In the same LAShTAL.com thread referred to in Majesty in nature, the idea of “ultimate reality” arose, exemplified in the following comment from Ian Rons where it is termed “absolute meaning” or “absolute knowledge”:

However, yes of course people do make statements which they presume to be meaningful; but I would say that, ultimately, they are kidding themselves if they believe those statements tell us anything concrete about the universe absolutely, even if it helps people to interact with the universe…but ultimately we realise (through a fairly simple and not-very-abstract train of thought) that we cannot reach the absolute this way, so therefore our statements can never have absolute meaning or represent absolute knowledge.

Although not in direct response to Ian’s points, I made a separate post specifically on this idea of “absolute reality” or “ultimate reality” which warrants reproducing here, and therefore follows.

It’s worth looking at these purported “other modes of apprehension” for a moment, because it ties in with this idea of “ultimate reality” that such “modes” are hypothesised to apprehend.

In a sense, we already know what “ultimate reality” is. If we ask “what is the ‘ultimate reality’ of a cat?” for instance, then we already basically know the answer: it’s little subatomic particles whizzing around. Even if we don’t have the much-vaunted “theory of everything” yet, we can make a reasonable guess that what it will reveal is pretty much more of the same. Even if we never find it, we can still make that reasonable guess.

Now, this is obviously not what people of a mystical inclination mean when they talk about “ultimate reality”, but the idea that there is an “ultimate reality” beyond this is definitely not an idea that should go unchallenged.

There’s a passage in The Lord of the Rings where Gandalf is describing Gollum:

“But as he lowered his eyes, he saw far above the tops of the Misty Mountains, out of which the stream came. And he thought suddenly: ‘It would be cool and shady under those mountains. The Sun could not watch me there. The roots of those mountains must be roots indeed; there must be great secrets buried there which have not been discovered since the beginning….’

“All the ‘great secrets’ under the mountains had turned out to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing, only nasty furtive eating and resentful remembering.”

I think that this talk of some kind of “ultimate reality” is much like this. Gollum looked at the Misty Mountains and reasoned, by a kind of magical thinking, that mountains are old, and their roots go deep, and since roots are at the beginning of things, there must be “great secrets buried there”. In reality, all he found was the same kind of stuff that’s on the surface: rocks, and pools, and regular stuff like that, just in a darker place. In the same way, mystics look at the universe and think there must be some kind of “ultimate reality” underlying it all, when all there really is is the same old universe we see every day, just in a greater level of granularity.

Back in the days when the argument from design was the best one we had to explain the origins of complex life, it seemed reasonable to some to conclude that the existence of complex and intelligent life must suggest some kind of designer, or at least some kind of “transcendental realm” where it all came from. These days, we know better, that once chance results in the creation of some rudimentary molecules which have the ability to replicate themselves then the plain old laws of physics in the context of scarce resources makes the evolution of complex life almost inevitable, given enough time. There needn’t be any more to it than this – “It is all about the survival of self-replicating instructions for self-replication.” It is likely that some similar explanation will eventually be found for the universe itself, for how simple things – or even no things at all – can, through the plain old laws of physics, result in the universe we see around us.

It seems reasonable to strongly suspect that the physical universe is all there is, and that there really is no “ultimate reality” beyond “what stuff is made of” and “how stuff works”. In other words, that those “little subatomic particles whizzing around” are “ultimate reality”, and that there is no “ultimate reality” beyond them. Thus, even if we were to have “absolute knowledge”, and to be able to perceive “ultimate reality”, there really is no reason to suspect that we’d perceive anything other than the effects of plain old little subatomic particles whizzing around. Therefore even if we were to gain access to some kind of “other mode of apprehension”, there is no reason at all to suppose that we’d apprehend anything other than basically just more of the same, only in greater detail.

The very idea that there is some kind of “ultimate reality” beyond this is, I think, a purely religious idea, and a religious idea so vague that not only is there no reason to suggest that such a thing exists, but that there is absolutely nothing at all which can be said about what it might be even if its existence were to be postulated. Thus, when we ask “what is a cat, really?”, with the inherent implication that there is some kind of “ultimate catness” which can be known, we have a statement which is not only entirely imaginary, but which is actually utterly meaningless. The search for this kind of “ultimate truth” or “ultimate reality” is therefore no different from the search for the legendary invisible pink unicorn. It’s the kind of thing that folks of a mystical inclination have been led to believe is there waiting to be discovered, but which they’ve apparently never stopped to ever think about. My assertion is that there is no type of “knowledge” or “reality” beyond “what stuff is made of” and “how stuff works”, and that the idea that there is is nothing by an idle fantasy.

Even were it not for the above, the plain fact seems to be that our consciousness, reasoning faculties, perceptive faculties, and knowledge faculties, have evolved as a result of natural selection. Since natural selection itself is merely a result of “what physically happens”, there’s no reason at all to suppose that the process would give rise to any faculties that don’t deal with “what physically happens”. What would the survival benefits of such an “other mode of apprehension be”? What evolutionary purpose would it have served in our mammalian and piscene ancestors? And why, even if such an “other mode of apprehension” had evolved, it is so apparently difficult for us to access? We don’t have to try to see, or to hear, or to imagine, or to think, so how and why would an entirely “other mode of apprehension” – that is apparently only available to ineffectual mystics and to lunatics who like to dress up as wizards – have evolved? All kinds of animals have slightly different senses than we do – such as the “sonar” of bats, and the ability of insects to see ultra-violet light – but these are merely variations on a theme, just more finely tuned ways of perceiving the exact same things we perceive: physical particles, waves, vibrations, and the like.

Thus, the difference between “real world knowledge” and “absolute knowledge” – if we were capable of having such a thing – would just be the degree of detail to which we can perceive the physical workings of the universe. There’s nothing “beyond” that, no “ultimate beingness” of a completely different order that we could apprehend, even if we possessed one of these “other modes of apprehension”. There’s no deep “reality” out there that’s going to suddenly address our existential worries – there’s just the potential for more detailed knowledge about what stuff is and how it works. The idea that the universe is constructed on principles which are specially made to address our own existential concerns is outrageously absurd. We can, through various practices, attain to states of mind where we are not clouded by the kinds of re-entrant mental activity that compels us to compare the world with a favoured ideal, or which causes us to pay more attention to our thoughts than to reality, but there is no deep “ultimate reality” out there of a completely different order which we can attain to. It’s nothing but a regular old empty religious myth. The only things out there to be “apprehended” are the same old physical things we apprehend with the senses we already have, and while the potential may be there to perceive them better, the potential is not there to perceive some other type of “reality” altogether, because there is no other type of “reality”. It’s merely a false idea invented by the human imagination.