Refuting the External World Read online

  "Any idea?"

  "Tell me."

  "It must be because the nature of our apparatus for experiencing makes it so." I say.

  That got him thinking. I’m impressed at how seriously he takes this, taking his time, not rushing things.

  "Whatever comes out of any system," I continue, "inevitably has its form and constitution determined by the nature of that system."

  That sounded way stiffer than I thought it would. But it’s an important point. Regardless of whatever event in the objective world that causes a sensation to arise in us, how that sensation appears must ultimately be determined by the nature of our apparatus for experiencing.

  The sensation we experience when we touch an object has its specific nature and unique characteristics precisely because our apparatus for experiencing makes it so. And when we see colors, they appear the way they do because our apparatus has generated them in such a way.

  I make another attempt at expressing this to Walt.

  "Our experience must inescapably be molded according to the nature of our apparatus for experiencing, which is the source of that experience, and must therefore ultimately determine the form, shape and characteristics of the perceptions that comes out of it," is how I put it.

  "In other words," I plow on, "the sky is blue—not wet, hard or noisy—solely because our apparatus for experiencing makes it so!"

  He’s silent, grinding it out in his head. Common sense tells us that our experience conforms to what’s out there; that we’re seeing an accurate representation of the real world; that objects exist more or less as we perceive them. This talk about our sensorial apparatus being responsible for the form of our experience? Crazy! But how could it be otherwise? If we were to assume that our apprehension of things was unmediated, that is to say, that we were seeing them just as they are, we would have to concede that the actual world is really made out of the colors that we see and the sounds that we hear and the sensations that we feel. We would have to believe that objects in fact grow larger as we approach them and that a dinner plate seen from an angle really assumes an elliptic shape – but we don’t believe that. No, it’s precisely because objects appear to grow larger when in fact they don’t, that we must conclude that their appearance must not be determined by the way things are in themselves, but ultimately by the apparatus through which they are rendered apparent to us.

  Walt springs to life. "Wait, are you saying that there’s no correspondence between the way objects appear to us and the way they are in themselves?" he says.

  For now, I just want Walt to grasp this one concept.

  "I’m saying that the way they appear to us may or may not conform to the objects themselves – but whether they do depends not on the objects themselves, but on the nature of the mediating apparatus through which they appear."

  But of course, there’s no way that objects can be ‘like’ the way they appear to us.

  Our experience must inescapably take the forms determined by the nature of the apparatus through which it appears, with the result that the forms of objects as they appear to us are necessarily different from those of the objects themselves. That is, an object in itself cannot possibly have the form assumed by its corresponding appearance in experience, since that form is nothing but the ways in which our apparatus for experiencing renders that object apparent. And so, we can be sure that objects as they are in themselves are exactly not as they appear to us.

  That is, of course, if they did exist to begin with. They don’t. But Walt firmly believes that they do; that the objective world is real, and the way to go about this is not to shove the truth in his face, but to carefully lead him to a place where he himself can discover how and where his assumptions about reality went wrong.

  We are going there slowly but steadily. Screwing with peoples assumptions and beliefs is a tricky business and I want the house to be in order; to leave no stone unturned – more so than what a usual discussion warrants. If I assume that he’s on the same page when he’s not, Walt’s just going to decide that I’m a nutcase in spiritual lala-land, preaching my latest doctrine to those not rational, sensible and clever enough to see through the bullshit. But it’s the opposite. This is cutting through the bullshit, slowly, starting with the unfounded assumptions below the pile.

  Walt looks lost. "Okay, let’s see if we can look at this from another angle," I say.

  "Sure," says Walt.

  "Consider our sensorial apparatus for a second," I say. "Now, if its nature were different, wouldn’t our experience also be different too?"

  "I guess."

  "For example, it’s entirely conceivable that a hypothetical apparatus could produce experience that to others appears round, but for this one appears square."

  "Sure," Walt says.

  "Or something entirely different, some experience that is presented in sense categories that aren’t available to us, and therefore not something we could conceive of."

  "Like bats? Supposedly they use some form of biological sonar to get a sense of their surroundings. We couldn’t imagine what that’s like," he says.

  "Sure, but what about an apparatus that produces experience that are completely one-dimensional, like small packets of sense impressions, arriving one at a time?"

  "Probably possible in theory," Walt says, "but I find it hard to believe that such an entity could survive for very long."

  "But does the form of one’s experience determine one’s ability to survive? Is there a necessary connection? Couldn’t, for example, a robot with super advanced AI very well survive in the world? Surely, it could function, had it only the necessary sensors in place to interact with the environment – all the while producing no sensate experience whatsoever! Much like the Mars rover!"

  "I guess you’re right."

  "Now, this one-dimensionally perceiving entity could very well get by in a complex environment if his actual body—not the one appearing in his own one-dimensional experience, but the one that objectively exists in the real world—only were equipped with the right faculties that could respond to such an environment, all the while believing that he was, so to speak, ‘living’ in the one-dimensional world of his experience. Much like in the movie ‘The Matrix’, where the hero is hibernating in an incubator, all the while thinking that he’s walking around in a real world. In both examples, the character’s real world situation is very different from that of his experience."

  "Yeah, sure. But why are we talking about one-dimensionally perceiving entities?"

  "Because I want to point out that the form of our experience doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whatever is out there."

  Walt nods. He gets it. "Alright," he says.

  Chapter 3 – Our experience is undivided

  "So, we’ve established that the shape and form and constitution of our perceptions must ultimately be determined by the nature of our apparatus for experiencing." I say to Walt.

  He nods. "Stuff appears the way it does because our apparatus makes it so," he says.

  "That’s right. Now, consider an apple. An ordinary red juicy apple. Pretend for a moment that it’s actually here in your hand."

  Walt closes his eyes for a second. "Okay," he says.

  "In feeling its shape, would you agree that the roundness of this apple is a sensation?"

  "Yes."

  "But then, if the roundness of this apple is merely a sensation produced by your sensorial apparatus, can the actual apple be round in and of itself?"

  Now we’re getting to the good stuff – to actually be asking questions about objective reality itself. Walt’s now in a position where we can start bringing his assumptions about reality into focus, to place them under careful scrutiny, and see if they still make sense. If they don’t, we can discard them, one by one – and thereby find, like in peeling the layers off an onion, that at the heart of it there’s absolutely nothing at all.

  "Well, of course we can’t be certain," he says. "We’ve already established
that we cannot go beyond our experience; we can’t verify what’s out there. But I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t at least be possible, if not probable, that the apple truly is round in and of itself."

  "Please think about what we actually mean by the word ‘round’."

  Apparently that’s too obvious to require any consideration, because he answers right away. "It’s pretty clear to me," he says.

  "But how did we come up with that concept? What’s the origin of the word?"

  He realizes that I actually want him to think about this, so he actually does. "We saw round stuff and made a word for their specific shape," he says after a while. "We called it ‘round.’"

  This is an important insight. We form concepts by distilling our experiences into words – we generalize their content; creating symbols to represent them in their absence – to use in reason and to communicate with others. Concepts aren’t somehow given to us; they are derived and formed from our direct experience – and the meaning they have must therefore be grounded in the perceptions from which they were drawn. Follow a concept back, looking up its definition—and its definition’s definitions and so on—you’ll eventually find your way to a sense perception. If you don’t; you have in your mind, not a concept – but an empty word.

  I try to express this to Walt. "That’s right," I say. "We form concepts by abstracting, and what we abstract from can neither be, nor originate from, anything other than our direct experience. Whether we have a concrete concept such as an ‘apple’, or something more abstract such as ‘food,’ at the root of its hierarchal structure lies, as its ultimate referent, nothing other than direct immediate perception."

  "So?" Walt’s wondering where I’m going with this.

  "So, the concept of ‘round’ was derived from sensations. The word draws its meaning from the perception of roundness!"

  "So?" he says.

  "So, how can an apple be round in and of itself when we by ‘round’ mean the sensations of roundness? Can the actual apple resemble a sensation? Can the apple be ‘like’ a perception – whose nature and the appearance of which is determined by our apparatus for experiencing? Can it be ‘like’ that?"

  Walt looks puzzled. He doesn’t respond.

  "In other words, can the apple as it is in itself be ‘like’ the apple as it appears to us?"

  He thinks a while longer. "That’s the question, yeah – but it seems insolvable since we can’t know the apple as it is in itself. It’s beyond our experience."

  "I can assure you that there’s a solution," I say. "We just have to look carefully."

  "At what?"

  "At how thinking and language distorts what’s right in front of us."

  ***

  "What do you mean?" Walt says.

  "What if there is a way to know about things as they are in themselves, even though we can’t directly observe them?"

  "How?"

  "While we might think that there’s no limit to what can possibly exist beyond our experience, the truth is that there is a limit. Even though we can’t access objective reality to look for ourselves, we can know with certainty that there are some things that are simply not out there."

  "But how can you know that?" Walt asks.

  "Because they’re necessarily not out there, by definition. The distinction between our experience and objective reality has inherent in its logic that whatever exists on the one side cannot exist on the other. In other words, we can know by analysis alone that for example ‘joy’ or ‘pain’ can never exist out there. Subjective experience can exist no more in objective reality than imaginary things can exist in the real world, or real things can exist in an imaginary world."

  I pause to make sure Walt’s following. "Imaginary things don’t exist in the real world because if they did, they wouldn’t be imaginary, but real," I explain. "Likewise, experience cannot be a part of objective reality since objective reality is only that precisely because it’s not experience."

  Walt’s thinking. "But maybe ‘joy’ or ‘pain’ does somehow exist out there," he says. "How could we know?"

  "Saying that they could is a nonsense proposition. An experience cannot in any conceivable way exist independently of experience. Anyone claiming that it could is stating an obvious contradiction. Joy is only joy insofar that it is experienced – otherwise it is not joy."

  "Okay. But that isn’t very helpful. No one thinks that joy or pain is out there anyways."

  "I agree. But what if we can find that ‘round’ is just like ‘joy’? That it is simply a form of our own subjectivity?"

  "Can we?" he asks.

  "The only thing stopping us from seeing it as self-evident truth is thinking and language." I reply.

  ***

  "Our notion of ‘an experience’ involves a model of perception that includes three elements," I tell Walt. "There’s the perceiver, which is me, then there’s the act of perceiving, which is a faculty of myself, and lastly, there’s the object perceived."

  "Okay," says Walt.

  "We say that ‘I see an apple’ or ‘I hear a noise,’ but the fact is that this division between ‘I’, ‘see’ and ‘apple’ is solely conceptual."

  "Those three elements," I continue, "the ‘I’, the ‘see’ and the ‘apple’ – they’re not part of our direct experience. They’re not representative of what’s going on."

  "What’s going on then?" he asks.

  "A little analysis, which we already did briefly, reveals that the ‘I’-element, which would be me, the perceiver, must necessarily be outside of experience. Our experience appears through an apparatus that isn’t itself an object of experience."

  "Just as the camera isn’t in the photo and the painter isn’t in the picture," Walt says.

  I nod. "—which then leaves the remaining two elements: the act of perceiving and the object perceived."

  "And how can you possibly explain away those?" he asks. "I’m pretty sure there’s seeing of objects. Look here for example," Walt holds up his cup. "This is a cup of coffee," he says, articulating like one does when talking to half-deaf old people.

  We’re both laughing at that. We’re back to being playful and I’m in a good mood for a fun little experiment. "Okay," I say. "This cup you’re supposedly seeing, what is it made of?"

  "Ceramic, I think."

  "I mean in your direct seeing experience."

  "Yes, I’m talking about my experience here." Walt says.

  "Isn’t it more true to say that, in your direct experience, the cup is made out of color? Do you actually see anything other than color? Isn’t ceramic just an idea, a concept drawn from the experience of color and touch and sound?"

  He looks at the cup again. "Well, yeah, I guess," he says.

  "So you agree that nothing is given in the direct experience of seeing, other than color?"

  He’s now inspecting it carefully. "Well, I see shapes and light and color."

  "But shapes are just particular patterns of color, aren’t they?"

  "True."

  "And I’m sure that you by ‘light’ mean different shades, which are just different colors. Isn’t a very bright light just shades of white?" I say.

  "Fine. There is nothing but color in my experience of the cup."

  "So, is there ‘a cup’ and the colors of the cup?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do you experience both an object and its colors? Or is it just the colors?"

  "No. You’re right," Walt says. "It’s just the colors!"

  "So there’s no cup, just a particular pattern of color that you then come to call ‘a cup’?"

  He’s smiling now. "Correct. No cup. Just colors," he says. "I’m only seeing colors."

  "What if I said you don’t?" I reply.

  ***

  "Actually, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised. Are you saying that I don’t see colors?"

  "Here’s the thing: We don’t ‘see’ ‘colors’, because a color and the seeing of it are the exact sam
e thing. Saying that we do implies a division between ‘seeing’ and ‘seen’ that simply isn’t there in our experience."

  "Go on, please." Walt’s intrigued.

  "Let’s talk about seeing first," I begin. "What is the one and only criteria for saying that I ‘see’?"

  Walt thinks for a few seconds. "That I have working eyes?" he says.

  "So, it has something to do with your eyes?"

  "It doesn’t?"

  "But you see in your dreams, don’t you?" I ask.

  "I don’t know if I would call that ‘seeing’," Walt says.

  "Why not?"

  "Because when we see something in a dream, we don’t afterwards think that we actually saw it, you know, for real."

  "You mean that whatever appeared in the dream wasn’t representative of anything existing objectively? That it was all in your head?"

  He nods. "Precisely."

  "But how do you know that that’s not what’s happening right now?"

  He thinks for a few moments. "You’re right," he says. "I don’t."

  "Nevertheless, something did appear in the dream. And it appeared visually – and the fact that it did is what I mean by ‘seeing,’ regardless of what that appearance meant or represented or indicated."

  Walt nods silently. I keep on talking. "If we by ‘seeing’ mean something like ‘an accurate apprehension of external objects,’ then of course we don’t ‘see’ in our dreams. But since we cannot be sure that we accurately apprehend external objects even when we’re awake, we would have to leave open the logical possibility that we don’t ‘see’ then either – which is kind of absurd, since the fact that we see is a given, simply by how we define it. Therefore, ‘seeing’ can only mean that something is appearing visually, whether or not that something is an accurate representation of a real thing."

  He thinks for a while. "Alright, fair enough." he says.

  "Now, what does ‘appearing visually’ mean?" I ask. "What constitutes a visual experience as opposed to an auditory or a tactile one?"