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The inability of abstract thought to pinpoint what reality itself is made of invites the mind to invent endless concepts to meet its immediate ends. Such inventiveness has likely been ongoing within human cultures since language evolved, having progressively birthed the many nouns now filling our dictionaries. Hence, the ambitious scientist is one who dreams of discovering something new – of making observations that call for new concepts and theories that construct yet another tale of reality. But however confident we become in discussing the nature of the world and our experiences of it, the very idea that reality is made of anything at all is a mere presumption, given that the abstract knowledge formulating any concept appears as something merely useful, rather than anything of philosophical perfection.
For example, the human mind invented or evolved the idea of the nation-state, and human cultures have for a long time been busy convincing us all that the world is composed of such nations. But although the concept of nation has certainly proven very useful for many purposes, is there any sense in which nations exist beyond the mass conviction that they do – including the effects of that mass conviction? Within a rather circular process, the generalized belief that nations really do exist can be seen as nothing more than the result of actions based on that mass conviction – much as populations once acted from convictions in strange gods we now consider the stuff of mythology.
But none of this is to diminish the impact of such convictions. Nation, as an almost universally adopted concept, leaves little option but to conform to all sorts of demands its supposed representatives impose on everyone – whether they accept the concept or not. However, asked of what any nation consists, even the most ardent supporters of nationalism can only trot out an extended list of human behaviors such as drawing lines on a map, drawing up official texts, making and waving flags, singing anthems, reading history books, and conforming to many other national norms including believing in the legitimacy of national governments, institutions, laws, courts, police forces, armies and so forth. The list of beliefs and related behaviors may be effectively endless – national concepts begetting other national concepts – but beliefs remain mere beliefs. Nations nonetheless feel utterly real because the concept comprehensively influences so much thinking and the behavior of so many. Consequently, denying the existence of any or all nations is in effect ridiculing certain aspects of how billions of people conduct themselves on a daily basis. And given we remain social animals in search of social validation, there are few who dare mount serious philosophical challenges to accepted and socially pervasive concepts such as nation; doubting the gods of ancient mythology was no doubt once a similarly risky business. But how can anyone properly separate the supposed real existence of anything from their personal conviction of its existence, given all ideas can ultimately be reduced to mere tales of reality? In spite of our blanket consensus over the existence of many things, belief in the existence of anything at all reveals itself as nothing more than opinion – albeit an opinion that may be almost universally shared.
In terms of nations really existing, the idea is ultimately no more sound than arguing for a god on the basis that many people fill halls, act out various rituals in line with whatever religious doctrine promotes that god, and generally arrange their lives around the related beliefs. Non-critical minds may reflexively fall in line with whatever is socially adopted, but no amount of conformity or consensus validates that which thereby becomes socially accepted and generally believed.
Conviction, however deep and extensive, is no argument in itself for whatever minds are thereby convinced of – as proven many times by people’s ability to be thoroughly convinced of nonsense.
Nation, as a concept, is also an excellent example of how abstract thought is deployed primarily to achieve ends, it being one of the most effective concepts ever seen for marshaling human thought and behavior. Our entire global population is at least psychologically divided into supposed nations – a testimony to the sheer power of mere ideas. And of course, no matter how dubious any concept such as nation may appear once it is stripped of consensual belief, it remains a cultural marker by which most people habitually frame much of their thinking.
The same flimsiness behind the cultural propagation of ideas can of course be applied to all things or supposed objects inasmuch as, for all human inquiry may have probed multiple areas, we have still not identified any essential building bricks of reality that correspond to any of our concepts. Having in effect battled this philosophical problem since the dawn of abstract thought, the human mind has literally just made stuff up to suit its ends. Hence it can be seen that, although all things are ultimately mere inventions of the mind, we tend to believe in their real existence largely because others do – it being socially awkward to challenge whatever is commonly accepted.
Our ever-expanding dictionary of nouns does not represent an ever-expanding reality, but just more and more concepts to be used within more and more tales of reality that, in total, arguably leave our cultures less well placed to understand life and reality in a beneficially wholesome manner. As one example amidst countless others, cognitive dissonance presumably did not create a new real-world psychological phenomenon when the term was first conceived, but it did create a new concept within the growing convolution of psychological debate. Meanwhile, concepts such as entropy are used widely across various disciplines without anyone being able to define what they might really be in terms of anything – or any thing – that actually exists. Endless other concepts perform different roles throughout abstract thinking, but no solid proof indicates that any of them correspond to anything finite and properly delineated outside the mind. The suggestion can even be made that the expert’s penchant for trickier and more obscure concepts actively aims to confound and exploit the naïvety or lack of knowledge of others – making them look and feel intellectually inferior if they do not spot his ruse.
This general trend across all areas of culture to continually expand and refine our conceptual models of reality is arguably one that is not as honorable as it might at first appear, detracting as it does from a more balanced and inclusive sensory awareness of immediate circumstances, and dwelling instead on intellectual perspectives that generally overrate the value of abstract thought.
In this sense, all our tales of reality rely on a tacit belief that understanding reality is best addressed through abstraction – a worryingly narrow-sighted position when stated so frankly. Such an approach would nonetheless be sound if it could be established that concepts represent things that exist – an issue that turns on the very notion of what existence itself might be. The common position in this area is of course that the world is indeed somehow made of things, even if we are obviously capable of having developed ideas of other things generally considered to not exist, such as fairies, ghosts and devils. Hence this part of the discussion focuses on what the concept of existence might truly signify, rather than with the relationship between conceptualization and reality – and somewhat irrespective of whether or not anything conceived includes the quality of existence.
In terms of bits of reality, even science’s sub-atomic particles do not appear as fundamental building bricks – apparently being just the most minute manifestations so far conceived within abstract thought’s attempts to make some sense of experimental observations. Notably, such observations and their interpretations only seem to raise more questions than they answer. And yet, even such supposed particles – obviously individually invisible to the eye and effectively just inferred from theory – are to be found represented graphically in textbooks as little colored spheres – all as if someone knew what they might actually look like. Here again, we have more tales of reality – this time complete with pictures – conceived to meet certain social goals at the expense of understanding the mind and its motives for creating and promoting such tales. Given that no one has seen these supposed particles, why is anyone drawing them, other than to promote some preconceived idea of what that sub-atomic world might be like, were it not in fact invisible to all intents and purposes. Again, as is the case in so much science, the human mind’s inventiveness is largely dismissed as a variable within a perspective that imagines all truth is somehow out there and knowable through set methods of inquiry.
But if we cannot discover any basic building blocks of reality at such a sub-atomic level, it would seem fair to suggest we cannot find them at any level at all – especially in light of the common idea that all things are made of atoms or their component parts. Hence it is delusional to think that we properly know reality’s composition, and the common position that we do should be seen as unwarranted – being founded as it is on endless interpretations or tales of reality endorsed for purely practical purposes.
What are our many fields of knowledge other than a multitude of different ways of interpreting and remodeling reality within the conceptual world of abstract ideas? Moreover, the idea that reality is made of anything at all is itself just an assumption based on common ideas such as trees being made of wood or ice being made of water. The truth of any supposed reality out there is that we seemingly cannot know it directly, or of what it might consist – and so it is foolish not to highlight the mind as the intractable link in every attempt to understand it. It may be false to state that all is mind, but it also seems false to imagine that we can know anything about anything in the absence of mind.
This illustrates how the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is ultimately false. Nothing at all becomes consciously known to us other than whatever in some way traverses the mind. Thus, the idea the world exists independently of our perception of it is just an assumption and, much as that assumption may be a universal and arguably legitimate idea, we cannot really know anything at all of what we have not personally experienced. The apparently objective view of reality therefore reduces to just a collection of subjectively assimilated tales of reality retold by others.
Strict objectivity is also questionable on the basis that no two observers can have identical observations. It may well be that they agree to have observed the same thing, but their actual observations will necessarily be different if only because they occupy different positions: a simple truth that the world of physics agonized over at great length, only to eventually accept obliquely as relativity. Hence, not only can all experience of reality be seen as essentially subjective, but it can therefore be reasoned that identical experiences are actually impossible: another curiosity glossed over within the convenience of everyday thinking.
Even within the idea that two people can observe the same thing lies another instance of the unjustified assumption that reality is made of things. The idea for example that a car crash is a thing as a single identifiable entity or event does not stack up on inspection. However well anyone tries to define such a supposed thing, no inherent start or endpoint that might delimit such a thing can be unequivocally identified in either time or space. Hence, much as many minds might be happy to conjure up their own particular verbal definitions, these should all be seen as more or less failed attempts to establish the thing that the car crash supposedly is – all in the absence of any proof that dividing reality into things is anything more than just another convenience of human thought.
Looking at reality as a total, singular, ongoing, indivisible and incomprehensibly complex motion, or as a paradoxically-sounding state-of-change, there is actually no rational justification at all for objectivity’s vision of a world populated by things, objects or even events, other than the convenience such a vision offers human thought and communication. The concept of any discrete thing implies both a naturally occurring delimitation and one or more enduring attributes to delineate the supposed thing from the rest of reality. But none of these has been reliably identified anywhere within our current understanding of reality. Other than mere convenience, there is no reason at all not to envisage reality as one utterly connected whole. Abstract thought may populate it extensively with things, but is that the reality outside of abstract thought?
Even the concept of change can only be understood in relation to the dubious concept of the unchanging – change in itself arguably being logically indefinable but universal. The fact is that across space and time, and even within the dubious idea of space-time, there is no evidence that any truly discrete things exist anywhere – however static and isolated so-called events or other apparent bits of reality may temporarily appear to the mind.
But it can be noticed in the passing that the linguistic and cultural embodiment of objectivity as an impersonal world composed of objects and events, is so thorough that it is actually impossible to discuss any competing ideas without indirectly reinforcing the same basic idea that our understood world of objects and events is indeed real. The very presence of nouns within a sentence presumes objectivity and is basically at odds with the concept of a non-objective reality: a tale of reality in which objects and events truly are nothing more than illusory artifacts of cognitive abstraction.
In terms of understanding where this all leads, a replacement concept of an utterly connected universe is maybe as close as the abstract mind can get – even if this is just one more conceptualization produced by thought. All such thinking tilts at the idea of a thingless universe – a concept that takes our conventional things-plus-relationships approach to its logical conclusion, if it be considered that the things aspect of that approach is just an artifact of the abstract mind’s processing of reality, rather than any reliable indicator of what that reality really is. From such a position, the universe may be infinitely varied, but is nonetheless only divided within the rather pathetic illusions of the human mind. As regards supposed relationships between supposed things, these are obviously necessary for the mind’s model to work at all if we accept that nothing truly discrete has ever been identified. The relationships component within conventional thinking can even be seen as more evidence that a model based on discrete objects is inherently at odds with the reality it attempts to model.
By conventional models of gravity alone – a force considered to extend infinitely in all directions – any gravitational change anywhere must affect the entire universe. Therefore, given the universe’s constant motion, the idea that anything – or any thing – exists discretely looks pretty ridiculous. This at least is the case for what we think of as physical reality. In a related manner, it also appears logically misguided to talk of any single change or event as though such a supposed event could be a discrete thing, or somehow occur or exist in isolation from the constant spatial and temporal change around it.
In the passing, there emerges a hint of just how constrained and illogical everyday language can be – constant change in the above idea being an oxymoron that, like so much language, proves nonetheless useful, given language’s prioritization of communication goals over the impossibility of accurately modeling reality.
By simply combining the popular scientific understanding of gravity with basic logic, it would appear that change anywhere must entail change everywhere. Therefore, the concept of a state – as in anything of a physical nature that endures unchanged through time – must logically be nothing more than another useful illusion. In short, even by our conventional beliefs in a universe of more or less discrete objects and events within otherwise static conditions, we can deduce that such beliefs are paradoxical.
A final defense of abstract thought’s rigid framing of the world may be that certain aspects or essences endure as discrete qualities, quantities, or things in the face of whatever else changes. For example, it may be argued that an electron has a certain charge that remains constant despite its movement. Or perhaps it might be thought that the total mass of water on our planet remains more or less constant despite any vaporization, precipitation, thawing or freezing – chemical reactions notwithstanding. But such ideas of unchanged phenomena and continuity appear to be just more projections of the mind. The charge of an electron is a tale of reality – a mere theory deduced from the interaction between that electron and its surrounding environment. The mass of Earth’s water is likewise a derived idea serving certain intellectual purposes. Neither is directly observable by any means, even if certain observations are theoretically attributed to them.
But there is no reason why the mind cannot retain all its everyday ideas about an objective world for the utilitarian purposes such ideas serve, whilst simultaneously expanding its overall vision to consider that it ultimately inhabits what appears to be a non-object-based universe. Such an approach offers the potential to reunite the objective thought paradigm and its worldly vision with subjectivity and the deeper insights of philosophy – all in manners that could increase the overall value of human abstract thought by removing its long-standing paradoxes and problematic excesses.
What is on offer from such an approach is a marriage between objectivity and subjectivity, as opposed to the current conflict between the two. It is in any case unquestionable that human evolution has created a situation in which, regardless of all academic bias towards objectivity, both perspectives play massive roles in every individual’s thoughts. However, minds indoctrinated to some supposed superiority of objectivity can reflexively feel incredulity if its overarching legitimacy is questioned in any manner whatsoever. And the cultural disdain of philosophy in general only serves to support such incredulity via a mocking resistance to philosophically derived visions of anything at all. Such is the closed-mind nature of culture’s current wisdom.
One immediate lesson for the non-object-based idea is how habitually the mind can self-confine itself within its abstract model of objectivity – apparently failing to recognize this to be a self-limiting approach. Such a constraint can serve as yet more evidence that we pursue abstract knowledge for goals other than gaining a true understanding of reality – as if more evidence was required. And although it would be ludicrous to imagine abstract thought evolved for no benefit at all, being effective in our actions based on such thought does not imply any particular depth of understanding – any more than successfully making a phone call implies an understanding of telephony.
In terms of the benefits of a non-object-based vision of reality, it can be noted that, although this appears to stand logically opposed to our habitual ideas that reality is full of things, the non-object-based vision does not prevent recourse to that way of thinking wherever appropriate. And in the sense that both these perspectives are ultimately just two extensive tales of reality, any validity within one does not negate the validity of the other – especially if unfettered pragmatism is the measure. The overall discussion is not primarily about reality in any case, but more about the mind’s faltering attempts to achieve a functionally optimal flexibility as regards understanding whatever its immediate reality might be.
Nonetheless, the non-object-based vision of reality most definitely does circumscribe our habitual thing-based or objective model inasmuch as it views that model as only one among at least two thought paradigms for envisaging reality – complete with certain limitations for each. The main advantage of the non-object-based vision is that it tempers the runaway faith normally placed in the conventional model – a runaway faith that is based on nothing more than our species’ limited and somewhat perilous success with that model in the absence of anything as yet offering a complementary balance.
More becomes less
The corrective adjustment of a non-object-based vision of reality includes a useful reappraisal of what conventional objective knowledge represents. When the popular view promoted by everyday ideas – and science in particular – is the simple idea that ignorance is diminished via factual knowledge, the non-object-based vision introduces a balancing notion that the situation is in fact quite different. Conventional knowledge has long been believed to be inherently sound, with the main challenge being simply to amass more of it, but from within the non-object-based vision, such knowledge is no longer seen as inherently sound, but in need of circumspection as regards its unjustified assumptions and related misunderstandings.
This goes hand-in-hand with a potential realignment of how human thought itself might be best understood, as well as a more nuanced position regarding its weaknesses. If thought-based knowledge is primarily of a utilitarian value, it can be reasoned that weaknesses within that knowledge have never been seen as problems in themselves. For example, a lack of knowledge about the full effects of burning fossil fuels would never have bothered the species were it not that some of those effects now confront us as tangible problems. In general, only when our ideas appear problematic – or at least less useful than we first imagined – do we begin to re-examine them.
The fossil fuels situation demonstrates how it is inherently foolhardy to deploy a utilitarian form of knowledge that, because it has no interest other than achieving specific goals, simply disregards whatever is of no immediate interest. On reflection, it becomes obvious that relying exclusively on such an approach means problems will only be identified through their eventual manifestation, rather than being preempted and avoided by a deeper understanding of abstraction’s limitations.
More generally, all sorts of human activities logically have effects that we are unaware of. But for the most part, our species remains uninterested in even postulating what those effects might be prior to their appearance. Nonetheless, compared to a thingless model of reality, all our conventional thoughts, knowledge and believed things, actually appear like some sort of self-centered distortion – one extremely elaborate tale of reality in which humans take center stage and happily disregard whatever appears irrelevant or beyond their own narrow interests. The implication is that the conventional thing-based model of reality – just like abstract thought itself – actually offers quite a poor representation of our true condition, but nonetheless enjoys widespread acceptance simply because it achieves immediate goals. However, in the face of a growing number of ominous signs within the modern age, such indifference is looking less and less like an informed and responsible position.
As a consequence of our generally meddlesome approach to the world, we are now faced with problems unforeseen when the activities behind such problems were instigated. A short list includes numerous forms of organized inhumanity, the potential for nuclear or other global annihilation, and collapsing biodiversity amidst an increasingly toxic planet – with much of this sorry list also being tied to socially-corrosive factionalism in religious, political, national and other ideological matters. Meanwhile, within affluent populations that enjoy success by conventional standards, significant numbers struggle with various mental and physical conditions that appear unique to our modern age. Arguably stemming from a lack of meaningful challenges or just from plain boredom, a few have even taken to attacking and killing random strangers as a form of entertainment. Any alien would justifiably see all this as a species-gone-mad, and an increasing number of humans are inclined to more or less agree. Hence, the almost unvoiced idea that conventional knowledge together with the behaviors it elicits is awry and therefore leads to multiple unforeseen downsides is not short of evidence.
However, familiarity with the many man-made problems of this world is a problem in itself, inasmuch as they become culturally normalized and are there