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For all it is often said that there is no arguing with facts, who if anyone has really examined this idea? In general, the view seems to rely on a presumption that is actually quite shaky: the idea that facts flawlessly represent bits or aspects of reality.
Even basic facts such as the Sun is hot can be analyzed to demonstrate logical imperfection. For example, sometimes the concept of the Sun is astronomically considered to extend to the edge of our solar system such that very cold regions are included – hot and cold being only relative terms in any case, and the Sun itself being actually cold relative to certain cosmological bodies.
These issues essentially concern how the mind frames its thoughts and ideas as facts. In doing so, the mind is not dealing directly with external reality, or what we might consider actual temperatures in this instance. In relation to what it considers to be reality, the mind’s description of that reality as facts is simplistic, of only relative relevance, and potentially misleading. Even if the mind thinks about the actual temperature of the Sun, it faces a new problem: which part of the Sun is it to consider? And on top of the fact that what is commonly thought of as the Sun allows no direct temperature measurements in any case, there is also the issue that temperature measurement is simply another comparative system of human invention – reality displaying no inherent system of measurement.
In terms of a truly generalized theory of relativity, the Sun becomes whatever one includes within the concept the Sun, and it can be considered either hot or cold, given these are only comparative or relative terms. But even if we move to more exacting ideas such as the specific temperature of a specific part of the Sun, we thereby reduce the scope and relevance of whatever information might be delivered. Hence, increasing the specificity of the information only decreases the legitimacy with which it can be generalized to describe the Sun as the term is commonly used. By next adding in the variable of time with its ongoing temperature changes, it becomes obvious that even by the most conventionally objective views of reality, the temperature of the Sun can never be anything other than a wild generalization. That such a generalization is inevitable within any attempt to constructively answer a question regarding the Sun’s temperature is perhaps the only thing in all this that can be called a reliable fact.
Although we cannot seriously question reality itself without risk of being branded insane, we can indeed legitimately question the conceptualization and linguistic encoding of it as facts. Given that any fact is merely a description of reality somewhat removed from whichever part of reality it describes, it is arguably foolish to do any philosophy that fails to question the entire paradigm of factual information.
In terms of trying to authentically represent reality, integrity problems result from the related encoding processes, given that the abstraction of reality into concepts and ideas is susceptible to both accidental and deliberate distortion – not to mention crass simplification. For example, the sky is blue is a stark statement that the sky is in an arguably impossible state given the planet’s atmosphere is highly transparent. Furthermore, such a statement can be misleading even in everyday terms if applied to situations in which a few clouds exist.
Because both the sky and its supposed blueness are hugely generalized concepts in relation to the complex physical reality they seek to encompass, the factual statement’s simplicity becomes a philosophical travesty in terms of authentically informing us about reality. The reason we are nonetheless happy with such statements is that, far from forming unquestionable facts that no one could argue with, they rather humbly convey loose casually-formed thoughts that are at least useful when, in this instance, we want to communicate that the sky is not overcast.
But the problems with factual information are more than just the problems of abstract thought seeking to accurately frame the endless complexity of our surrounding world. That world is also one in which everyone from the scientist to the salesman has identifiable motives for promoting linguistically framed facts that are often more or less remote from reality, if not intentionally twisted or even based on lies. Even the definitions of concepts that compose supposedly factual information are inherently woolly. Consider the fact – as many would see it – that technology is good. Without bothering to pick over possibly tricky issues defining the concept of technology, the concept of good alone is obviously wide-open to different interpretations – leaving the entire statement a poor candidate for any pretensions of being factual.
Knowing language to be a model incapable of exactly describing reality, should facts not be regarded as nothing more than merely useful at best? The statement that technology is good simply cannot be unequivocally verified as either true or false in any meaningful sense – its loose terminology reducing it to a mere comment on a par with stating that one’s preferred football club is the best.
Minds can nonetheless grab hold of such ideas and argue vehemently as if some great truth was to be revealed by sorting out whether, in this particular example, technology really is good or not. The tacit underlying presumption of all attitudes concerning such ideas seems to be that reality has certain absolute and true qualities, and that argumentation only exists because those qualities remain poorly recognized by whoever contradicts one’s own position. Hence, such arguments are typically framed by intellectually vulgar assumptions that one of two positions must be correct, with the other being therefore incorrect.
Such stubborn binary thinking can prohibit any recognition that social competition often lurks behind such crudely polarized positions. The desire to convince others of one’s own ideas easily inhibits any awareness that simplistic and linguistically expressed tales of reality will never grasp the unbounded complexity of the real world. As a result, throwing in a phrase such as It’s a fact is not unusual: an apparent appeal to some idea that human knowledge has achieved forms of absolute certainty that actually appear philosophically impossible.
Also revealed within such arguments is that disputed facts tend to concern highly abstract, obscure and ideological subjects, as opposed to directly perceived experiences and observations. Naked reality before our eyes is never confusing and is inherently hard to refute. Hence, impossible as exactitude may be, we generally do not argue about the sky being blue, the Sun being hot, or water being wet. It is other ideas more disconnected from experience and sensory perception that engender our real misunderstandings. Notably, our many seemingly interminable debates about less tangible issues possibly reveal far more about ourselves and our confused thinking, than they do about anything else.
As there is no end to the number of facts that can be produced by the interplay of the mind and human experience, facts can be found that appear to support just about any conceivable idea. Furthermore, since so much factual information rests on comparative forms of thinking, two or more logically opposing facts can easily be seen as equally relevant or even correct. For example, the weather on any given day is both good and bad depending on whether you talk to an exterior painter or a farmer who wants rain.
Meanwhile, today’s mountains of highly-disconnected information make it easier than ever to cherry-pick facts supporting any and all sides of a given argument – a situation in which different sets of facts can cobble together competing and apparently incompatible supposed factual realities. But multiple real-world simultaneous realities notwithstanding, such fact-wars only render many of their combatants rather foolish for adopting the absolutist approaches that fuel such conflicts. Nonetheless, for minds oblivious to any greater overview of all this, a veneer formed of supposed factual proof offers the convenience of easily making the case for just about anything. Notably, the world of political campaigning consists of grown adults enthusiastically engineering such purposefully biased re-framing of reality: the assembly of more or less dubious facts to create even more dubious arguments.
Identity issues
It is arguable that the only indisputable facts exist within mathematics – for example, in an equation such as 3 + 4 = 7. However, even this can be disputed inasmuch as what appears either side of the equal sign is strictly speaking not the same from a philosophical perspective – the addition of two figures being something different from stating their total as a single figure. In truth, the two sides of the equation are rather obviously not equal or the same, and this becomes obvious from even a simple inspection of their graphical representation. Furthermore, to the extent that the equation might be accepted as being factually correct, it amounts to a circular argument that a total count of 7 remains a count of 7, however we envisage it. Should we really expect anything else? The equals sign therefore only reflects a convention that the process or concept of adding two numbers be equated with their total. Nonetheless, even within a concept of pure abstraction in which no words or graphics are used to represent mathematical values, envisioning 3 + 4 is surely not the same as envisioning 7? Even thinking through two instances of what we might think of as exactly the same thing involves separate instances of cognitive activity at different times.
As is the case with seemingly identical electrons, the mere idea of two discrete things – such as the two sides of an equation – logically necessitates the identification of one or more distinguishing features in order that such things can be conceptually differentiated as not actually one and the same thing. Without this being the case, not only mathematics, but most human abstraction would be impossible. Nothing would be conceptually distinguishable from the rest of reality. This can be approximated by reasoning for example that, although 3 + 4 = 3 + 4 is mathematically pointless, we can still distinguish two different sides to such an equation. A more tangible example might be stating that the sky is the sky: a statement ironically hard to argue with because, of itself, it informs us of nothing, and so there is nothing to argue over. So, although some sort of incontrovertible logic can be seen within such statements, there is no substance beyond that logic. Using the concept sky in such a context does not even provide a clue as to what that concept refers to. Philosophically, it would seem that, however useful it may appear, the mathematical device known as the equation ultimately lies somewhere between a pointlessly circular form of thought, and a logical absurdity for equating two things that logic itself determines must be different in at least one identifiable respect. Absolutely equal instances of anything would logically be impossible to distinguish from one another.
Other weaknesses exist as regards more worldly knowledge. Once we leave the heady abstraction of mathematics and relate thought to the world as experienced – the only world commonly agreed to exist – the supposed entities from which facts are built become subject to the muddiness of flexible definitions and changing perspectives. Hence, even the world of physics with its laws of the universe and theories about that universe’s origins can be seen as just more tales of reality that require occasional rewriting – yesterday’s facts being reframed as previous misunderstandings when they no longer fit whatever ideas and observations create supposedly better facts.
Removing any lingering doubts regarding the mind’s willingness to embrace factual knowledge without properly questioning what such knowledge represents, many everyday ideas illustrate our extensive ability to believe in contradictory tales of reality. For example, most people seem to consider it a fact that they act from a position of free will, at the same time as they more or less accept factual science and its basically deterministic view of the universe in which free will plays no part. Short of cranky metaphysical perspectives on how reality works, these two positions are obviously incompatible – but nonetheless coalescing in billions of human minds.
Perhaps nothing as clearly exemplifies the fundamental knots created by abstract thought as this and other traditional dilemmas of philosophy – free will-versus-determinism being just one. As regards how people develop, the nature-nurture debate concerning the different roles played by genetics and social upbringing provides another example, whilst the mind-versus-body dilemma seeks to delimit the roles played by those two entities in relation to many phenomena. In a situation where these dilemmas can feel somehow related, the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity can appear similarly awkward – many human phenomena appearing partly objective and partly subjective in manners hard to disentangle.
At their most basic, all such conundrums are obviously posited in terms of distinctions between one supposed thing and another. Hence, and with dramatic ease, they disappear – as opposed to being resolved – in the absence of those distinctions. Logically, the core problem has nothing to do with reality out there, but everything to do with flawed human attempts to understand it. All these long-standing philosophical dilemmas resolve to nothing more than artifacts of the human mind’s abstract approach to modeling reality; their real resolution therefore being found in transcending that approach.
More explicitly, we can state that the problem of trying to, for example, distinguish the role of the mind from the role of the body, stems from an unwitting and unwarranted presumption that the two are properly separate. Notably, without such a distinction, the problem cannot even be formulated.
Of course, one reflexive response to this position might be that much as this logic is sound, we cannot just pretend that mind and body are one and the same thing on the basis that this resolves a long-standing philosophical dilemma. But the error here is to assume that the only alternative to distinguishing two things is to conflate them.
On the basis that abstract cognition is a goal-based activity, it seems natural that separate concepts such as mind and body would evolve to fulfill different communicative functions within a situation that nonetheless cannot be fully understood by imagining them to be either the same thing or two different things – all because no such properly discrete things exist anywhere in the manner abstract thought readily imagines. It should be remembered that the distinction between such concepts is hatched and embraced essentially at the cognitive level and is therefore ultimately just an invention of the human mind. Mentally distinguishing body from mind is obviously useful in many situations, but in assuming such convenience to reflect some true division within reality, we arguably take the mind’s inventiveness too unquestioningly. This is an inherent issue of abstract thought itself: the intellectual enthusiasm with which it has been embraced by humans creates the potential to overlook the limitations of the modeling processes on which it relies. And the evidence of this permeates all areas of human culture as umpteen seemingly intractable disagreements and controversies over what are in fact, mere ideas.
Like other key aspects of abstract thought, the origins of this are ancient. To meet certain social ends, the heavens were once populated by multiple gods that in today’s world are widely considered to have never existed. But countless fights and battles nonetheless raged amidst efforts to establish some supposed truth about those gods – battles that to some extent continue to this day. However, the main issue in all this is not about whether one or more particular gods might really exist, or about the intellectual problems of trying to relate body and mind; it is about how abstract thought can successfully build all sorts of concepts for practical purposes, with the supposed existence of any corresponding things being rather incidental. In effect, we generally prefer practical and useful ideas and explanations over any would-be authentic tales of reality. A notable reason for this is that on close examination nothing at all fits reliably within the latter category.
The most popular tales of reality are created, promoted and adopted primarily to fulfill personal and social goals. Thus, the relevance of such stories to supposed objective reality is actually of secondary importance, and arguably never more valid than in some relative or circumstantial sense. This is all well demonstrated by the many scientists who spend time embroiled in the study and principles of empirical science, only to later pray to gods of whom they have no evidence whatsoever, but that are nonetheless embraced enthusiastically within culturally respected religions. As is so often the case with all animal species, the primal desire for social integration is revealed as the common factor underlying much activity.
But given gods are commonly seen as at least metaphysical possibilities, and also that we think of bodies to be physical flesh and bones right before our eyes, is it not reasonable to consider that some of these things might really exist? This question only highlights how easily the mind ignores that its tales of reality are based on conceptualizations exhibiting no necessary correspondence to anything at all of a demonstrably discrete nature. Crucially, the overriding tale of reality behind all others is the effectively absolute and thoroughly subliminal conviction that the world is made of things, bits, objects, or whatever we like to call its supposed parts. Being the very basis of abstract thought itself, this conviction is so widely held that to work with it at all – as we all do all the time – is arguably to be blind to its utter ubiquity and blanketing pervasiveness.
The world reflexively imagined by abstract thought is intractably a world formed of components and, where helpful for practical understanding, relationships between those components. Or from an alternative perspective, the relationships can themselves be seen as just more components. Hence a challenge naturally arises as regards the relationship between any two conceptually-entangled supposed things such as mind and body. What exactly is that relationship and how does it work? What is its nature and scope? Notably, although such troublesome questions do not appear to even exist outside the human mind – or perhaps because it is so – they are the very stuff of many long-standing philosophical dilemmas. Thought creates the problem, but human culture has so far been too stupid to notice that all of this can be reduced to abstract thought chasing its own tail.
Given an overall connectedness of our situation, every attempt to define mind, body or the relationship between them must inevitably meet circumstances that will undermine whatever is put forward. As an example, what is to be made of exhilaration or any other emotions that, as we normally think of matters, simultaneously course through both mind and body? From the conventional perspective, it seems body and mind are two things too deeply interrelated to properly understand either of them individually or the relationship between them. But such an argument only highlights how our crude form of thinking is bogged down within its habitual things-plus-relationships model, and it thereby overlooks the truth that concepts such as mind and body remain mere inventions of cognition.
A rectangle consisting of a square of blue to the left of a square of green is easily described as done in this sentence. Such a description is of course a hugely simplistic compromise in terms of the detail within any real-world situation that might be thus described, but it is nonetheless suitable for the basic purpose of providing graphic description. However, suppose instead that the blue on the extreme left is the start of a smooth color gradient that extends all the way to green on the extreme right such that there is no noticeable sharp change of color – and then ask where the blue changes to green. Any supposed point at which the color really changes from one to the other is not something people will be able to agree on. Exactly what colors are covered by terms such as blue and green is open to debate – even within color science. Complicating matters further, any color the eye sees is a function of other variables such as personal eyesight and lighting conditions. With such points in mind, it makes no more sense to think of the blue and the green within the gradient as separate colors than it does to imagine they are the same color. Furthermore, even the supposed relationship between the two colors can only be approximated by stating something along the lines of one fades into the other. All in all, the exact nature of the color gradient cannot be accurately detailed by any amount of verbal description.
This illustrates a situation in which language including the terms blue and green is reflexively chosen to loosely describe a very small corner of reality, despite the fact that both terms are beyond absolute definition and arguably don’t really represent any things or qualities that exist in isolation from one another. Notably, the difficulties in defining either the colors or their supposed relationship stem wholly from a mental approach that unthinkingly presumes discrete things and relationships between such discrete things to be an entirely sound basis for modeling reality. The fact that the human mind’s modeling of the world struggles to transcend this things-plus-relationships paradigm is the source of countless problems in so many areas, rather than any aspect of whatever external reality the mind seeks to address.
Responding intelligently to various key philosophical dilemmas that have dogged philosophy for centuries has nothing to do with figuring out, for example, if free will exists and, if so, what its nature might be – or if we instead inhabit a deterministic universe, and why we are then deluded with ideas of free will. Neither does the meaningful response lie in some supposed better understanding of what some posited entity called mind really is, or how it relates to a similarly posited entity called body. The missing jigsaw piece lies in exposing the error abstract thought makes when it presumes its things-plus-relationships paradigm can truly mirror reality – as opposed to just being a generically useful and convenient framework: a tool of inherently limited functionality.
The causality illusion
Despite its stunning effects on the planet, the evolution of abstract thought within the human mind is very arguably at only an embryonic stage compared to its potential. The evidence lies in the difficulty it has transcending its own conviction that its modeling of reality is inherently sound and flawless – even when faced with intractable problems resulting from that conviction.
In evolutionary terms, holding steadfast to such a self-limiting position is hardly surprising given the huge dominance the technology of abstract thought has accorded our species. Hence, most minds do not think at all about how they think, and the process feels almost as natural as breathing. But the interesting issue in terms of a further evolution of human ideas is that any development beyond our current position does not necessitate dismissing our present ideas. Human culture could add a corrective adjustment by embracing a wider perspective. Nonetheless, for this to happen, certain habitual and deeply ingrained notions within current human thinking require uncompromising re-examination.
For example, it needs to be seen that the common notion of causality is troublesome; the conveniently simple idea that events occur in which causes produce effects breaks down on examination.
If a car smashes at speed into a stationary car, the normal thinking is that the speeding car caused the accident – or event. But the notion that one car is any more the cause or effect than the other makes little sense given that if either car is removed from the scene the event does not occur. Moreover, the understood states of both cars are altered by the event, and so it is no more logical to state that the stationary car caused the motion of the speeding