Do Better People See More?

Do good people perceive anything at all that evil people do not?  Anything?

Once this line is crossed, we must allow for the existence of persons, castles, dragons, and unicorns that the good can see and the bad cannot. If there is any moral dimension at all to percipience, and if we allow that everyone is morally imperfect, then it follows that we must allow for the existence of things we cannot perceive.  Well, yes, you say:  the very big, very small, or very distant.  No, we aren’t just talking about the things that telescopes or microscopes can’t yet see.  This logic says the Demiurge may be sitting in the next armchair.

A commonplace sentiment?  No, this is more than the romantic wish-dream of the artsy types. It’s hard, cold logic that sitting next to you as you read this can very well be a person who is invisible to you because of the moral nature – not the cognitive power – the moral nature of your eyes.

None of this is a comment on probabilities, of course.  Just because we must allow for the existence of dragons and fairies does not mean that dragons and fairies are probable.   They are not more probable because they are possible, and the probability that a certain thing exists is often confused (by supernaturalists from my camp) with the cold logic that this same thing must be allowed to exist.  These two questions have nothing to do with each other.    The materialists like to argue that nothing can exist that all of us can’t perceive; the religious like to argue that because God must logically be allowed space to exist, He must therefore exist.  Both views are nonsense,  ditches on opposite sides of the rational road where emotional warriors crash and spin their wheels for a lifetime.

Science is that method which seeks to drain the moral dimension from perception.  Before it can be labeled “science” an experimental result must be repeatable by any experimenter, whether morally good or bad.  So, for those who hold that science is the only source of knowledge, any perception that changes with the character of the observer cannot be part of the knowable universe.   The empiricist (a scientist is not necessarily an ontological empiricist) is a cultivator of an impoverished perception.

The universe is either material or mystical. Once you pass this fork in the epistemological road, there are no degrees; each road leads all the way to the Many or the One. The universe is either divided into smaller and smaller particles described in more and more numbers, or language and numbers end in: One. People choose between these approaches to at early ages.   The universe you live in is the one you LIKE.