Beyond John Locke: Reality and Experience

John Locke argued that there is a difference between how the world is and how we perceive it to be. This idea has come to dominate Western civilization and is frequently taken for granted when intellectuals, at least, think abstractly. Crucially, it is different from how they live their lives. In real life, they are experiential realists, regarding perception as a fairly reliable guide to making their way in the world. Only some of our perceptions, Locke thought, reflected reality. He attributes colors, sounds, and other aspects of reality to the perceiving subject, not objects. The arrangement of molecules (as we say these days) determines the frequency of light (again, to use modern concepts) that an object reflects, which hits our eyes and is somehow transformed into what we experience. The fact that the color of an object is communicated to us by light waves is seen as some dastardly trick, fooling us into thinking the world is filled with colors. Such thinking seems no different from some philistine insisting that a painting is “really” dabs of paint on a canvas or that speech is just vibrations of vocal cords. One has taken a Gestalt, isolated one small part of it, and then contrived a conspiracy theory. “Hey, Bob, when your mother calls you, it’s not really your mother. Your mother’s voice is being electronically reproduced and amplified, possibly bounced off satellites, and so on.” It is as though in describing an aspect of how something happens scientifically, one has debunked the phenomenon.

Locke does not even bother arguing his position. Once he has asserted that the “ideas” (immediate objects of perception) of secondary qualities depend on the perceiving subject for their existence, he takes that as sufficient reason to think that they do not exist in the world, which assumes the perceiving subject is not in the world, nor the results of their interaction with it. The only relevant point he makes on the topic beyond that is to note that the pain felt from being cut by a knife is not in the knife. In pointing this out, he is hoping to emphasize that nothing of what our senses tell us about reality is true of the world, except for aspects of the world that can be measured and given a numerical ascription. Since no one has ever thought, inaccurately, that pain resides in knives, Locke is making a fallacious argument from ridicule, the idea being that thinking that things in the world have color is as misguided as thinking that pain is a property of knives. It is a strawman position. It is the equivalent of saying to a theist, “I suppose you believe in Father Christmas, too.”

One alternative to Locke, promoted by people like John Dewey, is that color is an emergent phenomenon; it emerges in the interaction of the organism with its environment. Get a mind, add some eyes, mix in some molecular structure producing various light waves, and hey presto, color. Locke seems to have in mind some such scheme without the emergence part. Instead, color and other ideas of secondary qualities are subjective illusions. Dewey contended that most of our philosophical problems stem from imagining that we are not part of nature. Since we and our minds are part of the universe and are thus a portion of reality too, then our experiences are also “real” and contribute to what is, as well. Locke seemed to reject this scheme because he, along with early modern scientists, excluded mind from reality. Though science is an invention of mind and is undertaken by conscious creatures, and the measurements taken must be analyzed by mind, mind itself cannot be seen by science or measured, so the minds of scientists, and certain analytic philosophers, deem mind unreal. The observer is removed from the picture, and we try to imagine a world without observers – presumably without imaginers either, something that makes no sense. Quantum physics, on the contrary, puts the observer back in the picture and acknowledges that in observing the world, the world is altered and even comes into being as an actuality. For a wave function to collapse, and thus for a determinate state of affairs to be the case (i.e., Shrödinger’s Cat), an observation must be made. And that observation lies outside the world of possibilities and probabilities of quantum physics. So, the latter is not complete unto itself nor self-sufficient.

The idea that color and other “secondary qualities” (those that supposedly depend on the senses) are emergent properties is not, however, very satisfactory. Like oil and water, trying to mix mind with a simple-minded take on physical reality does not work. The two will simply not congeal into one unified thing. Noam Chomsky correctly, for once, comments that consciousness is easy. It is something with which we are all familiar. It is the nature of physical reality; however, that is problematic and about which agreement seems impossible. He notes that whole books have been written about what particles are, with no consensus in sight. Imagining that “consciousness” is the hard problem, but physical reality is straightforward has no basis in science whatsoever.

Rupert Sheldrake, in Science Set Free, promotes “extramission” as a corrective to the intromission only theory promoted by Kepler. Intromission is light waves coming into the eye and then converted into what we see. How this is accomplished is ignored in the manner of a Jedi mind trick – “Nothing to see (!) here. Move along.” Sheldrake points out that prior conceptions of perception also had extramission – something being projected out from the eyes. This something is essentially mind, clothing the world out there with secondary qualities. It might be just a personal limitation, but extramission seems weird, inexplicable, and unappealingly non-realist about experience. Mind being superimposed on physical reality retains the oil and water problem and posits a physical reality existing independent from consciousness that is only semi-knowable in some sense.

The emergence of mind, or anything to do with mind, from physical reality is arguably a non-starter. It would seem to require a miracle. Mind can only come from mind, so it must have been there all along. Moreover, Sheldrake’s extramission theory essentially accepts Locke’s picture of colorless, silent, tasteless, texture-less, smell-less atoms in the void, but with the human mind bringing it all to life. If those ideas are unsatisfactory, can we think of our way to experiential realism in some other way? Even if the goal is uncongenial to you, it might be interesting to discover if you can do it. One attempt to do so might look like the following. Animals evolve the organs needed to perceive the world. The world has a visible structure. But it also has sounds, smells, textures, temperatures, and tastes. Eyes, ears, noses, taste receptors, and a sense of touch have evolved separately in multiple species. The corporeal world is there waiting to be discovered. Light from the sun hits the skin, a nerve senses something, and so it begins. The beauty in us perceives the beauty in the world. The divine within us responds to the divine around us. The capacity for perceiving beauty can be developed and increased, or it can shrivel and wither, and, of course, the same thing can happen to divinity. A failure of imagination and a focus on the pragmatic can hinder our perception of reality.

The goal is to see what rearrangements of thought might be necessary to take our perceptions seriously and avoid pretending that the world is completely different from what we experience. There is no reason to imagine that this latter tendency is helpful, useful, or true. We do not actually believe this view anyway. In normal circumstances, our head, chest, and stomach agree about the reality of what we experience, unless we are schizophrenic or autistic (Descartes had strongly autistic tendencies including having problems with the theory of mind, asking how we know other people are not automatons, and thinking animals were not conscious). Only when we enter a classroom or laboratory and adopt a “rigorous” academizing stance, we are tempted to be skeptical. Anything that reduces hypocrisy, claiming one thing and living a completely different way, might tend towards the good and the true. Someone claiming that rational egoism is true and that thus genuine love and friendship are imaginary, while devoted to family and friends, is assuming a similar stance, i.e., lying, or at the very least, being confused.

Instead of saying that things have a taste and thus we have evolved tongues and noses to taste them (taste being very reliant on smell), Locke said taste did not exist. He was, arguably, wrong. We taste with our minds but via our tongues. Conscious awareness uses sense organs to sample different aspects of the world. It is true that our experience of the world is partial. A bee can see ultraviolet light, and we cannot. A shark can detect electrical impulses, and we are unable to. However, all thought, and all experience is necessarily partial, but not for that reason unreal. All thought is a simplification and interpretation. To think all things simultaneously is to preclude thinking. Not simplifying, selecting, and interpreting would mean reproducing every single aspect of reality which would not be helpful or useful. It would be like being asked to interpret a novel and simply copy it again, word for word. We have to decide, for any given purpose, what level of simplification is required. How partial or complete do our partial truths need to be? The religious impulse, through worship, singing, contemplation, poetry, and prayers, is there to remind us of what is there beyond the merely useful for any particular goal. A forest is beautiful and to be cherished independently from the wood that it may provide. Meditation is an exercise in not doing but being and is thus fundamentally religious. “Don’t just do something; sit there!” is the Zen instruction.

As finite beings moving through the world, we need to, and do, experience the world relative to our location and the type of creature we are with our particular needs. We also experience the value of the world. We find within the world, the good, the true, and the beautiful. Much of the natural world is beautiful, and we have evolved the feelings, judgment, and perceptions necessary to appreciate it.

In place of what Wolfgang Smith calls the corporeal world, Locke hopes to substitute what Smith calls the physical world. The physical world is the world physicists posit and deal with. The physical world is described mathematically. Physicists get so used to thinking in these terms that many of them actually start to think that they are describing the full reality itself.

Locke and Galileo thought that only the world as it can be measured exists. Locke called these primary qualities. They are solidity, extension, figure, number, and motion which happen to mirror the number of senses we possess, though they are supposed to be independent of the senses. George Berkeley pointed out that ideas from these so-called primary qualities are never experienced separately from the ideas from secondary qualities, and thus there is no basis for thinking they can exist independently from each other, with one set being put in one camp and the other in another. If knowledge is to come from experience, as Locke claimed, then Berkeley’s position is stronger. By rejecting much of experience as unreal, Locke set up the British school of thought for centuries of pretended skepticism. Of course, in real life, the British, even the philosophers, continued on with life as normal.

Iain McGilchrist notes in The Matter With Things, which inspired this article, that measurement is a distinctly human phenomenon. Measurement depends on mind, and measuring things is an activity undertaken for human purposes. For Locke, objective reality is coextensive with what can be measured; with the measurable. That means that if human beings and the human mind did not exist, objective reality would also not exist. If you say that objective reality is in fact what can hypothetically be measured, this concept still depends on human beings. Nothing can even be hypothetically measured without human beings or human-like intelligence and behavior. Human beings are the only creature that we know of who measures things. This puts a whole new spin on the claim that man is the measure of all things. All things only exist if they are, or could be, measured.

The measurable is a tiny subset of what exists. It is literally an abstraction (to pull or draw away from) from a larger whole. The love a mother has for her child, the beauty of a piece of music, the quality of a TV program, and the excellence of a novel cannot be measured, yet they exist. Part of the attraction of measurement for a certain kind of person is that it can provide a degree of emotional comfort and security, contributing to a sense of order and perhaps mastery of one’s environment. Yet, in quantum mechanics, one only measures probabilities and thus the nondefinitive. The impulse for certainty that an engineer might have is returned to the epistemic limbo of the philosopher. Anecdotally, a student attending Middlebury College’s summer program for German around the year 2000 had switched from physics to philosophy because he had gotten to quantum mechanics in graduate school and hated all that uncertainty. In a darkly funny and telling way, he found more pseudo-certainty in (analytic) philosophy–the study of the controversial and unprovable–than he could in the hard sciences.

The corporeal world exists with its sounds and smells. We have evolved the capacity to perceive them as have a multitude of other animals, insects, birds, fish, etc. The senses we have are not arbitrary, and they do not bring these qualities into existence. The world does not become silent because one person is deaf. The world was not silent before any creatures existed. It had an aural property that ears evolved to detect. Ears did not insert sound into creation. It would be inexplicable that different creatures would simply invent something that did not exist independently from each other. The perception of “secondary qualities” does depend on sense organs and consciousness – though not the secondary qualities themselves. Primary qualities do not get us away from this because measurement also depends on sense organs and consciousness.

Once the world has been measured, we have a set of numbers. The numbers once abstracted and perhaps put into a database, have no particular connection to the real, corporeal world. Some physicists and mathematicians then imagine that these numbers are the reality and that the real corporeal world is an illusion. Analytic philosophers, generally suffering from physics envy, in turn, invented the word “qualia” to describe the experience of corporeal reality, what it is like to taste pineapple being a popular example. The term “qualia” seems intended to make the regular experience seem like some niche phenomenon and optional, like a liking for badminton. It is akin to social justice warriors describing normal men and women upon whom the survival of the species depends to have babies and look after them as cis-gendered and heteronormative weirdos. The world as abstracted numbers theory could not be any less “empirical” if you tried. The physicists then feel a kind of pity and condescension for us non-physicists for thinking that what we experience is real and primary. On the contrary, the corporeal world is primary. It is where we live and move and have our being. The physical world, using Smith’s term, however, is an imaginary world of numbers. In quantum physics, particles exhibit super-positionality–being everywhere at once, having no determinate reality. Once they are observed/measured, the wave function collapses, and a mere potential is converted into actuality. Whitehead described the world as that aspect of God that got to be actualized.

In quantum physics, observation and measurement are counted as the same thing. Both observation and measurement are inherently dependent on consciousness. In distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities, Locke and Galileo did not manage to exclude the contribution of the mind to reality. Whereas the corporeal world does not need us for its existence, measurement does. Perhaps numbers have some metaphysical existence of their own, but the measurement is relative to human activity and interests. The world does not come pre-measured. It does, however, have a visible structure. In the quantum realm, measurement changes reality, as Heisenberg pointed out. We have to hit things with particles that alter them. Moreover, the smaller something is, the higher energy we must use to perceive them, altering them all the more. Measurement is interactive, reality-altering, and mind-dependent.

If measurement, observation, and interaction are all the same thing on the quantum level, then perhaps we could at least say that aspects of the world come into existence through the intervention of the mind and other parts not, since not all “interactions” involve the human mind.

One reaction to the point of view being promoted here is to start talking about light waves and sound waves, and so on. This is just to go back to Locke’s and Galileo’s prejudice in favor of what can be measured. It could be compared to someone saying that they like the taste of coffee and someone else saying, “What you really mean is…” and then describing some physiological process or other.The green leaves of a tree will indeed vary in color as the sun rises and sets, so what, one may ask, is their “real” color? The real color varies somewhat depending on the time of day. At night, their color fades away nearly completely. “Light waves” are part of that abstracted “physical” world rather than the corporeal; to adopt a perspective that can be useful for manipulating the world rather than appreciating it.

We cannot see the light, but we can see things that light reflects off, which is why space is dark though the light passes through it. We see the world. Light is a precondition for this seeing. We do not see “color”; we see a colorful Gestalt. “Color” all by itself is a weird abstraction and does not exist other than as a concept, like the word “tall.” Tall what?

Kant posited various categories of thought needed for human existence and thought, space and time being two of them. But, then, Kant also introduced the idea of “the thing in itself,” which we could never experience. This introduces non-realism about experience again. Behind the locked door of “the thing in itself” lurks Locke’s colorless, silent, tasteless atoms in the void, or something akin to that it would seem.

The famous early twentieth-century physicists tended to say that the universe is more like a mind than a machine. It would explain why the four main forces: weak, strong, electromagnetic, and gravity are what they are because they are purposefully determined by mind rather than by random chance. The universe as mind might be what is needed for experiential realism. If the brain is a filtering device, then the world as a conscious phenomenon gets selected and filtered by our brains according to our needs. What we think of as “matter” provides resistance to the vagaries of thought. The brain excludes and selects and channels. The wall of the house resists our attempt to push against it. Friction both hinders and aids locomotion. Furthermore, the whole enterprise exists, perhaps, in the mind of God. Something like that is indicated by our intuitive and instinctual tendency to be animists, with a spiritual and divine reality living within each thing and emanating from them. Evolutionary biologists call this “the over-detection of agency.” The rest of us could choose to call it “the perception of what is” instead.

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