Things and meanings
Which is more real?
The New Mindscape #A3–3
In the instrumental rationality of the materialist Operating System, beings in the world have no intrinsic value or meaning.
Chicks have no value or meaning in and of themselves: they are simply a material resource, whose value and meaning is ascribed to them by us humans who see them as food; and more specifically, by the agricultural corporation, which sees them as profit and tries to maximise the efficiency of chicken production.
Other than this instrumental goal, chickens have no value or meaning. If we think they have value as living beings, as being cute, or beautiful, we are free to think so, but those are only our own emotional sentiments — we can enjoy the chicks in our mindscape, but they themselves have no such intrinsic value or meaning.
And the same could be said of humans too — they have instrumental value, which should be maximised through more efficient production and more abundant consumption. Anything else is mere subjective feeling.
Materialism and instrumental rationality are based on making a division between material existence, which is considered to be “real”, and our mindscape of thoughts, imagination, and feelings, which is considered to be less “real”.
Since the mindscape is a “subjective” world, is it less “real” than the objective world “out there”? Can something “unreal” be more powerful than “objective reality”?
In fact, the world of meanings and significances — the world of intangible objects of consciousness, which fills our mindscape — is just as “real” as the world “out there”.
In our perception, experience and action in the world, the two are united into one. Our perception of material objects is always immediately connected in our minds to intangible concepts, words, ideas and meanings. At the same time, for intangible mental objects to have meaning, they always need to be linked to a memory or association with some tangible reality.
A good illustration is my first visit to China. I was an English teacher in an oil school. In 1993, there were hardly any foreigners in Sichuan. Because foreign faces were rare, wherever I went, there would be crowds of people looking at me, pulling at the hair on my arms, and calling ‘Laowai, Laowai (foreigner, foreigner)!’ I attracted a lot of attention. One day the newspaper China Oil News decided to write an article about this foreign teacher in the oil college. A journalist came to interview me. We spent the entire evening having delicious Sichuan hotpot together. We had a great time chatting together. I saw his face for three hours. He also saw my face for three hours. The next day, I read his article about me in the newspaper. This journalist described me as having blonde (“yellow”) hair, a “tall nose” and blue eyes.
I couldn’t believe it. This person had spent the whole evening with me, but, in his mind, all foreigners have blonde hair and blue eyes. So even though he had looked at my brown eyes for three hours, the next day, in his mind, my eyes were blue. In those days, I was shocked that somebody would call my hair blonde. I considered my hair to be reddish-brown, or auburn (it wasn’t grey yet!). It’s certainly not called blonde or “yellow” in Western countries. Now, I have been living in China for so long so that it doesn’t shock me anymore when somebody says I have blonde hair. Someone told me that actually, if someone’s hair is not dark brown or black, it can be called “yellow”. And 20 years ago in Sichuan, if your eyes were not black or deep dark brown, they were “blue”. And never mind the standard for a “tall” nose…
The point is that we have categories in our minds. Ideas and concepts — objects of consciousness as James said — in our mindscape literally “colour” the way we look at the world.
More than 20 years ago, in that place, there were basically two eye colours in peoples’ minds. The world was divided into two types of people: those with black eyes and those with blue eyes. That was all they saw.
To give another example: when I grew up in Canada, which was before global warming, we had a lot of snow in winter. But I only know four words related to snow in English: “snow”, “ice”, “slush”, “sleet.”
But the Inuit (Eskimo) people who live in the Arctic, near the North Pole, have dozens of different words for different kinds of snow. Similarly, the Sami people in the Arctic regions of Scandinavia have over 180 different words to designate types and conditions of snow. As soon as they see it, they can instantly name very detailed qualities and subtle differences in types of snow. But for me, all I see is white snowflakes. So the way we see things is literally an expression of the ideas in our own minds. We do not fully see the world that is outside of ourselves.[1]
Even something that seems as obvious as “black” is also a concept in our minds. “Black” is only a word. You cannot define “blackness”, because when you see this “black” phone and you say it is black, you are actually connecting this thing to a concept of black in your mind. You have a concept of black, which is not exactly the same as this phone — that concept is in your mind.
Your mind can connect different things together — this phone, your hair, the frame of your glasses, using the same concept of “black”. By making those connections, your mind sees something in common between these different things. Even things that appear to be so obvious, such as “black”, are actually concepts — objects of consciousness. They are ideas, something in our imagination.
The meaning we give to things, whether we perceive them as good or bad, is not inherent in the thing itself, but comes from our own consciousness.
You may say something is useful — obviously, ‘useful’ is a judgment. But even blackness is a judgement — you have judged this thing to be black. Even if we look very closely, the blackness of your phone and of your hair may be not the same. So even the most obvious things are actually ideas in our minds, objects of consciousness that we attach and connect to the things that we perceive.
Thus, we perceive objects, but we attach qualities to them — such as names and colours — based on our pre-existing objects of consciousness. These qualities are not only tangible ones, such as colour; but also include moral and abstract qualities. When he speaks of the power of abstract objects of consciousness, William James notes that
“The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims … in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just. Such ideas, and others equally abstract, form the background for all our facts, the fountain-head of all the possibilities we conceive of. They give its “nature,” as we call it, to every special thing. Everything we know is “what” it is by sharing in the nature of one of these abstractions. We can never look directly at them, for they are bodiless and featureless and footless, but we grasp all other things by their means, and in handling the real world we should be stricken with helplessness in just so far forth as we might lose these mental objects, these adjectives and adverbs and predicates and heads of classification and conception.”[2]
Whenever we are moved by something, it is the intangible qualities of the thing that move us, and not the thing itself. Our intangible ideas, the abstract objects in our mindscape, are more powerful than physical objects — and they guide and affect our action in the outside, “objective” world.
[1] David Robson (2012) Chilly words: how Eskimos really say “snow.”
New Scientist, Volume 216, Issues 2896–2897, Pages 72–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079(12)63275-8.
The influence of words and concepts on our perception is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For discussion on this hypothesis, see O’Neill, S.P. (2015). Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis. In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction (eds K. Tracy, T. Sandel and C. Ilie). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118611463.wbielsi086
[2] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture 3: “The Reality of the Unseen”.
See the next essay, on Sartre’s gnarly tree root and Zhuangzi’s useless tree.
See the previous essay, on Would you enjoy a materialist dinner? Don’t fall into the dualist trap.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
