The Ultimate Guide to Metaphysics

A review of Philosophy Now’s book

Philosophy Now is a newsstand magazine, and although I’m not subscribed to it, I stumbled upon their newly released book “The Ultimate Guide to Metaphysics: The Nature of Reality”. I loved it and was surprised at its quality, both regarding the content and the actual print and design of it.

It’s separated into 5 different chapters: Causality & Time, Identity & Change, Knowledge & Perception, God, and Free Will. Each has around 6 essays, of anywhere from 2 and 6 pages. I liked almost all the articles, and I found the length of it perfect. It doesn’t go too in-depth to allow diversity but still feels like a solid overview of the argument. I liked two essays in particular, which I will summarize.

One is “The Philosophy of the Organism”, by Peter Sjöstedt-H. This is how I found the book since I’ve been following Peter for a while and I’m a fan of his work. In this essay, he introduces the work of Alfred North Whitehead. It tries to overcome the problems in philosophy of mind, and it offers a new option beyond materialism, dualism or idealism. The first cannot account for consciousness, the second views mind and matter as distinct (which causes the problem of how they interact and where mind comes from), and lastly idealism rejects matter. He starts with perception, which is influenced by Berson, Whitehead approaches it in a totally different way from how we usually think of it. It’s not a representation of the world, but rather it’s part of the world, just a fraction of reality, but within reality. With the example of vision that Peter gives, by perceiving light, in some sense, the whole star becomes part of me. The subject and the object are permanently connected.

Besides, Whitehead argues that there isn’t something truly inorganic. Just like we now know that there is a descending line within the animal kingdom, he argues that everything has a sort of “consciousness descent”. Consciousness is changed within each level, but never lost, going to subatomic particles and whatever is beyond it. As he puts it” Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms”. Awareness is part of reality, and matter and mind are an abstraction, they are both one. Although consciousness as we typically think of it requires unified sentience, which most life forms or physical objects do not have.

The second essay is by Robin Beck, titled “You Won’t Know the Difference So You Can’t Make the Choice”. It’s somewhat funny that this article ended up being one of my favourites because even after finishing it, I was quite annoyed at the author. Referencing the Matrix and the possibility of a simulated universe, Beck argues that it doesn’t matter which pill you take, and you have no reason to take either. This is because we have no option to confirm which one is the real world. We were sort of conditioned to assume that it’s obvious that the red pill is reality while the blue pill is the fake/simulated world. The same skepticism that leads one to believe that the current world might be fake can be applied to any other world that one could enter.

I was quite angry while reading the article because I felt that the author was missing the whole point. Sure, Matrix doesn’t provide epistemological certainty about the realness of the world, but that’s not the goal. The symbolism is the skepticism and the willingness to confront the truth at the expense of our current worldview — a transposed cave allegory for the modern world. Ignoring this key aspect felt almost as heresy. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood its importance.

While one can benefit from this embodiment of the axial age looking for a deeper hidden truth, it nevertheless sits on this axiom of what is true in the first place. The Matrix takes this a bit too far because it literally splits the two worlds apart (real and illusion), while most of the time they are conceptualized as the same “world” in the way we think of it — people often use the word dimension. Originally though, this was more a Heidegger truth in the sense that it is unconcealment, not necessarily a different “dimension”. Nevertheless, despite how the gap between the two is expressed, one requires an epistemological compass to know what is real. Otherwise, that defeats the whole point. I was annoyed that he was ignoring the symbolism of truth-seeking, but rather, he was reminding us of our assumption that we can even know what is real. Neo didn’t, at least according to the author. So before heroically taking the red pill, first ask yourself, what sort of pill are you taking? Will you experience the truth? If so, how can you know?

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I also have a philosophy podcast. If you want to check it out look for Anagoge Podcast.

Tiago V.F.