Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the division of philosophy that concerns itself with the study of the physical world.

While this may seem harmless, the interpretation of the physical world is incredibly complex. First, we do not experience the world directly. We only experience the world through the filter of our minds.

On one hand, our mind governs what we sense and perceive while on the other, it also controls our ability to understand itself.

The human brain is a bundle of neurons; current estimate peg the brain as a series of 100 billion neurons that each make between 10,000 and 100,000 connections. This insanely complicated object allows us to have experiences.

And each of us experience a different form of reality. We even have varied perceptions even when we experience the same events. For instance, to the blind their existence is without sight; to the deaf their existence is without sound. But this is a valid existence to them.

Now a new question arises: What is reality?

For both the deaf and the blind, reality consists of four senses. For these individuals, that is the extent of their knowledge of reality. We consider a human as an organic being with five sense and yet an existence with four senses is still intrinsically human, is it not?

It is a mistake to say these versions of reality are more or less “correct” than what another human can perceive. In fact, to say one human experience is more or less correct than another would mean there would have to be some measure, some scale upon which we can plot human experience.

For there to be more and less correct versions of reality, there must be a basis to judge this correctness to: in this case, we must say one individual is “completely human” and radiating out from this point, coordinates gradually become less and less human until they are no longer human at all.

This would be crazy.

Furthermore, correctness is vague by definition because it is only a relative term. A student is only correct relative to the answer a teacher is seeking; in turn, a teacher is only correct relative to the expectation set by a principal, a principal is only correct relative to the benchmark set by the superintendent, and so on and so forth.

But who is to say what is correct when it comes to our experience of reality? Who is to say what is incorrect? How can we quantify and compare sensations and perceptions? Can there a definitive answer to what correct is in every given situation? What and to whom is this correctness relative to?

In other words, we judge the merit of one subjective idea on the back of another subjective idea. Even if we analyze current events through the lens of past events, who is to say that past events were correct?

Now we are drawn back to the very beginning: We judge correctness through our arbitrary perceptions of reality. We affix labels to the world around us — labeling some as true, others as false; some as helpful, others still as harmful. Yet we have no coherent methodology for this labeling.

Since our experience is rooted in what we deem to be true (which itself is an uneven ground), when we are asking metaphysical questions, are we not asking questions about our own self?

The brain — which allows us to experience all things — also provides a limit for our experiences. Those items which the brain cannot comprehend, much like sound for those born deaf and sight for those born blind, are not brought to our attention.

We are unaware of our ignorance, due to the fact that only a narrow band of reality is able to pass through the filter of the our senses and perceptions, and penetrate into our consciousness. From this conscious stream, a further limit (believed to be only 1–2% of conscious information) is stored in our memory.

In fact, there are many barriers that stand between the physical world and what we perceive it to be (the sense organ, the signal, the transmission of the signal, the decoding of the signal, and so on) and the removal of any one of these barriers (for example, improper decoding of the signal) would actually drive us farther away from understanding the physical world.

And herein lies the tragic irony: the brain also allows us to think, but by doing so, it lets us only think of itself. How can one with a mind think outside of it? And how can one without a mind be expected to think at all?

At best, when we seek to understand the physical world, we compress the information we receive into a form that we can understand. Over and over, we encounter “human perceptions” and get no closer to “objective perceptions”.

I conclude that metaphysics is not the study of the physical world; rather, it is the study of the one thing that we know. Metaphysics is the study of one’s self.

This post was originally written on April 10, 2013 when I was 18-years-old.