Are Mountains Real?

[Post at Preface to Atheism, Apr 27, 2024.]

When philosophers ask if something is real, they mean: Does it exist independently of our thoughts?

Whose thoughts, exactly? Well, generally, human thoughts. Our in this context means us as a species.

But what if we aren’t the only creatures who have thoughts? What if cetaceans have thoughts—or great apes—or birds—or aliens living in a galaxy far, far away?

In my last post, we saw that Elon Musk believes that our earth exists independently of our (human) thoughts but almost certainly not (“only one chance in billions”) independently of the thoughts/experiences of some unspecified aliens (presumably with their supercomputers) somewhere far, far away.

For that matter (according to most who hold a supernatural worldview) there is a God out there who also thinks—and who originally thought us and our world into existence.

Idealism

So when we ask whether or not something is real, we have two questions: “Does it exist independently of our thoughts?” and the broader question, “Does it exist independently of all thought, including thoughts of powerful aliens and God?”

The answers might not be the same.

Consider George Berkeley’s idealism.

Is the physical world around us real? Does it exist independently of our thoughts? Berkeley would say yes. But does it exist independently of God’s thoughts? He would say no.

His idealism has to be taken seriously because Berkeley presented a strong case for the conclusion that objects are mental in nature—that objects are not independent of thought.

We’ll get to this in a moment, when we ask if mountains are real (that is, independent of thought). But first I want to point out that idealism is not the standard viewpoint for most people who believe in God.

The standard (Christian & Muslim) viewpoint is this: Yes, the physical world was created by God (e.g. God thought it into existence) but once created, the world exists independently of what anyone thinks about it (whether the thinker is human or alien or even God).

Philosophers call this external world realism (or thought-independent realism or observer-independent realism—you get the idea).

If I see a mountain and start climbing it, there really is a mountain independent of my own mind (and body) which I am climbing. Independent of God’s mind too. As we say, the mountain is real.

Or is it?

You are probably thinking, how can Berkeley (or anyone whose feet are solidly on the ground) sincerely doubt the mind-independent existence of the mountain.

Answer: by thinking carefully about what a mountain is. And, as we will see, what a valley is.

If you read one of my earlier posts, Roundness and what is real, you may have an idea of where we are going.

A mountain is an object. A physical object, right? But what defines the object?

Is it a giant agglomeration of rock and dirt which rises above the valley? Does mountain include trees and bushes growing on it? The birds flying around and landing on branches? As we trudge up the mountain path and raise dust, is the dust raised part of the mountain? Or is it not? Will it become part of the mountain again if it settles back on the ground? How close to settling on the ground (or leaves) must it be?

For that matter, where does the base of the mountain end? Does it end at the bank of the river in the valley below, at the point where the flowing water ceases to make the ground wet? Does the answer depend on how much rain there was last night?

But wait—the bank of the river and its surrounding flood plain is part of the valley, not the mountain, right? Can a spot of land belong both to the mountain and the valley at once?

So where exactly does mountain meet valley? And when I say exactly, I mean exactly: show me the dividing line down to the square millimeter (or molecule or electron or smaller) where one side is mountain and the other side is valley.

Well you can’t. Or if you can it is utterly arbitrary. In fact, the divide is whatever anyone chooses it to be.

This is a problem for the claim that the mountain (or the valley) is independent of thought.

Notice that we can’t avoid the difficulty here by trying to distinguish between mountain as a category (clearly a mental construction) and an individual instance of a mountain (hopefully not a mental construction). We like to give individual mountains names, but does this make them less of a mental construction?

Consider: Cowrock Mountain and Wildcat Mountain in north Georgia overlook a beautiful valley formed by Town Creek. Yet given this specific instance we still have the difficulty of precisely identifying the mountains’ boundaries with the valley. So we see that individual instances require us to either be vague or to adopt utterly ad-hoc boundaries.

Such decisions are necessarily arbitrary, and therefore necessarily mental in nature.

A mountain is a mental object.

Or as soon as we try to define the mountain, it becomes a mental object.

Objects and meanings

In short, a mountain is a meaning. Even specific mountains like Cowrock and Wildcat are meanings.

Indeed, all objects are meanings, with their assigned properties and qualities. And so, as soon as we think about something, about mountains and valleys for instance, they can’t be thought-independent.

This sounds like a truism. But in reality, it’s just an obvious fact of our existence. The moment we try to know the world, we are inextricably dealing with the world of thoughts. Everything in that world is mental. None of the objects and properties and relationships and boundaries that we could ever think about will be or could be thought-independent.

Still, aren’t we thinking about something out there? Something which really is independent of our thoughts?

Yes.

Only, nothing we think about stuff “out there” can ever be thought-independent. Meanings can never be thought-independent: they are the very stuff of thinking.

Any object we imagine can never be “out there” because by their very nature objects are meaningful things formed and existing “in here”, in our thoughts.

Still, we want to say that when we look at the mountain (or are climbing it) there is a real, thought-independent thing there in front of us. We can interact with it. We do interact with it.

But our thoughts do not.

Our thoughts are only “about” it. Thoughts, in other words, are of a fundamentally different nature than physical reality.

What would Berkeley say?

Berkeley would disagree. He argued that the mental object, with its meanings and properties et al, is precisely what exists out there.

This “physical” world consisting of numerous objects with properties is—Berkeley acknowledged—independent of our human minds. You know this if you’ve ever lost a sock doing laundry, and then months or years later, discovered the sock behind the dryer. The sock clearly had its own existence, separate from your thoughts, all along.

Objects (and their associated properties) out there in the world persist even when we don’t think about them (or forget they exist). Berkeley wondered how this could be so, if objects are mental stuff—that is, mind-dependent.

And his answer was: God.

God keeps all objects in mind all the time, thus insuring their enduring existence even when our own minds forget about them.

External world realism and object anti-realism

But Berkeley’s solution to the discovery that objects are mental constructions—it’s not the only possibility.

The other possibility is that there is stuff out there in the external world of a fundamentally different nature than the nature of mental objects constructed by minds.

The objects we experience—yes, they are mental constructions—but as such “stand in” for non-mental stuff out there in the external world. That external stuff maintains its existence not because it’s a bunch of mental objects constructed in God’s mind, but rather because it’s non-mental in its very nature.

Under this view, there is no direct connection or correspondence between external world stuff and our mental constructions. The meaningful objects we imagine are substitutes, mappings at best. The mountain object in our mind stands in for the (very real) external reality that we are climbing. It persists, even when we are not climbing it—not because God’s mind has the mountain object in divine view—but because the thing we are climbing is not an object at all, not a mental construct in any sense.

I hope the reader understands that I’m trying to draw an impenetrable divide between objects—which are mental constructs (Berkeley was right on this point)—and real (mind-independent) “physical” stuff.1

Two important points flow from this. The first is that although we are asserting realism (thought-independence) regarding the external world, we are asserting anti-realism regarding objects (including scientific objects), properties, and relationships between objects and properties. This is also anti-realism regarding mathematics, quantities, universals of any sort, and so on. All are mental elements and therefore exist only in our thoughts.2

This is also anti-realism about what we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. We think our senses are sensations coming to us from the world out there. They are not. Our brain constructs them so that we have subjective experiences which appear to us to be the world but in fact are a simulation—a sensory stand-in for the world. The stand-in only exists inside us.

Anti-realism, as far as the mountain goes, means the mountain (as soon as we sense it or conceive of it as a mountain) is a mental construction, and therefore thought-dependent rather than independent.3 The assertion that objects are not thought-independent is called object anti-realism.

Again, this includes scientific objects. Why? Because scientists can’t think about their subject without conceiving of objects, and these objects are necessarily mental constructions—even though they are meant to stand in for real stuff in the external world.

The second point, which helps explain the first, is an assertion about what thoughts and meanings and objects and properties are: sensations produced by the brain.

Thought can’t escape being a sensation—that is, an experience we have. Objects, even scientific objects, are necessarily experiences occurring within the brain and created by its neurons.

In short, meanings are a type of sensation produced by our neurons.4

Furthermore, sensations (including meaning sensations) interact only with the neurons in our brain. There is no interaction outside of this sphere. Our consciousness, our thoughts, our mind, is only a production by the brain done for its benefit.5

This means that there is no interaction between our sensations and the world “out there.”

We don’t perceive the world, in other words.

We don’t see it. We don’t hear it. We don’t smell it. We don’t taste it. We don’t even feel it.

Our bodies interact with the world, certainly. From these interactions, our brains create sensations—including the five senses and sensations of meaning—which our brains then use as a stand-in for the outside world. (Think of the stand-in as the visual, auditory, tactile, aromatic experiences you have, combined with “objectification” which create objects with properties and joined with “meanings” tacked on by (probably) the neocortex.

The stand-in is composed not just of our sensory experiences but also has these tacked on meanings about objects within the stand-in.

All this happens and exists within the brain, and does not constitute an interaction with the world out there. Our bodies (not our sensations) interact with the out there and send signals to the brain, which then produces the stand-in (again, our sensations and thoughts) for the “out there”—which we then use as a guide for our actions.6

So is the stand-in an accurate representation of out there?

It can’t be. There is no direct interaction between the stand-in and the surrounding world.

However, what we can say is that the stand-in is a useful representation of whatever is out there. If it’s not useful enough, we don’t survive.

So the brain is constantly trying to improve the stand-in based on our interactions with the world. Much of the improvement goes beyond the initial sensations of our senses and involves changing our meanings, our mental stuff.

All this is to try to make the stand-in as useful to us as possible.

Summary

So if we pull everything I’ve written together, what we get is this:

The nature of the “physical” world and the nature of thoughts (consciousness) are completely unlike each other. Philosophers call this dualism.

The alternative is to say they are the same, adopt Berkeley’s idealism and bring in God to explain why the external world has independence from our thoughts (though not from God’s).

But dualism wasn’t the original state of things.

Originally—per naturalism—consciousness did not exist. It arrived on the scene after billions of years of evolution, when it finally began to be produced by neurons in the brains of some species of animals on earth.

So dualism only emerged with the development of brains capable of producing subjective sensations.

Because of this evolutionary development, no sensations, thoughts or meanings can match the actual nature of the world around us (evolution has no way to pull that off)—indeed they can only be a stand-in, a simulacrum, a representation created in a different medium.

We can’t know the mind-independent external world as it is.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t matter to us because we modify the stand-in using pragmatic empiricism—that is, our brain creates a sensual stand-in with hooks for meanings which we then constantly try to improve to be as useful a stand-in for the world as possible.

How do we do this? By acting in the world and noticing what works better and adjusting our understanding accordingly.

Hopefully this makes sense. And if it does, then hopefully you’ll understand why I describe this as philosophical naturalism based on philosophical skepticism.

And in fact, maybe you can see why I say this is actually a scientific meta-hypothesis (an hypothesis which ties in and gives context to a large range of other scientific hypotheses).7

Footnotes