116. NOTHING IS REAL AND YET EVERYTHING IS REAL - On Constructing A Better Reality
Nothing is real and yet everything is real. In many ways philosophy is about confronting this truism that we’re usually too afraid to acknowledge. In fact, our fear of acknowledging disconcerting truths might be the reason philosophy is not for everyone. While philosophers sit around seeking clarity and understanding of things others simply accept without question, those others look at us strangely. The unexamined life, they say, is entirely worth living. Examining life too much can only lead to problems.
David Hume straddled the line between the two. Radically transforming our understanding, throwing away key ideas of causality and self but then recognising that this might be a cause of anxiety. He suggests playing backgammon with friends and drinking wine, as the solution. In other words: once the uncomfortable truth is exposed, ignore it. It is too much to deal with and stay happy. Ignore it until you can forget.
I was at dinner the other day with my in-laws, discussing my father-in-law’s colour-blindness. Everything in the garden is red to him, because he sees greens as reds. My family were marvelling about how he still loves to garden despite never being able to fully see what he has done, and I became the spectre at the feast. I pointed out that arguably none of us ever see the garden “properly” because all we actually have access to is the representation of a garden constructed in our heads from sense-data received through our sense-organs and reconstructed virtually by our brains. The image we believe to be seeing “out there” is actually always “in here”. The call is coming from inside the house. And so not only have we not ever seen “the” garden, only “a” garden, but we have never even seen the same garden as each other. We have only ever seen the version of the garden constructed in our heads and privately accessible to us and us alone. For all we know our “green” that we feel so very sad my father-in-law has never experienced is someone else around the table’s “blue”.
None of which is to say that there isn’t a real garden out there. Only that this level of “reality” is inaccessible to us. It may be the cause of our sensations and experiences, but those experiences it causes are not identical to the thing itself. I see, in my mind’s eye, the image proffered by light-rays bouncing off an object I will never see directly and interpreted by my brain. But the causal-object is still there. At least, it is unless you are an idealist, who, like Berkeley, might suggest that if this is so, and we have no means of knowing for sure there is a causal-object (because we can never experience it) then we cannot assent to such a thing’s existence.
All of this is standard stuff for a philosopher. We’ve heard it all before, and had the time to go off and play backgammon in order to selectively ignore the things which make us most uncomfortable. But my in-laws were hearing all this for the first time and were clearly discomforted by the thought. We quickly moved the conversation on. Still, there are some even more disconcerting consequences of the standard philosophy of perception canards that too few thinkers seem bothered by.
Consider: it cannot both be true that advertising has no influence on our thinking and that people spend over £23bn a year on advertising. At worst, people are spending their twenty three billion pounds to influence us in a range of ways we are barely aware of. At best, the only advertising that has ever worked is the advertising for advertising itself which has convinced so many people to spend billions on a product which is utterly useless. Which means advertising does still work.
What has this got to do with our perception of a garden? Well, it is simply to remind us that it isn’t just our sense-data that we construct worlds out of in our heads and then tell ourselves a story about to make-believe that what we see is real. Desires and seeming needs are also constructed by unbidden prompts to that super-computer in our heads which it tries to make sense of in a coherent and cohesive narrative. I can’t be buying this new PlayStation because I’ve been led mindlessly by advertising because that would violate the story I tell myself that I am free. So instead I acknowledge that the advertising might have added to my awareness but actually my final decision to purchase the console came from careful deliberation and personal choice. It just so happened to coincide with the launch of this new product.
People feel the same way about ideology. When they hear the claim that their deeply held beliefs are in fact the result of ideological indoctrination from their family, their school, their place of worship, they resist the idea despite a possible wealth of evidence. Because these ideas are my ideas, freely chosen, and couldn’t possibly be simply the lazy result of repetition and shared delusion. The whole idea of free-will itself, of course, another possible construct given that our so-called freedom is so clearly determined by so many things and must be if our freedom is to make sense and not be the pure insanity of randomness that has no explanatory story. But, of course, if we are not really “free” then so much else falls apart: not only every “choice” we think we have made, but our values, our responsibilities, our thoughts about the actions and behaviours of others…
We must never forget that the human eye lies to itself every day. There is a blind spot to our side which the brain just fills in to make a clear and coherent picture where no such picture exists. We can expose the blind-spot by attending closely to it and holding a finger there. We can get killed in car-crashes that rip us out of the fantasy world we inhabit and smash us back into reality if we forget it’s there.
When we look at the moon, we see a face that isn’t there. The jacket hanging on our door in the dark becomes a ghostly figure. A house, if looked at in the right way, has its windows turned into eyes and its door a mouth.
Buddhists, and Hume, say the self is a story we tell our…selves… too. One we need to learn to forget if we are to be truly enlightened.
We have created languages to try and construct a shared world out of the many worlds in our individual heads. To name things and ideas and give them mutual meaning. To create bridges out of our solipsism. But the history of linguistic philosophy shows us too how many muddles and mistakes this clumsy tool has given us. Our shared linguistic reality falters and becomes victim of interpretation and misunderstanding if, that is, it was ever describing anything real to begin with. Philosophers today continue to try and untangle the mess of words in regular use and get to the bottom of what we are trying to say, but even in this task there are disagreements about what exactly we are trying to get to the bottom of. Social meaning? Objective meaning? Subjective meaning? Meaning to clarify or meaning to transform? One, all, neither?
If you’ve ever wondered why philosophers can’t ever seem to find agreement on anything perhaps this is the answer? If the world is a total construct which ignores difficult idiosyncrasies and contradictions by telling both individual and collective stories and creating narratives then we are all starting our philosophical investigations from completely different constructs of not only the “truth” but of what is “important”. When we then think we have “solved” something, each new individual story, or set of stories, a philosopher tells can convince only those already sharing certain other assumptions with them about the world which are unlikely to ever be universal. The effort is futile - another reason to play Backgammon.
We live trapped inside our story-telling skulls in a constructed reality of sensible things and understand the world we are biologically forced to inhabit through constructed narratives of ideology and shared linguistic use. We tell ourselves stories about what and who we are and what the world around us is like. We tell those stories and, importantly, we change those stories to fit with new information so that it all makes a coherent and continuous whole. We seek explanations and answers, even where there might not be explanations and answers to be found. No matter - we create myths and gods to account for our mysteries, giving even the mysterious a sense of clarity and purpose. It can still be explained. Our story remains coherent. The grass is red because it has always been red. It’s red because I am colour-blind and I am colour-blind because I call “red” what you call “green”. If, however, through evolution and genetic inheritance more future generations called your “green” “red” then it will become you who is colour-blind and not me. If I concede I bought the PlayStation because Sony paid millions of dollars to make me want it then I might also have to consider the impact of the millions of dollars spent on ThinkTanks, grants and research to disseminate certain political ideas that I hold to be true, or the way my religious faith is embedded into the society and family in which I was raised. And if I concede that my religious and political beliefs are, like my consumer desires, merely the result of strategic indoctrination then I might have to ask about all of my choices. Did I marry this person because I truly loved them and made a choice, or was it merely a story I told myself? Did I want to have these children or was it just a biological imperative that formed as a story in my head? Do I like these friends, or were they just there? Did all the things we have in common form a special bond of some sort, or did we have those things in common because it is just what people in our social class, of our age, at that time, tend to do and we have retrospectively made it appear more special than it is? Did I choose to write this blog post right now, or was I just doomed to?
When I leave my desk in despair and go to play Backgammon I realise that the whole world might be Backgammon. A constructed reality of arbitrary rules that nobody has to engage with if they don’t want. At any moment we could sweep away the board and play a different game. But, importantly, so long as we agree to play Backgammon then the constructed reality of Backgammon is as real as it ever could be. Like Tinkerbell in the story of Peter Pan, or financial currencies when they are strong, we keep it alive through our belief that it exists. So long as we’re playing Backgammon and agree to playing Backgammon then the rules of Backgammon are in play. They are as real as the greenness of our grass. A shared agreement of language and interpretation that may not hold any objective truth, but has a causal story that makes it so all the same. And so long as we are all enjoying the Backgammon, why ask too many questions?
Because in the wider world it is not Backgammon that we are playing. It is hard to look around and conclude that everyone is enjoying it, or even that we have all agreed to the construct. Hence we must continue to ask these questions and trouble the construct in order to show that reality can be transformed simply by transforming it. All that is needed is collective agreement to what the new fantasy might be. Not necessarily the agreement of everyone, just enough of us sufficient to play a new game.
Nothing is real and yet everything is real. As real as we agree to make it. Are we really happy playing Backgammon when so many better games are possible?
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com