Doublethink

I just finished re-reading George Orwell's 1984 the other day and then had a nice little discussion with a friend who believed that reality is mutable, that how we think about things REALLY makes things. Needless to say, I was mildly shocked. This sort of metaphysical outlook is becoming all to common. Honestly though, the amount of BS in the world could lead someone to BELIEVE that reality has not concrete existence--an understandable extension of today's mass marketing of everything. Needless to say, I don't want to draw any parallels to any current political issues (not to say that this sort of philosophical discussion is completely irrelevant!) but here, in a more formalized way is how I responded to my friend.

In the dark world of George Orwell's 1984, reality is tortured. The hero of the story has been captured and tormented by the Thoughpolice, because he dared to question Big Brother, dared to hope that a firm reality, one that is not continually edited to fit the current social and political "truth" did, in fact, exist. Stubbornly, Winston sought to maintain a world in which reality existed beyond his thoughts. Living in a world that rejected the ancient precepts of "natural laws", laws which work, have always worked, in the world, regardless of human intervention, Winston is forced to confront the foolishness of the mutability of the past. His captor, in an attempt to "re-educate" poor comrade Winston Smith, explains clearly the underlying metaphysical sensibilities of Ingsoc ("English socialism"):

Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind and nowhere else.(George Orwell, 1984, p. 205)

Those words, as odd as they may seem at first glance, appear to fall into line with one of the two major metaphysical schools of thought: anti-realism. In the end, anti-realism, though a perfectly wonderful twist for a strange totalitarian government or stranger still science fiction, falls miserably short of being a sound philosophical position.

For many (real life ?) anti-realists, to linger on Thomas Kuhn who's writing primarily relates to scientific revolutions, the world actually changes when our minds, our paradigms change. He would argue that when a scientific revolution takes place, our paradigms change. Paradigms change because anomalies were detected in the previous paradigm. One can only see what is within one's paradigm, and there is no fixed reality, therefore, when a scientific revolution occurs reality actually changes to conform to the new paradigm. These changes in paradigms are of a religious nature; one actually converts from one worldview to another. The old one false, the new true. As others (Berkeley) would put it, when we perceive things in the world, we are actually perceiving our sensations, not the thing perceived. That is, there is only the mind and what is contained in the mind.

Anti-realism relies on a view of truth that is, for many, completely subjective, while realism holds that, though our perceptions and values may be subjective, truth exists concretely "out there." Realism presupposes a reality which exists, is true, regardless of how one thinks of it. The reasons, evidence, and justifications do not, in the end, make things true or false; the way things are determines truth. Past events, for example, contrary to the Party slogan, "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past," exist however we interpret them (or assign cause to them) whether the event is recorded or even remembered.

For anti-realism to be true, it must follow that we actually conceive of objects before they can be real. In this account of truth, the mind orders reality. To some extent this is quite true. The world, nature, life on earth, does not classify itself in neat Linnean order; we humans, with our systematic brains do. Our minds make sense out of events, assigning cause and laying blame. Anti-realism, requires that there be a conception of the truth before it becomes true; in other words, we (society, culture, family and our individual temperaments and interests) must package it up in such a way that before it becomes true, before we can even "understand" it. But do our minds actually create reality?

Though, we do process reality (those millions of bits of stuff out there) into manageable portions, it seems clear that we do think and talk about objects, we actually can refer to those objects, before we have a mental theory of that object. Before we can talk about a "thing", there has to be a thing to talk about. Let us say that at some point in a conversation, I say that "I saw a leucosticte the other day." You may not even know what a leucosticte is, or even have a clue that such a thing might exist. Now, there must be such a thing before we can discuss what it was that I saw. (Nevermind that there really are such things as leucostictes, which are a genus of finches.) But let us suppose we were talking about "unicorns" or any other mythical or unreal creatures. Does it follow that there must be a real unicorn before we can talk about it? Yes, in the sense that everyone knows what a unicorn is: a horse with a horn on its head. Everyone knows what a horse is; we've all seen a four-legged, big creature humans, in English, have labeled a "horse." We all know what a "horn" is, too. When we refer to the mythical creature "unicorn", we are essentially speaking about "a horse with a horn on its head." The conceptual theory ("unicorn"), though a completely fanciful creation, is a composite of two very real objects. For anti-realist, the opposite is held as true; that is, we actually "make up" the concept of "horse", which, like the unicorn, is collection of non-related ideas. It appears though, that the anti-realists have the power to simultaneously hold in his mind two contradictory beliefs, and believe both equally. In 1984, this is called "doublethink". On the one hand, everything is subjective; at best, we might say or think we agree what a given word, concept or truth might mean, but, to even have a conversation about "leucostictes" or "unicorns", presupposes the reality behind those words. Though an anti-realist might make the claim that we can change reality, our words must refer to something outside of the text of our words. And if words alone have meaning, yet did not actually refer to external realities and contained so much personal, cultural contamination as to be unfathomable possibly even to the speaker, then true dialogue is at best extremely difficult.

But let us say for a moment that one could change or control reality by some mental miracle, that we could exercise some form of "reality control" as Wiston's captor O'Brian suggested. How does this actually work? In the words of O'Brian himself:

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation--anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wished. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature. (1984, p. 218.)

"If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it," Winston later muses, "then the thing happens" (1984, p. 229). For anti-realists, the best that we can do is to agree upon the meaning of a word or event; humans do not have access to the true essence of a thing.

It goes without saying that we cannot communicate about things without language. Furthermore, it is understood that human language, itself, is a very imperfect mechanism. We are stuck with what we have. With that in mind, though, we cannot be lured into a world-construction wherein what is true can be, at the same time, in our minds and out there, as anti-realists seem to want to place it. It is untenable that two opposing, yet equally held, concepts be held and believed at the same time. (The anti-realist may argue that he really believes that true is completely mind-dependent, but, if that were true, any attempt at communicating those "truths" would be absolutely pointless, because the recipient is essentially living in a different world.) The language of a metaphysical realist is more concrete, despite the imperfections and difficulties in communicating. What one means by a given word, phrase, or concept, for the realist, actually refers to the truth or essence of a thing. Because we can actually compete the validity of a statement to the way things are, the realist can, with some confidence communicate.

Our perceptions are not, in fact cannot be, what makes a thing true; they are how we perceive that thing. If we go so far as to say that reality only exists as long as we agree upon its validity, that humans must experience it before it magically becomes real, then how does one person express reality to another? In the end, it becomes impossible, and we end up in a world in which, if one wanted to, one could levitate at will, change the way things are with a single thought, and reduce ourselves to speaking only of opinions which at any given moment can be re-written to suite current political or social needs. The world of Winston Smith is one filled with subjective reality, where objects, events, things do not come into existence until they are conceived of by human beings, where people can exist in a state of doublethink. This form of "reality control", relying on a truth which only exists between the ears, makes for great fiction, or ugly history, has very little strength of merit.