The Flat Cosmos Society

Andrew Klavan writes of a conversation he had as to "whether the world was actually flat back in the days when people thought it was flat." His interlocutor "said yes, the earth was flat when man experienced it as flat. I disagreed."

The question goes to the relationship between appearances and reality, and supposing the latter exists, how could we ever know it? In other words, how could we ever know whether or not what we take to be the final reality isn't just another appearance, another layer of the onion?

Maybe it's layers all the way down.

I believe this would be the Buddhist view: everything is just more sunyata yada yada. Except to say that this ultimate truth about appearances cannot itself be just another appearance, hence the two truths doctrine: there is conventional truth (the world is flat) and ultimate truth (no, it's round). According to Gemini, conventional truth 

is the reality we experience daily. It includes tables, chairs, people, and all the objects we interact with. These things appear to have a solid, independent existence, and for the purpose of daily life, we treat them as such. For example, it's conventionally true that a table can hold a plate. However, this is considered an appearance or a "conventional" reality.

Here one can appreciate how Fritjof Capra came up with The Tao of Physics: just substitute "Newtonian" for conventional and "quantum" for ultimate, the latter being the way things actually are. 

According to many Mahayana schools, upon closer examination, nothing has an inherent, independent existence. A table, for instance, is merely a collection of non-table elements (wood, nails, labor, etc.). It's a temporary construct that arises from a confluence of causes and conditions. Its existence is dependent on other things and on our mind's conceptual designation. The "emptiness" of the table means it is empty of a solid, independent "tableness."

So, is everything like a table, made up of a temporary confluence of exteriorly related subatomic particles mostly held together in the mind? Analogously, we can look up in the nighttime sky and see the Big Dipper, but that is wholly a projection, a function of human pattern recognition. Humans are prone to superimposing illusory patterns onto randomness, but also decomposing real patterns into an essentially false randomness.

I was going to say that the left "has" conspiracy theories, but it is more accurate to say that it is a conspiracy theory, i.e., a habitual stance of false pattern recognition, from global warming to Russiagate to white supremacy. Why do they do this? 

It's partly a result of education, which is to say, indoctrination. The left dominates the educational establishment at all levels, but this still begs the question of why the conspiracy theorizing? Education didn't used to be this way, rather, was a more or less disinterested pursuit of truth.

Well, truth is another word for reality, the reality beneath appearances, and it seems that with the Enlightenment the tenured took a wrong turn into a world of pure appearances. Klavan touches on this in the essay linked above:

It was the philosopher Kant, of course, who would give the Enlightenment its name. He did not believe man could know conclusively whether God exists, because he did not believe man could ever know the essential truth of anything, only its manifestations.

And that is the essential truth -- again, appearances all the way down. With one exception: Kant's theory, which gives us the ultimate truth of our situation. Conversely, Klavan expresses the common sense view that "the world we experience is a reasonable analogue for... the thing-in-itself," and although we may not know the latter in full, "a sane man’s knowledge of the manifestations is a workable model.

Which means that it is not a matter of seeing the world as appearance or reality, rather, a dynamic and complementary relationship between the two: yes, the world is always an appearance. Of reality. If it were only appearance, then we could never know it, much like any other animal that can never stand outside or above its own perceptions and say, "it looked like this, but on a deeper level it turned out to be that." 

Recall Klavan's conversation above, as to whether the world was actually flat when people regarded it as such. Again, his partner said that it was indeed flat when people perceived it that way:

But maybe we were talking at cross purposes. The real question is whether or not the flat-earthers were deluded. And no, I don’t think they were. What they saw, they saw properly, but they did not see enough. When they had more information, they saw more.

In clinical terms, a hallucination is perceiving things that aren't there, while a delusion is thinking things that aren't the case. So, are we all deluded? No, because the person who isn't deluded is eager and grateful to be corrected, while the deluded person cannot be corrected and is threatened or offended at the effort to do so.

Like the left?

Yes, like last night, I caught a few minutes of Anderson Cooper, who led off his program with President Trump's desire to purge the Smithsonian of its obnoxious -- and delusional -- wokeness. 

Of course, Cooper defended the delusions of wokeness with the equally deluded delusion that Trump's real motivation is that he is a racist. That anyone can still believe this in our enlightened day and age is a real testament to the left's ability not just to fend off reality, but to superimpose their persistent delusions on it. Truly truly, it is their superpower.

Which I mean literally, in that their perceptions are "supra-" to what is registered by the senses (and by plain common sense). Which reminds me of a book I recently got around to reading, Frédéric Bastiat's classic What is Seen and What is Not Seen. Ultimately, what is seen are appearances, and what is not seen (by the left) is reality.

To be perfectly accurate, what is not seen is the dynamic and evolving dialectic between appearances and reality, which is the bestwecando. To repeat:

There is no reason to think a sane man’s experience, whether material or spiritual, is delusional. As far as I can see, the world we experience is a reasonable analogue for what Kant called the thing-in-itself. We may not know the thing-in-itself, but a sane man’s knowledge of the manifestations is a workable model.

So, the perception that the world is flat is still a reasonable analogue for the way things are. You're not putting yourself in any danger if you go about your day on the assumption that the world is flat. In fact, for purposes of day-to-day living, it might be preferable not to bother calculating the curvature of the earth on your way to Trader Joe's. 

But a lot of what Bastiat deals with has more to do with temporal than spatial appearances, especially as they pertain to economic policies. For example, we might perceive, say, the immediate consequences of an increase in the minimum wage, and conclude that they're all positive, because the remote consequences are never seen; or, when they are seen, they are attributed to something else that then needs a new policy to address.

One certainly sees this with rent control: every time it is instituted it results in housing shortages and higher living expenses overall. The left then endeavors to tackle these "new" problems without ever connecting them to the original policy. In short, they never get to the reality beneath appearances. 

Now, what has this to do with the cosmos? This post has already run overtime, so we'll have to ponder this question in the next installment.