The Possibility of Vision

TenDayInterval.mp3

Everything inItsRightPlace.mp3

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time…..I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist…….nor do I conceive what I is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity”

David Hume: A Treatise On Human Nature

“1. The world is all thst is the case”

“1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”

Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Assuming physics to be broadly speaking true, can we know it to be true, and, if the answer is in the affirmative, does this involve knowledge of other truths besides those of physics?”

Bertrand Russell – Physics and Experience

To think about consciousness is difficult, moment to moment it is the one thing of which we are not aware, that is despite its unique relationship with all with which are aware. Of course from time to time we will comment on how we feel or what we see but in none of those statements are we even implicitly referring to our own consciousness. But without it, we wouldn’t have the awareness that would make any of those statements remotely intelligible.

The words here as they are read by you, the sense of your hand guiding you, the sense of the back of your neck. These are not things, they exist as constellations of activity in your brain. They are qualia, aspects of consciousness. The sense of having a word on the tip of your brain, that’s also consciousness. But, and it would be unnatural to do anything but this; we conflate each of those experiences with the things they are experiences of; they are in fact just mental activity.

Of course your hand and your neck exist, as do these words. However, the point remains; between you and your experience is a world taken for granted. That world is an interpretation, and reality, once you’ve been removed from it is something quite different to what we interpret. Cut open a human brain and there is nothing that looks like a word or a book or even a desk lamp, there is a fleshy organ and in that organ millions of connections infer not just the lamp, the book and the words, they infer you reading it as well.

Given that this is the case, and this is the case, what certainty do we have that we are even really real? That is a question that has been asked and examined and attempts have been made to answer with varying degrees of satisfaction. Ultimately however, each answer has led to a regress of absurdity, leading to more and more questions at every turn. One of my favourite answers used to be the idea that it is by virtue of the coherence of evidence that we can be sure that the world exists, and my favourite retort; we could also be be coherently wrong about all of those facts as well.

To make matters worse; physics tells us that the world that we see is in fact an inference and a relatively bad one at that. The table, the book and even the ink on the page that make up the words are made up of billions of electrons buzzing about, and between them a lot of empty space.

The issue it seems to me that makes us nervous is that we like to feel certain about things. Novelty is always nice when it doesn’t threaten you, but when you can’t be sure that you’re really reading these words on this screen because you may in fact not exist, or these words may only exist by virtue of your thinking them, then the uncertainty is a little more daunting.

To be certain of everything you believe is in reality a probabilistic nightmare. Desire for certainty is a necessary disease of the mind, it is the anxiety of uncertainty that lies behind neurotic disposition, and that is the point. How many nightmares have been caused in the world because one group of people have killed to defend one false proposition against another? How much of history is marred by sacrifices made in the name of ideas that today we’re certain are parochial, ridiculous even. Science itself is in part built around the idea that it’s central authority lies in its own ability to falsify itself. And how many ideas that we take to be the fabric of reality today will our future generations  inquire with an equal humour? But that said the fabric of what we take to be the essence of the world, the values and assumptions we make in the simplest of our observations seem unavoidable.

That single impasse, the impasse of pragmatism has shifted debate from the quest for truth to the nature of attitude. Progress, it seems, is less to do with what we know than our attitude towards what we think we know.

And yet we certainly will, and we certainly do take our own existence for granted. But we fail to take for granted the same sense of existence in others, or even the world in which we live. The distance between us and the minds of others, those minds who share the uncertainty of reality with us are at a greater distance from us than the least tenable of our beliefs.

That is an irony, and it’s a bad one too; the further away someone is from us the easier it is to forget the one thing they certainly do share with us, that is humanity, consciousness and a mind. It is all of the minds in this world taken together that give is the most coherent picture of the world we can have, it therefore seems viciously illogical that we are also so capable of standing at such a distance from people who for all the superficial differences are in essence the same as us. Most importantly, people who share a world with us and have as much right to a picture of existence as us.

Within the depths of those minds are the anxieties of existence that drive each of us. For some however that existence is in fact desperate, and in a society that can give anything to anyone most people struggle with the very fact of existence. That is madness for a rational society.

But as much as we would like to believe it is the case, society is not rational. Of course the law, the government and the values that we share preserve some kind of rationality. The concept of human rights, international diplomacy and democracy are in effect standards of rationality that have developed and evolved over time, they have been made possible through history; even though many of these ideas were born of inequity at one time or another. But there is a deeper and more significant point, one that leads to an absurdity that is unavoidable, just like art, language and any other form of expression, each of these institutions are born of human minds and shape human reality and in as much as that is the case, and again, that is the case, they are only capable of as much reason as we are in using them.

“THE HOPE OF SATISFACTION TO OUR MORE HUMAN DESIRES – THE HOPE OF DEMONSTRATING THAT THE WORLD HAS THIS OR THAT DESIRABLE ETHICAL CHARACTERISTIC – IS NOT ONE WHICH, SO FAR AS I CAN SEE, A SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY CAN DO ANYTHING WHATEVER TO SATISFY”

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“THE GOOD WHICH IT CONCERNS US TO REMEMBER IS THE GOOD WHICH IT LIES IN OUR POWER TO CREATE – THE GOOD IN OUR LIVES AND IN OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE WORLD. INSISTENCE ON THE BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL REALISATION OF THE GOOD IS A FORM OF SELF ASSERTION, WHICH, WHILE IT CANNOT SECURE THE EXTERNAL GOOD WHICH IT DESIRES, CAN SERIOUSLY IMPAIR INWARD GOOD WHICH LIES IN OUR POWER, AND DESTROY THAT REVERENCE TOWARDS FACT WHICH CONSTITUTES BOTH WHAT IS VALUABLE IN HUMILITY AND WHAT IS FRUITFUL IN THE SCIENTIFIC TEMPER.”

Bertrand Russell – Mysticism and Logic