Solidly Material
It was important to talk about my epistemology first because that sets the skeptical tone of my whole philosophy up to this point, but when I’m actually doing philosophy, everything comes back to metaphysics. It’s the foundation off of which I build all my ideas.
I think about reality in three different ways: the noumenal, the phenomenal, and the conventional. The first two, of course, come from Kant, and I basically define them the same way he does. Noumenal reality is how things in themselves really are, independent of our experience of them, and as I said in my epistemology post I’m not sure we can ever know if we’ve figured out what noumenal reality is like. I think it exists, which is why I include it as a kind of reality, but since I can’t make any definite claims about it I will leave it at that.
Phenomenal reality is more interesting. This is reality as we understand it, as close as we can come to the noumenal with the tools we have. All phenomenal claims have to be taken with a grain of salt because they might not be noumenal and are therefore subject to change, but that’s okay. It makes the quest interesting.
The final type of reality is not Kantian. I’ve decided to call it conventional because of a different sort of reality split made by Buddhist metaphysicians: conventional vs. ultimate. In Buddhism, ultimate reality is unchanging, indivisible, does not depend on anything else for its nature, and we can know it. It also technically doesn’t exist. This is the doctrine of emptiness, emphasized by Mahayana Buddhism. Conventional reality, on the other hand, is what we experience in everyday life. It is holistic rather than reductionistic, and the fact that it doesn’t actually exist, at an ultimate level, doesn’t make a difference to us in how we live our lives.
I took conventional reality as something separate from phenomenal reality because experience is so central to my philosophy. I think it’s important to acknowledge that in everyday life we don’t typically think much about metaphysics (unless you’re me) and we don’t need to. There is a lot of metaphor in conventional reality, along with what Buddhists call convenient fictions, which are things that don’t truly exist but that make it easier to communicate and get around in the world. Some examples of this for me are holism, mind/body dualism, fate, and the self.
Yes, indeed, I don’t believe that the self exists. Many people recoil against the idea that there is no self, thinking that it would invalidate their entire lives or that the existence of the self is obvious. Why even question it, especially if I’m basing everything on experience?
In fact, experience is what makes me question the self. What I’m talking about here is an essential kind of self, something definite that I could draw a line around, separating Me from You and everything else. I can’t figure out what this would be. It’s not my body, because if I lost parts of my body I would still be me. It’s not my personality, because my personality has changed throughout my life and I’m still me. It’s not my memory, because people who lose their memory through amnesia or Alzheimer’s are still themselves. It’s not my consciousness, because when I’m in a dreamless sleep or I’ve passed out, I’m still me. In the end, I think that it’s an aggregate of things, and as long as there are enough of these things present — body, personality, memory, history, consciousness, emotions, perceptions, other people’s impressions of you, etc. — then the self exists conventionally. A conventional self is good enough for me.
As for my ideas about phenomenal reality, they began as a reaction against Catholic doctrine. I’ve always been empirically-minded, which didn’t bode well for my religion. Some people claim to have had religious experiences, such as seeing Jesus standing at the altar in my hometown church or feeling some kind of otherworldly presence, but no matter how much I desired to have such experiences, I never did. My experience has always been very much of this world. Therefore I believe that the world is real, that it is wholly material, and that it is a lot more impressive than any kind of spiritual or supernatural world would be.
Speaking more philosophically, I react against a Platonic view of metaphysics. The idea that this world is a shadow of a better or more real reality bothers me, whether it’s heaven or the forms; it devalues what we have, and I can’t find evidence for it. One thing I like about Plato is that he acknowledges the reality of ideas, but I don’t think that ideas are anything extra-real or absolute. They exist between thinking beings, not on their own, so they have an abstract sort of reality that is still rooted in and dependent on the material.
Such materialism seems to lead to a deterministic worldview, and for a while I was a hard determinist, but I’ve decided that this isn’t necessary. Some things about my experience feel random and quantum indeterminacy supports that idea. I’ve decided that there are causes operating in the world with various strengths, and there are so many competing with each other that sometimes chance decides which one will manifest in an effect. There are also some beings that have such developed awareness that they notice causes and can influence things to create an effect. I consider these beings to be free, and I’ll talk about that some more in my post about ethics.
All the kinds of absolutism I reject seems to comfort people, but they just bother me. What’s so great about having an essential self? All the work is done for you. There’s no becoming. It’s much more fun to be your own creator. And what’s so impressive about this imperfect world being created by an absolutely powerful, absolutely intelligent being? Surely such a being could have done better. But a world like this created by chance, indifferent chance, molding mere material? That is impressive. It might not have even existed had some other cause won out in the distant past, yet here we are. That is something to celebrate.
No Comments »
Filed under: Assign 4-1 Metaphysics tagged atheism, Buddhism, Catholicism, determinism, Kant, materialism, metaphysics, Plato, self