and aver that the facts as they were must be the ‘real’ cause.  And whilst it is true to say that an effect, such as a thought, is a particular consequence of causes identifiable in non-thinking physical states, it is not possible to say thereby that the difference between cause and effect can be explained by that fact or any number of causal convolutions, or that the cause is capable of saying anything to us unless we put the ‘words into its mouth’, with a meaning that never belonged to the facts as they were, or nature as it was.

Mike Laidler

Leadership and Democracy

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We use the vote to tell our governments what we think, but how do we know what to think?  Does making a decision on the basis of the available evidence mean that our reasoning is balanced for us by that evidence?  And can we mean what we say or do if the brain makes us do it under the influence of its inputs?  In fact, are we just being carried along on a tide of influences that appear to us as our opinions?  Is this why our choices get skewed by the facts that happen to grab our attention or the past experiences that bias our views?  Then what does this say about voting in democracies that are meant to operate on the balance of public opinion?  Are we any better when it comes to collective decision-making?

Can a consensus of opinions draw us nearer to the truth?  When confronted with an irresolvable dilemma it might seem reasonable for an individual to commit the choice to the toss of a coin.  However, we don’t want to commit to chance important choices on matters of national policy, so we might listen to the debates and take note of the opinion polls giving us a statistical insight into the balance of public opinion?  But can we really claim to know the collective mind?  Can we rely upon the statistics to give us the facts?  Can democratic opinion resolve a dilemma in any event?  Is the opinion of the masses any less fickle than the singular decision of a dominating leader?

Does democracy enshrine the sovereignty of the majority over ‘the right thing to do’?  Ironically, our dilemmas appear to be most acute when we give ourselves an either/ or predicament.  So what can the statistics reveal about issues that split a population down the middle?  Suppose there are millions of coins in a bag of national treasures and they happen to tumble out at random.  They would tend towards a balance of 50/50, heads and tails, with the trend towards this balance increasing as the number of coins increases – the reason being that the coins don’t know what they are doing.  So when our mass choices at elections and referenda tend towards such a balance of opinions, might this not mean that the statistics are indeed telling us something about ourselves – that the balance of collective opinion is no better than chance?

Mike Laidler

Words of Reason

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If there was no ambiguity about the nature of ‘the real’ there would be no need to single out or believe in the fact of it. As it happens, most of us live in a literal reality – our understandings being shaped by the words used to divine ‘the real’, with the intellect aspiring to truths couched in words of reason, echoing facts said to speak for themselves. Yet words are but foils for ‘the truth’, expounding a logic drawn from the precepts of which we explain our understandings – or is it understand our explanations? – in any case, being expressly validated as a outlook that defers to the facts, as if the facts tell us what to know. But this derived form of realism sidesteps the real task of philosophy – to expose the fictions and unseen contradictions generated by a reasoning that sees no greater truth than itself. For despite knowing that the reasons of today can turn into the regrets of tomorrow, we dutifully abandon our doubts and rationalise away problematic truths with ever more sophisticated forms of sophistry – thereby to convince ourselves that the rhetoric of reason remains our ultimate mentor – as if it is ‘the truth’ that abhors the contradictions – as if the intellectual impasse of contradiction also delimits the nature of ‘the facts’.

Mike Laidler

Knowing Belief

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Reality may be seen as a plurality of the physical and metaphysical, more especially because the ‘thinking makes it so’ – for whilst the physical world remains essentially insensible and objective the metaphysical becomes personal and subjective. This form of metaphysics is evident in the nature of thought thinking about itself: ‘I think therefore I am’ – knowledge being a state of mind discernible in the recognition of its own inferences. However, our obsession with the inference of a reality beyond inference leads us to infer that real knowledge belongs to external facts that know nothing, as if they can also explain for us the transition to a knowing universe and demonstrate that the fact of the knowing is a change of less significance than ‘the facts’, in the greater glory of their objective oblivion.

It seems, to those who care to look, that knowledge is a minefield of assumptions beginning with the mind’s inferences about itself. Not surprisingly, popular forms of factual knowledge purport to minimise the need for inference – so in knowing for sure that Paris is the capital of France we may also rest assured that other forms of factual knowledge will not lead us astray. But such knowledge masks its own deficiencies and our ignorance of a deeper truth – that all ‘knowing’ is built upon inferences fashioned into beliefs. Indeed it is belief, rather than fact, that is the patron of knowledge, actively tuning the known by turning and pitching one understanding upon and against another; and no matter whether it ends in agreement or disagreement, that end is mediated by belief because the facts can’t tell us what to know.

Belief and knowledge are more alike than we might imagine, yet we tend to believe that knowledge displaces belief, which is why the ‘knowledgeable’ are dumfounded by what others are prepared to believe in disregard of the ‘known facts’. However, the knowing adds something to those facts, and the conclusions we draw go beyond the facts, entering into the realms of belief by the fact that we are drawing conclusions, and in particular because we feel the need to do so. So whether or not we are ‘in the know’ we are all using beliefs of one sort or another to put that knowledge in perspective, and it is the perspective that determines what we are prepared to make of ‘the facts’. Of course belief and knowledge are not static, then it is a matter of belief whether we take the facts to be static – and in every discipline the basic facts are open to reinterpretation, or not, depending the beliefs upon which that discipline is founded, and by which means the discipline gains its purpose. Indeed, to know is to believe we know, but to truly know is to know we believe and that we ‘believe in order to understand’, knowing that knowledge is built upon the myths by which we ‘explain the inexplicable’.

Mike Laidler

Migrant’s Law

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What is the cause of the European migration crisis?  Is it the illegal trafficking or the subjugation of people’s lives to the vagaries of warfare, political instability and economic imbalance?  

 

What is the basis of this wider problem, which afflicts the powerless and shames the powerful?  Can the law tell us what to do or should our humane judgment be allowed to prevail?  The migrants keep telling us that they are human beings – then to what justice are these people entitled?  

 

Is our system of justice the best in the world if it operates exclusively for us?  Can there be a larger framework of justice in which justice is not subject to who counts as ‘us’ or ‘them’?  Or will the economic ‘laws’ provide the final answer by reassuring us that ‘we’ happen to need an influx of more people to sustain ‘our’ economic growth?

 

Mike Laidler   

 

Instantiation

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Reality is a paradox – the whole that is more than the sum of its parts, the ‘is’ that is greater than the was, the cause in the effect.  

 

It seems rational to understand how things change by looking to what there was beforehand, but this doesn’t tell us what might happen next.  And when we strip away the reality we know we see another kind of reality beneath so our interest and understanding naturally centre on its discovery.  However, the fact of the difference tends to be read as a sign that the action is really taking place at a primary level – that the familiar world is somewhat ancilliary, that our discovery of the fundamentals has ‘shown us’ the true state of affairs – that change is caused.  

 

We see change as caused instead of the cause.  Thus we claim to explain the fact of change as caused by something else – by putting it down to discernible causes showing that there is nothing more to it, and by mechanising the process to confirm that the whole is no more than the sum of its parts because there is nothing else to see.  Then we proceed to identify the changed facts with the unchanged facts, by seeing the manifest ‘change’ as a mere detail compared with things in their rudimentary forms.  And, for good measure, the change to complexity is seen as the cause of the thing we need to explain, as affirming that the difference between cause and effect comes down to the change at the level of the cause, revealing causal complexities hitherto unseen.  

 

Likewise we seek to explain ourselves by referencing our thoughts, intentions and beliefs to their physical causes – to understand our actions in terms of the activities of the brain, as if the consummate properties of one state of reality can be understood in terms of the vacant properties of another – as if everything is actually something else and therefore the fact of change, the one thing we cannot really explain, doesn’t stand apart from what we know of its causes in terms of something else.  So we end up identifying, defining and explaining the nature of change by the activity of its cause; but everything is active and effects instantiate a different kind of activity in addition to the activity of their perceived causes.  Hence change is the true cause, the active cause of causality, the efficacy of the effect.  In fact everything in existence adds up to the inexplicable fact of change instantiating itself, as it was at the beginning of the universe.  

 

Ultimately, the ‘environmental causes’ of change are merely accompanying factors of change that do not explain its instantiation in terms of things changed or changing any more than they explain those environmental changes, or indeed, the initiation of an environment.  And no amount of environmental feedback can equate to or explain for us the change to cognition and explanation – though this amounts to our best attempt at understanding a potential that defies explanation, an inexplicable potential that is inherent to all things.  For the potential in change cannot be explained incidentally by the properties of things that differ, or by the differing properties of things that remain stable.  


Mike Laidler

Objectionable objectives

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Objectivity is a curious paradox.  It represents a puzzle in thought about the way we think, which some think represents no puzzle at all so long as we put our own thoughts to one side.   It is a point of view that cannot operate without a subjective backdrop and its passionate defence runs contrary to its revered neutrality.  It purports to elevate the importance of what is thought by deeming it secondary to the subject matter – the objective facts – as if to align the point of view with a real object, which has none, thereby rendering the subject more realistic.

But facts can be seen to give us the right answers only as long as we can think of no better questions to ask.  For it is not as if the facts speak for themselves, or the objects of attention select themselves for our attention, or that once the ‘real’ facts have been identified we can rest assured that our ‘objective conclusions’ will be valid.  So it may not be valid to conclude that people are animals because that’s the fact of it, or that being subject to Darwinian principles means that biological facts determine our nature, or that inheritance is quintessential – as were the conclusions of one Adolph Hitler.

Mike Laidler.

In commemoration of ‘VE day: 8th May 1945’.

Definitive illusions

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Life teaches us that there is more to every fact than the fact of it. So the fact that philosophy can’t give us “the answer” teaches us a useful lesson in reality – that the definitive truth is an illusion of the fact we try to make of it – as if everything is either/ or: this or that, true or false.

Instead, philosophy opens up a reality of multiple truths about a world that is simultaneously one thing and another. It teaches us that the belief in the ultimate “fact” or “truth” is a residue of what we have gleaned from someone else’s bad philosophy.

Mike Laidler