Questioning the Concept of Causality | Part 2 - Boundless Boundaries & Thingifying the Totality

paradigmprospect (69)in #philosophy • 5 years ago (edited)

Continuing our exploration into the notions of causality and trying to discover why we are so hellbent on finding a cause for everything. If you want to catch up and read part 1 you can do so here

As I have already eluded to briefly, one of the great "causes" for our being hung up on always finding causes for everything can be found in our language and its rules. Language tries to relay to other people specific selected aspects of what we perceive and consider, and in doing so there are certain side effects we have gotten so used to that we hardly notice them after a few decades of growing up in a linguistically focussed society.

You see, the whole point of language is to distill a group of ideas and concepts into a relayable image. Were we to always explain and list every detail of our mental image, language would fail to be brief and concise and would therefore become unusable for efficient information-relay.

So in a way, we are sacrificing specificness and detail for convenience in relaying rather crude ideas in the hopes that our conversational partner is enabled through our words to create a similar enough image to ours in their mind.

BUT - as many Eastern philosophies often point out: Our obsession with language and our extensive use of it it have long started to alter the way we perceive the world and how it seems to unfold in front of us, to the point that we actually think subjects can verb objects, disregarding the totality and its myriad of factors that are always present but too cumbersome to mention.

And while language is useful and even beautiful on the human level, for reasons of syntax its very structure constantly reinforces the notion that there are things and that those things do other things, to the point that we eventually confuse language's structure with the structure of what is.

What?

Hmm, I have to admit it took me rather long to see the point in this myself when I first heard it but it's totally worth pondering <3

One of the mentioned "parts" of language is a subject, the "thing" that we are talking about. But then, does it really exist as such?

Sure, on the human level it seems there are things - a chair is a chair, a plane is a plane and a factory is a factory. But, going back to what we explored in part 1 - the boundaries of said objects are often rather flexible and unprecise, they are vague and superficial distinctions. What exactly does that mean?

Well, an easy example would be a wave in the ocean. Let us really think about this: Are there actually waves? Not really... there is the ocean (and even that is questionable as we will see) but waves are merely tiny parts of the ocean taking on a specific shape for a brief moment. There is no logical way to separate the "atoms" of a wave at a specific point to call it "the wave" as distinct from the ocean because all potential transition points in the water are ultimately fluid and always moving. At best, a "wave" is a temporary snapshot of the ocean at its surface.

At clear moments of the mind it can be really easy to see that what we call a wave is nothing but a linguistic convention to help us talk about a certain temporary aspect of the ocean, maybe because we want to surf on it or for some other helpful purpose. But strictly speaking there is no such thing as a wave if we were to measure its boundaries in a definite, physical sense.

What about the ocean itself? Everybody knows what we are referring to but then where exactly does the ocean begin and where does it "end"? Are river deltas that flow into the ocean part of the ocean? If not where do the rivers end exactly and where does the ocean begin? Isn't it all the same water eventually?

Mountains are another great example. Everybody can understand that the tip of mount Everest is part of the mountain but where exactly does the mountain start? What about rocks that have fallen down from the mountain, what about the snow on its peaks?

If we are honest with ourselves we will see that we are doing our best as human beings to find approximations for "logical" parts of the totality that make sense to talk about and designate them with a specific label, but physically speaking we will see that the boundaries of any such object will never and can never be nailed down precisely - everyone would draw the line somewhere else.

Hmmm, not sure what all of this means...

Well great! Confusion is certainly helpful because it allows us to rethink "things", lol.

What about a more "distinct object" like a chair? It should be fairly easy to say what is part of the chair and what isn't, right? Well, I have never seen into the atomic level of matter myself (even though some shamans claim there are ways to do just that) but a thing that seems to have baffled physicists for the longest time is that matter may actually be mostly empty space and not solid at all. What we perceive as solid - in their model - is atoms rapidly vibrating, always fluctuating in their exact position. So while the chair may seem hard enough to hit our foot on, from their perspective on a strictly physical level of measurement it isn't quite clear where the boundary of the chair is because the atoms and molecules that compose it are always moving and in flux.

Hmmm... but what about me? What about a human being? Are there no human beings? Of course there are - from our level of perception ;)

Then again on the physical level it may be quite hard to distinguish where exactly your skin ends and where the "environment" begins for the same reasons mentioned in the previous examples. You may cite additional factors like body heat - is it part of you? Some may say yes, some may say no; but we all can agree that without your body there wouldn't be any body heat.

What about your old skin that you still carry around with you that is about to fall of? Strictly speaking it is no longer organically attached to your body but then it would take a diligent search of your body surface to find those little pieces of skin before they fall off, at which point it becomes apparent that your old skin is no longer "you" even though it was - just moments ago.

Then there are people like Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Science (IONS) who study laboratory experiments on things like telepathy or the magnetic field of a human heart - phenomena that go way past the "boundaries" of your physical body and are actually measurable. Are these "things" not also a part of you even when they reach beyond the confines of your confined organism? If you are curious about this idea come check out one of my past articles

There are many other interesting fields of study along those lines like "the sense of being stared at" that Rupert Sheldrake has researched and written about extensively - the "effects" of your gaze upon someone else who can tell above chance that you are looking at them. There are also interesting bits of research into "phone telepathy" or "dogs that know when their owners are coming home" - all of them amazingly interesting things to look into.

You see we have already begun to drift far from what most people regard as certain fact today even though the above mentioned examples have huge bodies of evidence and laboratory results to back them up. It's just that they are rather inconvenient for a conception of reality that is so obsessed with labeling things as separate and clearly distinct, when in fact it may turn out that most if not all boundaries are more of a linguistic or mental convention rather than actual measurable fact.

For living beings there is another eye-opening quality that makes it even more weird though: The experience of seeing all separation fall away from yourself on altered states of the mind when these concepts of separation simply fail in light of the actuality that is happening within and around you.

More on that in the next part of this series <3