Tying Up Ends (or, The Making of a Gordian Knot)

In the last few student posts an idea has been floated that there is no absolute or objective reality, or that if there is, it really does not matter as long as there is intra-personal constancy of perception and inter-personal constancy of communication. There was also the introduction of the wonderful phrasing "looks-p" and "is-e." If there is no absolute or objective reality, or if it does not matter, then there seems to be no point in talking about "is-e." The character of Socrates in Plato's dialogue Theaetetus drew, albeit insincerely, on the doctrine of Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things, alike of the things that are that they are and of the things that are not that they are not" to suggest omitting the verb "to be" altogether and replacing it with "to become." Thus we would not say, "The book is red," but "The book is becoming red."

And yet no one communicates or thinks this way. We say that the book is red, that murder is wrong, and that our love for one's family just is, that it exists. In fact, all of our declarative statements and even our questions are grounded in an assumption of absolute, objective reality (that is, right up to the point where we want to invoke a relativistic viewpoint in a discussion of some thorny topic like ethics, politics, or religion.) When the teacher asks, "Why were you late," neither the student nor teacher thinks that the question or the answer are about an individual's perception of reality, no matter how constant that perception may be.

So let us assume for a moment that there is an absolute, objective reality, one that can be described "is-e." Is there not a sense in which many, perhaps most, people want looks-p to be the case to be the same as what is-e the case? In other words, don't most people want and even believe that their perceptions and objective reality more or less agree? In the movie The Matrix, Neo is disappointed when he looks at a restaurant where he used to eat, only to realize that it is an illusion. By the same token, we despise the character Cypher because he chooses the false world of perception over the less pleasant but real world.

So, are our thoughts and language about absolute reality just a pointless bit of mental flotsam? Does our ability to conceive of and talk about absolute reality serve no more purpose than our ability to talk of unicorns? Or is it possible that our deepest assumptions in everyday life correspond to the fact of absolute reality? If so, could the pursuit of knowledge not be seen as the ongoing effort to square what looks-p with what is-e?