Manifesto

Acceptance of Rational Existence is acceptance that the basis of humanity is rational and further that our rationality has existence.  It is a simple idea that goes to the foundation of all thought and all understanding.  RE calls on us to examine what it means to exist but does not concern itself with qualifying or otherwise defining existence.  RE is fundamentally conditional; IF anything exists ideas exist.

To deny the existence of ideas denies the existence of the human condition. There is no consideration of kinds of existence like metaphysics, platonic forms, ontology or identity.  RE only requires simple assent to the existence of rational concepts and sees no value in separating such existence from any other kind of existence.

The essential elements of human existence therefore are not physical but rather conceptual founded in ideas and constructed with human intellect.  Our worlds consist of mental constructs.  What we envision, conceive, model, explain and communicate is our world, our Rational Existence.  As such our world has have very little physical reality in the normal sense. Ideas cannot be objectively measured or otherwise qualified materially.

Our conceptual models relate to existent universal order as much as we can make them do so, but there is no objective framework for our concepts.  Order pre-exists our discovery of and our conceptualizing of that order.  We can only know our concepts and probe and test those concepts within a physical framework we devise with our conceptual framework.  This is how we refine and enlarge our reality and thereby discover new and more valuable concepts.

The physical world is our home, but is defined and designed entirely by our conceptual models.  Although words and names are ostensibly to communicate our concepts they contribute more to how we view the physical world than just communication.  Words build our reality. What we know is only stored in words, names and symbols to be read and recreated in the minds of others, or as tools for us to conceptualize our own experiences.  This is the only physical form for our Rational Existence; ink on paper or stored electronic switches.

The reality we experience is perceived sensually (sight, sound, smell, feel, and taste) but we build our world conceptually.  Whenever we put a word or a name to any experience we begin to build a concept of that thing.  We can know a great deal about any single thing through our senses, our intellect, our shared experiences and imagination.

What we can know is that which we conceive.  Our world, our universe, all that we can possibly know is our reality.  Actually, it is more than that.  Our world includes our misconceptions, our mistakes, our errors, superstitions, prejudices and other errors.

What is not real to us is physical reality.  If we do not conceive of a thing we are confused, lost, without rational thought.  The instant we begin to make sense or assign thoughts or words to a situation we have entered a conceptual realm.  We use input from the physical realm to build our conceptual worlds, but we do not live in the physical realm.

If our world were purely physical there would be no self-awareness, no conceptuality, no intellect, nothing rational.  We would react as animals react, as plants react, we would not be able build intellectual or conceptual models, use figurative wording, understand relationships, aspects or attributes.

Humanity lives in a conceptual realm.  The alternative is hardly possible. We cannot become purely reactionary, cannot forget to order our environment with language or map our surroundings conceptually, or model our relationships with out surroundings.

Rational Pre-Existence is acceptance that the idea, model or concept is the most real, true and scientifically verifiable reality. The theory is our reality, in scientific terms, not the data. It is recognition of the fact that some of our ideas and concepts conform to a real and true, independently verifiable universal form.  It is recognition of the fact that the universally verifiable laws and principles we recognize in science and society exist, and pre-existed our discovery of those laws and principles.

This is not to say that all our concepts, even our universal concepts like racism and other prejudices, superstitions, economics and political theories are correct.  In fact, to accept pre-existence implicitly accepts the fact that NONE of our concepts can be wholly and completely true.  We have but a limited model of a part of a pre-existent conceptuality.