what can we know?
Put bluntly, metaphysics asks simple albeit deep questions:
- Why do I exist?
- Why do I die?
- Why does the world exist?
- Where did everything come from?
- What is the nature of reality?
- What is the meaning of existence?
- Is there a creator or omnipotent being?
Although these questions may appear idle and futile, they seem to represent an innate longing for knowledge of the human mind. Indeed, children can and often do pose such questions, only to be faced with resignation or impatience of adults.
To make things simpler and tractable, one can focus on the question “What can we know?”.
When you wake up in the morning, you instantly become aware of your self, i.e., you experience an immaterial inner reality you can feel and probe with your thoughts. Upon opening your eyes, a structured material outer reality appears. These two unsurmountable facts are enough to sketch a small metaphysical diagram:
Outside
Focussing on the outer reality or physical universe, there exists an underlying structure forming and selforganizing process starting with an initial singularity or Big Bang (extremely low entropy state, i.e., high order, giving rise to the arrow or direction of time). Due to the exact values of physical constants in our universe, this organizing process yields structures eventually giving birth to stars, which, at the end of their lifecycle, explode (supernovae) allowing for nuclear reactions to fuse heavy elements.
One of these heavy elements brings with it novel bonding possibilities, resulting in a new pattern: organic matter. Within a couple of billion years, the structure forming process gave rise to a plethora of living organisms. Although each organism would die after a short lifespan, the process of life as a whole continued to live in a sustainable equilibrium state and survived a couple of extinction events (some of which eradicated nearly 90% of all species).
The second law of thermodynamics states, that the entropy of the universe is increasing, i.e., the universe is becoming an ever more unordered place. It would seem that the process of life creating stable and ordered structures violates this law. In fact, complex structures spontaneously appear where there is a steady flow of energy from a high temperature input source (the sun) to a low temperature external sink (the earth). So pumping a system with energy leads it to a state far from the thermodynamic equilibrium which is characterized by the emergence of ordered structures.
Viewed from an information processing perspective, the organizing process suddenly experienced a great leap forward. The brains of some organisms had reached a critical mass, allowing for another emergent behavior: consciousness.
Inside
The majority of people in industrialized nations take a rational and logicall outlook on life. Although one might think this is an inevitable mode of awareness, it actually is a cultural imprinting as there exist other civilization putting far less emphasis on rationality.
Perhaps the divide between Western and Eastern thinking illustrates this best. Whereas the former is locked in continuous interaction with the outer world, the latter focuses on the experience of an inner reality. A history of meditation techniques underlines this emphasis on the nonverbal experience of ones self. Thought is either totally avoided, or the mind is focused on repetitive activities, in effect deactivating it.
Recall from fundamental that there are two surprising facts to be found. On the one hand, the physical laws dictating the fundamental behavior of the universe can be mirrored by formal thought systems devised by the mind. And on the other hand, real complex behavior can be emulated by computer simulations following simple laws (the computers themselves are an example of technological advances made possible by the successfull modelling of nature by formal thought systems).
Outlook
This conceptual map allows one to categorize a lot of stuff in a concise manner. Also, the interplay between the outer and inner realities becomes visible. However, the above mentioned questions remain unanswered. Indeed, more puzzles appear. So as usual, every advance in understanding just makes the question mark bigger…
Continued here: infinity?
Taken from http://j-node.homeip.net/knowledgebase/metaphysics/
tags: metaphysics, outer reality, physical reality, inner reality, mind