Groping Towards Reality

Humans are part of reality, but seeing reality clearly is sometimes difficult. I have been looking for a metaphor for the process of orienting oneself to reality and avoiding fiction. The best I have come up with so far is groping towards reality.

From ancient to modern times people have both groped towards a clear understanding of reality and attempted to construct blinders so that they could misinterpret the world to suit themselves. More often than not, the world being a complicated place, the same person or groups of persons would get parts of the picture right while painting in illusions for other parts.

Both the existence of reality and the human ability to know it have been questioned from ancient times. I believe questioning things, including what appear to be fundamental truths, is a good thing. What is funny is that having concluded either that reality is an illusion, or that humans can not know anything much about reality, people seldom question those conclusions. [See also my Questions to the Illusionists].

In some ways certain Buddhist critiques of the reality of reality are more cogent than their modern philosophic counterparts. In the Surangama Sutra the Buddha asks Ananda, "What is it that gave you the sensation of seeing? What was it that experienced the sensation? And who is it that experienced the feeling of being pleased?" The analysis that follows, in question and answer style, is quite sophisticated even if it ultimately leads one astray.

Cast forward to the modern philosophy of deconstructionism and you have Wittgenstein's (later) philosophic methods turned on their head to create a rationalization that amounts to saying: the world is not real, or at least we can't really know much about it.

But we do know a great deal about the world, both individually and collectively. Not only that, but other animals know about the world, even if they are not smart enough to create a theory of why it is just an illusion. We are both in and of the world.

It has taken our sensory apparatus and nervous system a couple of billion years to evolve. Our genetic inheritance gives us the ability to survive in the world, and that requires the ability to gain a knowledge of the world. Human babies are prepared to learn about the world. They learn from their interactions with the world. Their learning is held in their brains.

Groping is a good word for the process. The baby feels its way, reaching about uncertainly. It uses the resulting memories to build maps and images of the external world. It learns about its body. It begins to learn a language.

Having learned a language, a child starts learning about the world second hand. Family members relate what they did when "away." They talk about events that happened in the past, or what they plan to do in the future.

They also inevitably tell the child things that are not true, or are partly true. Prejudices, superstitions, and religions. Cultural behaviors: how to behave, what is expected of a child, a man, or a woman.

Children cope as best they can. One thing leads to another. There may be formal schooling. Some people eventually feel impelled to try to figure out what "the truth" is. But it is a complex world. Some people change religions, but in most cultures during most of history changing religion was a dangerous and daring act. Today in these United States of America people shop for a religion, a philosophy, a self-help guru, or a school of psychology. Most are shopping for amenable society, not so much for truth.

I think that philosophies tend to oversimplify the human condition. It is a complex world. We are complex. Each brain is a wonder of cellular architecture, capable of holding and comparing billions of memories of experiences.

Lately, I have been inspired by the work of Jeff Hawkins and colleagues on how the cortex of the brain might work [See my Machine Understanding blog]. The process described by Hawkins can fairly be described as groping. He believes that the detailed structure of the brain has evolved to turn sensory input into memories and automatic predictions about the world. Humans constantly adjust to the world, noticing when it does not conform to prior predictions.

The culture of science, while it has been used with bad motives all too frequently, for the most part follows the same pattern. The scientific method, amidst the ugly complexity of the world, is a kind of groping. We look at the world and what we think we already know. We form a hypothesis, or prediction. We set up an experiment to test the prediction against the hypothesis.

Quantum physics and molecular biology are usually considered to be very difficult sciences. You must work hard and be smart to succeed at them. But when it comes to studying humans, there are extra difficulties. The world is not an illusion, but humans are particularly good at distorting data about themselves.

On that line, a comment on a book I just finished, Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell. This is an illuminating book about the human condition. It picks apart our assumptions about what makes a human highly successful in our society. Each of the chapters, focusing on one aspect of human culture and how it impacts success, is a great read. You will see Bill Gates, The Beatles, and math test scores in a whole new light if you read it. There are illusions in the world, but the world is not an illusion. The idea that success is a simple result of genius is one of our cultural illusions.

If Wishes Were Horses

This blog was meant to be mainly about philosophy, but I have been writing a great deal about politics lately. That is okay, history and politics are about reality, and philosophy is (or should be) about reality. Reality is everything, but looking only at subsets of reality can send you astray.

Now let's look at some folk wisdom:

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride."

As far as anyone can tell, this is genuine folk wisdom, not to be quoted from the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, Benjamin Franklin, The Beatles or even Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to my Familiar Quotations, it first was printed in 1670 in John Ray's English Proverbs as "If wishes were horses, beggars might ride."

Nothing quite sums up the case against prayer, subjectivist philosophies, wishful thinking, and the power of positive thought quite like this proverb.

Few people worry about not having a horse these days. Horses being the object of desire gives the phrase a vintage that could pass for wisdom even if it were unwise.

Am I saying it is best to dwell in negative thoughts, or to be in a constant state of pessimism? No, though occasional thorough examination of the negative is as instructive about reality as is occasional thorough examination of best case scenarios.

I want a philosophy that corresponds to, that accurately describes, reality. On that tiny bit of reality we call Earth, in the tiny sliver of time I will live, I don't want to waste all my time on illusions. Illusions are a part of reality we humans construct in our minds. We can learn a lot about our mental parameters by looking at illusions. In our lives the illusion/reality foreground/background sometimes inverts; we become disillusioned. Illusions are sold to people for a variety of reasons. When we are children we have little choice other than to believe the stories we are told of the world, whether they are true or not. I thought Heaven and Hell (and Purgatory and Limbo) were real when I was a young child. More complex illusions, more believable ones anyway, may fool me yet. The important thing to remember is that people may be lying to you, or they may be telling the truth, and it is up to you to decide when it is important enough to investigate a matter for yourself.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

If you want to ride a horse, you need to do more than wish for it. Wishing for it does not prevent you from riding it; it might be a first step. You still need a plan and you need to execute on plan.

Are people's interpretations, and even perceptions, of reality subjective? Sure. Leaping from that to the idea that people create reality is a leap to nowhere. Reality was around before people. Even horses were around before people. People are a creation of reality, not the other way around.

Read all about the various philosophies and religions; it won't take that much time, it should not hurt you. But when it comes time to chose a philosophy, and make a life plan, and execute that plan, you should start with a firm foundation. If you turn out to be wrong, admit you are wrong and right yourself. If the popular consensus is wrong, be aware that people will think you are wrong for not agreeing with them, but keep in mind that reality is on your side. Reality is heavy; it is your best friend and ultimate refuge.

Reality is very complex, to be sure. One day the wind blows from the north, another day from the south. One day we do everything we can to keep cool; another day we can survive only by setting the world on fire. Weathermen are fine, but if you want to know the way the wind is blowing where you are, the best thing to do is just step outside and feel it.

Natural liberation might be defined as being liberated by knowing you are part of nature, and knowing what you can about nature, and acting on what you know.

See also my Philosophy page

Questions to the Illusionists

[Illusionists is my term for people influenced by a broad spectrum of religious and philosophical systems and beliefs that deny the reality of the sensory world. That is, they believe that ordinary reality as experienced by human beings is in some sense an illusion.]

Do you believe that Mount Everest is real? What about Mount Rainier? What about your local hills or mountains?

If you don't believe mountains, or particular mountains are "real," then you define "real" in a peculiar way.

Do you believe that what is happening now, around you, is real? [Hard core Illusionists deny even that.]

Do you believe that what happened to you ten minutes ago was real? Are things that happened in the past not real? Do you believe events really occurred in the past only if you remember them? If you don't remember something, did it not happen? If you remember now but forget later?

Let us admit that both what is in the past and what is distant is real, while admitting that we may have incorrect or missing information about the past or what is distant. We may even may be incorrect in our opinion of the here and now.

Now consider the life of an animal, say a dog. The dog has a beginning that has (or had) a place and a time. You can choose birth or conception for the beginning point, but then stick to that for this example. The dog also has (or had, or will have) an end, for which we will use its death. The dead body of the dog is of no use in this example.

Our dog is like Mount Everest in that, while it is alive, it is real. Even if it is away from us. Most people know there are living dogs all over the world. We may know some individual dogs quite well. Aside from being a living animal, a major difference between a dog and a mountain is the short life time of the dog. The lifetime of a dog is very comprehensible to humans because they typically live a fair fraction of a human lifetime.

Now further suppose there is a dog in New York City (if you are in New York City, suppose it in some other city) and the dog's master has taken a vacation to Florida. The dog is being cared for in New York City by a friend of the master.

The master may or may not think of the dog while on vacation. A sane master knows the dog is in New York City. He does not need to imagine that the dog is also in Florida, physically or "in spirit."

We can accept that Mount Everest is real, but far away. We don't imagine that an invisible, intangible copy of Mount Everest must be with us in order for it to exist.

When the dog is in the past, when it has died, in a sense it is far away in time. Yet we should not need to believe that it has an invisible, intangible copy of itself in our presence, or in some imaginary space like heaven. The dog is real, but it is in the past.

Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and other Illusionist doctrines are elaborated systems of confusing the real and the imaginary.

In particular they prey on people's fear of death and emotional attachments to people who have died.

When in fact people who have died are real, they are just in the past.

For more essays by William P. Meyers on this and related topics, see his:

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