Category: Reading

The symbiotic ecology of the psychedelic realm

Reading | Philosophy of mind

Asher Walden, PhD | 2022-09-04

Psychedelics are becoming mainstream. In the wake of cannabis legalization, and following some of its legal and economic pathways, several psychedelic plants have been decriminalized in a number of cities across the US; and beginning in 2023, psilocybin will be legal (with various restrictions) in the entire state of Oregon. Clinical research on the medicinal use of psychedelics is being pursued at a frenzied pace, fueled by both philanthropic funding and extremely promising early results for their safety and efficacy in treating various recalcitrant mental health issues including addiction, depression and PTSD. There are well-endowed centers for research at Johns Hopkins, The University of Texas at Austin, NYU, Ohio State University, Mass General Hospital, etc., as well as a number of non-profit and public benefit corporations. And of course, for-profit and publicly traded companies have invested heavily in manufacturing and standardization, not only to supply clinical research, but to gain market share in the case that psychedelics are legalized nationally—an outcome they forecast the next few years. This list is of course limited to my own country; similar movement is parallel, or even outpacing these developments, in Canada, the UK, The Netherlands and elsewhere.

The need to train mental health professionals in the optimal use of these medicines has produced a surge in published work on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. But there is also a growing literature on the historical contexts of psychedelic plant use, the protection of indigenous knowledge and cultures, philosophical and speculative works on the content of psychedelic visions, and so on. This has opened up new possibilities for exploring psychedelics in the context of the arts, music, social theory, religious studies, and not least of all, the philosophy of consciousness. What follows is a beginning, an effort to make the first few steps in using the data from psychedelic experience to expand our philosophical understanding of what consciousness is, and how it relates to existence itself.

If a given consciousness is like everything else in the cosmos, we should be able to clarify at least two dimensions of its ontological structure: its distinction from other consciousnesses and its internal coherence. In other words, what is it that distinguishes a consciousness or a conscious self from other conscious selves? But also, what are the internal components or aspects of a consciousness, and how are they held together? Several authors have made good inroads into the first issue, describing in various ways how consciousness, though ultimately a single substance, can partition itself amongst selves who believe they are independent. But the issue of internal complexity has not been adequately addressed. While we may recognize certain kinds of multiplicity in our conflicting desires and discrete levels of self-knowledge, these considerations are almost always examined from a psychological perspective only, ignoring what they suggest about the metaphysics of consciousness. I would like to move in this direction by suggesting two kinds of constitutive principles: functional independence and symbiosis. Both of these principles can be understood by analogy to the human body.

By functional independence within the human body, I mean the limited integrity of the various organ systems. The circulatory system, the nervous system, and so on, each have a degree of functional autonomy, but at the same time, they are hierarchically structured in the sense that they serve a common telos [Editor’s note: purpose, goal] in the functioning of the body as a whole. Thus, they have both lateral interrelations, to the extent that they overlap, cooperate, and sometimes interfere with each other, as well as vertical relations. The overall integrity of these systems requires smooth functionality in both dimensions. In a similar way, we learn from the Abhidharma tradition [Editor’s note: ancient Buddhist philosophy] that consciousness can be analyzed in terms of its discrete perceptual bases, which have a number of interrelations. What we call sight, sound, hunger and anger are so many disparate consciousnesses that operate in parallel, but are also vertically aligned (by the five aggregates or categories) to form the experience of objects and events in the constructed world. The perceptual world is neither ultimately real, nor ultimately unreal. It simply has the constructed nature that it does, which is shared, robust and continuous in (our experience of) time. The nature of the self is that it is one construction among others. So, from this Buddhist perspective, if you want to understand what the self is, you simply need to understand the process by which the bases or foundations of perceptual consciousness are synthesized.

I have explored this kind of internal complexity in an earlier essay. For the remainder of the present essay, I want to focus on the other kind of internal plurality: namely, symbiosis. The analogy of the body, in this case, rests on the observation that much of our body is not our own at all, but made up of various quasi-independent microorganisms. I have in mind especially our gut bacteria, which are so important not only for the digestion of our food, but for the regulation of mood, our immune system, and even cognition. Researchers have found strong connections between our microbiome, stress and auto-immune responses such as inflammation, which is at the root of a host of physical illnesses. There is even evidence showing a relationship between gut biome diversity and autism. Given the sheer number of neurons in the gut, and its role in producing neurotransmitters such as serotonin, we are justified in saying that the gut thinks for itself (think, for instance, of ‘gut feelings’). But what’s important here is the fact that this second brain is, in large part, genetically alien. This means that our bodies are much more complex (logically, not just biologically) than we normally assume.

The body is like a nation-state in miniature, where most of its citizens are genetically similar, but a substantial minority are immigrants and refugees of questionable legal status. The issue of hospitality is of paramount importance here. At the risk of multiplying analogies recklessly, think about how one might respond to ants in the house. If you have a lot of ants there are at least two options. On the one hand you might lay out traps and poisons. There is even the nuclear option: the kind of poison which the ant takes back to the nest and which wipes out the entire colony. On the other hand, you could simply seal cracks in the molding and do a better job sweeping up crumbs, to minimize the motivation for ants to come in in the first place. Which option do you instinctively prefer? Now, what if I suggested that the ants you have were a special kind of carpenter ant, which actually helped maintain your house, repairing rotten wood, and even driving away disease-carrying vermin? Then you might think twice about trying to seal them out, much less trying to kill them all off. Just so, most of the bacteria in and on your body are not only not harmful, but very helpful in minimizing the harmful bacteria, along with their other household tasks. Doctors have finally started to come around to the dangers of overprescribing antibiotics! In our era, the most dangerous cells in our body are not foreign invaders, but our own cells mutated out of control in the form of cancers.

What I want to suggest here is that many of the thoughts and feelings we experience as ‘our own’ are not really our own at all, but genetically alien, quasi-independent selves, which exist in symbiosis with the ‘native’ aspects of our conscious lives as described in the Abhidharmic analysis. They are those mysterious and mischievous beings that have been called at various times gods, spirits, angels, demons, elves, archetypes, mass-delusions, aliens, neuroses, and so on. They constitute a rather heterogenous collection of forms of consciousness that have their own psychologies, their own moral principles, their own likes and dislikes. But like the microbiome in our guts, they serve prophylactic and other functional purposes that we are deeply dependent on. If we welcome them as full citizens of our psyche, we will be all the stronger for it.

The basis for the present proposal comes from the contemporary confluence of comparative mythology and religion on the one hand, and on the other the renaissance of research on psychedelics. This convergence has its roots in the work of the patriarchs of the ‘perennial philosophy’ (William James, Huston Smith, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts), who were themselves fascinated by the similarities between ancient myths and the phenomenological contents of non-ordinary states of consciousness. The implicit suggestion is that humans universally share the neurological capacity to enter into visionary states in which they experience interior but transpersonal events of the highest reality, value and meaning. The ways in which people enter these states are rather varied. They can be triggered by (among other things) oxygen depletion, fasting, sensory deprivation, drumming, psychoactive medicines, or most often, some combination thereof.

The contents of visionary states are widely consistent not only with each other, but with the contents of the world’s mythologies and religions. They include several classes of material experienced as ‘given’: Gods, spirits, angels and demons, and inhabitants of other realms of being; conscious intelligence in non-human actors such as animals, insects, plants and the Earth itself (herself?); Consciousness/Existence itself experienced as unified and purposeful; the souls of others, alive and dead; specific insights about one’s mortal life encompassing healing, moral renewal and vocation. So, from the perspective of the sheer subject matter, it obviously looks as if the stories, myths and beliefs that we think of as ‘religious’ may have their origin here. But what is actually happening here? Are people who take this medicine simply projecting unconsciously remembered myths and repressed wisdom onto the dreamlike stage of visionary experience? Or are the myths actually the literary record of encounters with independent non-physical realities?

The third option, a middle way, is that the experience is literally a manifestation of mind, that is, an opportunity to see the internal structure of one’s own consciousness, and an insight into the nature of consciousness more generally. Up till now, the primary context for describing and interpreting the entities encountered in visionary states has been mythic, religious and/or supernatural. On the other hand, the common denominator in all these categories can be seen as consciousness itself: the appearance of consciousness in unexpected places, and in unexpected forms. The term ‘psychedelic’ means ‘mind-manifesting.’ I want to argue that this is precisely what is happening in these states: the structure of the personal self, the ordinary ego identity, is temporarily stripped away, or at least thinned to the point of transparency, so that the underlying structures and forces that constitute consciousness more broadly are revealed. In this case, the various beings encountered are not independent selves in the way that individual humans (think they) are; rather, they are patterns in the structure of consciousness, best understood (so far) in terms of Jungian archetypes.

Recall that Jung [Editor’s note: Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung] was essentially a Kantian at heart. He believed that the archetypes functioned as structuring principles, universal categories that gave our experience their shape and texture. But how could this possibly work? Kant was talking about space, time and logical categories. These principles structure experience by giving form, but no content, to perceptual elements. By following out Jung’s analysis, we can see that the archetypes actually contribute a different kind of structure to experience, by giving perceptions their semiotic salience, their meaning and value. For us, things like sex, warfare, hunting, pilgrimage, birth and death are to discrete individual perceptions the way the constellations are to individual stars. They provide an over-arching trajectory and form that allows us to cognize vast quantities of data in very efficient ways. The way they do that, in part, is by turning an otherwise senseless series of events into a coherent story. But the relationship goes both ways: we rely on these archetypes for sense-making, while they rely on us to give them specific content. They are interested in our lives and push us in various unconscious ways toward courses of action that tell the story that they want (us) to tell.

In order to flesh out this admittedly speculative proposal, we can address these three questions: what is the evidence that these things exist? What is their ontology or mode of being? And how does this contribute to the working out of the idealist ontology more generally? Concerning the first question, what is the evidence that psychic symbiotes exist? Simply that we seem to encounter them, repeatedly and robustly, in roughly the ways that Jung says we do: in myths, dreams and psychedelic visions that spill over into our ordinary conscious life in distinctive and persistent ways. This is not to say that the archetypes as Jung understood them are the only such psychic symbiotes that exist—there is some reason to think that there are others. And ‘archetypes’ might not be a natural kind either: the term may turn out to comprise several sets of beings that are rather different in their logic, nature and scope. But whatever the actual extension of the category of psychic symbiotes, they do share certain ontological features that we can briefly summarize.

For one thing, these other beings are made up of consciousness. This should not be read in a deflationary sense, as if they are merely products of our collective imagination; after all, many of us believe that everything is, ultimately, made up of consciousness. My earlier use of the analogy to the physical body should not be taken to imply a dualist doctrine either. Nonetheless, a consciousness-only worldview, even if (or especially if) it is ultimately monistic or non-dualist, must take careful account of the deep, perhaps infinite internal complexity of consciousness, its varied forms, manifestations, resonances and conflicts. To say that those other beings are made up of consciousness is to say that they are no more or less real than our own conscious selves. However, unlike us, they do not necessarily have a bodily anchor within perceptual spacetime.

They are located both intrapsychically and transpersonally. That is, while we experience ourselves as located within, and in primary relation to, a single physical body, they appear to exist simultaneously within our own consciousness and within that of other people as well. (This is where the analogy to bacteria apparently breaks down.) On the other hand, if we change our frame of reference to look at souls as such, rather than bodies, we could just as easily see the others as unified and simple, and understand ourselves as located simultaneously within them, and between them. In fact, given the much longer timespan of their existence as compared to our own, this inside-out perspective is probably the more appropriate one.

Finally, they want what they want—we should not give in to the temptation to think that they are merely subaltern expression of ourselves. They are mostly (but not always) friendly to humans, to the extent that they depend upon us as much as we depend upon them. But their forms of life are profoundly different from our own. As to the subjective experience of their own conscious perspective, we can hardly imagine. It’s not just a matter of imagining what it would be like to be a dog or cat, instead of a human. It would be more akin to imagining what it would be like to be a gene, or a galaxy.

The third question asked above was, how does this kind of consideration contribute to our ongoing efforts to ramify the idealist perspective? It shows how human consciousness is simply a braid or a strand in the tapestry of consciousness that is the cosmos, where each stand is itself a tightly woven band of finer threads, and simultaneously is itself woven into larger braids. Idealist metaphysics tend to echo the neo-Platonic trajectory in treating the singleness of ultimate consciousness as primary, and its various manifestations as derived from that original unity. On the other hand, what would it look like to treat the most specific, most diverse plurality of consciousnesses as basic, with unity being generated by successive modes of interrelation? The middle way here is to allow for a flexibility of perspective, such that we can treat, for the purpose of a given analysis, any level or frame of consciousness as basic, and then move either ‘up’ or ‘down’ to look at its parts, or that of which it is a part.

Kant taught us that time, space and the elements of logic are stipulations of the way we organize perceptions in conscious experience. The upshot of this line of reasoning is to emphasize that mereology, the relationship between a whole and its parts, between the one and the many, is similarly constructed. This applies, in ways that may make us uncomfortable, to ourselves as well. It is strange to think that the parts that comprise us are not entirely homogenous, not entirely our own. And it may be even more difficult to accept that we ourselves are only parts, from the perspective of some greater whole. For a number of social and political reasons, it is salutary in our time to continue to push away from Leibnizian Monads, understood as individual discrete units of consciousness, and towards a greater sensitivity to the ways in which consciousnesses overlap, intertwine and mutually constitute one another. Likewise, we should push back against the notion that human consciousness as we normally experience it is the basis or measure for all forms of consciousness in the universe. It may be that the use of psychedelics, and the creative possibilities for culture that they may inspire, will help in this regard.

 

In lieu of a traditional bibliography for this informal essay, I would like to acknowledge, with gratitude, the influence of Dr. Robert Corrington in my own work.

Situating Analytic Idealism within Nietzsche’s critique of realism: A world-historical view

Reading | Philosophy

Prof. Richard Grego, PhD | 2022-08-14

Friedrich Nietzsche’s work is so influential that almost every subsequent school of thought across disciplines (from philosophy to the social-behavioral sciences to literature, critical theory and the fine arts) has acknowledged at least some connection to—if not an affinity with—his philosophical legacy. Central to this legacy is a hierarchical conceptualization of knowledge and reality that also reveals an important distinction between philosophical “realism” (the view that there exists an objectively real world or true facts separate from our subjective perspectives on them) and “anti-realism” (the view that we cannot transcend our subjective perspective on reality and hence can never know reality or truth objectively or in itself); a distinction that has been crucial to theories of mind and metaphysics throughout the world’s intellectual history. Placing comparative idealist and materialist ontologies within the framework of Nietzsche’s hierarchy of knowledge and the realist and anti-realist dichotomy, can highlight essential characteristics crucial to understanding their respective positions in this connection. Further, situating Kastrup’s analytic idealism within this Nietzschean framework reveals important aspects of its ontology in novel ways.

In an early essay On Truth and Lie in an Extra Moral Sense [1], and elsewhere, Nietzsche describes an ontological-epistemic hierarchy whereby our knowledge of reality becomes increasingly distant and dissociated from the authentic experience of reality from which it emerged, leaving our knowledge of, and connection to, reality vague at best and deluded at worst: Reality in itself, insofar as it can be described at all, is an incomprehensibly creative chaos—a well-spring of infinite possibilities, perspectives and events occurring in multifarious ways. Since we are unable to directly comprehend this chaos, we develop “metaphors” and then “concepts” constructed from metaphors, through which to understand it.

This is both natural and inevitable, Nietzsche claims, since reality at its most fundamental level—or what (co-opting Schopenhauer’s term) he called the “Will” or “Will-to-power”, and what Nietzsche’s contemporary, William James, in Principles of Psychology [2], described as the “great blooming buzzing confusion” of pure unmediated experience, the unbounded spectrum of unfolding potentials in our world—is too overwhelming for a limited, local human mind to rationally assimilate and still remain sane, or even survive. Our minds must—through sense perception, mental associations, symbols and language—turn this relentless flood of raw pre-cognitive events, from a world of limitless and perpetually evolving possibilities, into more limited, orderly and abstract actualities. For our survival, we transform the chaos of pure reality into a mentally digestible conceptual order. We do this by turning our sense data from pure experience into “metaphors” or symbols that attempt to describe this data (albeit with very limited success) in terms of abstract ideas, and then we refine our symbolic metaphors into what we take to be more accurate depictions of sense data: “concepts.” Eventually we become so accustomed to seeing reality through the lens of our metaphors and concepts that we think the metaphors and concepts literally are reality. Kastrup’s illustration of “our perceptions as a cosmic dashboard providing salient, but indirect, information about the mental universe out there” [3], which then becomes illusory when we take this information to literally be the universe out there, speaks precisely to Nietzsche’s point. Since our limited (dissociated) minds are unable to directly experience the ultimate depth and richness of reality (fundamental consciousness), which is their source, they experience it in terms of sense data and the conceptual constructs derived from this sense data.

 

NIETZSCHE’S ONTOLOGY
The Will (chaotic flux of all existence) generating:
> Metaphors (via sense impressions derived from the Will)
> Concepts (abstract ideas derived from sense impressions)

 

Interestingly, there is an important sense in which ‘materialist’ (sometimes referred to as ‘physicalist’) ontologies—the view that all reality reduces exclusively to material entities or forces that can be described by the physical sciences—share Kastrup’s and Nietzsche’s perspective. Materialist theories of consciousness in philosophy, neuroscience and psychology view the limitations of our knowledge via a kind of inverse hierarchy, whereby the interaction of the physical world with the neuro-chemical structure and activity of our brains gives rise to sense perceptions, which then give rise to ideas: concepts derived from these sense perceptions. Unlike Kastrup, however, this materialist theory holds that the material-physical world from which this mental hierarchy arises is the sole fundamental ontological reality, and that phenomena become increasingly illusionary as they progress from physical interactions to conscious experience [4]. Keith Frankish, a well-known advocate of a version of materialism called ‘illusionism,’ writes:

Illusionists agree with other physicalists that our sense of having a rich phenomenal consciousness is due to introspective mechanisms. But they add that these mechanisms misrepresent their targets. Think of watching a movie. What your eyes are actually witnessing is a series of still images rapidly succeeding each other. But your visual system represents these images as a single fluid moving image. The motion is an illusion. Similarly, illusionists argue, your introspective system misrepresents complex patterns of brain activity as simple phenomenal properties. The phenomenality is an illusion. [5]

 

MATERIALIST—ILLUSIONIST ONTOLOGY
Physical world / laws of physics generating:
> Brain neurochemistry caused by the physical world / laws
> Sense impressions (qualia), conscious thoughts, etc. caused by brain neurochemistry

 

Much closer to Kastrup than materialists like Frankish—whose work Kastrup has refuted himself—there is a rich heritage of ‘idealism’ (the view that all reality is ultimately mental, or the activity of consciousness) in many of the world’s intellectual traditions, which have also posed similarly structured hierarchies of knowledge, albeit in ways that turn the materialist hierarchy on its head. Plato viewed both sense-perceptions and the conceptual constructs derived from them as illusory, in much the same way as the materialists. However, inverting the materialist hierarchy, Plato’s idealist ontology places a kind of cosmic consciousness (called “the Good”) at the creative pinnacle of all existence: It generates the less real, abstract, quasi-spiritual, quasi-mathematical “Forms” or ideas which, in turn, generate even less real individual minds, thoughts, bodily sensations and—least real of all—what we perceive as the physical world [6]. Traditional Buddhist cosmology describes a very similar regressive hierarchy of reality and knowledge leading from an all-encompassing universal consciousness  (“arupadhatu” or formless potentiality), which engenders a realm of cosmic order and Jungian-type archetypal spirits (“rupadhatu”), which in turn generates the world of individual minds, sense-perceptions and physical objects-forces (“kamadhatu”) [7]. Even physicist David Bohm’s quantum theory involving a “super-implicate order” (the dynamic realm of all potentialities for the physical world), generating the “Implicate order” (the structure of this potentiality’s unfolding in spacetime), which then generates the “explicate order” of the physical universe, is arguably an expression of, or analogous to, the idealist legacy that largely inspired it [8].

 

PLATO	BUDDHISM	BOHM’S PHYSICS
The Good generating:	Arupadhatu generating:	Super-Implicate Order generating:
> the Forms	> Rupadhatu	> Implicate order
> the sensory-material world	> Kamadhatu	> Explicate order

 

Thus, both the idealist and the materialist views of knowledge are hierarchical (in that they pose an ontological-epistemic order from less to more real, and eventually to the absolutely real)  and realist (because there is one absolutely true reality to which these hierarchies correspond). It just goes in opposite directions for each tradition: the Platonists think that the more you move in an immaterial-mental-transcendent direction, and away from the material-nonmental, the more real you get; the more you approach reality and ultimate truth. The materialists think that the more you move in a material and sensual direction, away from the non-material and mental, the closer you are to reality or ultimate truth. However, while idealism and materialism disagree with one another on this most basic ontological ground, they also, from Nietzsche’s vantage-point, share one important similarity that makes both an anathema to his own philosophy: their common commitment to philosophical realism.

Nietzsche agrees with both idealist and materialist frameworks to the extent that (as explained above), like them, he sees a hierarchical scale of self-delusion involved in our attempts to attain true knowledge of absolute reality. However, their delusion is that any true knowledge of absolute reality can be attained at all. Since they base their hierarchies on idealized conceptions of ultimate absolute truth (whether mental or material), both these traditions are mistaken. All human attempts to attain absolute truth through conceptual constructs—whether in religion, philosophy or science—are equally misguided, since they believe they can arrive at some complete Grand Idea or Ultimate Concept of reality through abstract reasoning and mentally contrived ideas. Plato and his legacy, Nietzsche claims, place an idealized absolute reality at the pinnacle of a grandiose ontological-epistemic hierarchy as the ultimate Form of all forms: an eternal, unchanging, absolute cosmic Mind from which the lesser reality of an ever-evolving material world emanates. Then Post-Enlightenment materialists simply turned the Platonic hierarchy around without fundamentally changing it, by locating this absolute Truth at the physical ground of a scientific cosmic order from which (somehow, mysteriously and inexplicably) the illusion of mental activity springs. Nietzsche agrees with the materialists that the Platonic quest to capture reality via abstract concepts is an exercise in self-deception, because it mistakes concepts of reality for reality itself; a reality that, Nietzsche insists, our concepts can never be trusted to do justice to. But Nietzsche also thinks that the materialist are doing the same thing—perhaps even worse—because they also assume there is a fundamental material reality (the world defined by the physical sciences) ontologically prior to, and more real than, the concepts we have about it, unwittingly ignoring the fact that the “physical world” is itself is merely another concept about reality!

Ever the arch anti-realist, Nietzsche rejects both idealist and materialist worldviews for their respective forms of realism: for supposing that some final, God’s-eye-view definition of Truth and reality transcends all biased and illusory views. It’s not that there is no ultimate reality; it’s just that this reality eludes our epistemic purview as soon as we even begin to conceive of it. The infinite depth and variety of reality inspires and gives rise to our metaphors and concepts, but it is too profoundly wondrous (and terrible) to be reduced to, or captured by, these metaphors/concepts. As soon as we transform the richness of pure experience into a concept, it ceases to be what it genuinely is, by being abstracted into our intellectualized conception of it. Like the flowing water of a stream caught in a bucket, living experience loses its vitality when it is reduced to abstract concepts. To return to Nietzsche’s hierarchical schema: the anarchic “Will” isn’t non-existence; just the opposite. The incomprehensible and ineffable Will is existence in its most authentic form, but only authentic insofar as—like Lao Tzu’s “Tao” that, when named, ceases to be the Tao [9]—it remains unspoken, unthought and beyond the limitations of reifying metaphors or concepts. Nietzsche’s Will, like the varieties of existentialist “freedom” and “nothingness” that it inspired, is Reality and Truth that can only perhaps be realized in some absolute sense by being it—dynamically and spontaneously—rather than just thinking about it.

There are also anti-realist ontological-epistemic hierarchies similar to Nietzsche’s: for instance, Nagarjuna’s Madyamika Buddhist ontology [10] describes the illusory world of sense perception (“samsara”) as less real than the realm of enlightened consciousness (“Nirvana”), but only insofar as Nirvana is simply the realization that the samsaric world it encompasses is not real in an absolute sense. Both samsara and Nirvana are rendered unreal, in turn, by reality’s ultimate incomprehensibility (“emptiness”), since even Nirvana’s disclosures about reality are void of ultimate reality insofar as they involve concepts of, or statements about, reality. The Bohr-Heisenberg interpretation of reality via quantum physics is analogous to Madyamika’s anti-realist subversion of hierarchies: the indiscernible domain of “nature” under investigation in quantum physics gives rise to derivative theories about nature and its forces, which in turn generate even more abstract boundary conditions for deriving these theories, the reality of which is paradoxically undermined by their grounding in the mysterious phenomenon they are attempting to understand in the first place! As Heisenberg explained in his famous Physics and Philosophy:

We cannot disregard the fact that natural science was formed by men. Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature … it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning … This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like space and time. Therefore it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth. [11]

One essential characteristic all these anti-realist theories share is that they remain ontologically neutral in an important sense. Neither Nietzche’s “Will” nor Nargarjuna’s “emptiness” nor Bohr-Heisenberg’s “nature” have any definable “substance” in any conventional sense of this term. Like “Brahman” in Advaita Vedanta or the “God” of apophatic theology and Sufi mysticism, they remain the ubiquitous source of all existence but cannot be identified as existents themselves.

 

NAGARJUNA-Madyamika	BOHR-HEISENBERG
EMPTINESS encompassing:	NATURE encompassing:
** Samsara >< Nirvana **	** Modules-theories >< Boundary conditions **
(co-creating each other within emptiness)	(co-creating each other within unbounded nature)

 

And it is here that Kastrup’s analytic idealism might be usefully situated within this realist/anti-realist framework. In fact, if analytic idealism is anti-realist in this way, it would not only differentiate his philosophy from those of 19^th-century thinkers like Berkley, the German Idealists, American Transcendentalists and later British idealists [12], or even contemporary idealists and cosmopsychists, whose respective versions of idealism arguably trend toward the kind of realism that Nietzsche critiques, but, more importantly, it would make Kastrup’s ontology less vulnerable to this critique itself. Like most analytic philosophers, Kastrup has a predilection for logical clarification, precise definitions and classification, which can give his arguments the kind of abstractly conceptual or “realistic” sounding tenor that Nietzsche was averse to. He has often referred to himself as a “scientific realist,” for instance, when declaring his epistemic commitment to scientific integrity [13]. This might sound contrary not only to anti-realism but also to his own idealist principles. Moreover, along these same lines, he has actually speculated about what the metaphysical nature of universal consciousness (or Will) might be—in stating that it is most likely impersonal—which would seem, in a realist vein, to attribute definitive properties to universal consciousness.

However, a more important consideration here is what Kastrup means by terms like “realism,” and what his thinking along these lines amounts to. As far as scientific realism is concerned, Kastrup has clarified his position clearly, stating that:

my position is that both space and time are qualities of experience … spacetime is not an ontological primitive; it isn’t some kind of scaffolding independent of consciousness. It is only an amalgamation of qualities—amenable to mathematical modeling—that themselves only exist in consciousness. I thus stand by my core claim that consciousness is the sole ontological primitive. [14]

Kastrup’s brand of scientism realism appears, therefore, to be of a Kantian variety (referring here to the philosopher Emanuel Kant): The scientific-empirical reality we can make objective claims about (defined by Kant as “phenomenal” knowledge) is delimited paradoxically by the subjective parameters of our sense data and interpretive concepts (defined by Kant as “categories” of understanding). However, the objective reality we are attempting to describe, or ultimate reality in itself (what Kant calls the “noumenal”), remains beyond the ability of our limited phenomenal knowledge to comprehend [15]. In this, way scientific knowledge is reliably discernible, stable and objectively real insofar as it captures a genuine aspect of truth: what reality looks like when viewed through the scientific lens. However, insofar as this knowledge is only an abstract and truncated model of reality, rather than a complete rendering of reality in itself (physicist Steven Hawking’s theory of “model dependent realism” in The Grand Design comes to mind in this connection [16]), it cannot be a “real” representation of the Truth in any absolute sense. Kastrup’s scientific realism, therefore, qualifies as both a realist and an anti-realist position, depending upon how it is understood.

 

KASTRUP
Universal Consciousness generating:	Universal Consciousness encompassing:
> Individual identity, sense impressions, ideas	** Self-identity >< external world **
> the concept of an external physical world

 

While his definitive assertions about the impersonal nature of universal consciousness are more difficult to reconcile with an anti-realist ontology—which places apprehension of universal consciousness in itself beyond the purview of conceptual categories and constructs—Kastrup qualifies everything he says about universal consciousness with the reminder that any such statements—his own included—are just ‘phenomenal’ in the Kantian sense and not absolutely true of the ‘noumenal’ universal consciousness itself. Eschewing his usual analytic formality, he candidly explains:

everything is in it and therefore everything is in nothing. Nothing exists and nothing is going on. And out of that nothing everything exists. The entire richness of the drama of life … exists in this nothing … What I’m saying now violates our categories, and normally I surrender to the categories of our culture because that is the only way to be respected in a culture that has elevated those categories to the position of religious truths … I’m trying to transcend those categories. This dichotomy between nothing and everything is entirely artificial. [17]

Thus, with respect to Nietzsche’s critique of ontological hierarchies and realism, Kastrup’s ontology presents the prospect of resolving the important dilemmas with which Nietzsche was concerned. Like Nietzsche, Kastrup’s ontology and theory of knowledge can be viewed hierarchically. However, also like Nietzche’s “Will,” which is radically subversive of all paradigms and hierarchies, Kastrup’s notion of universal consciousness devests these hierarchies of independent substance, even as it invests them with genuine symbolic meaning. The universe’s entities, categories and concepts are indeed objectively real, but only as expressions of a deeper reality—universal consciousness—of which they are, paradoxically, subjective aspects. In this way, his idealist ontology resolves and transcends the Neitzschean critique levelled against the entire history of philosophy, religion and science. Nietzsche often lamented the end of history and, with it, any hope for progress in humanity’s quest for Truth. However, he sometimes expressed hope that a new mode of understanding, in the form of a metaphysics that transcends metaphysics itself, could emerge from the graveyard of humanity’s prior, failed, spiritual-intellectual ambitions along these lines. Kastrup’s novel approach—representing in many ways the culmination of a perennial effort to achieve this ambition—may serve as the beginning of such a metaphysics.

 

References

1. https://archive.org/details/NietzscheOnTruthAndLie/page/n7/mode/2up
2. http://www.public-library.uk/ebooks/50/61.pdf
3. https://www.amazon.com/Science-Ideated-Mainstream-Scientific-Worldview/dp/1789046688 (152)
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo
5. https://aeon.co/essays/what-if-your-consciousness-is-an-illusion-created-by-your-brain
6. https://www.amazon.com/Sensual-Austerity-and-Moral-Leadership_-Cross_Cultural-Perspectives-from-Plato_-Confucius_-and-Gandhi-on-Building-a-Peaceful-Society/dp/303089150X?keywords=richard+grego&qid=1636349443&s=books&sr=1-2&linkCode=li3&tag=infinite092-20&linkId=0d2106f76bbd9abe724fbb3fb8fbc104&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_il
7. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203451175/buddhist-unconscious-william-waldron
8. https://archive.org/details/wholenessandtheimplicateorderdavidbohm/page/n119/mode/2up
9. https://www.with.org/tao_te_ching_en.pdf
10. https://aaari.info/notes/03-06-06Tam2.pdf
11. https://vdocuments.net/heisenberg-physics-and-philosophy.html?page=15 (39-53)
12. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/#FateIdeaTwenCent
13. https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=mcafee&ei=UTF-8&p=bernardo+kastrup+scientific+realism&type=E211US105G0#id=1&vid=33cf86de45a3ec3dd49ac3610343219a&action=click
14. https://www.amazon.com/Idea-World-Multi-Disciplinary-Argument-Reality/dp/1785357395 (252)
15. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4280
16. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7lZ7JU-iHeBNllYTVdRS2JjbEE/view?resourcekey=0-Cthfm9YTNyaRElOy1Qp_Yg
17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBlbAF5h1gw

Playing in the field: The nature of children and consciousness

Reading | Psychology

Donna Thomas, PhD | 2022-08-07

Interest in children’s unexplained experiences, such as telepathy or imaginary friends, tends to be centered on the question of whether such experiences are real. Yet, once we start to consider the nature of childhood, the focus shifts more towards questions over definitions of ‘real,’ in terms of how reality is defined when making claims about children and their experiences. Children navigate the everyday world through imagination and play, states of mind often considered subjective fantasy and, as a result, never afforded time to be queried with children. In our modern age, it isn’t only younger children who are navigating the imaginal realms; older children and teens, too, spend most of their time in cyberspace. Not only does this affect children’s cognitive capabilities—for example, enhancing metacognition, spatial visualization and perceptual speed—video gaming can catalyze states of consciousness similar to those found in activities such as meditation and yoga nidra.¹ Studies show how video gaming was found to be an amplifier of experience, like prayer or meditation. A sharp correspondence has been found between a high prevalence of lucid dreaming and game playing across teenage populations.²

An absence of research into children and consciousness lends itself to assumptions made about children’s ways of being and subjective experiences. Autism is a good example of this. Despite the increasing number of children diagnosed with autism, there is no clear pathophysiology. Autism is still poorly understood and there isn’t a straightforward aetiology [Editor’s note: cause of a health condition] for its emergence. Autism is defined scientifically through different lenses—for instance, in terms of genetics—and rarely explored from the perspectives of children with autism. In 2006, William Stillman published Autism and the God Connection, a book that aimed to redefine the autistic experience. Stillman shares the story of Boone, a five-year-old boy with autism. Boone’s mother reported that six months prior to the events in New York on September 11, 2001, Boone drew over 100 clocks, each with the time set to 9:11. Drawings of balls of fire and smoke from tall buildings with many windows were also created by Boone. What makes children with autism more open to experiences such as precognition may be their acute sensitivities—such as sensory, emotional, cognitive and spiritual sensitivities—all caused by differences in their neurological development.³

Earlier studies into children and ESP began to show how experiences such as telepathy or telekinesis could be extensions of our natural cognitive functions,⁴ especially for children who experience a deficit in areas of their cognitive functioning, such as non-verbal children. In this way, experiences such as telepathy and clairvoyance would be extensions of normal perceptual processes. For example, precognition would be the reversal of memory and telekinesis an extension of motor abilities in children. In other words, these experiences are not super or paranormal; they naturally occur in response to a child’s need to survive and interact with the environment.⁵ In the late seventies, parapsychologist Alex Tanous co-authored a book with Katherine Donnelly that offered advice to adults for supporting their psychic child. Tanous & Donnelly advanced thinking around children and psi towards the idea that children could naturally enter altered states of consciousness, such as bilocation, or being in two spots at the same time.

 

Playing in consciousness

For adults, reality can be clearly defined by what is logical or possible and shared by many people, and there can be clear instances when a child miscalculates an illusion, such as mistaking an adult dressed as a teddy bear for an actual big teddy bear. This doesn’t mean that children’s imaginary worlds or playful activities don’t hold some aspect of a reality that goes beyond usual ideas of a fixed, physical world. For example, play is a child’s activity that is mostly taken for granted; very little is known about the nature of play. Social scientists may speculate that it is a socially constructed activity where children will mimic the world of adults. This claim may carry some validity, but there could be far more to play than meets the eye. Play cuts across species and carries many benefits for wellbeing. Playing entrains or brings into sync brain waves and physiological systems in mothers and children. When children play, they weave strands of ancestral inheritance, embodying self in material and non-material spaces.⁵ Creativity is often viewed as a product of play, but perhaps the impulse to create may in fact cause children to play. As the playwright George Bernard Shaw reminds us, “we don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

In early religious scripture, play is synonymous with a joyful state of presence. The literature around altered states of consciousness in adults refers to this as transcendence or states of oneness. Play, in its deepest form, entails a transcendence of the norm, a state of consciousness from which different expressions, such as freedom, happiness, connectedness and creativity, emerge. William James noted how ritual and play induced transmarginal consciousness, states that are subtly veiled in the everyday.⁷ Trance has been linked to ritual and play, with one class of play referred to as the ilinx, the Greek word for whirlpool.⁸ Ilinx is a type of trance state, “an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind … surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure or shock which destroys reality with a sovereign brusqueness.” In children, this may be seen in spinning around until they fall over in fits of laughter, or moving in great rotations on playground equipment. In adult ritual, this may be seen in the whirling dervishes or the parachuter hurtling to earth from the plane. In Children’s Folklore: A Handbook, Elizabeth Tucker discusses dangerous play, in the form of nonsexual choking games played by children, that are similar to adult and adolescent versions of asphyxiation. Children enjoy this form of play because of the ecstatic feelings associated with oxygen deprivation. It becomes clear that there are many natural and subtle ways that children may enter different states of consciousness that are conducive to experiences considered anomalous.

 

Consciousness and self

Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) saw play as a state, rather than a functional activity. Winnicott used the term ‘transitional’ to refer to a space between inner and outer reality. A transitional object, such as a toy, is used to bridge inner and outer worlds. Despite the transitional object being viewed as an external object by an outside observer, Winnicott suggests it is experienced by the infant as being neither self, other, internal or external, but on the boundary between these as a point of intersection. A transitional object is one “about which the question ‘is it created by me, or does it come from the outside’ cannot be meaningfully asked, because it does not exist in any of these psychic realms.”⁹ Infants’ perceptions of objects being part of who they are is seen as an illusory act. This illusion, according to Winnicott, is an infant’s sense of being omnipresent, creating the external world and perceiving everything as a facet of one’s own subjectivity. But perhaps, unlike what is suggested by Winnicott, there is no illusion of omnipresence; rather, children see through the separation between so-called objects, such separation being the illusion. Children seem to intuit a subjectivity that extends far beyond the bundle of thoughts, sensations and perceptions known as ‘me.’

Young children, in their pre-egoic state, experience self and others, inner and outer worlds, as one homogenous experience. Jung observed how very young children still have “an awareness of mythological contents … haunted by a constant yearning to remain with or return to the original vision.”¹⁰ Others have noted the “original vision” as the dynamic ground of being or, in Lacanian terms, “the register of the real.”¹¹ Some scholars have argued that children’s pre-egoic states are chthonic, rooted in a dark underworld—rather than the transcendental realms—only accessible to those who already sport an ego, such as adults.¹² Psychologists have argued that children possess a natural joy, wonder and connection, character virtues that Plato and Aristotle saw as intrinsic to the “nature of soul.” Although the influential child psychologist, Jean Piaget, described children as “artificialists,” egocentric and coerced by their parents when sharing their intuitions about the nature of reality, contemporary research suggests this is not the case. Instead, children are “natural theists”¹³ who intuit teleological explanations of a universe imbued with meaning and purpose.

As adults, would we so easily dismiss children as fantasists if a new understanding of the nature of consciousness and reality became available? Today, the mainstream model of materialism—which still carries a hegemony over child development theories, research and systems that support children—is being questioned.

 

Ideas of the world through the I’s of children

If ideas of the world are to be formed from the living experiences of children, it becomes clear that materialism, as the dominant model of reality, doesn’t cut it. Not only does materialism lack explanatory power for making sense of children’s ways of being and experiences, it also denies them. A process of elimination may be warranted to find better ontologies that could support not just our understanding of children, but also inform wider social transformation. To stay committed to the living experiences of children, an idea of the world needs to accommodate several qualities children demonstrate:

• A sense of I-ness or Me-ness that carries qualities of being collective, connected and shared, rather than located and individual.
• Experiences that go beyond usual notions of personhood, space and time.
• Appeals to nature.
• Natural virtues such as creativity, wisdom and intuition.

Challenging mainstream materialism requires a courage to break free from normative systems of thought, which determine not only our ideas of self and the world, but also our livelihoods, credibility and acceptance within research institutions. Panpsychism, as one alternative, may not require this type of bravery, as it stays safely within the parameters of materialism, simply claiming consciousness to be a fundamental existent in matter. But panpsychism has a problem with the subject, as it cannot explain how several smaller subjects—such as those at the level of subatomic particles—combine to make larger subjects such as you and me. To circumvent this, advocates of panpsychism propose even an elimination of self, of subjectivity, to address the subject combination problem.¹⁴ After all, if there is no self, there is no problem. But although there are legitimate doubts about a type of self that we tend to identify with—a subject that is located, centered and individual—children reveal a self, a subject, that is non-local, decentered and shared. Indeed, infants and children’s ways of being, their sense of omnipresence and intuitive explanations of the world, suggest that there is a subject: something to which experience is known. Staying committed to the living experiences of children entails a need to explain their sense of

ipseity or selfhood … a conscious presence devoid of form and objects, yet ready to assume ordinary qualitative tones and to serve as the apprehending recipient of objects if the right conditions for the emergence of an individual conscious perspective materialize. (Shani & Keppler 2018)

For Shani & Keppler, consciousness entails a state of subjectivity described as a pure subject, which does not have individual perspectives. Individual subjects form when the pure subject is conditioned through different forces, a little like the factors needed to turn water into steam (heat) or ice (cold).

Idealist models of reality, such as those proposed by Shani & Keppler, Kastrup and others, would position children as “patterns of self-excitation of consciousness,”¹⁵ alters of a mind-at-large. For a child, the boundaries of their experiential field may be more permeable to the larger field of mind, the “original vision,” for adults experience more layers of conditioning than children. If so, children’s experiences and ways of being could be considered valid and revealing, as opposed to mere fantasies. Whether in dreams, through play or jumping in puddles, children are already where they should be, in communion with the true nature of reality, while adults are left out. We have forgotten how to play or be in eternity with an earthworm; we can’t remember how to create different worlds, filled with exciting creatures; we don’t hear the whispers of the ancestors telling us to slow down, be quiet and go sit with a tree. Children are not afraid to ask the big questions about reality; let’s be inspired, follow suit and start to playfully question everything we thought we knew about the world.

 

References

1. see Gachenbach, 2006
2. see Ionas, 2015
3. see Bogdashina, 2015
4. see Ehrenwald, 1978
5. Terry Marks-Tarlow, 2015
6. see James, 1902-1910
7. see Caillois, 1961
8. see Rosegrant, 2001
9. see Jung, 1931
10. see Lacan, 1981; see Kristeva, 1980
11. see Wilbur earlier works, 1984
12. see Taylor, 2009
13. see Keleman, 2004
14. see Harris, 2021
15. see Kastrup, 2018

 

Bibliography

Bogdashin, O. (2013). Autism and Spirituality: Psyche, Self and Spirit in People on the Autism. Spectrum Paperback

Caillois, R. (1961). Man, Play and Games. University of Illinois Press

Ehrenwald, J. (1978). The ESP Experience: A psychiatric validation. Basic Books Inc.

Gackenbach, J. (2006). Video game play and lucid dreams: Implications for the development of consciousness. Dreaming, 16(2), 96-110

 Harris, A. (2021). A Solution to the Combination Problem and the Future of Panpsychism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28(9), 129-140

Ionas, G. (2015). Video Games and the Internet and their Effects upon the Brain of Children and Adolescents. Journal of Business Economics and Information Technology, 2(6)

James, W. (1988). William James: Writings 1902-1910: The Varieties of Religious Experience/Pragmatism/A Pluralistic Universe/The Meaning of Truth. Library of America, William James Edition 

Jung, CG (1931). The Stages of Life. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Volume 8. The Collected Works of Carl Jung

Kastrup, B. (2018). The Universe in Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25 (5), 125-155

Keleman, D. (2004). Are Children “Intuitive Theists”?: Reasoning About Purpose and Design in Nature. Psychological Science, 15(5):295-301

Kristeva, J. (1980). The Bounded Text. In Roudiez, LS (ed.), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, pp. 36-63. New York: Columbia University Press

Lacan, J. (1981). Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. JA Miller. New York: Norton

Marks-Tarlow, T. (2015). From Emergency to Emergence: The Deep Structure of Play in Psychotherapy. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 25:1, 108-123

Taylor. S (2009). Beyond the pre/trans fallacy: The validity or pre-egoic spiritual experience.  The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2009, Vol. 41, No. 1

Wilber, K. (1984). The Developmental Spectrum and Psychopathology: Part I, stages and types of pathology. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 198

The timeless mind: A thought experiment

Reading | Ontology | 2022-07-31

Massimiliano Sorrentino, PhDDaniela Panighetti

In our previous two essays (see here and here), we have shown that there is reason to believe that mind may be older than is currently thought. More specifically, we outlined a scenario in which life on Earth is the work of a conscious author engaged in a creative process. From a third person perspective, this author’s first-person experience would be perceived as the activity of the Earth’s atmospheric system, corresponding in this scenario to the author’s ‘brain.’ If this is indeed the case, we must push the appearance of mind back to at least four billion years ago; in other words, to the time when life is currently thought to have first appeared on Earth.

The issue we would like to explore now actually precedes the question of the origin of the mind. What we would now like to ask is whether it is possible for mind to have had an origin at all. Such a question is naturally too complex to be addressed in just a few lines, so we will broach a simplified version of it, tackling the problem from an epistemological perspective. We therefore suggest posing the following question: is it possible to construct a well-formulated theory illustrating the way in which mind originated from matter at a certain point in the past?

Irrespective of how far back in time we might push the appearance of mind, we believe that it is not possible to develop a well-formulated theory of its actual origin under materialism. The ultimate reason for the inability to do so stems from the fact that mental contents emanate directly from our experience; conversely, we are unable to have direct experience of the hypothetical ontological substance known as matter, other than as a mental concept. The mind therefore holds an epistemological primacy as compared to matter: we have greater certainty of the existence of mind than we do of matter. Any attempt to explain the origin of mind taking matter as the starting point exhibits a divergence between the ontological plane and the epistemological one.

To delve deeper into this point, let us focus on the correspondence between mental and physical brain states. When we perceive a circular shape within our field of vision, a precise neural pattern is activated in the visual cortex. If that pattern is activated in a somewhat artificial manner, we nevertheless perceive a circular shape, regardless of whether a circular object is before us or not. Materialist theories of consciousness not only fail to explain the appearance of perceptual experience, they also do not explain why any particular brain state should be identical to the experience of perceiving a circular shape. In other words, they do not tell us anything about the nature of this puzzling neural code of perceptions. Conversely, when we refer to the genetic code, for example, we are well aware of the biochemistry responsible for the correspondence between base triplets and amino acids; and even if we were not familiar with it, we would nevertheless be able to research it rigorously, according to the scientific method. Under materialism, it is not possible to understand, in principle, how a theory of the origin of mind might be developed.

We wish to underline that the problem does not lie in the fact that, at present, we do not have a plausible theory of consciousness under materialism. Rather, the problem is that it does not appear possible to even imagine how such a theory might be formulated. Even if we had an understanding—down to the minutest physical detail—of the way in which the brain, the atmospheric system and other possibly conscious systems function, we would still be none the wiser as to why a system with certain physical characteristics should be endowed with consciousness. Moreover, we would remain equally ignorant as to why certain brain activation patterns correspond to whatever mental patterns they correspond to. An obstacle of this nature is not found in any other area of science, which should be no surprise: what we are trying to explain here—i.e., subjectivity—was excluded from scientific enquiry in the very delineation of the scientific method itself. In the scientific method, the subjective perception of heat is replaced by the objective height of a column of mercury. Therefore, when tackling the problem of consciousness in a world conceptualized as material and objective, it becomes impossible to recover the subject—i.e., an individual who experiences the sensation of heat. The problem, therefore, is a failure to remember that the subject has been excluded from the ontology for purely epistemological reasons—i.e., so as to formulate the scientific method.

We should note that such problems would not arise if the ontological and epistemological planes were not split, as in idealism. Indeed, in any idealism, the mind is assumed to be the only ontological substance, without an origin. In such an ontology, matter—the non-mental substance—would be replaced by the substance that makes up our very mental contents. In such a conceptualization, the subject cannot be excluded from the ontological set. Instead, we need to introduce a universal subject at the root of reality; a subject whose mental contents would be the ultimate reality of what we define as the physical world. In this conceptualization, when each of us refers to themselves by using the term ‘I’, ultimately it is the universal subject that is referring to itself.

With the introduction of such a universal subject, the mind-matter problem needs to be re-formulated in idealist terms: what is the relationship between the mental contents of such a universal subject—the objects of the so-called physical world, including the brain—and the private mental contents that belong to each of us? Obviously, we cannot expect to provide an answer that is certain, nor can we expect to give the matter an exhaustive treatment; we simply want to show how, under idealism, the problems that emerge appear easier to tackle than the unintelligible mind-matter problem.

Let us imagine that we built a computing machine equipped with a particle detector. The machine has output actuators whose parameters—voltage, frequency, etc.—encode the values of the physical properties of the detected particle, such as momentum, mass, charge, and so on. Let us also imagine that we can wear this machine as a backpack, so that the output actuators come in contact with the skin on our back. The output parameters of the machine are now perceivable as electrical stimulation of the skin. Let us further imagine that we spend enough time training ourselves to use this machine. Since we have built it, we know how the outputs are encoded. As such, through its ongoing use, we find it progressively easier to build a mental image of an event, starting from the machine’s response to the event.

In using the machine—which can be regarded as an appendage of our body and brain—we experience two types of mental content, which in semiotics are called ‘signified’ and ‘signifier.’ The signified pertains to the plane of content, while the signifier pertains to the plane of expression. In linguistics, they are the plane of words, as sequences of letters, and the plane of meaning, to which the sequences point. The code is what establishes the relationship between the two planes. For example, the genetic code establishes the rules of correspondence between certain base triplets (signifiers) and a specific amino acid (signified). Within a language, syntax describes the rules by which signifiers can be combined into sentences, while semantics describes the meaning of that which is signified. In the case illustrated above, the signifiers will be constituted by the level of output voltages generated by the machine, which we are able to experience as electric discharges on our body. That which is signified will, in turn, be the physical characteristics of the measured particle, as encoded by precise machine output patterns. As we continue to practice using this ‘prosthesis,’ the focus of our attention will gradually shift from signifiers to meanings—i.e., from felt electric discharges to the cognition of particle characteristics—in the same way that, as we learn a language and are able to read it with increasing ease, our attention tends to gradually shift from letters and words to meanings.

Now let us compare this scenario with the one proposed in our previous essay: the atmospheric system impacted by cosmic rays. We are not responsible for the creation of the atmospheric system. Rather, it spontaneously appeared as a self-organizing system at thermodynamic disequilibrium. What happens in idealist terms is this: a subset of the mental contents that constitute reality—namely, the subset associated with the earth’s atmospheric system—is organized so as to detect stimuli associated with the remaining mental contents, thereby producing output patterns according to a code known to the universal subject. We must explain the relationship between the atmospheric system and the private mental contents of the Earth by regarding the latter as mental contents of the universal mind as well. Among the whole ensemble of mental contents of which the universe is made, some elements, such as the lightning discharge patterns discussed in our previous essay, are signifiers, while others are signified.

This rationale can be equally applied to the emergence of the first nervous system on Earth; and it is possible to provide the same interpretation when it comes to our own mental contents. Nature is constituted by the mental contents of the universal subject, and our mental contents are a subset of those. They are the ‘signifieds’ that correspond to signifiers constituted by our brain’s discharge patterns, which in turn are mental contents of the universal subject, just like everything else.

We certainly cannot claim to have explained the relationship between mental contents and brain states; our reason for outlining the foregoing embryonic interpretation of such a relationship was simply to point out that, under idealism, the mind-matter problem is more tractable than under materialism. In other words, while in materialism we are faced with an unintelligible problem—given that consciousness is irreducible to matter—in idealism we are faced with more tractable problems, such as the problem of multiple minds (i.e., given that nothing other than the universal mind exists, why do there appear to be multiple minds?). We believe that, unlike the problems of materialism, this problem could be ascribed to language limitations. More specifically, we suggest that perception is related to the existence of a code that introduces a distinction between what things are (as symbols or signifiers) and what they represent (the ‘signifieds’ or meanings).

There are thus reasons to believe that the most suitable ontology to avoid the mind-matter issue is some form of idealism, such as the one we proposed.

 

Bibliography

1. R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992
2. Nagel and T. Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist and NeoDarwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. New York: OUP, 2012

How to understand your mind, beyond thought

Reading | Psychology

Johannes Jörg | 2022-07-17

The experience of the human mind is exuberantly rich. It includes thoughts, pain, boredom, hunger, depression, dreams, lust, all sorts of emotions, moral sense, and infinite shades of ever new experience. One field of mentality, however, stands out as the pretending mainstay of the human mind: thinking. Without a doubt, the faculty of thinking is symptomatic of the human condition and has a crucial part to play: It is the self-reflecting, re-representing, recursive mirror of mentality. It is at the level of thinking that questions about the nature of mind are formulated. And it is also there that thinking can be called into question: Can self-referential questions about mind be addressed in a satisfying way by thinking? Can the process of thought understand itself?

The advancing development of formal systems has revealed that any system of thought—be it semantic, logical or mathematical—runs into systematic problems if it is applied to itself. Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem famously proves mathematically that logically consistent and complete axiomatic systems are impossible. A non-contradictory mathematical system cannot prove its own non-contradiction [1]. There are different kinds of contradictory logical systems that are equally valid. Logic cannot prove itself logically without circularity. Strictly speaking, the axioms of logic are arbitrary. The Duhem-Quine thesis delineates any theory as a network of many interrelated propositions [2]. A complete axiomatization of complex theories turns out to be impossible. In conclusion, no theoretical understanding can possibly be built on rigorously solid ground.

As such, thinking cannot grasp itself. Apparently, understanding cannot be grounded by itself. Formal systems of understanding applied to themselves end up in the Münchhausen trilemma of either a circular argument, a regressive argument or a dogmatic argument [3]. An ultimate foundation for formal systems of understanding proves to be impossible. A system of thought can only operate within the system and cannot go outside of itself to gain a perspective on itself. It’s the system of thought that provides the perspective of speculation in the first place. If it turns back to itself, thinking naturally starts running in circles.

In hindsight, it shouldn’t strike us as a huge surprise that circular references sooner or later meet epistemological boundaries. Just like any other scientific understanding, the matter in question needs to be understood in terms of something else, to avoid circular reasoning. However, these findings are not particularly tragic. It is merely formal thinking that is epistemologically limited in relation to formal thinking. It is not necessarily thinking in general that is limited; it is not the human mind that is limited; at the end of the day, it is not even thinking that wants to understand thinking: It is the human being that wants to understand being a human being. In this quest for self-knowledge, the human being merely makes use of the faculty of thinking. So, how far can thinking reach in relation to understand being human, so to understand the human mind?

 

Mentality and concepts of mentality

Questions about mind arise in thought. But they do not, and did not, arise out of the blue. Thinking and its highly abstract cognitive capacities are built on more fundamental forms of mentality. This is obvious, both in an evolutionary, phylogenetic view of the species and in a developmental, ontogenetic view of the individual. No child is born with a ready-made intellect and preconceived concepts. There need to be primary mental experiences before secondary mental concepts can be abstracted from them. The distinction between primary experience and secondary concepts is all-important.

The system of thinking turns primary mental experience into secondary conceptual memories of experience. Thus, it introduces almost any experiential content into a vast system of concepts, where they can be related and reflected. Thinking then ceaselessly weaves and rearranges ever larger, denser and more entangled webs of nots and links. What makes the machinery of conceptual relationships boundless is the fact that the complexes of concepts it produces can, themselves, be re-introduced into it, turned into even richer meta-concepts, which in turn can be re-introduced again, and so on. By relating to itself and recursively re-introducing its own operations into the system, ultimately a whole secondary cosmos of incredible conceptual richness and complexity is created. And it is in this self-referentiality of thinking that the trickiness of human cognition begins [4].

When the human mind self-reflects in thought, it is not primary experience that relates to itself directly, but mental concepts that relate to mental concepts. No matter how hard one tries, whatever is reflected in thought has already been transformed into a secondary concept. The agent of self-referential thinking—the thinking “I” that navigates the processes of self-reflection—is nothing but a thought itself. The thinking “I” is merely an abstraction, not the living human being as a whole, which of course comprises immeasurably more than thought. The actual living human being can never be a content of thought. It is the other way round of course: The actual human being and its mentality include a cognitive system that is able to produce the self-referential thought of “I”. No thought and no thinking ever are the human being. The map won’t ever be the territory [5].

 

Self-referencial thinking

The faculty of thinking has immeasurable powers to account for the world, with one major exception when it comes to itself: Since thinking itself is part of the picture it tries to complete, it can never create a complete account of the world. Its very activity creates more content that would have to be accommodated in the picture again. The ultimate problem of thinking is thus thinking itself. But the problem obviously cannot be solved by thinking. In self-reference, every thought is the creation of a new problem and loops into infinite regress. The most central problem of thought is even fueled by thinking, or rather created by the act of thinking to start with.

The autobiographical self—the concept of “I”—that navigates self-reflective thought processes operates within a closed system of thought, inside a web of concepts [6]. It is limited to the system of thinking and cannot go beyond. Thinking can only do thinking [7]. If questions of self-knowledge are processed by thinking, there is no hope for an answer, because within thinking they are self-referential tautologies to begin with. The thought of “I” is asking itself what the thought of “I” is. The thinking “I” can never grasp itself, because every grasping is that which it tries to grasp.

Only in conjunction with other mental faculties can the human being realize and attach value to non-conceptual aspects of human mentality. Only the pressing urge of non-conceptual experiences can open up a perspective into human mentality that sees beyond the illusions of thought. To stop getting enmeshed in its own fabric, thinking must be grounded by the larger field of human mentality it is a part of [8].

 

Thinking is about life

As stated before, the system of thinking did not, and does not, arise out of the blue. Conceptual thinking is the latest achievement of 4 billion years of evolutionary self-organization of living systems. Thinking operates within the living system and in the service of the living system. It is an integral part of the larger system of life and cannot be understood independently from it.

Just like any other self-organizing system, thinking must be conceptualized by the mechanisms of self-organization that created the system in the first place. From an evolutionary point of view, thinking is the latest and thus least foundational cognitive function of a human being. From within thinking, life appears to be about reasoning, solving conceptual problems, truth and so on, since anything that is to enter thinking must be turned into a conceptual thought first. However, from the perspective of the living human being as a whole, the internal affairs of the system of thinking are of limited interest. The organism only cares about it to the extent that thinking contributes to the organism’s life-supporting regulatory processes.

The driving forces of thinking are the living states of the organism. Naturally, this cannot be intuited easily from the perspective of thinking. But neither is it particularly difficult to derive: If there is pain, thinking gets going to eliminate the source of pain. If there is hunger, cognitive processes get going to alleviate the hunger. If there is sexual arousal, cognition plots behavioral strategies to bring about sexual gratification. The driving forces of cognitive activity are the living states of the organism. This seems obvious with hunger, but it is also necessarily true for any cognitive activity: If there were no living state underlying the cognitive activity, there would be no mechanism of self-organization for cognitive activity to emerge in the first place [9].

Internal sensations, representing the living states of the organism, are the primary experience of aliveness. They are the very first-person perspective of the organism, the foundational realm of human mentality. Internal sensation is the bedrock of the human mind, from an experiential first-person perspective [10].

 

Sensing the way forward

From the perspective of the living human being as a whole, cognitive concepts are not just about other concepts, but primarily about the experiential, feeling states of the organism they are connected to. Thoughts operate in the service of the aliveness of the living system that brings them about. Therefore, the actual problems of thinking cannot be solved by thinking, as they are about something else entirely. Thinking cannot alleviate pain, hunger or sexual arousal by its own efforts. It can only contribute by plotting strategies for relief. This is obvious with hunger, but in principle none of the actual problems of thinking can be solved by thinking alone.

All this may sound like a dead end for the intellectual endeavor. But the recognition of thinking’s own limitations is the crucial breakthrough required to overcome the epistemological deadlock of self-referentiality. Indeed, comprehending the mechanisms that give rise to the quest for self-knowledge is the biggest possible achievement of conceptual thinking. It does have a prominent role to play, provided that it be accompanied by other mental faculties. Only when thinking ceases to arrogate to itself the position of supreme mental authority is it capable of surrendering to its assigned task. Only then can it cease to serve itself and begin to put its superior powers to the service of its larger purposes: the health of human organisms and societies, the promotion of life and the flourishing of ecosystems.

When thinking is not accompanied by an explicit awareness of inner states, it loses guidance from its actual motives and, therefore, wanders blindly in conceptual labyrinths. For as long as thought processes are not informed by inner sensations, they operate in a trial-and-error fashion. The resulting corrective feedback is suffering, which eventually persuades the mind to change its ways. Yet, as soon as thinking coincides with an awareness of the underlying subtleties of unease and tension that motivate cognition, the system starts to operate differently. It stops being run by secondary conceptual abstractions and focuses on primary, inner experience instead. This is how the tail-chasing dynamic—the vicious circle of self-referential thinking—is broken. Feeling our inner states has the potential to ground and settle cognitive compulsion. The unmediated experience of the origin of the question of self-knowledge is nothing other than its answer. Although a sensation can never be thought, the origin of a thought can be sensed [11].

Conceptual understanding does not decisively affect the driving mechanisms of cognition and, as such, cannot provide much actual satisfaction to the living human being. A theoretical understanding of physical tension doesn’t alter its unpleasantness. From this perspective, the quest for self-knowledge starts to become an entirely new kind of epistemological venture. It shifts from theoretical reflections towards practices of sentient exploration and a training of the capacity to feel.

Fully experiencing a sensation is tantamount to understanding the sensation. It is not necessary to reflect on pain to understand its painfulness. By the awareness of a living inner state, understanding is already achieved as an embodied state of being, which entails mechanisms of self-regulation without further ado. The living system essentially is a self-organizing system—an essentially self-understanding system, so to speak. When unconscious dysregulation comes into awareness, it is already being regulated. Sentient self-exploration increasingly builds embodied knowledge, which progressively reduces dissatisfaction, the lack of self-knowledge.

 

References and comments

[1]        Gödel, Kurt (1931): Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I, Monatshefte für Mathematik Physik 38, pp. 173–198. English translation in: van Heijenoort (1967), 596–616.

[2]        Quine, Willard Van Orman (1951): Two dogmas of empiricism, The Philosophical Review, 60(1), 20–43.

[3]        The term Münchhausen trilemma was coined by Hans Albert (1968): Traktat über kritische Vernunft. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1968. English translation: Albert, Hans (1985): Treatise on Critical Reason, Princeton University Press, Princeton. It is a thought experiment, also known as the Agrippan trilemma, to demonstrate the theoretical impossibility of proving any truth without appealing to accepted assumptions. A justification of all knowledge must start with some knowledge (as with dogmatism), not start at all (as with infinite regress) or be a circular argument justified only by itself.

[4]        The distinction between “primary experience” and “secondary conceptual abstraction” can be understood as analogous to Schopenhauer’s distinction between “will” and “representation.” Schopenhauer, Arthur (1844): Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Band 1 & 2, Reclam, 677 p. English translation: Arthur Schopenhauer (1969): The world as will and representation, Courier Dover Publications, Volume I &Volume II. The term “will” is designated by Schopenhauer to refer to a blind, aimless urge to live, thought of as a primary metaphysical principle. In contrast, secondary “representations” are merely the way the world presents itself to the intellect and reasoning.

[5]        Korzybski, Alfred (1933): Science and Sanity. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. The International Non-Aristotelian Library Pub. Co. pp. 747–761. The Polish-American philosopher coined the phrase, “The map is not the territory,” and used it to convey the fact that conceptual models of reality and reality itself are often confused.

[6]        In systems theory, a system whose operators are not determined by its environment, but instead by its own structure and organization, is considered “operationally closed.” Neural processing operates within neural processes. The neural system generates operations through the network of its own operations. Humberto R. Maturana & Francisco J. Varela (1980): Autopoiesis and Cognition – The Realization of the Living, Springer Science & Business Media, 146 p.

[7]        This bottom line brings to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein (1921): Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 14. English translation: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by C.K. Ogden (1922). Wittgenstein concludes that language is an ineluctable condition of thinking and cannot reach beyond itself. In the preamble he anticipates his bottom line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

[8]        Countless types of psychotherapy explicitly work with the induction of experiences that do not aim directly at conceptual understanding. For example, body-oriented psychotherapy, music therapy, art therapy, movement therapy, autogenic training, gestalt therapy, psychedelic therapy, ego state therapy, somatic experiencing, and so on.

[9]        Due to its operational closure, neural processing cannot communicate with its environment. Neural processing operates within neural processes. Nevertheless, neural processing interacts causally with its environment, which are the living states of homeostatic regulation of the metabolizing organism. In systems theory this inter-systemic relationship is called “structural coupling”. Humberto R. Maturana & Francisco J. Varela (1980): Autopoiesis and Cognition – The Realization of the Living, Springer Science & Business Media, 146 p.

[10]      Presently, there isn’t even a clear scientific consensus as to what exactly internal sensing (‘interoception’) is, let alone how best to measure it. But despite this shortcoming, the significance of interoception is beyond any doubt.

[11]      Specific training of the awareness of subtle bodily sensations has been promoted by countless schools of introspection for ages, even though these first-person traditions are not able to substantiate their methodologies in terms of rigorous third-person scientific explanations.

How Idealism—and Schopenhauer—saved Tolstoy’s life

Reading | Literature

Michael Asher, BA, FRSL | 2022-07-10

In 1877, only a year after completing his second masterpiece Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy fell into a severe depression—what he later called an arrest of life. It was so profound that, while undressing alone in the evening, he had to first remove a rope from his room in case he was tempted to hang himself. He refused to take a rifle with him on hunting trips so as to avoid sticking the muzzle into his own mouth. Not quite fifty, Tolstoy had led what most would have considered a full, vigorous and creative life. He had spent a decade in the army, serving as a cadet in the crack Russian artillery at Sebastopol in the Crimean war and, as a writer, had become the star of the St Petersburg literati. The owner of a prosperous thousand-acre estate with many serfs and hundreds of horses, he had a beautiful wife and children, and enjoyed the respect of his class—some said he was more revered in Russia than the Tsar.

Suddenly, though, he could not look back on his life without being seized by horror. “I killed people in war,” he wrote. “I summoned others to duels in order to kill them, gambled at cards; I devoured the fruits of the peasants’ labour and punished them; I fornicated and practised deceit. Lying, thieving, promiscuity… drunkenness, violence, murder… there was not a crime I did not commit…” [1] His life as a writer had been even worse, he thought, with its vanity, self-interest and pride. His literary fame was worth nothing. “I would say to myself, ‘Well fine, so you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world, and so what?’” [2]

His life was meaningless. He had arrived at a moment of existential crisis, likening himself to a man lost in a dark wood, without any inkling of how to find a way out. Instead of merely sitting down under a tree and accepting it, he began to pace back and forth desperately seeking a path, frenziedly looking for a meaning that he felt must be there. [3]

Tolstoy was aware that he was a casualty of the materialism that had largely supplanted religion as the dominant ideology among European elites since mid-century. As Charles Taylor has written, this period saw a sharp rise in what he calls unbelief, not only because many people lost their faith, but also because new parameters of knowledge undermined the certainty of the old religious values. The most obvious changes were in the way people imagined the world they lived in [4]. Science had demonstrated that the universe was much vaster than the cosy cosmos previously envisaged, and the theory of evolution had shown that forms were not fixed, and that the world existed in a perpetual state of change. “With my own self this belief assumed the form it usually takes among the educated men of our time,” Tolstoy confessed. “The belief was expressed in the word progress … I continued to live, professing faith only in progress. Everything is evolving and I am evolving; and the reason why I am evolving together with all the rest will one day be known to me.” [5]

The precariousness of this outlook had first dawned on him a few years earlier at a public guillotining in Paris. As he watched the heads roll, he felt he had just witnessed a crime that no theory of progress could justify. “I knew it was unnecessary and wrong,” he wrote later, “and therefore that judgements on what is good and necessary must not be based on … progress, but on the instincts of my own soul.” [6] The empiricist-materialist paradigm had, he saw, cut people loose from their moorings, without any moral compass or idea of where they were going. “In answering live in conformity with progress,” he wrote, “I was speaking exactly like a person who is in a boat being carried along by wind and waves and who, when asked the most important and vital question, Where should I steer? avoids answering by saying, We are being carried somewhere.” [7]

Almost everyone of Tolstoy’s acquaintance—both inside and outside Russia—was drifting in this same boat: the materialist malaise affected the entire European privileged class. He saw clearly that this was “not life but only a semblance of life, and the conditions of luxury in which we live deprive us of the possibility of understanding life.” [8] In fact, he thought, the upper classes had substituted the pursuit of pleasure for a sense of meaning: they were aware of the mouth of the dragon gaping beneath them but distracted themselves by self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption. Tolstoy referred to this as epicureanism—he felt he could no longer share it. A few people remained truly ignorant of the problem, though it was too late for him to join them and, in any case, such ignorance tended not to last. The only other ways of escape were equally unsatisfactory: either end the agony by killing oneself, or live a life of quiet desperation, knowing it was all pointless but carrying on anyway—a road to existential misery.

For two years, Tolstoy endured the agony, staving off the temptation of suicide, in the “vague awareness that my [negative] ideas were mistaken” [9]. His life became a quest to discover the answer to a fundamental question: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by my death? He quickly realized that he would not find a solution in science, since scientific knowledge was based on certain laws of nature that were simply inductions from observations of nature itself. All science could say, he thought, was that “in the infinity of space and the infinity of time infinitely small particles mutate with infinite complexity. When you understand the laws of these mutations you will understand why you live.” [10]

Next he turned to philosophy, and among several philosophers mentioned in the book he wrote about his spiritual crisis—A Confession—is Arthur Schopenhauer. Tolstoy had first read Schopenhauer’s work The World as Will and Representation a decade earlier, while finishing his classic War and Peace, and was delighted with it. “Constant raptures on Schopenhauer,” he wrote to his friend Fet, in 1869, “and a whole series of spiritual delights which I’ve never experienced before … at present I am certain that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant of men” [11]

Tolstoy accepted Schopenhauer’s view that the physical world existed as appearance: what appeared to be objects were no more than representations of a transcendental subject. This subject was will—the essence of the world or the world-in-itself—of which humans were part. “We are not merely the knowing subject,” as Schopenhauer put it, “we ourselves are also among those entities we require to know … we ourselves are the thing-in-itself.” [12] In other words, the universe was mental—a shared mind-at-large—and everything that existed, existed within this universal will.

Even before reading Schopenhauer, Tolstoy had referred to will as the essence of the soul, and in his notoriously revisionist epilogue to War and Peace, he cited will as consciousness or awareness [soznanie], a concept that would later become central to his world view. He observed that man knew himself by consciousness: the awareness of oneself as a being with free will. “To know himself as living, a person must know himself as willing,” he wrote, “he must be conscious of his will. His will, which expresses the essence of his life, a person is conscious of and can only be conscious of as free” [13]. He added that what is discovered in the consciousness of self as a free being is a dimension of reality outside space, time and causality, and that this self is a participant in the divine. “If God is the whole, which contains the infinite universe and I am not just a part of that universe but a participant in the whole … then there is nothing else but this whole, and nothing other than me.” [14]

Clearly, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics was a profound influence on Tolstoy’s writing. Anna Karenina, indeed, has been called, “an artistic embodiment of the world as will and representation.” [15] Other scholars, though, have pointed out that, while the earlier part of War and Peace seems to express a Schopenhauerian perspective, this is problematic, because Tolstoy had not read the World as Will and Representation at the time he wrote it. How is this possible? It seems likely that many of the ideas Tolstoy expressed in this earlier work were his own, and that the reason he so delighted in Schopenhauer’s writing was because he found there the confirmation of intuitions he had had since his younger days. “He had been pondering the same questions,” wrote Sigrid McLaughlin, “and had arrived at similar … conclusions. These ideas were then in all probability reinforced as he gradually became more familiar with Schopenhauer’s philosophy.” [16]

If Schopenhauer’s metaphysics helped Tolstoy find a path out of the dark woods during his spiritual crisis, though, it raises the question as to why this perspective, adopted many years earlier, had not helped him avoid it in the first place. The answer probably lies in the gap between the intellectual or rational grasp of the subject that Tolstoy could apply in his fiction, and the emotional—he termed it irrational—understanding that he could apply in his own person. In fact, as Richard Gustafson has pointed out, in his personal life Tolstoy was in one sense a perpetual outsider. “He had no real friends … and was suspicious of the motives of those close to him. He did not trust or love others easily. He could not bear opposition to his opinions.” [17]

Brought face to face with his imminent annihilation, Tolstoy was obliged to embrace what he agreed with in Schopenhauer’s view in a manner that lay beyond reason. In A Confession, he makes it abundantly clear that he rejects Schopenhauer’s pessimism—the idea, also expressed in various ways by other philosophers and sages, such as Socrates, Solomon and in Buddhism, that life is suffering, and that the will is an unknowable, evil power behind existence.

This was a cultural perspective, he realized: a view from within the culture of the dominant class in civilization. The void of meaning in the lives of Tolstoy’s circle was directly connected with their luxurious lifestyle: a lifestyle legitimized by the Cartesian underpinnings of the Enlightenment. They were parasites who amused themselves at the expense of other people’s labour, and it was almost impossible to feel connected to oneself, others and nature, while living in this manner. Tolstoy asked himself how he could have been so mistaken as to think that his life and the lives of sages such as Solomon, Schopenhauer and others were the true, normal life [18]. After all, Solomon was a king, Buddha a prince, and Schopenhauer the scion of a wealthy banking family—all had been members of the ruling class in their time, and their pronouncements came in reaction to the suffering inherent in hierarchical civilization, where vanity was virtually de rigueur.

What struck Tolstoy most forcibly, indeed, was that the peasants, who formed the majority of the population, were not affected by this joyless ennui. While the upper classes spent their lives in idleness, amusement and dissatisfaction, he observed, and regarded suffering and death as a malicious joke, the peasants “suffer and approach death peacefully and, more often than not, joyfully. … these people who are deprived of all those things, which for the Solomons and I are the only blessings … knew the meaning of life and death, endured suffering and hardship, lived and died and saw this not as vanity but good.” [19]

As he looked more closely at the lives of the illiterate folk, it dawned on him that while they knew nothing of rational learning—science, philosophy, or theology—they trusted in what he termed the irrational: intuition and feeling. In other words, they had faith. Tolstoy saw that it was faith alone that provided them with a sense of meaning.

This faith, Tolstoy observed, was not the same as that extolled by the Orthodox Church: what he referred to as blind faith, or a belief in the infallibility of Church doctrines. He had long since lost his respect for the Church because of its apparent approval of persecution, capital punishment and war. It had, he later wrote, perverted the original Christian message and become a means of controlling the masses. The faith of the ordinary people, he said, was the consciousness of life—the same as Schopenhauer’s will, but without the pessimistic connotations: there was suffering, certainly, but there was also loving kindness. Faith was inseparable from human existence. If there was human life there was faith. If there was none, life was impossible. “Faith remained as irrational to me as before,” he wrote, “but I could not fail to recognize that it alone provides mankind with the answers to the question of life.” [20]

Rational knowledge had led him to the conclusion that life was meaningless: his life had come to a halt and he had wanted to kill himself [21]. The problem was, he now saw, that trying to explain the irrational in terms of reason was the same as attempting to explain the infinite in terms of the finite. His life, of course, had no meaning within time, space and causality, because those were simply aspects of representation, not will. Faith gave meaning to life beyond these limits. “Whatever answers faith gives,” he wrote, “such answers always give an infinite meaning to the finite existence of man; a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation or death.” [22] In other words, expecting reason to disclose meaning was like expecting a knife to cut its own handle. Just as the handle directs the knife-blade, so faith—a sense of meaning derived from non-rational values, feelings, and intuitions—gives direction to reason. These feelings are not aspects of representation, but of the transcendent subject: Schopenhauer’s will.

Tolstoy had found his way out of the dark woods: he had the answer to his question. It had been staring him in the face in the work of Schopenhauer over many years, and indeed, had been part of his intuition from childhood, but had been obscured by the dominant ideology of his culture: the Cartesian rationalism that denied feeling. It now required an act of volition to embrace fully. “A great change took place within me,” he wrote, “the roots of which had always been in me. … the life of … the rich and learned, became not only distasteful to me, but lost all meaning.” [23]

Thereafter, he turned his back on his class and refused to indulge any further in the vanities of social distinction. Leaving his wife and children in the mansion he had grown up in, he moved into a small farmhouse on the estate, officially dropped his title, dressed like a peasant, associated with peasants, and worked with his hands alongside them. He disowned his earlier writing, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and repudiated the copyrights so as to derive no further income from them. He attempted to make his estate public property, but ran into so much opposition from his wife and family that he dropped the idea.

He continued to write, however, turning out no more epic novels, but penning a large volume of material, starting with the autobiographical A Confession—the story of his spiritual awakening in 1882—followed by other spiritual works, such as What I Believe in 1884. In 1894 he wrote The Kingdom of God is Within You, a work expressing his belief in non-violent resistance that profoundly influenced Gandhi, with whom he corresponded. Among his fiction works was The Death of Ivan Illyich, a novella about an official who, dying as a result of an infection caused by a small accident, realizes that he has wasted his life in pursuit of power, possessions and status, and that he must renounce that life in order to be able to die in peace.

Although a censored edition of Ivan Illyich was published in Russia in 1886, most of Tolstoy’s later works were banned by the authorities and were described as Tolstoy’s abominations by the Orthodox Church, leading to his excommunication. They were published in England though—in Russian as well as in other languages—gaining him fame as a Christian Anarchist and social reformer, both within Russia and worldwide. ‘Tolstoy colonies’ were set up in many countries and his estate became a site of pilgrimage, to which his followers flocked from all over the world. In Russia, those found in possession of his banned works were persecuted, although his global reputation and the reverence in which he was held within his own country prevented the authorities from arresting him. Nevertheless, he remained under police surveillance until his death in 1910.

Although Tolstoy’s reputation as a spiritual leader and social reformer was somewhat eclipsed by the Russian revolution and two world wars, it is now enjoying a renaissance, as it becomes clear that the materialist blight affects not just “a few parasites,” as he put it, but the entire world. Indeed, industrial civilization currently threatens not only the well-being of the Earth, but also the future of the human species itself. Tolstoy was one of the first to grasp that the crisis of our society is not essentially political, economic, or even ecological, but spiritual. As he himself knew intuitively—and perhaps most of us know at some level—it can only be solved by an ontological change, by replacing the narrative of separation we have followed since the Enlightenment with a new non-dualist story: a story of re-connection with the cosmos, the transcendent self.

 

References

1. Tolstoy – A Confession p. 26
2. Ibid p. 36
3. Ibid p. 51
4. Charles Taylor – A Secular Age p. 235
5. Tolstoy – A Confession p. 32
6. Ibid
7. Ibid
8. Ibid p. 92
9. Ibid p. 63
10. Ibid p. 47
11. F. Christian – Letters p. 22
12. Schopenhauer – The World as Will and Representation
13. Gustafson – Resident & Stranger p. 95
14. Ibid
15. Sigrid McLaughlin – Aspects of Tolstoy’s Intellectual Development p. 207
16. Ibid p. 195
17. Richard Gustafson – Resident & Stranger – p. 96
18. Tolstoy – A Confession p. 68
19. Ibid
20. Ibid p. 74
21. Ibid
22. Ibid
23. Ibid p. 82

 

Bibliography

Bartlett, Rosamund – Tolstoy, A Russian Life (2011)

Becker, David – Tolstoy & Schopenhauer & War & Peace – Influence & Ambivalence. Canadian-American Slavic Studies 48 (2014)

Christian R.F. – Tolstoy’s Letters 1828-79 (1978)

Gustafson, Richard – Tolstoy, Resident & Stranger (1986)

Kastrup, Bernardo – Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics (2020)

McLaughlin, Sigrid – Some Aspects of Tolstoy’s Intellectual Development California Slavic Studies 5 (1970)

Schopenhauer, Arthur – The World as Will & Representation – trans E.J. Payne (1979) Soina O.S. – Leo Tolstoy & the Meaning of Life – Contemporary Search for Ethics –Soviet Studies in Philosophy 25:3 (1986)

Taylor, Charles – A Secular Age (2007)

Thompson, Caleb – Quietism from the Side of Happiness – Tolstoy & Schopenhauer, War & Peace Symposium (2009)

Tolstoy, Leo – A Confession & Other Religious Writings trans Jayne Kentish 1987 (2009)

The world in mind: Transcendental idealism in Husserl and Kant

Reading | Ontology

dr. Corijn van Mazijk | 2022-06-12

Consciousness and intentionality

Few concepts have proven as hard to define as ‘consciousness.’ In the past, numerous important philosophers – especially in Germany – have made this concept central to their thinking, but often for widely diverging ends, and without the clearest of definitions. Naturally, these great thinkers wrote in their own language, and translating their texts sets additional challenges. For instance, the German Erfahrung used by Kant can translate to ‘experience,’ but so can Erlebnis (more literally ‘living through’). Kant and others also used terms such as Einheit der Apperzeption (‘unity of apperception’) and Ich (‘I’) to refer to (a unity of) consciousness. Hegel and others frequently spoke of Geist (usually translated to ‘mind’ or ‘spirit’), whereas some phenomenologists spoke of Subjektivität (‘subjectivity’), Seele (‘soul’), the Latin Ego and the Greek Psyche, besides the more commonplace Bewuβtsein (‘consciousness’) and variations thereof (‘absolute,’ ‘transcendental,’ ‘pure,’ and ‘empirical’ consciousness).  All these terms can shift meaning as one goes from one author to the next, or even within single texts.

In the late 19^th century, one particularly fascinating intellectual movement came to prominence that sought to study consciousness in a more scientific manner, and thereby to break with what was seen as a long tradition of mythical reflection. Their approach was first outlined by the German-Austrian thinker Franz Brentano (1838-1917), well-known today for his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). According to Brentano, consciousness (and only consciousness, in contrast to non-conscious things) is characterized by what is called ‘intentionality’: the capacity to be ‘about’ or ‘directed at’ something. For instance, when I see a chair, my consciousness is said to be about or directed at that chair. I might also imagine, think about, desire, or otherwise value that same chair instead. Consciousness can thus have ‘aboutness’ (or directedness at an object) in very different ways.

The idea of approaching consciousness in terms of intentionality really caught on around the turn of the 20^th century. In the final books of Logical Investigations (1900-1901), Edmund Husserl, then a former student of Brentano, embarked on a kind of proto-phenomenological task called ‘descriptive psychology.’ The descriptive psychologist would assess consciousness not by observing external behavior (as in behaviorism) or through experiment (experimental psychology), but by describing one’s own conscious experiences just as they are lived through. It was, therefore, a descriptive science of the first-person viewpoint.

Many of the phenomenologists in the early 20^th century—of which there were more than a handful—were keen to keep the subject matter of this new descriptive psychology or phenomenology and that of the sciences of worldly objects distinct. For instance, as a descriptive psychologist, I might study the intentionality which enables me to relate to a physical object, or to value that object. However, that object itself does not belong to the analysis of the intentional experiences (Erlebnisse). Early phenomenologists usually preferred to stay silent on questions concerning the being of the external objects, which consciousness is directed at, and considered themselves realists partially for that reason.

 

Transcendental idealism

To the dismay of some of his colleagues and students, Husserl later came to reject this very picture, as he demanded a more fundamental clarity on the relation between consciousness and external world. At some point in the early 20^th century, Husserl was allegedly struck by an insight into the “a priori correlation”: the idea that any object somehow presupposes consciousness as a condition of its being given. Put simply, the world requires consciousness in order to appear at all. This is essentially an old idea, called idealism, and some form of it can be found in the writings of a number of earlier philosophers, including Berkeley, Kant and Schopenhauer.

It may well seem as if this talk of consciousness as a condition pertains, trivially indeed, to the ‘appearing’ of the world only. After all, appearing by its very nature involves consciousness in some broad sense, as any appearing is an ‘appearing to.’ The case then seems easily made that the world does not just appear: it also exists on its own terms. While the world appears to me, I also know that it will continue to exist when I’m long gone. Therefore, although its appearance depends in whatever ways on consciousness, its being does not.

But the mature Husserl came to believe that this is a fundamentally wrong way of looking at things. After all, whatever I know about the world in its own right still undeniably derives validity from my experiencing. For instance, I see a chair that I know existed before I was born; I believe that dinosaurs roamed the planet millions of years ago, and so on. The ‘being’ of the chair and of the dinosaurs clearly precede my own being—but this is still undeniably something I experience, a way for things to appear to me. We thus cannot simply take ‘being’ out of the picture of the study of consciousness and its relation to the world. If we would do so, we would thereby split the world into sense (appearance) and being (reality)—precisely the Cartesian view that Husserl (in spite of his association with Descartes for other reasons) everywhere opposes. Instead, according to Husserl, we must be consistent and grant that “every imaginable sense, every imaginable being” is anchored in consciousness (Husserl 1960, 84). True being and consciousness “essentially belong together” (Husserl 1960, 84).

Generations of Husserl readers have somehow found this idealism hard to digest. Moreover, they find it difficult to make it compatible with Husserl’s continuing insistence that scientific claims about external objects are distinct from phenomenological claims about appearances. Perhaps this means, or so they seem to hope, that external objects are distinct from appearances after all. This could again free us from what they believe is an otherwise suffocating idealism, which knows of nothing but appearances.

Failure to understand the compatibility of these two claims within an idealist framework has been the cause of an embarrassingly longstanding dispute in Husserl scholarship (the so-called “noema debate”). The solution to this debate is quite straightforward. Simply put, Husserl argues that there is one universe of being, which can be studied from two opposing perspectives or modes of experience. Only one of these modes reveals the world for what it truly is. In the first mode of experiencing, the natural-naïve mode, I take the things that appear as real, mind-independent objects. In the second mode of experiencing—the phenomenological one—the same real things appear, only now I relate to them exclusively as pure-appearance-of-real-things-for-me.

The crux is that the same universe of being that was disclosed in the natural-naïve mode is now seen for what it secretly was all along: ‘my’ universe of being; in other words, pure appearance. The first—naïve—perspective, therefore, does not yield any different objects; it also deals with appearances, only this goes unnoticed, as “I am completely given over to the object-poles, completely bound by interests … directed toward them” (Husserl 1970, 205). In a way, then, the naïve mode also deals with “absolute being,” which is “always functioning ultimately” (Husserl 1970, 153), but here in “hidden anonymity” (Husserl 1970, 205). Only in the second mode do I engage with absolute being qua absolute being (which Husserl simply calls “absolute being,” hence the confusion that it is a different entity).

Husserl thus essentially presents us with a variation of an old story told by Plato, the well-known cave allegory. We exit the cave by becoming phenomenologists, by turning our attention to the only true world, which is (contra Plato, of course) the world as pure appearance. It is certainly strange that many Husserl readers still avoid this position, as if it were something embarrassing. If we do accept it, we can effectively address another—even more widespread—misreading, namely that phenomenology would study the “subject” rather than the “object.” This misreading is to some extent reinforced by Husserl’s own choice of words, which centrally invokes talk of “subjectivity” as well as “reduction.” However, it is abundantly clear that “the universal concept of the subjective encompasses everything,” including the “universe of object-poles” (Husserl 1970, 179). In other words, phenomenology is not a science of the subject as opposed to the object: it is instead a science of the total universe of being, only qua pure appearance. Scientists, ordinary folk and phenomenologists all relate to one universe of being—they just do so from different perspectives.

 

Kant’s case against (and for) idealism

Husserl’s position is thus quite simple: there is one real world, namely the one that appears to me. Moreover, this view should not undermine our sense of access to an external world, for all my ordinary, ‘naïve’ ways of engaging with the world fit unproblematically into it. Husserl sometimes referred to this type of idealism as “transcendental idealism.” He thereby consciously placed himself in a tradition that goes back to Immanuel Kant, that other misunderstood idealist philosopher.

In Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787, abbr. A/B), the eccentric philosopher from Königsberg made a useful but much overlooked distinction between three types of idealism: skeptical idealism, dogmatic idealism and transcendental idealism (B274-275). A skeptical idealist—Descartes is Kant’s favorite example—is someone who thinks we can never be certain that outer objects exist, given that we principally deal only with appearances. This contrasts with dogmatic idealism, which Kant ascribes to Berkeley, which straightforwardly denies that we access external objects.

Kant believes that both views result from the same erroneous assumption, called “transcendental realism.” The mistake of Descartes and Berkeley was essentially to desire too much: they wished to get in touch with a completely mind-independent reality, and therefore felt unsatisfied with the appearances. This desire has its roots, Kant argues, in our naïve mode of experiencing, as objects of everyday experience have the “deceptive property that … they detach themselves as it were from the soul and appear to hover outside it” (A385). Everyday experience posits “objects outside us, completely separating them from the thinking subject” (A389). This results in the “dogmatic” (A389) conception of objects as enjoying radical independence from our experiences.

Kant then explains that we should not conceive of external objects this way, but instead decisively regard them as a subspecies of our appearances. In the final analysis, objects are “representations only” (369), they are “mere appearances” (A371-372). Yet this does not necessarily put them on a par with dreams, hallucinations and the like. We can continue to distinguish the “real” in the appearance from the “mere” appearance, all from within the appearances. Kant notes (in Prolegomena) that it is rather the internal coherence of certain appearances—them being “connected together correctly in experience according to rules of truth” (AK IV 291)—that makes us call something real. By analogy, the world I now experience might be “the Matrix” (from the movie The Matrix, 1999), but I still have dreams, illusions, as well as true, world-giving perceptions within this overarching illusion. Kant’s point is that we ought not to be concerned with the question whether our world is like the Matrix—at least not insofar as this is an utterly unanswerable question. Instead, we should be confidently satisfied with reality as the coherent pattern that unfolds for us within the appearances. It is in this sense that perception accesses reality, and this suffices, as long as we curb our desires appropriately.

In spite of Kant’s thorough criticism of idealism, he thus certainly ends up with a form of idealism himself, one which he—and Husserl more than a century after him—calls “transcendental idealism.” The preceding forms of idealism found in Descartes and Berkeley were simply not consistent enough, as they mistook the fundamental tenet of idealism to contradict our everyday and scientific sense of access to an external world. And this goes, for Kant at least, against the ambitions of any true philosopher.

 

Things in themselves

It thus shows that Husserl’s transcendental idealism likens Kant’s in more than just the name. In contemporary terms, they both can be said to defend a specific form of disjunctivism, one according to which appearances are divided into “mere” appearances (e.g. hallucinations) and world-giving appearances (today called “veridical perception”). Variations of this disjunctivism are still defended today. For instance, the enigmatic contemporary philosopher John McDowell writes that “the situation in one’s inner world is either that one is entertaining an object-dependent proposition or that it merely appears that that is so” (McDowell 1998, 247), meaning that “the notion of appearance is [itself] disjunctive” (McDowell 1998, 248). At the least, McDowell’s suggestive remark strongly resembles what both Kant and Husserl claimed.

Furthermore, Kant, Husserl and McDowell all suggest that, in cases of uncertainty, I usually possess “external” measures to determine whether I’m seeing something real or not. For instance, I might talk to other people to assess the coherence of my appearances in an objective manner, as when asking others whether they also see the pink elephant in the corner of the room. However, it would seem that, on the picture provided so far, there is no radically external measure for me to assess whether the overall pattern, which includes these others I talk to, is truth or dream (in other words, like the Matrix). There is, after all, nothing beyond the appearances that can function as the appropriate norm.

McDowell, as Crispin Wright (2008) among others pointed out, does not seem to deal with this problem of radical skepticism. However, Kant and Husserl did—and this offers us a platform for clearing what is perhaps the most widespread misreading of Kant. For the legendary thinker from Königsberg is almost standardly understood as saying that there exist things beyond the ones we can access in appearance, an idea condensed in the famous phrase “thing in itself.” Incidentally, this is also how McDowell interprets Kant (“our capacities to know things reach only so far,” McDowell 2009, 79), and Husserl likewise (“something belongs to [objects that] we cannot know anything about,” Husserl 1956, 363).

However, not only would such an interpretation contradict Kant’s own criticism of idealism discussed earlier; it also openly contradicts Kant’s treatment of the thing in itself. In the first Critique, Kant makes it explicit that “room remains” for things beyond the scope of possible experience. While such things are for us without “sense” (A240/B299), and indeed “signif[y] nothing at all” (B306), “they cannot therefore be absolutely denied” (A287/288-B344). But here we should wonder: if the phrase “thing in itself” cannot signify anything for us, why can’t we resolutely deny it?

Kant makes it clear that the reason this is so is that the concept of a thing beyond possible experience is “not at all contradictory” (A254/B310). That is to say, there is no formal contradiction [Editor’s note: a formal contradiction is an internal discrepancy in the very logical structure of a statement or position] involved in this proposition. Kant here makes a crucial distinction between two types of possibility: the actual possibility to comprehend—which would make a proposition meaningful—and the mere logical possibility of a proposition—which requires nothing but living up to basic rules of logic. In the latter case, a proposition can still be coherently conceived, but that’s really all there is to it.

Kant concludes, in a rather Fichtean turn of phrase [Editor’s note: cf. 18^th-19^th century German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte], that it is consciousness itself that limits itself by conceiving of a thing in itself. Our minds are “not satisfied with the substrate of sensibility, and … therefore add to the phenomena noumena” (A251). Again, “the understanding is not limited through sensibility [through contact with a supposed thing in itself]; on the contrary, it itself limits sensibility by applying the term noumena” (A256/B312). [Editor’s note: in Kant, the ‘noumenon’—plural ‘noumena’—is the thing in itself—i.e. the thing’s very being—independently of its appearance upon being perceived.]

The same misunderstanding, but here in reverse, pertains to Husserl. While Kant is often held to assert the existence of things in themselves—the “positive” concept of noumenon that he, in fact, rejects—Husserl’s phenomenology would finally have rejected the notion. But this is not a fair representation of either. In Ideas I from 1913, in a section called The Logical Possibility and the Material Countersense of a World Outside Ours, Husserl reiterates the true Kantian view. Here, he explicitly accepts the formal possibility of things in themselves: “something real outside this world is, of course, ‘logically’ possible; obviously it involves no formal contradiction” (Ideas I 108). At the same time, such a thing is not deemed actually possible (“material” possibility, in Husserl’s technical terms), because any thing in general must always be experienceable—and this is what the very concept of a thing in itself contradicts.

 

Is transcendental idealism still a viable position?

The previous discussion has brought Husserl and Kant together on a few key points that lie at the heart of the transcendental idealist doctrine. This doctrine is essentially very simple: the real world is necessarily “within” the appearances (or “for” consciousness), and indeed unproblematically so, while any “thing in itself” is merely a formally coherent idea. Naturally, this interpretation leaves many more nuanced differences undiscussed (e.g. their use of “transcendental” and “a priori,” see van Mazijk 2016; 2019; 2020a; 2020b), and their philosophies are obviously very different in still other regards.

The question rises whether transcendental idealism may still have something going for it today. Indeed, there are signs of idealism making some kind of comeback in academic philosophy. Intentionality has already returned to mainstream philosophy of mind, and so the door to idealism seems opened once again. While transcendental idealism deserves such a comeback, we should be cautiously optimistic. For the truth is that academic philosophy today is largely governed by arbitrary trends set by top institutions in the English-speaking (or otherwise Americanized) world. Perhaps, after the trendy comebacks of, among others, panpsychism and dualism—also old ideas—the time is now right for philosophers to rehash some core ideas of Husserl and Kant. At least, this time, they may actually be onto something.

 

References

Husserl, E. (1956). Erste Philosophie (1923–1924): Erster Teil. Husserliana VII, H. L. Van Breda (ed.), Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Transl. D. Cairns, The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Transl. D. Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Transl. F. Kersten, Den Haag, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff.

Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason. Transl. P. Guyer, A. W. Wood, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, I. (2004). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will be Able to Come Forward as Science. G. Hatfield (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McDowell, J. (1998). “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space”, in: Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

McDowell, J. (2009). Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Van Mazijk, C. (2016). “Kant and Husserl on the Contents of Perception”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 54, No. 2, 267-287.

Van Mazijk, C. (2019). “Husserl’s Covert Critique of Kant in the Sixth Book of Logical Investigations”, Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 52, 15-33.

Van Mazijk, C. (2020a). “Kant and Husserl on Overcoming Skeptical Idealism through Transcendental Idealism”, in: Kant and Transcendental Phenomenology, I. Apostolescu, C. Serban (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter, 163-187.

Van Mazijk, C. (2020b). Perception and Reality in Kant, Husserl, and McDowell. London, New York: Routledge.

Wright, C. (2008). “Comment on John McDowell’s ‘The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as a Transcendental Argument”, in: Disjunctivism: Perception, Action and Knowledge. A. Haddock, F. MacPherson (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 390-404.

How hyper-dimensional spacetime may explain individual identity

Reading | Cosmology

Prof. Bernard Carr, PhD | 2022-06-06

Bernardo Kastrup’s essay How Can You Be Me? has kindly mentioned my own approach to this question, but without giving many details, so this prompts me to elaborate on the topic. I should explain at the outset that I regard the problem of personal identity (1^st personhood) as one the most profound questions not only in philosophy but also in science. Indeed, I will argue that the question Why Am I Me? (slightly different from, but closely related to, Bernardo’s question) is fundamentally unanswerable within the current scientific paradigm. Of course, this question not only confronts myself and Bernardo, it also applies to any conscious being, including any readers of this article.

The problem of 1^st personhood is also closely related to the problem of the passage of time, which is also unanswerable within the current paradigm. Indeed, as Bernardo clearly appreciates, the question Why Am I Me? is closely related to the question Why Is It Now? Both questions have been the focus of extensive literature in philosophical circles, but I will argue that there is also a link with physics (my own professional field) and this has received rather scant attention. This is because both problems involve consciousness and this is usually regarded as going beyond the remit of physics, which is traditionally concerned with the 3^rd person account of the world. However, the situation has changed in recent years and several respectable physicists have now begun to address this problem. Nevertheless, I should stress that my own proposal does not represent the mainstream view of physicists.

 

Consciousness and self

Most scientists and philosophers assume that consciousness—and hence the sense of self—is generated by the brain. However, while there are numerous correlations between the contents of consciousness and brain processes, we still have no idea how the brain generates consciousness itself (i.e. 1^st personhood). This is the famous “hard” problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1996). Indeed, it is sometimes argued that the brain is merely a filter or receiver of consciousness (Bergson 1946), just as a TV set is a receiver of images produced elsewhere. Clearly this is not the standard view and most of the evidence for the filter model comes from phenomena that have not yet attracted mainstream credence (near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, etc). Nevertheless, it is not easy to refute it or to design experiments to distinguish it from the production model.

The filter model is usually associated with the view that consciousness is a fundamental, rather than incidental, feature of the Universe. It also suggests that mind is a unitary phenomenon, in the sense that “there is one mind common to all individual men … a universal mind” (Emerson 1983). This ‘One Mind’ perspective differentiates between individual consciousness (small c) and the universal Consciousness (big C) that is being filtered. For example, this might arise in an idealistic or panpsychist philosophy, although we need not commit ourselves to either of these views here. Whatever one’s philosophical perspective, the filter model raises the question of how Consciousness can fragment into billions of consciousnesses (even if we confine attention to Earth-based humans) and why I am associated with one particular fragment (i.e. why am I me?). Of course, materialists will reject this question at the outset, since it presupposes that there is some form self that is different from the body. But it’s precisely because the question is meaningless from a materialist perspective that I’m led to reject that materialist perspective.

Bernardo makes the important remark: “The answer to how one universal subject can be many—to how you can be me, as you read these words—resides in a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of time and space.” This is also my own view and in the rest of this essay I will argue that a proper understanding of the passage of time and consciousness requires the invocation of extra dimensions, beyond the 4-dimensional space-time of relativity theory. Indeed, this notion arises within physics itself, as a result of developments in string theory, so it seems natural to connect these ideas.

 

The passage of time

A long-standing problem on the interface of physics and philosophy concerns the flow of time. The point is that relativity theory does not describe the basic experience of “now” that is such an essential ingredient of our perceptual world. For in the “block” universe of special relativity, past and present and future coexist. So if one regards consciousness as crawling along the worldline of the brain, like a bead on a wire, that motion itself cannot be described by relativity theory (Fig 1a). Thus there is a fundamental distinction between physical time (associated with the “outer” world) and mental time (associated with the “inner” world).

This also relates to the problem of free will. In a mechanistic universe, a physical object (e.g. one’s body) is assumed to have a well-defined future. However, one intuitively imagines that, at any particular time, there are a number of possible futures, with the intervention of consciousness allowing the selection of one of these (Fig 1b). This is one motivation for the growing block universe (GBU), in which the future is not absolutely determined (Ellis 2006). The failure of relativity to describe the process of future becoming past, and different possible futures, may also relate to the collapse of the quantum wave-function to one of a number of possible states, since this also entails a basic irreversibility. Many people have therefore suggested that there could be a link between consciousness and quantum theory.

One way to accommodate the passage of time and the GBU (Broad 1923) is to adopt a second type of time (t₂) which relates to mental experience (Fig 1c). At any moment in t₂, a physical object might have a unique future in a mechanistic model or a number of possible worldlines in a quantum model. The intervention of consciousness or quantum collapse allows the future to change in the first case or to be selected from in the second case. This does not explain the flow of time itself—since there is passage in both t₁ and t₂—but it does describe how potential futures can actualise or change. I have also argued (Carr 2021) that this 5D model may relate to brane cosmology, in which physical spacetime is a 4D “brane” moving in a 5D “bulk” (Fig 1d).

Figure 1. The problem of the passage of time (a) and the selection of possible futures (b), and a possible resolution with a 5D model (c), which may connect with brane cosmology (d).

Linking physical space, perceptual space and memory

This model of time also has implications for the relationship between physical space and perceptual space. The traditional view is that the percept is localized within the brain, so that perceptual space is just an internal mapping of physical space with a separate one for each observer. However, this results from the outdated view that the arena of reality is 3-dimensional space. According to relativity theory, the arena of reality is 4-dimensional (4D) spacetime (S₄), so perception is a 4D process, with the brain just being one end of the causal chain. So physical perception corresponds to a sort of extended mind (cf. Velmans 2005), in which conscious experience is associated with all the parts of space-time to which the brain is linked through a causal nexus of signalling worldlines (Fig 2a).

Note that the nexus is very concentrated near the tip because it also represents all the neuronal processes involved in perception. The mapping between physical and phenomenal space is therefore complicated and not just a geometrical projection. Also, a more complicated “informational” model would be required to accommodate qualia [Editor’s note: “qualia” are the qualities of experience, such as the redness and sweetness of an apple]. This also has interesting implications for the nature of memory. The mainstream view is that memories are stored in the brain, but if percepts are not inside the head, the same must apply to our memories of those percepts. Indeed, the view encouraged by Figure 2(a) is that memories of physical events reflect the direct access of consciousness to the physical space-time that contains those events. In this case, the brain does not store the memory itself but only some link to the original space-time event, i.e. it contains a tag rather than a trace.

Figure 2. (a) 4D model in which perceptual space is associated with the space-time region connected to the brain via a nexus of signalling world-lines. (b) Illustrating the link between the problem of identity and the problem of the passage of time.

However, if one needs a separate time dimension to describe mental experience, this description of perception and memory cannot suffice. A complete description must involve a 5-dimensional (5D) reality structure S₅, with physical space-time (x, t₁) and phenomenal space-time (x, t₂) being different slices of (x, t₁, t₂) space (cf. Smythies 1994). The existence of an extra time dimension also has important implications for the nature of personal identity. Clearly Bernard and Bernardo are each associated with a distinct nexus of space-time connections (Fig 2b), but this does not explain why I am associated with Bernard’s nexus. So can a second time dimension elucidate that? More specifically, since physical time t₁ and mental time t₂ are different, what do we mean when we claim that Bernard and Bernardo are conscious at the same time? They may both be conscious with respect to external time, but 1^st personhood presumably relates to internal time. This leads onto a discussion of the next ingredient of our model.

 

The specious present

Since t₂ is invoked to explain mental experience, one might assume that it relates to individual experience. However, we know that the subjective flow of time can vary both for an individual and also from person to person. So how do we describe that? If a change in the rate at which external time appears to pass were interpreted as a change in the gradient dt₂/dt₁, it would correspond to a spatial variation in the function t₂(t₁) [Editor’s note: dt₂/dt₁ represents how fast t₂ flows relative to t₁ and t₂(t₁) represents which moment in t₂ corresponds to any given moment in t₁.]. But this is different from Fig 1(d), which assumes no spatial dependence. Also, what happens under anaesthetic (when no time appears to pass) or during dreams or for an electron (which is presumably unconscious)? These questions are hard to answer in the 5D model, which suggests that the second time dimension relates to a global flow of time rather than the 1^st person perspective.

An important point is that the passage of time only makes sense with respect to what is termed the specious present (SP), which might be regarded as the minimum timescale of experience. This concept was introduced long ago (Kelly 1882), but can be understood in modern terms as arising because our physical sensory systems have a resolution time somewhat below 0.1 second, so that we cannot experience a process shorter than this (Herzog et al. 2016). For example, if a light moves in a circle faster than 10 cycles per second, it appears as a static circle, so time in some sense becomes space [Editor’s note: this simple statement is a key point, so briefly reconsider the metaphor until you grasp it]. There is also an upper limit to the timescale of experience, since our brains are not aware of changes that are too slow. This is not determined so precisely but it is certainly less than a human lifetime and it may be around 10³ seconds if associated with short-term memory.

Although the SP is well-determined during the usual waking state and roughly the same for everyone, it may change in some circumstances, in the sense that the passage of internal (mental) time may change relative to that of external (physical) time. For example, this may happen in an accident (SP decreases) or a fever (SP increases) or as a result of taking certain drugs. Presumably, such variations can be explained by the brain having some internal clock whose rate can change (Eagleman et al. 2005). However, some changes in the SP are more dramatic (Wittmann 2018). For example, in a Near Death Experience (NDE) one may see one’s whole life ‘instantaneously,’ and in certain mystical states the SP may seem to shrink almost to zero or expand almost to infinity (Taimni 1961). It is not clear that such experiences can be explained neurologically, so this may support the suggestion that the brain is a filter rather than a generator of consciousness.

Since we only experience consciousness over a narrow range of timescales and there can be no experiences to remember on a timescale less than the SP, this raises the question of whether there could be other forms of consciousness in the universe—not necessarily associated with brains and perceiving the world through organs sensitive to a different frequency range—with a very different SP. This would be analogous to how we perceive electromagnetic radiation over the narrow range of frequencies associated with visible light. It is not necessarily a mystical notion, since the physical world contains complex structure over a wide range of scales.

 

The problem of identity

The notion of the SP is also relevant to the problem of personal identity. The traditional view is that my consciousness is localized in so much as the sensors through which I perceive the world are localized, so I am me because I have a unique history that differentiates my perspective from everyone else’s. More precisely, my identity is defined by the nexus of spacetime connections (Fig 2a). Clearly, the bodies of myself and Bernardo are in different places, so this is why I’m different from Bernardo (Fig 2b).

However, this does not solve the problem of identity because it does not explain why I am identified with a particular nexus. To illustrate this, imagine that myself and Bernardo (i.e. our bodies) were born at exactly the same time in neighbouring beds in the same maternity ward. Our neurons start to fire and we become conscious simultaneously. So why does my self become associated with Bernard’s body rather than Bernardo’s? If consciousness is produced by the brain, this question is meaningless because there can be no me distinct from the body. But that is precisely why we are obliged to adopt the filter model, and the following discussion will be within that context.

One possible (religious?) answer to the question is that my consciousness is associated with some form of mental body (soul?), which pre-existed my physical body, is temporarily anchored to it during life, and will separate from it at death. Indeed, even within life there may be phenomena (e.g. Out of Body Experiences, or OBEs) that suggest the existence of such a mental body. This explanation may be unpalatable to materialists but it is at least compatible with the filter model. However, even if one accepts this view, one must still ask why I am associated with a particular mental body, so this merely raises the problem at a higher level.

A second possibility within the filter proposal is that my individual identity will be lost at death, with my consciousness becoming part of some greater collective Consciousness. Or perhaps the first state just represents an intermediate state before the second. Whatever one’s view, there is clearly a link between the nature of identity and the issue of whether consciousness exists before birth and after death. There is a huge literature on this topic—from philosophers and theologians of all persuasions—but all I wish to stress here is that both views face the problem of how Consciousness can fragment.

 

Space, time and higher dimensions

As indicated in Figure (2b), there is evidently a connection between the problem of now, related to a special point in time, and the problem of me, related to a special point in space. This is because the distinction between space and time is fuzzy in relativity theory. I will now elaborate on this point by addressing two different but related puzzles and arguing that these require the existence of extra dimensions going beyond space and time.

The first puzzle concerns why the younger and older Bernardo are both linked with the same self. The obvious answer is that his identity is associated with his 4D body (i.e. his worldline) rather than his 3D body (cf. Fig 2a). But he also has an identity on the scale of the 3D specious present, SP₁, which is merely a segment of his 4D body (cf. an Alzheimer patient who has little memory of his previous self). Indeed, all the SP₁s on his worldline connect like links in a chain to form his higher 4D self. Although the SP₁s don’t interact directly, because they are at different values of t₁, Bernardo is aware of this 4D self and the flow of time is what links them. Indeed, since there is no distinction between past and future within the SP₁, we can envisage it as a closed loop in time which rolls along his worldline (Fig 3a).

At this point, I would like to introduce another crucial (albeit contentious) step in my argument. In certain states Bernardo’s SP may increase so that he experiences his whole life as a single moment. For example, the life review component of an NDE has this feature and this suggests that there is a ‘higher’ level of consciousness—still individualized but with a specious present SP₂ exceeding the human lifetime. (This might be compared to the light in the earlier example going around faster than 10 rotations per second.) Since the longer SP can also be represented by a closed loop, the usual flow of time experienced by Bernardo corresponds to the small circle moving within a larger circle (Fig 3b). This also suggests the existence of any extra dimension with respect to which the timeline is curved.

The second puzzle concerns the relationship between Bernard and Bernardo. How can they be the same and yet different?  Bernardo’s answer—inspired by his father’s chess game with himself and his own experience under anaesthetic—is that one can patch together successive experiences from a multitude of perspectives into parallel (seemingly continuous) experiences, each from a single perspective. This reminds me of how, during my first visit to the USA, I was overwhelmed by the number of movies on TV because there were so many channels. However, I found that I could watch several of them at the same time without losing the plots by switching channels at some appropriate frequency (cf. the film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in which David Bowie watches dozens of TV screens simultaneously).

A key ingredient to experiencing a single perspective in this picture is experiencing none of the others and this is why Bernardo’s anaesthetic experience is relevant. His proposal does not solve the problem of identity completely, because he’s not explained why he’s associated with a particular perspective, but it’s interesting because it relates the problem of spatial separation to one of temporal separation. In this context, we note that there is a link between temporal resolution and spatial resolution. For not only does Bernardo cease to experience the passage of time (i.e. to have a self) on too large or too small a time scale, his body also ceases to have an identity on too large or too small a length scale: it is too small to be resolved on a planetary scale and too large for its integrity to be recognized on an atomic scale.

Figure 3. Illustrating how a hierarchy of specious presents and the passage of time may be represented by a sequence of compact dimensions in relative motion. (a) corresponds to SP₁, (b) to SP₂, (c) to SP₃, etc.

At this point, I should draw attention to another anomalous state in which the identities of different people appear to merge. For example, in the life review of an NDE one may re-experience an interaction from the perspective of someone else. Or one may have a mystical experience in which one feels identified with the whole of humanity (cosmic consciousness?). I would argue that this suggests that there is a 5D level of consciousness with a specious present SP₃ much exceeding SP₂. In this case, the bigger circle in Figure 3(b) moves around the still bigger circle in Figure 3(c). From this higher perspective, all the SP₂s are links in a chain of global identity, with the 5D self linking 4D selves across space just as the 4D self links 3D selves across time. Since SP₃ is much larger than SP₂, the 5D self does not experience the flow of time of Bernard and Bernardo and therefore cannot discriminate between them.

Although the raising of 4D consciousness to the 5D level is analogous to the raising of 3D consciousness to the 4D level, there is an important difference between these two cases. The SP₁s are explicitly linked by a 4D worldline but there is no 4D link for the SP₂s. However, lines which are disconnected in 4D space may be connected in a 5D one. So while Bernardo and Bernard have distinct identities in (x, t₁) space, they may be connected in the (x, t₁, t₂) space.

This model is reminiscent of the old idea that all electrons and positrons are identical because there is a single electron zig-zagging forwards and backwards in time (Wheeler 1940), with positrons corresponding to the backwards portions (Fig 4a). Obviously, Bernardo is different from an electron, since he experiences a passage of time and is not going backwards in time. However, one can envisage a similar diagram by adding an extra dimension t₃, as indicated in Figs 4b and 4c; this is not identified with t₂, since this only corresponds to a global passage of time. More explicitly, we introduce a separate (x, t₁) plane for each observer and colour these red and blue. Both worldlines appear in each (x, t₁) plane but only one (shown bold) is associated with consciousness and the bold lines define a single path in the (x, t₁, t₃) space. Personal identity is therefore associated with a particular plane.

There could be various 5D zig-zag paths connecting the two worldlines. One (clearly exotic) possibility is a path which connects the end of Bernard’s worldline to the start of Bernardo’s (Fig 4b). This would be analogous to a time machine in which I go back in time (i.e. in t₁), so that I coexist with my first self but maintain a separate consciousness (i.e. in t₃). There would then be two consciousnesses during our overlapping lifetimes from the 4D perspective, but only one from the 5D perspective. For an SP exceeding the spacing (i.e. SP₃), both Bernard and Bernardo are conscious. But for the SP of Bernard and Bernardo themselves (i.e. SP₁), they are  sequential. One might also envisage a 5D path which then connects the end of Bernardo’s worldline to the start of Bernard’s, as indicated by the link to the green plane in Fig 4b. However, one avoids the ambiguity of which plane comes first in t₃ if the extra dimension is closed on the scale of SP₃, so that one can identify the top (green) plane with the bottom (red) plane.

Figure 4. Zig-zag model: (a) for electrons in (x, t₁) space; (b) for Bernard (red) and Bernardo (blue) in (x, t₁, t₃) space with retro-causal connections; and (c) for Bernard and Bernardo in (x, t₁, t₃) space with causal connections. If the extra dimension is compactified, the top (green) and bottom (red) planes are identified.

Of course, this model is very simplistic, since there are billions of consciousnesses and not just myself and Bernardo. But if one can have one loop in t₁, one can presumably have many, so the model is easily extended. This is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence,” except that one does not return as oneself but as someone else. Another complication is that a 5D path might link to a bold line in the t₁ future (cf. reincarnation), rather than the t₁ past, in which case bold lines might even merge or fragment. All these possibilities can be represented by various kinds of connection in the 5D space, but this issue will not be pursued further here.

Another possibility, closer to Bernardo’s ‘chess-playing’ proposal, is that the zig-zag in the extra dimension occurs throughout the lives of Bernard and Bernardo (Fig 4c), but on a time scale less than SP₁, so that each of us experience continuity of consciousness. This model is less exotic than the first, since it does not involve going backwards in t₁, but many other features are the same. In particular, Bernard and Bernardo are simultaneously conscious from a 4D perspective, but sequentially conscious from a 5D perspective. And if the extra dimension is closed on the scale SP₃, one can again identify the red and green planes.

 

Conclusion

I have argued that mind can be accommodated in physics by introducing a 5D psychophysical space which merges the phenomenal space of ordinary perception with physical space, the 5th dimension being associated with mental time. While one has a distinct identity in the lower dimensional (x, t₁) space, associated with a 4D nexus of signalling worldlines, one is connected with other consciousnesses in the higher dimensional (x, t₁, t₂) space. The multi-level time perspective therefore helps to explain how there can be many manifestations of a unitary consciousness. However, I have argued that the fragmentation of this into a myriad of individual consciousnesses also requires the notion of a specious present and this may require further dimensions. Clearly, this proposal is very unconventional from both a physical and philosophical perspective, but I note that Schooler (2015) has advocated a similar approach.

Although it goes beyond the present discussion, I have argued elsewhere (Carr 2015) that various transpersonal experiences suggest the existence of a space with more than five dimensions—termed the Universal Structure—which contains mental experiences of all kinds. I then identify this Universal Structure with a higher-dimensional model of modern physics, in which the physical Universe is regarded as a 4D slice of a higher-dimensional space. For if physical objects occupy only a limited part of the higher-dimensional space, it is natural to ask whether anything else exists there and the only non-physical entities we experience are mental ones.

But what is the nature of the extra dimensions? In standard M-theory they are spatial and compactified on the Planck scale (10^-33cm). However, in principle the compactification scale could be much larger and we have seen that one dimension is extended in brane cosmology. One could also consider a model in which the extra dimensions are compactified on a hierarchy of scales (cf. Fig 3c) and I have suggested that each dimension could be associated with a specious present. One would then have a hierarchy of levels of consciousness associated with a hierarchy of time dimensions. This need not imply commitment to M-theory itself, but one does require some form of higher-dimensional model. This proposal is clearly very speculative and certainly does not represent mainstream physics. Indeed, most physicists would not accept the reality of the phenomena which I’m trying to explain. Nevertheless, this illustrates how physics might at least in principle be extended to accommodate mind.

 

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