The Matter Paradox

Most people don't know about the paradox about what we call "matter." Matter is the supposed substance of the things you perceive, i.e. the object of experience. 

When I say most people, I literally mean most people in the world. Even though professors of philosophy know about it, almost none have it clearly defined in their mind. They don't see the paradox clearly, but do at least fully appreciate that it is an unsolved riddle.

Here I want to explain this paradox in a clear way, so that any reader that tries can get a clear picture of what the problem is. This is important because a clear understanding of a problem is an essential first step in solving it.

So, here is the problem. 

In philosophy it has long been understood that people only perceive their own subjective experience. Even if we say there is a table in a room and ten people standing around it see it, feel it, and so forth -- from the vantage point of any particular individual seeing it, his experience of it happens "in him." This is true even if the people standing around the table confer and agree that they are seeing the same table, for each that experience is individual and personal and is happening "in him."

Note that I have referred to the experience of the table being "in him." What exactly do I mean by "in." Normally it is thought that the experience each individual is having of the object happens in his "mind" or "brain." This raises a dichotomy between this experience, that is private and individual for each observer, and "in" the minds or brains of those observers, and the actual external object they are looking at. The one out there in the real world.

This may sound funny. It seems as if we just see the object directly. It feels as if the experience we are having of the table in front of us simply IS the table. But this is not so, and it does not take much reflection to realise it. The table does not fly through the air and pass through our eyes into our brain. Rather it is agreed by physicists and neurologists that it is electromagnetic frequencies we call light and vibrating air waves we call sound that stimulate our sense organs. And even these theoretical vibrations do not literally enter our brains, but stimulate nerves that send an electrical signal into our brain which our minds or brains converts into an experience. 

This means that the table that is the source of all this never reaches us. We never experience it directly. Rather, we only experience our own mind or brain's representation of it. 

This does not stop most philosopher from talking about the nature of the external object. Some philosophers call the external object the 'causally responsible outer object.' Now, most philosophers will admit that this causally responsible outer object is merely theoretical. So, when they speak of the 'matter' or 'substance' that in some way or another constitutes this outer object, it is theoretical also. 

So now I can explain the paradox. The causally responsible outer object (which we just admitted is only theoretical) is called what it is because it is considered the cause in some way. And our experience of a table (and here by experience I mean the sight, feel, smell, etc. of it) is the effect. Let me lay this out for clarity:

•    The actual outer table is the cause of the experience.
•    The experience of the table is its effect.

But when many philosophers go to picture or imagine the cause, they project onto it the supposed effect. For instance when we imagine what the actual table is like, we picture the completed effect. We think of the experience of the table and assume the actual table is like that. Hence, the paradox is that we are reading an effect back into it cause. 

This is actually a logical fallacy originally pointed out by John Dewey. 

A set of considerations, which hold good only because of a completed process, is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result. A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome. (The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, John Dewey, The Psychological Review, VOL. III. No. 4. July 1896. p. 367)

The solution to this paradox is quite simple and I've been trying to explain it for a quarter century. The answer did not occur to philosophers because they are habituated to think in terms of imagined substances, which in turn are based on experienced ones -- which constitutes the fallacy just describe. The solution is to posit a process to explain our experience rather than a substance. Our experience that we call matter or physical substance is only found in the completed result of that process, our experience. 

Now hopefully the title of my first book on this topic will make more sense. The Evolution of Perception and the Cosmology of Substance. Substance is the result of the process (a cosmology) of evolved perception. 

So I do not deny the existence of matter the way the famous idealist George Berkeley did, but rather explain matter as an epiphenomenon of a process. Only in the completed process do we get matter.