Jan Westerhoff

Another short introduction from the Oxford University Press series. In this case, we have an analytical philosopher, with a good understanding of the latest developments in the sciences of matter and mind, explore the meaning of reality in a number of guises.

Analytical philosophy can appear to be an elaborate language game, This, in itself, may have little relationship to reality so it is to the credit of Westerhoff that he makes every effort to take us through variant definitions of reality show more from different perspectives.

What is clear is that (like love or so many other general terms), what we mean by reality is highly situational. Debates on issues of reality can become heated, a waste of time simply because the participants in the discussion have not defined their terms or their stance.

Unfortunately, constantly defining terms as analytical philosophers are wont to do can soon take the fun out of things. This makes this book especially valuable.

It is a crib sheet for all those theories of reality that should perhaps be outlined before we even start considering what we mean by a particular instance of the 'real'.

Thus, Westerhoff looks at the reality of our own existence (are we dreaming ourselves?), at the reality of matter, at the reality of ourselves as persons and at the reality of time itself through the lens of five general theories.

We can see something as real if it appears to us as real, if it appears as real to most other persons, as anything not imagined, as what is there if we were not there or as what is left after everything has been reduced to core of being by analysis.

Any of these is plausible but none are definitive and they are not fully compatible with each other as a whole.

My own view is the relaxed one that the term 'reality' as descriptor of anything specifically meaningful is as useless as the terms 'love' and 'freedom'. These are rhetorical terms where the meaning lies not in the word but in the use of it to assert a position without full explanation.

It is also an 'introducer' word - it is useful for introducing us to something that does exist for us functionally by acting as a portmanteau 'folder' for many things that are mostly not like each other but which have similarities, being more like each other than they are like anything else.

The introducer word, far from representing something real (certainly not the nonsensical Platonic Ideal), represents an attribute of all things within its folder.

Reality 'really' means a word used to bring a lot of related ideas together through the shared attribute of presuming that they describe the nature of the world as existing. Any flaw in the book is simply the inherent flaw in analytical philosophy.

Having been given a word, the analytical philosopher feels that he must discover its meaning through the language game of analysis. The folder must, it would seem, be obliged into meaning to make sense of the academic or intellectual world.

Naturally, all that happens in this book is that our very capable analytical philosopher can come to no conclusion that is finally plausible, providing merely a menu of intellectually coherent possibilities which we probably chooose between on grounds of aesthetics more than logic.

There are small points of analysis where I find myself disagreeing with Westerhof while appreciating the crispness of his reasoning and the depth of his knowledge of science (and the clarity of his exposition) only because he simply cannot not rely on a 'given' language that maybe a false friend.

One area of discomfort is the way that the coding theory of ultimate reality is allowed to remain in the air as a gateway to a logic that may not be there.

It is as if the academic community simply cannot cope with the possibility that Platonism, logic and mathematics (the 'intellectual') might break down at a certain point - and that this must not be allowed to happen at any costs.

The paradox is that the determined attempt to ensure that all things can be encompassed within the intellectual results in a door being opened to the non-intellectual in a way that is more disturbing than the mere unknowable absolute irrationalism of the abyss.

This is the problem of 'theory' which has plagued humanity with often murderous results since the class of priest and intellectual first emerged.

Every description of ultimate reality is so concerned to extrapolate human-scale thought process into the abyss of unknowing, beyond the limits of current science, that it falls into the trap of allowing space for 'spirit' or a 'code' from outside.

It is as if a deep irrationalism at the base of reality is so terrifying that the intellectual (of whatever background) must be prepared to accept a rationalised irrationality rather than accept that there may not be anything rational there at all.

Westerhoff, to his credit, cannot be accused of going beyond his brief but I worry more than a little about leaving a gap where logic or mathematics ends and then not debating what might fill it on terms that say more positively - "we simply cannot know".

The 'silence' leaves a gap into which anything may flow as if it knew the answer to the implicit question.

This is rather dangerous because it is allows an irrationalist spirituality in through the back door, as those who are desperate for meaning seize hold of the fact that something has (it would seem) to fill the gaps left by (say) the limits of quantum mechanics.

The constant desperate attempt by New Age fluffies to link quantum effects to the existence of some universal consciousness is terribly sad but is not helped by scientists who start extrapolating ancient myths into the territory that defeats their best endeavours at final knowledge.

As a result, culturally, we find ourselves with increasingly hysterical appeals to the spirit in order to explain what is simply not understood matter. Instead of continuing to use a rational language of materialism to describe the unknown, the unknown gets reinvented as 'God' or worse.

Perhaps what is lacking in the book is simply the courage to leap ahead and say that not only do we not know X or Y, we may never know and, in that gap, we can either admit our lack of knowledge and remain embedded in material realities which function for us as we are ...

... or we can engage in the fluffy thinking of filling what we do not know with copies of our thought processes and then reinventing what is known as some sort of spirit or consciousness, an absurd tautology loaded with socio-political threats.

A second area of cultural interest is in the continued attempt to denigrate our sense of self simply because of the logical truths of our own perceptions and biology that lead to uncertainty - and the insistence of taking some reified permanent self at face value (as supplied by history) as our 'Aunt Sally'.

This is bound up with a third issue, the reality of time, where, again, a non-issue from our perspective as humans in the world (the subjective reality of the arrow of time) is exploited to create functional uncertainty in ourselves in relation to our perception of the present.

The point is that our primitive view of self and of time as 'real' (in the fixed sense required by our historic culture) may be entirely false without it diminishing the reality of ourselves as Selves and of Time, not merely to us but as a functionally useful and consistent social reality.

The problem lies in the conventional separation of Past, Present and Future. Westerhoff falls into the trap of taking it face value as if he can only communicate with his readers by accepting their 'givens'. But there never is a Present for human beings because of their perceptual apparatus.

What we have is a currently-being-processed immediate past (that we call the present) that is anticipating from experience an wholly unknowable future and matching the most recent data to not only internal memories and habits but the fixed capital of society and the material world.

Once we think of things in this way then our position as conscious beings becomes less passive, less of the instant loss of the future into the past through an unknowable but apparently perceived present and more the creation of the future through the immediate past's fast-moving and creative dialogue with the inherited past.

The Self thus becomes a very real entity as the processing unit creating immediate futures out of the dialectic of recent pasts and out of the materiality and history of the 'given' (the 'real' past to all intents and purposes).

The continuity that creates the Self is this process of moving forward at a rollicking pace until death or some other disruption (such as severe mental illness or incapacity).

The fact that much of the recent past is lost into the 'given' (albeit that some of this becomes embedded in the sub-conscious, unused memory and somatic symptoms) does not make the Self any less real. It ensures that it is making choices (often sub-conscious) about its own future.

The arrival of uncertainty at the margins of science, combined with the desperate desire to imagine meanings and seek certainties where none are to be found, offers profound cultural threats to humanity.

The idea that there is gap in what we know that must be filled with something (when there is no reason to fill it with anything) creates the space for the new obscurantism now leaching out from a troubled America into Europe.

This is the New Age nonsense of insisting on spirit without evidence except as lack while the idea that we are not selves but fluid objects in the given environment without free will is dangerous when governments and authorities are looking for excuses to deprive us of that free will.

The fact that the assault on freedom is given a false scientific basis should worry us exceedingly because scientists are now far too ready to jump from what they do know (through scientific method) to what they do not know but is politically convenient to know.

Here is an example from the Neuro-Scientist Head at the NIDA in a recent interview:

" Dr. Volkow generally forswears any interest in politics per se, but midway through a long day of meetings last month she sighed and acknowledged, “science and politics are intertwined.” We think we have free will, she continued, but we are... foiled at every turn.

" First our biology conspires against us with brains that are hard-wired to increase pleasure and decrease pain. Meanwhile, we are so gregarious that social systems — whether you call them peer pressure or politics — reliably dwarf us as individuals. “There is no way you can escape.”"

She is wrong - more worryingly, she is in an influential position in being wrong. Her scientific expertise is not in doubt but her judgement on society and politics is as flawed as that of an autistic Soviet engineer.

In fact, we can and do challenge societal norms and we can rewire our plastic brains through the exercise of will and thought in ways that are not simple matters of pleasurable or painful instinct. We can even unlearn pain and revise our pleasures.

What is going on here is that a desperate scientific and political elite subconsciously (if not consciously) wants the tools to ensure that we never question norms that are convenient to them.

Perhaps a particular vision of our late liberal society in despair demands that we never exercise the free will and reason that our masters increasingly wish to claim is deficient or even non-existent.

This attitude is dangerous because we are being persuaded to trust that scientists are right about things that are outside their competence. This is a new liberal-totalitarianism which echoes how Darwinism was once used to justify racial politics in its use of the new neuroscience.

In these two areas - the creation of the aware and free self through its mastering of data in time (expressed as an arrow, despite the analytical theoreticians) and the construction of humanity without recourse to mystification - the over-reaching of science and analytical philosophy is in danger of letting in the dead weight of obscurantism and tyranny by the back door.

Naturally, this book cannot be held responsible. It remains a superb little guide to the various way we interpret reality and how scientific discovery has to taken us to the limits of understanding what it is that we mean by reality (in any objective sense).

It is true that, objectively, reality is a very wobbly concept. It does not stand up to scrutiny without constant addition of explanatory clauses but this does not mean that one particular kind of reality - the reality of the individual - is not generally adequate to the task.

Something like seven billion realities compete to build a multiple of social realities that are all engaged in dealing with wants and desires in the context of a 'given' material reality based on the laws of physics operating at a human level and mediated through communications and technology.

Realities are thus constructed instantaneously seven billion times every living moment with collaborative or tyrannically imposed projects bringing increasing levels of complexity into some kind of working order, tested against facts on the ground.

Anything outside this 'reality of realities' might reasonably be considered only of interest as a speculative curiousity or as giving us more 'facts on the ground' for billions of minds to play with. It is either meaningless play or functionally useful, ludic or pragmatic, and centred on us.

But all analyses of reality that take playfulness as seriously meaningful are on the edge of psychotic, likely to make us unable to deal functionally with facts on the ground.

It would be disturbing to think that, having escaped twentieth century neurosis, we should fall into twenty-first century psychosis.

Alternative realities that bring in gods, spirit and God or which deny the creative role of each one of those individual consciousnesses striving, like the animals they are, for pleasure, survival or personal meaning are, albeit accidental, enemies of humanity as a progressing species. show less

Tibetan Buddhist writings frequently state that many of the things we perceive in the world are in fact illusory, as illusory as echoes or mirages. In Twelve Examples of Illusion, Jan Westerhoff offers an engaging look at a dozen illusions--including magic tricks, dreams, rainbows, and reflections in a mirror--showing how these phenomena can give us insight into reality. For instance, he offers a fascinating discussion of optical illusions, such as the wheel of fire (the "wheel" seen when a show more torch is swung rapidly in a circle), discussing Tibetan explanations of this phenomenon as well as the findings of modern psychology, and significantly clarifying the idea that most phenomena--from chairs to trees--are similar illusions. The book uses a variety of crystal-clear examples drawn from a wide variety of fields, including contemporary philosophy and cognitive science, as well as the history of science, optics, artificial intelligence, geometry, economics, and literary theory. Throughout, Westerhoff makes both Buddhist philosophical ideas and the latest theories of mind and brain come alive for the general reader. show less

This would work as an advanced undergraduate textbook. It doesn't assume much of the reader, but it does require some ability to think through details. It's a bit of a slog - it probably took me two months to crawl through. There is a lot of information here. This is all material that I have studied repeatedly over the decades, Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, Yogacara - it's pretty much a view that parallels the Tibetan perspective. It seems like East Asian Buddhism assigns different works to e.g. show more Nagarjuna and Vasubandhu. I don't recall Westerhoff reviewing that difference, between Tibetan and Chinese views of Indian Buddhism.

Even though the basic trajectory of ideas here is quite familiar to me, I got a lot out of reading this book. Westerhoff does a great job of inviting the reader, coaxing the reader, to thing through these ideas, to bring them to life. show less

The two great mysteries of philosophy have been the nature of the world and the nature of mind, and this Very Short Intro tackles their tangled relationship under four headings. First: is the world itself real? Second: is the stuff, i.e. matter, that world seems to be made from real? Third: is the mind looking out at that world real? And fourth: what about the “now” in which we’re asking these questions—is time real?
    The first of these compares the ancient “You’re dreaming show more all this, and will eventually wake” idea with its modern descendants: the horror-movie “You are an isolated brain in a tank” scenario (with wires and tubes feeding you a false picture of the world); and “reality” as a complete simulation, including you (and your unswerving conviction that you’re not one). Any of these could be true too: in the very near future, for instance, it will become possible to create a simulation of the entire planet at any chosen period or specific date in the past—and that is what we all are (although there’s actually a lot more to this idea than I’d realised).
    The next section, dealing with matter, takes us from Johnson “refuting” Berkeley by kicking that stone, to the quantum physics of today.
    The third, about whether you’re real yourself, specifically means that sense of a personal “I” we all seem to have. It has four main features: that it gives the appearance of existing inside the body, yet is in some way distinct from it; that while everything else comes and goes around it, this “I” seems to remain throughout an entire lifetime; that it integrates the moment-to-moment bombardment of information from both outside and inside that it’s subject to; and that it is the driver of your bodily vehicle, so to speak, the entity that thinks, remembers, feels, decides and acts. All of these may seem too obvious for words, but sadly (or perhaps not sadly at all) it’s extremely likely that not one of them is even true.
    And lastly, time, which is infernally difficult to pin down and riddled with contradictions as a concept—philosophical ones, yes, but difficulties now exacerbated by some of the findings of modern neuroscience in particular.
    Of course, our subject being the nature of reality, we first need to be crystal-clear about what we mean by “real”—like “illusion”, the word “real” is used in a wide variety of ways. The author does get round to this (gives us a list of five definitions in the chapter about matter) but I think I’d have started with those myself. Interesting read all the same. show less