Recently a Christian friend of mine sent me an email raising issues connected with probability, Covid 19 testing and the apparently unrelated philosophical question about what was the true nature of reality. As he is working in Africa these subjects are all linked together under the title of intercultural mission and contextualisation of the Christian message. Where social conditions may be very different and where perceptions & world view also seem so different social relativism is always a temptation. Social relativism is certainly not a position I would subscribe to myself although I do understand how it arises. For example, something as far removed from us as a bat experiences a world of very different quality to ourselves and its perceptions have very different connotations. But although the bat will see a vastly dissimilar world qualitatively and in terms of its meanings & goals, the formal structure of that world would be the same for ourselves; e..g the bat agrees with us about where objects are although the quality of their experience of those objects and what they signify will likely be vastly different. This identity of formal structure exists because the same transcendent laws organising the patterns that link a bat's experiences also link our experiences and, moreover, there is almost faultless registration* between the laws which govern our experiences and those that govern the experiences of the bat.
For me reality only exists in so far as interrogation of the formal logic controlling the patterns of our experience passes the equivalent of a kind of Turing's test for reality: that is, the underlying logic is sufficiently replete to return the same coherent and organised world when tested by any experiential sampling. But my contention is that without the potential for serving up an experience of a rational world the transcendent logic of the laws of physics is meaningless (See the introduction to my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity where I express similar views).
As I said in my response to my friend I've always had a tendency toward an idealist philosophy of reality: In my case I see reality as a replete formal structure linking together our experiential qualia into patterns; both the formal structure and the cognitive qualia are needed before a reality can be said to meaningfully exist. The vast logical structure of the universe is there to provide a coherent and rational experience of the world to conscious agents and above all to provide the universal contextual medium whereby centres of conscious cognition can communicate. If that world is not experienced and cognitively apprehended by some rational mind - primarily the divine mind - it makes little sense; a world independent of its service to perception is meaningless. True, the "thing-in-itself-ness" of the cosmos may be very different to the window on it that divine providence has provided us with (a bat has different kind of window). But for us that providence assures that its formal structure is rational, regular and coherent enough to reveal its patterns under interrogation - well, let's say most of the time, paranormal circumstances excepted, circumstances where at times it is almost as if reality has slipped into a chaotic dream state, sometimes referred to as the "Oz factor".
Relevant link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yed05ld0xhcGJwaDQ/view
Footnote
* I've adopted the term "registration" from the four-colour printing world where the four printing colours cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are said to have good registration if their printing positions align sufficiently to produce sharp correctly coloured pictures.
No comments:
Post a Comment