Bertrand Russell's Famous Table

"Suppose that, with your eyes shut, you let your finger-tip press against a hard table. What is really happening? Although you think you are touching the table, no electron or proton in your finger ever really touches an electron or proton in the table, because this would develop an infinite force. " --Russell

As I mentioned in an earlier post on Intuition, our day-to-day tendency to classify the persons, places, and things that we encounter leads us to make assumptions that, upon close examination, turn out to be self-contradictory and even grossly misplaced.

Bertrand Russell's famous table discussion serves as an example of how our unquestioning acceptance of the physical nature of objects reveals an even deeper misunderstanding of subtler, more complex, and infinitely more important aspects of ourselves, the world we inhabit, and the invisible forces of cause and effect that impact our every experience.

The important thing to keep in mind is that the perception that occurs in our brains as we attempt to classify information received via our senses is not that same as the reality that stimulates those senses. This is true both of our perception of the physical world and, by extension, nature and of the ultimate intelligence that controls all things.

"To say that you see a star when you see the light that has come from it is no more correct than to say that you see New Zealand when you see a New Zealander in London."

To the reasonable person, a particular table might appear to have certain indisputable characteristics: it is brown, it is hard-surfaced, it is apparently old. However, the brownness of the table is certainly a simple matter of how the light at a particular time of day reflects off the specific pigment of the stain applied to the table and is perceived by the aforementioned reasonable person. Only another person positioned at exactly the same spot as the first at the exact time of day, with the very same degree of sensitivity to light would see the table the same way. A person with the visual condition called Daltonism would perceive the color of the table differently, as would a creature with the trichromatic color vision of a bee. Not one of these interpretations would be right or wrong. Light waves that reflect from an object would be interpreted one way by the human eye, another way by a bee, and a third way by a scientific instrument. The degree of brownness might change from mid-morning to late evening. The table is not, in fact, brown. We perceive brownness from the light reflected from the table.

"It is extrordinarily difficult to divest ourselves of the belief that the physical world is the world we perceive by sight and touch."

Along the same lines, what we perceive as a table would appear to be something differently entirely if we were microscopic in size and found ourselves somehow among the atoms that form the object. That the size and shape of the structure would be invisible from us is not to say that we are merely unable to see it. Our view at that moment is just as legitimate as the view of the reasonable observer mentioned earlier. These two views of the same so-called object again demonstrate that what we thought of as a table is simply one interpretation.

Continuing, the apparent durable or long-lasting nature of the table is relative to the perception of a human being typically destined to exist on this earth for perhaps a period of seventy to eighty years. If we were discussing a melting ice cube rather than a table, we might say that it would exist as an ice cube for perhaps a half hour on a warm day. This interpretation would affect our assessment of the ice cube and its value to us. If my glass of punch is warm, then I'd better use the ice cube before it melts. As opposed to the table, I'd better not become emotionally attached to the ice cube because it's not going to be around for long. However, to the mayfly, with a lifespan as short as five minutes, if in fact the mayfly would have thoughts about the ice cube, he might interpret it as a colossal glacier that lasts for six lifetimes.

However silly that thought, there is a consequential conclusion to this line of thinking. The body is a bundle of sensations. That multiple people cannot have exactly the same interpretation of an object, due to differences in the way light waves, sound waves, smells, and the other physical sensations -- not to mention the more subtle intellectual and emotional stimuli -- are interpreted, begs the question: What in fact is real about the world around us?

Ignorant face value acceptance of what was perceived to be the physical world by the medieval church is what put the physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher Galileo, whom Stephen Hawking called "perhaps more than any other single person, responsible for the birth of modern science," under house arrest for the final ten years of his life, as punishment by the Catholic church for writing that the Earth revolves around the Sun. If we ourselves misinterpret the nature of the physical objects before our very eyes, what are the odds that we're accurately assessing another person's expression or tone of voice or what is really being said? How are we to understand the larger, clearly more important questions of our times and of all time? These are the questions of philosophy.

"When you press, repulsions are set up between parts of your finger and parts of the table. The repulsion consists of electrical forces, which set up in the nerves a current whose nature is not very definitely known. This current runs into the brain, and there has effects which, so far as the physiologist is concerned, are almost wholly conjectural...the knowledge we derive from physics is so abstract that we are not warranted in saying that what goes on in the physical world is...intrinsically...what we know through our own experiences. "

Facing the Truth

It's ironic that even the enlightened philosopher can be limited by the yearnings of the egoic mind and blinded by lessons inherited rather than learned. Out of humility, I hesitate to appear to criticize renowned and  accomplished thinkers, but from my experience an intense focus on an area of expertise can occasionally make it nearly impossible to accept something that even the diligent lay observer can see as clear as day.

In his insightful guide to spiritual enlightenment The Power of Now, Eckhard Tolle writes eloquently of "...an inward journey that will take you ever more deeply into the realm of great stillness and peace, yet also of great power and vibrant life. At first, you may only get fleeting glimpses of it, but through them you will begin to realize that you are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between birth and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation. Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be conceived of or spoken of -- yet I am speaking of it now. I am speaking of it not to give you something to believe in but to show you how you can know it for yourself."

I believe in meditation; and I believe that contemplation is our highest activity. Cogito, ergo sum. Disciplined meditation has in fact revealed a vast inner self to which I was more or less oblivious when I was younger. And it's indisputable that we humans are in fact born from the physical artifacts of a larger organism, to which we return said borrowed materials upon our passing. And it's not unreasonable to view ourselves as individual components of a force that could be thought of as a collective intelligence that is greater than humanity. But to assign sacredness to that intelligence, which is really just nature (which surely does not consider itself sacred), or to imply that we are more than meaningless fragments in the grand scheme, is to fall victim to counterproductive tendencies that have dogged mankind at least since the earliest days of recorded civilization.

If history has taught us anything, it is that we are wired to assign supernatural explanations to things we don't understand, explanations we embrace doggedly until each is inevitably proven to be false. The fact that we find something to be awesome says everything about the limitations of our intellect and nothing about the object; apart from the human mind, the quality of awesomeness does not exist in nature.

It's also easy to understand how we have evolved to value human life above nearly all else. A species that didn't fight single-mindedly for its survival would not have ended up at the top of the food chain as we have (so far). As a result of that evolution, we believe that we are the most important beings in the Universe. We dream of an afterlife and of a connection to a sacred intelligence.

The good news is that information is all around us. We learn from every single thing we see, hear, and smell, and from everyone around us. Believe what is real. Pardon my French, but don't make shit up. The truth is always best, even when it inconveniently does not lead us where we yearn to go. It's far better to discipline ourselves to believe in and then to embrace what is real. Why would we strive for more than this inherently wondrous and wonderful life that has been bequeathed to us?

Eckhart Tolle
The Power of Now
René Descartes