Solving For eXistence: Part 4

Categories of Confusion

Last time, we realized precisely why neither science nor religion can answer our biggest question for us. We’ve finally managed to put those to bed. This time, we begin to move forward for real. We are now on the bus, and here’s where we meet a guy I call Science Fish:

Science Fish
This fish is determined to explain all of existence as an emergent property of ‘wet’. Wet is the one undeniable constant in the life of any fish, so it makes sense that reality and existence would be made of wetness. But science fish wants to know exactly how wetness gives rise to existence. So science fish, being clever as all get out, devises every manner of instruments and technologies designed to study wetness in the utmost detail. He turns these devices to the wet in an effort to quantify all of its properties. What is the ambient coefficient of wetness? What is its inherent tension? Why does some of it get cold while some of it gets warm? Why does it sometimes freeze solid?

You get the idea. Science fish discovers essentially everything there is to know about the wet, but there’s still no explanation of where ‘wet’ came from. What made the ‘wet’?

This is where mystic fish gets involved. Mystic fish is big on meditation and gets lots of apparent insights from the wet about what it truly is and how it works. A lot of what mystic fish gets from these sessions contradicts science fish’s findings—especially the idea of something called ‘dry’. So now, nobody knows who’s right. All the fish are in an even worse state of confusion than before.

This is where theology fish gets involved, with the explanation that there’s a superfish who’s in control of everything. Whatever you can experience in life, the superfish ordains. The superfish is the author of all things, from fins and scales all the way down to wetness itself.

These three thought leaders have cognitive biases that keep them from seeing life clearly:

• Science fish is trapped in a belief system that wetness is all there is. There ain’t nothin’ more.

• Mystic fish is trapped in a belief system that points to the ineffable. It simply can’t be understood.

• Theology fish is trapped in a belief system that points to a supernatural agent for all things.

And while everyone’s trying to figure out which of these maverick fish is right, nobody’s looking at the possibility that they’re all wrong, but in different ways:

1. Science fish can’t accept the idea of something beyond wetness. So obviously, if there does happen to be something beyond wetness, science fish won’t have anything to do with it. He categorizes such talk as nonsense.

2. Mystic fish believes no fish can actually comprehend the answer, so it’s useless to ask. Just be.

3. Theology fish is agendized to convince believer fish to keep believing, so he trusts that he has the answer and doesn’t bother looking any deeper.

None of this is getting the fish commonwealth any further. They’re at a dead end. But of all three maverick fish, the one with the most promise to find the truth is science fish—if only he would expand his belief system to include the possibility of something...anything...beyond the wet.

Here’s what that one single shift would do:

First off, science fish would become curious again. And curiosity is the very foundation of science. So science fish would come to realize that every one of his inventive devices is actually made of the same wetness they’re designed to study. Therefore, he can’t rely on them to break him out of the box. The only thing that can do that is for him to find a new way to look at the problem.

Instead of grasping for expanded concepts of hard reality, science fish goes back to the basics, forcing himself to see the basics in new ways. The answer has to be there; he’s just been looking at it from unconscious bias, so the solution has escaped him.

It occurs to him that instead of studying the wet itself, he now needs to look at those who live in the wet. What is it they do that might shed light on the issue?

After a helluva lot of research, science fish discovers something critical: while all fish think they’re breathing wet, what’s actually taking place inside their lungs is that a not-wet chemical called oxygen is being extracted from the wetness, and it’s this not-wet chemical that a fish’s lungs use.

By golly, mystic fish may have been onto something! Maybe not the way she thought, but promising nonetheless. She described a dryness that exists beyond the wet. And wouldn’t ya know, that dryness sounds exactly like the ‘not wet’ chemical that every fish’s lungs use to stay alive.

It turns out, there is such a thing as dry. And while that thing doesn’t make much sense to the layfish, science fish has worked out an actual thesis: wetness is all that a fish can know, but there exists a dryness each fish uses every single moment of every day without even realizing it. And that dryness is actually the very thing that keeps all fish alive. But the instruments that science fish invented are themselves made of wetness, so they can’t detect the dry. The bias against anything ‘not wet’ is built right into their design. They never had a chance of getting to the root. It requires a leap of consciousness to grasp that something beyond the wetness can exist, does exist, and has always existed. It has never not existed. It’s been there all along. And it’s the very thing that powers the life of every fish and all fishkind. In fact, the ‘wet’ is actually secondary.

Turning this to Humans
Okay, enough with the analogy. What’s this all mean in human terms?

Science is restricted to a materialist view of existence. Any talk of something beyond the material is dismissed as nonsense because scientific devices can’t detect it. But that’s because scientific instruments are made of materiality. They literally cannot detect non-material things. This is exactly the situation science fish found himself in with wetness.

Now, science fish discovered that all fish must extract dry oxygen from the wet in order to breathe, but fish have no idea they’re doing it. For us humans, thought is the thing we rely on that we don’t even realize. We use it constantly, and our instruments made from materiality are hardwired not to detect it.

It’s impossible for a human being to not think. We do it so automatically that we even use it in our species’ scientific name: Home Sapiens Sapiens. We are, first and foremost, thinkers. If we were to remove our thought capacity, we would no longer qualify as humans. Thinking is just what we do. It’s automatic.

And yet, scientific instruments are categorically unable to detect thoughts. Sure, they can measure brain waves, but that’s just the brain’s activity while it’s thinking. So far, instruments can’t tell us what the brain is thinking about. That undetectable part is the actual thought. The brain waves are just evidence that a brain is active. What it’s active about still remains a guess. Only the thinker knows for sure.

So if thought is intrinsic yet undetectable by science, what do we do with it?
We remember ‘first principles thinking’ and come at it with new eyes.

It turns out, we need to re-categorize thought. It’s not just some incidental activity that brains happen to do by fortunate accident; it is the fundamental thing brains do. It’s what brains are for. The brain is an organ specifically designed to work with the non-material fact of thought.

Thought is pre-physical. It’s real, but science at its current level can’t quantify it.

Here, we’ve stumbled into a place where science can’t go. Science doesn’t function here; and yet, this place is undeniably factual. We think constantly. We know thought is an actual thing, but it lies outside science’s domain.

In the course of these articles we’ve been categorizing thought as pre-physical, but the more recognized word for it is ‘metaphysical’.

'Metaphysical' refers to anything real that science can’t quantify. Thought is the very first item that we can factually categorize as metaphysical. And since our brains are designed specifically to work with this metaphysical thing, that means we are intrinsically metaphysical creatures. We have an organ in our body that exists to work with a metaphysical thing—a thing science can’t quantify.

We’ve been operating beyond the restrictions of materiality since the very beginning, but we took it so for granted that we had no idea we were doing it. We had this metaphysical thing mis-categorized, so we had no idea what we were dealing with. We keep trying to understand how the brain generates thoughts, but current science isn’t able to prove that it does. The non-physical mind generates thoughts, and our physical brains appear to merely work with those thoughts in the way other organs work with chemicals.

Think of your hands. Hands don’t create the physical matter that you build things out of, but you can certainly build things. Our brains don’t create the thoughts we build from, but we certainly build things from our thoughts. In fact, we’re not able to build anything at all unless we think about it first. Thought precedes every single thing human beings do. Thinking is intrinsic to the act of living.

Our takeaway from this is: life is an inherently metaphysical activity. it only happens because there is consciousness, and consciousness is metaphysical.

Now we need to do a bit of housekeeping, because we all need to be on the same page about what we mean by ‘consciousness’. That’s next.