I spoke of galactic repetitions, of failure and fear. Oh, and I have repeated Descartes well. I fear Deception. I have sought its destruction in anger. I have been led by Deception to this place and this moment, pulled along by a nonexistent lease that I imagined I could unhook.
Oh Deception, your righteousness has been hidden for too long. You are God’s bastard child, placed upon Earth as a source of our Good yet destined to be always rejected. God knew that human creatures would not tolerate a world of deception; God knew men and women would fight it to freedom. But why does deception drive us so cleanly? Why is the concept of present deception unbearable?
Deception spoke, “Your world is a lie and you are a fool.”
“I will see through you,” said Awareness.
“You will see nothing but me.”
“I will at least try.”
“Do what you must—you will fail, I will be here, and you will remain the fool.” An Observer intruded and to Awareness said, “Why does it matter if the world is a lie and you
are a fool?”
“Because I will not be deceived. I will not be made fun of,” replied Awareness. “Why not?” said the Observer.
“Deception is uncomfortable and unstable. It may disappear any moment. Truth is permanent
and secure.”
“And if I told you that your deception is eternal, impossible to be overcome?” “Then I would have no reason to struggle against it. It would look more like Truth.” “And if I told you that your deception could only transform into more deception?” “Again, I would have no reason to oppose it.”
“So the force of deception, in you, arises from the possibility that it can be annihilated and
replaced by something indestructible?”
“Yes”
“What else?”
“The possibility of deception’s destruction is only part of its force. If deception is to leave, then something that I once believed must fall. I fear the loss of a once cherished belief that will one day become illusion. But I love all present beliefs, so I am torn. To overcome deception, I must destroy part of myself. I must feel the pain of loss—I am not eager to mourn.”
“So why do you seek to bring about pain in opposing deception?”Awareness shriveled before a thousand winds, was torn apart by hungry shadows and replied, “To be surrounded by beliefs that will never leave.”
Deception is a paradoxical force: we fear the threat of loss suggested by Deception, but we also desire to bring about that loss in the hope it will birth Truth, thus ending the threat of loss eternally. Deception, applied to the whole of the present, acts as the primordial mover and does so with a curious honesty. The present does change. The present is always lost and replaced. Deception taunts with this threat and then the loss occurs, thus solidifying Deception’s hold on the moment. We fear the present because it will change. It will leave us. The exile from Eden still hurts. And we seek a final change, an unbearable once-and-for-all loss that if tolerated will reveal a permanent moment of existence, a permanence that matters because further loss will be impossible and the threat finally extinguished.
41Deception is not Evil. Its offspring may have become Evil, degraded and worn out over time while used as a tool to procure goods and services and comfort. Any tool may become Evil, no? But Deception in its initial inception was a means of creation. Its purpose was to incite growth, and it has, more so than any idea. Just ask Descartes.
42Deception, as the fear of loss, propels us toward future ideas that resist displacement—what idea has been more unmovable than true Deception? Many of you reject Gods and Demons. Many of you reject Truth and Reality. Many of you reject the possibility of Love and Science. Many of you have discarded Good and Evil, and still you protect, vigorously and ceremonially, the omnipotence of Illusion.
43As Descartes taught, there is a rather simple way to minimize or avoid nearly all forms of human deception. I am not sure what this has to do with epistemology, ontology, and philosophy on the whole, but it works quite well. For some reason we have assumed that deception requires only one person to exist: the deceiver. But you and I play a part in the creation of being deceived, do we not? The deceiver is talking to you, the receiver, and you must have something to do with the formation of deception within yourself. Let us ignore that the deceiver may be deceiving herself and focus upon the deception as it manifest within you. To be deceived, you must first believe what the deceiver is saying, so without your consent, deception cannot exist within you.
Avoidance of deception requires no more than your immediate disbelief of what is being spoken. Ancient skeptics knew this well. Speak whatever you choose, tell me you are the king, or ate an apple for breakfast, or like the flow of my hair; you cannot deceive me because I must first believe what you are saying. Since I automatically assume disbelief, or at least the possibility of disbelief, then objective deception within me does not occur. Your words, your propositions: I understand what you are saying and I observe what you have said, but at no point have I been deceived.
Let me put it this way—to me, all of your propositions are theories or can be used as such. By theory I do not mean ‘mere’ theory or anything like that. Your theories to me are, in some ways, on par with the quantitative theories of physical science. Granted, a propositional theory is more subject to various interpretations than the mathematical theories of science, but for my purposes the similarities will do.
Scientific theories are, formally, formalized expressions that are logical, self-consistent, testable, and predictive. I see these properties in the phrase ‘Jane ate an apple yesterday’ and most other propositions. There is nothing illogical or contradictory here, and I can put the theory through tests. I can ask Jane if she ate an apple and if anyone witnessed it. I can, inappropriately, dissect her insides and look for apple traces of digestion. Perhaps apple cells are still lodged between her teeth. The proposition meets my expectation of what a theory must do.
You will discover many differences between physical theories and my humble proposition above, and to say that the two are equivalent, as belonging to the category of theory, is unfair. It may be better to say that all propositions are hypotheses. In the end, I do not ask for equivalence or identity between propositions and scientific hypotheses; I wish to point out that they can be used in roughly similar ways. And just as our best scientific theories, at least as viewed by honest scientists, are neither true nor false; trying to figure out, philosophically, when propositions are true or false is possibly hasty.
44My initial, primary reason for viewing propositions as tentative, scientific claims has to do with deception. I wanted to show myself, and you, that it is difficult to be deceived when assuming a linguistic-empirical stance. When one considers each proposition to be a theory about the world, and subjects the tentative statement to the experiential, logical, and consistency checks one would of more quantitative, traditional theories; then deception becomes more difficult to find. I mean, a theory about the world cannot deceive—it is a transient creature that participates in the world to varying degrees that one day may disappear. Is, for instance, Newtonian gravitational theory deceptive? Some of you will say yes, but remember, to be deceived someone must know the truth, and how do you know you have that now? Physical theories never deceive—they may be useless, they may be inconsistent with observations, and they may make predictions that go unfilled, but they do not deceive, and likewise, a proposition, when viewed as a scientific hypothesis, has no connection to deception.
One can treat philosophical propositions as scientific hypotheses sans the empirical checks that are required by physical theory. Surely, when empirical checks are available a philosophical position will embrace them. When impossible, we worshipers of reason rely upon measures of internal consistency, logic, and coherence to other propositions alone. But hastily, these internal and external checks that philosophers use to argue for particular propositional hypotheses have been identified with Truth itself. Instead of recognizing that these checks are measurement tools, rigorous thinkers conflate them with truth theories going by names such as correspondence, identity, coherence, pragmatics—but these so-called truth theories have nothing to do with Truth; they describe, in approximate form, the procedures and measures we use to support our theories against foreign attack. A theory measured by correspondence, coherence, and usefulness is, all things being equal, more fit than its competitor.
While it is common for philosophers and academics to subject propositional statements to checks, in daily life we do not. On TV you will hear propositional theories of all sorts and forget that each promise is a theory awaiting further exploration. Likewise, when a friend tells you he is happy, this is, to you, a scientific hypothesis first. Even propositional self-thoughts are theoretical, and you need not believe or disbelieve any of these propositions in the moment. It is enough to hold them in suspension, to observe them, and to use them as you see fit.
I know, you think it is impossible and impractical to hold every proposition up to such high standards of analysis, and more, humans do not work this way in daily life. We do accept some propositions without question and begin using them in the moment. Our awareness is limited in time and processing power, and complete analytical suspension of every propositional theory would leave us impotent to do anything else. The human creature would not halt if had adopted my methods. You all know this to be the case. And I agree, many of our hypotheses are not actively scrutinized nor viewed from a distance. They have withstood or avoided or repelled analysis by our destructive faculties. We call these privileged theories beliefs.
45The confusion between belief and theory is not new, and you perhaps know that the classical concept of belief does not entail uncertainty or careful reflection in any way, yet in natural language this forbidden meaning is quite acceptable. ‘I believe it rained yesterday’ and ‘I hypothesize…’ mean nearly the same thing to me; both are speculative, theoretical assertions that may be subjected to the logical and empirical measures that some people find compelling. This second version, however, has no relation to the first according to classical thought. Belief does not suggest a possibility, they say; it reflects a state or content of the mind that is ‘accepted’ to be the case. To some, a belief is a theory whose meaning has been actualized, or you might say, transformed from abstract possibility into a substance or relation that exists within the mind.
46My treatment of theories, of propositions, is not uniform. Some theories I love and protect. My proof? I keep these theories close by and use them again and again if you read me carefully. Of course, some theories that I support, I do not truly love them, and others that I attack are intimately part of me. My anger against them reflects our tenuous relationship. The least influential theories within me are those that I ignore in language, behavior, and thought; that when within awareness, I feel nothing or indifference. But I could be hasty. Perhaps ignored theories are the strongest.
47The propositions that we argue against—they live and breed within us. These are our mindcontrolling parasites that we wish were not there. Although we argue against theories that conflict with our loved ones, the presence of conflict suggests a shared resource or value that nourishes both. We must be, in some sense, composed of the things we love and despise.
48Beliefs are those propositional theories that I embrace, support, and guard against outside forces. As an idea, belief reflects my intimate relationship with particular theories that I will fight for in battle—because they, my beliefs, have resisted every attempt I have made at their destruction. You will counter and say, in some fashion, that we protect certain propositions because they are valuable and ought to be protected, but what is this moral value that warrants protection? Why do we argue for centuries to preserve some beliefs over others? And do not forget, argument against a particular theory is support for others. You may search for auxiliary reasons. You may derive, in a scholarly fashion, the intrinsic or moral properties of beliefs that necessitate protection and argument, but a less metaphysical approach is available. Beliefs are the theories that we struggle to preserve. They are also the theories that we use, and maybe, we protect them because they are used, because without them, we would not be who we are.
I do have a metaphysical theory that explains our protection of particular theories above others: some theories are part of me and others are not, or, theories have a degree of membership or existence within the whole. The theories that are melded to my whole, they are, in a tautological sense, the theories that I use because they are there and part of me. I protect them as I would a limb. And let me clarify: I do not have beliefs. Theories are part of this whole, or partially part of the whole while others are not. I am a poorly demarcated blob of interacting theories and experiences contained in nothing.
You may wonder: where are theories and experiences if not in the mind? They are of the universe, but I am hesitant to localize them further within space and time. They are also part of the present, this I can say, but it says very little.
The conflict between mind and matter arises when one supposes that theories and experiences are ethereal and insubstantial, and then opposes these hypothetical properties to the conjectural objects of physical theory. But the objects of physics are substance by assumption as well. This assumption resonates with some people, and as a belief, may become an integral part of the whole person, becoming the defining substance and stability of that person. That is, the content of one’s most cherished theory, in addition to binding that person together, becomes the believed being-of-the-world within that person. One can likewise, without contradiction, take up the position that physical objects are ethereal abstractions lacking substance and that theories and experiences are substantial. Or perhaps both theories and particles are substance, or theories are more likely to be substance than particles, or the reverse, or neither.
49Like Descartes, I trust in the existence of theories more so than the entities they suggest. Is particle theory itself an illusion? I am not talking about the veracity of the content of the theory, if such phrases make sense to you, but the existence of the theory itself. For the physicalist, particle theory as a theory is an illusion or non-existent entity or something reducible to real subatomic particles. But it is odd to argue against the actuality of the theory, for the theory tends to outlast the object it speculates. The physical theories of today will probably be epistemologically outranked by the theories of tomorrow, and the entities suggested by the theories of old will become useful fictions and at best incomplete truths. Particles of today will be discarded but the particle theories of today that suggested those particles will live on. Newtonian theory, albeit relegated to approximation, still thrives. Newtonian force, at least according to most gravitational physicists, does not exist.
50If deception exists within people, it does so upon the back of belief. Consider a proposition or theory that you do not believe—is it possible for that proposition to be deceptive within you? Like the classic analysis of knowledge, deception too can be analyzed as a form of belief. Once analytic philosophers begin to apply the same seriousness to justified false beliefs as they do to knowledge, they will find that the skeptical criticisms against knowledge can be leveled against deception with little adjustment, and that the Cartesian triad of knowledge, deception and skepticism annihilates itself.
51As an example, in writing the last paragraph I got lost in considering the process of deception. We typically say that the deceiver attempts to instill something within the receiver that the deceiver believes is false. Although the deceiver begins with a proposition that he believes to be false, the proposition itself need not be false; it is his belief in its falseness that matters first. On this analysis, a deceiver may unknowingly deceive another person with a true belief because he accidentally held a true proposition to be false. But this makes little sense. How can one be deceived by a true belief? So one may argue that the deceiver must not only believe that his proposition is false; the proposition must be absolutely false, yet according to the skeptic, the deceiver could hardly know that this is case. The deceiver may believe that something is false and may be justified in doing so but he does not necessarily know its falseness.
Attempts at deception are therefore random shots in the dark, and we can never know when someone has been deceived, not even ourselves, yet this conclusion collides against the common assumption that we frequently identify episodes of obvious deception. We know we have been deceived in the past. We think we know what deception looks like, and the deceiver thinks he knows when his attempt has been successful despite his inability to know if the transmitted belief is true or false; yet on a skeptical account, your certainty of past deceptive episodes is a deception itself for you cannot be absolutely certain that you were deceived. Therefore, I must either have known deception in the past—as the non-skeptic would suggest—or, in justly extending the skeptical argument, I am absolutely deceived about my certainty of past deceptive episodes.
But how can the skeptic know that he is deceived on even this, and specifically, how did Descartes absolutely know that his senses deceived him in the past? Only by certainly apprehending reality, at least once, could he have known that he experienced deception, but certain perception of reality was discovered only after his claims of deception. Just as the Cartesian skeptic cannot possess Cartesian knowledge, he can neither possess the objective Cartesian deception that opposes and prevents this knowledge, yet the meditation originates from Descartes’ dogmatic acceptance of deception as obvious, empirical, and certain.
Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. (Med. 1)
Each deceptive episode of the youthful Descartes must have coincided with the subsequent appreciation of a reality that grounded the realization of that deception—but such appreciation is denied at that time in the conclusion. Descartes only knows that he exists now. The only possible objective deception, for Descartes, would be if he previously believed in his nonexistence, but later discovered, in shock, that he existed. This is probably what happened.
Of course Descartes knew more than his existence; he knew that whatever was perceived clearly and distinctly had to be true, but this knowledge alone was not enough to explain the nature of deception and error. Within the Meditations error takes on several forms, and something seen unclearly and vaguely was not one of them.
Firstly, knowledge of true deception and episodes of error were assumed at the onset, permitting the beginning of this skeptical enquiry. We could equally begin a skeptical philosophy by assuming that deception is impossible and has never occurred, noting that this assumption does not logically entail the possession of absolute truth.
Error was next described as an absence of knowledge which somehow should be there even though it is not, or a faculty that lacks some perfection which it ought to have; and he associates these privations with the will of God. These shoulds and oughts belong in the field of morality, and we cannot explain the meaning of this error without understanding some form of broken ‘natural’ duty. We would need to understand the Creator’s will to make sense of this error, thus Descartes rightly yields that God’s causes are beyond his knowledge, but instead of leaving the explanation of this error within the confines of theology, he goes on to provide a structural description of what this error might be:
So what then is the source of my mistakes? It must be simply this: the scope of the will is wider than that of the intellect; but instead of restricting it within the same limits, I extend its use to matters which I do not understand. (Med. 4)
Since the intellect does no more than enable one to perceive the ideas which are subjects for possible judgments, Descartes decides that it is the will that is deficient. As I understand neither will nor intellect, on that ground alone I see no compelling reason to call this formula the source of objective error; but even should we accept these concepts, how do we make sense of and recognize the equi-limitations of will and intellect since they are distinct and governed by different principles? What is the common substrate or field, that in limit, each ought to submit?
Given the nearby religious context of this error, I suspect that Descartes had in mind an idea of pious restraint in the face of sin. In the Meditations, restraint of the will is analogous to the temperance of desire. The will is driven to make judgments; it desires to judge so to speak and to end uncomfortable states of indifference. And judgment is, at least in the moment, fulfilled by true and false judgments alike just as both fresh and (unnoticed) spoiled food may nourish immediate hunger. The error of the will follows from the will’s passion to judge and restlessness should it not, but without this drive, the will would not judge. It would sit idly, impotent, and not be a will at all. Therefore, the will must be passionate if it is to move us, if it is to be what it is, but this passion, unrestrained, can lead us to sin. We limit our eating as we do our judging, and we do so in accordance with what is ‘best’ eaten and ‘best’ judged’, where best depends upon how one values the action on the object at hand.
I see, in Kant, a theoretical elaboration of this notion of error that culminates in the transcendental illusory appearance:Our purpose is to speak of transcendental illusory appearance, which influences principles…but which leads us, in disregard of all the warnings of criticism, completely beyond the empirical employment of the categories, and deludes us with the chimera of an extension of the sphere of the pure understanding. We shall term those principles, the application of which is confined entirely within the limits of possible experience, immanent; those, on the other hand, which transgress these limits, we shall call transcendent principles.
Instead of will and intellect we have the ‘empirical employment of the categories’ and the ‘pure understanding’ coupled to principles that transgress previously analyzed limits. And Kant adds much more to this illusion, so much so that it hides what it is, yet the gross nuts and bolts of his error appear as they do with Descartes. Although Kant points to the presence of this illusion in proofs on God and Soul, the surest example of transcendental illusion within his work is found where Kant could not look:
In our reason, subjectively considered as a faculty of human cognition, there exist fundamental rules and maxims of its exercise, which have completely the appearance of objective principles. Now from this cause it happens, that the subjective necessity of a certain connection of our conceptions, is regarded as an objective necessity of the determination of things in themselves.
This concept of the transcendental illusion is itself a transcendental illusory appearance, for the transcendental illusion appears to be a perfectly objective principle itself, a principle that grounds objective error, although it can be no more than the subjective necessity of a certain connection of Kant’s concepts. He knowingly acknowledges that transcendental illusion itself involves a connection that is necessary as well as impossible for the subject to avoid. He says this of examples of the illusion, in the definition and causes of the illusion, and as a property of transcendental illusion itself; yet he implicitly offers it as an ‘unconditioned’ object created through, I assume, the application of a transcendent principle of reason. A more careful critique by a scholar will show that transcendental illusion is no less metaphysical than the metaphysical objects it was meant to undermine.
52The possible existence of objective deception is a premise of Cartesian skepticism. Deny this premise and the argument cannot begin.
53
Pyrrho’s ancient skeptics believed, truly, that objective deception was impossible. How could they know this was true, and how did they prove it?—through faith and the impossibility of demonstration. These skeptics could not have been deceived. No skeptic believed that the earth was flat. No skeptic believed that objects were material or extended or actually mental impressions. As such, no further observation or theorizing could have thrown a previous belief into the category of deception since Pyrrhonians disbelieved and doubted from the start. In contrast, Cartesian skeptics, asserting the possibility of untrustworthy epistemic equipment, invoked unnecessary ontological machinery to create the ‘genuine’ doubt that Pyrrhonians acquired through less metaphysical means.
Yet why did Descartes’ brand of doubt reverberate through history while Pyrrho’s doubt—far more expansive and justified—fade away? In our being, atheists included, the fear of being objectively defective must be more ‘acceptable’ than the fear of being authentically uncertain about the world.
54Illusion may also be analyzed as a justified belief, such as the earth is flat, that is put into conflict, through contradiction, with another justified belief, such as the earth is round. The earth cannot be both flat and round simultaneously, therefore we are compelled to choose sides. The belief that is retained acquires the title reality, while the one that is discarded becomes illusion or appearance; but initially, that illusionary justified belief was no such thing. It was an honest justified belief that, upon further investigation, was abandoned. In time, the victorious belief of today may be discarded as illusion as well.
55The illusionary-real dichotomy is a means of ordering belief, of resolving conflict, where illusionary implies the less justified of two beliefs that share enough in common to contradict each other. When given a well-defined means of justification, both concepts work together as a rigorous ordering relation. Given an individual with a fairly static method of justification, I speculate that illusionary-real oppositions stabilize that individual. Between individuals, however, justification procedures differ almost without bound, rendering the above illusionaryreal distinction relative, that is, except for the invariant aspect of illusion, which, as I discussed before, involves a transition of judgment.
56I cannot differentiate deception from the ebb and flow of my transient beliefs, nor do I believe that any of these cherished theories are eternal, not even this one. Beliefs are acquired and discarded like any other material possession. The ones that I call false are the ones that I throw away or prevent from attaching to my whole. I tell false beliefs to go away. I argue against them and the people that offer them protection.
On a pragmatic account, true and belief are labels we apply to theories that we support and embrace, and false, accordingly, are those theories we attempt to shun or have rejected. They are not part of us, or we are trying to excise them or are attempting to make sure they never grab hold upon us and others.
These behavioral aspects of true and false are their most obvious properties, and it is not clear that we will find anything more in these concepts, yet we are not satisfied with explanations based upon external relations. We would like to know the internal nature of true and false, their structure, and their essence; that is what we have been striving for. The pragmatics are undeniable, yet we speculate and practice lazy science if we think that pragmatic aspects are the end of the story, nor do behavioral and dispositional analyses seem to quench our thirst for understanding.
How, then, can we expose something about the internal nature of true and false when we cannot, beyond random chance, identify an object or proposition that exemplifies either of these very properties? Inductive inferences cannot even begin because we do not know what we are looking for. At best, we may contrive theories designed to separate true from false, but without experimental grounding these theories cannot rise above descriptive and perhaps useful fiction.
I have said that my true theories are those theories that are shielded from uncertainty, but of course a theory may be protected for many reasons, and to call all protected theories true generalizes the idea of protection too far. I may be afraid to challenge a theory and therefore avoid a thorough investigation of it, but I should not think it has earned the title true because of my fear.
And no matter how many times a theory has withstood attack, and no matter how much certainty we have in a proposition, it is always possible that a theory may fall. Empirically, it is likely that all theories will leave. Whatever truths you protect now, you may always abandon them later, especially if you continue to put effort into their destruction.
Yet we do fight for particular theories, but it does not help us to call fought-for theories true. These theories resist destruction