Go back to Page 1 of "Knowledge as Metaphor"
Illusion of Objectivism
In the last year, I have developed a growing interest and appreciation of mythology, so one of my goals in this essay is to illuminate the value of myth as providing meaningful metaphorical truth. As such, I want to cast further doubt on the intuitive urge to accept reality as it seems. I may be beating a dead horse, but objectivity is a horse we ride all the time in daily life and language, so I suspect it requires a thorough beatdown (if you are already on-board with “radical doubt,” spare yourself and just move on to the next section). Reality is commonly treated as objective. That is, outside of mind. Object-oriented, rather than subject-oriented. In other words, it is objects that make the world “real,” not subjects. In Autopoiesis and Cognition [25], biologist Humberto Maturana asserts, “The basic claim of science is objectivity: it attempts, through the application of a well defined methodology, to make statements about the universe. At the very root of this claim, however, lies its weakness: the a priori assumption that objective knowledge constitutes a description of that which is known.” In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [26], Thomas Kuhn writes, “Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. …(but) Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data.” He continues, “There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like “really there”; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle.” Philosopher Willard Quine makes the same point [27]: “One’s ontology (paradigm) is basic to the conceptual scheme by which one interprets all experiences, even the most commonplace ones… Judged in another conceptual scheme (paradigm), an ontological statement which is axiomatic to one man’s mind may, with equal immediacy and triviality, be adjudged false.” In other words, our paradigm informs the way we interpret empirical observations, then circles back to potentially shape our paradigm. As Werner Heisenberg put it, “Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves … What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” George Lakoff writes, “What objectivism misses is the fact that understanding, and therefore truth, is necessarily relative to our cultural conceptual systems and that it cannot be framed in any absolute or neutral conceptual system. Objectivism also misses the fact that human conceptual systems are metaphorical in nature and involve an imaginative understanding of one kind of thing in terms of another.” The essential point is that we seek scientific frameworks that reflect and explain our experience. When sufficiently satisfied with an explanation or proof, we call it “fact,” forgetting that we are making metaphysical assumptions about what the recognized patterns represent. The observed patterns can indeed be used to determine conditionally empirical facts within the paradigm, but we can’t know what deeper reality they represent. In other words, “truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions.”
Cognitive Scientist Donald Hoffman is a modern critic of matter/energy as ‘objective’ reality [28]. He says, ‘It’s very clear from quantum mechanics that our ability to measure the same publically accessible objects in the exact same situation and get the same results does not result in objectivity. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects.” Hoffman describes human perception as an interface, wherein our experience is created by the mind, using symbols (like color, smell, sound, taste, etc) to optimize our ability to survive by cutting out all non-essential information. Hoffman observes, “we’ve evolved these symbols to keep us alive, so we have to take them seriously. But it’s a logical flaw to think that if we have to take them seriously, we also have to take them literally.” He continues, “There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you. According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit to survive than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” There is plenty of evidence from psychology that our consciousness constructs our experiential world in ways that are highly subjective [29]. Put differently, we could say that waking consciousness acts more like a filter, stripping away all awareness and perception that is non-essential to survival. Many mystics and consciousness “explorers” (a nice way of saying explorers in the field of hallucinogens and entheogens) would say this is so. Even without considering the phenomenon of mystical experiences, Hoffman contends that reality may consist of immaterial universal consciousness. “Idealism” in the parlance of philosophy. It is fairly easy to imagine how this could be. For instance, though we use language to speak of a shared cosmos outside the body, we could invert the entire metaphysical belief structure to say that instead of looking ‘outside’ yourself at a shared physical world, reality is looking ‘inside’ a multi-focal universal consciousness to construct a cosmos that is informational in nature, and hence, ‘immaterial.’ In terms of empirical experience, the two scenarios are interchangeable. We say the brain causes consciousness, but this conclusion is created by its premises; we can invert our interpretation of empirical observations to say consciousness creates the appearance of neural correlates for its own activity. What we call ‘physical’ laws could be regarded as laws of a strictly psychological interface (akin the programmatic rules that govern a video game) with us being like characters in a rich, five-sense holographic world. Typically, when this is imagined in modern fiction (e.g. ‘The Matrix,’ ‘Inception,’ ‘Westworld’), the illusory reality is still rooted in physical Realism at some other level. Futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has predicted that virtual reality will feel “100% real” in 30 years, which – if true – would provide one more illustration for exactly why, philosophically, we needn’t assume a material basis for experience. If anything, Occam’s Razor would seem to favor Idealism, since it doesn’t require creating ‘objects’ outside of consciousness itself. But as Embodied Cognition suggests, our cognitive metaphorical paradigm still grounds itself in the embodied “physical” human experience. So, regardless of its metaphysical truth, physical Realism is a useful metaphor for Reality, so long as we remember its ontological validity doesn’t necessarily extend beyond metaphor.
The metaphorical framework we use to speak of the world provides context for the stories that give our lives meaning. This is true for my own life story as well. It is a mythos. The story I tell about myself is likely different than the story you tell about me, or someone else tells about me. That story changes with time, not only by addition, but by reconstructing the entire story. If I kill nine people when I am fifty, the mythos of my entire previous forty-nine years will be revised to suit the ending. The same is true if I am elected President of the United States. Not only is my own story being constantly revised, but the global context into which that story fits is constantly being revised by new scientific discoveries, religious ideas, experiences, perspectives, and so on. The death of a person or technology or idea does not end the perpetual revision of its mythos. Many major figures have risen to prominence long after death. This constant reconceptualization of mythos speaks to the profound extent to which our “reality” is constantly recreated, reimagined, and only loosely bound (by tradition) to “objective” history.
The premise that reality is physical and objective has been the unchallenged mythos since at least the Enlightenment (though it’s likely be been dominant in the west since at least Aristotle). This can be attributed to the success of science in measuring and successfully predicting our experience by assuming an objectively measurable reality. But in Meaning, polymath and philosopher Michael Polanyi writes, “the ideal of pure objectivity in knowing and in science has been shown to be a myth.” George Lakoff adds, “All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth any more than they can function without metaphor. And just as we often take the metaphors of our own culture as truths, so we often take the myths of our own culture as truths. The myth of objectivism is particularly insidious in this way: Not only does it purport not to be a myth, but it makes both myths and metaphors objects of belittlement and scorn: according to the objectivist myth, myths and metaphors cannot be taken seriously because they are not objectively true. But the myth of objectivism is itself not objectively true.” He concludes, “For us, meaning depends on understanding. Meaning is always meaning to someone. There is no such thing as a meaning of a sentence in itself, independent of any people.” [30]
Mythology as Metaphor
We are told that the understanding of reality offered by science is objective, devoid of mythology, and neutral in its ethical implications. It is not. It radiates meaning. In More Than Allegory [31], Bernardo Kastrup writes, “To say that nature is a mechanical apparatus without purpose or intentionality is itself an interpretation; a myth. …Underlying our contemporary attitude toward religious myths is the hidden but far-reaching assumption that all relevant truths about reality can be directly captured by the intellect in the form of language constructs. In other words, we take it for granted that, if something is true, then it can be said,” and said without contradiction or paradox. It seems to me that equating “true” with literal, physical, and propositional has done enormous damage to religious understanding. In particular, it has erected an apparent barrier between religious and scientific worldviews. I believe this split is a false dichotomy. It is the natural outgrowth of science being understood as myth-free and literal truth. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek contends that the notion of truth as literal is a modern phenomenon. He writes [32], “Robert Pfaller demonstrated in his Illusionen der Anderen, the direct belief in a truth which is subjectively fully assumed is a modern phenomenon… in premodern times, belief was not ‘literal,’ it included a distance which was lost with the passage to modernity.” Robert Pfaller asserts [33] that modernity’s supposed escape from mythology is an illusion, and that we have simply replaced one kind of ritualistic representation with another. Bernardo Kastrup writes, “Today, we don’t live in a mythless society. Our condition is much more tragic: we live in a society dominated by increasingly deprived myths.” The dominant scientific metaphor imagines the world as a machine, made up of inert material acted upon by chaotic energy, with the entire mechanism operating according to certain “laws of nature” supplemented by random chance with no inherent meaning to any of it. I was recently watching HBO’s Westworld, a story that takes place in a Virtual Reality, of which one character says, “I love that everything in here is intentional. Everything has meaning. The real world is just chaos.” It is hard to better summarize the manner and degree to which our scientific myths about the nature of reality have structured our modern conception of meaning. A reality guided by “chaos” has dramatically different meaning than a reality guided by “providence,” even if both result in a reality that looks exactly the same. They may be empirically indistinguishable, but the different metaphors imbue experience with dramatically different meaning. For instance, compare conceptions of the universe as: a) clockwork mechanism b) cosmic organism c) moral battlefield d) race for X (e.g. power, wealth, etc) e) testing ground f) meaningless illusion g) existential journey, and so forth. Each metaphor presents us with a completely different story about who we are, what the world is, and hence, a different mythos about existence itself.
It has been the traditional domain of religion to help guide us towards meaning in life, and provide a meaningful mythos. The meaning is necessarily metaphorical. The universality of a mythic truth makes it a different a deeper kind of truth than historical truth. Myths refer to deep archetypes that transcend time and appear in all different forms. In The Power of Myth [34], Joseph Campbell says, “Myths are infinite in their revelation… Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images… it is… what can be known but not told. So this is the penultimate truth. It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.” The notion that religious truth is a pointer, not the destination itself, seems largely lost on the form of Christianity I was raised with. This lack of “distance” between truth and comprehension cripples mainstream Christianity, and binds its dogma to a certain metaphorical view. The most common metaphor used for God in Christianity and Judaism is “Father.” This powerful metaphor entails certain associations, like Creator, Provider, Protector, Leader, Judge, and so forth. George Lakoff describes it as a “strict Father” metaphor, writing, “In the Strict Father model, God the Almighty created all that is according to his divine plan and moral order. He issues moral commandments in the form of moral laws binding on all rational creatures. Our duty is to learn God’s laws and to develop the moral strength to obey them in a world filled with evil, both internal and external. In the Final Judgment, God will punish the wicked and reward the morally good (or “saved”).” This metaphorical view of God profoundly shapes the Christian experience of God and religion. It also helps explain [35] how the profoundly un-Christlike doctrines of someone with an authoritarian bent like Donald Trump can appeal to evangelical Christians. Even though his personal morality may differ dramatically from theirs, the hierarchical structure of his moral worldview matches theirs. Beyond that, especially since the Enlightenment, “God” has come to be understood as an ontological proposition, an Ultimate Being with a certain character and personality. This puts God “out there” to conceivably be proven or disproven. I would say this objectivist conception of God in Theism is what effectively necessitated the modern version of Atheism. Bernardo Kastrup writes, “Cynicism (atheism) and fundamentalism are the two sides of one coin. Both practice voluntary blindness toward transcendent truth: one (cynicism/atheism) by refusing to acknowledge that shadows (of the Transcendent) convey valid insights about it, and the other (fundamentalism) by taking a shadow (of the Transcendent) to be the sole and complete truth.” In Modern Man in Search of a Soul [36], Carl Jung writes, “whenever we speak of religious contents we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object.” But there is a widely held view, especially in Protestant Christianity, that God is quite sufficiently and comprehensibly revealed in the Bible. God is thought to be known and knowable. The Protestant reformer John Calvin suggests an explicit and propositional knowledge of God. He writes, “there is no knowing that does not begin with knowing God” and “true wisdom consists of two things: knowledge of God and knowledge of Self.” My last essay examined the inscrutability of Self. How much more inscrutable must any conception of a Transcendent God be? John Calvin seemed to disagree. It seems many modern Evangelical Christians do too.
I would contend that “God” is another profoundly ambiguous word. It can mean any of a great many different things, as evidenced by broadly different conceptions like Theism, Deism, Pantheism and Panentheism, each of which has countless sub-variations. However, especially in the west, “God” is generally taken to be “super” natural. This defines God out of natural experience. Both western science and religion tend to start from a paradigm in which the cosmos is inherently material and inert, so both “God” and “consciousness” are absent from this paradigm of the natural world. That wasn’t always the case. Neurophysiologist Susan Pockett writes [37], “For most of human history, the word ‘consciousness’ was generally taken to indicate not the sort of individual awareness to which the word now refers, but rather a universal entity variously named Atman, Brahman, Allah, Jehovah, God, the Unmoved Mover (Aristotle), Absolute Spirit (Hegel), or any number of other names according to who was writing about it.” Thirteenth century mystic Rumi used the Sufi phrase “La’illaha il’Allahu,” meaning, “there is no reality but God; there is only God.” Or, as Saint Teresa of Avila put it, “You find yourself in God and God in yourself.”
A Divine Cosmos
In the pre-Christian East and West, philosophers and teachers largely encouraged the taming of desire and exercise of virtue as “the way” to God. That ethos dominates Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and essentially all of the major Greek and Roman philosophical schools. The idea of “God” was closer to a guiding principle of the universe than a Being with personality. Nature was metaphorically understood as a Divine organism rather than an inert machine. In Timaeus [38], Plato writes of the world as one divinely created animal, comprehending within itself all other animals. “the creator …constructed the universe, which was a single animal comprehending in itself all other animals, mortal and immortal.” In Meditations [39], the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius writes, “Ever consider and think upon the world as being but one living substance, and having but one soul, and how all things in the world, are terminated into one sensitive power; and are done by one general motion as it were, and deliberation of that one soul …there is but one and the same order; and through all things, one and the same God, the same substance and the same law.” The idea that nature is a manifestation of the Divine can be found in Judaism, and is a core teaching of Taoism. The Tao Te Ching [40] says, “Before the birth of all things, there existed an undifferentiated whole. A solitary void: unchanging, yet operating everywhere, without exhaustion. It is therefore considered the source of everything. I do not know its true name, although some call it Tao. If compelled to characterize it, I would simply call it great. …The Tao flows everywhere, in all directions. All things depend upon it, but it turns nothing away.” This echoes an acknowledgement of Divine unity held by many Greek philosophers. A fragment from Heraclites in the 7th century BCE reads, “all forms are produced by the One.” Buddhism doesn’t concern itself with the word “God,” but teaches the same underlying unity. The Zen poet Seng Ts’an once wrote, “The One is none other than All, the All none other than the One.” In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind [41], Buddhist monk Shunryu Suzuki speaks of “God” as “Big Mind”: “That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind. To experience this is to have religious feeling. …Whatever you experience is an expression of Big Mind (God). Big Mind and Small Mind (Self) are one.” This echoes Hinduism’s Upanishadic maxim that “Atman is Brahman.” One of the most common metaphors in the mysticism of nondual religions is the relationship between water and ocean. In the Crescent Jewel of Wisdom [42], 9th century Vedanta theologian Shankara writes, “Just as wave and foam, eddy and bubble are in their own nature water; so, from the body to the personality, all is consciousness, the pure essence of consciousness” (i.e. Brahman, God). In this metaphorical way, Self (wave) is in God (water), as God (water) makes up the Self (wave). Shunryu Suzuki writes, “Waves are the practice of the water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one.”
It seems to me that our understanding of “God” is necessarily metaphorical. So the metaphors we use to understand God determine God’s meaning to us. That is to say, God is found within, in experience, not as a feature of the landscape. Jesus says just that in Luke 17:21: “the Kingdom of God is within you.” As such, I might say that, in a sense, “God” is as “real” as you think God is. If you have no sense of God, then your mythological world is indeed Godless. If God is real to you, then God inhabits a space (maybe small, maybe large, maybe ALL) in the mythos of your worldview. God can be the cause of everything you experience or none of it at all. What and how we seek meaning in the world is inseparable from what we find. In Matthew 7:8, Jesus says “he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks the door will be opened.” In the words of Jewish theologian Martin Buber, “In truth, there is no God-seeking because there is nothing where one could not find him.” The idea that God is anywhere one might seek is asserted even more explicitly by Hinduism’s Mandukya Upanishad [43], suggesting that the form of God we find reflects the metaphor by which we seek God: “Those who believe in the Life see Him as the Life; …those who believe in the forms of matter, see Him as the forms of matter… Those who believe in the Scriptures, see Him in the Scriptures; …those who think of the consciousness which enjoys, see Him as the enjoying consciousness; those who think of what is enjoyed, see Him as what is enjoyed… Those who think of Time, see Him as Time; those who think of space, see Him in space; those who are set on words, think of Him as words… Those who dwell on emotion, think of Him as emotion; those who dwell on pure thought, think of Him as pure thought; those who dwell in imagination, think of Him as imagination; those who dwell in law, think of Him as Law; those who disregard law, think of Him as above law… Thus all ever perceive Him, each after his own thought …In whatever form He may appear to anyone, that form each beholds; He protects him, becoming that form; and he who thinks on Him under that form, enters into Him; the forms are all produced by the One; therefore Oneness is the blessed state.”
There can be as many metaphors and mythologies as there are minds to conceive them, and our myths and metaphors change with time. Our belief in a particular metaphor is formative to our conception of God and cosmos, and the metaphors we adopt as “true” condition the world we experience. However else one conceives of God, one near-universal religious assertion is that “God” is ALL. What does that mean? Christian theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, “God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him.” In other words, to say “God exists” makes God too small. It denotes God as an object within or limited to the domain of existence. Extending this thought, “God” is not an ontological assertion to be proven or disproven, but a placeholder for the ineffable, including and beyond Existence itself. This is a religious mythos that appeals to me. It is a metaphor for “God” that resonates with me. I am a child of Existence, so there is a sense in which God is closely bound to Existence itself in my human experience. I am subject to Existence, ruled by Existence, at the mercy of Existence, and perpetually marvelling at the wonder of Existence. I do not believe Existence judges me, or is in the business of parsing itself into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ I think all experience is rooted in the Divine. In the words of the Sufi poet, Rumi [44], “The whole world is a form for truth. When someone does not feel grateful to that, the forms appear to be as he feels. They mirror his anger, his greed, and his fear. Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it.” So then, what of suffering? The Isa Upanishad says, “For him who sees everywhere oneness, how can there be delusion or grief?” Rumi writes, “Existence answers, All this was made by the one who hides inside you… There is no reality but God; there is only God.” This is not an ontological assertion. It a metaphor, a mythos about existence itself. It is one I choose to embrace.
Notes:
[1]: The Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff
[2]: Ontological: Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence or reality as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.
[3]: Metaphysical: Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time and space.
[4]: Fundamental uncertainty is probably better summarized in this book than in my essays: The Uncertain Universe, by Andrew Thomas, though here is my Part 2 Essay
[5]: Part 6 Essay
[6]: The God Problem, by Howard Bloom
[7]: The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
[8]: Personal Knowledge, by Michael Polanyi
[9]: Philosophical Investigations, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
[10]: Philosophy in the Flesh, by George Lakoff
[11]: Looking for Spinoza, by Antonio Damasio
[12]: Waking, Dreaming, Being by Evan Thompson
[13]: Descartes Error, by Antonio Damasio
[14]: Mirror Neurons: “A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another.”
[15]: Research on link between Physical and Social pain.
[16]: Mindful attention’s effect on neural networks.
[17]: Placebo Effect information and statistics.
[18]: Novel Metaphors Influencing Sensory Judgments, by Michael Slepian
[19]: Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, by Friedrich Nietzsche
[20]: Divergent Thinking with Sir Ken Robinson (his very entertaining talk)
[21]: Quantum vacuum energy
[22]: Meaning, by Michael Polanyi
[23]: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Natural Sciences, by Eugene Wigner
[24]: Computation and the Future of the Human Condition, by Stephen Wolfram
[25]: Autopoiesis and Cognition, by Humberto Maturana and Francis Varela
[26]: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
[27]: On What There Is, by Willard Quine
[28]: The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality, interview with Donald Hoffman
[29]: David Eagleman talk about cognitive construction of experience
[30]: Meaning is created at higher orders of complexity that are progressively less material. In The God Problem, Howard Bloom writes, “The iteration of simple rules would mean nothing without the emergence of big pictures. Big pictures within which the smaller units fit. The brick would be nothing without the vision of the wall. The wall would be nothing without the vision of the apartment complex.” We find that the laws of nature transform at different scales of spacetime, new patterns emerge, new rules of behavior and meaning emerge, and meaning grows as interactions grow in scale and complexity. For example, subatomic particles can flit into and out of existence, can combine to form atoms, which combine to form molecules, which give rise to proteins, which give rise to organisms, which have intentions, which develop purposes, which ascribe meaning, and so forth. In Transcendence and Self-Transcendence,, Michael Polanyi writes, “At each successive stage of this epic process we see arising some novel operations not specifiable in terms of the preceding level.” For instance, the laws of mechanics are not implied by the laws classical physics, and classical physics is not implied by quantum mechanics. Polanyi continues, “Each higher level is more intangible than the one below it and also enriched in subtlety. And as these more intangible levels are understood, a steadily deeper understanding of life and man is gained. These understandings constitute transcendence in the world.” Observing the patterns of order that transcend from one hierarchical level to the next, Howard Bloom speculates that “there is more than an even chance that we humans have free will, competition, dominance hierarchies, love, and war because we inherited them from the cosmos that gave us birth… these things were basic patterns that shaped the behavior of the earliest particles, atoms, and colonies of cells… we have these nasty—and sometimes brilliantly creative—characteristics because they are deep structures, Ur (i.e. primal) patterns” in the cosmos.
[31]: More than Allegory, by Bernardo Kastrup
[32]: The Ontology of Quantum Physics (excerpted from “Less than Nothing”) by Slovaj Zizek
[33]: Interpassivity and the Theory of Ritual, by Robert Pfaller
[34]: The Power of Myth, by Joseph Campbell
[35]: Why Trump?, by George Lakoff
[36]: Modern Man in Search of a Soul, by Carl Jung
[37]: “Field Theories of Consciousness” from Scholarpedia, article by Susan Pockett
[38]: Timaeus, by Plato
[39]: Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
[40]: Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu
[41]: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki
[42]: Crest-Jewel of Wisdom, by Ari Shankarachara
[43]: Mandukya Upanishad, by unknown
[44]: The Essential Rumi, by Rumi