Reality, Sensation, Reason, and Knowledge
by Andre Zantonavitch
Initially, all individual human beings are non-existent. When first conceived, our mind and senses are similarly non-existent, and hence non-functional. At earliest existence, we have no power to reason or employ logic; we can't think and thus know nothing.
But eventually our sense organs begin to form and thus sense, while our mind simultaneously is created and starts to think. Learning and understanding come quickly and easily. So, perhaps, does certainty.
Human senses -- like those of lemurs, gerbils, crickets, and earthworms -- were made and evolved to be functional and useful, accurate and exact. So too the human brain and mind. Our thinking faculty has been developed -- via the impact of environment and selective breeding -- to be wide-ranging, profound, efficacious, and powerful. And even ambitiously, assertively, aggressively dominating.
The human central nervous system is directly connected to both the brain and the five principle sense organs. It tends to coherently, effectively, quickly, easily transfer information back and forth. In humans, this process is basically organized and intelligent. Broadly construed, the human mind and senses are part of the same unitary central nervous system process and bodily organ.
The purpose of the mind and senses -- their "object of desire" and "raison d'etre" -- is the perception of Mother Nature and Father Reality. This is so even though the brain and five main sense organs are constructed of nothing but nature and reality. So the senses are really just a way for a part of the world to sense and become cognizant of another, generally much larger, part of the world. The mind is just a way for the universe to think about and become cognizant of another, generally much greater, part of the universe. Existence likes to be aware of itself.
The human mind and senses tend to work in near-perfect harmony, with almost nothing among and between them contradictory, confusing, misleading, or irrelevant. Evolution sees to this via vigorous and merciless positive and negative feedback. Successful interaction with reality and the universe is richly rewarded, while incompetence and incoherence is brutally extincted.
Individual humans, like all high-order animals, also tend to guard and even enhance their brains and sense organs over their lifespan. They protect and improve them individually, as well as attempt to harmonize the interaction thereof. The natural maturation process -- whether in the womb, after birth, before puberty, after puberty, during midlife, or before death -- also tends to employ emphatic and unambiguous bio-feedback to keep both parts of the comprehension-complex working well and highly coordinated.
For this reason, it might be noted, the human mind is never really blank, or "tabula rasa," as Locke claimed. The moment it comes into existence, it has content. Biologically, it probably can't exist -- can't be a true and functional mind -- without contact with the senses. The human brain very likely can't be developed in isolation or grown in a test tube -- although an insect or worm brain probably can.
In human beings, the mind and senses also tend to play to each others' strengths. And they generally monitor, enhance, correct, and make up for the corruptions, damages, and failings of the other. Using the richly elaborate, sophisticated, self-repairing, and often redundant central nervous system, the human brain and sense organs tend to be very attuned to each other and very well equipped to improve or fix the functioning of the other if problems develop -- which they always do. There seems to be an outstandingly constructed, natural process of complex and subtle "checks and balances," cross-pollination, and continuous mutual monitoring.
The purpose of the mind and senses is to successfully ascertain what exists. And what exists, according to Democritus and others, is "atoms and space." This might also be described, as Hobbes would put it, as "bodies in motion." In learning about and solidly understanding these existents, the mind acquires what Locke calls "ideas."
These ideas in the mind tend to heavily mirror the atoms, bodies, and things in existence in the universe. The human mind in dependent on, derivative of, and posterior to the physical and metaphysical universe. But the Lockean ideas are highly inclined and fundamentally oriented to exactly reflect the Hobbesian bodies. The mental and physical worlds tend to have a direct, precise, eminently practical, one-to-one correspondence.
Mother Nature and Father Reality directly impress upon, impact, crash against, permeate, and thoroughly penetrate the senses -- just as various parts, subsets, aspects, and characteristics of Nature and Reality cleanly, clearly, directly touch various other parts, subsets, aspects, and characteristics of nature and reality. This contact is intimate and intense, not tenuous and uncertain. There's no spatial or temporal separation between the world of truth and the sense-mind complex. They don't glide past each other, and they aren't, and essentially can't be, remote, isolated, opposed, antithetical, or at war with each other. This is because the human sensing and thinking devices are the children of, and are made of nothing but, Mother Nature and Father Reality. Only these two exist in the universe and everything else -- corporeal, intellectual, metaphysical, spiritual, etc. -- is a part of them.
And so humans function inside Nature and Reality very well and very easily. Knowledge is acquired and truth discerned with great alacrity and facility. Nature does not "love to hide," as Heraclitus claimed early on. But nature does "abhor a vacuum," as Spinoza observed -- especially a knowledge and truth vacuum inside the human head.
And no more than molecules, rocks, planets, and wild animals are humans alien to reality. We're an integral, fully integrated, normal, completely natural part of the world, universe, reality, and nature. Also of metaphysical and spiritual existence.
Indeed, human beings seem to be the most natural and real part of it. We seem to participate in and partake of it most fully. With our truly outstanding sense-mind complex, humans seem to seek out nature and reality most, and know and enjoy them best. We seem to be the finest and most integrated part of the natural universe -- the part which is most noble, exalted, and god-like.
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