Art by Erik Johansson |
Is life is but a dream, as the nineteenth century nursery
rhyme assures us? Liberals, humanists, and naturalists insist that now more
than ever, with the rise of fascism in Europe, Russia, and America; with the
strange convergence of alt-right grievances with postmodern cynicism; and while
demagogues, charlatans, and agnotologists in politics, advertising, and the
corporate media are spreading doubt, spin, and propaganda, we should stand up
for truth. However, this conflict between so-called rationalists or critical
thinkers, on the one hand, and hillbillies and con artists, on the other, is a
tempest in a teapot. Those who take the long view are invited to understand how
truth died with God shortly after the Scientific Revolution, several centuries
ago.
The concept of truth had already been suspect for millennia,
when divine reality was thought to transcend human comprehension. What we took
to be mundane, worldly truths, such as that the desert is hot during the day or
that a normal human face has two eyes, a nose and a mouth, were mere illusions
compared to mystical “truth,” the latter being ineffable and at best
experienced as awe in moments of heightened awareness. Gods were only posited
by our imagination, based on a lack of data (and on a noble lie developed by
psychopathic power elites for the sake of pacifying the human herd of betas). Scientists collected the data, thanks to advances in technology,
mathematics, and epistemology, and the gods were accordingly replaced with atoms
and physical forces. Natural reality is measurable whereas the gods weren’t,
but atoms and forces are likewise beyond our understanding in that they’re wildly
counterintuitive.
The only thing we can fully understand is ourselves.
Everything else must be simplified in the telling of them with concepts and
models which idealize and which rest on falsifying metaphors that would
humanize the inhuman. The proper subjects of knowledge are us and our societies;
reason evolved to enable us to understand only minds and cultures with which
we’re intimately familiar since we identify with them. The stories we tell
about ourselves aren’t simplifications, since we’re identical with the subjects
of those narratives, not with our brains as such. When we seek to understand
the wider world, however, we either project human categories onto nature, as
occurs in theistic religions and in folk conceptions, or else we effectively
exchange the pursuit of truth with that of power.
In the epistemic context, anthropomorphism is
philosophically unforgivable, however socially useful might be the gratuitous
shrinking of outer reality so that it seems to fit within the human scale. Socrates sacrificed his life for
the principle that truth matters more than our comfort. Instead of flattering
ourselves with delusions that hold society together at the cost of confining us
to an animal mode of life, we should search for a higher calling according to
our position in the ultimate, metaphysical scheme. Unfortunately, Plato’s
teleological picture of nature is a rehashing of the folk prejudices, losing
the human interest of the transparent personifications in popular religion, in
exchange for pseudoscientific respectability afforded by the philosophical
discourse. Instead of angelic or monstrous spirits flitting about and deciding
how events unfold, there are supposedly levels of being, including Forms and
their material copies. In any case, scientific naturalism renders such interim
philosophical tales obsolete. What isn’t well-appreciated, though, is that the
very notion of truth is also outdated.
Power and Truth, Measurement and Agreement
On the contrary, says the scientific realist as opposed to
the pragmatist, science has proved a million truths, as can be seen from the
power of the myriad applications of scientific theories. Functioning and indeed
astonishing technologies stand all around us and that success would be
impossible were there no systematic difference between scientific models and
religious dogmas, for example. Indeed, there must be some such difference, but
a scientific vindication of the commonsense concept of truth isn’t it.
To be sure, we can try to make sense of the success of technoscience
by positing happy semantic relations between natural facts and the symbols that
scientists use to explain them. But that old-fashioned way of understanding
where we are is awkward in light of the content of the scientific picture.
Science shows us events occurring within or because of alien dimensions that we
can measure and predict despite the stubborn fact that no one in the least
understands those events. We can detect changes in the subatomic world, for
example, and can take advantage of those forewarnings by devising models that
work, in that their parts correlate with the facts, within the parameters that
interest us. We can then exploit those correlations with machines that apply
the lessons that are implicit in the models. But a scientific statement can be useful without being true. More precisely, the statement’s utility can
be as mysterious as the inhuman reality of nature that scientists discovered to
the detriment of all exoteric dogmas. We can say the theory is useful because it’s true, whereas a religious
myth is false, but in light of the anti-human content of that very naturalistic
theory, calling the theory merely true is itself dogmatic. Talk of truth now,
after science has shown us the monstrous scale of the universe and the inhuman
logic of quantum reality, is akin to chanting a mantra to ward off some fear.
But haven’t I just presupposed a truth, namely that the
universe is very large rather than small? No, because the intuitive concept of
size is meaningless for astronomical purposes. What does it mean to say that our
universe is enormous if the whole of it may fit into what would seem to
outsiders like a miniscule seed or near-singularity subsisting within a black
hole embedded in a parent universe, as the physicists John Wheeler, Lee
Smolin, and Nikodem Poplawski have theorized? Again, the concept of
physical size makes sense in the context of measuring things that pop up in the
field of ordinary human interaction. Thus, thousands of years ago, hunters
would have called a bear large rather than small, to signal the urgency of the
threat, and a baby is called small rather than large, in which case "large" connotes danger and “small”
connotes helplessness and preciousness. Statements that employed such concepts
were never merely true or false. Instead, the concepts comprise the mental HUD (heads
up display) we developed (during what Yuval Harari calls the cognitive
revolution, about 70,000 years ago) to interface with the environment after the
perception of the latter has already been put together and pre-interpreted by
the brain. And that evolutionary, biological story of how experience arises
shouldn’t be thought of as true. Instead, that story is powerful, meaning that
it achieves certain purposes. Likewise, religious narratives achieved
alternative purposes. It’s just that we Western Faustians, as Oswald Spengler
called us, care more about individual power than social harmony.
Take another example of scientific “truth”: global warming.
Scientists agree that our planet is warming as a matter of fact, due largely to
relatively recent human activities. We can model the mechanisms involved and
can use the models to predict what will happen next if we respond this way or
that to the threat. But is it true
that the earth is warming? To say that this is true is to say that our
concepts are adequate to the facts such that there’s a correspondence or
agreement between the former and the latter. And that is a hangover piece
of anthropocentrism. Far from there being an agreement between the neuronal firings in our head or a sequence of
linguistic symbols, on the one hand, and the facts we’re supposed to be
speaking about, on the other, our attempts to understand reality are laughably outmatched
by nature’s alienness.
Again, what does it mean to say that the earth is warming,
when the interval that interests us is trivial compared to the sun’s lifespan?
Yes, the planet’s climate has changed from year to year over the last several
decades (mere decades!), and the trend is toward greater warmth, but talking
about warmth in relation to the sun
is as absurd as saying that it would be a little chilly on Pluto. The concept
of warmth is suited to the mundane discourse in which we compare fractional
differences in comfort depending on whether we’re wearing a jacket made of
polyester or one of leather. Talk of global warming isn’t adequate to the task,
as is suggested by the film Sunshine, which depicts the sun as a majestic god
that enraptures an unlucky astronaut before roasting his every atom. No, what
we would need is a concept that grasps at an intuitive level the unimaginable
timespans and temperature fluctuations involved in the sun’s relation to this
planet. In the distant past, the Earth was much hotter, which allowed animals
to grow to monstrous size. (And that evolutionary statement about the dinosaurs
is also a gross simplification and thus isn’t well thought of as merely true,
because our concept of life is laughably inadequate due to our ignorance of
life’s relation to the universe as a whole.) Likewise, one day in the distant
future the sun will engulf our planet in flames. But there’s no word that
encompasses the wild variations in the sun’s overall relationship to Earth. So
our focus on the years that concern us is as arbitrary as a mayfly’s noticing just
the changes in its puny environment that affect its 24-hour life cycle.
It bears repeating
that measuring isn’t the same as understanding. A measurement can be more
or less accurate, but accuracy
likewise isn’t the same as truth. If you’re aiming for the middle of a dart
board and you hit that target, your throw measures up to the standard and achieves
your goal, but that doesn’t mean the throw agrees
with the middle of the board. The numerical values on a thermometer are as
anthropocentric as the linear divisions on a dart board. The decimal system
suits us because we have ten fingers and toes and we attribute superstitious
importance to ten as a complete figure; for the same reason, we mourn a baby’s
loss if it’s born with only nine digits. Moreover, arithmetic presupposes that
members of a type are interchangeable or that the differences between them are
negligible—which they may be, for our
purposes. When the Nazis assigned numbers to Jewish prisoners in their
concentration camps, Allied soldiers were horrified by the inhumanity, but when
we hold out a thermometer to measure the temperature and the reading says 30
degrees Celsius for the second day in a row, no one’s offended by this neglect of the
untold variations in the factors that determine those temperatures. If you pick
three apples from a tree, and then three more from another tree, you ignore the
differences between the trees, the apples, and the other parts of the orchard,
because your concept apple already
simplifies so that many different things can count as the same for your
purposes, and all that matters at the moment is that you have two groups of three things. The groups
are reduced to being the same in that abstract respect. But that abstraction
isn’t natural, just as there’s no such thing as a perfectly round circle or straight
line in nature. No two apples are exactly alike and no two environments or
temporal slices of an environment are remotely the same despite their having
the same temperature according to a device we set up out of self-interest.
If a mayfly could judge its environment, assigning
categories and drawing distinctions, and its judgments enhanced its fitness or
achieved its mayfly goals, we would say that its judgments are, at best, true for the mayfly. The mayfly’s model of
the facts would be so primitive and shockingly ignorant, from our comparatively
godlike perspective, that we could only condescend to that aquatic insect and
regard its worldview as having mere subjective
truth. But ideal subjectivity isn’t the same as semantic, objective truth. The
latter kind of truth is the agreement between a set of symbols and a real state
of affairs. For Kierkegaard, subjective truth is inner authenticity, meaning
the choice of how to live that remains “true” to your inner being. This integrity
or faithfulness to your private thoughts and feelings is obviously not the same
as the relation of semantic correspondence. You can express your authentic self
even in a hostile or indifferent world, in which case the feeling that some
statement is true for you, in that it coheres with your inner identity, needn’t
agree with anything outside yourself. On the contrary, subjective truth can be
tragic in that there may be a palpable disharmony between the self and the
facts, as the real world extinguishes the self and consigns it to oblivion.
Natural and Artificial Languages: Tools for Different
Purposes
You might be thinking that even if ordinary concepts from
natural language don’t agree with reality, since they’re too self-serving, scientists
use more precise, artificial languages, including arcane mathematical concepts
that may indeed encompass nature’s strangeness. But an artificial language like
physics or chemistry has as little to do with a natural one like English or
Cantonese, as subjective truth has to do with the objective kind, with the
alleged agreement between certain statements and facts. Natural language is a
tool for facilitating social relationships and thus its concepts ooze with anthropocentric
metaphors and projections. The point is to enable us to read each other’s minds
or to manipulate each other so we might dominate a social hierarchy. By
contrast, artificial language is a device for providing us with power over
nature.
When we speak of size or of warmth, we’re expressing
ourselves so that the standard ought to be Kierkegaard’s ideal of subjective
authenticity. Instead, most of us are self-deluded and so we concoct various
mesmerizing fictions, including Plato’s tale of universal teleology or the
semantic conceit of truth as agreement between us and the world. We take the expression
of our comfort, when we say we feel warm in this jacket, for a statement that
has as its objective meaning that it somehow latches onto reality, that it
captures or mirrors a fact. This notion of semantic truth made sense in our
ancient animistic period when we personified the whole world, believing that
living spirits were at the root of everything so that we could imagine our
self-expressions did indeed reflect wider reality. But after science revealed
nature’s monstrous complexity and its strange lifelessness, or its undeadness, our self-expressions are merely grotesque if we presuppose that they satisfy
anything outside themselves, that at their best our statements harmonize with
anything in nature we didn’t create.
An artificial language, such as the math used in a physicist’s
equations is a set of tools for measuring and predicting, not for
understanding. There is no hope a person will understand anything in nature
unless she becomes as alienated from all she holds dear as is the universe
alien to her intuitions. To understand something is to grasp its meaning.
Nature has no meaning. Meaning is a product typically of human foolishness, so
we understand only ourselves and our cultures. The rest is fit only for power
differentials and for edifying existential reactions such as angst, horror, and
awe. A scientist’s technical, abstract
concepts, then, are at best only foreshadows of the machines that will harness the
part of natural reality which informed the scientist’s model. The technical
concepts are part of the blueprint for the technology with which we try to gain
a foothold in the inhuman outer world. We have indeed overpowered much of our
planet, at least when our Faustian efforts are compared to those of other
species, most of which we’ve decimated or enslaved. But the conceptual
instruments we use to develop the weapons in our struggle against natural
processes don’t agree with anything.
Instead, these concepts are techniques for preparing for our conquest of the modeled
part of nature. The equations and definitions and laws divide and conquer their
subject matter, just as a scientist will lay an animal on the dissection table
and measure its innards to perfect the model of that species. That model doesn’t
allow us to understand the creatures
we torture, enslave, or consume; the point instead is for us to dominate them
as though we were gods. A diagram of the layout of an animal’s internal organs
doesn’t agree with the biological reality. On the contrary, the diagram is convenient
because it inevitably simplifies, leaving out details that don’t interest us.
The diagram is suitable only for certain purposes and those purposes usually presuppose
the ideal of human dominance of the planet.
Like an accurate measurement, a natural law will correlate with the facts, but
correlations are cheap and they don’t add up to truth. A thermometer is a
device that registers changes in the environment and displays them in a useful
fashion. Instead of meaningful agreement, there's causality, a mechanism
connecting the tool to some natural process. Likewise, Newton’s law that
force equals mass times acceleration is an arrangement of technical concepts
that puts us in contact with a certain natural order. If there’s a semantic
relation involved, it’s adequate only for our parochial purpose of dominating
natural territory like crazed apes running amok, wearing lab coats. We will
likely all be dominated by nature in the end, when our species is extinguished
and all traces of our accomplishments will be undone as the galaxy evolves as a
whole. Thus, to speak of the truth even of a natural law is unbecoming. The law
enables us to measure the course of stars and planets, and to reach the moon by
spaceship, but we don’t thereby understand anything, nor is our attempt to
overpower nature wise.
Our best statements aren’t true in the sense that they agree
with what they’re supposed to be about. The statements afford us some ultimately
meager power which nevertheless naturally corrupts us, since we’re animals and that
vanity may be the mechanism by which the wilderness counts us as being unfit to
endure the variations it’s bound to pursue according to its alien agenda, as it
were. Our technological success tempts us to overstep the bounds of ethics, to
presume we can be realists whose discourse is objectively valid, that science
agrees with reality, that there are realities named by our symbols so that we’ve
put our finger on the world once and for all, or that we’re progressing towards
that end. Again, this is an embarrassing lapse for alleged naturalists and
humanists. The problem is that the Scientific Revolution began with the Renaissance
during which early modern Europeans became engrossed in their potential for
progress. The early humanists were highly optimistic about the powers of
reason. But humanism needn’t amount to childlike glee in our secular abilities.
Indeed, humanists can be misanthropic:
we can be students of human nature, dismissing dogmas which held us down, but
lamenting our fate in the existential context. Late modern humanists should
know better than to parrot the exoteric dogma of semantic truth or to fall for
the myth-laden explanation of technoscience’s great successes. We succeed not because we agree with
nature, but because we’re predatory and psychopathic enough to aim to dominate
it, but are also hapless and deluded so that instead we'll all be crushed and Mother Nature won't even have broken a sweat.
If Life is a Dream, which makes for the Best Story?
Bury, then, the anthropocentric notion of objective truth, with
the theistic fictions. But is there a more fitting way of speaking
philosophically about how we best relate to the world, besides the humdrum
business of pragmatism? Perhaps our thoughts and utterances aren’t just
instruments, but artworks, and perhaps all of nature consists of things created and destroyed, as the
field of becoming. This metaphysical picture shouldn’t be thought of as true or
false, for the above reasons. Instead,
think of it as a poetic bet that honours the power of technoscience while not
indulging in any anthropocentric delusion. At a minimum, as Heraclitus
said, things in nature come and go. We too came and will go. Things everywhere
are created and destroyed. Our technologies are creations of clever mammals created
by a planet created by a star created by gravity acting on a nebula that was
created by atomic and subatomic shenanigans. This means that aesthetics should take priority over semantics when we
evaluate our judgments. Our worldviews are creations made of ideas. They
are all therefore fictional, and the fictions can be more or less useful for
various purposes, which is where aesthetics meets with pragmatism. But it’s not
just our worldviews, our models, theories, philosophies, and myths that are
works of art. Our reactions to the world that add up to the themes of our life
are also our handiworks. Moreover, our perception of the world is a figment of
the brain that interprets the inputs of the five senses. Put all this together and life becomes very like a dream, like a play
or set of scenes that seems normal when stitched together but that unfolds
strangely when viewed from a critical distance.
As the philosopher Kant pointed out, we think we understand
the world because we’re aware only of how the world seems to us as we help to shape
it with our basic categories and sensory modes. Other species might bring
different mindsets to the task of making sense of a reality that ultimately
eludes all our grasps. Our perceptions are collective hallucinations; the transductions
may be mechanically guaranteed, but the concepts and logic we use to understand
the sights and sounds are evidently detached from reality and tainted by our complaisance.
We judge the neo-fascists as dupes and trolls, and we presume we liberals and critical
thinkers are superior since our worldview is reality-based while theirs is a
set of memes spun by a propaganda machine such as Breitbart or Fox News. This
division may work for partisan purposes, but not for philosophical or spiritual
ones. Ultimately, we are all dupes and
monsters. We are predators that pretend to be passive observers who know
what’s happening in the real world. We’re playthings of unfathomable natural
powers that squeeze us even when we applaud ourselves for seeming to dominate the
wilderness with our toy machines. And the sign that a worldview is
reality-based is that it drives the contemplator to awe and to terror, not that
it motivates him or her to espouse any sentimental notion such as that we all
have equal rights. We’re all perfectly equal only in sharing the fate of being
worm food. That fate could inspire us just as easily to attempt to be
freeloaders, as to having empathy with others. Considering that life is a joke
and our so-called reality is a dream world conjured by the brain and by the
egotism and shortsightedness that drive mass culture, we might just as easily
decide to outcompete and dominate weaker, more deluded players than to pursue gentler,
socialist causes.
All this would be so were there no aesthetic standards in
addition to the delusional ones of morality, mass religion, and partisan games.
If life is a dream, the question is which
lives provide for the best stories. Which fictions are best as works of
art? The problem with Donald Trump, for example, isn’t that he’s a psycho
clown. We’re all psycho clowns in having to read the tea leaves supplied by our
brain, to make any sense of what turns out to be a wholly alien and monstrous wilderness
from which we hide under the circus tents of our self-serving, typically-ludicrous cultures. No, the problem specifically
with Trump is aesthetic: his lies are dull, because his vocabulary is literally
childish. That’s it. That’s enough reason to dismiss his whole life and his
claim on your attention. Trump is boring to connoisseurs with good taste in
life-fictions.
You’ll say this can’t be so, since the spectacles of Trump’s power plays are evidently riveting in that they hold much of the
world’s attention through the mass media. Trump does hold our attention—like a
train wreck. We consume news of the neo-fascists by rubbernecking, as we use
these particular clowns as canaries in the coal mine. We search for signs of
our civilization’s downfall as we learn that we can be pitiful enough to fall
for fascism even after the catastrophic ends of the totalitarian regimes of the
last century. We have little historical memory, precisely because social media
entrances us with spectacles of the moment. The internet was supposed
to bring everyone together in common knowledge; instead, the net ghettoizes us
as we settle into our sub-niches. And technoscience should have been powerful enough
to inform us of certain elementary facts of our nature and our past, but we’re
as easily fooled by demagogues as were the ancients who worshipped their rulers
as divine.
The phenomenon of
Trumpism is important and it deserves our attention, but Trump himself makes
for a dismal story. However greater the stakes were in his life, as he
reckoned with billions of dollars whereas most people deal only with thousands,
his deeds were unheroic and so as a protagonist he doesn’t attract the well-read
viewer’s attention. His life story isn’t a book we should want to read, because
we shouldn’t want the catharsis we’d achieve by identifying with Trump as a
character. True, Trump became president of the United States, which is
ordinarily heroic, but if Trump burns down the government he’s supposed to
lead, the way he burned down his companies and conned his previous partners and
investors, he’ll have reduced the presidency to his tawdry level and so spoiled
the genre of American politics. More precisely, he’ll have given the game away,
revealing the conflict between the psychopathy of all American presidents and
the equally cold-blooded group-think of the American deep state.
In any case, this is how we should begin to evaluate life.
Instead of congratulating some lifestyles for being based on truth and reality,
while condemning others as fraudulent, we should be searching for inspiration
as artists and as consumers of life-as-quasi-art. Not all social constructions
and fictions are equal, just because nature laughs in all their faces. Some
tales are original while others are clichéd and hackneyed; some resonate with
your emotions and so help you be subjectively true to your inner self, while
others seem mean-spirited or otherwise small-minded and function more like
traps than like opportunities for mind-expansion or for testing the merits of
your thought palaces. Life is but a
dream—and we should be thankful that we lack the vantage point for taking in
the cosmic whole, that we must content ourselves with fantasies and games to
distract us so that we needn’t continually ponder the absurdity of our
existential situation. Thank the strange
heavens for killing off the gods of our babyish religions and for awakening us
to the embarrassment of that secular fairytale of objective truth.
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