Here is a question I offer to save time only: what would you prefer to know completely, a single judgment accompanied by clear argument, or the person that created the judgment? Argue or agree with me, I will not ask why—I will want to know who you are. Fine, if there is time we can argue later.
8Similar perceptions may enter awareness by means of alternate routes, or be sensorial moments of an extended whole. In a dream a familiar object may be perceived, an apple perhaps, but this object will have followed a different path than the apple seen in waking life. We assume the dream apple arises from memory while the awake apple begins as a path through the retina. However, the dream apple from memory began as a path through the retina itself, and the apple experienced in waking life may find its way to memory and contribute to a future dream of fruit. A dream apple and an apple in waking life, as part of the same path, are perceptual slices of a solitary object extended in time.
9Pitch darkness is as much a visual sensation as a Hawaiian rainbow. 10
The historical ‘mere appearance’, as the adjective suggests, points to moral rather than epistemological concerns. In Plato, Descartes, and Kant we see the systematic devaluation of appearances. In Nietzsche we witness the reaction of one who seeks a reevaluation of this moral assessment, and today we find ourselves between those philosophers who worship appearance as a hyper-real, ontological first substance; and those who condemn appearance in the ancient tradition while searching for a means of its destruction.
11Theories morph, reach out, grow new limbs and slice off their gangrenous parts. They lust after time, collectively competing for the stability of the moment. I suspect that Truer theories are correlated with a greater degree of spacetime self-stability, but a theory’s stability may derive from attributes other than truth: dogmatism, denial, avoidance, promotion, aesthetics, comfort, and price are a few stabilizing forces commonly associated with the theory of the day.
12Theories create spaces for possible experiential judgments, and experiential judgments can tessellate together to form theories. A theory itself is judged according to a goodness of fit. If new experiential judgments fit into old theoretical spaces, then the theory is judged to be consistent, good, correct, useful, or verified—these are some of the words we use to describe the measure of a theory. If a judgment does not fit, the theory (or judgment) may always be contorted to make the fit more agreeable.
13Some experiences do not fit snuggly within any theory yet they have occurred nonetheless. These sorts of things cause trauma or inspire awe, and they tend to dominate the men and women that live with them.
14Do not say that theories are in the mind, for mind is a theory and ‘in the mind’ is another. Expectation and judgment connect theory to experience. A correlation between theory and experience is beyond both, but it can be fudged.
15An expectation that is fulfilled is not true, it is filled. True and false do not apply to expectations, nor are they a form of belief. Expectations are either filled or unfilled—they are transient, temporal things that may evaporate, and their endings have nothing to do with choice, logic, faith, belief, or truth. An expectation is a lock that may be opened by a key, except that the key is both temporal and spatial, and the lock creates the key, and the key, the lock; a lock that once turned, transforms into something else.
Every theory is a repository of anxiety and a source of comfort—including this one. (I would not debate someone who wanted to swap the roles of anxiety and comfort in this claim.)17
Listen carefully: science does not reduce the uncertainty of the universe; it deepens the everswelling, radiant abyss of the unknown. For each solitary prediction given by physical theory and law, a billion new opportunities are opened, all of which are uncounted, unobserved, and unexpected by man. The value of science and art are similar—both expand the unmoral possibilities of existence by unleashing the fiery unknown.
18Here is another definition of science: it is the process of reintegrating the discrete experiential blocks of attention that were split off from the unified self-interacting volume. In relating experiential blocks together, we begin to acquire a picture of the unified volume as it is relative to the person who fragments it. Since every act by men and women is part of the dynamic volume itself, the process of scientific reintegration necessarily complicates the very thing it is trying desperately to understand; consequently, science creates far more than it will ever explain.
19Uncertainty is not the antithesis of knowledge, it is its prerequisite.
20
Since the beginning, an absence of knowledge has been confused with the presence of illusion—but what is an absence of knowledge? Clearly the absence of knowledge, if known, is the presence of some other type of knowledge and not illusion. Yet illusion only becomes possible in the presence of knowledge. Knowledge that the world is unknown permits us to say that we are always deceived, but this deception is caused by knowledge itself. How can true knowledge birth true deception? And how do we know that the world is unknown?—perhaps this supposition itself holds the only deception to be found.
21God secretly hoped for Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. 22
Whatever our explanation of the universe on the smallest scales will be—quantum particles, fields, strings, or stranger things still—you can be assured that these minute atoms of reality will themselves be a function of the universe taken as whole, and the universe a function of them. Prediction is cheap. Any mass-produced algorithm with enough training can do it well.
24All change is a form of loss but only sometimes of gain. Change is a gamble. 25
Attentional objects, including internal and external impressions, are always labeled and indentified by a ‘recognition’ process that already exists, including those things that are unrecognized and unlabeled. We would like to speak of the ‘raw’ substrate that submits to the processes of attending, recognizing, and labeling; but whether this substrate is known or unknown, these processes are largely indifferent and dedicated to processing the ‘form’ of that substance. If substance is known, then only the form of that substance can interest us; if unknown, then the form is all we may know at that moment. Conversely, substance is grasped in the negation of attention, recognition, and labeling.
26Thought is expectation partially uncoupled from experiential biasing. It has achieved partial freedom from the past and future, which is why thought is glorified.
27
Someone said this before . Present assumptions create the past, and the future is your collection of expectations right now. Fortunately, assumptions and expectations are like energy—neither is easily created nor destroyed.
28We do not ‘have’ beliefs and experiences and thoughts, nor do objects ‘have’ properties, and words do not ‘have’ meaning. ‘Have’ is a distorted relation that implies necessity without doing any work. Berkeley’s idealism and later phenomenology developed out of the inadequacy of the relation ‘have’ that is sloppily scattered about philosophical discussions. To the tuned-in mind, each careless locution of ‘have’ in serious philosophical argument is a laughable pause that signals an obvious conceptual avoidance by the writer. The few individuals who have felt the impotence of the possessive ‘have’ necessarily produced influential thought. Berkeley, for instance, is refreshingly rigorous about the equivalence between an object and its properties upon declaring that objects are collections of properties. When other writers dogmatically state that A’s have B’s, I have no idea what they mean by this possessive, or any other possessive that is not a structurally assumed necessity. Do objects own properties, control them, exchange goods for them?
29A mark of Truth: the ability to perceive another being’s perceptions. A faulty F is either not an F, because it lacks something necessary of F-ness, or still an F, where the fault identifies a possible way of being an F. If the former then fault is merely a way
to point to other, perhaps related objects and makes no claim on objective error. If the latter then we can ask, why is a particular way of being an F objectively improper? There are many ways of being an F, all of which are ontologically sure and true. You may say, in a moral way, that an F should be one way rather than another, but then are we not talking of value or sin? A faulty F, so long as it remains an F, means an F that is other than I projected it to be. Whether it is something more, I cannot say.
31Physical processes of the universe, should such things exist, are outside of fault in understanding. A proton cannot commit a dynamical error, nor can two, nor a billion-billion entangled together. And when a particle appears to transgress its physical bounds, physicists do not see fault; they extend the notion of particle to include ‘virtual’ and ‘symmetry breakage’ or they may transform the theory altogether. Physical errors, like Godly errors, are impossible. Therefore, should not the physicalist conclude that particulate men and women have never, not once, committed an objective error, conceptual or otherwise?
32Color is an illusion to be sure, but this proposition is an illusion itself. Color only appears to be an illusion. Any paid philosopher ought to be clever enough to write a compelling manuscript supporting this regressive view.
33If allowed to run free, ‘appears’ and ‘looks’ are infinitely regressive verbs that always apply so long as you can contrive a series of alternative theories regarding the subject in question. We welcome these two in everyday speech. They are efficient. In philosophizing they make a joke of your entire project.
34 Illusion is an illusion.