Submitted by Infinitus De on
pixabay.com
... there is a mystery – what is reality? There’s something oddly arbitrary about reality; some things are real, others are not. That cake on the table in front of me; it could be real as far as you know; or it could indeed be that the cake is a lie. The number 47, though, is quite different; you don’t need to check the table or any location; you don’t need to look for an example, or count to fifty; it couldn’t have been the case that there was no number 47. Things that are real in the sense we need for haecceity seem to depend on events for their reality. I will borrow some terminology from Meinong and call that dependent or contingent kind of reality existence, while what the number 47 has got is subsistence.
What is existence, then? Things that exist depend on events, I suggested; if I made a cake and put it in the table, it exists; if no-one did that, it doesn’t. Real things are part of a matrix of cause and effect, a matrix we could call history. Everything real has to have causes and effects. We can prove that perhaps, by considering the cake’s continuing existence. It exists now because it existed a moment ago; if it had no causal effects, it wouldn’t be able to cause its own future reality, and it wouldn’t be here. If it wasn’t here, then it couldn’t have had preceding causes, so it didn’t exist in the past either. Ergo, things without causal effects don’t exist.
Now that’s interesting because of course, one of the difficult things about qualia is that they apparently can’t have causal effects. If so, I seem to have accidentally proved that they don’t exist! I think things get unavoidably complex here. What I think is going on is that qualia in general, the having of a subjective side, is bestowed on things by being real, and that reality means causal efficacy. However, particular qualia are determined by the objective physical aspects of things; and it’s those that give specific causal powers. It looks to us as if qualia have no causal effects because all the particular causal powers have been accounted for in the objective physical account. There seems to be no role for qualia. What we miss is that without reality nothing has causal powers at all.
Let’s digress slightly to consider yet again my zombie twin. He’s exactly like me, except that he has no qualia, and that is supposed to show that qualia are over and above the account given by physics. Now according to me that is actually not possible, because if my zombie twin is real, and physically just the same, he must end up with the same qualia. However, if we doubt this possibility, David Chalmers and others invite us at least to accept that he is conceivable. Now we might feel that whether we can or can’t conceive of a thing is a poor indicator of anything, but leaving that aside I think the invitation to consider the zombie twin’s conceivability draws us towards thinking of a conceptual twin rather than a real one. Conceptual twins – imaginary, counterfactual, or non-existent ones – merely subsist; they are not real and so the issue of qualia does not arise. The fact that imaginary twins lack qualia doesn’t prove what it was meant to; properly understood it just shows that qualia are an aspect of real experience.
Anyway, are we comfortable with the idea of reality? Not really, because the buzzing complexity and arbitrariness of real things seems to demand an explanation. If I’m right about all real things necessarily being part of a causal matrix, they are in the end all part of one vast entity whose curious firm should somehow be explicable.
Alas, it isn’t. We have two ways of explaining things. One is pure reason: we might be able to deduce the real world from first principles and show that it is logically necessary. Unfortunately pure reason alone is very bad at giving us details of reality; it deals only with Platonic, theoretical entities which subsist but do not exist. To tell us anything about reality it must at least be given a few real facts to work on; but when we’re trying to account for reality as a whole that’s just what we can’t provide.
The other kind of explanation we can give is empirical; we can research reality itself scientifically and draw conclusions. But empirical explanations operate only within the causal matrix; they explain one state of affairs in terms of another, usually earlier one. It’s not possible to account for reality itself this way.
It looks then, as if reality is doomed to remain at least somewhat mysterious, unless we somehow find a third way, neither empirical nor rational.