Perfect vision

One of the major themes in modern philosophy was concerns about the way that our contact with the world is mediated by our “ideas”. Thus, you are looking at a tree. But are you really seeing the tree, or are you just seeing your sense-impression, which doesn’t have much in common with the tree? Even direct realists like Reid who say you are seeing the cat still think that your conscious experience involves qualia that aren’t like a tree.

Thinking about this gives us the impression that an epistemically better way to relate to the tree would be if the tree itself took the place of our sense-impressions or qualia. Berkeley did that, but at the cost of demoting the tree to a mere figment of our perception. But if we could do that without demoting the tree, then we would be better kinds of perceivers.

However, that on some theory we would be better kinds of perceivers is not a strong reason to think that theory is true! After all, we would be better perceivers if we could see far infrared, but we can’t. It’s not my point to question the orthodoxy about our perceptions of trees.

But now think about beatitude, where the blessed see God. If seeing God is like seeing a tree in the sense that there is something like a mediating supersense-impression in us, then something desirable is lacking in the blessed. And that’s not right. Such a mediated vision of God is not as intimate as we could wish for. Would it not be so much more intimate if it were a direct vision of God in the fullest sense, where God himself takes the place of our qualia? We shouldn’t argue from “it would be better that way” to “it is that way” in our earthly lives, but in beatitude it does not seem such a terrible argument.

But where this kind of argument really comes into its own is when we think of what the epistemic life of a perfect being would be like. The above considerations suggest that when God sees the tree (and it is traditional to compare God’s knowledge of creation to vision), the vision is fully direct and intimate, and the tree itself plays the role of sense-impressions in us. We would expect a perfect being’s vision to be like that.

Now notice, however, that this is an account of God’s vision of the world on which God’s vision is partly extrinsically constituted: the tree partly constitutes God’s conscious experience of the tree. This is the extrinsic constitution model of how a simple God can know. We have thus started with us and with considerations of perfection, and have come to something like this model without any considerations of divine simplicity. Thus the model is not an ad hoc defense of divine simplicity. It is, rather, a model of the perfect way to epistemically relate to the world.