Q.E.D.

July 7, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

Proof is the presumption of presumption transcended.

What is proof in a universe that needs nothing of it?

There is no proof of anything without a mind to be convinced.

Objectivity doesn’t come into being until subjectivity comes into being.

Proof proposes to seal the fact of what must be the case on the presumption of what must stand as the evidence.

Every proof is construed of a selection of facts, perceived as if the facts had driven our selections.

There is no proof of an objective reality that does not rely upon a subjective realisation.

We are certain that we are conscious and yet we cannot discern its nature in any preconscious state of nature. Nor can we prove that such preconscious states relate to the fact of consciousness without relying implicitly on the very fact we are trying to establish explicitly in terms of those other facts.
(The consciousness uncertainty principle)

Proof idealises our ideas of reality, as if to elevate them above ourselves.

We offer proofs to the facts in the belief that the facts have offered us the proofs.

Proof reflects what we want to know in the belief that it shows us what we need to know.

No amount of proof proves that only the provable facts are worth knowing.

Our proof of causal relations relies on the assumption that causal relations provide the proofs.

Human agency introduces causal contingencies that no other facts can explain for us.

There is no proof that one fact belongs to another but for the fact that we believe it is so.

A proof gives the impression of having resolved implicitly the most irksome of all questions: What is a fact?

Proof represents the belief that we have dispensed with belief.

Every proof is an index of what is assumed in the understanding and what cannot be understood because of those assumptions.

Science validates its proofs by failed attempts at disproof.

No amount of proof can equate the fact of change to the fact of what was.

What can amount to the proof of subjective existence that is not satisfied by the subject being satisfied.

Every answer is a psychological construct of the psychology built into the question.

Everything we understand about the world is laced with anthropomorphisms because our understandings are anthropic.

Thinking is a fact of existence that cannot be made more real by recognising it as a fact of something else, as if the something else is the source of the thought, proving that our thoughts are not what they seem.

Mike Laidler

The consciousness uncertainty principle

Aside ~ June 15, 2015June 17, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

Consciousness is bigger than anything we can set-up in consciousness as the form of our awareness.

Furthermore, every time we probe the form of our consciousness in order to find out something new about it we alter the state of our awareness in the wake of our discovery – we generate a new state of consciousness, so ensuring that there is always something new to learn. And if, as it would seem, consciousness remains bigger than any fact we can determine about it, then our awareness of that paradoxical fact holds the key to expanding our horizons.

Mike Laidler

The nature of the beast

June 14, 2015June 17, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

Either we think through nature or nature thinks through us – either way, nature gains the power of thought.

Part 1: Dualities

Our presence in nature goes to show that there is more to reality than the unseeing and impersonal. Something has changed, and if that change is natural, then nature now forms a duality that is both sensible and insensible. In this duality the body retains its own needs and predilections, though like the ‘tame’ beast it can be pressed into the service of larger causes. Likewise, the dualities of change raise our schemes and intentions into powers and perversions under the influence of an emergent knowledge, or at least our version of it. We presume to identify truths, defend principles and know ourselves by espousing something that is no thing, something we see as all the more real for being more than us – whereby basic drives and noble values come to co-exist in us, and nature. Thus there is a paradox at the heart of nature: we know and so a part of nature knows, and it seems that all we know is owed to an erstwhile nature that knows nothing.

Part 2: Possibilities
We are a part of a nature that is in a process of change, in the act of becoming something more than it was. So it is possible to see evolution as something happening to nature. However, whilst it is patently obvious that thought has a presence in the universe, we are loathe to conclude that nature thinks through us, or even that will power makes a fundamental difference. Nonetheless, we introduce possibilities in the form of purposes, meanings, goals and designs that change the face of nature. Then, as a part of nature, we embody convergences of possibilities, each acting on the other and building into changes that extend the vital facts of nature into burgeoning faculties. And as nature comes to perceive itself though us, so self-perception elevates the natural into the realms of a super-nature – because nature doesn’t behave like that at its lower levels. Meanwhile, there remains the fact of what we were and still are – as animals contending with the dilemmas of our pleasures and pains. Typically, we crave food as much for the sake of pleasure as hunger, yet we make sacrifices and put ourselves under pressure to accomplish ends which place our basic needs and desires in conflict with our higher aspirations.
Part 3: Realities
In the bigger picture, the incongruous presence of personal existence in an impersonal universe is indicative of a convergence of possibilities with different natures. Thus nature changes through a series of ‘quantum shifts’ whilst losing nothing of what it was. So here we are. We look to the origins of the universe in terms of ambient possibilities of a different nature to the observable laws of physics, yet downplay the more obvious presence of animate possibilities acting upon the austere laws of nature. Nevertheless, something has obviously changed and the best example of this change is ourselves. We are both animal and animus, and the brain straddles this duality: being the insensible source of sentience, the impersonal seat of personality, the dark root of illumination, the blind cause of choice. And the mysteries of the body are eclipsed by yet deeper mysteries of the ‘known mind’ by which we presume to master ourselves, for it remains evident that the stark aloofness of our crowning glory in logic and reason can lead us to acts of wanton brutality that far surpass the savage nature of the beast. Paradoxically, our intellectual rowess is no surety against ourselves; and logic is not everything – for the nature of reality is such that we act through the auspices of other natures, binding our choices – and reason can serve any master.

Mike Laidler

Sapience

May 18, 2015May 26, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

You can learn about wisdom by studying the wisdom of others but you can learn wisdom only by studying yourself.
~
Wisdom knows the limits of knowledge in knowing that it depends upon the nature of knower as much as the facts known.
~
Wisdom is a paradox to itself, knowing the one thing we may be sure about is that all we know remains dwarfed by the magnitude of the unknown, which, by definition, we do not know. Meanwhile all the confidence and certainty in the known merely serves to divert our attention from the great unknowns upon which the entirety of knowledge is built and continues to grow.
~
Wisdom gives to knowledge doubt, knowledge gives to wisdom the cause to doubt.

Mike Laidler

Black sheep

May 7, 2015May 12, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

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

May 1, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

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

April 28, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

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

April 17, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

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

April 17, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

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)

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)

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

(Where is reason?)

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

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

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

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

(Where is reason?)

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

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

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

(Believing in belief).

Our realisations are the founders of realities yet to be.

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

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

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).

The mind in nature sees something nature cannot – itself.

(Where is reason?)

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

(Where is reason?)

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).

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

(Where is reason?)

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

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

(Where is reason?)

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

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?

April 10, 2015April 10, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ 1 Comment

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.