About Life, Universe and Everything-I : "Is This world real?"

About Life, Universe and Everything-I

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.        - Douglas Adams

The scope of this blog is pretty simple.

It’s to have a glance as to how philosophers down the ages have addressed certain questions:

• Is this world real?

• What about God? Does he exist?

• Does life have any meaning?

From Socrates to Aristotle, Descartes to Hume, Kant to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche to Santayana……….

The answer to ‘Life, Universe and Everything’ is of course ‘42’, as explained by Douglas Adams.(Read- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

But of course, we are looking for a much deeper answer to the primal queries and we are not satisfied with a simple ‘42’.

If you are looker for a deeper answer, well……there is nothing much that you will find here either.

Primarily because, nobody knows much of it. Period.

As the wise Socrates (469 BC – 399 BC) said eons ago: ‘One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.’

So let’s start with the questions, one by one.

Is this world ‘Real’?

Turns out the answer might not be so simple after all. Philosophers down the ages have spent many a waking hour trying to answer it.

For instance Plato(424 BC – 348 BC) divided ‘Reality’ into two:

The world around us that we experience by our senses is not the true ‘Reality’, says Plato. It is just a ‘transient reality’.

Then what is the true reality?

The only ‘true Reality’ are the  ‘knowledge/ideas’ that we understand with our ‘reason’.

The world of ‘ideas’ acquired through our ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’ alone is ‘true knowledge’.

And how do we get these ‘ideas’ if they are not supplied by our sense organs? Where does this reason/intellect come from?

The immortal ‘Soul’ says Plato.

Plato believed in a soul that transcends the body.

Hence the Sense organs that are part and parcel of the body are not reliable as they are perishable. But intellect or ‘reason’ resides in the soul. Hence by ‘Reason’ you can acquire true Knowledge.

What nonsense ,said Aristotle(384 BC – 322 BC), a student of Plato. He  bunked his teacher’s idea that we are born with an innate ‘knowledge/ideas’, which has its seat in the ‘immortal’ soul’

Aristotle said that we only know what we have comprehended with our senses, and that is all that constitutes our individual consciousness.

We do have ‘innate intellect’ but we definitely do not have ‘innate ideas’

So the battle began. Reason or senses?

The cat –fights between philosophers are legendary. As the joke goes:

The First Law of Philosophy: For every philosopher, there exists an equal and opposite philosopher.
The Second Law of Philosophy: They're both wrong.

The battle lines remain drawn for about 1800 years or so.

The debate got a new lease of life when   Descartes (1596 – 1650) known as the father of modern philosophy, rekindled it with a few provocative queries.

Descartes started with the basics: He asked “What is real? ”

‘When we dream, we feel we are experiencing reality. What separates our waking feelings from our dream feelings?

‘”When I consider this carefully, I find not a single property which, with certainty separates the waking state from the dream,”

So  “How can I be certain that my whole life is not a dream?”

So thinking, one thought struck him: It was that he doubted.

When he doubted, he had to be thinking, and because he was thinking, it had to be certain that he was a thinking being.

And thus he arrived at the grand conclusion: 

Cogito, ergo sum-I think , therefore I am.

There’s an old joke of Descartes of how he vanishes in a poof of logic:

Descartes walks into a restaurant and sits down for dinner. 
The waiter comes over and asks if he'd like an appetizer.                                                                                                      

"No thank you" says Descartes, "I'd just like to order dinner"

"Would you like to hear our daily specials?" asks the waiter

"No" says Descartes, getting impatient

"Would you like a drink before dinner?" the waiter asks

Descartes is insulted, since he's a tee-totaler

"I think not!" he says indignantly, and POOF! he disappeared.

For Plato it was ‘reason’ that was important, whereas Aristotle  relied more on his ‘senses’.

Descartes took a cue from Plato’s book – he relied not on his senses, but solely on his ‘reason’.

So Descartes was certain that he was ‘real’.

But what about the world as we see it?

Descartes thought the external world might be a fantasy. At least he was certain that the thinking ‘I’ was more real than the external world.

But there were certain characteristics which one could  perceive with our reason. These are mathematical properties, such as length, breadth and depth. These ‘Quantitative’ properties must be real.

But there were ‘Qualitative’ properties such as smell, color, taste etc that are linked to our sense perception and hence might not actually describe the true reality.

Thus there are two forms of reality.

One ‘reality’ is ‘thought’, and the other is the 'world', which he called ‘extended reality’ or ‘matter’.

The ‘true reality’ of the world is colored by our sense organs.

For a Bat ,the world is in ‘black and white’ only, as he does not have the sensory organs to recognize color. So trying to explain to a Bat, that the world is actually full of myriad colors is an exercise in futility.

Similarly we are also limited by our sense organs from recognizing the true reality.

So Descartes essentially divided ‘reality’ into two: Mind(thought) and matter.

He was what we call a ‘Dualist’

Enter Spinoza(1632 – 1677). He  did not consider ‘Reality’ in dualistic terms.

He coined two terms – ‘Mode’ and ‘Substance’.

The ‘Mode’ of Spinoza combined both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ of Descartes.

Thus a ‘Mode’ was any  shape, form or even ‘thought’ that ‘true reality’  transiently assumes: you, your body, your thoughts, your planet etc.

And what is the ‘True Reality’?

It is ‘Substance’.

‘Substance’ is the ultimate reality. It is the very structure of existence, underlying all events and things, it constitutes the essence of the world.

And  ‘Substance’ is ‘Nature’ is ‘God’.

There is only ‘Substance’ and nothing else. Spinoza saw the world as ‘one’, hence he is considered a ‘Monist’.

How did Spinoza die? By ‘Substance’ abuse.

But Locke (1632- 1704) bunked the idea of ‘Substance’ or ‘God’. He was an empirist and he only believed what his senses revealed to him.

He said that we cannot have anything in our mind except what  we perceive first in the senses.

Before  we perceive anything, the mind is a ‘tabula rasa’ - an empty slate.

We eat an apple and by its taste and smell, we get the idea that we are eating an apple. Every knowledge that we gain can therefore be traced back to a simple sensation.

But can we rely on what our senses tell us?

In this aspect, Locke said something similar to what Descartes had said earlier. He divided ‘Reality’ as having two ‘qualities’: Primary and Secondary qualities.

Any mathematical quality such as length, weight etc can be objectively perceived, hence they are real  and  are ‘Primary Qualities’.

‘Secondary qualities’ such as color, smell, taste etc are not inherent. It is the effect of the outer quality on our senses. Hence we can only talk of their effect on our senses.

So the irrevocable conclusion that was being arrived at was that since only material things can affect our sense, we know nothing but matter, and must accept a materialistic philosophy.

If sensations are the stuff of thought, matter must be the material of mind.

The thought process tended towards materialism.

Not so fast said Berkeley(1684-1753).

Of course, Locke was right when he said that all our knowledge is derived from sensation.

Therefore all our knowledge of anything is merely our sensations of it and the ideas derived from these sensations.

So any ‘matter’ is just a bundle of perceptions.

We do not perceive things as tangible objects.

To assume that what we perceive has its own underlying substance is jumping to conclusions.

If we sense a table, by thumping on it, it is just a sensation of something hard, but you didn’t feel the actual matter in the table. In a dream also, you are hitting something hard, but there isn’t anything hard. So what’s the difference between your dream and reality?

If you had no senses, and you keep striking your thumb with a hammer, the hammer would not exist for you at all. Hence what you experience as a hammer is just a bundle of sensations, or a bundle of memories; it is a simply a condition of the mind.

All matter, then, is simply a condition of the mind. And the only reality that we know directly is mind. 

So now there was no matter ,only mind!

Overheard in 18th century England: "Did you hear that George Berkeley died? His girlfriend stopped seeing him."

But the debate did not end there for sure. Enter Hume(1711-1776).

He said, who says there is such an entity as ‘mind’? Just as we know matter by perception, so also we know ‘mind’, only by perception, only in this case the process is internal.

We do not perceive any such entity as the “mind”; we perceive merely separate ideas, memories, feelings, etc.

The mind is not a substance or an organ that has ideas; it is only an abstract name for the series of ideas; there is no observable “soul” behind the process of thought.

So there is no mind either!

Locke had said there was nothing but matter;

Which was bunked by Berkeley by proving that only ‘mind’ exists;

And along came Hume who said that no entity such as the ‘mind’ exists either!

So the joke going around was: “No matter. Never mind.”

Voltaire(1694 – 1778) did some plain talk on what he thought of philosophers.

Here are a few quotes:

 “As wise as it is possible for men to be;… he knew as much of metaphysics as hath ever been known in any age,- that is, little or nothing at all.”

“Every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack.”

“The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women.”

“Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.”           

It took a Kant(1724–1804) to restore some sanity to the proceedings.

Kant agreed with empiricists that knowledge comes only through our senses.

 But hold on, he said- “Not all knowledge”.

The mind of man is not just a  ‘tabula rasa’ or an empty slate as Locke supposed, nor is it, as Hume, theorized a mere abstract name for the series or group of mental states.

Mind is an active organ which functions in three stages:

First stage: It receives sensations through its sense organs;

Second stage: it further applies the sensations received  to ‘forms of perception’

Third stage: It thereafter carries out  coordination of the perceptions so developed into ‘conceptions’.

What are these ‘forms of perceptions’ that mind uses in the second stage?

Space and time, says Kant.  Any sensation that we experience will not have any meaning if it is not ascribed in ‘space’ and ‘time’.

The sensations which have been received are ‘catalogued’ in ‘space’ and ‘time’ by the mind.

Thereafter the mind forms ‘conceptions’ by following the ‘law of causality’.

The  ‘Law of causality’, states : Human mind perceives everything as  a  matter of ‘cause and effect’.

A man, when he sees a ball coming  towards him will try to see where it comes from. But a cat will run after the ball without thinking where the ball came from. That is the ‘Law of causality’, which is a primary human condition.

Kant further says ‘Space and Time’ are not concepts that exist independently. They are also conditions of the human mind.

We are conditioned to think in terms of ‘space’ and ‘time’ as also the ‘law of causality’.

So to get back to Locke’s statement that Mind is a ‘Tabula Rasa’. The answer is ‘no’, as per Kant.

Because the concepts of ‘space and time’ and the ‘law of causality’ exist in the mind even before we have any experience.

They are a priori.

So, what about the world? Is it real?

Kant says we cannot say for sure.

Of course, unlike Berkeley he did not deny that the world exists.

The world that we experience is of course what we know through our senses and thought.

What it ‘really’ is we cannot know.

We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them; through the unique manner of human mind’s proclivity to put all sensations through the rigmarole of ‘space and time’ and the ‘law of causality’.

Science is naïve - as it supposes that it is dealing with reality. But philosophy realizes that the world is just a bundle of sensations, perceptions and conceptions and true reality can never be known.

Hinduism  has also an interesting take on ‘Reality’ too.

Analogous to Spinoza’s ‘Substance’ the wise seers also talks of one ‘Super Self’ or ‘Supreme Consciousness’ which permeates the entire world -  meaning you and  me; the entire world of sentient and non-sentient beings; the universe itself and anything else you can think of.  

Hinduism says there is nothing, but the ‘Self’. The whole purpose of this existence is to comprehend the underlying reality of the ‘true self’. For this purpose Man gets reborn again and again till he is able to get rid of his attachment to this illusory world and become one with ‘Reality’.

In Advaitism, a branch of Hinduism, however, this concept of the ‘illusory world’ goes one step further.

Advaita does not stop at just conceptualizing a ‘Supreme Self ‘ which pervades everything. It says ‘Self’ is the only thing that exists. Rest everything is a ‘Maya’ or a ‘illusion’.

Meaning that everything else, apart from the ‘Self’ is ‘Unreal’.

And why do we not see this reality of the ‘Self’? It is because of our ignorance. This can be explained in the metaphor of a rope and a snake:

“Imagine entering a darkened room and you see dimly, lying in the middle of the floor, a snake ready to strike. You run away scared, and after a little while, mustering up courage, re-enter the room, now armed with a large stick and a good torch. Shining the torch on the floor, you see now that the ‘snake’ was actually a coiled piece of rope.

In the same way, because of our ignorance (=darkness), we  see what appears to be a world of discrete objects, the creation(= snake). When we bring in a torch( =gain ‘self’ knowledge) we discover that we are imposing false names and forms on what is in fact our own ‘Self’.”

This  idea of ‘Non-Duality’ of reality is essentially Adi Shankaracharya’s interpretation of the Vedas and Upanishads. There are other branches such as Shaivism which do not  consider the world to be a dream. They say that this world is ‘real’ but transient, but the ultimate Reality is of course the ‘Supreme Self’.

But  Buddha did not buy this theory of the ‘supreme self’. 

He bunked the entire idea of a ‘Supreme Self’ as a delusion.

Unlike others, Buddha was no armchair specialist. He walked the talk, and followed severe penances and followed the Yogic instructions to the letter in an attempt to achieve and understand the ‘Self’ as had been promised by the Sages.

Buddha’s experience was that the Yoga and penances laid down, gave practitioners only a brief respite from suffering.

That , according to him would be a contradiction in terms, 
since Nirvana was eternal.

He thus walked his own path and attained Nirvana. In his teachings, Buddha taught his philosophy of the ‘Four Noble truths’ and the ‘Eight fold path’, while completely rejecting the concept of an eternal, unchanging ‘Self’.

Buddha saw life as an unbroken succession of mental and physical processes which keep people in a continual state of change. (akin to what Hume said later)

A Buddhist walks up to a hotdog stand and says, make me one with everything. The Buddhist pays the vendor and asks for change. The vendor says, change comes from within.

“The infant is not the same as the adult; I am not the same today as I was yesterday. There is nothing of which I can say “this is mine,” said Buddha.

There is thus no “I” or unalterable ego.

Buddha also rejected the idea of an eternal soul.

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.”