The Phenomenon of Knowing

By Gyan Francis

The book attempts to present a new vision or view in the world of knowing. The query it poses is, What is it that we know? Our spontaneous assumption is, what we know is real, the existent as it is or exists. The attempt here is to find how far our claim that what we know is real or that what is there and what we know is the same is true. If not, what is it that we know? The theory of relativity claims, on the scientific evidence, that we do not know what is real because the realthat which ischanges. Einsteins theory of relativity throws the onus of relativity on the nature of the real. This attempt tries to find the cause of relativity, if there are any. One may be surprised to find a new vision of what we know and the cause of relative nature of knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543451252

Gyan Francis

Gyan Francis was born, 86 years ago, in a small village, near Cape Comorian, at the tip of India. After secondary school, he followed a three years and four years’ courses in Philosophy and Theology respectively. Being ordained priest, he opted to work in the North of India. All along his dedicated life he worked for Human Development among the rural communities through economic and social change. However, the outstanding contribution he made was eliminating leprosy, both in leprosy colonies and in communities. He helped healing thousands of leprosy-affected patients. At present, he is engaged running schools in remote rural areas of Uttar Pradesh. He has written a Volume of Science-philosophy under the title, “The world of Man” The present book is the second in the line.

Book preview

Part One

KNOWLEDGE A RELATIVE

PHENOMENON

Chapter One

The Real Is Not Relative

The theory of relativity is a discovery that plays a great and important role in understanding and evaluating the world of man, including man himself. It opens a new horizon in the sphere of knowing. The theory holds that the vision of the real or the real itself is not absolute but differs and changes according to conditions, such as the observer, the positions under which the real is perceived, the position of the observer, etc. The importance of the theory is that it makes a dent or breakthrough in the wall of our natural and spontaneous conviction, that what we know is the real itself. As the invention of Nicholas Copernicus, the theory of relativity is very confusing to most minds. The finding of Copernicus claimed that the earth went circling round the sun, and the claim looked obviously ridiculous in the face of the direct perceptive vision of the entire human family, which perceived the concrete fact of the sun rising in the east unfailingly every morning, going around the earth, and setting in the west. Likewise is the claim that things are different, depending on the perceiver and circumstances under which they are perceived, and in the face of our spontaneous conviction that we know the real and we know it as it is there, and the fact that we see or perceive things concretely as they are.

The source of the conflict

This conflicting development springs from an inculpable cognitive conviction of spontaneous origin. The phenomenon of cognition opens its perceptive sight to the vision of the world of numerous objects that are there, concrete and unfailing. This world, as it appears to us, is all what we are able to know. They are real, necessary, vivid, concrete, sustaining, and all that we are and want to be, we for it and it for us. Nothing, other than this world of our perception, exists for us. And in the course of his evolutionary development, man’s creative cognition expanded its horizon. He lives, moves, and has his being in the world he perceives (knows). His spontaneous conviction is that the world he perceives or knows exists there as he perceives it. The world and the things he perceives exist as he perceives them. There is no reason or chance to suspect or think that the world he perceived could be, in any way, other than the world that exists as he perceives it. He is inevitably and absolutely convinced that the world he perceived is the world that exists. The world is absolute, and his knowledge of the world is absolute (not relative).

This immutable that human mind captured the real, continued unquestioned for many millennia in (human) cognitive realm from its inception. Any attempt to call such conviction to question irritated thinking minds. As a consequence, all along the age of reason, philosopher after philosopher attempted to find rational systems to explain away the obstacles that presented themselves, expelling any suspicion that man perceived the real. The defense stressing the conviction that man knew the real and all that is real was knowable; to be is to be known. Omne ens est verum gained perceptive support. To be known is the essence of being. This trend of thought took the human society to an increasing height where man’s knowing principle was raised to the level of spiritual or immaterial nature. In the age of reason, Philosophers attempted to establish the claim of knowing the real on an unassailable footing to build their created world of reason. The genius of Plato, endeavoring to establish the capacity of human cognitive power to reach the real, proposed the doctrine of distinctions between clear intellectual vision and the confused vision of sense perception. Being inevitably convinced that the mind knows the real or what is known is the real itself, Plato held that clear intellectual vision knows the real, and at the same time, the confused vision of sense perception does not bring a true vision of the real. He held that vast majority of humans belong to the second category. Plato arrived at the conclusion that particular things, not being perfect under all aspects, do not bring perfect knowledge. Say, a particular cat does not possess all the perfections of –- cat (the idea of cat)in its completeness. Completeness does not exist in any particular cat, held Plato. Hence, no particular object, an object of perception, can provide knowledge of the real, which is perfect. Only the concept of the cat, in the mind, is capable of providing knowledge of the real.

What is of interest here is not the tenability of the claim, so much as the ability of the cognitive power to suspect its own ability to know the real. But the conviction that man knows and should know the real could not be called into question. The spontaneous drive was to find the way to establish that the real was reached by human cognition though not by perception of the sense organs but surely by intellectual intuition; understanding or reasoning reached the real. That perhaps was the only way open to the human mind. The fundamental reason for the situation was total absence of knowledge of the nature of cognitive mechanism, the device of knowing, namely, what was it that was doing the knowing process. In the absence of such knowledge, the easy assumption man arrived at was that the acts of reasoning, speculating, and judging were the products of a power beyond anything material in him. The easier way out was to accept the presence of an immaterial power or principle in man, which alone conceives universal concepts, such as animal, man, justice, peace, and good and evil, the immaterial realities. The phenomenon of the nonmaterial or spiritual principle in man, making man what he is, was not only acceptable but also more importantly highly gratifying.

Plato held that the sensible world of perception is ever changing and could not be eternal, the unchanging real; however, the truth, the real he held, is apprehended by the intellect or reason. He introduced his theory of the cave to explain the nature of perception, the simile in which those who are destitute of philosophy are compared to prisoners who are able to look only in one direction, being bound. There is a fire behind and a wall in front of them. The fire throws the shadows of the things between them and the fire as well their own shadow, which they perceive. Inevitably, they regard these shadows as real. Plato recognized that the mind by reason reaches the real. However, the notion of the relative nature of cognition, at least partially, is very much there. Plato established the fact that the real appear different under different conditions. In other words, he established that our perceptive power does not present the things unchanged but presents them differently, dependent on perceptive condition.

The dawn of reason, which enabled man to build the image of self and self-consciousness (a unique outcome of creative cognition), initiated the structuring of self-image, which assumed an increasingly growing importance under preferential need. Man was more than eager to raise this self-image to utmost possible heights. Reason and religions were engaged in the process. Already in the age of reason, Plato expressed emphatically the reality of the soul and its preeminence over the body in his psychological dualism, which corresponds to his metaphysical dualism. In the laws, he defined the soul as self-initiating motion or source of motion (action). Plato said in Timaeus that the only existing thing that properly possesses intelligence is the soul, and this is an invisible power. In Phaedo, he claimed that the soul cannot be a mere epiphenomenon of the body. Already the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is established in Plato’s system of reasoning.

This trend has captured man to the extent that the poor mortal man, terrified unceasingly by the impending demise, found an immensely comforting solace. Religions, one after another, use the cognitive development of man for over two millennia, enforced continually, augmenting its claims and assertions to establish the existence of an immaterial principle—the spiritual soul—in man, which is created to know the real. In the seventeenth century, René Descartes produced one of the renounced statement with which he established the claim that the intellect knows the real, a claim even the extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of upsetting. He proposed that even if one suspects all certitudes, the subject that suspects is real cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, and if I know that I am, I should be able to know similar other truths. Man, therefore, knows the real is reassured once again by Descartes. In the similar stain, the empiricists of the British school of knowledge treated the nature of what is known and the faculty of knowing. The issue of what knowledge represented was accepted and that the real was known in the act of knowing was taken for granted.

In his elaborate treaties, Emmanuel Kant, who was woken up from his slumber by David Hume, agreeing with Berkley’s doctrine that all general ideas are nothing but particular ones, annexed to a certain term that gives them a more extensive significance and makes them recall upon occasion other individuals who are similar to them. Kant’s exploration into the cognitive phenomenon was to establish the existence of the rational world in the various levels and kind of knowledge. He, however, arrived at the conclusion that there are areas that are beyond the perceptive intuition of phenomena, which he named a noumena. Kant seemed to recognize the limitation of the knowing substance that itself is a noumenon.

The period of human exultation of self continued unabated. When we look back along the cognitive development of man, one can notice why and how this situation persistently continued. One basic reason was that man found his world of perception almost fully explained by reason, and this explanation was quite suitable and comfortable. The other basic reason was the absence of knowledge of the nature and capability of his knowing phenomenon itself. Though such situation continued for thousands of years, it could not hold on in the face of evolving and self-creating human cognitive development.

Chapter Two

The Entry of Natural Science

Dawn of the new vision

The twentieth century that opened a new vision of the earth and the universe at large, both the micro and macro, made a fundamental breakthrough in the natural cognitive world itself. As mentioned above, the self-glorying man’s immutable conviction that he is the center of all that is and that he is the chosen of the Maker, who raised him to the level of the Maker Himself, was demolished. This spontaneous, undisputable conviction, that he is made to know everything, including the Maker Himself, and which left no place to question his conviction to know things as they are, started to dissolve in the new vision of scientific perception. The new understanding of the universe, including the cognitive system itself, revealed in the scientific vision demonstrated totally different basic structures of the same elements, natural perception presented. The concept of matter and energy as opposite and different realities vanished. The new revelation removed the obvious perceptive concept of matter and spirit as two different and opposite realities—matter (inaction) requiring energy (the activator). Our natural perceptive vision that presented them as two opposite realities was shown to be totally false. In the scientific vision, both, so distinct in our natural vision, are demonstrated one and the same basic form of the noumena, the real. What is the true value of our cognitive power in this new vision?

In an era when man lived and lives with the conviction that the world he perceived and knew was reality itself, it was impossible to suspect and much less to accept that the world of reality is different and other than the world he perceived. It is against this almost impressive human spontaneous cognitive climate Einstein presented his special theory of relativity. This theory is hailed as one of the great contributions in the understanding of reality. Its greatness is a breakthrough from the traditional perceptive vision of the real, which labors under the conviction that what is known is the real itself. In The Physics of Consciousness, Evan Walker stated,

In1905 Einstein had a better idea that has revolutionized our conception of space, time matter and energy. It is a picture in which space and time, matter and energy are relative—they depend on the observer in a very curious