Why the world has to exist

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Intellect: “Color is by convention, sweet by convention, bitter by convention; in truth there are but atoms and the void.”

Senses: “Wretched mind, from us you are taking the evidence by which you would overthrow us? Your victory is your own fall.”

— From the Fragments of Democritus

Before you read this post o’ mine, this piece from

Johnny B. Truant

is required reading:

What if the world doesn't exist?

I hope you read that first because the next parts won’t make sense if you haven’t at least attempted the main points.

What do you see?

Mr. Truant directs the reader to a photo and asks what you see.

Assuming for a second that all of our eyes work the same (or, for those with visual impairments, you can adapt this experiment to sound), what we’re actually seeing in the photo isn’t a car at all.

We’re seeing a bunch of shapes and colors. “Car,” on the other hand, is a deduction we’re drawing.

It’s early days, but we have to pause here for a question or three while I put on my annoying philosopher hat.

What do you mean what we’re actually seeing? How are you (any you) in a position to know that?

There are good and bad replies to that second question, which is the heart of the issue at hand.

I don’t buy that the experience of seeing a car is a deduction (or inductive inference, or abductive explanation, or any other form of explicit reasoning).

When I look at the photo, using his example of the car on fire, I see a car on fire. The verb “to see” plays an important part here. I am seeing. Not thinking, reasoning, or deducing. I’m not processing the experience as I would work through a math problem or logic puzzle.

The seeing-as “just happens”. It’s what we call a phenomena, or an appearance. It’s automatic, unconscious, and outside the scope of explicit reasoning.

Let’s not race through this. The objection is clear: If you were to pluck a wily Greek from the 4th century BC into our time, he’d be mystified by the photograph — about the fact it exists as much as what is in the image. He would plausibly see the same elements of the car in his perceptual field, but utterly lacking our frame of reference, he could not understand it as a car.

This much is true. What draws my side-eye is the assertion that there’s some magical brain-magic that assembles raw, unfiltered data into a picture-like image, somewhere inside your skull, when you then recognize as “car”.

And that is what this is: a magic-like process that somehow, through unknown and inexplicable hand-waving, results in an appearance of color, sound, taste (and the rest) out of merely physical events.

What is missing in our ancient friend is not perceptual access to the world. He sees as clearly as we do. And were we to fill him in on a few thousand years of history — he is fully capable of understanding the basic principles of transportation by vehicle — he would soon learn to see the car as a “car”.

What do you “actually” see?

That’s what you actually see: Colors. Shapes. Gradients. Comparative dimensions. In terms of raw sensory input (the objective information provided to your eye, presumably by things out there in the real world), that’s all you have.

Nay, sir. It is not remotely all that I have.

The interested reader can take a look at last week’s entry about Rene Descartes for a longer treatment of why this story is faulty.

Cartesian consciousness compounds cognitive confusion

Descartes’s conclusions about what is, and what is not in the mind resulted from his method of skeptical doubt. He told us that the measurable quantity is more real than the vague and obscure quality on grounds that what can be measured is more distinct and clear. Because Descartes demanded absolute certainty above all else, only mathematics and geometry could meet his standards of knowledge.

The division of the world into what is objective and measurable, on one side, and what is subjective and not, on the other, seems convincing to almost all of us because we’re steeped in it from a young age. It’s baked into the Western tradition, even the English vernacular after a few centuries of marinating in it.

I can write (and have written) many thousands of words diving deep into the many moving parts of this argument. For brevity’s sake, let me skip right to the knock-down.

How is it that you can divide what we actually see, which means the measurable quantities, from the mere interpretation, which means the intangibles of qualitative experience, without assuming some prior and reliable contact with reality?

That question is the master key behind the rest of this article. Keep it in mind.

In other words, if you say that you know that the measurable is true and accurate, and the ineffable or qualitative “in the mind” is false and misleading, how have you measured this?

If you haven’t measured it, or can’t, then why is it true?

Hold that thought. This story takes a further twist:

There’s no mind-bending philosophy in my argument here. There’s no spirituality, no deep-dive into the nature of consciousness. There’s no new-age, no concepts embraced only by hippies on LSD. It’s just a fact about what’s given and the meaning created from what’s given. Think about it.

Even if you experience “red,” you only see (i.e., receive raw sensory input equating to) photons of light at 7000 angstroms. The same is true of “car.” You see shapes, colors, and gradients. It’s your brain that takes that raw data and says “that’s a car” — which turns into our experience of a car.

Any time you leap beyond the barest givens, you are doing metaphysics. Metaphysics is inescapable in discussion like this.

Which leads into the real problem:

What exactly is “given” in experience?

This is a bigger problem than it seems. What is given in experience depends a great deal on what your intellect brings to the table.

But Matt, you say, isn’t that Johnny’s point in his article?

Yes, in a way. And at the same time no.

Let me start with the provocation:

I’ve never seen a photon at any wavelength.

I’ve been informed for many years, including university-level physics courses, that this is the physical nature of light according to our best present theories. I understand, in my intellect, that when I see light, I’m seeing some weird voodoo with particles and waves that nobody really understands.

I have no reason to dispute the truth of those theories.

So… ?

Independent of whatever physics says about the world, what I experience when I see is not photons. Photons can explain the micro-structure of the world that I experience, but I don’t experience them, and neither do you.

That story about photons interacting with cones and rods in your retina, and then (hocus pocus in your brain), followed by “abracadabra!” you see red mistakes a property of the whole for a property of its parts.

Eyes don’t see. Brains don’t see. Seeing is something that living, breathing, thinking, feeling human beings do.

The “car” example is more interesting. Unlike light, a car is a manufactured artifact. People had to get together to create and build cars and all the infrastructure to use them (they don’t run well without roads or gasoline).

“Car” is much more than a function of behavior in the brain. It’s a shared entity that, in a real way, belongs to the culture of a time and place, and to the English language.

Our time-travelling Greek couldn’t see the image as “car” for an important reason that has nothing to do with his brain failing to put the parts together.
He lived in a time and place when the material, conceptual, and social realities couldn’t begin to conjure the idea. That dimension of interpersonal understanding leads down more deep and fascinating rabbit holes, which I will not go down here.

The point here is that in saying that a person experiences color as “nothing but” photons at some wavelength, it’s the photons that are placeholders for the bare data allegedly “given” in perception.

But there is nothing given about it.
Outside of discussions in philosophy seminars or blog posts like this, it would rarely or never occur to me to break down my experience in this way. It takes an effort of thinking and reasoning, informed by my background knowledge of science and years of tedium spent reading about the philosophy of perception, to make that imaginative leap.

The situation is the exact opposite of a given. It takes a lot of boredom and deep-thinking time, usually by people steeped in our skeptical traditions received from Descartes and British empiricism, to reason to such conclusions. They don’t appear spontaneously by looking at your surroundings.

The reduction of perceptual experience into basic elements like “photons” and “atoms”, or even the components of perception, is what requires explicit reasoning.

Analyzing experience into its component pieces is not the default way most humans do, or ever have, experienced reality.

You can make a parallel case for the “what is it like” thought experiments.

Stop for a second and imagine what it would be like to experience the world through smell. I don’t know about you, but I can’t do it. Smell is pretty one-dimensional for me. I either smell apple pie or I don’t smell apple pie. It’s not that way for dogs.

Not weird enough? Okay, imagine being a bat. They “see” with sonar, and not just vaguely. Bat sonar insanely fine-grained. Using sound waves, a bat can find objects the width of a human hair.

Here’s a thought to chew on while we’re thinking dog-like.

Why is it that humans can imagine what it is like to be dogs and bats, but bats and dogs don’t wonder what it is like to be a human?

Before you leap to an awful knee-jerk reply, consider that the imaginative faculty is, so far as we know, unique to the homo sapiens organism on planet Earth.¹

The ability to leap with the imagination into the sensorium of a radically different type of being — even if you can’t quite make it concrete — requires a human point of view as a starting point.

To imagine the “what it is like” of another kind of being involves a uniquely human perspective.

To ask the question of “what would a bat experience?” supposes a mostly human-like frame of reference for experience.
The bat may not experience anything at all, as you and I do. The bat may well sense a mosquito on its radar. Lacking language and thought, the bat lacks the knowledge that it senses a mosquito.

Bare sensation and the sort of knowing-that which goes on in human experiences are two different matters.

When we see the car, or even see the color we call “red”, we don’t just have a blinding flash of sensations. We know that we know. There’s a higher-order awareness involved in our powers of language and thought.

There is no “ground floor” of reality that you can access through brute sense-data or information. It requires the active contribution of thought to carve up your perceptual field into “atoms” of information. There is nothing given in experience without a thought of the given.²

Okay, then how do we explain cases of illusion, hallucination, or failing to see what is obvious to others?

If I were to walk up behind your car at an intersection carrying red and blue flashing lights, you’d probably think a cop was trying to pull you over. The information from your senses is a certain pattern of flashing light … but the meaning that comes to you from that information is that you’re about to get a ticket. Which, in turn, evokes emotional responses in the seconds before you realize it’s just me back there playing a trick: anger, frustration, embarrassment, or whatever else.

That’s a good point. I’ve often been spoofed when seeing a thing that looks like one thing only to learn that it was something else. This happens to me all the time while bird-watching.

But…

Photo by Sachin Khadka on Unsplash

Most people think that our experience of the world is a faithful re-creation of what’s actually out there. It’s not, though. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, and over time it creates so much “shorthand meaning” to go with sensory data that eventually the shorthand becomes confused with what’s there.

Does this sound like a slam-dunk to you?

Well.

Wait for it.

You can’t talk about mistakes unless there is a fact of the matter separating the truth from the falsehood.

If it were true that experience didn’t accurately represent at least some parts of the “Great Outdoors” outside of our minds and words, then what’s the difference between merely seeing the fake lights and the real presence of a cop pulling you over?

If there is a cop, then you are wrong if you interpret the lights as some kid at a rave.

How could you be wrong if you experience isn’t disclosing at least some important truths about the world-how-it-is?

Errors suppose truth.

You can be spoofed, yes, but you can also catch your breath, have a closer look, and realize, oh, yes, in fact that’s just some lights.
The momentary failure of accurate perception can be corrected because we can reach a more-accurate perspective.

The problem for the skeptic is that he doesn’t see knowledge as a constant, never-ending work-in-progress. You either know, right now, or you don’t know, and anything outside that instantaneous snapshot doesn’t count.

Things change. You change, the environment changes, and the coupling of you + environment changes together.

Here’s the biggest challenge of all and the final link in this chain…

If experience gave us no accurate access to reality, then science would not be possible.
All those facts about the physical properties of light, the physiology of your sense organs, and the quasi-magic of information processing allegedly going in our brains would be no more true than the sensations of color and sound and smell. They would be part of the consensus fabrication of our brains/minds.

If you didn’t read it, scroll back to the quote in epigraph of this article. (You should always read my epigraphs.)

The quote is one of the precious few snippets we have from the pre-Socratic thinker Democritus. Offering a striking precursor to today’s materialist philosophies, Democritus argued that all that exists in fact are “atoms and the void”. He didn’t mean the atoms known to modern physics — they borrowed the ancient term atomos from him and Epicurus to refer to the smallest indivisible parts of physical reality.

We can forgive him the details. What matters is the metaphysics.

Now, atomists and materialists try to get sneaky on this and say that they aren’t offering a metaphysical view at all. This is just how things are, according to experience.

We’ve already dismantled that defense. If the brain or mind (or whatever) constructs meaning, then what may seem to you as given is anything but given.

If the personal interpretations are squishy head-noise, then so are the shapes, sizes, weights, and every other quantity.

There’s a fine line between channeling David Hume by claiming that “All I see is a constant conjunction of events in my perceptual field”, and the extra leap to the claim that this is all that really exists.

In the two lines of his quote, Democritus points out a well-known paradox facing his own atomist philosophy.
Edward Feser, who I thank for first introducing me to this counter-argument, states the paradox of atomism as follows:

Democritus’s point is that if the atomist says both that atoms are all that exist and that color, sweetness, etc. and the other qualities of conscious experience are not to be found in the atoms, then we have a paradox.  For conscious experience is what provides the empirical evidence on which the atomist account is itself based!  The atomist thus seems unable to fit the very evidence his theory relies on into the picture of the world the theory describes.  Democritus was intellectually honest enough to take note of this problem, though we don’t know how he tried to resolve it, if he did.

If we hold the belief that reality is nothing but atoms and human interpretations, then we rule out all of the evidence we have for that belief.

Here are the two big takeaways:

One: There is nothing “given in sensation” which is not already subject to the mind’s activities of meaning-making. The fable of the given elements of perception is already a result of certain beliefs, ideas, thoughts, and concepts that are not given in experience.

Two: The skeptic’s line depends on an artificial distinction between the objective “out there” and the subjective “in here” which collapses into self-contradiction. The evidence taken from the senses is then put to work to dismantle the truth of the senses.

Where does this leave us?

Let’s move slowly here because there are two separate points to consider:

1. How we experience the world depends a great deal on how we are constructed and how we function.

2. The fact that some beings are constructed differently and (therefore) inhabit “different worlds” of perception implies that none of our perceptions are accurate.

Point (1) is true and hard to dispute.

Point (2) is a patch of thorns. The idea that all your thoughts and feelings are arbitrary fabrications of neuro-magic is not plausible for the numerous reasons covered above.

Things do matter independent of us making up stories about them. There are things that we know, even if we can’t always make them articulate in words or show our work.

I think the major source of trouble here has to do with what we’re willing to accept as a standard of truth.
If you need facts that cannot be doubted, which are available to all and any observer without regard for time or place or positioning, then you don’t have many options. (You may have none at all.)

That’s a standard that works in physics, which relies heavily on abstract mathematics, and which many people have (sadly) tried to apply to the full range of experience and fulfillment, much to our detriment.

Fortunately, living the regular life of a human being doesn’t require that kind of certainty. We don’t have to seriously worry about whether gravity will keep us on the ground or if the sun will rise in the morning. If we did, we’d be in trouble.

Maybe we don’t know for sure. Maybe we just have no guarantee that what we see, touch, taste, or feel in our intuition is true. Who would give you that anyway? Are you expecting the glowing hand of the Divine to reach from on high and give you a golden certificate of authenticity? And if you needed it, why would you trust that experience anyway?

This path leads into the time-wasting trap of the Agrippan trilemma.
For any piece of knowledge, you either:

• (a) assert it as a self-evident truth, or else

• (b) you need one further truth to make it true

Should you opt for option (b), you then have a choice between:

• (c) a never-ending sequence of beliefs, each supporting the next, off to infinity, or

• (d) a self-referential circle of beliefs that make themselves true

Naturalized brain-based skepticism aims at option (a) but ends up wandering dangerously close to the endless circle of (d).

If we want to understand ourselves, we need to look somewhere beyond brain-magic.

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FYI this article is in no way intended as a sleight against Johnny, who wrote an in-depth and highly readable article expressing a point of view that many find plausible. I encourage you to read his piece (I know you skipped it) and think seriously about the ideas before reaching any conclusions. I disagree with his position, but I’d rather you see how the parts move instead of deciding The TRVTH.

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Here’s a few more relevant articles from the MP archives:

What Korzybski got wrong about the map and the territory

How to be a productive iconoclast according to Owen Barfield

Thanks for reading.

-Matt

p.s. If you found this valuable, interesting, funny, or it made you upset that you had to use your mind for activities that don't involve infinite scrolling, I ask that you do me a favor and share it with just one person.

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1. I’ll leave aside whether the higher primates, cetaceans, and perhaps some other stand-outs like corvids and octopuses (!) might have some forms of proto-imagination.

2. I recommend spending a few days weeks years with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason if you want to dig further into the impossibility of “raw sense data”. If that isn’t enough brain-melting fun for you, the ambitious reader may want to tackle the essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” by Wilfrid Sellars for his treatment of “the myth of the Given”.