Philosophy, or er…
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference
Richard Dawkins
It is the theory which decides what we can observe
Albert Einstein
We see only what we know
Goethe
You and I do not see things as they are. We see things as we are
Herb Cohen, presidential advisor
After much pondering, a penny dropped and revealed to me the blindingly obvious fact that Philosophy is a matter of.. opinion. And for me, what was the point of ‘opinion’?
What I needed was facts. My question was ‘What is true and what is not?’, and not ‘What does somebody else think is true and what is not?’
Down the centuries, people of alarmingly high intellect have spent their lives trying to find the answer to the appalling question of ‘What is the point of my life?’ but without any real hope of finding The Answer, because deep down many of them didn’t believe there could be an answer. Others gave up hope of Understanding, and fell back on Faith/Belief.
This condition still obtains, and even more so in these ‘post-religious’ days. Relativism rules, or rather ‘no-rules’. It’s a free-for-all. Have you tried reading a modern philosopher, especially a French one?
§ ‘Hegel had said that difference is contradictory in itself. But the question now is to pave the way for a non-contradictory, non-dialectical consideration of difference, which would not envisage it as the simple contradiction of identity, nor be obliged to see itself as ‘dialectically’ identical with identity.’ Vincent Descombes, ‘Modern French Philosophy’, CUP 1980
These thinkers all seem to be Materialists, and their works seem to be packed with paradoxes: in fact, it seems that you’re not much of a philosopher these days unless you can produce an endless stream of paradoxes. And ‘paradox means ‘non-sense’.
No doubt many people have considered that the methods of philosophy might somehow be faulty. But what is the alternative? Religion provides only Belief as an ‘explanation’, and Science is concerned more with the ‘how’ of things than the ‘why’. So Philosophy/Opinion plods on, despite failure to persuade, and not a little nonsense.
Of course, I mean no disrespect to the philosophers themselves who have taken on the task of trying to figure out the Universe. But trying to apply small human intellect to the unspeakably huge questions of the Universe really is unlikely to be successful. To start with, we have the problem of the definition of terms. How do we define ‘a window’, let alone ‘Mind’? Or ‘natural’? A philosopher needs to be precise in his definitions, and I can’t see it being done for any of the concepts that a philosopher might wish to discuss. If ‘Life’ cannot be defined how can one apply logic to anything concerning it?
And it’s no help to dress up your terms in abstract symbology, as the symbols mean no more than the terms they represent: ie, a quality or expression which has already been sort-of-defined in words. One might even wonder whether words can ever be competent to describe or define anything, let alone the apparently ineffable. Might the ineffable ever be effed by words alone?
§ It is something of a miracle that anybody ever communicates anything to anybody, once you consider the slippery nature of words. In fact, the words of a conversation act mainly as carriers for the other qualities that really matter to us: intonation and body language: the vectors of shade/degree and emotion.
Writing is different, but it is astonishing to me how often people can misread, misinterpret, ignore, or misquote something I’ve written that seems to me to be perfectly clear and obvious. It is extraordinarily difficult to write a sentence that you can be certain will mean precisely the same thing to all people.
Once he has hammered out some sort of definitions for the terms he is going to use (apart from ‘Life’ and scores of other ultra-important concepts like ‘Reality’, ‘Consciousness’, etc) the philosopher next has to define his premisses, meaning he has to make clear what he is going to take as granted, or as self-evident truths. Until the nineteenth century, virtually all philosophers took ‘God’ for granted; since then they have mainly taken ‘no-God’ as a Truth. Can either of them prove the truth of these premisses (either that ‘God exists’ or ‘God does not exist’)? I think we would have all heard about it by now if they had, and would need no more philosophers.
In fact, every premiss that I can think of (bar one: ‘the validity and value of logic’) for a philosopher is really no more than an assumption. And what use are assumptions when seeking clarity?
I came to realise that we have grown so used to the specialisation of trades, including the ‘trades’ of knowledge-compiling and information-sifting, that we think our self-appointed specialists in wisdom, (‘The Philosophers’), must be the ones who can answer our existential dilemmas for us, and we have thus handed over our personal seeking to the professionals. Surely they can put us right if anyone can?
But a few moments’ reflection shows that, largely because of the problems of definitions and premisses outlined above, it is obvious that so far at least they can do nothing of the sort, as they all disagree with each other. Therefore one of the following must apply:
* They are all wrong, or
* One or more of them is/are partially right, or
* Only one of them is right, and all the others haven’t noticed.
This is a rather harsh summary, I know, but it’s pretty accurate, wouldn’t you say? If Philosophy had ‘worked’, none of us would be in any doubt by now about the nature of Reality, and what’s more, we wouldn’t need any further philosophers, French or otherwise, to further baffle us.
Will philosophers ever solve The Problem of ‘What is the point of it all?’? I see no reason why they should. Words…..
Religion is not much concerned with logic, which is why so many of us find it baffling. Philosophy and science are very concerned with it, however. A philosopher hopes to persuade by the logic of his arguments, and quite right too. There is no other sort of ‘argument’ than a logical one, except for a brawl which never persuaded anyone of the correctness of any view. But the poor philosopher is hornswoggled by the problems of definition and proof, especially proof of premiss. What can we all accept as an absolute Truth? Anything?
Science is based upon the principle of Cause and Effect, reason, and logic. It is thus a tragedy that it should have got ensnared in the dogmatic unreason of Materialism.
So now what? How could I make progress in my hunt for an understanding between science and the paranormal? It would seem that all three modes of investigation could not or would not operate according to the rules of logic, the one tool I felt I could trust. But a Universe full of exquisite order and pattern could not possibly be ultimately random and thus irrational, and thus mad, as the Materialists claimed.
***
I was stuck. All I could do was to keep reading and thinking and see what turned up. Just to be sure I wasn’t going to be missing anything, I thought I’d make a list of the Terms and Conditions I would need to operate under, so that I didn’t fall prey to any dogma or prejudice. I ended up with this:
- Reason and logic must apply at all times.
- Any ‘law’, if applied at all, must be applied universally.
- No paradox is ever acceptable as ‘explanation’.
- Every premiss must be tested for evidence and internal logic.
- No dogma of any kind is acceptable.
- All ‘evidence’ is to be tested; none is to be rejected a priori.
- Until proved to be wrong, all ‘evidence’ is to be kept on hold.
I called these rules my ‘Seven Principles of Investigative Thought’, which sounded rather over-grand, so I abbreviated it to ‘SPIT’. Of course, any scientist will recognise these principles as the ones he works by. But I’m afraid not every scientist does so when confronted with anomalies. The history of science proves this over and over again**.
If we consider the problems I find with Materialist-Science in terms of the seven requirements of SPIT, we get (by number):
- Logic and Materialism are incompatible, as Materialism requires something from nothing time and again (See Chapter 5).
- The law of Cause leading to Effect is violated by Materialism as it suggests no Cause for Life, Mind, etc. It assumes spontaneous self-creation.
- Materialism is paradoxical in that it requires Matter to be both biotic and abiotic at the same time.
- Materialism is based upon the unproved and irrational premiss that Matter lies at the root of everything else in the Universe.
- Materialism has become a dogma, and is thus unacceptable.
- Materialism automatically rejects all evidence for Anomalies.
- As 6.
Maybe it was time to look to history to see how science had come to lumber itself with a foolish straitjacketing dogma?
A Brief History of Materialism
Part One: A Body Blow
It is only the very wisest and the very stupidest who never change
Confucius
We tend to think of Materialism as being a recent hypothesis, but it is as old as the Greeks, and probably much older. There must have been more than one Palaeolithic hero who found himself, one freezing evening, huddled round a fire that wouldn’t catch properly, soaked through and shivering, thinking ‘Blow this for a game of hunter-gatherers. I mean what’s the bloody point?’
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