Accidentals and Essentials: Experience and Reality

Observation and Theory, Experience and

Imagination: What’s Real and What Isn’t

1.0
We experience things and processes, events and spaces, times and moments, extended sequences of events, and so on. We may name (or label) any such experience, and having done so, we tend to think of it as a unified experience, whatever its extent in space and time. Naming is the first step to theory, the precondition of explanation.

2.0
2.1 The things we experience are bundles of sensory inputs. They may be relatively simple bundles, such as the ones that we label “apple”; or complex, hierarchically layered bundles, such as “song”; or more complex networks of experiences such as “fair play”; and so on. But all experiences which we perceive or apprehend as having some kind of unity in space and time can be reduced to a bundle of sensations.

2.2 The “unity in space and time” seems to be a given. Neuro-psychological research indicates that it’s a product of the brain’s processing of sensory inputs. Comparing human and other animals’ perceptions clarifies that insight: a frog responds to a fly-sized object such as a raisin only when it moves. But when it moves, the frog will try to catch and eat it, even when it’s a raisin.

3.0
3.1 We learn in grammar class that nouns name essentials (apple, kitten, rainstorm, triangle) while adjectives name accidentals (red, soft, greasy, warm, loud, sharp, salty, etc). The trick seems to be to recognise what makes an apple an apple and not a kitten; and what features of an apple can vary without destroying its appleness. But these distinctions are illusory, since any description of the essence of an apple is merely a list of accidentals, its so-called properties. Botanical classification makes that quite clear. We may infer that “apple” is a the minimal collection of accidentals that differentiates it from pear, cherry, raspberry, peach, mango, .... Note that the properties overlap: it’s the differences between the lists that differentiate the fruits.

3.2 We can also differentiate objects by abstract qualities, such animate/inanimate, food/non-food, etc. Anthropologists have discovered that there are no universal classification systems. While there is little doubt that we perceive objects as more or less stable collections of sensations, that does not entail that we classify them that way. Apparently humans have a penchant for believing that whatever they name is real. So when we name some aspect of human behaviour as “just”, we start collecting the properties of Justice, and arguing with other people about which of these aspects are accidental or essential. Thus the white wig and black robe of a British judge are accidentals. But is the British Common Law a better system for arriving at just judgments than the European Roman Law? Any argument pro or con will rely on explicit and implict assumptions about the essence of Justice.
 

4.0
4.1 The brain combines sensory inputs into experiences. Some of these combinations are built-in, so much so that the brain organises different sensory inputs into the correct temporal sequence even though the processing time of the inputs varies so much that the results are in not in the correct sequence. When the brain fails to produce the correct image of the reality mediated by senses, its possessor is more or less deluded. If he knows it, he may well be more disturbed by that knowledge than by the failure to parse reality correctly.

4.2 Some of these combinations are inherently incorrect: we call them “illusions”, and the essential (;-)) point is that knowing we perceive an illusion does not cancel it. Nor does the fact that we have acquired  many, perhaps most, of these illusory parsings during the development of the visual cortex after birth.