by
Sergio Caldarella
Deny the reality of things
and
you miss their reality;
assert
the emptiness of things
and
you miss their reality.
Jianzhi Sengcan
If someone would try to explain, to an audience of people
without a scientific background, the principles under which modern physicists
consider the world, the audience would probably see his or her statements at
least as mildly delusional or even entirely crazy: not only is contemporary science
crowded with all sorts of strange objects,[2] bizarre theories,[3] and counterintuitive behaviors,[4] it also affirms that those concepts and representations
are the roots of an unknowable “fundamental reality.”[5] The first realization coming from this
apparent “strangeness” of our universe is that every ultimate representation of
the so-called “physical reality” is not only impossible, but epistemologically
wrong! A physicist once joked that the reason we are unable to mentally represent
dimensions higher than the 4th is because we’re made to gather
bananas from trees, not to think about the dimensions of our universe. In
psychological terms, this means also that every effort to “match” the so called
“reality” of the world to our mental faculties is doomed to fail from the very
beginning, unless, by stating that the world is as simple as it looks (a rock
is just a rock, a tree is just a tree),[6] we prefer to substitute illusion – or a shared
illusion – for reality. After all, illusions have power because human beings, in
contrast with other animals, tend to act according to what they believe to be
true. Therefore, whoever is able to shape your worldview controls you, because most
people will act according to the belief system that has been proposed to or
imposed upon them. The social consequences of this attitude have been vast and
extraordinary throughout the entire history of mankind. If someone can, then,
establish a consistency of illusion, that person can create a consistent
unreality that benefits him or her in various ways.[7]
Modern science – including logic – shows that we are
allowed, from a physical standpoint, only a vague glimpse into reality, a feeble
understanding similar to an island surrounded by a sea of illusions. Isaac
Newton, the father of classical physics, after a long series of successful
scientific discoveries, humbly declared: “I seem to have been only like a boy
playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a
smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of
truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Human beings generally tend to be
suspicious, or openly skeptical, about such a viewpoint, because they intuitively
believe that they possess some sort of personal certitude about the forms of
their perceptions and their consciousness of the so-called “reality” of the
world. Some philosophers have even announced a convenient conflation of being with perception, as expressed in the phenomenalist proposition of the Esse est percipi, To be is to perceive,[8] by the Bishop of Cloyne. But reference to
perception per se doesn’t solve intellectual
dilemmas and paradoxes about cognitive issues:[9] we can easily perceive matter as “solid,” a straight stick partly immersed in
water as “bent” or the earth as “flat,” all the while knowing that they are not; therefore our esse doesn’t necessarily depend on, or follow, our percipi, unless we prefer to exchange
the illusion of the flat earth for its spherical reality. Perception is a
limited (and too-often wrong) tool in the investigation of realities, whether
they be internal or external, and the same errors that apply to the resulting
interpretation of the world through perception are easily carried over to the
understanding of ourselves.
Following the various claims and doctrines of Empiricism,
Materialism, Utilitarianism, Huxleyan-Darwinism and Pragmatism, today’s
biological sciences have taken a certain approach to consciousness, declaring,
in many instances, that “the world is an illusion constructed in our heads.” Obviously,
neurologists are not claiming “there is no world out there”; they are simply
pointing out the inadequacy of our brain to process reality “as it is.” Strange
as it seems, this conceptual attitude is a derivation from the belief that
there is indeed a “reality as it really is” out there, and that, even if our
mind is playing tricks on us, we can select from this “reality” what is useful
or convenient to our survival.[10]
Somehow we take for granted that the topic of
consciousness is related to perception[11] or to the “reality” of the external world; by doing
so, we’re establishing a hypothetical relationship between ourselves and what
we call, in general terms, “the external world.” When the Peripatetic axiom, nihil est in intellectu quod prius non
fuerit in sensu, nothing is in the
intellect that was not first in the senses, eventually made its way into
modern philosophy, [12] it became a key element of Empiricism, supporting
the belief that our entire thinking is a patchwork of elements we have
experienced through the senses. Following this line of reasoning, a unicorn is
then merely the sum of a horse and a narwhal or, in other words, all there is
is what there is: est quod est.[13] Lewis Carroll, himself a mathematician and a logician,
well-aware of the intellectual debate regarding consciousness and perception, instead
had Alice say, “one can’t believe impossible things,” to which the Queen replied
“sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” The
irony of such an answer should be duly noted.
When we try to ponder the aforementioned discoveries of
physics, we’re thinking about something
beyond our realm of perception; then,
accepting such conclusions, we can’t interpret reality any longer through only the
senses,[14] but through the intellect. Therefore, Leibniz’s
addition to the Peripatetic axiom, “nisi
ipse intellectus, except the intellect itself,” gives an opening to reach
above and beyond the mere senses.
The idea that what’s outside us determines what’s inside
us is an interpretation of reality characteristic of the Western cultural tradition,
mainly based on the fact that each human being is a privileged “point of perception.” Other cultures have instead related
consciousness and perception only to the interior of the human being and have understood
the problem of consciousness as autonomous from the external world: this is the
reason why the statues of the Buddha have closed eyes, because they are contemplating
the “real reality” inside. Similarly, the Gospel
of Luke declared, “No one will say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’;
because the Kingdom of God is within you,”[15] and centuries later, M. K. Gandhi echoed, “the
truth is to be found nowhere else other than within ourselves,” pointing once
again to a concept of truth not based on sign and reference, but which requires
a deeper understanding, not necessarily dependent on the external world. Is not
just ethical/philosophical thinking that points to an internally generated
reality; even neurobiology asserts that the world is, in fact, “inside your
brain,” meaning that reality is something generated by the brain, or, to
use a similitude, the world is the canvas on which the brain paints “reality.” Some
contemporary academics go so far as to claim an “illusion of consciousness,”[16] or a
dream within a dream, as Edgar Allan Poe would probably have said,
poetically. Neurobiology, with the statement that “reality” is something that “happens
inside your brain,”[17] seems to have rediscovered the old philosophical
concept of representation (Vorstellung), i.e. that reality seems to
be, up to a certain extent, a selection of perceptions. If the brain really manipulates the world to the
point of creating a representation that resembles reality in the way that a
Tintoretto painting resembles Venice, then all our minds are merely producing elaborate
hallucinations and illusions. If this were true to the extent claimed by some
neuroscientists, we would have no physics, mathematics, logic, philosophy, or
even any common understanding, because a long chain of physiological illusions would
not allow any consistent cognizance of the external world, nor any possibility
for real communication – If your triangle is my square and my triangle is
someone else’s octagon, then our languages cannot meet on the ground of a
common hermeneutic.
Although we accept that the world cannot be entirely perceived
in absolute clarity – a realization as old as rational thinking – there are, at
the same time, intellectual instruments and methods that allow us to cross the gap
between appearance and reality, without necessarily retreating into mechanistic
or reductionist explanations that would lead to bizarre conclusions.[18] If we did not have intellectual tools to
investigate the universe apart from our wishes, desires, misperceptions, etc.,
we would be fatally abandoned to a subjective physiological response to the
external reality, and the entire human world would resemble a solipsistic
asylum where each individual lives in some sort of a personalized cosmos
generated by his/her brain and for himself/herself, therefore incapable of any
real communication with others. It’s a monadic vision of the human being, a
fractured interpretation of reality, where the individual is living in some
sort of a cosmic theater with just one spectator. A thinking being should refuse
such solitude, as it only leads to confusion, a radical separation from other
humans, error and despair.
[1] Published in «The Bulletin of Computational Mathematics
and Epistemology» vol. III, #49, pp.35-40, NYC, February 2018.
[5] At a fundamental level, Heisenberg proved that it’s
impossible to know both the position (p) and the momentum (x) of a particle on
an atomic level. Moreover, at the Planck
scale, the laws of physics, as we understand them, break down entirely.
[6] Dr. Johnson, a champion of naïve realism, believed he
had refuted Berkeley’s thesis of the non-existence of matter just by kicking a
stone and spouting: “I refute it thus.”
[9] In many ways, Descartes reacts to the uncertainty of
perception when he is looking for a certain ultimate ground with his res cogitans.
[10] Once again, a disguised Darwinian doctrine emerges
here. From the epistemological side, Niels Bohr was the greatest critic of any
representation of atomic realities: “We must be clear that when it comes to
atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”
[11] Plato rejected the idea that knowledge can be
identified with perception (αἴσθησις): see Theaetetus
184b-186e.
[12] The axiom was first posited through
a Scholastics interpretation of Aristotle, was later put forth again by Pierre
Gassendi, then by John Locke (“There appear not to be any ideas in the mind
before the senses have conveyed any in,” An
Essay concerning Human Understanding, II, 1, 23), and was finally taken up
by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz with the addition, “nisi ipse intellectus.”
[13] A conceptual attitude that
can easily be converted into support of any kind of authoritarianism.
[14] In mathematics, for example, the equations can reveal
things of which we were not aware before performing the calculations, so our
wishes or preconceptions play little role in the logical conclusions. As a
major example, we can recall the discovery of irrational numbers, made by the Pythagoreans:
they wanted the world to be commensurable, but mathematics taught them
otherwise.
[16] But if consciousness is an illusion, who is making
this statement and what legitimacy does it have? Logically such a statement has
the form of a self-referential paradox similar to when people declare that “all
truths are relative,” without realizing that for such a statement to be valid,
there must be at least one truth that is not relative, and that’s the truth
stating that all truths are relative. See also the Epimenides paradox that
tricked even Saul of Tarsus (Epistle to
Titus, 1:12–13).
[17] It’s called “the internal model” or “mental model.”
Optical illusions are examples of how the “internal model” works.
[18] I believe this attitude of viewing reality as a pure
solipsistic product of our brain is deeply influenced by the modern
predominance of sophistry that allows people to believe it is legitimate to say
that there is “your truth” and “my truth,” “your logic” and “his logic.” Therefore
it seems plausible that there is even “your world” and “my world,” which is a
radical non-communication among human beings.
