Mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you disappear from your life

Mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you disappear from your life

Part 12 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

As David Hume demonstrated by his inability to identify a 'self' when he looked into his own mind, mystifying what the meaning of the word 'IS', is, is the means of making you disappear from your own life. Those engaged in that mystification, 'gnowingly' or not, are in opposition to the understanding that we can know reality as it is, which is the idea promoted by the nominalists, rationalists, skeptics/empiricists, and idealists, whose ideas about 'ideas' take varying approaches to having you believe that thinking not only doesn't make reality clearer to us, but misleads and separates us from it, trapping us within our minds in a 'copy world, which distances our understanding from what is actually real and true.

What may come as a shock to fans of sci-fi like the Matrix, is that the real technology trap has nothing to do with machines & computers, it's Ideas and their systematic misuse which are the means of trapping you within an ideology, which excludes you from your own life and ability to live it well.

Beware the 'innocent' progress from Error, to Pretense/Pretext, to Malicious lie

A prime example of such an ideological technology trap, is the bizarre twist that modernity has taken in misconstruing Aristotle's signet ring & wax analogy, and aided by our ignorance of the Three Acts of the Mind, the idea of being born with a 'blank slate', Tabula Rasa, has come to be viewed as having less to do with how our senses give us access to reality and store that in memory, than with alleging that our minds only have access to those impressions that the 'signet ring' of reality has 'somehow' impressed into that wax they equate our minds with, and that it somehow does so without our involvement. What that means is that we are unable to have contact with reality ourselves, as by this theory we can only have a muddled awareness of the impressions that've somehow been left behind in the wax, and which we can only 'feel' from the interior of the wax, and whose impressions we follow around like bread crumbs in an attempt to figure out what has happened 'out there', even though the theory means that we can't have any 'real' effect upon our senses determined lives anyway.

Beware the switcherroo involved in the term 'Empiricism'.
There exists the legitimate scientific sense of Empirical facts, as sound observations, methodically noted and measured, and not accepting as fact what cannot be substantiated. That's all well and good and admirable.

But there is another philosophical sense of 'Empirical', that entails rejecting the human means of cognition, by abstractions and conceptualization, and does so under a false front of 'scientism!' and virtue signaling, as it sniffs at and dismisses concepts and reasoning in favor of 'hard facts', facts which are invariably assembled into unfounded positions such as 'trust the science!'. I recommend against doing so.

However bizarre that might seem, that is what the 'copy theory' of ideas has come to mean, and it is modernity's claim that our own experiences, ideas, and memories, 'aksually' separate us from reality, and equally bizarre is the fact that a number of well respected and admirable people have helped in establishing it.

John Locke for instance, in the act of batting away the rationalism of Descartes, nevertheless advanced a materialistic theory of ideas in his thoughts on education and morals, the error of which has been intensified with every iteration of thinkers who've added to it, particularly in the development (and misuse of) 'Empirical Thinking', which is:

relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory

Thomas Reid identified the root error that Locke had made,

"...[536] First, Because, when he purposely defines the word idea, in the introduction to the Essay, he says it is whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, or whatever the mind can be employed about in thinking. Here there is no room left for objects of the mind that are not ideas...."

David Hume took that erroneous idea and ran with it, advancing what had been a mere error, into ever increasing falsehoods, as his positions helped in intensifying the effects of the copy theory several times over, and transformed an old fashioned skeptical attitude towards presumptions of what we think we know, into the claim that all we think we know about what occurs in our lives, is nothing more than chance associations of events we have and can have no real comprehension of. With that came the incredibly consequential claim, that Causality is not observing the effects that follow from the nature of that reality which caused them, but is instead nothing more than the unwarranted projection of our expectations onto the world of experience, because of what has only chanced to occur in sequence before, which our minds fabricate as having a causal connections, in order to give us a sense of control or power, which, in Hume's mind, is all a figment of our imaginations.

According to Hume, the only things we can have the confidence to trust and talk about, is empirical evidence taken directly from experience ('taken' how?). But he continues (almost as if he has no regard for causality) if we then reason from those same experiences, we cannot understand there to be any 'real' causal connection between them, other than their being 'contiguous in time'. According to Hume, our believing that we can understand how one experience follows from another - causality - is nothing more than 'a priori' ideas which we deceive ourselves with.

And what are these 'a priori' ideas which Hume derides? Webster's defines 'a priori' as:

"relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions"

, and gives the example that:

"So, for example, "Every apple is a fruit" is an a priori statement, since it shows simple logical reasoning and isn't a statement of fact about a specific case; "apples are sweet" is a posteriori, as it expresses something the speaker knows from experience."

The fact that these ideas assume that neither 'apple' nor 'fruit' are considered to have resulted from 'logical reasoning' connected to experience, is something you should take a moment to consider the meaning of, and what such a statement tells you about the thinking that thinks that is 'true'. The IEP, which entirely buys into Hume and modernity's usage of the terms, tells us:

"...A given proposition is knowable a priori if it can be known independent of any experience other than the experience of learning the language in which the proposition is expressed, whereas a proposition that is knowable a posteriori is known on the basis of experience...."

, meaning that 'a priori' ideas are the waxen impressions that we've formed within the interior of our minds, and we have done so without any real connection to reality. Note: What they are saying and the exceedingly dangerous path they are inviting you to travel down (which is what Reid & Beattie warned against), and beware: it takes only a few steps to abandon the path and ground of Common Sense, and become sucked into the Idealist's Matrix.

According to Hume, the 'reality' is that because we've formed these ideas within our minds, separate from reality, then:

"... If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything. The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits...."

Thomas Reid on Hume:

He argues that our concepts are just the contrived word games of definitions that we fabricate to socially construct (anachronistic, but accurate) a narrative:

"...to convince us of this proposition, that where there is no property, there can be no injustice, it is only necessary to define the terms, and explain injustice to be a violation of property. This proposition is, indeed, nothing but a more imperfect definition...."

, and so Hume claims that conceptual terms such as property, justice, violation, are totally unlike reliable empirical facts and math, which, in his mind (and it's worth noting that in his mind, he chose to target the foundations of Justice), requires reasoning directly from experience in order to very reliably discover,

"...That the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides...."

, and,

"...That the cube root of 64 is equal to the half of 10, is a false proposition, and can never be distinctly conceived. But that Caesar, or the angel Gabriel, or any being never existed, may be a false proposition, but still is perfectly conceivable, and implies no contradiction...."

Well. What can common sense tell us about this today?

Quite a lot, actually, as Thomas Reid & Beattie's arguments are every bit as applicable and effective today, as they were when they first made them, and it should be emphasized that it was their arguments and understanding that carried the day over Hume's, and so deeply informed the understanding of our Founders' era.

The only thing keeping their common sense from being understood by us today, is the attention that modernity has diverted away from their arguments. It's worth noting that Hume would've been relegated to an odd philosophical footnote in history, if not for the pernicious rise of German Idealism which Hume woke from its 'dogmatic slumber' (via Kant), and the aid that was given to that by 'Classical Liberals' such as J.S. Mill.

I strongly recommend reading what Thomas Reid had to say, especially as what he says is exceedingly clear, and said with a lively humor, which exposes the folly of Hume's assertions, and makes plain the obvious truth that reality is directly known and knowable to us.

That being said, there are still a few additional points I'd like to add in regards to the key issue that Hume & those following him, rest their cases upon, which is 'a priori', and his putting 'empirical thinking' up on a pedestal to portray it and themselves as being 'strictly logical', proclaiming deductive logic to be the gold standard while turning his nose up at abstractions and inferences, either ignores or evades that fact that all deduction is derived from, and requires, prior inference!

If someone says inductive logic is inference, is not dependable, they're confessing that they don't really know what they 'no!'. All deductive concepts, resulted from what previously had been inferred from something else, which was found to be sound enough to take as self-evident - all deduction implies those instances which that concept was inferred from.

Hume can only declare the primacy of his 'empirical thinking' by evading the fact that logic operates by means of general abstractions, being compared to less abstract particulars, and that neither logic nor science could operate at all, if we 'dispensed with' inferences, abstractions, and systems that adhere to them.

All of that equally escapes his attention when he says:

"...That the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the squares of the other two sides...."

, and,

"...That the cube root of 64 is equal to the half of 10, is a false proposition, and can never be distinctly conceived...."

I wish I could ask him:

"Tell me David, where in experience do you find this '64' of which you speak?"

, because the fact is that neither Sixty, nor six, nor four, are found anywhere in nature. '64' exists only in the mind of man, and does so only in one that has successfully abstracted from quantities of anything, to arrive at the concept of number, and from which he's then able to apply those numerical concepts to everything that can be quantified (and to discern those qualities that aren't quantifiable).

How could anyone 'do math' uncontaminated by 'a priori' concepts? And if it's so central to 'empirical thinking', how & why does counting, mathematics, not to mention geometry, have to be so studiously learned? How does knowing that '2 + 2 = 4' become Common Sense?! And how to do any of that without the use of either syllogistic reasoning, or any of the other conceptual abstractions involved in either defining or calculating a hypothenuse, or to know and prove their calculations to be correct?

Without those abstractions, neither Hume nor anyone else could acquire the ability to count from 0 (!) to 64, nor to sum up the internal angles of a triangle, without first respecting and applying the exceedingly abstract concepts and systems of numbering, counting, and addition.

What Hume and modernity framed as a consequence of his ideas, turns a blind eye to is the understanding that 'causality' isn't something we simply string together from a sequence of events, Causality is the consequence of identity in action, and interaction with other identities within a given context - materially and immaterially - and that Logic would not and could not exist without it, and without which no 'empirical' observations or calculations could be made at all.

To be a sceptic, to be an empirical thinker (as Hume intends it), to be a person that can sincerely proclaim that

"...The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits..."

, is to be as far from being a realist as can be imagined. It's not at all surprising to note that the words that he conveniently makes use of, words like "sciences", "enquiries", "men", "contradiction", "existence", "intelligible", "true", "confused", not to mention "existed" and "identity", and so on, are metaphysical conceptions which legitimate Science, not to mention Mathematics, depend upon and could neither exist nor be performed without!

To say even so much as '64', is to make every bit as much use of 'a priori' concepts, as what Hume meant to slight with 'Caesar' or 'or any being never existed', and doing so is evidence of a dis-integrated mind, which is the sadly un-surprising result of a mind that is bereft of the unifying benefits of metaphysics. The conceptual blindness that is a consequence of ignoring, evading, denying, some (and always more) of what is real and true, truly dis-integrates you from the world, and from your own self, as it wipes out the very thing that makes Common Sense possible - our ability to apprehend, to make a judgment, and to reason from that reality.

The lack of connection that such a person's ideas have to what is real and true, leaves them as the prey of, and into themselves becoming, fabulists, conceptual embezzlers, and intellectual amnesiacs, as it involves their thinking in a level of distance from reality that's hardly even up to the level of being called dishonest, because there is so little reality left in their comprehension to be dishonest about. For Hume to have equated the validity of concepts that have been inferred 'a priori', with words arranged to speak of falling pebbles extinguishing the sun, was a demonstration of his having already fallen into a fantasy world of Ideas, where effects are so easily disassociated from their causes, that he'd left himself trapped within an idea of a world without identity, within a mind so stripped of meaning, value, or purpose, that he was unable even to identify that as being 'bad'.

As Josef Pieper noted in his amazing, and amazingly brief essay, 'Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power':

"...Can a lie be taken as communication. It means specifically to withhold the other's share and portion of reality, to prevent his participation in reality. And so: corruption of the relationship to reality, and corruption of communication - these evidently are the two possible forms in which the corruption of the word manifests itself..."

Thomas Reid"... contended that there was a fundamentally incorrect hypothesis at the heart of the treatise which he could neight accept nor verify, a hypothesis which he referred to as the 'ideal system' or the 'theory of ideas,' which taught that every object in our knowledge is only an idea in our mind This hypothesis is also called the 'copy theory,' the idea that the only relation between the external world and our mental ideas of that world is that the latter are (hopefully) a copy of the former..."

The elephant in the room that Hume is evading, is that his claim that 'non-empirical' words imply "... no contradiction...", that is only the case for the person who has failed to integrate their own thinking, which is less a comment upon reality and our ability to know it, than a confession of having given so little meaningful thought to the nature of identity, experience, and causality, that he failed to ensure that the concepts he 'understands', are connected to, and derived from, what is real and true.

Whether that came as a consequence of his having slipped and fallen into Descartes' notion of an artificial doubt (Descartes' rationalism is distraction, his artificial doubt is the key) as being a 'something' of the mind, or just a lazy and self-flattering cynicism, the consequence of failing to be concerned with the danger inherent in accepting contradictions, is abandoning the basis of common sense. Such a foundation as that is wholly incapable of supporting or adhering to reality, or a system of ethics that reflects it, or of utilizing logic as anything other than a tool for word games, which leaves their own words having, and able to have, no meaning, even to himself and serves only to support schemes for peddling pure sophistry of the kind that Aristotle debunked 2,000 years earlier.

Hume sadly demonstrates the truth of that in his own statements. When reading his thoughts and those who think like him, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that in Hume's ideal of empirical thinking (not the good kind) - you don't really think, you don't choose (free will, in his opinion, being only a sensory illusion). In Hume's idea of Empiricism, there was, 'empirically speaking', no 'You' in you:

"When I introspect, I see no 'me' within"

, and that a person was:

"... nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity..."

, and that without those perceptions, there is no 'you':

"...When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist..."

Hume was a phantom in his own mind, unaware of the fact that the 'Self' he sought was that which was doing the seeking. He took the position that a human being is nothing more than "... a bundle or collection of different perceptions...”, and from that position he admonishes us that all a 'realist' can do, is to recite those isolated 'facts' that he's observed to happen sequentially, and that we should refrain from fabricating any additional 'ideas' - especially moral ones - upon them:

"...It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another34. Such is the foundation of moral reasoning, which forms the greater part of human knowledge, and is the source of all human action and behaviour...."

, and so advises us to dismiss them as mere fictions:

"...If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

, which leaves man bereft of an understanding of reality, of causality, of logic, of ethics, and of science as well.

In Hume's two-dimensional world of 'facts', we're incapable of coming into 'the fullness of understanding', and can neither comprehend nor justify a difference between a criminal shooting a person to rob them, and a policeman shooting a criminal to prevent him from murdering his intended victim - both deaths are but empirical 'facts', and as their causes are illusory, so must be the pretense that there should be consequences for those actions.

To put the matter more provocatively, by Hume's way of thinking, today's woketivists epitomize his ideal of 'empirical thinking', since, as per David Hume, they've seized upon all abstractions and 'a priori' concepts that enable us to identity and understand what a woman 'really is'. Having seen to it that all such abstractions have all been "committed to the flames", 'their truth' is now unmitigated by 'abstractions' of understanding and delusions of causation, it is the simplest and most 'logical' of things for them to insist that mutilating a person's genitalia and breasts to alter the shallowest of outward appearances of experience, does in 'fact' empirically make a 'man' into a 'woman', and a 'woman' into a 'man', and how could any empirical thinker deny that?!

The people whose minds have been taken by modern thinking don't believe that they're pretending when they say that a man can be a woman. The 'Woke Virus' has so stripped their minds of the ability to engage in common sense realism, that they actually believe that surgically altering appearances, or even donning costumes, can and does transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man. Their seemingly over-the-top reactions to anyone who denies that 'fact' to them, is their frantic and hysterical response to an understanding that legitimately threatens to obliterate their entire worldview and concept of 'self', and so they treat your disbelief as an all-out assault upon what remains of their soul.

That is the endpoint of the supposed 'reasonableness' of Hume's empirical skepticism, and his attacks upon Causality, and it has enabled such perilous cracks to be inserted into the foundations of the house of The West, as to have even stripped it of its roof (the Arts & Humanities), which has left the western world unable to find shelter from the anti-western storms of modernity.

That erosion of the West that Hume's empirical skepticism made to seem clever and 'sciency', was quickly advanced upon by Immanuel Kant, who transformed Hume's radical skepticism into the full blown idealism that has made the Western World so structurally unsound over the course of the last two centuries. Kant, who claimed that Hume had woken him from his 'dogmatic slumbers', was less interested in refuting Hume, than in doubling down on his claims and extended them with his own assertion that aksually our sensory media don't give us impressions of reality, instead they create our reality,

"...It has hitherto been assumed that our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to ascertain anything about these objects a priori, by means of conceptions, and thus to extend the range of our knowledge, have been rendered abortive by this assumption. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not be more successful in metaphysics, if we assume that the objects must conform to our cognition..."
Critique of Pure Reason, translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1901), 41.

, which we're only then able to experience by being systemically encased within our own subjective copies of it.

According to Kant, the experience of thinking prevents us from having any real experience of 'the thing itself' of reality.

It's that Kantian system that forms the basis of our modern practice of 'epistemology', and it's that process of 'thinking' that has progressively insinuated itself into every aspect of our lives - philosophy, religion, art, history, education, law, and 'economics' - which has been progressively transforming what had been the solid foundational rock that the House of The West was built upon, into only so much sand.

The radically worse nature of Kant's theory of morality, which is based upon explicitly non-contextual nature of his 'categorical imperative' (which naturally begins not with reality, but from your preferences severed from it), is such that actually claims that it would be immoral to lie to the murderer at your door who's come to kill your daughter, by telling him she's not at home. Kant was called out on that implication of his 'Categorical Imperative', and Kant held to it:

"...if you have by a lie hindered a man who is even now planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. But if you have strictly adhered to the truth, public justice can find no fault with you, be the unforeseen consequence what it may... "

, emphasizing that, even to a would-be murderer, you 'should' be

"To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred unconditional command of reason, and not to be limited by any expediency"

That's what Kant's ideal of 'morality' looks like in practice, and indeed once you dispense with reality, causality, and a respect for what we can understand to be real and true, your own thoughts become a threat to your life and happiness.

In sum, where in traditional philosophy our minds and our knowledge are the benefits of being human, to the modern idealist, our lives, minds, knowledge, and abilities, are the curse of being human which they want to rid our world of - and that is who the proverbial 'They' are.

It's important to be aware of what they want you to buy into, and to give some active thought to noticing and identifying the evidence of it in what's happening around you, because there are those amongst us who are actively attempting to interfere with and even prevent you from being aware of that. It is important to realize that when given an idea, the mind will fill in the blanks with your expectations, unless you pay attention to how reasonable those assumption are or are not. It's important to be aware of all of this because your lack of clarity enables them to peddle banalities such as 'your truth is not my truth', and considerably more involved versions of that (such as monetary theory, 'price inflation', and income distribution curves), to reshape 'your reality' as they see fit.

Which they can only get away with doing, so long as you're unaware that you can and should know what is real and true.

The good news of course is that Reality hasn't gone anywhere, and neither has your ability to experience and perceive and verify it, the only thing that's been altered is where our attention is habitually directed to, and how & why it has been misdirected, and to break that spell we only need to open our eyes up to the sleight of mind being performed upon us, and be willing to engage with it. As Aristotle said at the opening of his Metaphysics, 'All men by nature desire to know', and to that end our senses provide us with the ability to perceive reality, and it is our mind, memory, judgement, gives us the ability to reason our way to understanding far more about the nature of what we're perceiving, than perception alone ever could.

The nature of human nature is that the three acts of the mind occur naturally, and they do so without separating us from, or encasing us within, a lesser matrix knockoff of the world we live within. Believing otherwise is a philosophical spell which skepticism and idealism teach us to cast upon ourselves. Stop doing that. Stop reinforcing that.

...from Stephen Coughlin's Unconstrained Analytics 

By caring about what is real and true, by consciously observing the causal relationships within the world around and within us, a logical hierarchy naturally emerges in our approach to, and understanding of, what is real and true and of our place within it - that is how our minds work (this one post gives an overview of their relation). And as we gain a more solid footing, and a clearer perspective from which to best identify not only what something is, but in what context it exists, and where it does and does not take precedence over other considerations, we find ourselves displaying the mark of prudent thinking.

IS that so - It all depends upon what the meaning of 'Is', is

IS that so - It all depends upon what the meaning of 'Is', is

Part 11 of 22, from Exiting the Wizard's Circle of Economics

Where we should begin is of course where the beginning of the subject is, because if you haven't given some thought to what the meaning of the word IS, is, then what it is will assuredly be taken from you by those who recognize that you haven't yet grasped it, and seeing the power they can gain by using that to their advantage, they'll do so before you've even noticed that it's gone (welcome to the last thirty years (at least)). The sorts of things that should be on people's daily radar, but usually flies well under it, are the most routine points that're used, misused, neglected, or violated, in the standard practices that you very likely do not connect with 'economic thinking', such as what is meant by an 'Idea', or a 'Concept'.

Modernity has developed some very dangerous 'ideas' about ideas (Thomas Reid's comments on this are both revealing, and humorous, and to those used to the 'modern' mode of thinking, unexpected - in one he uses the sense of smell to swiftly reduce idealism to rubbish), that are essential to the semantic deceptions used in general today, and by economics in particular. They do so by using those words that you, classical philosophy, and modern misosophy share (especially in the case of words such as 'value', 'is', 'truth', 'good', 'choice') only in the spelling of, so as to more easily lead you astray. This is due to a kind of verbal-magic trick being performed on and about you with that, and if you can become aware of even some of what is and has been concealed by deliberate mislabeling, the affect upon you is like catching sight of the magician slipping a card from his sleeve - it frees you from the illusion that he'd magically made it appear.

If you've ever said "Well it's just Common Sense", you can thank Thomas Reid and his refutation of Hume's notions, for it, :

Being able to develop a strong enough grip upon what IS, so that it won't easily slip from your grasp, is one of the most significant features that underlies and structures the Western form of reasoning. Its purpose and effect is to help you determine what is (Metaphysics ), what is most likely to follow from that Causality), as well as testing the validity of what we believe (Logic), and then clarifying what we should do in response to that (Ethics).

That is what traditional philosophy always practiced, so as to identify, clarify, and determine whether or not you were justified in believing that what you've understood to be real and true, was or wasn't so, which is the means of keeping you free of the webs of sophistry that TURDS seek to wrap about your understanding.

Although the moderns' advertised that their new field of 'epistemology' exists (ahem) to help you to 'justify belief' - that's not quite the same thing. One problem with their claim, is that it is founded upon the basis of Kant's assertion that we cannot know reality as it is (which is just the tip of that philosophical iceberg), which is what modernists and post-modernists depend upon in subverting and replacing what traditional philosophy sought to have people understand.

Let's begin at the actual beginning, by flagging a few key points from Metaphysics,

• Reality exists. - You perceive that the hand before you exists (and yes Neo, even if it's only a computer simulation, the simulation, or a dream, in that context, it exists)
• Identity - What reality exists as, entails its identity - You don't see the reality of your hand as an undistinguished whole, you identify it - from non-contradiction this isn't that, runs from a silhouette to a molecular scan - through perceiving the elements of your palm, fingers, thumb, etc.
• Awareness - observing what Reality exists as, engages our awareness of our conscious selves - we become aware that there is a self that's observing the hand before us, and that it too exists within reality.

Note that these three points don't strike you in three sequential steps, all three - Reality, Identity, Awareness - are always simultaneously implicit in, and entangled with, every thought and observation we make.

And for the unwise guys who might say:

"You can't prove that reality exists!"

, every word they used in saying that: 'You', 'can't', 'prove', 'that', 'reality', 'exists', presumes that reality does exist, and that something about it is being communicated by those words they've chosen within it, to you who can understand their words and exist within the same reality as they do. Have a nice day. If they persist with something like:

"You don't know what's true for me!"

, just retort:

"So how do you know what's true for me?"

, and if they retreat into:

"No one person can know that their judgment is true!"

, they fully deserve a retort of:

"Is that true in your judgment?"

, and so long as you don't follow down the path of their thinking (and the virus of modernity is trying to draw you in there), and instead examine what they've said and the implications of their statements, a technique known as Retortion, you can safely disarm their mind-traps and continue on your way.

With the outrageous obviousness aside, there are some importantly obvious points to make:

• It is self-evident that human beings are endowed with five senses and a mind at birth.
• It is self-evident that the development of the mind & senses enables us to perceive, judge, and reasonably understand what is real and true in our world.
• It is self-evident that only by intelligently conforming our thoughts to reality, can we learn from our experiences and be better able to take those actions needed to serve and preserve our lives - materially, individually, socially.

What these observations make self-evident to us, is that when we attend to having our thoughts and actions reflect reality, we're able to increase our knowledge, successful actions, and wisdom.

Equally self-evident, is that whether by accident, error, or carelessness, we can be wrong. We can make mistakes.

When we fail to conform to reality, we experience some degree of failure and confusion in whatever it is we might've been trying to achieve.

Which, believe it or not, is a good thing.

Why?

Because it tells us at least three very important facts:

1. that thinking well is not an automatic process, but is one which requires us to be attentive to reality and in our thinking about how to respond to it,
, and,
2. what that reveals is that our ability to discover an error, is confirmation that we can recognize what is real and true!
3. It's important what we direct our attention to.

A moment's consideration makes plain that discovering an error is at the same time revealing a truth that is the most fundamental one of all - which is essentially Aristotle's law of non-contradiction,

that a thing cannot be both true and false at the same time, and in the same manner and context.

, as being the 1st rule of thought, and the foundation of logic. It is also a truth which is the most feared by those who primarily value power, because it has the potential to explode all of their artful sophistries - the wrapping of layers of confusing words to mask contradictions - and leaves them powerless.

They hates it. Truly they do.

What this means for the rest of us, is that we can perceive the world around us, and by virtue of our knowing firsthand that we are capable of making errors, we also know that we're capable of perceiving and judging what is true (if not, an 'error' would be an unknown concept to us), and we do that best by methodically reasoning between our perceptions and judgement, towards a better understanding of what is real and true. It's important that we choose to direct our attention - sensorially and mentally - towards what is actually relevant to a matter, no matter how inconvenient that might be to our feelings and preferences.

But what do we know of how we're able to perceive the world, and abstract ideas from it?

Using the tools available to him at the time, Aristotle used the image of how a signet ring is impressed into wax, as an analogy for how reality is impressed into our minds by means of our sensory perceptions, which we then use in forming our thoughts and memories. From Part 12 of De Anima:

(A) By a 'sense' is meant what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter. This must be conceived of as taking place in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold; we say that what produces the impression is a signet of bronze or gold, but its particular metallic constitution makes no difference: in a similar way the sense is affected by what is coloured or flavoured or sounding, but it is indifferent what in each case the substance is; what alone matters is what quality it has, i.e. in what ratio its constituents are combined.
(B) By 'an organ of sense' is meant that in which ultimately such a power is seated.

, and from there he went on to surmise that when we are born our minds must be 'tablula rasa', a 'blank slate', as prior to our having the data of the senses to work with, we should have no knowledge or ideas of them.

Note: Aristotle was not equating the mind with the wax, the analogy was illustrating the action of the sense perceptions carrying reality into our mind, with the wax being what we retain of that action in memory. He also did not say that our thoughts are, or are limited to, the data of our sense perceptions, or that we are nothing more than our perceptions. Tabula Rasa meant only that our knowledge of the world we live within, begins with our experience & perceptions of it.

The process of identifying what it is we perceive, begins with a part of our mind that precedes any of the contents our senses provide to it, and is what was once commonly understood to be a, if not the, central feature of human nature, The Three Acts of the Mind. If the term is unfamiliar to you, you can thank your education for having robbed you of it, as did mine, but cheer up, you can remedy that, just as I did.

To hit the highlights of what I went over here, the Three Acts of the Mind is a central function in how our mind operates:

First Act: Apprehend (Understand) - We open our eyes, and whether seeing something for the first time, or understand that we know it by name, a Rock for instance, we apprehend it, conceptualize, identify it
Second Act: Judgment - The act of mind which combines or separates two terms by affirmation or denial. 'Rock is hard' is a judgment
Third Act: Reasoning - From our observations and judgments, we move towards further conclusions and applications of them. 'As rocks are hard, I should avoid striking my toe against them.'

These acts are initiated just below our conscious awareness, at the level of observing the 'signet ring' of reality being impressed through our senses into our mind, where some impression of it is left in the 'wax' of memory. In every waking moment the 'difference engine' of the human mind is constantly involved in performing these acts, observing, distinguishing and identifying what has been observed and what's remembered, and making an initial judgment about what to do about the differences it finds, in a process that is common to all human beings, everywhere and every when, the effects of which Thomas Reid called 'Common Sense' (an enjoyable audio of Reid's Inquiry here).

As Reid notes:

"...The same degree of understanding which makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life, makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident, and which he distinctly apprehends.

All knowledge, and all science, must be built upon principles that are self-evident; and of such principles every man who has common sense is a competent judge, when he conceives them distinctly. Hence it is, that disputes very often terminate in an appeal to common sense...."

Common Sense begins with the most basic level of experience, as the effects of touching a hot coal or stove produces the common and self-evident recognition, judgement, and reasoning, everywhere and every when, that one should not touch hot coals or stoves. The good sense of that is self-evident to all who have any sense, and denying it would be evidence of that person's sense being impaired, as Reid also notes:

"...The laws of all civilised nations distinguish those who have this gift of heaven, from those who have it not. The last may have rights which ought not to be violated, but, having no understanding in themselves to direct their actions, the laws appoint them to be guided by the understanding of others. It is easily discerned by its effects in men's actions, in their speeches, and even in their looks; and when it is made a question whether a man has this natural gift or not, a judge or a jury, upon a short conversation with him, can, for the most part, determine the question with great assurance..."

The scope of what is considered to be common sense, rises from direct experience at the level of having the basic sense to not touch hot stoves, on up to ever higher levels of thought regarding what the individual and their community share a common understanding of, or can be expected to. What that means, is that the faculty of Common Sense is not an entirely 'black box' feature, but is open to our actions improving (or degrading) it, meaning that we can consciously 'train' ourselves in how well we perform the Three Acts of The Mind, though after the fact, so to speak, by developing our habits of thinking, knowledge, and purpose, and by what we accept as being of value (by belief or action), all of which depends upon what we attend to.

For instance, staying close to the direct level of experience, in any human society across the ages, if you were to play a musical instrument to anyone with adequate hearing, they would report hearing its sound, and whether or not they recognized the instrument or even considered the sound pleasing, it would be self-evident to them that what they heard had come from that instrument. It would be equally true in all of those instances that those who'd consciously developed their habits of listening, and by paying attention to what they're hearing they could develop the ability to further identify that sound they'd heard as being the note 'C' or 'C#', or a combination of notes that make up the chord 'C# minor', and whether the instrument playing it was in or out of tune. To those who'd developed that ability, those identifications would be 'self-evident' to them, and anyone else who later developed that ability would as well.

Those actions of the mind of apprehending, judging, and reasoning which we've just looked at in regards to touch, and hearing, are equally active with the input of the other senses of sight and smell. The same applies in regards to the far more intricate issues involving our knowledge, thoughts, and habits of mind, and as the legal example of Reid's just noted, 'anyone' within a society should be able to identify what would commonly be considered to be foolish thinking & behavior, and so remark with words to the effect of:

'That just goes against common sense!'

, which is the 'output' of the three acts of the mind operating upon what can reasonably be expected to be commonly known to all.

To the degree that the sense of such conclusions seem obvious to people, the conclusion is drawing upon a common understanding that is so fundamental to their thinking, that the response is close to coming without conscious thought, it is self-evident, though if you were to ask them to go on and explain their conclusion in detail (a favorite 'gotcha' of 'on the street' reporting), it would likely take a few moments of conscious consideration of what it is that they know, to explain it if you could - try explaining how you know a note is C#. The more basic the reasons, the more the sense of it has been absorbed into their 'common sense', and so the more likely they haven't had to consciously consider the details of it in ages - to see what I mean, try giving an off the cuff explanation for why Fall follows Summer, or why there are four seasons.

OTOH, someone such as a logician who has consciously developed their habits of mind and knowledge in the practice of logical reasoning, and so often has occasion to actively consider the subject, would likely be able to identify the particular errors and fallacies responsible for that same common sense conclusion, and the details of which would seem as 'self-evident' to them, as identifying the notes 'C' or 'C#' would've seemed to the musician. And yet someone else of equal intelligence from outside of that community, might not be able to 'make sense' of the statement at all - at first - though once familiarized with the context, they too would be likely to come to the same conclusion.

The operations of the Three Acts of the Mind are common to all people, everywhere and every when, but what contents of the mind are common to people within a community, and so able to be recognized as 'Common Sense', depends upon the knowledge and behavior that is commonly understood in that community, and what people choose to focus on.

Developing what is recognized as a societal baseline of knowledge and expected norms of observation, identification, and judgement - and behavior in accordance with that - is a large part of what education aims at. It's with that baseline in mind, that I invite you to consider the nature of an 'educational system' that willfully fails to provide its students with what should be common sense in their society.

What should also be commonly understood, and can be simply by being attentive to the operations of the mind, is that because our perceptions do reliably inform us about reality, we're able to recognize that we're capable of making mistakes in identifying what it is we perceive ('I thought that round green object was an apple, but it was a tennis ball'), and in judging what actions we should take ('It's for hitting, not biting'), and in reasoning our way to being aware that what we are able to perceive, may not be all that there is to perceive or conceive (such as that while green is a shade we're able to perceive, others such as infrared light, are not within our field of vision, yet remarkably we are able to discover that), and what should be done about it.

An important point to make here, is that our sense perceptions (technically this refers to sensation, percept, and perception, but unless you want another several pages, 'perception' will have to do) are never wrong.

But Van! We do make mistakes, you just cited an example of mistaking an apple for a tennis ball!

Hold on now, read what I said again. Through our senses we perceive that range of reality which they are attuned to (we don't perceive all ranges of color, but we do perceive those within the range our eyes are attuned to, yes, even those who're color blind still perceive the range they're capable of) as it is. What we tend to think of as errors of perception, comes from our making errors in identifying what it is we are perceiving. The perceptions themselves (yes, including the oddities of vision, and delusions and hallucinations are matters of the mind, not of perception), are of reality as it is, and if that were not the case, we could know nothing at all.

It also matters, as I've been noting, what and how you pay attention, do you attend to that particular issue of importance within the context which makes it important, or do you allow your focus to fixate on that one point and forget about the context it has importance within? If you're not getting the distinction, there's the famous 'monkey business' video of people asked to concentrate on a basketball being passed amongst them, that you should take a moment to watch.

But because we are able to perceive the world around us, and because we are able to make mistakes in judgement, it is especially consequential that we be attuned to the nature of what we identify, and what contextually follows from that, which is the nature of causality - cause and effect. Understanding how it is that the nature of matter, and of our own thinking, are integrated and follow a process, a telos, where one thing follows from another, is important to have a grasp of.

In observing the reality we are able to observe of the world around and within us, Aristotle proposed his theory of 'The Four Causes' (gone into in more detail here), which observes the nature of how effects are preceded by causes, which logic and reason follow from (and would not be possible without), and how best to use those insights to abstract ideas from reality and so develop our experiences into knowledge of the world to a far greater degree than sense perception alone could ever have provided us, and which we can gain wisdom from. The Four Causes are, in brief:

1. the Material Cause: “that out of which”, e.g., bronze is what a statue is made out of.
2. the Formal Cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.
3. the Efficient Cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
4. the Final Cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, or that health is the end that's being aimed at by walking, losing weight, medicine, and surgical tools; e.g., or that to enhance a park setting is why a bronze statue is commissioned for a place in it;

While I'll understand if you don't care much for what causes a bronze statue to be produced, by developing the habit of looking deeper into the nature of causation than only the shallowest of surface appearances, you'll be more aware of where you are situated within the world, more informed about what it is you are observing, and less mystified about what's going on around you.

In short, an attention to causation, enables you to have a more thorough understanding of what truly does matter to you, in your life, both immediately, and long range.

And you should especially note that modern philosophy dismisses and ignores the Efficient and the Final causes from all consideration (and Thomas Aquinas' addition of the Exemplary Cause, which guides the intellect), and focuses only on the 1st two causes - as they must, because the pretenses of their theories would be unstainable otherwise (teaching college students to hate Israel for 'occupying' land, is infinitely easier to accomplish by pointing only to the first two causes of borders and guards, while ignoring the efficient and final causes of history and justice, and the contradictions those would expose in the rest of what they're taught on the issue).

How this all fits together, and whether or not we're aware of it, is something that we shouldn't breeze past too quickly, so let's pause and take note: We perceive reality and are able to identify it, and in abstracting from our experiences and considerations, we're able to assemble and associate those perceptions and observations into considerable amounts of interrelated and integrated knowledge, that knowledge branches out fractal-like from any one particular aspect of what we experience, and from which, properly understood, is able to provide us with a wisdom which can enhance and guide our experience in life, and the quality of it.

A brief illustration of that follows from beginning with the senses alone, that we perceive from some distance over there, a round, no... wait... a spherical object, green in color, and moving to pick it up, it feels smooth to the touch, solid, has some weight to it - ooh, it smells tart, tastes sweet & juicy. With that data as a starting point, we are able - by choice coupled with action - to methodically reason and investigate the substance of the apple. It's within our power to develop a knowledge of the apple itself and the tree it came from, and of the soil, fertilizer, and climate that it grows best in. Investigating the structure of the skin and meat of the apple can lead us into an understanding of the structure of the cells and chemistry that it's made of when alive, and how its materials decompose back into the soil, afterwards. From all of that we can develop habits of understanding and behavior in regards to what we come to understand to be real and true, that extend from beyond that of growing and eating an apple, to the wisdom to apply the principles which that understanding was developed through, to every other aspect of our lives.

By conforming our thoughts to what is real and true, perceptually and conceptually, we're able to achieve a greater understanding of our world than could ever be grasped by sense perception alone; this is true materially, ranging from the biology of cells to the infrared spectrum, and from the very small level of sub-atomic particles to the beyond vast nature of the structure of distant galaxies. Likewise immaterially as well, in regards to how observing and understanding yourself and those around you will find common ground in the moral principles and virtuous behavior that form into habits of character that benefit ourselves and those in society with us, which aid us in guiding our future thoughts and actions.

The unifying nature of that, is what we saw Bastiat noting in his Economic Harmonies, and it shows in what Reid had earlier observed as well:

"...The same degree of understanding which makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life, makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident, and which he distinctly apprehends.

All knowledge, and all science, must be built upon principles that are self-evident; and of such principles every man who has common sense is a competent judge, when he conceives them distinctly. Hence it is, that disputes very often terminate in an appeal to common sense.

While the parties agree in the first principles on which their arguments are grounded, there is room for reasoning; but when one denies what to the other appears too evident to need or to admit of proof, reasoning seems to be at an end; an appeal is made to common sense, and each party is left to enjoy his own opinion..."

Leaving the malicious distractions of modernity aside, when our concerns are for what is real and true, our perceptions, conceptions, and understanding, do not distance us from, or serve as barriers between, ourselves and the reality we exist within. Rather, through abstracting from what we are able to perceive to be real and true, we develop concepts which both reflect reality, and enable us to unite our thoughts and perceptions with our experiences, to better understand the lives we're living and the world we're living within, than perceptions alone could ever provide.

IOW, the very practical fruits of attending to metaphysics, causality, and ethics, is an improved ability to engage in an organized pursuit of happiness, which is the most reliable method for achieving some level of success in living lives worth living, and does so in a way that you can be thankful for whatever prosperity you do achieve, which is an approach that epitomizes the culture of the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian West.

Any claims and assertions against that will, and are possibly even intended to, reduce the scope and quality of your life, and your ability to live it well.

For those who doubt the consequences of lacking that, there's sadly no shortage of object lessons to be learned from 'stars' who've tragically ended their lives by their own hand or habits, after having achieved the trappings of 'success' without having first learned what a successful life is, and how to support and sustain it.