Mankind as a deformation of philosophy, or what philosophy is about

Asi je to úplný nesmysl sem dávat něco v angličtině, takže tenhle blog berte jako takový test, abych sám sebe přesvědčil, že tomu tak je a obratem ho smazal. :-)

Philosophy is a very tricky field. Doing philosophy, you don’t have as many points of direct contact with reality in order to prove your conclusions, as e.g. physics has. Physics can test its hypothesis by doing many precise and in-depth experiments, or by carrying out detailed and many times repeated observations of for example galaxies. The link between philosophy and the real world is thus rather generic, even though philosophy strives to create an adequate and reliable model of reality, similarly to physics. However, the philosophical model is much more abstract than the physics one. There are only a few points of contact between philosophy and reality in the form of philosophical axioms, such as the following: the generality of emergence which means that everything is only a phenomenon; the non-existence of infinity; the generality of motion; the axiom which tells us that chance is only a hidden determinism and determinism always contains nonzero coincidence, which means (again) that every chance is purely phenomenological, etc. Philosophy without such axioms can’t be correct philosophy because it is out of reality and it doesn’t have any empirical background, hence it can’t describe the world around us properly.

In our context, axioms are not arbitrary like some mathematical axioms today. Only the non-arbitrary axioms which were seen a million times in reality, without even a single exception (like e.g. original historical axioms of Euclidean geometry) create a solid basis for correct philosophy. In the hunt for such axioms we must exclude phenomena which are on our noetic (cognitive) horizon, because such a position hides structures of those phenomena. Therefore, these phenomena sometimes appear not to be results of emergence, they appear not to be only phenomena but basic essences / absolute entities. This, nonetheless, is just a delusional impression and a result of our incomplete knowledge.

Maybe even a more challenging situation is when it comes to philosophical thinking, because philosophy doesn’t have as many exact in-depth rules as e.g. mathematics which is a “machine” composed of such rules. Philosophy simply doesn’t have a detailed plan of the “town”. Hence, building a proper philosophy without such a map needs to avoid even the smallest mistake in orientation, in its basic ideas or basic conclusions. Making such a small mistake in philosophical foundations causes a significant deformation of the whole philosophical building (which can be compared to the butterfly effect). Even a single smallest error causes philosophy to go in a very wrong direction and to take the wrong turn on a basic philosophical crossroads. The biggest of such errors is related to the question whether philosophy should focus mainly on a subject, and whether philosophy should be subjective (as we will see later). Here we can notice that the logic of thinking is independent of subjective opinions, hence it is objective, and the best example of this objectivity is the mathematical “machinery”. Philosophy is very gentle, it though must use logic, but its logic is rather fuzzy, not fully exact one that firmly marks the way, like in mathematics. Philosophy is often a matter of quite careful and delicate perception of regularities of reality. Philosophy is almost an art, but as opposed to art, it must fully respect reality and be objective. It is the art of objectivity or at least objectivisation which is the maximal tendency for objectivity, even if we must sometimes guess this objectivity because it is hidden although it fully exists.

While, for example, physics is like a lighthouse firmly resting on the rock of empiricism and reality, philosophy is like a boat that is thrown about by waves or carried away by a sea current. We need to eliminate the current and silence the waves of the sea of emotions and subjectivity as much as possible, but the waves and the stream will still be strong enough, so we must sail the ship of philosophy very carefully and skillfully to achieve success and to reach the dream target – supreme knowledge. At the same time the captain philosophy has to navigate the ship perfectly without a good map, as said previously.

The mathematical joke that the difference between mathematics and philosophy is that mathematics needs a paper, a pen and a trash-bin, while philosophy needs just a paper and a pen, is not only pejorative, but it also shows how tricky and painful philosophy is. From this point of view it is even more demanding than maths because its mistakes are not easily visible, findable and correctable as they are in maths. That is why the majority of ideas which the public assumes are philosophy, are in fact only deformations of philosophy, or out of philosophy, a dead end branch of a philosophy river, but they are not healthy philosophy itself.

The biggest deformation of philosophy is, unfortunately, caused by human beings, our subjectivity and emotions. Take for instance the strong anthropic principle, the simulation hypothesis (e.g. Bostrom’s simulation argument of self-simulation) or existentialism. Many people think that a man is the main topic of philosophy, but that is not true at all. Philosophy must study the most general regularities, and because the presence of human beings is marginal within the universe, it can’t be a subject of philosophy. We should consider that people inhabit only one planet of the solar system, so majority of space in the solar system is without any human presence. Considering the closest stars, which are approximately 4 light years away, people are only a grain of dust in a huge space. Thinking further about our galaxy that holds 200 billion of stars and about the universe with hundreds of billions galaxies, people are literally nothing in comparison to the universe or even the multiverse. Additionally, if we consider the extra-terrestrials, we can’t assume they are the same as humans, especially when even our animals are quite different to us. These ETs, if they exist, can possess very different ethics (if any), very different attributes and maybe even post-consciousness if we extrapolate the evolution and compare us to animals in relation to the ETs. This shows us again that human beings are just one unique case amongst plenty various life forms, rather than something widespread.

In addition, we can evaluate how much energy can people control. We are talking about only a small part of the planet Earth’s energy. Furthermore, our planet’s energy is nothing when compared to the energy of the Sun. What is more, there are objects with a billion times higher energy than our Sun, e.g. black holes. And you can imagine how astonishingly huge the energy of the universe is, when there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions stars and with at least one big black hole each. The energy used by people is literally nothing in comparison to the energy of the big bang, and we are still not considering all of the parallel universes if there are any.
Consequently, human beings are not something general and significant within the universe at all, they are virtually nothing. Thus, the omnipresence of our subject in our thinking is only phenomenological; it is just an illusion caused by the fact that we are (from our point of view) the observers of the world. All the time, this is no more than our subject and our consciousness which we can’t free ourselves of. Our subject is like a pair of glasses with a miniscule viewfinder which deforms and blocks our vision, but we can’t get rid of the glasses, we can merely improve them a bit. We can’t physically cast off our consciousness and our subjectivity, so the only way to free us is to overcome it mentally - by abstraction and thinking.

As the observers, our consciousness suffers from its locality. It is at one place in space so it’s inevitable that it perceives phenomena that are closer as more significant and “bigger” than those that are far. This is a simple principle called perspective. Such deformation represents a crucial problem not only for philosophy. Focusing mainly on our planet, people historically considered that the Earth is the centre of the universe or rather that there is only the Earth (and the Sun and planets) and a copula with plenty of light dots, instead of the universe. Later on, we overcame this view, and realised that the Earth is not the centre of the solar system, the light dots are suns, and soon after, that some “suns” are in fact galaxies composed of billions of stars. Now we can imagine the existence of billions of universes, each probably with hundreds of billions of galaxies. We partly overcame this deformation of perspective, but partly it is still valid because we don’t know almost anything about parallel universes, the multiverse and about the entity which contains the multiverse, etc. etc.

The perspective does not mean only the spatial perspective, but also a general noetic (epistemological) perspective (caused by noetic locality) which includes time perspective (i.e. we know less about events more distant in the past or in the future, or about events much quicker or much slower than our consciousness), or structural perspective (i.e. we know less about very small things (in comparison to us, e.g. about super-strings) or about very big things (e.g. about the multiverse)). One dimension of noetic perspective is also the perspective of similarity. We have a better understanding of what is similar to us (e.g. other people) than what is different to us (e.g. dolphins) in physiology, surroundings, type of food, etc. Some dimensions of noetic perspective are more like cognitive blocks: when we are in “one place” of the electromagnetic spectrum, using a very small range of frequencies visible to our eyes, we ignore a huge majority of frequencies. Partially, we have overcome this block by constructing devices that are able to register many more frequencies than our eyes could, but there is still only a minority of range available to us.
The impossibility of registering gravitational waves used to be not only a blind spot, but rather our whole blind sphere. After constructing the LIGO apparatus which can for the first time observe gravitational waves, it led to a totally new way of perception. The observation via quantum entanglement is most probably waiting to be discovered and may even be able to show us the internal structure of black holes. It’s because the entanglement is faster than light and it is also a background from which physical space originates. In our context it is not important whether this prediction is correct, but it shows us that there are other ways of observation which are currently our blind spheres. Moreover, there are plenty of other ones we don’t even know about. Our noetic locality appears to be an almost complete ignorance rather than a mere deformation. We don’t know much e.g. about dark matter, neither we know anything about dark energy, and this is only a beginning. All these (and other) dimensions of noetic perspective create noetic deformation / noetic blocks of our knowledge which must be surpassed to free our mind and our intellect, in order to reach the best possible overview and the most comprehensive knowledge applicable to the biggest area. Noetically non-local philosophy is the goal.

Going to the first and most blocking noetic locality issue for philosophy - subjective deformation, we can be explicit and enumerate a few typical examples of fields which suffer from extreme locality, hence are not philosophy, even though the majority of people think they are. Those are e.g. existentialism, ethics (a part of sociology) which is only about relations amongst people or about a relation of people to closed surroundings, religions, the theory of consciousness, artificial intelligence, most streams of sociology and psychology, etc. All those (and others) are closely related to one place and one specific topic, so they are extreme view deformations while trying to be valid generally for all reality. Such deformations often claim to be philosophy, but this is merely an attempt for their glorification, for their ascension to achieve a status of rationally proved omnipresent validity. Isn’t it a philosophical snobbery?

These human-oriented fields are for sure very important, but only for us, not for the universe. For instance artificial intelligence or a conscious god seem to be a way to omniscience and/or to omnipotence, but they are the exact opposite. Their locality leads to their philosophical ignorance. The locality is a crucial problem because every transfer of information, which is totally necessary for getting info from omnipresent reality to any intelligence, means a loss, deformation and delay of this information. It is enough to think e.g. that we see the universe in the past, because the light velocity is very slow. The idea of omnipresence of any “observer” is just a completely unfounded fairy tale. For “omnipresent” validity of philosophical ideas we must rectify cognitive deformations caused by locality.

Copernicus represents one of the best known historical examples of noetic rectification. As a first step away from locality, he overcame the noetic deformation with his heliocentric solar system. A second well-known example is Darwin’s evolution of species. Both are what genius Jean Piaget called “decentration” in psychology, and we will use the term in a more decentric / general way as a noetic decentration which means negation of a central point of view in all noetic dimensions (space, time, structure, similarity, etc.). In fact, thinking itself is impossible without such decentration. The first decentration in our mind evolution is psychological differentiation between a very young child and its mother which is the initial step of self-realisation of the child’s emerging mind. This is a beginning of the following tendency: the more entities you have in mind, the more “space”, more freedom, more possibilities of combinations and more knowledge for thoughts you have.

Centration, in contrary, focuses on the closest things, mainly on human beings, and is imprisoning us to noetic locality, to people who are at the same place (the Earth), at the same time and on the same structural level. This is almost like a noetic black hole, a collapse of our thinking, the end of our way of seeking the most general point of view. It is like a toothache which causes us to ignore the world around us, focusing on just one point, reducing the whole world only to one dot. Using the words of William Shakespeare we can say: “There has never been a philosopher who could tolerate a toothache patiently...”. The philosophical “toothache” is often caused by focusing on self and our human kind. We have to choose: either philosophy or human kind.

Of course, focusing on human issues is useful and valuable in the field of psychology, sociology (including e.g. ethics) or political science, etc. Nevertheless, the relation of philosophy and human issues is like Heisenberg's uncertainty principles: the more human issues you have in it, the less philosophy and freedom you have. Subjectivity is like a ball and chain. That is why a program of high level philosophy must be a program of eliminating human issues from it… There is one single exception, and that is to investigate mechanisms of deformation caused by the observer / human being, aiming to reduce the influence of human factors from philosophy. It is impossible to remove either factor totally, in our case the subjective factor (because of the axiom of zero nonexistence), just as it is impossible to achieve zero inaccuracy of either attribute in the case of the uncertainty principle.

For the success of our civilisation and our technologies, it was necessary to find a way out of the focus on human beings which is like a prison of philosophical mind. At the same time, the achievements of our civilisation are also a proof that the objectivity approach is valid. All the results of our sciences - our technologies (cars, planes, computers, mobiles, medicine, the construction industry etc.) are based on the objective approach where we empirically ask reality what is true and what is not, with the help of logic and natural laws that are extracted from reality, and so as well are objective.
This tendency of objectivisation is also expressed by another axiom which tells us that a deeper structural level is primary in comparison to upper levels. This higher level is asking a lower level for replies to its questions; our consciousness is asking e.g. electrons for answers via an experiment. This approach can be called neo-materialism because it is something completely different to mechanical materialism of 18th century, where the foundation of the world was a particular substance - a matter composed of atom which was the basis of everything. Today we are trying to determine whether such a basic structural level should be represented by atoms, or neutrons, protons and electrons composing these atoms, or quarks and gluons composing nucleons, or e.g. super-strings and something deeper, or even whether any “final” level exists. The structural level hierarchy goes also up: our sentences as expressions of our thoughts are composed of words, words consist of letters. While letters are more “material” than sentences, neurons are more material than letters which are dynamic structures composed mainly of neurons in our brains.

Evidently, what is more material, is relative. For example atoms are very abstract in comparison to their nucleus and electrons orbiting around it, because on a model where an atomic nucleus is the size of an apple, the first electrons would be approximately 5 kilometres away from the nucleus. Atoms are mostly an empty space, but still relatively compact in comparison to the space outside of material bodies. Neo-materialism is relative, but it doesn’t mean it is subjective. The boundaries of e.g. an atomic nucleus are not voluntary and dependent on opinion of people, but they are (mostly) independent of any subject. Moreover, the relativism is controlled by algorithms which are again objective. The simplest algorithm is that the deeper a structural level is when compared to another structural level, the more material it is.

A good example of the fact that relativity doesn’t mean postmodern arbitrariness, is one of the best paradigms that are responsible for the wave of relativisation - the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. Relativistic properties are not unchangeable like in the mechanical materialism paradigm; they are flexible, but according to immutable laws or formulas. Dilatation of time and contraction of lengths show own flexibility, however, this flexibility works according to exact formulas. Finding dynamism of everything around us, including biological evolution, geological movement of continents and the creation of the universe, proves the philosophical axiom of movement generality which Heraclitus of Ephesus expressed by the famous sentence “Panta rei.”. Almost nothing is static as it was presumed in the time of the Enlightenment, but everything is flexible according to practically changeless rules. It is evident that these rules themselves extremely slowly change, already since the big bang where they originated. Of course, also the rules according to which the big bang evolved, formed themselves in a certain time… and da capo al fine. Still, there is enough stability in order not to think that everything is changeable by our free will or by our opinion. The impression of arbitrariness is supported by our ignorance and by the fact that our knowledge is rather limited, partial and incomplete. Although, this is only our superficial illusion coming from substantial partiality of our picture of the world, and despite our perception of it, the world itself is “regular”.

So, in a nutshell, philosophy is the most general description of the most general rules and topics (not to the subject), and it is objective, neo-materialistic, dynamic and relative.