◆ Existential Rationalism: Handling Hume’s Fork ▪ The desire to transcend conceals the truth.
◆ 1. The original story of existential rationalism ▪ Hume shatters our hope of having certainty about anything that exists in the world
▪ Alan Watts (1915-1973) very instructive. He explains the essence of Oriental philosophy with British articulateness so that my Occidental mind could get it.
▪ my search was the answer.
▪ epistemological (meaning knowledge-theory related ) aspect of satori, in broad strokes, is the insight that we cannot know reality at all because we are part of it. ▪ Satori implies abandoning the hope to discover reality.
▪ quantum computer is a concrete example: it is the perpetual motion machine of our time.
▪ any attempt to describe reality is futile.
▪ reality implies a separation from the conscious mind.
▪ assumption that there is objective knowledge beyond experience to be found.
▪ it is irrational to claim that we can know reality because no mind can wrap itself completely around something it is part of.
▪ We don’t look at reality but through it
▪ Reality must remain a mystery, albeit a familiar one.
▪ Western thought is inherently dualistic this way:
▪ Truth is essential in our lives, but it resides in our being, not beyond it.
▪ Dualism provides an alibi for philosophical timidity
▪ evidence-based science has brought us a long way: it should continue to be cherished
▪ it can only falsify and not provide positive guidance
We haven’t yet acknowledged we are part and parcel of a single world. ▪
What is missing in Western thought is a rational consideration of subjective consciousness ▪ widespread belief in the promise of quantum computers is startingly irrational
◆ 2. Rationalism, again
▪ Existential doubt calls for truthful existential answers. What could such an answer look like? An idea, a feeling, a belief, or even a person?
▪ The belief in an external world independent of the observing subject lies at the foundation of all natural science
▪ is it possible to obtain any objective knowledge at all?
▪ rational people must agree that it is equally irrational not to dare to challenge assumptions
▪ It is not heretical to have an open mind.
▪ belief in objective knowledge implies that we can know something about what exists independently of people
▪ existence precedes the distinction of truth by consciousness
▪ Viewing consciousness as not separate from the rest of the world has a long tradition in Eastern thinking
▪ perceived separation from reality is an illusion
▪ Looking for existential clarity outside of ourselves is more prevalent in the West and the Islamic world
▪ all knowledge humanity will ever be able to collect is knowledge of experience .
▪ People may look for ways to find agreement based on individual truths. If they are successful, they might speak of shared truth
▪ The dualistic way of thinking has been spectacularly successful
▪ Just because a notion is successful doesn’t mean it is true.
▪ Experiment, even when scientifically replicable, is still a form of perception.
▪ Western thinking has lost touch with human experience in almost schizophrenic self-denial
▪ Objective knowledge requires a conceptual, third-person view of the world, but nobody has ever met a “third person.”
▪ Western world has forgotten what being truly rational means
▪ Could it be that an update of the Western way of thinking is required?
▪ It helps to revitalize some principles of 18th-century rational thought
▪ rationalism and empiricism are rooted in phenomenal experience
▪ Contemporary Western thinking is under the spell of an existential illusion
▪ reality cannot be caught
▪ rationality’s premise doesn’t need to be a dualistic belief in higher truth
▪ Improved existential understanding allows, even demands , conceptual rigor to coexist with enlightenment
▪ scientific method leads to rational knowledge, not objective knowledge ▪ reason can also help find a consensus where the scientific method doesn’t apply
▪ Existential rationalism isn’t the West’s first “subjective” philosophy, but it seeks to be a more comprehensive one ▪ Hume’s challenge to rationalism is finally met ▪ inevitable conclusion is that quantum computers will never actually compute
▪ Alchemy was a boon for chemistry, but it could not make gold out of lead.
▪ Humanity doesn’t play a zero-sum game
◆ 3. What is experience?
▪ Internal medicine recognizes that the sleeping mind is not the same as the unconscious mind
▪ One cannot be conscious of something and not experience it
▪ blindsight
▪ experience is always phenomenal. Experience is identical to the conscious mind, and it imagines the hypothetical experiences of concepts, for itself, as its sole product.
▪ There is no reality in the vibrations of air molecules that produce sound or the lack of water in the blood that causes thirst
◆ 4. What is knowledge?
▪ law of identity of indiscernibles clarifies that two entities with different names that share all properties are actually a single entity
▪ Since the conscious mind is an inseparable element of reality, it doesn’t reflect reality but what it is like to participate in reality
▪ Seeing is a real experience, but what it sees is not real
▪ Vision is but one of the countless aspects of the phenomenal experience. The closer I pay attention to the visual experience, the more I notice that I cannot see it separate from the rest of the phenomenal experience
▪ True, false, fictional, or transcendent: it doesn’t matter; concepts are products of the conscious mind, so abstractions of experience
▪ Ontic knowledge is not knowledge of reality but the knowledge that is the real experience of participating in reality.
▪ The key is understanding that concepts are imaginations of the conscious mind
▪ Present immediacy essentially defines the ontic knowledge of phenomenal experience. This condition has a consequence: all phenomenal experience must be private
▪ The subject who has the experience is no longer our first-person conscious mind, but an imagined “other person,” possibly a projection of our conscious mind in the past or future.