Mouse Makes Amends

I’m told that my previous blog was confusing. I of course disagree, but then who am I to say? I’ll try again.

All of our ideas are formed in our heads. They’re of several sorts.

One: Some of our ideas appear in our heads as words, pictures, and feelings depicting the stuff communicated to us by our senses. Those images etc are always consciously experienced, though we may notice some of them more than others. Nothing in our consciousness of sensate data is explanatory. If we were limited to our senses, we would have no knowledge of the causes of the things we experience. So this is the lowest form of knowledge. For want of something to call such experiences, we may call them “imaginations” or “hearsay” or just raw, unprocessed consciousness.

Two: Some of the words we hear ourselves thinking are of the sort we call “names.” At sometime in our personal past we have learned to connect certain words to certain things. When we see an image that looks like a tree we connect the image to the word. But before we can do this, we – or those who taught us the names – must also have engaged in a third kind of experiencing, called “wonder.”

Three : We wonder what these sensed things are. We may not be conscious of our wonderings, but it seems apparent that our brain/minds are challenged to identify similar things – like different kinds of dogs – and that our brain/minds invent concepts like the word “dog.” We are never conscious of the process that forms concepts, but when the brain/mind is stumped about what to call a thing, we may become conscious of the brain/mind’s problem. That’s what we might call a conscious wondering.

Four: A special form of wondering occurs in our heads when we “hear” ourselves wondering about the why and wherefore of things. These may proceed into actual inquiry, though nothing in the experience of wondering specifies the method by which the why’s and wherefore’s may be sought. One method involves what we have come to call science. Another involves religion. All such methods, however, begin with wonder and proceed through a different form of experience called “theorizing.”

[None of the above involve actual knowledge of causes and effects. They may all be classified as what Spinoza calls “knowledge of the first kind.”]

Five: Theories arise as potential answers to wonderings of why and wherefore. Before the formation of a theory, the mind has been a passive “presenter” of experience, but as it forms its first theory about why or wherefore (or even, “what should I do about this?”), it becomes an active part of the human being, an ally in the human’s need to survive.

[I’m tired of this. The rest should be easy for anyone. The point, though, is that ideas – whatever their form or category – emerge for us out of ourselves. There is nothing like any of the above in the world “out there.” We are the final arbiters of what we believe to be right or wrong for us. If we get it wrong, there will probably be consequences, some bad, some worse, some deadly. The troubles we find in the world – apart from the catastrophic events of nature – have nothing to do with the world itself except as it is manifest in what we are. But that’s common knowledge. We have, however, made the mistake of believing that there’s a fatal flaw in human nature, an “original sin,” as it were. The only flaw we actually have is the one that we have created, the belief that we do not have it in our power to make up a world in which human beings can live together in peace. We’ve come too far from caves and smallpox to accept the notion that we are a species doomed to its own destruction. We need only start recognizing the source of our ideas. None of the ones dealing with “rights” and “religions” have come to us from the mind of God. We made them up, and the sooner we catch on to that the sooner we will begin to approach the boundaries of real salvation.

A commenter to the previous blog said, “In the end, the scriptural exhortation 'to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God' is the attitude that will bring peace to the world." He was of course right in the part he quoted, but by referencing a “scriptural exhortation” he has apparently believed that the advice he proffered came from somewhere other than a human being. If so, he’s wrong in one of the deadly ways. He’s also holding on to a notion of God that is as far from reality as I am from a genuine mouse. (The mouse is grey.) When obviously bright people like our anonymous friend wake up to their own power, then, and not before, will the world turn from the destructive path onto which current epistemological beliefs have led it. Selah.]