Prologue.
The first (law) was never to accept anything as true if I did not clearly know it to be so; that is, carefully to avoid precipitate conclusions and preconceptions, and to include nothing more in my judgement than was presented clearly and distinctly to my mind so that I had no reason to doubt it.
(René Descartes 1596-1650) Discourse on Method Part 1
Descartes was the first original philosopher to emerge in Europe since the time of Aristotle. The first of his four laws of logic, quoted above and suitably paraphrased, formed the basis of my early training as an engineer. Whereas Descartes was a rationalist, who sought to lead his mind from subjective certainty to objective science by thought alone, the approach of the engineering tutors was essentially rational empiricism. That is to say that they would seek to ensure that their students took nothing on trust, rather that they reached conclusions based on careful observation and measurement. I feel sure that, in a technological age, the tutors would say that their approach was essentially sensible and practical.
After five years of fairly intensive training it is not surprising that the techniques I learned have remained with me, largely unaltered, throughout my life and have formed the basis of my approach to the solving of problems of almost all kinds. Those problems which presented most difficulty and which resisted the rational empiricist approach were associated with what have been termed the ‘Big Questions’ about life that beset our minds from time to time. Such issues are primarily metaphysical in nature, for example, the nature of self, the nature of God, the issues of being and knowing and reality about which it is difficult to make much linguistic sense. This is because, in dealing with factors outside our experience, there is a dilemma in expressing certain ideas except in terms of a sufficiently comprehensive language and within an appropriate reference framework. Immanuel Kant summed up the problem very neatly in his Critique of Pure Reason when he said that because ‘things in themselves’, the noumena, lay outside our normal perceptions, they were unknowable. Bertrand Russell effectively concurs when, in his discourse on the ‘Problems of Philosophy’, he says : “We must attach some meaning to the words we use, if we are to speak significantly and not utter mere noise; and the meaning we attach to our words must be something with which we are acquainted”. Fortunately, perhaps, considerations of “the Big Questions” are not exclusively the preserve of philosophers and other specialists. At some time in our lives most of us will give some thought to these matters because they are fundamental to our culture and to the way in which we view the world.
As a young man I did not spend a great deal of time speculating on the question “Who am I?” because I believed then that I knew who I was and the question was therefore irrelevant! Such is the confidence of youth, living exuberantly each day and planning for the future based on the anticipated certainty of continued existence. Now, as I approach the twilight of my life, I am not so sure about these matters any more. I am aware of my capability of thought, of the factors that have played some part in shaping my character and I am conscious of my experience of the world about me. This latter perception provides a sense-data reality which is applicable to me and, although I have no way of knowing with certainty whether this reality is identical when seen through different human eyes, I am aware through linguistic communication that my reality is shared, at least in part, by other people. Whilst I live within my personal world of perceived reality science tells me that many aspects of it are far removed from the truth. In other words, and by definition, they are not actually real. For example I am told that the table at which I am working, whilst it feels substantial, is, in fact, largely space and the solid feel to it is brought about by the wave motion of the particles of which it is comprised. Indeed, at the quantum level wave motion and particulate existence are interchangeable because a quantum object can sometimes behave like a wave and, at other times, like a particle depending on circumstances. In the quantum realm therefore wave/particle duality ensures that certainty is abandoned in favour of probability. Since this occurs within our-selves, as in the outside world, there is inevitably an effect that may serve to modify our thinking in some way and perhaps even influence our sense of identity.
There is a general tendency amongst human kind to consider themselves, as a race and sometimes individually, as somehow special and removed from the so-called reality they inhabit. The fact of the matter is that at a fundamental level we are part of the world we inhabit and of the cosmos that gave birth to that world. The iron in the haemoglobin of our blood owes its existence to some unimaginable stellar furnace of aeons past. Indeed we can trace back our ancestry still further to the hydrogen atom, the most prolific in the universe, which gave birth to the stars which, in turn produced every other heavy element known to us and perhaps to a few that we do not yet know. Our bodies are comprised of trillions of atoms identical in form to the same atoms which exist in nature and the individual particles/waves of which exhibit the same unpredictable behaviour as other quanta elsewhere in the universe. It could not be otherwise because one cannot envisage by any procedure of logical deduction a scenario in which there are two independent acts of creation, one for the the universe and another for living species which inhabit it. All matter and all living things owe existence to one stupendous act of creation which, we are told, began fifteen billion years ago with the Big Bang and which has been continuing and evolving ever since. But whether the universe started with a Big Bang, or whether it exists in a steady state, continuously evolving matter in infinite space, it represents a visible, substantive physical reality of which I am an insignificantly tiny part. I do not have to be able to measure this to be aware of the truth of the statement because I know it to be true with a primitive certainty. And this function of knowing provides some substance in answer to the question “Who am I? ”.
If all matter, including what we describe as living matter, is comprised of the same star stuff there are two characteristics which differentiate groups of matter one from another. Firstly, the degree of ability by which they are able to apprehend the universe around them, if at all. Secondly, the depth of the relationships which they are able to form with other groups. Both these characteristics have a link to consciousness and, apropos human kind, consciousness is superficially defined as that part of the mind that is aware of self, the environment and of mental activity. It is also the means by which we build our own personal reality from the vast array of sensory stimuli presented to us. Or a number of realities. Robert Ornstein says that we are all part of several “realities” at once; they may be individual, familial, social, political, financial and others. 1 Consciousness must also play a significant part in the function of knowing so if one is to investigate knowing, the key to understanding, one must also examine the state of consciousness, the key to identity.
The difficulty with any individual enterprise geared to the consideration of the universe and one’s place in it is that the act of observation by an observer who is part of the universe could be construed, in one sense, as the universe observing itself. Thus the conclusions reached could be considered suspect from a number of points of view, not least the philosophical. This reservation would no doubt have been approved by Francisco Sanches, the Portuguese philosopher, in his work Quod Nihil Scitur, (Why nothing can be known), published in 1581. Descartes too is likely to have approved the reservation even although he was able to set his rationalism aside temporarily in order to write a proof of the existence of God using arguments first propounded by Anselm and Thomas Aquinas four hundred years earlier. Oddly enough this sally into the metaphysical, designed to make the church comfortable with his philosophy, backfired and he was likened to Vanini (burned at the stake in 1619) and accused of heresy for propounding, despite his antecedent exemplars, weak and ineffectual proofs for God’s existence. In attempting to separate himself from his foundation beliefs, the better to discompose bias against them, Descartes was unsuccessfully emulating the example set by Copernicus in 1543. Quite apart from the adverse effect on his subsequent career it must have disturbed him greatly to realise that he had published something which appeared to be so much at odds with his basic philosophy of doubt.
Separating oneself from a long held opinion is clearly not something to be done lightly unless it can be shown that there are grounds for believing that the opinion might be false. Since it is equally clear that we cannot separate ourselves from our environment the rationale for a personal odyssey into knowing and understanding must take account of the effect that our connection with the environment has upon our thinking. Quite how this will be done remains to be seen. Basic beliefs need to be re-examined in the light of experience and the emphasis placed on a fresh start. Further words of Descartes identify the protocol for my odyssey more succinctly and poetically than I ever could.
It is some time since I first realised how many false opinions I accepted as true from my childhood, and how doubtful was the entire structure of thought which I had built upon them. I therefore understood that I must, if I wanted to establish anything at all.....that was firm and liable to last, once and for all rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and start again from an entirely new foundation.
( Meditations, I )
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Bibliography ... Prologue
1 The Psychology of Consciousness: Robert Ornstein; Penguin Books Ltd (2nd edition) 1986
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