FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH: Speaking of Multiple Realities, Part One
By Christopher Worth
For the next few weeks I have decided to write on the philosophical concept of mind and world. I inadvertently began this conversation last week, but I would like to write a full series exploring where the mind comes together with the physical world. I will be referring to writers on the topic, not in this first article but in future ones.
Here in America we have a magazine who's focus is contemporary Buddhist issues. The magazine is called Tricycle. They also have a companion virtual community set up in the style of Facebook. I post a lot of these articles on my blog there. Well, last week's article illicited some response and started a conversation having to do with whether I was arguing that you could literally, physically control emotions with thought or if I was saying that we had a choice behind the the response illicited by the emotion. Of course, the latter is what I was trying to say last week. This conversation on Tricycle led me to think about how a participant in life can craft their world. Can individuals, through thought and emotion, influence physical reality? To start, let me say that I believe that we can, but that this influence can only be seen through the filter of language. When I say language, I am not referring to the simple spoken word (if you can call it simple). I am talking about cognitive truths. The mind codes and decodes its reality through the filters of language. Filters is pluralized for a reason, because I believe art is a language, religion (all religion) is a language, math is a language, genetics is a language, and in fact all occupations have specific specialized languages so that it all acts to code our "individual" worlds.
Now, bringing it back to a more concrete understanding, I used to walk around Marshall University's campus with a philosophy student from Japan, and we would walk in the many triangles over and over again for an hour at a time, often. I would say to him just as many times as we walked in these patterns, "I can isolate all language back to one action in human evolution." Now of course I was quite young and pompous, and that statement was extremely flawed at the time, but I've done a lot of thinking about that topic from those days until now, to the point that I have a more mature understanding and can quite comfortably lay out for you, the reader, what I'm about to for the next couple of weeks. So bear with me because we're going to start a grand adventure, and our jumping off point are those patterns rolled by me and walked by my Japanese friend more than ten years ago.
Patterns. Triangles. Simple squares. They appear on cave walls and rock facings all over the world, generated by an ancient people far removed from our modern understanding of who we are. Or at least we think so. The brain as we know it is the same as it was when our common ancestor walked into civilization as we define it today. And so we are operating with the same toolbox, responding to the same stimulus, in virtually the same way (at least at the hardware level as our ancestors did). If we understand that to be true, then the reason that we "communicate," in any way that we do it, has been for the same reasons since time immemorial. We express things, draw, speak, sell ourselves in order to convey first a root compulsion to survive, second a root compulsion to primitively carry on our lineage, and third (but not at all less than the others) to ask questions of what is beyond us.
The "us" I am referring to in the above paragraph speaks of humanity as a whole, but for this conversation, for our understanding, I want to focus on reality as first being an interplay of all language forms, and second being isolated to individual experience except for occasional overlapping when it comes to interacting with other human beings. Of course, in this case occasional really means every other millisecond, not just some rare and random instance. In other words, in my mind, humans act within a singular reality that is wholly their own, and it is through the acquisition of languages as we have defined them that we become collective. Now, this collective reality is, I believe, a real thing. But it only exists for individuals if they buy into it on their own. So, imagine collective reality as a building built with bricks that are molecularly individual, but once bonded become a strong collective reality. We'll talk about this more as the weeks progress.
This brings me to the example of the woman at Starbucks last week, where I said that I believed that "She's clouded by an illusion of ignorance." The response I got on Tricycle was quite hostile towards the woman, but it leads me into what we are discussing today; if what I say is true and humans develop a language (aka the thing that we code and decode our world with) through filters, then the woman from Starbucks I will assume for the purposes here has not interacted with a functional disabled person or any disabled person at all for that matter. Therefore, she has not and could not develop understanding/empathy for my situation. She has no language to express my reality, because we have not shared time, shared space. I cannot hold her responsible for not knowing. I can only acknowledge her ignorance and expand her vocabulary. For what it's worth, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, he said that we cannot talk about anything outside of our direct experience without first building a vocabulary using the world around us. Until next week!