Abstract
Reality contains information (significant) that becomes significances in the mind of the observer. Language is the human instrument to understand reality. But is it possible to attain this reality? Is there an absolute reality, as certain philosophical schools tell us? The reality that we perceive, is it just a fragmented reality of which we are part? The work that the authors present is an attempt to address this question from an epistemological, linguistic and logical-mathematical point of view.
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Notes
Euclid offered the following proof published in his work Elements (Book IX, Proposition 20) and paraphrased here. Take any finite list of prime numbers \(p_{1},p_{2},\ldots ,p_{n}\). It will be shown that at least one additional prime number exists that is not in this list. Let \(P\) be the product of all the prime numbers in the list: \(P=p_{1}p_{2}\ldots p_{n}\). Let \(q=P+1\). Then, \(q\) is either prime or not: (a) If \(q\) is prime then there is at least one more prime than is listed. (b) If \(q\) is not prime then some prime factor \(p\) divides \(q\). If this factor \(p\) were on our list, then it would divide \(P\) (since \(P\) is the product of every number on the list); but as we know, \(p\) divides into \(P+1=q\). If \(p\) divides into \(P\) and \(q\) then \(p\) would have to divide into the difference of the two numbers, which is \((P+1)-P\) or just 1. But no prime number divides 1 so there would be a contradiction, and therefore it cannot be on the list. This means at least one more prime number exists beyond those in the list. This proves that for every finite list of prime numbers, there is a prime number not on the list. Therefore, there must be infinitely many prime numbers. It is often erroneously reported that Euclid proved this result by contradiction, beginning with the assumption that the set initially considered contains all prime numbers, or that it contains precisely the \(n\) smallest primes, rather than any arbitrary finite set of primes. Although the proof as a whole is not by contradiction, in that it does not begin by assuming that only a finite number of primes exist, there is a proof by contradiction within it: that is the proof that none of the initially considered primes can divide into the number identified above.
What the number 3 means depends on the definition of a number.
The significant coming from the sign becomes significance after passing through a filter or sieve, which we will call the doxical filter. This filter consists of two essential components: the language and the belief system.
It is noteworthy that the discipline of semantics was known much earlier, the Spanish Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia (1240–1292) (become popular in Bee Season, a film starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche) that presents ideas that are surprisingly modern. Abulafia tried to skip the limits of language delving into the hidden meanings of writing lexemes. He created metalanguages to overcome literal languages. He specialised in breaking those systems to access meta deeper levels (connotative depth) of each word. He used lexemes as tools to discover the hidden meaning of each of them, in relation to the root or origin of the word.
The above example corresponds to the ideal case of a single culture. Understanding a culture other than ones own essentially involves understanding intersubjective rules that give meaning to actions and cultural products. In the language of an African people the lexeme ango means dog, but this tells us nothing about what a dog means for natives (do they hunt with their dogs or eat them, etc\(\ldots \)), in contrast to what it means for a Westerner. If this happens with a simple term like a dog, how much greater is the disturbance when to bump into terms having a metaphysical reference? (Evans-Pritchard 1965).
What has unfortunately happened is a restricted expansion of language within each discipline in modernity. This expansion occurs within each scientific discipline independently, so that we now have another serious problem: we discovered that coordination between the languages of the various disciplines does not exist (despite language expansions), which leads to more confusion. Language has been expanded with separate form and now we do not know equivalences, which means the expansion of actual language has turned against ideas which should work towards the expansion of language. If the expansion of language should aim at a better understanding of the hidden realities, now that expansion has only served to disconnect the various fragments of reality and, to the lose linguistic equivalence on the depth of each cognitive discipline, we are in a new Tower of Babel. The worst language confusion are now different existing languages, and specialized languages that exist within each of the disciplines.
Plato’s metaphysics is divided into four levels of reality and four epistemological ways of apprehending the Forms. The four levels of reality are: images, sensible objects, lower forms, higher forms. The four epistemological ways of apprehending are imagination, perception, reasoning and understanding. Those on one level of reality or awareness cannot recognize what is being said by those on a higher level. The lowest level of awareness is illusion. Illusion is the practice of holding opinions based solely on appearances, unanalyzed impressions, uncritically inherited beliefs, and unevaluated emotions. The next level is informed awareness, which attempts to distinguish appearance from reality in an “everyday”, common-sense way. Informed awareness is based on observations and perceptions of physical objects, not just images or representations of them. These lower two levels of awareness are part of the “becoming” layer of awareness and use the “becoming” layer of physical reality. The next level of awareness moves out of the realm of becoming and into the realm of being. This is the first stage of knowledge acquired through deductive reasoning. The final and highest level of reality moves beyond deductive reasoning. At this level, the soul has no need for perception or interpretation. Higher forms are directly understood, apprehended, and glimpsed. A further concept in Plato’s metaphysics is that of The Good (Plato’s God). The Good is the highest form possible. It makes the existence of everything else possible. The Good cannot be observed with the five senses and can be known only by pure thought and intelligence. In Plato’s Timaeus, the Demiurge is really an intermediary between the essential realm of non-materiality and the world of matter. The Demiurge takes the inert substance of matter and acts upon it, bringing forth the templates of life from the realm of thought into the realm of matter. Aristotle considered the most fundamental features of reality in the twelve books of the \({\hbox {M}\upvarepsilon \uptau \upalpha \upphi \upupsilon \upsigma \upiota \upkappa \upeta }\) (Metaphysics). Although experience of what happens is a key to all demonstrative knowledge, Aristotle supposed that the abstract study of “being qua being” must delve more deeply, in order to understand why things happen the way they do. A quick review of past attempts at achieving this goal reveals that earlier philosophers had created more difficult questions than they had answered: the Milesians over-emphasized material causes; Anaxagoras over-emphasized mind; and Plato got bogged down in the theory of forms. Aristotle intended to do better. Although any disciplined study is promising because there is an ultimate truth to be discovered, the abstractness of metaphysical reasoning requires that we think about the processes we are employing even as we use them in search of that truth. As always, Aristotle assumed that the structure of language and logic naturally mirrors the way things really are. Thus, the major points of each book are made by carefully analyzing our linguistic practices as a guide to the ultimate nature of what is. Philo of Alexandría equates this with the Logos, whom he refers to as the “man of God”. The Logos was originally conceived of as the active role of God as the principle of reason. To this Philo adds Plato’s idea of forms, transforming the Logos into the Divine Mind—the idea of ideas or form of forms. The Logos becomes the eternal Form of Wisdom for Philo. According to Plotinus, the basis of all reality is an immaterial and indescribable reality called the One or the Good. There are several levels of reality that emanate from the One or the Good, much like ripples in a pond emanate from a dropped stone. The second level of reality is Mind or Intellect (nous). Mind results from the One’s reflection upon itself. The level below Mind is Soul. Soul operates in time and space and is actually the creator of time and space. Soul looks in two directions—upward to Mind and downward to Nature which created the physical world. The lowest level of reality is matter. According to Plotinus and Neo-Platonism, matter is viewed very negatively. Plotinus, himself, held such disgust for physical things that he despised his own body. He did not celebrate his own birthday since the birth of his physical body was nothing to be celebrated. He also did not take care of his physical health or hygiene. For example, Plotinus had puss-filled sores on his body that he refused to care for. Unfortunately for his students, he liked to embrace his pupils, causing many of them to flee from their teacher. The function of language, or the extent to which language can function, is as the mirror reflection of the intellectual in discursive reason, in the facilitation of memory, in that, as Plotinus says, the verbal expression unfolds its content and brings it out of the intellectual act into the image-making power, and so shows the intellectual act as if in a mirror, and this is how there is apprehension and persistence and memory of it. The mechanism of perception mediates between the sensible world of objects in nature and the inaccessible intellectual, or nous, in a dialectical process between the subject and the world. There must be an affection which lies between the sensible and the intelligible, as Plotinus puts it, a proportional mean somehow linking the two extremes to each other, the sensible form and the intelligible form. In the perception of an object, the object is already apprehended by the perceiving subject in relation to the perceiving mechanism, the construction of intellect involving the mnemic residue and the intelligible form, through the use of geometry, as vision is understood in relation to geometry and mathematics, the intelligible mechanisms as the underlying structure. In the Long Commentary on the De anima 3.1.5, Averroes posits three intelligences in the anima rationalis or the rational soul: agent intellect, material or passible intellect, and speculative or actualized intellect, also called acquired intellect. While material intellect is “partly generable and corruptible, partly eternal,” corporeal and incorporeal, the speculative and agent intellects are purely eternal and incorporeal. Actualized intellect is the final entelechy, or final actualization of potentiality. It is a form of intellectus in habitu, which can be both passive and active, corporeal and incorporeal. Material intellect is a possible intellect, a possibility, because it is both corporeal and incorporeal, thus neither corporeal nor incorporeal. Material intellect becomes actualized intellect through the affect of the agent intellect, which illuminates, as a First Cause, the intelligible form or forma imaginativa, the residue of the sensible form, the sensation, in the anima rationalis. The illuminated intelligible acts on material intellect until material intellect becomes actualized intellect, at which point intellect is able to act on the intelligible. Maimonides’ negative theology is complemented by other elements of his epistemology. He held that there are significant limitations on what human beings can demonstrate scientifically. It is essential to Maimonides’ philosophical anthropology that human beings have an intellectual essence, a rational nature capable of comprehending intelligible features of reality. Again, to say that man is created in God’s image is to say that a human being has a rational soul. In Maimonides’ view Adam and Eve could have led untroubled lives guided exclusively by clear intellectual conceptions of the true and the false, without concern with good and evil. Such lives would have been free of frustration, pain, anxiety, and fear. All that was required was that Adam and Eve heed the injunction not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In eating of the tree they yielded to distraction from intellectual activity and sought satisfaction in the lesser objects of the imagination. Good and evil are not, in Maimonides’ view, demonstrable or intuited intelligibles. Our conceptions of good and evil involve the imagination.
We have chosen the Hebrew letter Aleph used in the sense of Jewish mysticism: “God is One”: the absolute unity of God. “There is none other besides Him:” “One, single, and unique. ”One counts ”nothing from something
For Jewish mysticism, the only reality is Ein Sof as there is no time and space (Scholem 1969). For there to be variables of time and space, reality must be created of emptiness. This is temporary according to whether Ein Sof is admitted into the vacuum, occupies it and nullifies the variables of time and space. Our reality is named with the letter \(\gimel \) and is a spatiotemporal reality derived from the true reality of \({\varvec{\aleph }}\) level and is called the reality of Ein Sof.
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Nescolarde-Selva, J., Usó-Doménech, J.L. & Sabán, M.J. Linguistic Knowledge of Reality: A Metaphysical Impossibility?. Found Sci 20, 27–58 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9347-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-014-9347-1