Category: philosophy

I love Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, post structualism, postmodernism and the philosophy of language.

Concepts

Warren Tang26 Comments

1.
Our being has the characteristic of data creation with-in and with-out the mind. We create concepts at every turn. We replace the real things with its concepts. We also mistake concepts for the real things.

Plato was one of the first to create the idea of ideal forms that all else is based upon. Real cats are but shadows of the ideal cat, where the ideal cat is the model for the cats of the world. But Plato did not have the benefit of current understanding. Cats did not always exist. It would be safe to say cats did not exist two billion years ago. Did the ideal form already exist then without a single cat to be in existence? What is the point of having the ideal form of cats if there were none to be?

The more likely answer would be that our ideal form of cats comes from our experience and observation of cats by way of blending all that is considered ideal of a cat, rather than something like an ideal form existing before we start.

2.
This is like the present state of Apple’s App Store. It is far from ideal but we keep bits we like here and there and remove other bits that don’t seem to work. Call it “tweaking”, “evolution” or some other term you like. Ideal forms are not there. Only the concept of ideal forms exist. We must not mistake the concept for the real thing or for the verbal form of it.

The Noise In The Data

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What are the limits of my knowledge of the world?

For the last ten years I have “existed” in Japan. Within this time the nature of reality has not changed. This is as expected and is not surprising. I had lived in the three countries previously, and also extensively spent time in another country intermittently most of my life. The nature of reality holds true for all these places. I have also looked through the telescope at the International Space Station, the surface of the moon, Jupiter and Saturn its moons, Mars, and the light from distant stars and galaxies. As far as I can tell the nature of the reality is no different than to the one here on Earth. But that does not mean the nature of reality cannot be different elsewhere in the parts of the universe I have yet to observe.

What I can say is this: the nature of my immediate physical reality is thus, and that is all that matters.

Why should I need to worry about there being a different reality? For me, to function and operate in this world, this is all that I need to know – that within my world, reality is uniformed.

In the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, The Buddha said this when asked about the “deeper questions” of the nature of the world:

“[Your questions are] just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a brahman, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him.

The story tells us The Buddha’s attitude toward questions of irrelevance. What we need to know is immediately available to you through your senses and perception. This should be your starting point on the investigation into reality, whether you are Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, atheist, a philosopher or scientist or any other category of being I have not mentioned. For this is truly what is common among us, our senses and perception. Everything else is supplemental and, in my opinion, like noise in the data.

On Reality

Warren Tang5 Comments

1.
This morning I took the garbage out, as I do every Saturday morning. There was the sky. There were clouds, mountains, trees, rocks, roads, my car. birds singing, the rice fields, our vegetable garden, my neighbour bringing home a dead wild boar. This is physical reality. The world I see and all its objects, space and time exists. I verify it independently. And you can come verify it as well. The world where you are now reading this is the same but different part of the physical world. I can, if I want to, come to you and verify it independently as well. Few would argue that this is not the world, not real.

Outside my house, as I said, are rocks. The one particular rock that I picked up this morning is real. It existed with the ground, vegetable garden, mountain, clouds, sky. But does the rock “know” of its existence and the physical reality it belongs to? Let me put it down – both physically and metaphorically – for the moment and come back to it later in this post.

2.
There is a physical reality. But how do I know it? I know the reality through my senses and perception of it. There is no other way for me to have knowledge of it. The senses, my, eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue give me the sensory data, and my brain saves and processes this sensory data to let me know of its existence.

Suppose there was a person who was born without any senses (no eyes, ears, nose, skin or tongue) but with a brain. Would this person know anything of the reality? Now let us suppose there was another person who was born with all the senses but without a brain. Would this second person know anything of the reality as well?

3.
Yes, there is a physical reality. And in the reality there are objects which can know the world and objects which cannot know it. These objects have been called variously throughout history as animate/inanimate, sentient/non-sentient, etc. I prefer either observing/unobserving or perceptient/non-percpetient objects. I am perceptient. The rock outside my house is non-perceptient. There are a multitude of objects out there. They are either perceptient or non-perceptient. I can perceive the existence of perceptient and non-perceptient objects. Others can perceive them (and me as a perceptient object) as well. The rock has no such understanding of the reality. Note, this does not make me “better than” or “superior to” the rock, only that I am different from it, as far as objects are concerned. The non-perceptibility of the reality is the rock’s characteristic. The perceptibility of the reality is a characteristic of my being.

4.
Senses precede sensation, and sensation must precede perception. And perception limits and informs my understanding of the reality. I act and make decisions (inferences) in accordance to my understanding of the reality. Knowledge is the sum of perceptions, inferences and actions of a perceptient object. The rock outside my house cannot know the reality. It perceives nothing, makes no inferences and does not act volitionally.

5.
The physical reality is made up of objects, perceptient and non-perceptient. It includes space which separates the objects, and time in which objects interact within the space. The interaction is complex. To not look at this complexity is to ignore the reality, to ignore space, objects and time.

Generally, I do not like to make analogies but I will make one here because analogies make concepts easier to understand. Furthermore, the ability to make analogies is a characteristic particular to the perceptient object that I am – a human being.

Chess is a game with a physical reality and rules. In the physical space of eight-squares by eight-squares and thirty-two pieces (sixteen to each side) is the game played. There are five different pieces (king, queen, bishop, knight and rook) and the pawn (the pawn is not called a “piece” for some reason). each piece and pawn has its own particular characteristic. The objective of chess is to win the game by checkmating the opposition king. The minimum needed to play chess are 1) to have a chess set, 2) to have a playing partner, and 3) to know its rules. Yet, having these conditions do not make for an interesting and entertaining game. Knowing how to win – the strategies and tactics of the game – knowing how to interact meaningfully in the reality is what is needed.

Defining observing objects

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I am an observing object. I observe the objective reality. I observe that I observe, and I observe that I am observed.

Defining Objects

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There are numerous objects in the world. They are of two general types – observing and unobserving objects. I am an observing object. I interact with the space and objects as an object. I therefore mark time by interaction and by observing this time.

Defining The World

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The world is the objective reality, the collection of independently existing things – space, objects and time. Space is a special kind of object. Time is the interaction of space and objects.

Band-aid Philosophy

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It would be very wrong to think we are objective beings able to be absolutely impartial. No amount of trying will we ever reach complete objectivity. We view everything from the very bodies we inhabit never being able to leave it as much as we believe we can. Imagining that we do is of course possible but in reality that imagined objectivity is coloured by the entire experience of being who I am. To exactly know who or what I am is an impossible project. We must not exactly give up on this but to let the mystery be just that, an eternal mystery. Only then we will be content and be able to move on. To accept that we contain and never cease to perform value-judgements is the first step to move on to understanding ourselves, others and other things. We must always ask what are our values and how did we arrive at them. Only then can some of the problems of the world can be, like a band-aid to temporarily cover a wound, imperfectly solved. We can only hope for band-aids. We should celebrate the band-aids.

The Natural Animal

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Not too long ago we human species had still believed that by being able to think that we are greater than The Animal. By actually having the capacity to imagine a Human/Animal binary in itself had somehow made us mistakenly believe We greater than Them. Along the way, we have gradually come to realise we are but another animal and have also began to suspect that God may not exist at all.

All this is very well, of course. The Faithful find it incredulous that The Atheist believe they are crazy. But at the same time The Faithful will hold the exact same incredulous view of The Atheist. ‘Why would anyone want to believe they are godless animals’, The Faithful would ask.

I would go as far to say that not only are we Animal but that we are also Natural with full positive connotations. And I would also say that being able to imagine God, denounce Him, and to be able to hold on to a Us&Them viewpoint is completely natural. The Human Animal (or ‘Humanimal’) for being self-perceptivably so different to the other animals is really quite the improbability. Or perhaps eventually every life-system has its equivalent human species which goes through a patch of arrogance then humility to realise it is just another Natural Animal in exactly the same way we have.

Does not a belief in a flat earth imply that the planets are flat as well?

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I love looking at the moon. I love watching it slowly change from a full moon to a new moon. I love half and crescent moons also. But they are all the same moon in different light.

By observing the moon and watching it change I can confirm that it is indeed a sphere. By looking at the shadows I can point to the direction of the sun, and infer its location relative to us.

But why should the moon be spherical? The more we look out there the more we realise that the other planets are spherical as well. So maybe the planet we live on is as well.

That thought probably prompted man to sail away from the coasts and literally venture out into open waters. The evidence increasingly pointed to the world as being round, or at least not being flat.

This also prompted us to think about how and why things do not fall off a round-edged world into whatever is beyond the horizon. Perhaps everything is falling into the centre – gravity. Eureka! All problems solved.

The fact is we have observed, with our own eyes, the planets and planetary satellites out there, and they are not flat but round. Things don’t fall off the planets because they are round. And the Earth is not special. It is not flat. And we, human beings, are not special. The world neither figuratively nor literally revolve around us, just as the Sun does not revolve around the Earth. It is only ignorance and arrogance that makes us think the planet and us are special. And sometimes people are kept ignorant for reasons of maintaining this power and control over them. This is not unlike the flat-earthers’ narrative that the Sun revolves around the flat Earth, all the while telling you that you are their Sun.

The Book of Warren (The Unauthorised Revised Version)

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In the beginning was a “big bang”. No one is sure how it happened but it happened about 14 billion years ago (in Earth time, that is). All the material in the universe came from this event. The material in the form of dust slowly gathered to form galaxies, suns, planets and satellites through attraction. The planet we call Earth was formed about 4 billion years ago, a little after the formation of the Sun, the star which gives us the energy for our survival, around which we revolve. Life on Earth began around 1 billion years ago in the form of simple cells. Our species – Homo – is perhaps one to two million years old. Civilisation in the form of societies and writing came about perhaps 20,000 years ago. Recognisable society is perhaps 7,000 years old. We know these things because we are smart.

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