A Question of Societal Delusions
Every age has its misunderstandings, its irrationalities, its delusions, which are often accorded by those harboring them as profound truths.
Maybe it’s the latest popular fad masquerading as science to an unsuspecting, and uninformed public. Maybe it’s some religious doctrine whose advocates wish it to be given ‘equal time’ in public school science classes.
Perhaps it’s a national government flirting with pseudoscience, spending millions on classified ‘human enhancement’ programs that turn out to be fruitless, or legislators with conservative religious leanings who feel offended or nervous about the implications and their own misconceptions of some new and promising medical technique.
It could even be some new permutation of an old occult or New Age doctrine, or perhaps something entirely new, entirely divorced from even a superficial connection with science, despite using its own obscurantist jargon.
Regardless.
These irrationalities ebb and flow throughout history, sometimes waxing with the ascension of extremist ideological movements and waning in proportion to the public understanding and acceptance of science when its pretenders stand exposed to their adherents…and sometimes victims…as the cranks, quacks and charlatans they are.
Note that it’s only possible for a belief to be a delusion – an objectively false belief – if it is also possible for things to be objectively true…and THAT requires an objective reality for that truth to exist.
My personal view is that the idea of an objective reality cannot be a delusion even if all ideas are considered to have equal truth value, which is itself an idea, for one cannot argue for the equal validity of all ideas and then consistently argue that the idea of a subjective conscious observer-created reality is any more valid than that of an objective observer-dependent reality, one in which in which the term ‘observer’ need have nothing to do with consciousness or even if the observer has a mind at all.
Unless, of course, the equal validity of all ideas means the validity of none of them. Arrrgh! The logical somersaults melt my brain…*ahem*
And so, my ever-perspicacious readers, do I ask:
What widespread societal delusion is a pet peeve of yours? Why? Is it something that you or someone you know personally dealt with at one point?
Posted on Friday, 12:00, July 30, 2010, in Troythulu's Queries and tagged Delusion, Inquiry, Noontide Query, Query, Question, Questioning, Questions, Society. Bookmark the permalink. 3 Comments.
Hope. To be specific, as I define it, Hope of the first type. Yes, I define Hope as having two types. The first being the more common Hope. The Hope that many people voted for in the last election. It is the same Hope many religious people have. The Hope that some other higher power will sweep in and solve all of their problems. At best, nothing will happen. At worst, you will get what you wished for, loss of control and subjugation. I much prefer the second type of Hope. The Hope for a solution to be found. This is the active Hope. The I’m making a mental tickle note Hope, the Hope of placing an issue on my mind’s desktop, that I, or we, need to find a solution, and I will keep returning to this with more and new data to be worked into the problem until I/we find a soluiton and make it work. This is the true Hope of progress, not looking to any other source but ourselves for the answer to what is needed. Unfortunately, I beleive the majority of the society is predisposed and programmed even to not look into that solution.
Reality is an illusion; there is no real world; there is no objective reality.
This delusion comes from the current epistemological and ontological views in vogue, which are taken from the modern era (Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, etc.). Ironically, the delusion, and the current ontology, is based on a purely empirical notion of what’s real, which is defined extremely narrowly (mainly, it’s based purely on sense perception). It’s the old ontology, and the logical end is pure subjective reality and relativism. Whitehead points out three erroneous premises which modernity (and post-modernity, actually), hold to be sacred, which resulted in this relativism and the surrounding ideas that there is no objective reality: “…(i) The acceptance of the ‘substance-quality’ concept as expressing the ultimate ontological principle. (ii) The acceptance of Aristotle’s definition of a primary substance, as always a subject and never a predicate. (iii) The assumption that the experient subject is a primary substance.”
The fact is, when one broadens the ontology/epistemology to include the full human spectrum and tools of apprehending reality, one comes up with (as did Whitehead) the idea that there are two kinds of perceptions: perception in the mode of “presentational immediacy” and perception in the mode of “causal efficacy.” This distinction gives us the tools to claim that while Kant was right, the subjective world as we see it isn’t the actual world, it’s an illusion, our sense data lies to us, nevertheless, there is a SOURCE of this sense data–the actual (real) world. This ontology isn’t based on substance (material, like rubber) overlaid with qualities (subjective qualities, like “red”), but it’s based on what Whitehead calls “actual entities” or “Actual Occasions.”
From Whitehead’s “Process and Reality” (1978, p. 157)
Aloha!
Come to think of it, that’s one delusion I’ve considered particularly worthy of mentioning and ‘debunking’ from time to time. I’ve often seen it promoted on the blog of a psychic that I used to frequent to get some insights into the thinking and arguments of paranormalists, though the longer I read his posts, the less credible they began to sound.
Aloha!