“We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit.” - Blaise Pascal [1]
Returning to our friend the solipsist, who, with arms crossed, looks upon us triumphantly, we proceed to inquire further into the nature of his metaphysics. Does he mean that my body is neither mine nor an actual body, but only an appearance of a body that, in his mind, is arbitrarily assigned to an illusory “other,” viz., me? “Granted,” he quickly replies, “the nature of my consciousness and how it corresponds to the world that is revealed to me is unknown...” And so be it! We shall concede as much; however, if he imagines causing me bodily harm, does he not rather imagine committing violence on himself, by his self? Or if he imagines harming himself, is not the pain theoretically more personal to “his” body rather than that part “he” calls “me”? And what if, instead of imagining these possibilities, he acts upon them, so that the pain inflicted is no longer strictly abstract but feels more direct, appears to cause physical damage, and requires more than mere thought? “Sure, I admit each of those differences. That said, the common and necessary factor in each instance is my conscious presence, apart from which, none of those different states of being really exist, that is, to me.” But whether any object exists independently of apprehension or not can never be known to a subject without that subject's prior apprehension of the object in question. It is every bit as meaningless to argue over such an impossibility as it would be to debate the pros and cons of “Acirassi,” or, a term lacking content and otherwise every bit as useless.
To put it another way, imagine yourself waking up one morning in entirely new surroundings and having it revealed to you that all of your prior experiences on earth had been nothing but an elegant fabrication. Our solipsist had been correct! Yet, what about the solipsist's uncertainty about this new reality? Does it not remain? How could he know that this world, the one he has only now awoken in, is not also a product of his consciousness? “But that's my point,” he insists. “We cannot know anything except that we exist, and that we exist in a thought, viz., the thought that we exist. 'Je pense, donc je suis!'” [2] Is it not strange that, on the one hand, our solipsist doubts if he can “know” that objects, other than himself, exist independently of thought, and yet, this thought is the very affirmation of his own independent existence? The problem is the impossibility of conceiving even an omniscient being who could overcome our solipsist's challenge. It seems one can never be satisfied so long as he demands the knower to become, strictly, a known object, and cease to be the knowing subject, somehow; asking the knower to paradoxically exchange perception of said object for pure objectivity, which the knower cannot ascertain since the “perceiving subject” upon which all knowing depends has been eliminated from the equation. In other words, simply to possess “knowledge,” inquisitive minds will discover that doubtfulness over the infallibility of certain knowing-abilities necessarily ensues, and human experience never fails to bear this out.
All the worst off for objectivity then. Or, that would have been so, had multiple revolutions of human ingenuity not occurred during that period when decrees of condemnation were regularly issued from Rome over what some authorities perceived to be threats to sacred tradition. It can be conceded, to little effect, that individuals cannot trust their senses and reasons on the basis of self-assurance alone, but it must be stressed that we distinguish the apparently real from the real as do we the internal from the external. While we may not ultimately understand the relationship between the knower and the known, we can enlighten ourselves by conceptualizing the differences of those objects that arise exclusively in the mind, viz., internally, and those that seem to impress their features on our perceptions, i.e. externally. Take the concept of fire, for example. One can conceive the image of a fire in his or her mind, abstracting a visual of its glow, the amount of warmth it dispenses, the smell of burning wood, etc.; one cannot, however, be harmed by sticking an imaginary hand in it. Furthermore, all objects of thought seem to derive their qualities from sensations that we have received “externally,” that is, through connection with “the world,” via the sense of touch (including our eyes, ears, and other forms of feeling). A fire that is real, as opposed to an apparently real or imagined one, is efficacious upon objects that appear in the senses and not exclusively to those in thought, as is noted to occur in dreams; real objects possesses the ability to cause a practical change in the perceptive world, viz. the senses, as in the burning of skin or the subsequent ash that oftentimes blinds one's sight. It can also effect other objects, such as other persons in the immediate vicinity who can relate similar experiences using symbols, viz., language. Each of you call this bright, burning sensation “fire” and can describe its relations to your senses in like manner, contrary to the imagined one, which bears no relation to other nearby objects or persons unless you relate it to them symbolically, imitating the experiential quality by means of restrictive concepts. The familiarity of certain terms and ideas, and their correspondence to the causes and effects of real fires, viz., those which are perceived by the senses and can be experienced separately from, and with far more intensity than, any mere abstraction, allows two or more parties to share intelligible experiences through communication, whether unique or alike in some way.
Apart from the inefficiency of thoughts to produce change in objects, with the exception of whatever change is manifested in the thinking subject's behavior, objects regularly change, seemingly independently of thoughts and by a set of rules that our thoughts neither adhere to nor always apprehend. It is all but certain what will ensue if a lit match is thrown onto inflammable liquid; it is never certain which thought will succeed another. The reason that, after waking, we “often observe the absurdity of dreams,” as Thomas Hobbes writes, “but never dream of the absurdities” [3] of waking thoughts, is due to the difference in causal relations between thoughts that are exclusively “internal” and those that directly follow our sensations of the “external” world. “If we dreamt the same thing every night,” says Blaise Pascal, “it would affect us as much as the objects we see every day... But since dreams are all different, and each single one is diversified, what is seen in them affects us much less than what we see when awake, because of its continuity, which is not, however, so continuous and level as not to change too; but it changes less abruptly, except rarely, as when we travel, and then we say, 'It seems to me I am dreaming.' For life is a dream a little less inconstant.” [4] Regardless of whether or not the real and the apparently real are as different in their causal and effectual relations as they may seem, we can make an intelligible and meaningful distinction, and hence satisfy all that is required for using “objectivity” and “subjectivity” as separate measuring points. As a general rule, we might follow William James when he writes: “Before I can think you to mean my world, you must affect my world; before I can think you to mean much of it, you must affect much of it; and before I can be sure you mean it as I do, you must affect it just as I should if I were in your place. Then I, your critic, will gladly believe that we are thinking, not only of the same reality, but that we are thinking it alike, and thinking of much of its extent” (emphasis in original). [5]
Thus, we surrender our right to knowledge in the sense that our solipsist implies. Let him asunder that as he pleases, and we shall merely add: that the knower should apprehend the object separate from possessing the means for subjective perception is utterly incoherent. In this way we agree, that all knowledge is subjective. However, concepts require more, and we demand a means to differentiate the manner in which claims to knowledge are subjectively ascertained. We realize that, appreciating the contrasts and variations within the nature and quality of thoughts and perceptive experiences, we can “cut and divide” the objects that exist as a result of sense perception, viz., externally; we do so by understanding their causal relations to each other and to us, the knowing subject, and by placing in a distinct, if artificial, category, purely mental abstractions, as in the case of the real and the imaginary fire. We need not pretend that we can fully explain the relationship between the knower and the known to realize that within our present framework, “objective” and “subjective” contain an obvious and specific distinction, even if we have as much trouble understanding where exactly the separation lies, as we do in adjoining the past and the future by the term present. In any case, by “objective” facts we mean statements relating to the world that can be experienced by any subject using functionally similar instruments, including his or her sense organs. Any abstraction that cannot be demonstrated through the elucidation of the definitions employed, in connection with the object and its parts conferred upon, or rather, to be shown “a copy and a reflection” of phenomena experienced by the senses, cannot be deemed objective, as it must either lie exclusively with the subject or remain concealed in abstruse metaphysics that our sense instruments (as well as our intellects), whether designed or naturally selected, fail to confirm to in any satisfactory way; oftentimes it is both.
We can only know as much as the concept of “knowledge” entails. It does not imply absolute certainty but rather degrees of certainty. Based on a clear understanding of basic ideas and their definitions, we can know, with utmost though imperfect certainty, that a human being, who at the very least existed at a definite point in the past, wrote these words that you, among those who presently exist, read, probably with the aid of some virtuous amount of patience.
The author must be forgiven if the discussion thus far has seemed unnecessarily excessive. I cannot, however, downplay the frequency in which certain gentlemen will speak about knowledge of objective truth or fact and yet make appeal to nothing but subjective knowledge, or rather personal experience. Nobody can dispute that knowledge, in this sense, as a systematic conceptualization of any given percept, can sometimes be rendered false or ill-grounded when measured by a more rigorous method. Nota bene: such rigor must proceed any real attempt at objectivity.[6] Any idea that is found lacking in its ability to clarify observable phenomenon—that is, does not form part of a framework by which disinterested parties may test hypotheses and advance, even when it requires updating or discarding previous presuppositions, a specific solution to a well-defined problem, and more importantly, is not so much as rendered intelligible by analogy to other known phenomena—cannot be expected to satisfy the basic requirements of justification that an objective inquirer might hope for.
I have not the space nor the time to defend the utility of the scientific method but must take it for granted that the interested reader has a vague grasp on history proceeding the Scientific Revolution, its struggles, failures, and triumphs in explicating mathematical principles and simple mechanistic procedures by which natural phenomena is seen, possibly to emerge, but more plainly, to reveal its order. One of the most peculiar observations, especially within many Idealist frameworks, is the production of consciousness, intelligence, and language—all of which allows for a certain species, though imperfectly and restrictively, to contemplate and to some extent understand the Universe—primarily due to variations in a ruthless conflict over the right to multiply, evolving over the course of billions of years. I have never understood how consciousness can be considered a necessity to the existing order other than its pertinence to the perceiving subject (to restate this redundancy and then use the term “objective” equivocally as they wash their hands of “arbitrary rules” seems to lie at the heart of their game); yet the perceiving subject can, through imitating the existent order by use of eloquent symbolic contrivances, discover means for understanding events that occurred deep in the past, and in the future: the birth and death of the Universe, stars, galaxies, solar systems, planets; Charles Darwin's simple yet brilliant theory upon which every branch of life descends, due to a few obvious laws operating within immensely complex and ever-fluctuating conditions, from a single, or perhaps a few, common progenitors. Thus, if material bodies result from consciousness rather than the other way around, it's inexplicable that we should perceive a world in which stars existed billions of years before thinking subjects, unless we are poised to attribute an experiential quality to every star. But why stop there? Every atom? Electron? The entire Universe? At that point, in such a context, in the absence of any genetic properties and their phenotypic results, including functional brains, and very likely, the possibility of thoughts and memories, not to mention anything that can be justly defined as biologically or physiologically analogous, I cease to understand the meaning of "experiential quality." Even for the simple one-celled organism, or bacteria, or the common virus, I cannot conceive what “consciousness” should even be taken to mean. If consciousness evolved, and every indication, including one's own transition from birth to adulthood, strongly suggests it did, how could the very process of evolution depend on consciousness? To argue for or against this notion is precisely what I believe James meant when he said that “metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air.” [7] We must concur with Niezsche, both that “we should agree with these skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of today” in their rightly placed suspicion of man's ability to ultimately make perfect sense of the world, and yet also we must ask: “What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be—the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete reduction ad absurdum, assuming that the concept of a causa sui is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently, the external world is not the work of our organs--?” [8] Much of what seems to be the objective world may be, though further qualification is necessary. The only escape for the Idealist, against all reason, is to ignore the abundance of accumulating evidence that links different states of brain activity to all sensations, including consciousness, so as to reveal a chemical mould on which natural selection sculpted the birth of a thought, a thought that would eventually evolve to abstract and conceptualize the many possible meanings of being and sense.
Many have attempted to justify their theories of consciousness using quantum mechanics. Perhaps we will have more to add on the subject later, but for now, it will suffice to say that for two complex topics in which much of the puzzle is clearly absent, to my knowledge, experts in their respective fields—particles physics and the multiple brain sciences concentric with consciousness studies—do not find any such connection. It would certainly be an interesting discovery, one made possible no less as a result of collaborative efforts extending throughout time and space, and its philosophical implications would desperately require clarification, especially if we grant but a kernel of truth to Albert Einstein's statement that “belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.” [9]
I readily admit that the world of particle physics and energy fields is not the world of everyday human experience. It is a remarkable fact that “objective” reality as conceived by scientific realism is not the reality of common sense. Bertrand Russell once wrote: “We all start from naive realism, i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.” [10] Compare this with cosmologist and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, writing more recently: “The fact that we need to refine what we mean by 'common sense' in order to accommodate our understanding of nature is, to me, one of the most remarkable and liberating aspects of science. Reality liberates us from the biases and misconceptions that have arisen because our intellects evolved through our animal ancestors, whose survival was based on whether predators might lurk behind trees or in caves and not understanding the wave function of electrons in atoms. The modern conception of the universe is foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it. That is worth celebrating.” [11] In my view, it is astounding to what extent Darwin's idea (as Krauss hints) of descent by modification can enlighten our perspective on the supposed “object-subject” Gordian knot. Through slow, incremental changes that have occurred over mind-bogglingly long geological timescales, on the simple principles “multiple, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die,” [12] Homo sapiens, [13] a bipedal species in possession of an organ specialized for transmitting sense data into memories, abstract reconstructions, and meaningful symbols, fought and thought its way to the status of a demi-god. [14] “Owing to this struggle,” Darwin famously wrote, “variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species, in their infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will generally be inherited by the offspring... I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useless, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.” [15]
The biologist Richard Dawkins has written that “Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection” is “the ultimate consciousness-raiser”; [16] Philosopher Daniel Dennett likewise claims that “the Darwinian Revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution,” for it bears “an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed.” Furthermore, he continues, “Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers—welcome our not—to questions in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in another direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn't that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own “real” minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin's idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding” (emphasis in original). [17]
In Summary—To this point we have argued that knowledge is never understood to entail infallibility, and that uncertainty necessarily follows from conceptualization of sense perception. We have conceded that the relation between the knower and the known may remain obscure, and yet we are still obliged to distinguish the concepts of “objectivity” and “subjectivity”—elucidating the differences between abstract thoughts and concrete objects, and their respective causes and effects—as they relate to ourselves and to the apparent world around us. We suggested that the current evidence in the cognitive sciences, and one's own experiences throughout life, reveal a strong relationship between physical changes in the brain and one's private experience, including states of consciousness which range from “nothingness” to “incommunicable bliss”; that the brain almost certainly appears to be the likely vehicle by which sense data is apprehended and translated into corresponding abstractions. We found that none of this contradicts, and often even depends on, a scientific realism that promotes skepticism but places low value on speculation and sophistry. More importantly, we have not had to embrace any unwarranted assumptions, but rather only more precise definitions; Finally, we have suggested that upon scientific realism, the Universe reveals her hidden secrets, including the discovery that human beings, and their powerful brains, have evolved from lower forms. This is where we have arrived at presently. In the next section, we shall consider the question of Design and some challenges to the views that I have hithero put forth.
1. Pascal, Blaise, W F. Trotter, and Thomas M'Crie. Pensées: The Provincial Letters. New York: Modern library, 1941. Print. (Section 268, p. 93)
2. Je pense, donc je sui is French for “I think, therefore I am” as it first appeared in René Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637.
3. Hobbes, Thomas, and J C. A. Gaskin. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. (p. 13)
4. Pascal, Blaise, W F. Trotter, and Thomas M'Crie. 1941. (Section 386, p. 125).
5. From “The Meaning of Life,” included in James, William. William James: Writings 1902–1910. New York: Library of America, 1987. Print. (pp. 843-844).
6. Nota bene: A Latin phrase meaning “note well.”
7. Ibid. (p. 851)
8. Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter A. Kaufmann. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print. (Sections 10 & 15, pp. 17 & 22-23, respectively).
9. Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print. (p. 349).
10. Russell, Bertrand. An Inquiry into Meaning & Truth. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1940. Print. (p. 15). Full work can be viewed online at the following address: >http://ia601409.us.archive.org/30/items/BertrandRussell-AnInquaryIntoMeaningAndTruth/AnInquiryIntoMeaningAndTruth.pdf<
11. Krauss, Lawrence Maxwell. A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. New York: Free Press. 2012. Print (p. xvi).
12. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life[,] and the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Modern library, 1936. Print. (Ch. VIII, p. 208). The Origin of Species is a remarkable work of ingenuity that ought to serve as a guide for anyone wishing to present a novel argument.
13. Latin for “wise man.”
14. Ibid. (from The Descent of Man, Ch. I, p. 411) Darwin's full quote: “It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion.” See also page 431: “Man in the rudest state in which he now exists is the most dominant animal that has ever appeared on this earth.”
15. Ibid. (from The Origin of Species, Ch. III. pp. 51-52)
16. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. First Mariner Books ed. Boston: Mariner Books, 2008. Print. (p. 142).
17. Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print. (pp. 21, 63).
Returning to our friend the solipsist, who, with arms crossed, looks upon us triumphantly, we proceed to inquire further into the nature of his metaphysics. Does he mean that my body is neither mine nor an actual body, but only an appearance of a body that, in his mind, is arbitrarily assigned to an illusory “other,” viz., me? “Granted,” he quickly replies, “the nature of my consciousness and how it corresponds to the world that is revealed to me is unknown...” And so be it! We shall concede as much; however, if he imagines causing me bodily harm, does he not rather imagine committing violence on himself, by his self? Or if he imagines harming himself, is not the pain theoretically more personal to “his” body rather than that part “he” calls “me”? And what if, instead of imagining these possibilities, he acts upon them, so that the pain inflicted is no longer strictly abstract but feels more direct, appears to cause physical damage, and requires more than mere thought? “Sure, I admit each of those differences. That said, the common and necessary factor in each instance is my conscious presence, apart from which, none of those different states of being really exist, that is, to me.” But whether any object exists independently of apprehension or not can never be known to a subject without that subject's prior apprehension of the object in question. It is every bit as meaningless to argue over such an impossibility as it would be to debate the pros and cons of “Acirassi,” or, a term lacking content and otherwise every bit as useless.
To put it another way, imagine yourself waking up one morning in entirely new surroundings and having it revealed to you that all of your prior experiences on earth had been nothing but an elegant fabrication. Our solipsist had been correct! Yet, what about the solipsist's uncertainty about this new reality? Does it not remain? How could he know that this world, the one he has only now awoken in, is not also a product of his consciousness? “But that's my point,” he insists. “We cannot know anything except that we exist, and that we exist in a thought, viz., the thought that we exist. 'Je pense, donc je suis!'” [2] Is it not strange that, on the one hand, our solipsist doubts if he can “know” that objects, other than himself, exist independently of thought, and yet, this thought is the very affirmation of his own independent existence? The problem is the impossibility of conceiving even an omniscient being who could overcome our solipsist's challenge. It seems one can never be satisfied so long as he demands the knower to become, strictly, a known object, and cease to be the knowing subject, somehow; asking the knower to paradoxically exchange perception of said object for pure objectivity, which the knower cannot ascertain since the “perceiving subject” upon which all knowing depends has been eliminated from the equation. In other words, simply to possess “knowledge,” inquisitive minds will discover that doubtfulness over the infallibility of certain knowing-abilities necessarily ensues, and human experience never fails to bear this out.
All the worst off for objectivity then. Or, that would have been so, had multiple revolutions of human ingenuity not occurred during that period when decrees of condemnation were regularly issued from Rome over what some authorities perceived to be threats to sacred tradition. It can be conceded, to little effect, that individuals cannot trust their senses and reasons on the basis of self-assurance alone, but it must be stressed that we distinguish the apparently real from the real as do we the internal from the external. While we may not ultimately understand the relationship between the knower and the known, we can enlighten ourselves by conceptualizing the differences of those objects that arise exclusively in the mind, viz., internally, and those that seem to impress their features on our perceptions, i.e. externally. Take the concept of fire, for example. One can conceive the image of a fire in his or her mind, abstracting a visual of its glow, the amount of warmth it dispenses, the smell of burning wood, etc.; one cannot, however, be harmed by sticking an imaginary hand in it. Furthermore, all objects of thought seem to derive their qualities from sensations that we have received “externally,” that is, through connection with “the world,” via the sense of touch (including our eyes, ears, and other forms of feeling). A fire that is real, as opposed to an apparently real or imagined one, is efficacious upon objects that appear in the senses and not exclusively to those in thought, as is noted to occur in dreams; real objects possesses the ability to cause a practical change in the perceptive world, viz. the senses, as in the burning of skin or the subsequent ash that oftentimes blinds one's sight. It can also effect other objects, such as other persons in the immediate vicinity who can relate similar experiences using symbols, viz., language. Each of you call this bright, burning sensation “fire” and can describe its relations to your senses in like manner, contrary to the imagined one, which bears no relation to other nearby objects or persons unless you relate it to them symbolically, imitating the experiential quality by means of restrictive concepts. The familiarity of certain terms and ideas, and their correspondence to the causes and effects of real fires, viz., those which are perceived by the senses and can be experienced separately from, and with far more intensity than, any mere abstraction, allows two or more parties to share intelligible experiences through communication, whether unique or alike in some way.
Apart from the inefficiency of thoughts to produce change in objects, with the exception of whatever change is manifested in the thinking subject's behavior, objects regularly change, seemingly independently of thoughts and by a set of rules that our thoughts neither adhere to nor always apprehend. It is all but certain what will ensue if a lit match is thrown onto inflammable liquid; it is never certain which thought will succeed another. The reason that, after waking, we “often observe the absurdity of dreams,” as Thomas Hobbes writes, “but never dream of the absurdities” [3] of waking thoughts, is due to the difference in causal relations between thoughts that are exclusively “internal” and those that directly follow our sensations of the “external” world. “If we dreamt the same thing every night,” says Blaise Pascal, “it would affect us as much as the objects we see every day... But since dreams are all different, and each single one is diversified, what is seen in them affects us much less than what we see when awake, because of its continuity, which is not, however, so continuous and level as not to change too; but it changes less abruptly, except rarely, as when we travel, and then we say, 'It seems to me I am dreaming.' For life is a dream a little less inconstant.” [4] Regardless of whether or not the real and the apparently real are as different in their causal and effectual relations as they may seem, we can make an intelligible and meaningful distinction, and hence satisfy all that is required for using “objectivity” and “subjectivity” as separate measuring points. As a general rule, we might follow William James when he writes: “Before I can think you to mean my world, you must affect my world; before I can think you to mean much of it, you must affect much of it; and before I can be sure you mean it as I do, you must affect it just as I should if I were in your place. Then I, your critic, will gladly believe that we are thinking, not only of the same reality, but that we are thinking it alike, and thinking of much of its extent” (emphasis in original). [5]
Thus, we surrender our right to knowledge in the sense that our solipsist implies. Let him asunder that as he pleases, and we shall merely add: that the knower should apprehend the object separate from possessing the means for subjective perception is utterly incoherent. In this way we agree, that all knowledge is subjective. However, concepts require more, and we demand a means to differentiate the manner in which claims to knowledge are subjectively ascertained. We realize that, appreciating the contrasts and variations within the nature and quality of thoughts and perceptive experiences, we can “cut and divide” the objects that exist as a result of sense perception, viz., externally; we do so by understanding their causal relations to each other and to us, the knowing subject, and by placing in a distinct, if artificial, category, purely mental abstractions, as in the case of the real and the imaginary fire. We need not pretend that we can fully explain the relationship between the knower and the known to realize that within our present framework, “objective” and “subjective” contain an obvious and specific distinction, even if we have as much trouble understanding where exactly the separation lies, as we do in adjoining the past and the future by the term present. In any case, by “objective” facts we mean statements relating to the world that can be experienced by any subject using functionally similar instruments, including his or her sense organs. Any abstraction that cannot be demonstrated through the elucidation of the definitions employed, in connection with the object and its parts conferred upon, or rather, to be shown “a copy and a reflection” of phenomena experienced by the senses, cannot be deemed objective, as it must either lie exclusively with the subject or remain concealed in abstruse metaphysics that our sense instruments (as well as our intellects), whether designed or naturally selected, fail to confirm to in any satisfactory way; oftentimes it is both.
We can only know as much as the concept of “knowledge” entails. It does not imply absolute certainty but rather degrees of certainty. Based on a clear understanding of basic ideas and their definitions, we can know, with utmost though imperfect certainty, that a human being, who at the very least existed at a definite point in the past, wrote these words that you, among those who presently exist, read, probably with the aid of some virtuous amount of patience.
The author must be forgiven if the discussion thus far has seemed unnecessarily excessive. I cannot, however, downplay the frequency in which certain gentlemen will speak about knowledge of objective truth or fact and yet make appeal to nothing but subjective knowledge, or rather personal experience. Nobody can dispute that knowledge, in this sense, as a systematic conceptualization of any given percept, can sometimes be rendered false or ill-grounded when measured by a more rigorous method. Nota bene: such rigor must proceed any real attempt at objectivity.[6] Any idea that is found lacking in its ability to clarify observable phenomenon—that is, does not form part of a framework by which disinterested parties may test hypotheses and advance, even when it requires updating or discarding previous presuppositions, a specific solution to a well-defined problem, and more importantly, is not so much as rendered intelligible by analogy to other known phenomena—cannot be expected to satisfy the basic requirements of justification that an objective inquirer might hope for.
I have not the space nor the time to defend the utility of the scientific method but must take it for granted that the interested reader has a vague grasp on history proceeding the Scientific Revolution, its struggles, failures, and triumphs in explicating mathematical principles and simple mechanistic procedures by which natural phenomena is seen, possibly to emerge, but more plainly, to reveal its order. One of the most peculiar observations, especially within many Idealist frameworks, is the production of consciousness, intelligence, and language—all of which allows for a certain species, though imperfectly and restrictively, to contemplate and to some extent understand the Universe—primarily due to variations in a ruthless conflict over the right to multiply, evolving over the course of billions of years. I have never understood how consciousness can be considered a necessity to the existing order other than its pertinence to the perceiving subject (to restate this redundancy and then use the term “objective” equivocally as they wash their hands of “arbitrary rules” seems to lie at the heart of their game); yet the perceiving subject can, through imitating the existent order by use of eloquent symbolic contrivances, discover means for understanding events that occurred deep in the past, and in the future: the birth and death of the Universe, stars, galaxies, solar systems, planets; Charles Darwin's simple yet brilliant theory upon which every branch of life descends, due to a few obvious laws operating within immensely complex and ever-fluctuating conditions, from a single, or perhaps a few, common progenitors. Thus, if material bodies result from consciousness rather than the other way around, it's inexplicable that we should perceive a world in which stars existed billions of years before thinking subjects, unless we are poised to attribute an experiential quality to every star. But why stop there? Every atom? Electron? The entire Universe? At that point, in such a context, in the absence of any genetic properties and their phenotypic results, including functional brains, and very likely, the possibility of thoughts and memories, not to mention anything that can be justly defined as biologically or physiologically analogous, I cease to understand the meaning of "experiential quality." Even for the simple one-celled organism, or bacteria, or the common virus, I cannot conceive what “consciousness” should even be taken to mean. If consciousness evolved, and every indication, including one's own transition from birth to adulthood, strongly suggests it did, how could the very process of evolution depend on consciousness? To argue for or against this notion is precisely what I believe James meant when he said that “metaphysical discussions are so much like fighting with the air.” [7] We must concur with Niezsche, both that “we should agree with these skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of today” in their rightly placed suspicion of man's ability to ultimately make perfect sense of the world, and yet also we must ask: “What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be—the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete reduction ad absurdum, assuming that the concept of a causa sui is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently, the external world is not the work of our organs--?” [8] Much of what seems to be the objective world may be, though further qualification is necessary. The only escape for the Idealist, against all reason, is to ignore the abundance of accumulating evidence that links different states of brain activity to all sensations, including consciousness, so as to reveal a chemical mould on which natural selection sculpted the birth of a thought, a thought that would eventually evolve to abstract and conceptualize the many possible meanings of being and sense.
Many have attempted to justify their theories of consciousness using quantum mechanics. Perhaps we will have more to add on the subject later, but for now, it will suffice to say that for two complex topics in which much of the puzzle is clearly absent, to my knowledge, experts in their respective fields—particles physics and the multiple brain sciences concentric with consciousness studies—do not find any such connection. It would certainly be an interesting discovery, one made possible no less as a result of collaborative efforts extending throughout time and space, and its philosophical implications would desperately require clarification, especially if we grant but a kernel of truth to Albert Einstein's statement that “belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science.” [9]
I readily admit that the world of particle physics and energy fields is not the world of everyday human experience. It is a remarkable fact that “objective” reality as conceived by scientific realism is not the reality of common sense. Bertrand Russell once wrote: “We all start from naive realism, i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.” [10] Compare this with cosmologist and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, writing more recently: “The fact that we need to refine what we mean by 'common sense' in order to accommodate our understanding of nature is, to me, one of the most remarkable and liberating aspects of science. Reality liberates us from the biases and misconceptions that have arisen because our intellects evolved through our animal ancestors, whose survival was based on whether predators might lurk behind trees or in caves and not understanding the wave function of electrons in atoms. The modern conception of the universe is foreign to what even scientists generally believed a mere century ago that it is a tribute to the power of the scientific method and the creativity and persistence of humans who want to understand it. That is worth celebrating.” [11] In my view, it is astounding to what extent Darwin's idea (as Krauss hints) of descent by modification can enlighten our perspective on the supposed “object-subject” Gordian knot. Through slow, incremental changes that have occurred over mind-bogglingly long geological timescales, on the simple principles “multiple, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die,” [12] Homo sapiens, [13] a bipedal species in possession of an organ specialized for transmitting sense data into memories, abstract reconstructions, and meaningful symbols, fought and thought its way to the status of a demi-god. [14] “Owing to this struggle,” Darwin famously wrote, “variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species, in their infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will generally be inherited by the offspring... I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useless, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.” [15]
The biologist Richard Dawkins has written that “Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection” is “the ultimate consciousness-raiser”; [16] Philosopher Daniel Dennett likewise claims that “the Darwinian Revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution,” for it bears “an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed.” Furthermore, he continues, “Darwin's idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology, but it threatened to leak out, offering answers—welcome our not—to questions in cosmology (going in one direction) and psychology (going in another direction). If redesign could be a mindless, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn't that whole process itself be the product of evolution, and so forth, all the way down? And if mindless evolution could account for the breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own “real” minds be exempt from an evolutionary explanation? Darwin's idea thus also threatened to spread all the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity and understanding” (emphasis in original). [17]
In Summary—To this point we have argued that knowledge is never understood to entail infallibility, and that uncertainty necessarily follows from conceptualization of sense perception. We have conceded that the relation between the knower and the known may remain obscure, and yet we are still obliged to distinguish the concepts of “objectivity” and “subjectivity”—elucidating the differences between abstract thoughts and concrete objects, and their respective causes and effects—as they relate to ourselves and to the apparent world around us. We suggested that the current evidence in the cognitive sciences, and one's own experiences throughout life, reveal a strong relationship between physical changes in the brain and one's private experience, including states of consciousness which range from “nothingness” to “incommunicable bliss”; that the brain almost certainly appears to be the likely vehicle by which sense data is apprehended and translated into corresponding abstractions. We found that none of this contradicts, and often even depends on, a scientific realism that promotes skepticism but places low value on speculation and sophistry. More importantly, we have not had to embrace any unwarranted assumptions, but rather only more precise definitions; Finally, we have suggested that upon scientific realism, the Universe reveals her hidden secrets, including the discovery that human beings, and their powerful brains, have evolved from lower forms. This is where we have arrived at presently. In the next section, we shall consider the question of Design and some challenges to the views that I have hithero put forth.
1. Pascal, Blaise, W F. Trotter, and Thomas M'Crie. Pensées: The Provincial Letters. New York: Modern library, 1941. Print. (Section 268, p. 93)
2. Je pense, donc je sui is French for “I think, therefore I am” as it first appeared in René Descartes' Discourse on the Method in 1637.
3. Hobbes, Thomas, and J C. A. Gaskin. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. (p. 13)
4. Pascal, Blaise, W F. Trotter, and Thomas M'Crie. 1941. (Section 386, p. 125).
5. From “The Meaning of Life,” included in James, William. William James: Writings 1902–1910. New York: Library of America, 1987. Print. (pp. 843-844).
6. Nota bene: A Latin phrase meaning “note well.”
7. Ibid. (p. 851)
8. Nietzsche, Friedrich W, and Walter A. Kaufmann. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print. (Sections 10 & 15, pp. 17 & 22-23, respectively).
9. Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print. (p. 349).
10. Russell, Bertrand. An Inquiry into Meaning & Truth. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1940. Print. (p. 15). Full work can be viewed online at the following address: >http://ia601409.us.archive.org/30/items/BertrandRussell-AnInquaryIntoMeaningAndTruth/AnInquiryIntoMeaningAndTruth.pdf<
11. Krauss, Lawrence Maxwell. A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. New York: Free Press. 2012. Print (p. xvi).
12. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life[,] and the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Modern library, 1936. Print. (Ch. VIII, p. 208). The Origin of Species is a remarkable work of ingenuity that ought to serve as a guide for anyone wishing to present a novel argument.
13. Latin for “wise man.”
14. Ibid. (from The Descent of Man, Ch. I, p. 411) Darwin's full quote: “It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion.” See also page 431: “Man in the rudest state in which he now exists is the most dominant animal that has ever appeared on this earth.”
15. Ibid. (from The Origin of Species, Ch. III. pp. 51-52)
16. Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. First Mariner Books ed. Boston: Mariner Books, 2008. Print. (p. 142).
17. Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print. (pp. 21, 63).
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
