All that exists is equally real, just not equally important. If the seeming stimuli encountered in waking life really do exist beyond one's consciousness, they are not more or less real than mental existents like thoughts. If matter only exists because it is metaphysically sustained by conscious perception as some variants of idealism hold, a logically possible but unprovable thing, it is not less real than mind, yet it is less foundational. Either way, mind is still epistemologically more foundational because the mind must be relied on to reject or doubt the existence of the mind, while any matter would be external to one's mind, neither self-evident nor demonstrable from mere passive sensory observation. At the same time, neither mind nor matter would be more real than the other. Matter can actually be logically proven to exist [1]--the only way to prove anything--but it is not less or more real than my or any other consciousness regardless of whatever causal relationship between the two is ultimately correct.
Some people deny that consciousness is real, though they of course have to be conscious to do so. Some deny that matter is real when even the absence of a logical proof of such a thing would only make skepticism demonstrable, as it would not logically follow from an inability to confirm its existence that it does not exist. There is literally nothing that can do the knowing if there is no consciousness to perceive and think despite how there could be visual perceptions of material objects and environments even if no physical substance existed. However, what almost everyone never thinks of or accepts is that there is only one thing that could possibly be the heart of reality and the intrinsic truth(s) and supreme existent: the laws of logic which could only be false if they were still true, making their truth inherent. For example, that something logically follows or does not follow from another concept could only be false if it followed from reason being false that anything reason would necessitate is false, and reason could only be false if reality was such that it logically necessitated reason's falsity.
It is the necessary truths of logical axioms that aee the ultimate part of reality: reason is the supreme existent and the epistemologically self-evident thing that no one could even know of their own existence without relying on. More than just being an inescapable epistemological tool, since reason must be true, anything that contradicts it cannot exist, that is, it cannot be true. It, by contrast, can only be true in itself without dependence on any other thing. If anything, it could only be reason that is "more real" than anything else in reality, but it is reason that means it is impossible for one thing to be more real than anything else in existence. Again, metaphysical primacy and epistemological accessibility are not equal across different aspects of reality, but nothing known or unknown in all of reality, both categories being consistent with and governed by the necessary truths of logic, is more or less real than the rest.
No comments:
Post a Comment