Perception of Reality Part 1: Physicalism vs. Dualism

Fellow Humans,

I began to write this piece about sitting on my roof… something about moonbows and how the moon looked like a hologram in the mist… Before deciding you likely don’t care. Instead, I am going to simply begin rambling about perception and reality. Also fair warning, I have a bad habit of writing in an unnecessarily confusing manner - doing my best not to, but will probably fail. Stay with me.

For attempt two I begin: Is anything real? What is the nature of reality? Do you have a ‘mind’, or are you just a physical body? Incase this piece becomes dreadfully long, I shall spoil the ending… we still have no fucking clue.



Since the beginning of Epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge, the study of knowing) the philosophies of Reductive Physicalism and Substance Dualism have dueled. (this is a bad pun but I refuse to apologize)

Physicalism vs. Dualism

Let us jump right in; (Reductive) Physicalism is the philosophical position that everything which exists is nothing more than its physical properties and that everything is physical - the world is made only of physical stuff including us and our ‘minds’

This would imply that:

• There is no free will (prove it wrong I dare you, we can have a fun circular argument)

• Your personality or self is shaped completely by outside factors including your genetics and the environment. The ‘self’’ is simply the firing of neurotransmitters in your brain which makes decisions in response to stimuli - all decisions are premeditated and based on cause and effect.

Mind-body or (Substance) Dualism is the view that mental phenomena are non-physical, or that the mind and body are distinctly separate. The mind is a separate non-physical substance that can not be reduced to or explained by the physical world.

These physical and mental realms are Interactionist - meaning there are two entities, mind and body, each of which can affect the other.


But how could something purely mental effect something purely physical, if they are completely separate? Where would the connection between the physical and mental realm be, if they were not entirely separate? Where would this connection reside if by having a location in the physical world the mental existence would become physical? Where does the mind reside? What would tether your mind to this body in particular? (I realize I am now asking more questions than I am supplying answers)




To counter the stream of unanswered questions within Dualism, I offer you the gift of Marie’s box - for Physicalism is equally fallacious:

Marie has spent her entire life in a black and white room. She spends all of her time studying optics, how we interact with light, and the artistic appeal of color. Over time, she learns everything there is to know about color. Still, she has never actually seen color. So if Marie leaves her black and white room and sees color for the first time, does she learn anything new? The qualitative experience of seeing color is not the same as knowing facts about said color. If the world was purely physical seeing color would not have contributed to her understanding at all, it would not have told her anything that she did not already know - which seems absurd.

Physicalism is, therefore, missing QUALIA: instances of subjective, first-person experience - what Marie gains when she sees color.

Though, the physicalist can then argue that this notion is begging the question (I love me some petitio principii) - declaring philosophical fallacy in which the premises assume the conclusion they are supposed to be proving - as Marie’s problem assumes that she must be learning something new when she steps out of the room, which would be false if the world was purely physical.




Honestly, at this point, I’d rather be a solipsist. Talk about having it easy. You are alone in your own brain, making it impossible to prove that anything else exists. The final stop for all information is ultimately you. It’s the egocentric predicament. If you want to speak with certainty you only experience your phaneron (fancy word for your little slice of reality), not true reality. The belief that only you exist and everything else in the universe are figments of your imagination is, well, solipsism. Since any perception of the ‘physical’ world is then perceived in your lil slice or limited perception of reality, all you experience is not the objective world but a small version of it that enters your brain. Think of the matrix, we have no means to know that reality actually exists, we could be a brain in a vat. Or have falsified memories. The entire universe could have been created last Thursday, and you could have been implanted with falsified memories of your existence beforehand. There is no way to prove otherwise. You really can’t know.

cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am.

Maybe Descartes was right, you can cast doubt on the existence of your body, but not on the existence of your mind, so all which can actually be proven to exist is your mind. Boom mind-blown. (this whole piece is chockablock with bad puns)



Now that we’ve discussed the philosophy of perception and reality, we can soon deep dive into the question of perception affecting reality in physics - quantum mechanics get excited. Come swim with me fishies.



Love and Rage,

Raina





P.S. all grammatical mistakes are purposeful. I will soon explain the unnecessary rigidity of our language structure. It’s damn narcissistic, acting all complex when language has no reference of what ‘complexity’ even entails.