The Explanation
A Kantian Conundrum
(Please note the significance of capital letters in this text to differentiate between the ordinary and metaphysical meaning of a word.)
How sure can I be of my knowledge of the world and my self? Greater minds than mine have wrestled with this problem.
I find Kant’s treatment of this question enlightening and helpful. He categorises judgements. In between the certainty of logical truths which defy doubt and the empirical facts of science which rest on observation and experiment, there is a class of judgements he calls “synthetic a priori”. These are principles which cannot be deduced with logical certainty. The human mind applies them to experience without troubling to gain empirical proof. “Nothing comes from nothing”. “Any event must have a prior cause”. “There are external objects”. Assumptions about the sequence of events and the identification of objects seem necessary to make any sense of experience.
Kant asserts that knowledge of the world is only possible, if the mind provides a systematic structuring of the representations it receives. This means the reality I am so familiar with is a “known” reality in the sense that it is formed by applying the mind’s perceptual and analytic tools. Kant argues strongly that the mind will fall into error, if it attempts to make an assertion about the Reality that lies behind the reality the mind is set up to handle. This implies that I am banned from talking about “things in themselves”.
No matter how great the philosopher, I hold that we should always seek to doubt and question. Kant was not an idealist. He believed there was an external reality. His transcendental argument for this is that the concept I have of my self as separate presupposes something outside to differentiate “me” from the “not me”. I too prefer to believe that the world is not purely a construct of the human mind. There is some underlying Reality. Despite Kant’s admonition surely I can still wonder how it is that the synthetic a priori judgements fortuitously fit with Reality. There might be clashes with non objects, holes in reality or inexplicable happenings. This is the conundrum. Explanation can be attempted by a range of speculative conjectures.
1. Could it be that the collective consciousness of the human race exerts some control over the raw data of Reality to keep it in check? This would explain why I experience a solid, dependable and substantive world, which I cannot change by an individual act of will. However this conjecture is anthropocentric and the collective will mysterious. It suggests an answer to the primary question of how it is that we confront an ordered world. Ingenuity can be applied to keep this conjecture going to explain the fossil record, but I prefer to believe that primitive life did not have to struggle to exert some control over Reality to survive in the world.
2. For the physicalists common sense has a ready answer to the puzzle. If Reality had not been ordered and knowable, the human race would not have survived. The human brain developed a successful approach to understand the environment it found itself in. The principles we apply without question have stood the test of time. The survival of the human race is sufficient proof of the ability of these presuppositions to create a known reality that interfaces successfully with the underlying Reality.
This is a sound practical approach that can accept that the presuppositions on which human knowledge is built may not always hold good for all future conditions. I find it somewhat dull and it will always struggle to explain the hard question of self awareness.
3. Finally I turn to the strange and mystical alternative. Known reality is just an aspect of the greater Reality. It is not fortuitous or contingent that the synthetic a priori principles apply to all experience without objection from an underlying Reality. The principles are a necessary consequence of forging a known reality out of the greater whole.
In known reality I am a subject perceiving objects. My knowledge is characterised by perception and experience from an individual point. I analyse, categorise and divide. The greater Reality may be an undivided whole. Awareness, matter, energy, and light undivided. This Reality can only be grasped as a whole, which is impossible for an individual. The unity of Reality ensures pattern and order in reality.
The synthetic a priori principles cover presuppositions of separate existence and an external world in which objects and events can be picked out and connected. The axioms of mathematics and geometry rest on presumptions of dimension, duration and sequence, which appear to be found by examining experience, but these concepts (or their precursors) are needed before or else the experience could not be had. Therefore I conclude these are necessary principles to give me a place in space and a point in time. The absence of this perceptual and conceptual framework would leave me infinity in no space, eternity in a moment, no separate existence and everything and nothing. If I cannot experience the whole, perhaps an inner sense can still recall a faint echo of being one with a greater Awareness.
These principles separate me from Reality, yet allow me to experience reality. They define me as a subject experiencing objects. I can pull back and examine my thoughts and feeling objectively. The one thing I cannot examine is that mysterious ingredient of self awareness. This is not my sense of self which I construct. It is a fundamental feature which tells me I am aware. Here is a paradox. Self awareness is my one intimate experience of an indivisible whole. If I think of Awareness as a field permeating Reality, my individual awareness is the point where the field coalesces on my physical presence.
1. This does not require a belief in a knowledgeable and powerful God. The greater Awareness need only be thought of as a passive potential; an intrinsic, impersonal, non human fundamental property of the whole.
2. The known world is real, but there has to be more than I can grasp. Common sense and science are valid within the domain of known reality.
This essential ingredient of self awareness eludes me. As soon as I think of it, it is not there, but always with me while I am aware. I sense it, but cannot make it an object of my sensibility. It is the key component of my existence as a thinking and feeling subject. It is as if my face was glued to a peephole through which I perceive the world, but sense something beyond or behind my gaze and this gives me the idea that this ingredient comes from outside the scope of known reality.
Here lies the possibility of a direct link to Reality. However if there is a third eye or sixth sense, Kant’s admonition tells me that I would still not see things as they are in themselves. My understanding has to form its own reality. I might though be able to glimpse another aspect, which gives me a taste of a greater reality. Reality-in-itself is beyond the reach of an individual mind.
Science investigates the nature of reality behind appearance. Equipment can greatly extend the range of human perception. Theories explain the underlying structure. This broadens my grasp of reality and I realise there is far more in reality than I could ever experience and understand. None of this could bring me any closer to Reality. I can put the segments of an orange together and comprehend the whole, but awareness of Reality would require me to be the orange.
This discussion centres on what the human mind can know in contrast to what actually exists. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics are great achievements and have transformed our understanding of reality. However if the reality we can know is just a splinter of a greater whole, perhaps we will never be able to create one complete and consistent theory of reality. The further we probe, the more indications will we encounter that our understanding is partial.
The question then is what sense can I make of any input from a sixth sense. Language evolved to handle perceptual input. My mind might fail to interpret reliably input from “awareness”. Therefore I read with interest various accounts of mystical experiences. The essential feature of such experiences is losing the self within something greater. Stopping thought and turning off perception would seem to be a sound tactic for letting in experience from a sixth sense. These experiences are then interpreted by the mind of the mystic. The accounts I have read are described in terms of the religious beliefs of the mystic.
How complete is their union with their gods? In my view union with Reality implies the end of individuality. I am no adept and claim only to gather a sense of something greater beyond or behind reality. This though is enough to give grist for those who seek enlightenment. The conventional explanation for religious belief is the need to come to terms with death. The sense of a Reality behind reality must also drive this impulse. My contention is that the construction of religious beliefs is a misinterpretation of a fundamental aspect of human experience. Simplistically I am a splinter that holds a faint echo of being part of a whole, but would be unable to comprehend the whole except in splintered fashion.
I surmise that Awareness as a fundamental property of Reality is latent. It is not self aware. Self awareness is manifested by independent awareness; the result of an interaction between a brain and Awareness. There is a dualism of dimension here. Awareness is not recognised as something which can exist in reality, yet the existence of self aware conscious individuals implies its existence in Reality. This creates individuals whose actions and thoughts cannot be wholly explained or determined by cause and effect. There is an extraneous ingredient in the self aware individual.
This supposition cannot be proved. I make an assertion about something which lies outside normal perception. Like religion this depends on faith or what you wish to believe. I prefer to believe there is a mystery science cannot explain. Otherwise consciousness, free will and individuality will be reduced by neuroscience to bio-chemistry. I can only point to great music, art, intuition and the feelings these engender. Within the limits of its view, science may well be able to explain these feelings, but science rests on the presumption that there is nothing beyond the reality that can be known through perception.
The logic of my conjecture is that I exist as a transient interaction between a living organism and Awareness gathered from Reality. Death dissolves any personality back into the whole. However my life identity is a strand through space and time. This implies persistence in Reality. There may well be an intermediate state without a physical body. Known reality is a sliver of a greater Reality. I imagine a fish seeing the keel of ship. Likewise my knowledge of myself is only a part of a greater whole. My head emerges from dark water and my gaze cannot penetrate the surface.
Withdrawal from the world is advocated as better than bodily experiences in some religious tracts. I can see the merits of calm contemplation of universality to offset the stress of daily survival, but independent awareness is a great achievement and should not be dismissed as worthless. I think both perspectives have to be combined.
If there is any survival of personal identity this implies the persistence of an individual viewpoint in a separate reality, but this speculation falls outside the domain in which my understanding is valid. I am suspicious of other ways by which this is deduced. I note that in my dreams I import my physical identity and personal history. There may well be content filtering through from Awareness, while I am disengaged from my senses. However when I dream of floating, I imagine I have a body. When I am in a strange place I project my wishes and recollections to link it to places I know. The experience is distorted to make it fit within my terms of reference. This makes me sceptical about all those accounts of past lives. If the memories of dead people are accessible to a living individual, then the mind of the living individual would strive to organise these into a personal history.
RA 2009
