Presenting Material Objects

Jason Peterson
(Copyright 2006)

Although it has generally appeared to most people through documented history that we exist in a material world, that our bodies are objects in space, and that external objects exist in the same fashion, it has long been a debate whether or not we can prove that material objects exist. Many intelligent people have attempted to prove or disprove this in the past, and while drawing from some of these people, I will set up a case for claiming that the existence of material objects is not only probable, but must be the case.

Descartes first solidified the argument for the existence of the self in stating that, in order to be a thinking thing, he must have to exist as the one who is thinking. He goes on to attempt to prove the existence of his own body and other material objects by stating that whatever appears to be true to him must be true due to the opinion that a perfect and good God would not deceive him, nor give him instruments of apprehension that are designed to deceive him. He tries to prove the existence of a perfect and good God by claiming that a cause and its effect must be equally real, so if he can think of a being so perfect and good, there must be a perfect and good being that put the idea in his head. This theory falls short on providing a proof for material objects, in that it doesn’t provide an argument for determining the correct assignment of responsibility. In other words, he doesn’t show why this perfect and good God must be someone other than himself. From his own perspective, if Descartes is God, then by his own logic he would be able to implant the idea of a perfect and good being in his head, and the “perfect and good” would become whatever he wanted it to be. So, if he wanted to take on a form that appeared material and create a perceptual world that appeared material, and wanted not to remember being God, his want would make it a perfect and good thing to do. This still allows for material objects to be inferred without actually existing. However, it is useful in showing that it requires more time and effort for a being to continuously, actively deceive than it does to do nothing and allow things to appear as they are, which will have importance later on in this paper.

Moore takes a boldly simple approach to providing evidence for the existence of material objects in his argument for propositional validity. He states that a proposition can only be considered true by two methods; either it is logically deducible from other true propositions, or it is true on its own without being deducible from other true propositions. He shows how there must be at least one proposition that is true by the second method or we would have no logical basis for declaring all propositions that are true by deduction, to have any truth to them at all. All of science and philosophy seems to be based on a trail of deduced propositions that go all the way back to one original assumption that we give truth to without question. Moore makes the point that due to this second method, the existence of material objects could just as well be known to be true in the same fashion. In response, if this were the case, that in order for a proposition to be true by assumption, it does not have to fit under any condition except that we choose it to be true, then as long as any assumption doesn’t disagree with what propositions we already consider more evidently true, it can be just as true. For instance, if I were to say at random, that God lives beyond the edge of the universe where light has not yet reached since the beginning of time, and he is doing a crossword puzzle in his head right now, because we have no evidence to say what is actually out there, or if God exists or not, it can be considered just as true as the fact that you’re reading this paper. This is very troublesome, so instead I am more inclined to suggest that the one proposition that exists as true without being deduced from others must live up to a condition other than, or in addition to, that we choose it to be true. Discovering whether the existence of material objects is a proposition that fits this new condition or not, will allow us to finally decide on the matter. Until then, we need to take this discussion in a different direction.

Berkeley claims that one can never perceive the real essence of anything, that the information received through sense experience gives a representative picture of the inferred “outside world” (the representative theory of perception), and one can never penetrate to the true essence of an object. This would appear to hinder any attempt to prove the existence of material objects at first, but Leibniz tells us that, “…it cannot be denied that the senses are inadequate to show the necessity [of necessary truths], and that therefore the mind has a disposition (as much active as passive) to draw them from its own depths.” This means that trying to rely on sense data to prove anything to be true is not an accurate or well-defendable stance, as what ability we may possess to be able to identify truth can only come from internal conceptual analysis. We can always use sense data to help guide or inspire our analysis, but to base any decision purely on sense data will not lead to any truths. All this leaves us with, then, is logic. For, no matter how flawed we may or may not be as beings, logic is guided by universal unarguable rules, so we can be sure that it is something we can use correctly, and thus it becomes the best instrument we have for discovering truths. It is therefore with logic, that I begin my case for proving the existence of material objects.

Logic (as reason and order) is the most crucial and essential part of existence. As far as order goes, nothing can come into being without a pattern of qualities to fulfill, or have duration of those qualities without a strict adherence to order. Without pattern, the basic building blocks of any object, material or otherwise, would never arise to build anything. Without duration, even patterns could not exist, because the moment they came into being would be the moment they ceased to be, so in essence, they wouldn’t have ever “been”. It requires order at all times to create existing objects, and to keep them in existence for any finite amount of time. We know from Descartes that we do exist as thinking things. We can also know that we have a finite duration that is at least as long as it takes for us to think about our own duration. Here we see that we must have order, and so too must all other things in existence.

The other part of logic, which I refer to as reason, is the truth and the connection between the components of that truth, that all things in existence must follow the rules of that existence, whether appearing to follow them or not. In other words, if all things in existence must adhere to logic in order to exist, then we can say that all the relationships and situations we encounter in the existing world must have a logical explanation. Having concluded this, I will now pull sense data back into the discussion to help show how this truth affects the understanding of material objects.

If you take a yellow paint sense datum, and a sense datum of red paint, you can perceive both of them simultaneously in your perceptual world as two different colors (assuming you aren’t color blind). We have no reason to believe that sense data can change once it has hit your sense organs, as we only ever perceive one form of a particular sense datum at a time. However, when we take the two paints and mix them in equal amounts, we get a sense datum of orange paint. If the data can’t change on their own, then it must be true that the red and yellow data have stopped being transmitted at the exact moment the orange datum transmission was initiated. Another example we can discuss is taking what appears to be a ball and dropping it. It falls to what appears to be the floor. Why should the sense datum of a “ball” be swayed to move closer to the sense datum of a floor? If data is all that exists, would this imply that the data itself has gravity? Data travels into our sense organs freely, so it seems absurd to think that data has a weight or substance. One explanation for all of these occurrences can be borrowed from Descartes in inferring the existence of an all-powerful deceiver. It seems possible that there could be an entity that works non-stop to deceive us. It would have to have given us the senses that we use to perceive its deceit, and then continually feed us with sense data that hides and misrepresents the real world, and go so far as to come up with a vast variety of complicated concepts such as gravity (making the ball appear to drop), and cause and effect (yellow and red becoming orange), relativity, distance, atomic theory, etc., and remember to always send all of us the right data so that the continuity of these concepts keeps us convinced that we are experiencing a real existing world with apparent material objects. This would surely be a relentless and exhausting mission. We can tell from introspection, not just from sense data alone, that in order for anything conscious to put forth so much time and effort, there must be some kind of reward, or pay-off or goal, or most importantly, some justifiable reason to be doing so much work. But what reason could be so worthwhile to justify such an act? There is no logical explanation for universal intricate deceit without gain. If there is no justifying reason, this situation cannot exist in our logical existence.

The other explanation is that, if the sense data can’t change by itself, and there is no deceiver, then there must be some other real existing thing that is emitting the yellow and red paint sense data, and there must be a real change in the emitter to initiate the emission of orange when the two are mixed. Also, if the sense datum of the ball is dropping, and the data has no gravity or substance, and there’s no deceiver, then the emitter of the ball datum must have a property that attracts it to the emitter of the floor datum. Gravity must exist, and so too then must the existing partakers of gravity – material objects.

One might suppose there is a third explanation in claiming that there could be a mix of the two extremes; that some of what we experience through sense data is reflective of material objects and some of it is deceit. In this case, the lie would have to differ from the rules of existence or it would be true, and I believe any differences of this sort would prove obvious and suspicious to us in comparison to the truths. However, even if this were the case, material objects would still have to exist to make up the portion of our experience that rests on the true side of the divide. So, there are still only two explanations in question: either all sense data is planted by a deceiver, or material objects exist.

When you compare the two explanations, knowing that one has to be true, and the other has to be false, it only follows that in a logical existence, the most logical (or following the most reason and order) of the two explanations must be the true explanation. In a logical existence, it also follows that we should have sense perceptors for a reason, and that we should be perceiving particular sense data for a reason. There would be more reason for us to be fulfilling a pattern of human with a pattern of human sense perceptors if we were using those perceptors to help us endure in the world as it really is, than there would be reason for a universal intricate deceiver to be justified in putting forth so much time and effort. The existence of material objects is a conclusion drawn from the more logical of the two explanations (in paragraphs 8-9), so it must be true.