Monday, October 16, 2023

A Truth About Perceivability And Sensory Experience

It is not only logically true that mere perception of the senses does not mean that what is perceived exists beyond the mind.  It is also logically necessary that not seeing something does not itself mean it does not exist, and this could be true of material things as well as all sorts of logically possible supernatural beings or phenomena that do not exist by necessity, as the laws of logic themselves (though they are immaterial, inherent truths, not a divine or otherwise nonphysical being) and the uncaused cause do.  This receives wider recognition when it comes to supernaturalism, though many people do not realize that there are far more immaterial things with either absolutely certain existence or logical possibility than just God, angels, or demons.  When it comes to physical objects and phenomena, this is partially denied or overlooked even by some people whose irrationalism drives them to the contradictions of sensory empiricism or scientism.

In contemporary scientific paradigms, there are already many physical things that are reportedly suggested to exist according to varying degrees of sensory evidence which falls short of logical proof.  Subatomic particles, if they exist as they do according to what is always ultimately hearsay, would only be directly perceivable to a being at a scale much, much smaller than that of human macroscopic life as it is now.  If one exists, a multiverse spanning dimensions with their own potentially differing laws of physics (the laws of logic by necessity would be intrinsically true and fixed in all universes, and even if no universes existed at all) could be perceived, just not by a being with mental and sensory experiences that are limited to one universe.  It is logically possible for dark matter, too, to be observed, but by a being with very different epistemological limitations than humans or with no epistemological limitations at all.

In none of these cases, like with any other sensory experiences, does seeing or hearing things mean there actually is something physical outside of one's immaterial consciousness that is being seen or that generates the sound (which is itself nonphysical even if it is carried by vibrations in matter).  That something like dark matter cannot be directly observed means that there is even less or more indirect evidence for its alleged existence, and when it comes to microscopic objects or creatures, the fact that one is either encountering hearsay from others or is using technology that itself cannot be verified to show the material world as it is adds more layers of epistemological uncertainty.  The absence of a perception still does not require that a material thing is nonexistent.

One cannot know from the senses anything except that some sort of physical matter exists (as proven here [1], though this is more foundationally knowable by reason and is far harder to discover than many people who makes assumptions would imagine) and that one is perceiving a variety of seeming stimuli originating from outside one's mind.  The mind can perceive whether or not there is matter or external sound or energy.  Its existence is self-evident in light of logical necessity, though not as fundamental as logical axioms: no being could doubt or deny or even passively "ignore" its own conscious existence unless it already existed as a consciousness to do so.  What one sees with one's eyes is in no way verifiable through this experience because there is no logical necessity in it actually existing materially beyond one's perceptions.  How much more is something beyond the knowability of a being who cannot even see the material structures or realms they might imagine!


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