perception

Subject to oneself

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Is consciousness an illusion generated by the brain?  But how would we know it without the overview that enables our recognition?  So consciousness ‘looks on’.  And there can be no scientific discoveries without a sentient faculty of realisation.  Hence the dawning of awareness heralds a new kind of reality in which facts become identified as perceptual objects.  Likewise, self-awareness marks a new kind of realisation – evocative of ‘a self’ as the object of its own perception.

However, reality is not necessarily limited to that which is framed by perception.  And there is something odd about the nature of self-discovery because it involves the perception of facts that had hitherto escaped recognition – even when the recognisable element of such facts obtains imaginatively of the subjective realisations of insight.  Then what of science’s embrace of an ‘objective reality’ of things natural – is it inclusive enough to show that scientific knowledge represents nature’s insight into itself?

Mike Laidler

Before and after

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We see ourselves perceiving the world on the basis of things ‘as they are’, ‘out there’, ‘in existence’, but there is a problem with this ‘world view’ because perception, in common with everything else, involves the coming-to-be of things that were not – and this raises a question of change which we cannot resolve ‘at source’ either by looking for a first cause or by attributing the form of the effect to its cause.

In addition, knowledge and explanation contrast radically with an external reality of objective facts now drawn into the realms of observation – but we believe that the logic and language of proof can iron out the difference.  Indeed, the grammar of explanation begs the question of a ‘deep structure’, holding everything in place, whereby all ensuing differences are seen to evolve as a result of secondary shaping influences.

However, even though causes are seen to underlie effects, those effects are not merely embedded in their causes like sculptures waiting to be released from blocks of stone.  So there is more to change than the nature of the underlying preconditions, just as there is more to the shaping influences than pure chance.  That is not to say that chance doesn’t have a part to play, but it means that evolution by chance is not the explanation.

Accordingly, whilst it may be said that everything happens by co-incidence, there is more to co-incidence than blind chance.  And whilst we rightly remain wary of accident, we know that all eventualities are contained within prevailing boundaries of possibility – anything cannot happen at any time.  In fact, no cause explains those prevailing boundaries even though we come to explain outcomes as effects belonging to causes operating within them.

Consequently, perception maps the world with contours of its making whilst perceiving itself as the effect of an objective reality.  But the very presence of perception shows that reality is subject to change – with effects arising as modified causes.  And despite our aspirations to explain change causally, causality remains subsidiary to the changing boundaries of possibility.  Then who can say that we too are not instrumental in ‘the shape of things to come’ – beginning with ourselves as mere causes on the threshold of change.

Mike Laidler

Insight

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The world can be seen as nothing but matter in motion, except we may see it otherwise – and it is the seeing that makes the difference, for without that insight the world remains nothing but matter in motion.

The Sound of Silence

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Science is a reality proceeding to its completeness through the realisation of possibilities and the discovery of what is there. A prerequisite for this exercise is the capacity for knowing which the knower uniquely brings to the facts under study in a reality now extended by a new and different kind of realisation – one that takes place in the mind.

This process of completion began long before we invented science. Hearing a sound extends the reality from its physical state into a co-existing mental state. It is futile to argue whether the one or the other is the more real, they both add up a new reality – a reality that has already changed with the advent of its perception. We now know that we occupy both versions of this new reality – knowing that the physical waveform of sound is not everything to know, that perception brings sound to life and without that living perception the ‘sound’ remains in the silence of its physical state. Meanwhile the forests may fall and the mountains crumble without the full reality of sound having made its appearance.

Scientists know that the reality of knowledge is incomplete without an objective basis, yet tend to overlook the fact that the objective basis is incomplete within a wider reality that is known to obtain – that the world is incomplete in the oblivion of its physical completeness without the presence of a knowing realisation to change what happens next.

Mike Laidler