Abstract

© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Monday, 10 December 2007, Thursday, 5 June 2008

Metaphors and Experience

John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding) tells us philosophy is the attempt to understand human experience—why the world is as it is, why we are why we are, and how we ought to live together. It uses concepts and reasoning to work out things. Our minds, somewhere in our bodies, seem to get sense data, put them into consciousness so that we can consciously process them, and build up conclusions to determine how our bodies will move in reaction. Today, there is no need to have to suppose these things. Conceptual thinking and reasoning can be studied empirically by cognitive science and give us an empirical foundation for understanding thinking and philosophy itself. The pretension philosophers had that philosophizing is thinking utterly abstractly was found to be false. There is nothing peculiar or special about philosophizing. All thought is based on the same conceptual machinery as everyday thinking about personal experiences—metaphor. Surprisingly, much of it is not conscious.

A popular metaphor is that mind acts as a container for data coming in from the outside world, and our thoughts—data manipulated and managed by reason, a personification of a higher thinking process. Thoughts are puppets for the puppet master, our higher thinking process. We see it all in our mind’s eye as if we were viewing it all happening in a theatre, what Daniel Dennett called “the Cartesian theatre”. Anything to do with Descartes, or indeed with philosophy generally, sounds imposing, but it is no more than making our marionettes dance to our tune. The marionettes might have different colored costumes but they are being manipulated by the same processes, the common level of thinking.

What then are the marionettes? Really they are little figures of wood joined flexibly and operated by strings. Here they are metaphors for the equally basic everyday experiences of us all since we were born, joined together and manipulated in flexible combinations to conjure responses matching possible personal choices. Clever and creative people can do more with their puppets than the rest of us, making them do amazing things for such basic objects as bits of wood, but their marionettes are no different basically from those of the rest of us.

Thoughts are built on personal experience, the experience of sensing and identifying physical objects in our environment, and of physically responding, mainly by movement, to what is seen and heard. The mental bits of wood are metaphorically our most basic experiences as we emerge from infancy, and they are put together extending the bits-of-wood metaphor as our marionettes, more complicated metaphors that enable us to understand our surroundings better and react more appropriately to them.

Basic metaphors are not transcendental or abstract, but are necessarily descriptions of whatever we have and can experience as we grow to maturity, the ordinary human bodily experience in the here and now reality of living in a particular place. No human explanation can avoid being rooted in and conditioned by bodily experience, and the metaphors that constitute thought and language are rarely pure. Metaphors are necessarily freely mixed in formulating more complicated concepts because we begin with only a limited repertoire of them.

Metaphor is not an impediment to thinking, but is the substance of it. All philosophy is metaphorical at root, and the metaphors cannot be removed. Careful cognitive analysis can detect it and obviate it, but cognitive science is new, and older philosophical works contain many errors. Even Kant credited with presenting “pure, rational, moral theory” is irreducibly metaphorical, so his claim that morality emerges from transcendental, universal, practical reason is false. Now morality can be appreciated in a realistic, down to earth way in the approach of embodied cognition—that thinking and knowing comes from our bodily reactions with the world, from the experience of having a body with inseparably linked perceptual and motor abilities that supply all our mental data. The mind is not just a supernatural device to manipulate symbols supplied from beyond. Everything about it depends on the world in which it grows. Thought results from an organism’s ability to act in its environment.

Advanced thinking refines and unifies the ordinary mixed metaphors of human experience in any environment and society, but our experience is essentially entirely subjective. All explanation consists of bodily metaphors which condition supposedly rational conclusions, so that unacknowledged root metaphors can emerge as conclusions. We get objectivity from our personal subjective world by sharing it with others and verifying by different approaches that what we experience in common is so. By using the shared metaphors of a people’s social life, people in any society learn to relate to that life. It is called culture.

The culture of the modern world is science which requires common agreement among different workers, multiple attestation, multiple methods, repetition and convergence to give us confidence that any unnoticed bias stemming from the peculiarities of our own experience are exposed, thereby approaching objectivity. The value of philosophy is in keeping science moral—to reveal its assumptions and to keep them serving humanity and human society. Science can be no more disembodied than any other mental activity. When its efforts cease to serve us, then they ought not to be pursued. Philosophy can offer the criticism and the tools of criticism to allow this.

Greek Philosophy

The success of modern science shows the world is knowable. It is not absurd, random or capricious but is ordered. It is what the Persians called arta, a word with a common etymon as “order”, and what the Greeks called a cosmos, the opposite of chaos. Careful observation of the cosmos reveals regularities which we can express as natural laws allowing us to make predictions. Science is the method by which we can do this systematically. The first step in knowing was the Persian acceptance of arta as underlying the world, but for the Persians it was rather as we treat morality today, as if it were a mystical or divine principle of goodness. The Persian’s neighbours, the Greeks, realized it meant the world could be studied, and understood independently of the whims of Gods. Two and a half millennia later, people refuse to let go of the primitive idea of the world ruled by the fancies of super beings, or even just one of them!

Early Greek philosophers saw the gods as representing the types or essences of things in Nature, their characteristics and categories. Much more primitive people than Greeks had already noticed that the world seemed to consist of opposites. The Persians explained it by having two gods, one good and one bad, but the Greeks took classification much further and then ignored the gods. They sought to classify things by their substance, their form and the way they changed. Thus things could be grouped into types based on similarities. Things of the same type behave similarly because they had similar essences. A log is made of wood and it burns. So the log burns because it is made of wood. Personal characteristics could be treated in the same way. A man is honest. He has the essence of truthfulness which makes him truthful—causes his honesty!

Once classification begins and becomes a habit of mind, eventually the classifications get extensive enough to need themselves classifying in a meta-classification. The Greeks had begun studying Nature or physics (physis) and ended up studying metaphysics, whatever it is that makes Nature as it is. Thus the metaphorical explanations familiar to us as physical space and movement in it, derived from our experiences of growing up and trying to survive in reality, were stretched to attempting to explain what we conjured in our imaginations quite removed from reality. Yet our explanations—and even our questions—remained constrained by our experiences and the bodily metaphors used to describe them.

“What is being?” and “What is the purpose of life?” are questions formulated from our own reality, but extended beyond it to where the underlying metaphorical structure of explanation is no longer valid. The order we perceive in our everyday lives might be entirely localized to our part of the universe, temporally or dimensionally. Trying to imagine what is beyond our immediate experience might be impossible. The world might extend infinitely in its complexity. We learn by sucking it to see, by peeling away layers of the cosmic onion to find what is within, and who knows how many layers there might be? The more distant from our own reality that we become, the more uninstinctive our discoveries get, and the harder they are to capture with the range of experience and metaphors for explanation we have.

Most people do not want to consider such possibilities and prefer the comfort of thinking everything is understandable in principle. They assume that some category encompasses everything, and though we might not understand it, someone does. They call it God. God, for many people, is the essence of being, personified. The essence of being is the essence of the category of all things that exist. It emerges in Aquinas’s “Ontological Argument for God”, God being the essence of all existing things, so must exist. We are because God is. It is an explanation to a Christian but is actually the substitution of an unacceptable mystery, in that it is inexplicable, for an acceptable one, in that God can explain it even if we cannot!

The Greek philosophers in the cities of Asian Greece, could see no progress being made in the assumption that gods ruled the world. If it was true, it was tough, because gods could not be studied, but Nature could be, and Nature was what directly affected us, even if Gods manipulated it. In any event, they decided that the study of physis, the physical world, would be more productive than speculating about gods. A folk theory of elements seemed already to have existed widely—possibly spread from Persia because it was a dualist hypothesis—and Thales and others made use of it. Nature consisted of two basic polar essences, hot and cold, and wet and dry. Combinations of the two essences made the four elements from which everything else was made.

1. Earth is cold and dry
2. water is cold and wet
3. air is hot and wet
4. fire is hot and dry.

This hypothesis and the associated one of the four bodily humours prevailed for 2000 years until modern science displaced it a few hundred years ago, and even now marginal cults stick with it. All the elements were observable—physical—though these Greeks had not yet conceived the notion of matter, they were materialists. Soon Plato was to offer a new theory—the physical world was an imperfect illusion of the world of forms or ideas—idealism, the opposite of materialism.

Some of the Milesian philosophers thought there was a prime element, and different philosopers tried to formulate a physics based on different elements as being it. Babylonians, soon to surrender to the Persians, saw the world as an ark floating on a chaotic sea with their god of life (Ea, Iah) being the god of the earth and the pure water that came from it. The oceans and rivers were water, water was in and under the earth, water was in the air and came out of it, and water was even in fire and could be seen issuing from it as steam. So, Thales took his cue from this Babylonian myth and made water the prime element. Others put forward other elements as prime. Anaximenes chose air, and Heraclitus fire.

The trouble with the idea of a prime element is that it undermines the duality theory that they are made up of the mixtures of hot-cold and wet-dry. How could everything be made up of just one element? Anaximander decided they were all made of something else—to apeiron, a boundless substance, but Anaximenes identified to apeiron with air, which seemed to him to be sufficiently boundless, but combined it with the notion of form to get over the mixture problem. Effectively, he imagined air undergoing changes of state—condensation—to form the other elements. Air could condense into water, then further into earth, and yet could get more volatile and become fire. These explanations are metaphors. The Greeks were drawing on their experience of hot, cold, wet, dry, dew, evaporation, condensation, freezing, volatility to try to explain through metaphor the constitution of Nature. They were thinking metaphorically.

Having considered what is the essence of material things the Greeks were left with the question of what is the essence of being itself. We know that religious believers satisfy themselves that God is the answer, but philosophically, it is the realm of metaphysics, what is behind Nature, what is needed for Nature (physis) to be. Metaphysics is Greek, and supernatural—the religious term—is the equivalent word in Latin, what is above Nature. All we experience in life is Nature. Anything we can experience is natural, so there is an obvious problem in speculating about the supernatural. It requires some sort of extrapolation from the natural to the supernatural, assuming there is a continuum between, and our experience of the natural is expressed in metaphors derived from that experience, so our extrapolation into the supernatural is based on the same bodily metaphors.

A philosopher who thinks water is the world’s basic material has extrapolated from a wonderfully complex variety of substance in the world to just one of them. That then is the closest we have to the nature of being. Metaphors for such an essence will be aqueous ones. Each of the other elements is responsible for its own metaphors of essence or character, and lo! it is just what is found in astrology, an ancient psychological art based on precisely this sort of thinking. Another philosopher says that thought is closer to the essence of being because we can know nothing without first thinking about it, but thinking is an extended metaphor of living experience, and our thinking cannot avoid it, so cannot be more primary than the life that yielded the metaphors.

By asking, “Why is there anything?” we are using metaphor to formulate the question. We are making Being a metaphorical object in the world that Being is responsible for! Thus the “Ontological Argument for God” is flawed from the outset. Being simply is! No God is required to explain it, and introducing a God does not explain it because then God simply is. We have introduced a spurious entity, God, contrary to Occam’s Razor. The “Argument of the First Cause” is similar. Christians say the First Cause caused things to be, and that is God. But nothing caused God, so why must Being be caused? The idea of God has just shoved uncaused Being one unnecessary step further back. Our experience of the world of being is that things are caused, but to imagine Being as itself caused is to give Being the status of one of its own characteristics. Our thinking is conditioned by our experience in reality, the world of Being, but our metaphorical question, “Why is there anything?” falsely treats Being as an object in our experience, something which it includes!

Plato—Forms or Ideals

So, different Greek philosophers adopted different hypotheses—essence, substance, form, pattern, logic, appearance, atoms, number, change, were all selected or elaborated by one school or another. All are something familiar to us within our experience, but used metaphorically to explain something beyond our experience. Later philosophers were constrained in the same way. Plato could speak of becoming, things that were coming into being, as if there was a space that could be entered and then left, and Being was a characteristic of that space—a metaphor. Philosophers began to extend everyday metaphors like these to accommodate their increasingly subtle arguments, and they began to create new metaphors from what they considered they had established.

Plato took to the notion of forms because the essence of anything was its form, and form was the idea of the perfect thing under consideration, its ideal, its eidos. As form was a perfect thing, imperfect things did not have their own forms—there were no imperfect forms or forms of imperfection. Imperfect was a reduction from the perfect of the form. What is perfect is good, so things that are opposites of imperfection are things deficient in the ideality of it. Cowardice does not have any ideal other than courage, its opposite because it is its most imperfect copy. Virtue was a positive essence and vice was the absence of virtue.

Characteristics as essences is a metaphor and essences as ideas and ideals extend the metaphor to give the essence of Platonism! There is a category of essences, one of which is the essence of Being, the essence of the category of Being. It is a taxonomy and the higher it is, the more real it is, so the essence of essences is an idea that is more real than the other ideas. It is the idea of Goodness, or the Good. Plato, arguing thus, establishes that reality is merely an imperfect reflexion of what is truly real, ideas! It seems Plato was a sophist. He has proved that what is commonly experienced as solid and there—reality—for what is merely imagined—ideas—and this must have seemed as amazing for the ancients as quantum spookiness is to modern physicists.

According to Plato, essences are the core characteristics of any category, so the Good, being the essence of all essences, is the motive force of all being, with no cause beyond itself. So the Good is the First Cause, or the Prime Mover. Plato’s excuse for the Good being uncaused, unlike all other essences, was that light illuminates objects making them visible, but is itself invisible, so the Good was metaphorical light. Knowing is generally metaphorical seeing, so the Good was that which allowed all knowledge to be known. In a parable of troglodytes living in a cave, the sun outside projected shadows on to the wall of the cave, and the troglodytes took the shadows to be reality.

Humans are in the same sort of situation, getting only imperfect information through their imperfect bodies in the imperfect world. The world we experience is no more than shadows of the perfect world of God, transmitted by the Good who is the metaphorical light of all knowledge. The real spiritual world was outside waiting for us to emerge from the grave of life by following the light. Christians liked this, and Aquinas eventually declared the Good was God. So Plato’s books are among the few that have survived Christian destruction in the European Dark Ages when they refused to copy anything they did not give their imprimatur.

Actually, Plato’s parable shows his error. Plato wants us to believe that the world of ideas is real and reality is false, and his parable is devised to show it, but looked at correctly, reality is what it seems to be, and forms or ideals are dreams. Use of false analogy or metaphor like this is a popular way of putting over mistaken ideas in the name of religion and even philosophy. Consider the shadows of the troglodytes to be sense impressions in their heads, and the metaphor is better. Our sense impressions are not reality, but they are a subtle but faithful reflexion of it formed through our personal and evolutionary experience. If they did not accurately reflect our environment, then they would be valueless to us, and we would never have evolved them. They are valuable because we can sense food and predators and so can tailor our acts to suit. It helps us survive, and would not if the impressions were seriously wrong. Plato divorces his reality of forms from the reality that the troglodytes can react with, so it is not reality to them, but something they can only dream about—imagine—a world of ideas!

Aristotle

Aristotle continued the investigation of knowledge, calling it episteme, and why things are as they are—metaphysics—the study of the essence of Being—what makes things be. Aristotle saw the Platonic error of dismissing reality as being something less than his “reality” of ideals, and appreciated that the ideas were themselves the shadows of what was real and in a real world. We are real and in a real world, so our ideas depend upon reality and not the opposite. For Aristotle, essences were not ideas but ideas were essences. In other words, the mind could appreciate what was essential in reality. Reality was rational. It could not be something and its opposite simultaneously. The Word, Logos, was reason and what was reasonable was logical, a fundamental aspect of Being. Logic was an ontological principle.

Essences could be grasped by the mind (a metaphor) as ideas, but not by the head as objects, so essences were not material. Aristotle accepted that essence was form. It is because the mind could grasp essence that we can know the world. The original Greek skeptics doubted that the world could be known at all, but Aristotle showed by his argument that it could. The modern skeptic does not doubt that the world can be known, but doubts everything until it is proved to be so. The mind grasps essence because the form of whatever is perceived leaves an impression on it like a signet ring pressed into soft wax (a metaphor). It is these metaphorical impressions that the mind grasps as knowledge or comprehension.

Aristotle distinguished ten principle subcategories of Being—substance, quantity, quality, relation, space, time position, condition, action, passiveness—and he suggested four kinds of causes:

1. material—what substances cause something to be
2. formal—what form or essence it has
3. efficient—what makes something happen or cause
4. final—what aim or purpose something has.

Each of these is a metaphor, the last one standing out as expressing a human characteristic in non-human objects or events. A purpose is a telos. Aristotle thought the world had purpose as part of its Being. Things happened because of telos, and arguments based on unconscious objects being purposes are called teleological. Natural events happen because everything tries to find its “end”, its final state, according to teleology, and that “end” is part of everything’s essence. Teleology is the logical consequence of Aristotle’s chain of metaphors. Ideas are essences that leave their impression on the mind, and human purpose is one such idea and therefore essence. Everything has essence, and if purpose is an essence, everything must have purpose as one of its essences or part of its essence. Christians liked this because any such purpose matched God’s will, so, once they realized it, they eagerly grabbed Aristotle as their own, though before, they had ignored him as a realist. The scientific basis of teleology—what seems to give things purpose—is the natural law that everything seeks a state of minimum energy.

Descartes

Plato’s central metaphor was that the essence of anything was the idea of it, while Aristotle made the idea of anything its essence. The two sound identical but the difference is primacy. Plato’s formulation made ideas prime while Aristotle made the thing prime. Its essence then was the idea we have of it. Plato thought we could only know the idea while Aristotle thought we really did know the thing through the idea of it. For Plato, only ideas were real, but for Aristotle, the thing was real and its essence made an impression of the mind as the idea.

These early philosophers were extending the range of their metaphors. They spoke of thoughts never met in daily life, thoughts therefore expressed in common metaphors familiar to everyone who had been born and lived old enough to learn from common experience. What is common to both Plato and Aristotle is that we can know the essence of anything because we receive it as an idea. The idea corresponds with the essence of the thing. Whether reality was the form or the thing, it impressed itself on the mind directly.

Descartes thought otherwise. He decided that the mind and the body were quite separate and independent worlds. The mind was internal and the body was in the external world of “things in themselves”. Plato and Aristotle used metaphors that the mind could “see” things to understand them, or “group” things to know them because the external world made “impressions” on the mind. Descartes had no such theory. The material and mental worlds were independent, and were independent because the mental world had to last after the material world had ceased. His ideas were contrived to preserve Christianity. Even so, his thinking was original, and has profoundly affected later thinkers and the formulation of science.

Dennett’s Cartesian theatre is that our ideas appear on a mental stage briefly illuminated by the mental spotlight of reason, and observed by our understanding. The whole theatrical metaphor is his metaphor of intuition, and intuition the metaphor of understanding by “seeing” something on the mental stage. Instead of being a metaphor, Descartes makes “knowing as seeing” into a philosophical truth. What is clearly seen in this mental theatre cannot be seriously doubted. It is true! It is a great comfort to those with religious delusions, offering philosophical justification to every madman who thinks he is God. Nothing empirical is needed for the Descartian to know everything absolutely and certainly, though the objects perceived must be brightly illuminated by the light of reason, seen with crystal clarity, and unobstructed by anything else. But it is all subjective, and madmen are always the ones who see the most clearly, whether it is Bush or Hitler. The Cartesian man thinks he is God.

The trouble, of course, is that the Cartesian mind is disembodied. It floats above and beyond everything. Descartes is because he thinks. The essence of being human is thinking, and it is conceived as utterly independent of our bodies. Imagination is mental, but it is conjuring images of the world, so it is corporal and no part of the human essence, and the same is true of emotions. Nor does the mental world extend in space, but the physical world does. Thus he proves that the physical world is separate from and inferior to the mental world. But, we think in terms of our experience. Without images of the world, thought is impossible. Descartes, who was a mathematician, saw the problem but claimed it was solved because thinking was “reckoning”. It was mathematical. External impressions were treated by the mind as mathematical forms which required no particular image. The guarantee that the mathematical forms correspond with external reality is God, who is too good to deceive us. Thus by a little Christian sophistry or Intelligent Design, God keeps body and soul separated yet magically able to interact.

Descartes’ error is that thought is a function of the soul, and therefore independent of the body. Actually all our thinking is based on the experiences we have as our body grows from birth, and the instincts we have developed through our evolutionary experience. Ideas are about external reality, and are expressed in terms of our real experience as metaphors. They are not innate, or universal formal operations like mathematics. Humans might be distinguished by an enhanced capacity for rational thinking, but it is an extension of animal sensibility, and not a unique faculty humans have. Chimpanzees have just been shown to be better than humans at memorizing lists. As thought is about and produced by the world and our experiences in it, mental introspection is not absolute, and can yield no absolute knowledge as Descartes thought he had shown. Nor can introspection yield absolute knowledge even about the mind itself, because much thinking is actually subliminal.

Descartes gave us an edifice of belief about the separation of the body and the mind that was acceptable to Christians, and so was not challenged by the churches. It has therefore been taught for over 300 years. Though many scientists have rejected it, it has been perpetuated as another “not-disprovable” theory that Christians could hang on to. But the cognitive scientists studying the workings of the mind scientifically have shown that Descartes’ edifice is no proof of mind-body duality and therefore evidence for God, but, like any set of thoughts, is an extended metaphor of our own experiences. Worse! It is one that is jerry built in almost all of its novel features. Descartes theory of mind cannot be accepted once this is realized. In particular, Descartes has no adequate explanation of what links the mind and the body, other than God. Like Intelligent Design, it explains nothing at all, because anything at all can be attributed to God as an explanation.

Mind-Body Duality

The idea that mind and body are separate, leading to two worlds, the spiritual and the material, and the notions of subject and object is simply a metaphor of the experience we have of being inside our own body looking out. We, our personality or self, on the inside seems divorced from all that is out there. It is a common experience of mankind, and doubtless other animals too, if they could express it. It is an experience of the way we are, with eyes and ears feeding sense impressions into the brain behind them. It is an embodied experience, and mind-body duality is a metaphor of it which should be recognized for what it is rather than being magnified into mysticism.

It seems as if our mind is immaterial and separate from the material world it gets impressions of, but from experience we know it is not, which is why we do not step into raging torrents or in front of a number 10 bus—lest our mind cease with the destruction of our body. The effect is accentuated because our acts of perception are automatic like breathing and the pumping of our hearts. Normally, we are not conscious of observing things. We do not think of ourselves as looking and hearing when we are using our eyes and ears. We lose sight of it! Though it is a bodily action, observing seems unconnected with the body, seems purely mental, though we might realize it as soon as we consciously think about it, or consciously close our eyes. Most people are not as analytical even as this, and in the infancy of humanity, everyone was the same, and misconceptions arose that are still with us today when we ought to know better.

The concept of the soul to stand for the disembodied spirit inside our body is one such misconception. The soul is simply our consciousness, our personality, our psyche—as in psychology—the Greek word meaning… soul. The false idea of the soul has persisted because it is cultivated constantly by religions which need it to account for the main reward they offer the faithful for filling their coffers and the wallets of their professionals—life after death. Innocent followers of religious scams think all of their fellow believers cannot be wrong, yet all think the same, so they are connected by the need for false reassurance, and nothing like evidence.

It is a dangerous belief, a dangerous error, as we know only too well these days when people take it as being so literally true they are willing to kill themselves to kill a few of their enemies in the conviction that they will end up in different places after death! Believing that soul or spirit can exist without a body demeans our bodies to worthlessness, and the real material world they occupy too. The mind—soul, if you insist—is a function of the living body like breathing, and our bodies are agglomerations of material cells and molecules temporarily co-operating in the world. Believers would do better to accept that God put these conglomerations together and so they are sacred rather than that God who is ineffable, intangible and almighty needs defending against human slights, real or imagined, while the body is the work of a devil.

Our personalities have grown out of experience, evolutionary experience and personal experience in the world. Personality cannot exist without the world. The world moulds it. Children locked up for substantial periods of their early lives, or brought up by animals, never develop a fully human personality thereafter. They are permanently damaged mentally.

What then is transcendence? God is supposed trancendent because he is outside the world, so transcendence is the ability to imagine yourself outside yourself We observe the world and can imagine ourselves somewhere else in the world, experiencing what they experience. It is empathy. Transcendence is empathy, and the transcendence of God must be His stellar empathy! Empathy lets us feel we are someone else or experiencing someone else’s condition, so we are transcending our own bodily situation. It is not in the least mystical, but an essential part of being normal social human beings. Without empathy we cannot care for others, and can have no moral sense because others would not matter to us. In reality, spiritual experience is empathy, and the mystical feeling we sometimes get of “oneness” with the world is a total empathy with it, a realization that with it we are and without it we are not! We cannot exist without it, and it makes us what we are. It is God in practice. The Christian God is only a theory, the Christian theory. Nature is the real God, or rather Goddess not being a creator but a procreator. You could say:

Nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animate and more than human.

G Lakoff and H Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh

Spirituality, properly conceived is not something out of this world. It is an ethical and aesthetic relationship with the world. It is an appreciation of the world’s kinunity.

Do not say, This is a stone and not God. God forbid! All existence is God, and the stone is a thing pervaded with divinity.

D C Matt, The Essential Kabbalah (1995), cited by Lakoff and Johnson

All existence is the source of the metaphors with which we construct our thoughts including that of God. God is purely notional, and inevitably expressed purely as metaphor, but the stone is part of the reality that gives us our metaphors. The stone or rock is a metaphor for God. Nature gives us the metaphors we use to describe God. Which is primary? Which is greater?

Kant

The great philosopher, Kant, aimed to derive a moral theory independent of religion, from “pure practical reason”, but he was using metaphors of human experience no less than anyone else, or than any human could, and he used much of Descartes’ construction too, and the faculty model of mind. So care is needed that assumptions are not creeping in with the metaphors and the accepted parts of Cartesian philosophy that then emerge as apparently “pure practical reason” when it is not. Kant seems to begin with the strict father metaphor of Judaeo-Christian religion, replaces God with Reason the strict father, and universalizes the whole caboodle on the basis of humanity being an extended family.

The Enlightenment had brought forth a model of the mind called the faculty model, in which the mind is a metaphorical society or social institution like a corporation made up of separate departments or faculties with different functions for processing the data streams that the mind has to handle. Each department has a task in the processing of data, which flows from one to another according to a flow diagram as in a software program. There are seven main faculties:

1. Perception—receives the data
2. Imagination—creates images of the data
3. Feeling—an instinctive, rough and rapid, sorting and response department, that can respond quickly but is volatile and often panicky
4. Understanding—a filing department that allocates data on the basis of judgements and decisions decided by Reason
5. Memory—is the repository of the records, but can make errors
6. Reason—the administrative center, making the rules for the other departments by judging the value of proposals it receives and passing its rulings to Will.
7. Will—the executive department, receives rapid decisions from Feeling, and considered judgements from Reason, and can act or not, as it decides. When will is strong, it does what is right, but otherwise might not.

Each department operates in distinct ways, with Reason the department of the Chief Executive, and sometimes each faculty is personified. The whole model has no empirical basis. It is entirely metaphorical, yet has held sway all this time with little questioning. Yet cognitive studies find little truth in it as an adequate model of thinking. Reason and Feeling, for example, are not separate and almost opposed in purpose, for Reason cannot operate without Feeling. Nor does the mind have an executive center in reality, and nor is Memory anything like a central library or store room, but is much more dispersed, as if every operative unit kept its own records but made them generally available as needed. The reason the inaccurate metaphor has lasted so well is that it seems right, and Kant and most modern philosophers take it for granted.

It is hard not to notice, once you think about it, that this metaphor has an authority built into it—Reason. Will is morally obliged to follow Reason’s decisions, but might be distracted, perhaps by the rough and rapid decisions made by Feeling, or by perversity. Will has to be strong not to be distracted. This is the core schema of the strict father family in which Reason is the father—or God—Will is the child, and Feeling stands for temptation, or Evil. The Judaeo-Christian tradition provides us with most of our strict father metaphors, because the strict father tradition is that of the paternalistic religions, while the nurturant mother tradition will have its religious reflexion in the earlier Great Mother Goddess tradition. No one is sure about what the goddess religion was because it is prehistoric and has been well erased by the professionals of the later patriarchal religions, but such evidence as we have suggests a dominant, mainly pacific, Mother Goddess tradition was forcibly replaced by a more aggressive Father God tradition, which remains with us in the west, and swaths of Africa and the middle east.

So it is that Kant finds we give ourselves morals. Our Reason tells our Will what to do. Emotions are influences of the body which will divert Will enacting from the judgements of our purely mental and rational Reason. Personal moralizing is purely autonomous, as long as we resist the influence of Feeling and Emotion, worthless as far as Kant was concerned. Reason is assumed to be the essence of humanity and all humans are necessarily endowed with it. It is universal among humans. Thus morality which is decided by universal Reason, is itself universal.

Yet all of this construction is an extended metaphor in which the initial assumptions emerge as conclusions. Christian morality has been given a new and secular twist, but Reason is the strict father or God, and Kant’s ethical philosophy is a secularization of Christianity, but he thought it gave morality a base independent of God. As Kant saw Feeling as a counter to Reason coming from the body, he was maintaining Cartesian mind-body duality, with Reason being the purely mental, equal to the soul, and Feelings representing carnal influences.

Objectively, the duality is social. One has the duty of being moral only within society, and what tends to undermine it is one’s inclination to behave like a solitary animal able to do as it wished because it was responisble only to itself. Reason prescribes what is ultimately necessary for your own ultimate long term interest and benefit—accepting social norms—while feelings and emotions are the atavistic need to do what suits you right now. Kant called these urges “a certain rabble of acts of sensibility” that we all have, and which he knew would reduce us to being brutes if we yielded to them. Being brutish is acting the solitary beast—ignoring society and doing just what one’s selfish, atavistic instincts want. For Kant, the answer was independence of a kind but within society. Society was—is—a given, and so therefore is morality, but each person should aim for autonomy within society, and so we should do our duty but not incur debts, make demands, or even show you are hurt because they burden society. Self-reliance like this is a primary virtue of the strict father upbringing.

The moral freedom of everyone, according to Kant, has to be respected because we are all subject to the universal reason in us. People are “ends in themselves” because Reason gives us the ability to legislate morally for ourselves. We are all free to choose our own moral ends, and so are morally independent or autonomous. We are what makes morality possible. Morality is purely human—not God-sent—something that ought to be self-evident. It is how we should behave, and that means socially, because a non-social animal has no responsibility to other animals of the same kind.

Kant brings in dignity as an expression of our independence or autonomy in acting morally. Reflecting the Christian origins of his thinking, Kant ends up with a “kingdom of ends”, a society in which everyone is dignified and therefore acts perfectly morally with no need of coercive laws. It is the Christian “kingdom of God”—heaven! Strength of Will is necessary for it. Without a strong Will, the distracting Feelings originating from the body will not be resisted.

What of self-abuse such as destructively bad habits? Can that be immoral when it bothers no one else? Kant says it is, because of the bad effect it has on our dignity. More important is that self-abuse rarely does bother no one else. It can only be true of people who have effectively rejected society while remaining in it. The modern popular forms of self-abuse, drinking alcohol and taking drugs has consequences for society obvious in most of our city centers especially on a saturday night. Even if addicts are not criminals, it is rare that they are not a burden on society through their demands on welfare, health and social services, and their reduced effectiveness as people. Liberal society recognizes that moderate drinking and occasional drunkeness can be a way of relieving stress, and a means of social lubrication, and that is why it is encouraged up to a point. Immoderation and addiction are what burdens society and makes drugs and drunkeness anti-social, and so immoral. The problem is not that alcohol and drugs make us irrational, but that through them society is affected.

Sex is similar. In itself, it is a thoroughly natural pleasure, but has consequences. The first is that it causes pregnancy, so untrammeled sexual indulgence can be a burden on society when unwanted children are born or society has to provide for single mothers, or even abortion services. Today, we have cheap and effective contraceptives, and it is the duty of citizens to use them if they are unwilling to accept the consequences of their lustfulness. There are few excuses for children being born unwanted, and it is morally wrong to bring unwanted children into the world. Similarly, there is a duty to make sure you do not spread sexually transmitted disease, especially when society has provisions for its prevention and cure, as it mostly has these days. Otherwise, there can be nothing morally wrong with voluntary sexual pleasure. Providing people fulfil their duties as citizens to ensure they do not have unwanted children or spread disease, it is a private matter.

What of suicide? Augustine made it a mortal sin to stop Christians from doing it immediately they had been baptized, and certain, they then thought, to go to heaven because they thought baptism washed their sins from them. Kant followed Augustine in accepting suicide as morally wrong. But why should it be morally wrong to take what is yours—your life? Socially, it is morally wrong to do it when its leaves others in society destitute, children, or wife, or elderly parents, but obviously there is no sanction that society could apply to anyone who is already dead, unlike religion! When someone is able to make provision for any dependents after their death, what ought to stop them from being able to take their own life, once they think it serves no further useful purpose? What could be wrong about ending it? Even in Kant’s notion of autonomy, there can be no objection. He was forced into special pleading—it was an unnatural gratification and was brutish, plainly false allegations. Brutes, that is animals, do not kill themselves. Suicide implies the essence of humanity, in Kant’s terms—reason. It is a considered decision. A madman killing himself in his mania is not committing suicide. It is not a rational decision, but a symptom of the absence of reason.

Kant introduced the expression “categorical imperative” for some absolutely imperative moral law that anyone sets themselves. A categorical imperative must in principle apply to everyone, must not use people as a means but respect their freedom, must be fair, and help us move towards a “kingdom of ends”.

Kant’s whole scheme was a Wee Free Old Testament Christianity secularized, with no room for the caring, empathy or love of Christ’s own teaching, yet based on the categorical imperative of a secular God called Universal Reason. He advocated respect for the whole of humanity through regarding them as Ends in Themselves, but divorced it from all feeling of natural compassion, because feelings, however good, were contrary to Reason and therefore evil.

Kant tries to use “pure practical reason” to present us with a pure philosophy of morality, but, like everyone else, uses metaphors derived from material experience to do it, and without realizing it, ends up with the puritanical Christian assumptions with which he began, but secularized. Modern experiemental cognitive studies contradict Kant’s conclusions. Not only are they not universal, they are no more true than the initial Christian assumptions of a God-based morality—they are not true at all! The ancient Greek sophists could prove anything, and frequently did, getting commissions as advisors from wealthy citizens with political ambitions in the agora. Not all were crooks though. Sophistry began as a noble philosophy of utter skepticism that anything could be believed, and they showed they could be convincing about anything. Later philosophers like Kant forgot their message—beware of being convinced by your own erudition. A sophist might have seen through complicated schemes of argumentation like Kant’s, but it took science to do it—practical empirical studies of perception and thinking. Above all, Kant ignores all human feeling. A and H Damasio (1994, cited in Lakoff and Johnson) showed that people who could reason but had lost all feeling could not function socially or morally. Reason is not absolute or universal. Feelings are necessary for social life, and morals are rationalisations of them.

Competition and Society

Evolution as a confirmed scientific outlook is denigrated by fundamentalists, yet paradoxically they use an idea of faux-evolution in society—they value competition, getting on and being successful, market forces and capitalism, the survival of the fittest in business. Though they reject it in Nature, the consider it natural in society. They have it exactly the wrong way round. In Nature, individual competition for scarce resources causes successive generations to adapt to their environment, and over the millions of years that organisms have been adapting, many different strategies for survival have evolved. A particularly important one for human beings is social living. Social living is an evolutionary strategy that pits co-operation among a group of animals against others living alone. The success of humanity is the success of social living and of co-operation. Helping each other helps us all survive in competition with other animals, and is what distinguishes humanity.

The individual seeks to survive and have kids. Society offers the best way for us to do it. We maximize our own self-interest by helping others to maximize theirs. Society is therefore not contrary to evolution. The colony of co-operating animals succeeds better than their solitary non-co-operating rivals who remained outside of society. Co-operation and even altruism benefits us! Yet we have no wish to end up as colonies of human termites, so we also value individual freedom within society, while accepting that some freedoms necessarily have to be given up for the preservation of society. The liberal aims to get the balance right, the conservative emphasizes individual endeavour to the detriment of society, and the socialist over-emphasises society at the expense of the individual.

Socialists, though, are right in realizing the importance of society, something that conservatives resent. They cannot sensibly deny society but like it tiered like a wedding cake into a formal hierarchy with themselves at the top. Human societies are hierarchical, but if the differences get too great the ones at the bottom question the value of social living and society gets unstable. Then the top tiers have to use coercion and enforcement on the others, the reason why conservatives are authoritarian. Evolution is natural and an intelligent social animal like a human knows when society is being used against it by law and force. Then Nature asserts herself and the social groups being exploited will rebel to bring society back to its proper state of mutual co-operation. Law is necessary in society, but it is necessary so that society is maintained, not to undermine it. Yet hierarchies try to use the force of law to maintain inequality, and it cannot, at least in the long term. No society can be absolutely equal, even Christianity’s heaven, but nor can they remain stable and grossly unequal. When it is, the social contract, or holy covenant, is torn up by those at the bottom of the pile, and society disintegrates.

What the social contract undertakes to do is to make survival easier for everyone in society. Once it ceases to do that, some people might as well revert to solitary living—everyone for themselves. Society collapses and a new one is constructed out of its ruins, quite often by conquest, but more egalitarian for the mass of the population. It is inevitable because we have evolved to be social, we see the value of society and enjoy living in it, as long as it is fair to all—it is just. That is what morality is about, and why it is immoral to be rich when many people are poor. That was the message of Christ but most US Christians do not get it.

Society places demands on its members. They have to care for each other, and have not to demand more than anyone else. These are duties. In exchange, members of society have rights. Society must not take advantage of them. When people feel society is unfair, they object—sometimes violently. The conservative wants them forcibly put down. The liberal wants to know what has upset them, and what will make society acceptable again. Justified revolution is not criminality. Criminality is when individuals try to get an advantage over others contrary to the mores and laws of society. Revolution is the reaction of large numbers of people with an unattended social injustice. Criminals might pretend to be revolutionaries to cover their activities, but democracy—if that too is fair—exposes them as having no popular following. Society must nurture all its members. That is what it is for.

It follows that to advocate competition as the main principle of merit within society runs counter to it, unless it is controlled in such a way that the cohesion of society is preserved. Ultimately, a philosophy of life based on personal self-interest is a denial of society, a denial of what has made humanity successful, and indeed a denial of humanity. The principle of competition cannot be admitted as the main principle of society without destroying it. Within a society, co-operation is more natural, with competition restricted essentially to mating and leadership, and those largely stylized. Those who seriously advocate self-interest can be wholly self-interested by leaving society and fending for themselves outside it as solitary animals serving only themselves. Put so bluntly, they know they are wrong and refuse to do it, making excuses.

A degree of competition, as already noted, is valuable within a society, but society is entitled to preserve itself for the good of its members, and thus to control competition that is getting divisive. When greedy bands of men manipulate society to serve their individual ends to the detriment of the rest, society is entitled to declare it criminal. When they kill thousands for their own greed, there is no doubt about it. The authorities in society must stop it, or those whose society is being undermined will do it. That is why revolutions happen.

Analytic Philosophy

Modern Western philosophy is largely of a kind called analytic philosophy, developed early in the nineteenth century by Russell and Wittgenstein and propagated in the USA by philosophers fleeing Hitler like Nagel and Quine. A major element of it is that thought is impossible without language. Language is the basis of philosophy. An early analytic philosopher was the genius, Gottlob Frege, who thought mathematics was transcendent, universal and objective, and encompassed language in that meanings, or the sense of words, was independent of experience. The genius makes great strides forward in knowledge, but no one should assume they are right. Despite his genius which profoundly influenced others, including Russell and Wittgenstein, Frege could not avoid being wrong in some of his ideas. He was unaware of what later men knew, such as the discoveries of Gödel, and the cognitive scientists. Images and feelings, for Frege, were all we had from experience. Sadly, it divorced analytic philosophy from experience leaving it to arrive at absurd conclusions.

W V O Quine came up with the notion of “meaning holism”. He distinguished first order logic, concerned with entities, from second order logic, concerned with properties, and, being an advocate of Occam’s Razor in philosophy, restricted it to first order logic. What emerged was a theorem that showed that there was no meaning in any symbol until the meaning of them all was evident. Thus nothing could be known partially, but only as a whole—meaning holism! It is a startling conclusion. The elements and symbols of any system cannot be relied on as having any true meaning until the whole system is known. We cannot know just a part of the world, un petit peu of French, key aspects of science, the rudiments of law, the essentials of theology.

Consider a definition. A word is defined in terms of other words, the meaning of which are defined by yet other words. No meaning is secure until the meaning of every word is known. The interpretation of one meaning can change the meaning of another. So, it is, for example, impossible to translate one language into another. The translation of any passage depends upon the translations already agreed upon, but no translation can be certain until every passage is translated and all meanings are agreed. The various translations of God’s Word from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek, then into the local argot of Christians worldwide, are confusing not elaborating whatever the original meaning of God’s supposed Word was, according to “meaning holism”, which disproves anything so stupid as biblical inerrancy. Of course, this is no trouble to Christians because God can square the circle, and so can easily sort out meaning.

Empiricism, and therefore science, is invalid because no empirical observation is valid until all possible observations have been observed. Any new observation might change a previous one’s interpretation. Similarly, justice is invalid unless every case is dealt with, and the law fully refined to cover all circumstances. In summary, meaning holism is that no evidence is valid for or against any proposition until the meaning as a whole is understood. Quine’s proposition undermines everything we have known about thought, language, truth and reality. Yet it is predicated on the notion of transcendence—that entities have a universal meaning independent of human experience. That is what is absurd—the initial premise.

Everything we know is conditioned by the two aspects of our experience—our direct experience during our lives, and the experience embodied in us by evolution as we developed over æons of time. This latter has given us feelings, instincts, and mental categories, without which any thinking is impossible. What philosophers have deemed universal is common to all human experience, and so is not purely subjective. We all have the same visual and motor systems, so we experience spatial relations and movement in the same way, and learn how to use them, and how they relate to reality in common ways. It all allows us to express and understand common experiences, and use this understanding metaphorically in describing our experiences and thence unusual experiences, our personal thoughts, and ultimately abstract ideas. It is the nearest we get to Frege’s universal abstractions. They are true to the extent that they have had some consequence for us over our evolutionary experience. Our conceptions are formed in metaphors of vision and movement that we all understand because we have been there, not because they are transcendent, abstract, forms entering our heads by God’s will or magic, whatever the difference is. Finally, most of our thinking is below the level of consciousness, and comes to us only when it enters our consciousness. It is Gestalt.

Poststructuralists have criticized science as arbitrary because it is, like any postulate, based on assumptions that are no more valid than any other assumptions. One might wonder why it is then that any other assumptions do not lead to the amazing success science has had in yielding up the world’s practical secrets. Belief in God, in ancestors, aliens, fairies, perpetual motion, the spaghetti monster are all, on this argument just as valid as belief in science, yet they have all of them, including belief in God, led us precisely nowhere, often in a much longer time than belief in science has had. There are two good reasons why the argument is wrong:

1. Assumptions have consequences, and therefore, even if they are arbitrary to begin with, they can be accepted or discarded on the basis of the consequences. Correct assumptions have a chance of leading somewhere. False assumptions have little such chance. If what we deduce on the basis of some assumptions gets us nowhere, then it is either false or fruitless and can be discarded. If it gets us results, especially useful ones, then it is true and fruitful and can be accepted. Assuming God is a power in the world is either false or fruitless because nothing useful has ever come of it, but the assumptions of science are not false and are bountiful, so they have been confirmed as being true and valid assumptions, and only those opposed to science for their own personal reasons could possible argue otherwise. Science has shown a million times over that it works. It has provided us with a remarkable lifestyle, safety from disease, millions of useful and labour saving inventions, gadgets for our amusement. Its assumptions must be correct. The best that can be said for religious belief is that it has psychological effects, like believing in a good luck charm, but has the disadvantage that its believers will often die and kill to make others believe the same thing, especially when they do not want to and consider the belief to be deranged.
2. The assumptions were not arbitrary anyway. They were generated on the basis of experience, of custom and practice. The early experiences themselves might have been based on various assumptions, but trial and error sorted out what was valid from what was invalid, until, by the time the practices were systematized in science, the assumptions made were already known to be valid! By the same token, empirical results are not arbitrary, subjective or isolated, but are repeated by different people until agreed upon by a community of scientists whose skills are in making the tests until they are repeatable, or shown not to be. Moreover, different scientific methods and approaches turn out to be coherent, another proof of validity. Science is an interconnecting framework that is self-confirming. The fact that discoveries in science from different fields, from different observational viewpoints, using different technologies converge on the same set of coherent concepts gives us utter confidence in it. Beginning with assumptions grounded in experience and ending with up with conclusions and discoveries that work in practice is a virtuous circle. Begin with false assumptions about universal truths and abstractions and we end up with absurd conclusions utterly divorced from experience.

People who reject science will believe the most amazing impossibilities without any evidence other than say-so. They are nearly always convinced that their God does not like science and therefore they are defending God in refusing to accept science, yet, if God exists, is almighty, sustains the universe, and has made humanity in his image, then God has given us science. How could it be otherwise, if God is really the creator? Science cannot see a God, but no one denies, least of all scientists, that science actually proves there is no God. Nature works without the need of a God, but any intelligent God must have made it thus. Why should an almighty being want to constantly sustain a world that he can arrange to sustain itself? Too many Christians want their God to be like them—idiots—and the cleverer ones seem too scared of them to tell them so, or have decided to feed their prejudices as shepherds.

The brilliant linguistic analyst, Noam Chomsky, avowedly based his theories on the philosophy of Descartes, complete with its false assumptions of the transcendence of certain human powers. Chomsky’s theories of language are therefore themselves based on unrealistic assumptions, and are likely to be wrong. The essence of humanity, for example, is an inherent universal syntax. Other animals cannot talk because they do not have it. If we evolved, though, why do humans have it and other primates and other animals do not? What we see here is not an established fact but an established religious dogma. The universal syntax distinguishes humans from animals and so is the God-given divine image of Genesis. Empirical research does not support Chomsky, influential though he has been. Syntax is not independent of meaning, but helps provide it. It is not independent of communication but helps in doing it. It is not independent of culture, nor of the body and its experiences in getting where it is. Chomsky’s idea of syntax is not just unrealistic, it is impossible, at least without God! Chomsky’s theories are actually pseudo-scientific. It transpires that any empirically based criticisms of it can be evaded by re-defining the innate grammar, just as Christians keep all Christians good by disowning the ones who did wicked deeds though professing Christianity.

By accepting that meaning is a function of physical experience and not an abstract gift from God, or a mysterious force pervading the universe, puts science before theology and before philosophy. Philosophy is not discovering the conditions for science to be valid, science is discovering the necessities of life and experience philosophy must accept to be valid. Chomsky offered a philosphically based theory that experimental studies do not uphold. The experimental work is right because it is the ultimate test of correspondence with reality.

Rational Action

What of the theory of rational action that motivates everything in the modern world from business and government to ordinary folk living everyday lives, or so we are told. It postulates that we all act rationally so as to maximize the fulfilment of our desires, and minimize whatever is undesirable. People are assumed metaphorically to have rational goals, or a metaphorical destination, or a metaphorical bottom line to the balance sheet. The metaphors, as usual, are happily mixed. Those who reach their goal get a payoff, and will have a credit balance.

The path to the destination is not smooth. It is highly branched and becomes a tree, another metaphor. Negotiating all the branches is complicated, and has been modelled mathematically, yielding up a mathematical solution to what is considered the common problem of life. The mathematics is based on game theory and statistics, but has to be simplified in many ways, ending up representing very little. Yet, allegedly governments, businesses and generals use it to make decisions for them, that cost us as customers, employees and taxpayers, and often people elsewhere, deemed enemies or competitors, their lives! These methods suppose some mythical form of Kantian pure reason, yet it is uttely divorced from reality at the outset, and ends up with utterly inhumane consequences.

Real people base their actions on their common experience, and they do not use hypothetical pure reason supported by space hooks or God but recollections of experience couched metaphorically—metaphors of what has happened to them. D Kuhnemann and A Tversky have shown that probability, for example is not understood properly by most people, and nor is game theory, so people do not use anything like the rational action model used by governments and corporations. Many do not really use reason at all, but intuition based on experience and the exchange of experiences via metaphors. The reason is that their decisions are largely made in the cognitive unconscious. That is what intuition is.

Most often these natural responses are right. It is instinctively right to strike an attacking mad dog, but it is not right to automatically transfer the same action to a pre-emptive nuclear strike on another nation. What is entirely rational in one context cannot be simply transferred to another inappropraite context. Whatever mechanical or mathematical aids are used by presidents, generals or corporate bosses, the final decision is a human one, and the enormity of intercorporate and international decisions has to be impressed on to the decision takers. It is not an experience that they can have had. The benefit of social living is that people offer mutual protection. That is entirely countervailed once huge groups of people called nations begin to threaten each other as if they were kids in a playground. Morality is universal because our human experience is common. That is what we need to remember and respect others for.

Why has it Taken so Long?

Polarities like nature-nurture and innate-learnt are misleading. Certainly, these polarities exist, but the purity at the poles never obtains. Everyone is somewhere in between, because what is innate or nature requires nurture or learning for it to emerge. Many neural connexions that we are born with die off unused. The newly born infant has too many to function properly together, and without considerable die back, the child could not develop anyway. So, much of what is present in our heads at birth, and innate in that sense, disappears as irrelevant. Connexions that are used do not die off, and actually stimulate the growth of new ones. Without many neural connexions dying there could be no growth of new ones, and therefore no adapting to environmental pressures. No philosophy foresaw that considerable volumes of our infant brains must die so that we can learn, yet this is innate!

The neural connexions that grow depend upon the innate physiology that dictates the behaviour of growth, and the bodily experience that stimulates it. People born blind or deaf, grow mentally differently from people with sight and hearing. Normal people broadly have the same range of experiences as they develop, and they are the basis of universal philosophies. We all have similar experiences, and can understand a common restricted range of metaphors of sensing and motion in relation to a common reality. Thus we all conceptualize our experience in similar ways.

Some philosophers have maintained that the world is not real. As it is unquestionably out there, and no one who claims it is not real will jump off a cliff to prove it is not, they can only mean that each subjective experience of the world is singularly ours, and not objectively real precisely in being peculiar to each of us. Yet, once we begin to interact with our parents, then our peers, subjective differences are unified in a mutual exchange of experience and metaphor to become objectified. Our perceptions and conceptualizations of the world coincide for most of us through our mutual experience, and our exchange of that through common metaphorical descriptions.

The fact that we can meaningfully discuss such matters as the content of newspapers, TV, films, music and sports shows that we are conditioned into a common understanding of the world, a common regime of concepts, a common culture. This common experience allows us to function in the world, and with other human beings in society. It shows that practically the world is how we imagine it to be. A worldview is a complex of beliefs we hold that help us to negotiate the complexities of the world and society. We can be no worse off with a world view that ties in with reality as revealed by science than a world view based on false science and ancient beliefs, comforting as they might seem.

Why has it taken so long to appreciate the importance of experience in thinking? It is religion. Religion has divided mind and body because it needs disembodied mind to survive the obvious fate of us all—death! The idea that we are mainly spiritual and our bodies temporary prisons for the soul demeans what is important about us—our lives—and consequently philosophers like Descartes, Kant, the analytic philosophers and Chomsky have seen thinking in open or hidden ways as being an abstract phenomenon towards which the body has nothing to contribute except distractions. This philosophical outlook has even conditioned science, and scientific thinking. Only the growth of experimental cognitive studies from the end of the twentieth century has given us the evidence that we needed to fit in with evolution.

Suddenly, it is so obvious. Our bodily experience indirectly, throughout evolutionary time, and directly, in our own lives and social lives, is what enables us to do anything that we do! Besides the baneful influence of religion, though, is the empirical truth that we think largely unconsciously, so the processes involved have remained hidden from us. Unconscious thinking is thinking that has been conditioned by millions of years of evolution, and that we do automatically, just as animals do. Animals, notably chimps and bonobos might, to a greater or lesser extent, be conscious like us, and humans distinguished only in having evolved a symbolic level of it. Yet, still, most of our thinking remains unconscious like other animals.

The consciousness we have develops slowly from birth. New born infants are not conscious, though they can see and move. What they see and do is a mystery to them that they cannot even think about. We learn by testing our environment using our senses and movement. Physical objects we meet are slowly classified into mental categories already prepared for us by evolution. These are extended, mainly with parental help at first, then peer help, when basic metaphors of location and objects are extended to include increasingly refined categories until we gradually emerge into consciousness. Few of us can remember much before the age of three. That is the time it takes.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History