Today I am revisiting the views held by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea (1818), and his rejection of naïve realism, or what has been called scientific materialism, that the things we observe in the world are what they appear to be, absolutely, and forever, and not in anyway all or part a function of human perception and experience in the sense that they can be modified based by the very act of perceiving or experiencing them

Thus,  scientific materialism would reject the distinction between how things are independently from human observation versus how they are perceived by our perceptual and conceptual processes.  At the same time,  a scientific materialist would have to accept the the distinction between subject and object, i.e., the distinction between the observer and the thing being observed.

But if we  have no other means of accessing the world other than perceiving or experiencing,  is it in fact a meaningful exercise to even refer to it as a matter of some significance? To all intents and purposes, if we never refer to it again, what would be lost in our discussions about the nature of the world?

To deal with this alleged problem the German philosopher Immanuel Kant  (1724-1804)  introduced the “thing-in-itself”, or “ding ansich” in German – to suggest that the true nature of  the world is fundamentally unknowable as we can only grasp the nature of things indirectly through perceiving them as objects in relation to ourselves – how we have experienced them.  I believe Prof. Kant may have gone too far, in the sense that is is contradictory to say that something is fundamentally unknowable as to make such an assertion implies some knowledge about  it. Existence is not an attribute that can be asserted independently of the qualities through which it is instantiated.   In other words, the distinction serves no useful purpose, when at most the existence of the “ding ansich” might be implied as an essential element in a theory of perception. And maybe that is all what Kant had in mind.

Moving on,  it is one thing to experience the world through one’s senses – it is another thing to experience it logically, e.g., to experience such things as cause and effect, time, space and the various ways in which objects relate to us and each other. If these relationships are permanent features of the physical universe, it wouldn’t matter in what form you encountered them in your experiences, your conclusions about them would be same. But in the end, it would be less important what the world looks like versus what can be abstracted from it simply from interacting with it. And this would lead me to say that the nature of the world is about function (a method that relates an objective to its instantiation) –  and not form (the manifestation of matter and energy), the latter being  incidental to the process, and a means to an end in terms of being the medium that allows the function to be enabled or expressed.

This is an important view for me and consistent with my argument that we should perhaps be less preoccupied with the makeup of the material  universe, by poking into the furthest and oldest region of the universe, looking for clues of sorts and so on. Instead, we should look look more closely at what the logical or functional nature of the various cosmic events appear to be about,  such as the manifestation of a directional and seemingly intrinsic teleological process leading to ever higher degrees of material complexity and organization and where this particular process would seem to want to take us to.

And so the question should be: What has been accomplished to date by the process of material evolution?  As such, the cosmos appears to be a  work in progress, and that is at least some concrete information we have about the nature of the world as we have encountered it.

Andromeda Galaxy

I say this because it is my belief that poking around in the farthest reaches of the universe will not get us any answers about the origin of the cosmos, what it was that brought us about, and all that this might represent to us; that kind of information is likely not to be found out there. Why not?

Well, it is all about the nature of the information we are in search of. I believe we are necessarily limited in our ability to describe and interpret the universe beyond this being a function of the conditions that brought us about and defined the scope of what it is we are able to see, interpret and understand.

The nature of our perceptual apparatus is a successful response to these conditions, and our ability to gather, discern and interpret the data provided by it. Our survival as a species continues to depend on managing this information successfully, allowing us to see what we need to see, hear what we need to hear, etc.

Consequently, the universe that we see out there is very much of our own making, at least in terms of our conception of it, and to think we can extrapolate that to the larger hypothesis encompassing the very origin of the cosmos seems a bit of a stretch to me, notwithstanding some very smart people out there, including Stephen Hawking and his singularity theorems introducing such hypothetical entities as infinite space-time. But do we really understand what we are talking about here? I doubt it.

So where am I going with this? Not much further than to say that – to find the answers to the larger questions concerning our reason for being – we need to go in the opposite direction: into ourselves. We need to go into our own inner space and start cultivating the  fertile ground of our thoughts about who and why we are, with the hope that one day we might be able to grasp the significance of whatever it is that we represent as a living entity in the cosmos.

At the core of our being and in every atom in our bodies – and not hiding out in some far off corner in outer space – lies the origin of the cosmos, and the drive and determination that fueled the process that brought us here, and with it the meaning of all that we are and all that we can be. So very close to us – we cannot be separated from it – yet, clearly, still so very far away.