Eugene, I'm much in line with the points you've laid down.Eugene I wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 1:05 am This is one of the key questions of epistemology and ontology and there is no straight answer to it. The answer depends on one's ontological/epistemological position and chosen definitions of what is considered to be real. The definition of what is real differs widely across different metaphysics.
I can share my personal understanding/definition of "real". First, all phenomena of conscious experience are absolutely real by the very fact of their direct conscious experience. The experiencing (awareness) itself is real for the same reason. That includes the thoughts since the thoughts are also conscious phenomena, but it does not include the content/meanings of the thoughts. For example, a thought "Unicorn exists" is real, but the Unicorn (as a content/meaning of that thought) is not real in the same sense that the thought itself is real. One can still argue that the Unicorn as a meaning is still "real", but its modus of reality is different from the modus of reality of the thoughts. The reality of meanings is a "secondary" reality with a different modality of existence. And finally the third modality of existence is the reality of other "things" beyond the phenomena of our direct conscious experiences (for example, material objects in materialism), but the reality of these "things" has also a different modality - their reality is hypothetical. Since we have no direct experience of them and no direct and unfalsifiable evidence of their existence, we can only infer about their reality.
So, to summarize, there are three modalities of reality:
1. The reality of the phenomena of direct conscious experience and the awareness/experiencing of them itself.
2. The reality of the meanings of thoughts.
3. The realities which modus of existence is different from 1 and 2, whatever it can be
Some questions immediately arise:
- Is there anything at all that belongs to #3? May be all there exists only belongs to #1 and #2 categories? We do not know the answer, but different metaphysics are based on different hypotheses on what are the "things" belonging to the #3.
- How the elements of #2 correspond to the elements of #1 and #3 (if any)? This is the question of establishing the truthfulness criteria. We can say that a meaning (element of #2) is true if we can establish its 1-to-1 correspondence to the elements of #1 and/or #3. For example, we can say that the (abstract) meaning "2+2=4" is true because it corresponds to the patterns of #1 elements (observed sensory phenomena of conscious experience), while the meaning "2+2=5" is not true because there is no such correspondence. In other words, the thought "2+2=5" is real in #1 sense, its meaning is also real in #2 sense, but it can be called an "illusion" or "false" because there is no direct correspondence between such meaning and the elements of #1. This is of course a primitive and rough sketch, it just gives a basic idea. In reality such correspondence can never be fully established. Similarly, we can use the same scheme for the correspondence between #2 and #3 elements, the problem is that such correspondence will always remain hypothetical because the existence/reality of the elements of #3 is itself always and only hypothetical. And of course, the "Self" belongs to #3, IMO, together with "matter", "God" and so on, the reality of which remains hypothetical and a matter of inference (if held philosophically) or faith (if held religiously).
I think we can safely discard #3, as far as it's meant as something than in it's very postulation makes it impossible to have experience for (like Kant's 'thing in itself' that can never by known directly and as such can only be held by belief). Since we are concerned with only what the given can tell us, I think we can do this.
Let's focus again on thinking - as this is a point where epistemology and phenomenology converge. Before we have separated the world content into modalities and polarities we have our thinking - we couldn't speak of awareness, color, experience, etc. if we haven't formed a concept of them through thinking. Every modality or polarity - like subject/object, mind/matter, being/non-being, etc. - are already products of thinking trying to analyze the world content. In relation to thinking the world content seems to come into two distinguishable parts - world of perceptions and world of ideas. We are not postulating these as two distinct realms (as mind/matter) but only recognizing their distinct properties within the world content, in the same way we can recognize the distinction between color and tone. So in the act of thinking we are constantly uniting perceptions with concepts/ideas. This, I suppose we agree, falls into #1.
I also agree with #2 in the following sense. I can imagine a green sky. In this case I have the perceptions of my imagination that are connected with the idea of 'green sky'. As you said - this is a perfectly valid experience. It only becomes 'false' if I claim that this idea would match the sensory perceptions of the sky (in contrast to the perceptions of my imagination). Then there's a discord. The sensory perception naturally unites with the idea 'the sky is blue' and I can't reconcile this with the idea 'the sky is green' - the ideas are contradictory.
What about numbers? The mathematical thought-form-symbols are real - they implement mathematical ideas. When I see two apples, I can unite the perception with the concept of 'red' (if the apples are red). I can also discover the idea of 'twofoldness'. There's something in common between two apples, two hands, two legs - they all can be united with the idea of twofoldness. This idea may be experienced even without external perceptions - we can build for ourselves an imaginary picture of two sticks, two light blobs, or simply a symbol that expresses the idea. That's how mathematical thinking can become free from sensory perceptions and we can explore the relations of mathematical concepts and ideas in our own thinking. Whether these ideas in themselves can be correlated with the dynamics of the sensory perceptions is another matter. This is where physics stands - it tries to extract these mathematical ideas which correlate with sensory perceptions. Whether these ideas are in some way the causes of the sensory world is a different question. Most physicists wouldn't subscribe to that - they would say that they simply look for correlations between mathematical and sensory dynamics. With all this said, yes - there's no need to look for something externally real behind the numbers (in the sense of #3). The mathematical ideas themselves are real enough.
Now the big prejudice that comes over and over again is that these mathematical or any other ideas exist 'only in our heads'. But the given does not force us into such a conclusion. If we think something like that we are implicitly postulating isolated perception/idea bubbles for every being as 'things in themselves' and this can only belong to #3. The one world of ideas is a big stumbling stone for many because it seems to postulate some metaphysical common world of ideas (like a Platonic world). But it's not. It's the other way around. The given presents us with only one world of ideas. We go beyond the given when we postulate separate (and by definition inaccessible to us, thus only supported by belief, thus in #3) personal worlds of ideas.
Let's investigate more closely how we arrive at a concept such as 'awareness'. We don't have some clear cut perception of awareness (or at least I don't). For me, when I think of awareness, I expand my focus to encompass the totality of the world of perceptions - sensory, feelings, thoughts, will - everything. Then I make the observation that from moment to moment I can always encompass this totality - even if the contents of perceptions constantly change. Just as the idea of 'twofoldness' was abstracted out of the most diverse pairs of perceptions, so the idea that there's always a totality of perceptions can be abstracted out as an all-encompassing idea of 'awareness'.
As an act of cognition, the above doesn't really differ from the way I recognize the sensory perception of a dog and connect it with the concept of 'dog'. Similarly, it's the same act of cognition that we perform when we arrive at the idea of 'self' - there are certain perceptions and the perceptions of spiritual activity itself, that can naturally unite with the concept of "I". The question is - is there any difference in the act of cognition in the way I unite the concept of awareness and the concept of "I" to the world content? Not really. It's the same fundamental act of thinking, uniting concepts/ideas to perceptions. I remind that we have discarded #3 - we are currently wholly within #1.
It can be argued that the concept of awareness is more real because there's always a totality of perceptions while on the other hand it's possible to have that totality without clear perception of self-activity (which unites with the concept of self), which makes the concept of "I" unreal. But this argument is quite arbitrary. In the same way we can argue that the concept of dog is unreal because we don't always have a sensory perception of dog nearby. Furthermore, here we're quite impalpably elevating awareness to a status that leads it into #3. We are not always aware of 'awareness', in the same way we're not always aware of 'dog'. Most of our daily routine work is aware neither of 'awareness', neither of 'self' - we are fully engulfed in the concepts of our task at hand. Does this mean mean that 'awareness' is unreal? It's something of #3 to believe that even when we are doing something else, there's an 'entity' of awareness that persists. "Yeah, but we can always focus on the totality of experience and confirm that the concept of awareness is there". Alright, but we can do absolutely the same thing with the concept of "I". There's nothing on Earth that can stop me to bring my attention to my own spiritual activity and unite the concept of "I" in relation to it. In the very same sense I can argue that it's always 'there', just as the totality of perceptions (awareness).
So let's be clear - we're not at all trying to elevate anything into #3 - that would go against our desire to be grounded in reality, in the given. The point is that when we observe closely our own cognitive process, we can see that we are apt to assign quite arbitrarily the dividing line between 'real' and 'illusion'. I totally agree that if we imagine the self as an entity in #3, we have all rights to be suspicious - just as for any other forever inaccessible 'thing in itself'. But if we biasedly assign weights to concepts, as some being more real than others, we're simply making things harder for ourselves - we are creating hard problems that are unsolvable by definition.
Personally I don't care about #3. What I care is that the concept if "I" is found naturally within the world content and my aim is to uncover more and more the interrelationships between the elements of the world content. If I draw an artificial line that separates part of the world content as real and the other as illusion I need to have a good justification for this. And the given doesn't provide me with such justification. My thinking is no way more justified to attach the concept of awareness, than the concept of "I", and vice versa. Whether I like it or not - the perceptions that unite with the concept of "I" are there so it's in my best interest to find their proper place in the world content.