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The Limits of Reality

By

Peter Anyebe

Philosophy addresses two different aspects of the topic of reality as follows:

The nature of reality itself, and

The relationship between the mind, as well as language and culture; and reality.

On the one hand, ontology is the study of being, and the central topic of the field is

couched, variously, in terms of being, existence, "what is", and reality. The task in

ontology is to describe the most general categories of reality and how they are

interrelated.

On the other hand, particularly in discussions of objectivity that have feet in both

metaphysics and epistemology, philosophical discussions of reality often concern the

ways in which reality is, or is not, in some way dependent upon; or, to use

fashionable jargon, constructed out of, mental and cultural factors such as

perceptions, beliefs, and other mental states, as well as cultural artefacts, such as

religions and political movements; on up to the vague notion of a common cultural

world view, or Weltanschauung.

The view that there is a reality independent of any beliefs, perceptions, etc., is called

realism. A correspondence theory of knowledge about what exists claims that a true

knowledge of reality represents accurate correspondence of statements about and

images of reality with the actual reality that the statements or images are attempting

to represent. For example, the scientific method can verify that a statement is true

based on the observable evidence that a thing exists. Many humans can point to the

Rocky Mountains and say that this mountain range exists, and continues to exist even

if no one is observing it or making statements about it.

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The nature of being is a perennial topic in metaphysics. For, instance Parmenides

taught that reality was a single unchanging Being, whereas Heraclitus wrote that all

things flow. Existence, that something is, has been contrasted with essence, the

question of what something is. Since existence without essence seems blank, it is

associated with nothingness by philosophers such as Hegel.

The question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational

realism, arises in the philosophy of perception and of mind out of the debate over

the nature of conscious experience; the epistemological question of whether the

world we see around us is the real world itself or merely an internal perceptual copy

of that world generated by neural processes in our brain. Naïve realism is known as

direct realism when developed to counter indirect or representative realism, also

known as epistemological dualism, the philosophical position that our conscious

experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature

virtual-reality replica of the world.

In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they

may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything

that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible. A still more

broad definition includes everything that has existed, exists, or will exist. By contrast

existence is often restricted solely to that which has physical existence or has a direct

basis in it, in the way that thoughts do in the brain. Reality is also contrasted with

what is imaginary, delusional, only in the mind, dreams, what is abstract, what is

false, or what is fictional. The truth refers to what is real, while falsity refers to what

is not. Fictions are not considered real.

The term truth has no single definition about which a majority of professional

philosophers and scholars agree, and various theories of truth continue to be debated.

Metaphysical objectivism holds that truths are independent of our beliefs; except for

propositions that are actually about our beliefs or sensations, what is true or false is

independent of what we think is true or false. According to some trends in

philosophy, such as postmodernism/post-structuralism however, truth is subjective.

When two or more individuals agree upon the interpretation and experience of a

particular event, a consensus about an event and its experience begins to be formed.

This being common to a few individuals or a larger group then becomes the truth as

seen and agreed upon by a certain set of people – the consensus reality. Thus one

particular group may have a certain set of agreed-upon truths, while another group

might have a different set. This allows different communities and societies to have

very different notions of reality and truth about the external world. The religion

and beliefs of people or communities are one example of this level of socially

constructed reality. Truth cannot simply be considered truth if one speaks and

another hears because individual bias and fallibility challenge the idea that certainty

or objectivity are easily grasped. For anti-realists, the inaccessibility of any final,

objective truth means that there is no truth beyond the socially accepted consensus.

Although this means there are many truths, and not a single truth.

For realists, the world is a set of definite facts, which exist independently of human

perceptions "The world is all that is the case": Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,

and these facts are the final arbiter of truth. Michael Dummett expresses this in

terms of the principle of bivalence: Lady Macbeth had three children or she did not;

a tree falls or it does not. A statement will be true if it corresponds to these facts –

even if the correspondence cannot be established. Thus the dispute between the

realist and anti-realist conception of truth hinges on reactions to the epistemic

accessibility, knowability, or graspability of facts.

A fact or factual entity is a phenomenon that is perceived as an elemental principle.

It is rarely one that could be subject to personal interpretation. Instead, it is most

often an observed phenomenon of the natural world. The proposition that "viewed

from most places on Earth, the Sun rises in the east" is a fact. It is a fact for people

belonging to any group or nationality, regardless of which language they speak or

which part of the hemisphere they come from. The Galilean proposition in support

of the Copernican theory, that the sun is the centre of the solar system, is one that

states the fact of the natural world. However, during his lifetime Galileo was

ridiculed for that factual proposition, because far too few people had a consensus

about it in order to accept it as a truth, moreover the Ptolemaic model was just as

accurate a predictor. Fewer propositions are factual in content in the world, as

compared to the many truths shared by various communities, which are also fewer

than the innumerable individual world views. Much of scientific exploration,

experimentation, interpretation and analysis are done on this level.

This view of reality is expressed in Philip K. Dick's statement that Reality is that

which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. The early 19th century

German philosopher, Georg W.F. Hegel is best known for his system of inquiry into

the nature of reality. This system is called the dialectic. Hegel's philosophy of

history embraces the concept that a conflict of opposites is a struggle between actual

and potential worlds. A thesis can be seen as a single idea. The idea contains a form

of incompleteness that gives rise to the antithesis, a conflicting idea. A third point of

view, a synthesis, arises from this conflict. It overcomes the conflict by reconciling

the truths contained in the thesis and antithesis at a higher level. The synthesis is a

new thesis. It generates a new antithesis, and the process continues until truth is

arrived at. The triad is usually described in the following way:

The thesis is an intellectual proposition.

The antithesis is simply the negation of the thesis, a reaction to the

proposition.

The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by

reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition.

This is how Hegel has addressed the seeming paradox that we cannot evaluate our

faculty of knowledge in terms of its ability to know the Absolute without first having

a criterion for what the Absolute is, one that is superior to our knowledge of the

Absolute. Yet, we could only have such a criterion if we already had the improved

knowledge that we seek.

It is to resolve this paradox that Hegel adopts a method whereby the knowing that is

characteristic of a particular stage of consciousness is evaluated using the criterion

presupposed by consciousness itself. At each stage, consciousness knows something,

and at the same time distinguishes the object of that knowledge as different from

what it knows. Hegel and his readers will simply "look on" while consciousness

compares its actual knowledge of the object—what the object is "for consciousness"

-- with its criterion for what the object must be "in itself". One would expect that,

when consciousness finds that its knowledge does not agree with its object,

consciousness would adjust its knowledge to conform to its object. However, in a

characteristic reversal, Hegel explains that under his method, the opposite occurs.

As just noted, consciousness' criterion for what the object should be is not supplied

externally, rather it is supplied by consciousness itself. Therefore, like its

knowledge, the "object" that consciousness distinguishes from its knowledge is

really just the object "for consciousness", it is the object as envisioned by that stage

of consciousness. Thus, in attempting to resolve the discord between knowledge and

object, consciousness inevitably alters the object as well. In fact, the new "object"

for consciousness is developed from consciousness' inadequate knowledge of the

previous "object." In this case, what consciousness really does is to modify its

"object" to conform to its knowledge. Then the cycle begins anew as consciousness

attempts to examine what it knows about this new "object".

The reason for this reversal is that, for Hegel, the separation between consciousness

and its object is no more real than consciousness' inadequate knowledge of that

object. The knowledge is inadequate only because of that separation. At the end of

the process, when the object has been fully "spiritualized" by successive cycles of

consciousness' experience, consciousness will fully know the object and at the same

time fully recognize that the object is none other than itself.

At each stage of development, Hegel adds; we, which is a reference to Hegel and his

readers, see this development of the new object out of the knowledge of the previous

one, but the consciousness that we are observing does not. As far as it is concerned,

it experiences the dissolution of its knowledge in a mass of contradictions, and the

emergence of a new object for knowledge, without understanding how that new

object has been born.

A criterion for the Absolute has been presented as the natural order, N-O. Then it

would be possible to evaluate the human faculty of knowledge, or the personal

order, P-O in terms of its ability to know the Absolute, as the approximation of the

N-O by the P-O. The N-O is derived as a function of the following principles:

Relativity,

Normality. and

Duality

Thus, Relativity defines the problem by presenting knowledge as the identification,

definition, and resolution of the contradictions that characterise nature. Normality

suggests the appropriate approach to the resolution. And Duality provides the outline

for it. In this case, nature is identified as a reduction agent, much like the aperture of

a camera. Then the contradictions are defined by the extreme points of phenomena,

such as the positive infinity, +∞ and negative infinity, -∞ on the number line. Every

other point that lies between these extremes would be automatically less than the

best point, defined by the +∞; but greater than the least point, or -∞. Moreover, it

would be impossible for the phenomenon to exist outside this limit.

This introduces the concept of optimisation, which involves the improvement on a

phenomenon, to upgrade it from the minimum to the maximum possible state of

being. Then the optimum state is defined by the minimax, which in principle would

be equal to the maximin or factor that must be nurtured to effect the improvement.

Recall the duality series in operations research as follows:

Maxima

Minimax

Maximin

Minima

Between the minimax and the maximin is the col, or saddle point. This point

specifies the principle for effecting the optimisation. Notice that this series traces the

normal curve. Recall also that by the perception model of mind, PMM a mind that

is performing optimally would reduce phenomena into the five, 5 essential

components. And the typical standard procedure series, SPS comprises six, 6 items.

These are the five, 5 essentials that cumulate into the item that is described, which is

then the sixth, 6th

. These items, selected correctly, would be inclusive of every thing

that can be known about the phenomenon. No phenomenon can exist outside its

minimum permissible limit, or beyond its best possible form or perfection.

Goodness or the optimum nature may however shift, according to the quality of the

optimisation procedure. This too maximises when the procedure matures.

By this concept, the typical standard procedure comprises six, 6 items. These

include the object or purpose that is to be achieved, which is the sixth, 6th

item; and

the five, 5 items that describe it. The fifth, 5th

item identifies the principle that

determines the process by which the purpose is to be achieved. The forth, 4th

item

operationalises the principle to indicate the level of process maturation. Then the

first three, 3 items define the tripod on which the operation rests. They define the

limits of the operation. Serially:

1. Perfection Standard Procedure

2. Goodness 6. Purpose

3. Permissivity 5. Process

4. Maturation

The Reality Series

Fact

Optimisation

Saddle Point, Col