Philosophy sucks; a fine work of intellectual vandalism, chapter 3 Metaphysics for stoners

Chapter 3: metaphysics for stoners

So, do you exist?

This is a classic example of a malformed question, a tautology to boot. and yet it is the justification for an entire field of philosophy, the great and terrible Metaphysics.

It also happens to be the exact sort of question one comes across when stoned. another such question: what if we're all just brains in a jar? again, an unproveable hypothesis, yet one of the major questions one comes across in the search for the meaning of the stuff we seem surrounded on all sides by.

If I were to adopt a strictly empirical philosophy concerning metaphysics, I could not say even one word concerning it.metaphysics is, in the end, a sort of learned mysticism. but is that such a bad thing? and what really stops mysticism from being the unabashed truth?

It can be said that, even early on, metaphysics was an attempt to replace or augment the old religious view with a view similar to a science. the early formulations were downright juvenile, saying that the world was made of "water" or "fire" or even that matter was afflicted with the attracting force of "love" and the repelling force of "hate". it sounds to us the formulation of immature minds, and in some ways that is correct. but the early efforts became the basis of all science, and to an extent, a more complex and mind boggling metaphysic.

for instance, when I start throwing around words like "panpsycheism" or "noumenon" there is no end to the strange and bewildered looks I get from other passengers on the bus. any sufficiently advanced metaphysics is indistinguishable from psychosis. again, it is exactly the kind of thing that occurs to one when high.

so, let us pose the questions here: is the world completely in our heads? or are our heads the byproduct of random chemicals being fired off at random times? Is there really a free will, or are our actions completely predetermined? what is the nature of the objects we interact with? does anything really change?

this chapter is my attempt to reconcile these questions from a bona fide stoner's viewpoint. after all, the world is only stabilized by the person who views it.

           
                            1: the nature of the world of things and ideas

I will start with a simple proposition; there is a world of things, and there is a world of ideas. a question that has come up, that was, indeed, forced to come up, is this; how do they interact, and which one is dominant?

continuing with our first proposition, we will have to say that they are different worlds. obviously, without the imposition of superpowers or miracles, which generally amount to the same thing, the thoughts in my head are unable to kill people or obliterate objects. further, in my head I am capable of imagining things which do not exist in the real world. I can picture my public speaking audience in their underwear; their wardrobe is unaffected.

so the question becomes, if the world of Ideas is ineffectual on the world of Things, what has to be the nature of my mind? to answer that we must look at the reverse of my proposition; can the world of things effect the world of ideas?

this question is a bit harder to clarify. certainly events that occur in the world of things, such as an earthquake or a storm, have real effects on my body. and we know that effects on my body necessarily cause the appearance of certain mental states. this seems easy enough, but as we shall see it most certainly is not.

for one thing, the imagination we brought up before can radically alter our reactions to the world of things, especially in advanced states of psychosis. If you don't see the world as it is, and are rather trapped in your head, the world of things can impact your body, but not your mind. further, on a more mundane front, if I picture my public speaking audience in their underwear, I may not be able to read one of the audience member's shirts, or remember what color it was, thus diminishing the effect of the shirt, a thing, on my mind, or, rather, if I don't allow the world of things to effect me mentally, our connection is severed. after this, we can say hesitantly that perhaps the world of things can effect us as little as the world of ideas can effect it.

So, then, how do the two interact? this is the crux of what we will explore further in this chapter; the answer? the world of ideas and the world of things meet in the one place where both can effect; the body. The body was, for many years in the history of philosophy, either completely distrusted or completely trusted. either one has implications on our philosophy concerning it.

how do we begin to engage the world of things from the world of ideas? through our intermediary, the body. the mind tells the body to perform certain actions, and these actions cause effects in the world of things. if we were sheer mind, we would be as ghosts, unable to observe or interact with any of these things. on the other hand, if we were but material, we would be as plant life, unable to make a decision to grow this way or that, but merely with inherited cells, in other words, we would lack consciousness, and there would only be interactions of things with other things, unthinking, unfeeling, and completely meaningless.

The body, however, carries both consciousness and thinghood. through digestion and respiration, we are governed by materialistic process; by creation and cognition, we are governed by idealistic processes. but how, and this is the big question, do we reconcile this distinction within the human being?

as I write this, dear reader, I am also a miracle of modern science. when I was born, my brain was malformed, causing all sorts of chemical imbalances which in turn cause all sorts of disorders. through the aforementioned miracles, a little pill is able to keep me within textbook definitions of sane. from this, might we infer that the material influence is stronger than the ideal one?

yes and no, contradictory enough. we can say that the material has an effect on the body, and through this it produces an effect in consciousness. again, the body is the intermediary; without the existence of it the chemicals would be useless. another example:

from time to time, I partake in alcoholic beverages. I find that at those times my perceptions and behavior are altered. again, the chemical has an effect on my body, and this alters my consciousness. it seems the victory of materialism is assured. but let us take a look at the reverse; how does consciousness affect the body?

sometimes, as hard as it is to believe by my bold and irreverent demeanor, I become nervous or stressed out. during those times, my digestion is affected, and sometimes I believe I may be developing an ulcer. when I am surpassed, my body induces an adrenaline response, purely a response to a mental state, but which has a very real effect on my bodily system. so, then, does consciousness control the body, or is it purely materials acting on materials? am I a monkey, with chemicals bouncing around my head, or am I a human with complex powers of reason and willpower?

again, the thing that ties it all together is the body. without it, neither chemical or mental state would have a battlefield for play and counterplay. is the world of Ideas separate from the body, or is the world of things separate from the body?

The body, my facticity, is the only thing that allows the existence of either. therefore, let us alter Descartes famous maxim: I have a body, therefore I am. the system I am trying to introduce here, dear reader, I call materialistic Idealism, and it is my favorite contradiction and dualism. let us try to define it.

I am body; the body is neither a thing, in the strictest sense, nor is it an idea or concept. the only thing we can say about it is that it IS. the body allows mental states to exist, and it is these mental processes that make the world of things anything at all. In simple terms, things feed off my mind for existence in any definable sense, mind feeds off things for any definable existence, and both are only possible through the imposition of a medium, which is the body.

what is of utmost importance in the world of things? the drug, which can affect the mind materialistically.

what is of utmost importance in the world of ideas? the creative or destructive act, which uses the body to change the world of things.

From this proposition, we will fill in the blanks for the questions we posed at the beginning of the chapter.

                        Free will and determinism

do you move freely through the world, or is the book of your life already written? the Vikings believed the former; modern man has based his legal system on the latter. let us take off from our ontology to see if we can find the answer.

the mind decides of its own volition the creative or destructive act. however, the mind is fixed in our bridge, the body. if the body determines an act to be impossible, the act is neutered. similarly, the world of things, such as gravity and magnetism, also provide their limits to the creative or destructive act. the will is limited, we must concede, but the bigger question is if it is possible.

If the will is possible, it can change the future through creative or destructive acts. if impossible, its creative and destructive acts were bound to happen anyway due to the conditions of the past. The old view, and we cited the Vikings as proponents of this, was that the will was impossible. their justification for this belief was based on a religious motivation. clearly, if we are to refute it, we will have to go beyond religion.

If there was a god, he would be the one who created the body. but, according to our ontology, no creative or destructive act is possible without a pre existent body. If god is the absolute ideal, he would still be unable to affect a change in the world without some sort of facticity. if, however, the god is an absolute material, he would be unable to create change because he would be incapable of conceiving the creative or destructive act. therefore, we can only picture a god as a sort of dualism of mind and matter, or in short, a body. he would have to be self-caused to be a creator at all. further, as a being mediated with a body, his body would have to exist at all points in time and be consistently acting to form any sort of determinism; he could not be a force, as an absolutely material god could be, nor could he be a ghost as an absolutely Ideal god would be. but if god is not a force of nature, to cause anything in the world he would be forced to act. therefore, at very least, god has free will.

But, as the liberals consistently remind us, humans posses the divine in themselves. and if they are being acted upon, they at very least choose freely their reaction. clearly, religion cannot cause us to lack free will. but can the past take away our free will?

The past, if we can define it at all, is the totality of causes, effects, and actions occurring before our present. the past, unlike our self caused god, is a force, in that it provides a chain of cause and effect. but we know that not all causes produce the desired effect, nor do they always produce the same effect. by sheer probability, we can't be effected the same way every time. something might produce the same effect 99.999999 percent of the time, but we can never know for certain that it will always do so. at very least, we cannot predict the future with all assured accuracy. if this is the case, then the future might be different every time. this doesn't prove free will directly, but does prove that the chain of cause and effect is no always the same. therefore, we can deduce from this that it is not an obligating force because of chance. as it is not entirely obligating, we are free from it. indeed, we are limited by the current state of affairs, but not obligated.

Therefore, according to our ontology, we are indeed free, even if this freedom can be frighteningly small.

                        Teleology

Does the universe have a purpose? are we headed to an eventual event horizon? again, we will look to our most real thing, which would be the body. the body possesses two purposes, both nigh constantly. these are, respectively, growth and death.

we can watch the universe grow just by looking at it; trees, in the world of things, being a good example. In the world of ideas, things grow as well, from the first primitive thought to the most advanced science and philosophy of the contemporary age.

But that which grows, too, must die. In a poetic formulation:

    The words
           that become deleted...
       The thoughts
           that become buried...
       The pool of cells
           that slowly evaporate...
       The echoes of consciousness
           that slowly fade...

the be all, and end all of our existence, nay, the existence of all things, rests on the principal of formulation, development, and decay. we can easily observe this in living things by planting a tree in our back yard. assuming it doesn't  die rather quickly, due to neglect (the usual case) we watch it expand, then eventually wither and die. but we see this tendency in objects too. a rock forms, due to various geological processes, and eventually erodes to the point where it ceases to be a rock and becomes sand, that is, if you'll forgive the simplicity of such an explanation.

the universe, too, will die, in the sense an inanimate object can do so. is there any meaning in this? yes and no. we are forced to accept, through our form of teleology, that all things are transitory. but, just as with the life of a single man, we are able to find some cause for triumph in the fact that it ever existed at all. against Buddhism, I must say that the transitory too is worth consideration, for otherwise nothing would be worth the time.

but, as long as a human being is alive, he grows in ways that are hard to quantify, if through nothing else the accumulation of experience. growth is part of our nature, just as it is with material processes. the human race will flourish until its dying day, and we would not have it otherwise.

                            Concluding remarks

Through our exploration of the metaphysical, we were able to contact the drug, the most fundamental transcendental object. through our use of the drug, in its various manifestations, we are able to transcend the purely mental and logical in favor of an influence of the material, thus realizing what Sartre would call the fusion of the In-Itself (which is to say, phenomenon and objects) with the for-itself, or the consciousness, whose nothingness we are. sarterian philosophy considers this impossible, meaning that we have accomplished, in this chapter, a progress beyond existentialism. and we got to take drugs while doing it, which makes it so much cooler.

But what about the empiricism which we discussed at the beginning of the chapter? by formulating a metaphysic at all, we have angered its delicate sensibilities. after all, we can't verify metaphysical claims, meaning our whole effort, at least to the science minded, amounts to a handful of beans.

however, at no point in this book have I tried to produce anything cognitively meaningful. If the science minded are still reading this, they were probably pissed off already. but, luckily for them, I happen to completely agree with their judgment.

in the words of David Hume:

"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."

however, in this particular book of philosophy, I happen to be completing the doctrine of the sophist, so in a way that evaluation of this chapter is personally quite flattering. sophistry was the first true doctrine of philosophy, and I am its disciple.

to wrap up, metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that would have long been discarded if religion had not factored so prominently in the western tradition. nothing it concerns is strictly verifiable, and much of it is just thought provoking rather than inventive. positivism was right in doing away with it. what we have as miracles of modern science would not be possible if this particular philosophy was embraced.

still, it was pretty fun, and we did manage to create a small foundation for taking drugs as a religious act. although the rastas beat us to it. just keep in mind for future forays of your own into metaphysics: "a difference that makes no difference is no difference at all."-William James