You are assuming what humans perceive is not reality. That implies that the human brain is capable of creating something which is, somehow, outside of nature, i.e. supernatural. It is to embrace dualism and to abandon materialism. There can be no consistent materialist position that denies the reality of perception. This was pointed out long ago by Feuerbach.
The arguments in favor of supernatural perception are always incoherent.
The “argument of limited perception” argues that we cannot perceive all of reality at once, therefore we cannot perceive reality at all. For example, they would point to the fact that certain things can block you from seeing all of reality and thus getting a full picture of it, like being trapped in Plato’s cave, being a brain in a vat, being in a simulation, etc. We obviously cannot perceive all of reality at once, sometimes we even need tools to see things like ultraviolet light. But none of these things imply we cannot perceive reality at all. That is another leap which such an argument does not get you there at all.
The “argument from illusion” argues that you can be tricked based on what you perceive and therefore what you perceive cannot be real. This is nonsense. To be “tricked” implies you misinterpreted something. It does not imply you somehow “misperceived” something. Interpretation and perception are not the same things. A magician can use slight-of-hand to trick people into thinking he is conducting magic, but that does not prove that the people who observed the magician perform their trick somehow “misperceived” the magician. They may cleverly hide certain things so you don’t see them, and this limited perspective may make you inclined to misinterpretation, but if you misinterpret what the magician does, that is a fault of your interpretation, not a fault of your perception. You still perceived everything correctly that was available for you to perceive. Magicians, your brain, the laws of physics, etc, many things can influence what you perceive in a way that may make you inclined to misinterpretation if you are not careful, but all of these things are physical things in the real world, and so you are always perceiving them “correctly,” and if you misinterpret them, that is your own fault, not reality’s fault for tricking you.
Also, dialectics denies the underlying “thing.” I actually disagree with Lenin here, I think he misinterpreted Engels. I found it pretty clear from Engels’ “Dialectics of Nature” and his “Anti-Durhing” that he is very much denying the underlying thing-in-itself, because Engels had a holistic view of nature. Nothing actually exists as a thing-in-itself. Nature is one indivisible whole, and “things” are abstractions created by humans as a way to break nature up into chunks that are easier to deal with conceptually.
Indeed, Engels stresses a lot in “Dialectics of Nature” that, if you analyze any “thing” more closely, the boundaries which separate that “thing” from everything else clearly become more and more ambiguous, before disappearing of itself. This is why he says, in “Anti-Durhing,” that “definitions” are unscientfic, because it is useless to stress over trying to rigorously define and categorize things, because these categories always break down upon deeper analysis anyways.
In my opinion, the laws of dialectics are not even fundamental. They are in fact derivative of the assumption that nature is holistic and this chunking is epistemic. If you start with that premise, then the laws of dialectics logically follow. The law of contradiction arises from the fact that breaking up a holistic reality into chunks cannot be done without error. There will always be disagreement between your idealized “thing” and the real world due to the interconnections between that “thing” and its environment that are lost in this chunking.
The “metaphysicians” that Engels attacked were those who falsely equate the chunked reality for true reality, as if reality is actually divisible into things-in-themselves, which can be understood entirely independently from everything else. If you adopt that point of view, then you run into many identity paradoxes, such as the Ship of Theseus paradox, the Water-H2O paradox, the teletransportation paradox, and arguably even the mind-body problem. But Engels is clear he rejects identity, even saying he rejects the law of identity as fundamental (A=A) but as a high-level abstraction.
All identity paradoxes arise from falsely taking the abstract categories as equivalent to reality. The point of dialectics is to recognize that they are not equivalent to reality, and to construct a logical framework to make sense of reality within this framework.
“Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.”
You are assuming what humans perceive is not reality. That implies that the human brain is capable of creating something which is, somehow, outside of nature, i.e. supernatural. It is to embrace dualism and to abandon materialism. There can be no consistent materialist position that denies the reality of perception. This was pointed out long ago by Feuerbach.
The arguments in favor of supernatural perception are always incoherent.
The “argument of limited perception” argues that we cannot perceive all of reality at once, therefore we cannot perceive reality at all. For example, they would point to the fact that certain things can block you from seeing all of reality and thus getting a full picture of it, like being trapped in Plato’s cave, being a brain in a vat, being in a simulation, etc. We obviously cannot perceive all of reality at once, sometimes we even need tools to see things like ultraviolet light. But none of these things imply we cannot perceive reality at all. That is another leap which such an argument does not get you there at all.
The “argument from illusion” argues that you can be tricked based on what you perceive and therefore what you perceive cannot be real. This is nonsense. To be “tricked” implies you misinterpreted something. It does not imply you somehow “misperceived” something. Interpretation and perception are not the same things. A magician can use slight-of-hand to trick people into thinking he is conducting magic, but that does not prove that the people who observed the magician perform their trick somehow “misperceived” the magician. They may cleverly hide certain things so you don’t see them, and this limited perspective may make you inclined to misinterpretation, but if you misinterpret what the magician does, that is a fault of your interpretation, not a fault of your perception. You still perceived everything correctly that was available for you to perceive. Magicians, your brain, the laws of physics, etc, many things can influence what you perceive in a way that may make you inclined to misinterpretation if you are not careful, but all of these things are physical things in the real world, and so you are always perceiving them “correctly,” and if you misinterpret them, that is your own fault, not reality’s fault for tricking you.
Also, dialectics denies the underlying “thing.” I actually disagree with Lenin here, I think he misinterpreted Engels. I found it pretty clear from Engels’ “Dialectics of Nature” and his “Anti-Durhing” that he is very much denying the underlying thing-in-itself, because Engels had a holistic view of nature. Nothing actually exists as a thing-in-itself. Nature is one indivisible whole, and “things” are abstractions created by humans as a way to break nature up into chunks that are easier to deal with conceptually.
Indeed, Engels stresses a lot in “Dialectics of Nature” that, if you analyze any “thing” more closely, the boundaries which separate that “thing” from everything else clearly become more and more ambiguous, before disappearing of itself. This is why he says, in “Anti-Durhing,” that “definitions” are unscientfic, because it is useless to stress over trying to rigorously define and categorize things, because these categories always break down upon deeper analysis anyways.
In my opinion, the laws of dialectics are not even fundamental. They are in fact derivative of the assumption that nature is holistic and this chunking is epistemic. If you start with that premise, then the laws of dialectics logically follow. The law of contradiction arises from the fact that breaking up a holistic reality into chunks cannot be done without error. There will always be disagreement between your idealized “thing” and the real world due to the interconnections between that “thing” and its environment that are lost in this chunking.
The “metaphysicians” that Engels attacked were those who falsely equate the chunked reality for true reality, as if reality is actually divisible into things-in-themselves, which can be understood entirely independently from everything else. If you adopt that point of view, then you run into many identity paradoxes, such as the Ship of Theseus paradox, the Water-H2O paradox, the teletransportation paradox, and arguably even the mind-body problem. But Engels is clear he rejects identity, even saying he rejects the law of identity as fundamental (A=A) but as a high-level abstraction.
All identity paradoxes arise from falsely taking the abstract categories as equivalent to reality. The point of dialectics is to recognize that they are not equivalent to reality, and to construct a logical framework to make sense of reality within this framework.