Ultimate Questions by Magee Bryan;

Author:Magee, Bryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Where Such Ideas Come From

IN THIS BOOK MY AIM IS TO EXPRESS MY THOUGHTS AS directly as I can on the fundamentals of the human situation. These thoughts arose mainly in response to living, indeed as an essential part of living. I have, it is true, searched extensively for help in the writings of others, especially during long periods when I felt beleaguered. And what is more, I found it. Several writers fed important tributaries into my outlook, helped me, expanded my insights, rescued me from errors. However, my first concern was always with my own existential situation, not with what others have written; I was always trying to make sense of my own understanding, not that of others. I am intensely interested in what others have thought only in so far as it helps me and is grist to my mill. Because of that I quote a few, but not many, of the philosophers I have learnt from, though I do take advantage of the vocabulary they developed for the discussion of ideas.

The considerations that led me to my basic position started from personal experience in the most literal sense, bodily experience. Two realisations influenced me in particular. First, that it is a contingent truth, not a necessary one, that we have the bodily equipment we have, including our sense organs, our brains, and our central nervous systems, all of which are tangible things, material objects, bits of stuff. This equipment could have been other than it is: there exist sentient creatures with sensory equipment different from ours. It is not only that there are moths that can smell a potential mate a mile away, and lynxes and hawks that can see detail at distances impossible for the human eye: there are creatures who have different senses from ours altogether. Bats are equipped with something like sonar, and perceive objects in a way that works on the same principle as radar. Imaginably, we too could have been equipped with something like that—and with an indefinite number of other alien senses. To the responsiveness we already have to light rays could have been added the rays of radio, television, infra-red and X-ray. There are unknowable other possibilities that we cannot now conceptualise, any more than humans could, until recently, have conceptualised those I have mentioned. If we had many of them, our apprehension of the reality around us would be unimaginably different from what it is. As things are, we have the five fundamental senses we have: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste; and we have our brains and central nervous systems to transform, store and make use of the information those senses give us. It is worth reiterating that this is physical equipment, all of it, not anything abstract: it consists of chunks of matter, material organs that function in particular ways and not in other ways.

We are able to supplement their physical operations in two main respects. Firstly, we invent devices to expand their range. There are a large number of these.

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