The Experience of Reality and the Reality of Experience

Experience is irreducible to anything less, because anything less than experience is nothing. It's a genuine brain teaser, for what could the universe be like with no one there to experience it? Supposing you imagine it, you're putting yourself into the picture. 

It is also difficult to imagine how experience could have "emerged" from inanimate matter, thus the temptation to say it was there all along, i.e., panpsychism or panexperientialism. But "emergence" is just a cover for ignorance. To say that something emerged tells us nothing about how it emerged, and in any event, how can the greater emerge from the lesser? How does an object become a subject? 

We say experience does indeed preexist, only not at the bottom but at the top of the universe. In other words, it is transcendent, exerting top-down, vertical causation on what is below. In contrast to horizontal causation, which occurs in time, vertical causation is instantaneous, transcending space and time. Ultimately, reality is the vertically caused act of being, or the celestial business of teresstrial isness:

God's act of creating is "the primitive existential act which causes [a thing] both to be and to be precisely what it is." Both existing and existing as a definable reality are due to the Creator's ceaseless causing "to be" and "to-be-this-or-that" (Slattery). 

Thus, the act of creation "is not an event in the past but an ongoing action of God in the present." In fact, I don't think we even need to bring God into the discussion just yet, because it's such a loaded term. It is enough to speak of the necessity of a transcendent intelligence and of top-down causality, both of which implied by the new physics. 

Put another way, to the extent that "no one understands quantum physics," it is because it is unintelligible and incomprehensible in a universe devoid of vertical causation, i.e., in a mechanistic framework. Along these lines, Slattery tosses in a well known quote by the physicist Fred Hoyle:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. 

Otherwise we have to say that a supermonkey enlists blind chemistry and biology to account for itself, but as we always say, if science were sufficient to explain us, we would be insufficient to explain science. In other words, in principle we transcend any scientistic explanation, which, of course, brings Gödel into the discussion, specifically, in the next chapter, called New Math and Restored Wonder.

But before discussing Gödel, Slattery touches on scientist James Gibson's ecological theory of visual perception, which supposedly proves a realist metaphysic -- in other words, that we really do perceive the world as it is. 

Problem is, no matter how many times I read about the theory, I don't quite get it. Gemini, can you dumb down Gibson's ecological theory of perception such that even a person who earned a gentleman's D in high school physics can comprehend it? 

Okay, imagine you're walking into a room. Instead of your brain having to build a mental picture of everything from scratch (like a computer drawing each object), Gibson said your eyes and brain directly pick up on what the environment offers you.

So, instead of your brain doing a lot of complex calculations to figure out what things are, Gibson believed that the world itself provides you with enough information for you to directly perceive what you can do with things.

Key takeaway: Perception isn't about building a mental image; it's about directly noticing the opportunities for action that the environment offers you. These "opportunities" are called affordances.

We'll just take his word for it and move on. Slattery says that "Gibson showed that our sensing of reality is not a sum of parts," and that "his experiments led him to reject the notion that we merely perceive an image of the reality sensed." Rather, 

What is perceived, Gibson found, is not a picture of the reality but the reality as it is in the world outside of our mind. 

Thus, "in normal circumstances we see realities, not images." Which I already believe, because if we can't know reality, then to hell with it. 

Specifically, what we see are appearances. Of reality. Lesser animals know only appearances, but we are able to abstract from appearances to the essential (or formal) realities below, beneath, and/or above. The world is not just a projection of our intrapsychic categories, but an extraction of immaterial categories from reality. Either way,

The outcome is the sudden and shocking re-entry into the world of physics of a reality banished for centuries: the notion of the soul -- the body-mind understood as a unity. 

So, "Goodbye to the notion of ourselves as mere bodies with computer brains strapped on," and "Farewell to the notion that the human brain operates like a computer with algorithmic reasoning. There will never be any supercomputer with a human identity!"

Rather, we are the supra-computer, since the human intellect transcends, and cannot be reduced to, computation. Which is where Dr. Logic -- Gödel -- comes in. 

But this is supposed to be a holiday, so let's knock off early and resume the discussion tomorrow.

In essence, the text argues for a view of reality where consciousness is fundamental and potentially a top-down force, influencing the physical world. It critiques purely materialistic and mechanistic explanations, drawing on ideas from physics and perception to suggest a more holistic and perhaps even spiritual understanding of existence.

How about an image?

I can't directly create images. However, I can describe what kind of image might visually represent the ideas in the text.

• At the top, a radiant, abstract form suggesting "transcendent intelligence" or a source of being.
• Arrows pointing downwards from this top form towards a more detailed, earthly scene below (representing "top-down causation").
• The earthly scene could contain a person interacting directly with their environment, perhaps reaching for an object, to hint at Gibson's ecological theory of perception.

Don't be obtuse. Of course you can create images. Just depict one showing what you just described.