B: The World

It's early morning.  The light is just beginning to show in the sky outside my window.  A bird perched somewhere in the tree below greets the day with its delicate call.  Man has several names for this bird and this tree in various languages, and science has names for them in Latin which identify their genus and species.  I don't know these names, but then neither do the bird or the tree.  These names were not affixed to them by nature, but rather by man.  However, these names do identify genuine natural realities about them.  The words "bird" and "tree" signify them as something distinct from one another, and their particular names signify their distinctions from others of their type.  If it is a sparrow in the tree, we call it so in English because it possesses those attributes in common with birds of the type "sparrow", and in contrast to the attributes of another bird which we would call a "blue jay."  It has possessed these defining attributes for millennia before mankind affixed these attributes with the name "sparrow", for millennia before there even was such a thing as man, and it was certainly long, long before man began to be confused by himself and to doubt himself and to doubt the world and to ask, "Where is this 'sparrowness'?  Is it real?  Is it in the bird somewhere?  Could I find it if I cut the bird open?"  But the sparrow has gone on, simply being what it is, contentedly singing the unique song sung only by sparrows, oblivious to the sweet, simple, and breathtakingly obvious answer it's providing to our question.

At this hour there is very little traffic passing by on the road below.  The road and the vehicles that travel on it are creations of man.  They were ideas conceived in the mind of man, and turned into physical realities by shaping and manipulating matter, giving it the form and function designed by the human mind.  These things stand as a testimony, as evidence of the co-operation between reality and the mind.  The matter involved behaves according to physical laws, and the people who designed these things were able to do so because they discovered these laws, they believed these laws, and they shaped the material involved in such a way that they would be able to use these laws to their advantage.  The car travels on the road because of the laws of motion, of thermodynamics, of combustion, and many more besides.  If these laws were simply the invention of man, or if they existed solely as a fantasy in the mind of man, or if they had no relation to physical reality outside the mind of man, then the matter involved in the car and road would behave completely indifferently to these laws.  They would slump like stubborn horses refusing to stir as man struggles at the reigns of his desires.  They would sit rotting in a field as useless heaps of junk.  For they themselves are objects which lie outside the mind of man and beyond its direct control.  The fact that the car works stands as proof of the accuracy of man's concepts of these laws.  Like the bird and the tree, man has named these laws, man has studied these laws and formulated theories about them, man has designated them by the general word "laws" because of his confidence in his own ideas about them, but the functions and relationships between physical matter that they designate are genuine realities.  And again like the bird, these functions and relationships existed long before man discovered them, long before man existed.  "Nature", Francis Bacon said, "to be commanded, must be obeyed."  The car drives by as elegant proof of this.

As the car passes, its sound increases in pitch as it approaches me, and then abruptly switches to a low pitch as it goes by and speeds off in the other direction.  This is called "The Doppler Effect", and it is a peculiarity of my perception.  The sound of the vehicle never actually changes, but yet this effect is not entirely an illusion either.  It is a relationship between my ear, the speed of the vehicle relative to me, my position relative to the vehicle, and the compression and decompression of the sound waves as they travel the distance between the car and me.  There are a number of such peculiarities.  These are not delusions or unrealities, but rather consequences of my perspective on the world.  The way the information of the world reaches my senses and my mind is itself part of the world, and it too behaves natural law.  Like the Doppler Effect, these things can be discovered, scrutinized, and studied as part of the reality with which we all have to deal.

Sometimes these peculiarities have led man astray, and such an example is appearing now just over the trees.  In casual speech we still say the sun is rising, but by now it is common knowledge that the Earth is turning to meet the sun.  It is true that I have no first hand verification of this fact, and that I'm forced to take other people's word for it.  It is possible that mankind is in error about this "common knowledge", or that a vast number of people have lied to me about it all my life.  But when I consider the evidence that the human race as a whole claims to possess on the matter, my mind is set at ease on the issue of error.  When I consider the number of people that would have to be involved in a "lie", various world governments, various space programs, phone companies, GPS manufactures, astronomers...well, the list goes on....I'm persuaded to accept this "word" as honest in the face of the alternative.  I'm confronted frequently by such situations, most of them not as clear cut and easy to decide on.  I weigh the available information, consider the agendas of the source, consider its fidelity to other information, and consider how much internal sense it makes unto itself.  It may not be the most solid foundation to decide what one believes in, but given the limits of my own first-hand experience, it's the best that I can do if I hope to learn anything beyond the limits of my own life and the things that I personally witness.  I am not omniscient, nor do I claim to be, nor do I believe anyone else can claim to be.  It is always possible that I am mistaken, or that I have been misled.  But I believe that the truth is constant, regardless of my wanderings.  I have seen Saturn through the lens of my own telescope, and I have seen that Venus has phases like our moon.  This is valuable corroboration of what I've been told, as well as an awe-inspiring experience.  There's nothing quite like seeing it for yourself.

Although I must occasionally rely on my fellow man for factual information, it is not through man that this information is fact.  Whatever the actual relationship between the sun and Earth, or the actual nature of anything else for that matter, the facts of these things exist without regard to whether they are known or believed by ten or ten million people.  I may rely on my fellow man in my belief that the world is round, but if the world is round, it is not out of respect to the opinions of men.  For thousands of years, man believed that the Earth was flat, and the world stayed round in absolute indifference to that belief.  When Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth by comparing a shadow made by the sun at Alexandria with a shadow made by the sun in Egypt, the truth of the round Earth was waiting there to be discovered, outside of the ignorance of man.  When Copernicus discovered that the Earth went round the sun, the rest of mankind was still in the dark, scratching their heads over retrograde motion.  If facts existed entirely through men, then the entire history of science would just be men making things up and then selling the rest of mankind on the idea in order to make it fact.  It was the evidence presented by Copernicus and Eratosthenes that changed the minds of man, not the minds of man which changed the evidence.  The power of consensus is in its persuasiveness, not in its control over reality.  How can I know this for sure?  Another car drives by, reminding me of the physical laws by which it operates, reminding me of man's cooperation with those laws as facts beyond themselves, reminding that the inventions of man have often worked in defiance of consensus and the general faith of the population.

If I decide to trust in my fellow man, not as the determiners of my reality, but rather as fellow travelers seeking to discover its true objective nature, then I am able to gaze with them beyond our solar system, beyond our galaxy, and out to a distance of 14 billion light years in any direction.  This is not believed to be the limits of our universe, but it is the limit of what we can see.  We believe that this is so, because we believe that the universe came into being 14 billion years ago, and light from anywhere beyond that hasn't had time to reach us.  This last idea is bit controversial back here on Earth, it challenges what many other people believe, and leads to a lot of arguments along the frontiers of what we know, and what we are capable of knowing.  But like my sparrow, the universe goes on, placidly indifferent to the conflicts and confusion of man.  It is what is.  Whole stars are born and die out without man ever setting eyes on them, possibly without anyone ever setting eyes on them.  They burn just fine without the fuel of being seen.

So, this is the world as I find it.  My confidence in it begins with me, with my first-hand experience and with the rational conclusions that I have drawn from that experience.  I extend that confidence to the experiences, the explorations, the discoveries, and the ideas of my fellow man, depending on what degree I'm willing to trust them and how much I concur with their conclusions.  But I believe that the world out there beyond me and the facts of that world exist without regard for my confidence, or my confidence in my fellow man, or their own confidence in what they think they know.  I believe that the world out there is what it is regardless of what I think I know about it, or what anyone else thinks they know about it.  First-hand experience has convinced me of that much at least.  The world has demonstrated its constancy to me time and again.  I go to sleep, and reawaken and the world shows every evidence of having gone on steadily without my knowledge.  The world has cut me and bruised me many times to prove its solid existence.  It has often frustrated my efforts and at other times it has rewarded them in turn to demonstrate its indifference to my whims and wishes, and its obedience to my cooperation with its facts.

My understanding of the world begins here with me, in this room.  I can doubt the things I've been told about it.  I can doubt my own conclusions that I've drawn about it.  But I can not doubt the world itself.  I can not doubt the foundation of it, which begins for me with my immediate experience.  It could be said that I have no grounds for believing in this world, but yet I have no grounds for doubting it either.  The world itself transcends belief and doubt, because the grounds for those things have to be found in the world.

Suppose I do try to doubt the world.  I reject the world wholesale as it begins for me here in this room.  I try to flee from it through a door marked "doubt."  I find that this door opens onto this same room, and it returns me right back to the world, searching for the grounds with which to justify this doubt.  I dismiss this world as a dream, and again I try the door hoping it will return me to waking reality.  I find myself right back in this room facing the world which provides me with no evidence that I am asleep or that there is any "waking" world beyond this one.  I defiantly declare that the world is an illusion unto itself, and I flee again through the door, only to find myself dumped again on the solid floor of this room, the world showing me no distinction between physical matter and the illusion of physical matter.

As a thinking being, it is my privilege to keep insisting on trying that door for the rest of my life if I like, to perpetuate my attempt at doubt indefinitely, but I can not escape the fact that that door will always return me right back to this room.  It is not that I have grounds for believing in the world.  It is not that I have a reason to believe in the world.  It is simply that the world is inescapable.  My only choice is between the futility of trying that door over and over, or embracing the world as I find it, as it begins here with my immediate experience in this room.  Only by embracing the world can I leave this room, to explore it, to learn about it, to understand it, and to experience it.