Cartesian Experiment

Cartesian Experiment – Let us repeat Descartes’s thought experiment, and ask once again what there is of which we can be indubitably certain. We will bear in mind all of Descartes’s arguments about the possibility of illusion and of deception by an “evil demon.” But we will also bear in mind the critique of Descartes made by Husserl and others, that while there is undoubtedly thinking going on in our experience, it is not legitimate to conclude from this that there is a “thinking thing” here, cogito as a noun. What is here? There are, as we have already intimated, thoughts, but there are also bodily sensations and external perceptions. It may be that we are being deceived by the demon with respect to what is really out there, a la The Matrix, but we will leave this question aside: there are nevertheless these sensations and perceptions. It is tempting to add that there is the experience of a world and also the experience of a self. However, Buddhism and David Hume in particular invite us to doubt the latter: isn’t there just the experience of certain sensations and perceptions, without any need to attribute these to a “self”, or find the self “in” the sensations and perceptions in some way? Others will argue very creditably for the latter, but let us keep the possibility open that we cannot be sure of the experience of the self. Also thinking of a Buddhist perspective, we might doubt that there’s necessarily the experience of a “world” here: some Buddhist traditions, such as Zen, claim that at least some experiences are experiences of a kind of nothingness, where there are no separate “objects” and nothing seems “solid”, where none of those rules that need to be in place to make up a “world” inhere. These traditions even tend to value these experiences as being the most veridical we could have, whereas our experience of a rule-governed spatio-temporal reality is illusory. So do we definitely encounter the experience of a world? For the time being we’ll also cede this point to the Buddhist and leave the experience of a “world” out of our account of what is indubitably, certainly “there” in our conscious experience.

As “non dual” and other mindfulness and meditation traditions rightly keep reminding us, there is also a perpetually present awareness: in fact this is the one thing that is constantly here in our experience, whereas sensations, perceptions and thoughts are constantly changing and in some cases may not be there at all. (This may be questioned in the case of sensations, but it is certainly conceivable. Most of those who have spent some time meditating will know that there can be awareness present and yet an absence of thoughts.) Thoughts, sensations and perceptions are themselves of course experiences; in other words, we only have thoughts, sensations and perceptions by way of awareness. All we can be sure of is that there is an awareness and that it has these different kinds of experiential contents. It is of course the matter for endless debate what manner of thing this “awareness” is, in the Eastern traditions and in Western philosophy (and no doubt elsewhere as well): for example in the phenomenological school of Husserl and his successors.

At this stage all possibilities remain open to explain the origin of these contents, including the possibility that there is no real world “out there” independent of the experience of it (idealism), the possibility that all of this experience is generated by fundamental physical properties such as atoms, quantum fields etc. (physicalism), and the possibility that there is a world out there, independent of us as individual consciousnesses, but which nevertheless conveys itself perfectly in our perceptions (realism). What we will subsequently discover is that one part of what we experience, the part which is perceived as an external world, behaves in a way that has a certain regularity to it; science is the name which will be given to the study of this regularity, and physics the name of the science that that maps it in its most general forms.

At this point, however, I want to move out of the experimental situation and make some decisions, based partly on the consequences of adopting certain kinds of metaphysics. Specifically I want to rule out some options: firstly physicalism itself, which we can see, approached from this angle, looks distinctly unpromising. For physics only really deals with one part of this realm of indubitable reality, that concerned with the perception of an external world, and while it may be very successful in giving an account of the behaviour of the forms of that world, it does not thereby acquire the right to say anything about the real ontological status of that world. Even more damningly, there is no reason to think that physics or any other science can tell us anything about the nature of thoughts and feelings, and it is also incapable of explaining how anything like consciousness can emerge from the purely physical world it posits: the famous hard problem of consciousness.

But I also want to rule out the Kantian move of asserting that all of our experience, including our internal experience of the self, is just the experience of the kind of world, with its determinate categories, that a finite self-conscious creature must necessarily create, out of the intuitions it receives, and inhabit, so that any experience of a world as it is in itself is decisively ruled out. Such a move leaves us gesturing towards a “thing-in-itself” which no cognition of ours can ever approach and which lies in a relation to the world of experience that we can never clarify. Kantian transcendental idealism has had a deadly effect on the subsequent history of Western philosophy, so-called continental philosophy in particular.

What options remain open to us, as plausible ways to do justice to what we discover through this simple Cartesian thought experiment? Idealism certainly. And also direct realism: for any kind of realism which isn’t direct opens up the way for some form of transcendental idealism to enter back in. If there is a gap between our apprehension of the world and how that world is in itself we are once again in the ambit of the thing in itself. I have a lot of respect for both positions. In fact I sometimes feel that what I am searching for is an idealism that is also and at the same time a direct realism. Would anyone join me in this venture?