Sensory Lenses

 Ok, so yesterday I was trying to say this

You only know the world through your senses. Think of your senses as a pair of glasses. Without them your vision is blurry and nonsensical. With you only experiencing forms and shapes, etc.

You literally can’t interact with the world beyond your senses. It’s like being in a submersible in the Marianna’s Trench. Without the thick pressurized steel walls of that tank you would not be able to exist down there. Imagine it has no windows and only a computer screen that is set to infrared. 

What’s also crazy is that your body is possibly made of the same material as the world beyond your senses. So you are also cut of from truly experiencing your own body. And what you do glean is still through the lens of your senses.

So how are we able to know anything?

To understand this we must understand the layers of our sensory lens. 

The first layer is that of space and time. Without these we have no basis for any knowledge. Space and time are the preconditions of any experience. Without them how would you have a concept of measurement or size or (you get it).

But these concepts are still human inventions to some degree. Because they are the first part of our experiencial lens we don’t know if they exist outside of our experience. How would we? We trapped in a submersible and it is impossible to exit. 

 But remember that we can still experience this world that we created with our senses. And because the world created from our senses is bound by space and time they (space and time) are subject to them. Things decay and fade from our perspective. 

Is something else going on outside of our senses? We don’t know! All we know is what we can experience with our experiencial lens.

The second part of our lens (maybe even a whole other lens) is our capacity to reason. Logic, mathematics, argumentation. Our ability to abstract certain features of our experiences and make universal statements and/or create concepts.

This part of ourselves is fundamentally different from the parts that experience a beautiful dying world. Simple experiences are passing and not rational. “Woke up, took a piss, watched tv, ate some shit, fell asleep.” Even if there is ration thought in this process it is minimal. This person is just going with the flow, their temperament changing like the seasons.

When one is guided by reason their decisions tend to be more consistent and pointed at some higher concept.

We tend to believe that the capacity for rational thought is so fundamentally important and useful to us humans that we assume that it is the fundamental basis of that world beyond our senses that we can’t comprehend.

But this is begging the question, right? 

The world is fundamentally consistent and operates in accordance with certain laws

Everything that we know acts in accordance with these rationality or logic, therefore logic and reason must be the basis of all reality.

(Probably didn’t make a good bad argument here, but I did just wake up so excuse me)

Anyway 

Imposing consistency on nature is not the same as finding it there. We literally Kan’t find anything beyond our sensory perception so how could we know if that’s any basis for anything but this world that we created?

With that said, our ability to reason is fundamentally distinct from our capacity for sensory experience.

What I mean is this- is our sensory experiences are ephemeral, they are passing, memory’s fade and so does the body. Sensory experiences are fundamentally non-permanent and changing.

Reason is fundamentally universal and static in much of its methods and sciences. While millions have died sense the creation Pythagoreans theorem (a theory that he did not invent by the way), the theory has not changed (as far as I know). Our capacity for this, reasoning, is simply different from our capacity for sensory experiences.

Kant argued that the a difference between the phenomenal (world of sensory experiences) and the noumenal (world of platonic forms, or the world beyond our senses that we literally, by definition cannot comprehend because we cannot experience it) was that in the noumenal world may house God, the good, etc.

Kant also said that we have a bit of the noumenal in us. Our capacity to reason is our connection to that noumenal world.

Anyway I hope this helps in clarifying what I was trying to say yesterday.