"What Is Now Proved Was Once Only Imagined" Part II

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite."
William Blake
Wanderer Above the Sea of  Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, Wikimedia Commons

In the first installment of this series published last week, we read weighty testimonials from a plethora of eras and thinkers, attesting to the indisputable role that consciousness plays within the schematic of Creation. With the mind blowing findings furnished by science, the age old assertions of philosophy and religion can no longer be casually dismissed as mere poetic fancy:

"I said, “You are gods,

And all of you are children of the Most High..." 

Though humankind, so slow in attaining understanding through millennia of evolution, still pays fealty to the primacy of the "real" world of sense, and remains shackled, like Prometheus of old, to the rock of "Fate".

"But you shall die like men,

And fall like one of the princes.” (Psalm 82: 6 - 7)

Nonetheless, it will be protested by the realists among us that this is all strictly conjecture – highly intriguing no doubt, but ultimately conjecture, with no basis in empirical reality, incompatible with reason, and utterly nonsensical.  But was it not once considered nonsensical to assert that the earth was spherical, since it stretches flat all the way to the horizon in our field of vision? If we were to take at face value the report of our senses, the notion of the earth rotating on an axis would be still consigned to the realm of the absurd, seeing how fixed our position in any location, standing or sitting, seems to be. And a pox on the heliocentric theory! Do not our eyes clearly show that the sun, in its rising and setting, revolves around our fair orb? 

As Blake put it so wonderfully in his There is No Natural Religion:

“Man’s Perceptions are not bounded by Organs of Perception; he perceives more than Sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.”

Again, here we see truth appearing to align with seeming fiction. Nikola Tesla, in his 1905 work “A Means for Furthering Peace” wrote:

“Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Our hearing extends to a small distance. Our sight is impeded by intervening bodies and shadows. To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions.”

Recent findings in neuroscience seem to stand with both the inspired poet and visionary inventor.  Donald D. Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California Irvine, posits after three decades of research that, to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi’s observation in A New Hope, our senses are in fact limited and deceiving, a byproduct of our early evolution:

“The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction.”

Using the analogy of a desktop icon on a computer, Hoffman explains:

“Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not… Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer…You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know… Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.”

While this adaption was a necessary step in the unfolding of our racial consciousness - helping our ancestors to focus on the essentials of physical survival - we longer need to be bound by such limitation. The successive innovations of civilized life secured greater physical safety and financial security – the first two rungs of Maslow's hierarchy of needs – thereby granting us the leisure and time to ponder what lies beyond the realm of our immediate material existences.  Our collective vision, subsequently, has expanded into that mighty kingdom of intangibles (Plato’s World of the Ideal Forms) which the arts, sciences, and philosophy seek to explore. With each advance forward our reason has grown as well, so what was once considered inherently unreasonable is now considered common sense.

In the words of Blake:

“Reason, or the Ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.”

This is the great law of imaginative expansion which has governed humanity, from the earliest days of hunting and gathering to the present. It is the same law which spurred the astronomer – priests of Babylon to observe and record the movement of the celestial bodies, whose findings served as the chief launching pad for future discoveries, capped nearly two millennia later by the landing of men on the Moon.  It was this gift of vision which rendered the wheel, agriculture, engineering, writing, painting, architecture, medicine, locomotion, aviation, and the internet.

The philosophes of all ages, climes, and races have boldly tread the ground and lighted the path. It remains for us – individually and collectively – to cast the dye and venture forth across our own Rubicons. Whether we are crowned with the champion's laurel wreath or share in Caesar's ultimate fate depends upon our steering of the rudders of thought and rigging of the sails of imagination. As Shakespeare wrote in his Henry V: "All things are ready, if our minds be so."

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