No.398
There are two worlds: the world of Impression, and the world of Conception.
The world of Impression is George Berkeley's world, a world made of the impressions of our senses, of Kant's phenomena. It is ever-changing, complex past the point of human prediction, and subjective (although it can seem to take on an objective quality when multiple people see the same thing). It can act beyond logic sometimes, and branch off into dream-worlds and psychedelic dimensions, although the conditions for these events are more-or-less predictable (i. e. one falls asleep, drops acid or has a psychotic episode).
The world of Conception is not quite like Kant's noumenal world, or Plato's world of Forms. It is the world of thought beyond sensation, and of reason, but unlike the noumenal world it is not a place full of "things-in-themselves", and unlike the world of Forms it is not a place of objectivity or perfection. It, like the world of Impression, is subjective, but people can conceive of things in this world that match up with other people's conceptions, and then it seems pretty objective. It is the psychological landscape in which numbers and abstract thoughts are as real as lumps of wax, and where things are not merely "as they seem" but actually "as you think of them".
Everyone carries around these two worlds in their heads, and uses one to corroborate truths found in the other. As long as the illusion of objectivity in both worlds is maintained (that is, as long as we imagine that everyone can see the same things we see and think the same things we think), it's business as usual. It's when people's impressions don't match up that we get confusion: did she dream the whole incident? Was that a trick of the light? Is this eyewitness account reliable? It's when people's conceptions don't match up that we get disagreement: are we talking about the same person? How are you defining that term? Do you share my values?
There is something found in the world of Conception that one might be surprised to find, especially in the mind of a materialist or physicalist thinker: spirits. Here is a definition of the word "spirit", chosen specifically for its proximity to animist conceptions of living rocks and trees, or to the ideas of ghosts, angels, demons or gods, but not identical to the way your average spiritual person would define "spirit". Imagine that you perceive a dog. In the world of Impression, the dog is visibly wagging her tail and panting. The brown coat is evident, as is the long snout and large, draping ears. In the world of Conception, however, the dog is something more. Not only do you see the dog, but you associate her with her name and whatever memories you have of her. You might assign your best guess as to why she wags or pants, and imagine her little mind making decisions. You may even put words in her mouth, to better conceive of what she's thinking. Hume showed that causality and induction could be called into doubt; in the world of Impression, sure, but not in the world of Conception, where there is the clearest of necessary connections between every treat you dangle and every jump she makes. In the world of Impression, it's easy enough to reduce the dog to a machine with parts that acts in predictable ways; in the world of Conception, this is simply not the way you perceive the dog. Because impression and conception are both psychological events, can we really say which one is "more real"? On what grounds? Instead, we should say that they are two realms of being, with different standards of truth.
The world of Impression is indivisible. Staring for long enough at a well-camouflaged person in tall-grass prairie or thick underbrush, it becomes obvious that it's hard to pick out separate things by eye alone without sufficient visual clues. In order to differentiate dog from doghouse, we must put our impressions under the microscope, where they become conceptions. There, things are together or apart entirely based on how we think of them. As such, we can speak of the spirit of a dog, but likewise the spirit of a doghair, and likewise still the spirit of a pack of dogs, or a dog's skin cell, or a town, or a molecule, or a universe, or an atom. Spinoza may as well have been right, because the spirit of the universe may as well be called God. Can it not be said that Thor is merely the name thunder adopts when it resides in the Conception of a Norse, or that when it instead lands in the Conception of a Greek, it calls itself Zeus? When a person dies, their family may yet conceive of that person in their minds; is this what the afterlife means? Is this where ghosts reside? If a murderer conceives of their victim in a dream, is this not a vengeful ghost who haunts?
