Understanding Understanding
Now to slop into scattered notes on the full fundamental verosophical understanding of existence I’ve made many attempts to bring to some kind of coherent unified conclusion without success. I doubt if I’ll say anything I haven’t already said but hope to refine my way to better expression of my main points.
Because something an unnamed close friend of mine whose view of it is maximally opposed to mine about the similarity of my thinking to the thinking of Christian fundamentalists, I can’t restrain myself from boasting/confessing here that—because, unlike him, my way of attacking Important Questions has never been to consult a guru or run to the nearest library, or the equivalent, but to consult my own brain. Hence, the extent of loops and snarls you’re likely to find in these notes. But also, I hope, the rarely-encountered genuine insights—one or two of them perhaps even original.
The one thing holding me back would only be a problem for me: the lack of a proper term for my subject. I believe my tendency to want to begin any answer to a significant question from as far underneath it as I can may be responsible for this: i.e., I want to use taxonomy on it, which means naming categories commencing with the one at the top (for which there is, I’m sure, a good term in standard use that I can’t remember[1]). “Weltanschauung” comes closest, but I’d prefer something going back to Greece. “Ultriknowleplex?” No, because that would be an understanding of everything, and what I’m concerned with here is only an understanding of . . . understanding. “Ultrepistemology?” Maybe. (Wikipedia says it is.)
Now to work, I hope. No understanding of anything significant can avoid dogmas, or unprovable axioms like those of Euclidean Geometry. A successfully worked out ultepistemology certainly must. One can only try to make them as few as possible, as easy to understand, and as commonsensical as Euclid’s. I’m not sure I can get all that are needed for mine, but the most important one is that existence consists of nothing other than: matter and mind. (Or, for most not-too-bright scientists[2], mindless-matter and matter-that-has-somehow-unexplainedly-become-mind.)
Second dogma: that a human being has no way of gaining knowledge and building understandings out of them than by perceptually sensing matter.
My ultrepistemology also has what I term “temporary dogma.” These are facets of the human brain that I hypothesize that cannot yet be proven but whose existence is falsifiable. Among them are innate cerebral mechanisms for application of scientific reasoning to the interpretation of perceptual data that leads to understandings. Even more central to my theory is my so-far dogmatic assumption as to how the human brain records perceptual data. That it does have some record-making faculty has been sufficiently shown not to be considered dogmatically-accepted.
Perhaps my ultrepistemology’s final dogma is the belief that everything knowable can be linguistically expressed sufficiently (and I consider linguistics to cover all symbolic languages such as mathematics, although I think words would be enough, although too unwieldy for it too make sense to employ) for anyone sane to accept it as what I call “maxolutely true,” albeit never absolutely true. To all intents and purposes, then, my theory is absolutist.
The first of my scatter of notes is that while we may not be able to determine some sub-atomic particle’s mass and velocity both, with absolute precision, we can determine both with enough precision for all important purposes. For instance, we may not know what some electron is in relation to the nucleus of the atom it orbits, but we know where it is to the nearest foot, and who cares how far off we are?
I claim that all the paradoxes relativists gleefully bring up to support the value of the intellectual irresponsibility that their meagre mental gifts condemn them to result from the inability of anyone to devise a language that won’t lead to them. Example: pure logic shows that two parallel lines with both never meet and eventually meet; common sense is against the second outcome, though—and no one can empirically demonstrate two parallel lines meeting anywhere in the universe. (They will meet on the two-dimensional surface of a sphere, but the universe contains no two-dimensional spheres; such entities are imaginary only.)
First meaningful note: there are two kinds of realities: personally-valid realities and collectively-valid realities. Both are entirely based on sensually-perceived encounters with matter; they differ (when they differ) in how they interpret a given datum or data-complex. They can be recognized as follows: a collectively-valid reality is one that can be communicated. A given tree, for example, can be shown to be collectively-valid by one person’s bringing a randomly-selected second person to it and declaring it a tree with the second person’s agreement that it is.
It’s a complicated process, but the use of rationality based entirely on sensually-perceived data, can be used to reject the disagreement of a nut as to the existence of the tree—by showing that he is under the influence of drugs, or has some cerebral dysfunction, etc . If he says the tree is actually a witch, he will have stated a personally-valid fact. But such facts are of no verosophical value. The search for verosophical truths is the search for communicable truths only—as all collectively-valid truths are.
As for those in touch with Jesus, or the equivalent, the Jesus they are in touch with will always turn out not to be something transcendentally immaterial, but based on a misinterpretation of some datum or set of data. What happens in the Jesus-case is that the word Jesus, which is material, combines with some sensually-perceived data complex that is then misinterpreted as a real being. How the link to the data-complex came to be made will have been quite complex.
Phooey, I’ve lost it. I must give up trying to make sense and go into my blither-of-notes mode.
First of all, I have to bring in my concept of the urceptual other. Any human being a person sees will tend to be experienced as an urceptual other or representative of everyman (and representing women, too, the way a chess piece is a man even when it represents a queen). To put it in ridiculously simple but valid terms, the word Jesus can be made to stick to one’s urceptual other, through religious indoctrination but much else beyond the scope of these notes. So the person’s Jesus is, for him, materially real.
But he can’t bring another randomly-selected person into his yard and introduce him to Jesus the way he could introduce him to a tree in his yard. In other words, you can test every reality a scientist specializing in collectively-valid reality a scientist claims exists, but you can’t test the claims of a champion of some mystic’s personally-valid reality. It won’t be falsifiable.
I’m quitting here. I thought I had a better grasp of this. I should have by now. I’ll keep trying, though. All I’m saying is that subjectivity is only by chance not worthless. Objectivity is always superior to it. And worth pursuing even if it never finds the absolutely-valid answers halfwits think it ought to in order for it to deserve even minimal respect.
* * *
[1] “kingdom” As I contradicted myself about dependence on libraries by going to Wikipedia to find out.
]2] “Not-too-bright” because they think their way of describing matter and mind is a form of monism (and is not irrelevant).[3]
[3] I find giving my ideas enemies I can be angry with boosts my energy and improves my writing. Be that as it may, I do seem frequently to need to release the anger my lack of recognition as culturally of any value keeps ever-burning in me.
.