Suppose I were to hold a buttercup in front of your face: what might go through your mind is a small object, a flower, a shiny thing, above all, a *yellow* thing. Now close your eyes and remember that flower, and again you'll see yellow. If you simply press your knuckles against your eyelids you'll see lots of flashing colours, one of which may be yellow again. The exact status of this phenomenon 'yellow' (or 'red', or 'hot', or 'round') still vexes modern philosophy - how is it the same impression of yellow, eyes open or shut? Or for that matter asleep, because you may dream of a buttercup (or for that matter a yellow cat, something that doesn't exist in nature and you've never seen). Light of wavelength 580nm falling on the rods and cones of your retina, or groups of activated neurons might cause yellow to appear, but they're not what yellow *is*. Those philosophers who care about this at all, often simply call such things 'qualia' (qualities) and leave it at that.
There was one philosopher though for whom such qualities were not a problem, but the very backbone of his system. George Santayana, the 20th-century Spanish/American naturalist philosopher revived the theory of Essences, as employed by Plato and Aristotle, which has been largely ignored by modern empiricist and positivist philosophy. For Santayana yellow is an Essence, as is redness, hotness, roundness, all the words we use in speech and writing, the tunes we play, ideas, stories, feeling and emotions. Essences are patterns that our brains detect in the raw flux of material events in which we're immersed.
Platonism itself is by no means dead, as many respected contemporary mathematicians turn to his idealist view of essences to explain where the structures they uncover come from (Plato believed they exist as Pure Forms in another, supernatural, world or heaven). Santayana's theory, which is largely forgotten, would be far more suitable for their purpose because he was, unlike Plato, a materialist who believed that there is only Nature: 'I might almost say that my theory is a variant of Platonism, designed to render Platonic logic and morals consistent with the facts of nature. I am afraid, however, that this readjustment unhinges Platonism so completely that I have no right to call my doctrine Platonic'.
For Santayana the Realm of Matter, which is all that exists, is the material universe of particles and energy unevenly distributed in space and constantly in motion (that is, changing their distribution over time). Some tiny fraction of this universe - on one planet that we know of so far - has organised itself into living matter which can temporarily flout the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and is subject to evolution by natural selection. We don't directly experience the flux of matter, which would drive us mad were we to see it: instead evolution has equipped plants and animals (of which we are just another species) with sense organs and processing power to detect just those patterns that help them survive. We don't see protons because we can't eat protons. Bees see ultraviolet light but we don't, so they see nectar-guiding patterns on flowers that we don't. In short we all live in and through essences.
Santayana died in 1952 without witnessing Claude Shannon's Information Theory, which is a terrible pity because his Essences are in effect another way of looking at Information. Santayana distinguished between Being and Existence and was adamant that essences don't exist (only matter exists, and is the ultimate cause of everything). Shannon's Information has exactly this same intangible quality, manifesting itself through arrangements of material objects (words on a page, hands of cards, holes in a tape, magnetic dots, pixels) though it isn't those objects. 'Yellow' is perhaps then pure information, sometimes encoded in retinal cells, sometimes neurons, or paint or pixels, but always a unique point in the non-existent Realm of Essences.
If that makes your brain hurt, hang in there because there are are a couple more twists I'd like to impart. For Santayana essences are infinite in number, eternal, and unique, which may sound implausible until you think about the Real Numbers. Georg Cantor showed that these are transfinitely many, and each is in itself infinitely long, so the Reals could be viewed as bit-strings that encode all the essences to infinite precision. Not confused yet? OK, Santayana also posited a special essence he called Pure Being, which has no content of its own but includes all other essences. That sounds to me very like Class Object in Object Oriented Programming, which is the root of all other classes but has no properties of its own, so OOP could be viewed as a rather primitive scheme for capturing essences as computer-executable representations.
For a long time I've regarded all modern philosophy as nit-picking raised to an art-form, but reading Santayana has given me the tiniest glimpse of a possible philosophy that could interweave Information Theory, Complexity Theory and all the latest findings in cosmology and quantum mechanics into a coherent whole, while still leaving that space for human feeling and poetry that's missing from so many scientific materialist accounts of the world. So there you have it: Western Philosophy set straight; science, philosophy and poetry reconciled; the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, all for three quid. Never say that PC Pro doesn't deliver good value. Next month, my recipe for pickled walnuts, and hints for the sharpening and fettling of McCulloch chainsaws.
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