Philosophy

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

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

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

Objective subjects

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It shouldn’t surprise us to discover that we are good at being psychologists, seeing that we are our own subject matter.

But experts tell us that we need to be less subjective and more objective – to make objectivity the objective of subjectivity, so we can really surprise ourselves as we look upon ourselves as objects of the looking, thereby to get to know ourselves better.

However, there can be no objectivity without a subjective base to work from and return to with knowledge won – objectivity being a state of mind – whilst the fact of knowledge has no bearing in reality without a subjective reality to hold it in place, though we like to think it is otherwise, as if knowledge comes from the objects known.

Mike Laidler

Presuming to know

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Philosophical discourse is not as it seems to the onlooker. Outwardly it appears to revolve around versions of belief; but in reality the whole point is to get beyond belief, which is why beliefs are seen to feature so prominently.

In fact it is impossible to progress philosophically until belief is examined by tackling the presumptions underlying what we think and know, ultimately by facing up to the extent of our presumptions behind everything – thereby to discover something paradoxical – that we can know nothing about the world that does not depend on making presumptions, but that we prefer to think otherwise, to believe in certainties for the sake of ‘making progress’.

Meanwhile, for those who believe that knowing is a matter of what they know, the unexamined life, or the version examined by others, remains their preferred choice.

Mike Laidler

Diets of persuasion

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Rhetoric is a concoction of processed persuasions and artificial additives – a dubious philosophical sandwich – stuffed with beguiling logical-isms sitting between a premise (assumption) and conclusion, then served up to the gullible who are meant to swallow it whole.

But the worst of it is that, at its best, the reasoning ingested with the ‘conclusion’ is meant to be digested as if it gives nourishment to the premise.

Mike Laidler

What next?

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The past may be seen to predict the future for all solid-state elements in a mechanistic universe. This excludes the sub-elements of the quantum universe and the supra-elements of the sentient universe.

However, what is known of the quantum universe, in the context of the everyday physical reality that is ‘more real’ to us, is that the peculiarities of the former support, but don’t resemble the nature of the latter, which can be seen to exist in addition, ‘on top’ – in a supra-reality that now includes the fact of the seeing.

Only it seems that we have yet to learn this lesson with respect to the sentient universe regarding itself, a lesson that can only begin by recognising it as a reality known to be peculiar to the nature of itself – a reality as real as the peculiar nature of solid rock, which we also know is really not solid in a different reality.

Perhaps the difference is due to the diverging nature of reality, whereby what is and what ‘is next’ simultaneously occupy different realities. And as we learn that there is more to existence than either quantum or Newtonian physics can explain, we know that we can know it because of our first-hand experience of a peculiar reality of a different order – of knowing, learning and explanation in a reality that simultaneously occupies the physical universe, yet is not peculiar to it.

Mike Laidler

The problem of happiness

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The problem of happiness is that we have made it into a problem. Children are born with happiness in their being, which they systematically unlearn in learning to be happy.

There is no thing in the world that encapsulates happiness, apart from the things in the world said to make us happy. Thus ‘being happy’ is a construct that is conditional upon finding out how to be happy, which usually depends upon finding the things that make us happy – as if happiness is a thing to be found in the world.

Ironically, the quest to be happy can undermine our well-being on the premise there is something to be found that we do not have, as if it might flood into our lives to fill a vacuum – as if happiness is the experience of that it.

Unfortunately there is much sadness to behold in this quest for happiness – for those who need happiness to be defined for them will never find it on those terms.

Mike Laidler.

Rules without rules

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Morality is not as it seems. It is wrongly portrayed as the following of rules, because that’s as it seems. In fact true morality is the antithesis of rules.

Following rules for moral reasons does not moralise the rule, since in morality it is not the rule that takes the lead. Robots may be said to follow rules and abide by moral rules for non-moral reasons, but people can do so only by moral neglect, which neither releases nor absolves them of a moral obligation. Meanwhile, the creation of moral rules is but the moral diversion of those who think they can think for others.

Morality is more of a matter of what can be done than what has to be done. Morally ‘neutral’ reasons for what needs to be done always flow from a moral decision, and it can’t be someone else’s decision, otherwise we turn ourselves into the slaves of the rationalists, pragmatists, moralists and rule makers. But still we don’t escape our personal involvement in matters of morality, because morality is the condition for being human, the condition made human, the human condition that overrules the need to follow and obey.

Moral dilemmas are meant to be dilemmas. They are not meant to be solved and forgotten about. ‘Moral solutions’ are debased in the belief that they have been taken care of, or that they can be looked after by others, or that we can spread moral responsibility through shared moral decisions – that the majority knows the right thing to do, therefore it is right to abide by the consensus as a moral duty owed, as if a social conscience amounts to and accounts for morality.

However, no one else can make a moral decision on your behalf, in all conscience, even if it is with your consent, because conscience is not a thing that can or should be delegated in a moral society, especially for pragmatic reasons. For a moral sensibility is the only thing that can put pragmatism and reason in its place. It is the only thing in which you can truly find yourself.

Mike Laidler