Chapter 3: Reality and Being

3.1 : What is Real?

• Metaphysics is the attempt to answer the question: What is real?
• What grounds do you have to believe that reality is only what you can see, hear, taste, touch or feel?
• What grounds do you have to believe that there is a realm that consists more than this?
• The belief in God innately constitutes to a belief in an immaterial reality.
• What are we to say about most of the things for which people are willing to live and die?
  • Consider justice, or goodness, or liberty, or truth, or beauty, or love.
  • Are these material?
  • Can they be seen, touched, smelled, or heard?
  • Do they have a size, a shape, or even a place?
  • Are these real?
  • Haven’t millions of people died for these ideals?
  • Don’t millions of people devote their entire lives to the pursuit of ideals such as these?
  • Doesn’t such devotion imply that they are real?
• Maybe these things are too soft for a practical mind, so lets consider those notions…
  • Have you ever seen the pressure or forces of the supply and demand chain?
  • What about physics?
  • Electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, and other subatomic particles; the mathematician’s numbers, formulas, roots, and equations
  • and the astronomer’s laws, curved spaces, black holes, and compressed or stretched intervals of time.
  • Do we admit these odd entities into our notion of “reality”? But they arent hard or physical?
• Read: Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment
• What, then, is reality? What does it include? Are these questions even important?
• As the philosopher Robert Nozick has said, to say something is real is to say it has “value, meaning, importance, and weight.’’
• Perhaps because we cannot definitively answer these questions, their answers are meaningless.
• The search for reality could be meaningless.
• If we can not define reality, we cannot say with certainty what must ultimately matter to us.

3.2 : Reality: Material of Non-material?

• Saint Augustine: the universe contains in itself every kind of spirit, low and high
  • because God wanted to fill reality with goodness, he placed in the world every possible kind of creature that had the ability some to degree reality and therefore of goodness
  • Humans lied in the middle of this hierarchy, with having material bodies but also immaterial souls, we are both matter and spirit, straddling two realms of reality. Explored below:

Materialism

• Eastern Materialism
  • Charvaka / Lokyata philosophers on India around 600 BC
  • we should seek our happiness in this material world and its physical pleasures
  • turn away from religion and its delusions
  • There is only one valid source of knowledge: sense perception. Other kinds of reasoning are invalid.
  • we should seek our happiness in this material world and its physical pleasures
  • Inductive Reasoning: generalizing about what we observe
  • generalizations go beyond when can actually be observed
  • “where there is smoke, there is always fire”
  • Deductive Reasoning: appeals to general statements to reach logical conclusions
  • ultimately relies on generalizations that inductive reasoning produces
  • Therefore all information around is unreliable except what we feel in the present moment
  • if we cannot know something, it is wrong to say it exists
  • Any “things” we cannot perceive with our senses—such as souls, god, or any other spiritual “realities”—cannot be said to exist at all. Beyond the material world there is nothing. No afterlife.
  • There is nothing beyond now, so why not take in all pleasures we can?
• Western Materialism
  • Democritus supported this with theory atoms and that all things had a purpose on the physical plane
  • People got bored with this idea and Plato, Socrates and Aristotle preached the concept of soul
  • The Scientific Method became popular with Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Hobbesand Kepler
  • They quantified everything
  • Hobbes concluded that measurable matter is all there is in the universe. Only matter is real.
• Objections to Materialism
  • Difficulty in accounting for human consciousness
  • thinking, wishing, experiencing, hoping, dreaming, loving, and hating
  • Consciousness is the kind of awareness of things that we have when we are awake and that we do not have when we are sleeping.
  • Consciousness has subjectivity (directed by somebody) and intersectionality (directed at something).
  • consciousness has no apparent location, no volume, no mass
  • mustn’t we conclude that a brain state and a state of consciousness are two different things?
  • Even physics eventually brakes down into immaterial forces of energy, fields and waves.
  • Matter has been dematerialized - not just as a philosophical concept, but as modern physics.
  • A subatomic particle does not exist until interacts with something else so it can be observed - Heisenberg - Principle of Indeterminacy - the subatomic is intertwined with the mind
  • At its most fundamental level, the universe is made up of mind-dependent stuff! At the subatomic level, independent reality seems to have disappeared, leaving only “probability fields” of potential entities that do not become real until they interact with a mind.

Idealism

• Matter does not seem to account for everything. If we go far enough into thinking, only a mental state exists.
• Idealists go far enough to say that everything must be mental, the universe is not matter at all.
• Western Idealism
  • The belief that realities essentially composed of minds, and their ideas, rather than matter
  • What Shakespeare presented in the Tempest
  • In the west, the idea is as old as the Greeks
  • Plato’s Theory of Forms supported this
  • George Berkeley: he did not deny the reality of the world perceive. Rather, he denied only that this world is external two and an independent of the mind.
  • Dependent on my mind: Subjective
  • Dependent on God’s mind: Objective
  • Everything is just in perception bundles.
  • Imagination is subjective but the regularity of the world around us must be made by God in an objective manner.
• Eastern Idealism
  • Yogacarin: truth through the practice of meditation
  • Vijnanavada: mind-only doctorine
  • Vasubandhu was similar to Berkeley and belonged to these schools of philosophy
  • When we see colours hear sound, or smell odors, we inferred from the sensations that there must be external objects that causes sensations, but we are not justified in drawing such conclusions about the existence of external objects, all we ever perceive their sensations within us, so we have no basis, for concluding that external objects cause the sensations.
• Options can exist only in the mind. Yet the objects who perceives seem to exist in the world outside of our minds and perceptions cannot have physical effects. Get the objects with received due physically fucked us so we might object the objects who perceive cannot be your perceptions in our mind

3.3 : Reality in Pragmatism

Pragmatism’s approach to philosophy

• James held that philosophy should not lose its connection to personal and social problems.
• According to Dewey, philosophy arises out of social and emotional material.

The pragmatic method

• For James, the pragmatic method interprets an idea in terms of its practical consequences and asks what difference it would make if it were true.
• As James said,“whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real”; because there are many different interests, there are many different real worlds or “sub-universes.

3.4 : Reality and Logical Positivism

• Ayer’s “criterion of meaning” says a statement is meaningful only if it is a tautology (true by definition) or an empirically verifiable statement (verifiable in principle by observation).
• Because metaphysical statements are neither tautologies nor empirically verifiable,Ayer says they are meaningless.
• Carnap argued that meaningless metaphysical statements express emotions.

Objections

• Critics of logical positivism say that its criterion of meaning is unprovable and that if it is applied to itself, it implies that it is itself meaningless.

3.5 : Antirealism: The Heir of Pragmatism and Idealism

• Contemporary antirealists who are characterizable as the heirs of pragmatism and idealism claim that
  • (1) reality depends on the mind or its products, and
  • (2) there are many distinct external realities. Views that assert claim 2 are “postmodern.”
• Many contemporary antirealists argue that the features of reality depend on the language or system of concepts we use to describe or think about reality.
• Because there are different languages, there are different realities, each dependent on the mind and its system of concepts.
• Goodman argues “we make what we find” in reality by “drawing certain boundaries rather than others” around things.
• By using different languages and systems of thought, we construct many realities, each dependent on the mind.
• Putnam argues that just as different systems of counting indicate that different numbers of objects are in a container, what reality is depends on the system our minds use to describe it.
• Spender argues that we cannot know “things as they really are” because the classification system of the language we use “shapes” the reality we see.
• By creating our language, men have shaped our reality “to suit their own ends.” But there are many other equally true realities and not just one true “objective” male reality.

Objections

• Critics of Spender point out that if language created multiple realities that were all equally true, then the supposedly sexist reality created by sexist male language would be as true and acceptable as any other; sexism would not be an objective reality because there would be no one true objective reality.
• Searle argues that if people successfully communicate, they must assume there is one independent external reality because for people to understand each other’s statements, they must be talking about the same independent external reality.
• So, our ability to communicate implies that antirealism is false.

3.6 : Encountering Reality: Phenomenology and Exitentialism

Phenomenology

• Phenomenology and existentialism approach reality as it is subjectively revealed in our human consciousness and human condition.
• For Husserl, the “natural standpoint” is our normal awareness of the world spread out in space and time, with value characteristics and as something that exists “out there.”
• Husserl asks us to “bracket” the natural standpoint by suspending judgment about whether the spatiotemporal world we experience really exists “out there.”
• After bracketing, what remains is our consciousness, which involves both being conscious of something and that of which one is conscious. Analyzing this consciousness reveals being.
• For Heidegger, the job of philosophy is to study being, which is the individual’s very act of existing within the human world. To understand reality, we must understand our own individual being in our world, or Dasein.
• Dasein is temporal and finite—that is, bounded by death. If we are authentic, we respond with anxiety and face our responsibility for who we are; if inauthentic, we deny the present possibility of death and flee our responsibility for ourselves.
• For Heidegger, reality, or being, is temporal and finite.

Existentialism

• Kierkegaard’s philosophy is focused on

  • (1) getting clarity about what to do
  • (2) understanding reality through subjectivity
  • (3) overcoming the gap between God and humanity.

• Anxiety is a response to our freedom to choose to “leap” into the unknown future or nothingness

  that attracts and repels us, especially the “leap of faith.”

• How we choose is more important than what we choose.Through our choices we become the person who we are: Our free choices bring us into existence.

• Sartre believes there is no God and so no fixed human nature; we make ourselves by our choices so that we are completely responsible for what we are.

• A phenomenological study of our conscious experience reveals two kinds of reality: consciousness, or being-for-itself, and the objects of which we are conscious, or being-in-itself.

• Being-for-itself is nothing until it acts, and then the reality it becomes is whatever it chooses to do. This is why humans, who are being-for-itself, make themselves through their choices. Being-in-itself is not conscious and cannot make itself other than what it is.

• Simone de Beauvoir argued that men and women both define women in terms of their relation to men, and thereby become mere things for men and fail to make use of their freedom to make themselves.

Objections

• What one sees when one brackets as Husserl recommended depends on one’s assumptions, values, language, and so forth. So, bracketing cannot reveal the same thing to everyone.
• Critics say one can be in the mode of being-for- itself by freely choosing to be committed to a group where one gives up his freedom. But this contradicts Sartre’s view that to be a being-for-itself one must always remain free to choose.

3.7 : Is Freedom Real?

Determinism

• Darrow argued that their heredity and upbringing, together with the laws of causality, made Leopold and Loeb do what they did, so they were not morally responsible for killing Bobbie Franks.
• Darrow’s view often shows up in murder trials today.
• Determinists argue that previous events and the laws of nature cause all human acts, so humans are not free or responsible for their acts.
• Encouraged by Newton’s laws of motion, LaPlace argued that human actions are determined.
• Determinism holds that (1) human acts are causally determined, (2) such determination rules out freedom and responsibility, so (3) humans are neither free nor responsible.

Libertarianism

• Sartre argues that human consciousness can withdraw itself from any existing situation to seek \n a future that does not exist, so humans are not determined by any existing situation but are free and responsible.
• Libertarians hold that
  • (1) humans are free and responsible
  • (2) determinism rules out such freedom and responsibility
  • (3) human acts are not causally determined.

Compatibilism

• Hobbes argued that freedom is the absence of physical restraints, so when restraints are absent, our acts are free and responsible even though they are causally determined.
• Compatibilists hold that
  • (1) human acts are causally determined,
  • (2) determinism does not rule out freedom and responsibility
  • (3) humans are predetermined yet can be free and responsible.
• Critics say compatibilism ignores the real issue:Are we unfree in the sense that our acts are causally determined?
• Kant says when we act, we have to assume we are free, and when we try to explain our acts scientifically, we have to assume we are determined. Both viewpoints are necessary.

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