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Computer scientists don’t truly understand this

Posted on 2024-07-14 by Hans Busstra, MA

Computer scientists don’t truly understand this

Seeing | Computer Science | 2024-07-14

Hans Busstra, MA

Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhD

In this lecture given at the G10 conference, the director of the Essentia Foundation, Bernardo Kastrup, argues why the idea of conscious AI, though we cannot refute it categorically, is silly. Perhaps we should rather ask ourselves the question why we entertain the idea of sentient computers in the first place. According to Kastrup, this has a lot to do with the fact that most computer scientists are power users of computers but they’ve never built a computer themselves. If they had, they would be familiar with the nuts and bolts, and they would understand that the idea of microscopic transistors becoming conscious is not that different than proposing that a sufficiently complex sewage system—consisting of water pipes and valves—would become conscious.

Exactly because AI is having a fundamental impact on society with many regulatory and perhaps even existential challenges, it is very important that especially in academia we strongly distinguish between fact and fiction: to think that AI’s running on Turing machines—i.e. all AI’s we currently have—can become conscious is not even science fiction, it’s pure fantasy.

If you dream of a triangle, where does the triangle exist?

Posted on 2024-07-06 by Arthur Haswell, BA

If you dream of a triangle, where does the triangle exist?

Reading | Metaphysics

Arthur Haswell, BA | 2024-07-06

When we dream of a triangle, we experience a geometric shape with the measurable characteristics—angles and lengths—of a triangle. But the neural correlates of this dream in the physical brain are not triangular. So if all that exists is physicality, where in the physical world is the dream triangle? In this essay, Arthur Haswell not only elaborates rigorously on this thought experiment, but also anticipates and addresses various possible objections. The conclusion, he claims, is that the experiment demonstrates that there is more to reality than what we colloquially call ‘the physical.’

One night you have a vivid dream. You are walking down a corridor. At the end of the corridor you can see a triangle, stencilled in bright red paint upon a white wall. You come right up close to it and touch it. The red paint is glossy, in contrast to the white matte of the rest of the wall. You run your finger around it, tracing its equal lines and turning with each of its angles.

We find triangles in various forms: as printed images in textbooks, as pixelated representations on screens, or even as shadows cast by objects that are not themselves triangular. These physical manifestations of triangles occupy space and possess measurable properties that align with our understanding of what constitutes a triangle. Even in the case of a shadow triangle, there are measurable physical properties (such as angles and dimensions) of light and shadow that correspond with the geometric concept of a triangle.

In contrast, when we dream of a triangle, there is no sign of there being a physical instantiation of the measurable geometric properties that correspond with the meaning of ‘triangle.’ While there may be neural activity associated with the dream, this activity does not arrange itself into the shape of the triangle we see. As far as we know from current neuroscience, we would not expect to find neural correlates of a dream triangle that would be isometric with the shape experienced in the dream. If we looked at the neural correlates of a dream triangle, we wouldn’t discover, hidden within them, a triangle that corresponds with the dream triangle in question.

This sets dream triangles (or other imagined triangles) apart from all other kinds of triangles we encounter in the physical world. Unlike physical manifestations of triangles, the dream triangle lacks physical instantiation despite having neural correlates. The dream triangle, while potentially vivid and detailed in the mind’s eye, does not occupy physical space nor does it have measurable properties outside the context of the dream. Yet the dream triangle, despite lacking a physical instantiation, might be experienced with an apparent concreteness indistinguishable from physical triangles. This underscores a significant distinction: the dream triangle manifests in a non-physical manner, challenging a purely physicalist interpretation of reality.

This distinction is crucial. A computer rendering of a triangle would not exist within the code itself; the code would simply be a set of instructions that, when executed, resulted in a triangle being instantiated on a visual display. The rendered triangle is physically instantiated only when it is presented on a visual display, such as an LCD screen, where it is measurable as a pattern of light. Before this rendering, there is no triangle. If a screen or projector is not connected to the computer, there is no triangle. The dream triangle, however, is never rendered as a triangle on any physical medium.

Some might argue that advancements in technology could one day allow for the physical rendering of dream triangles, for example by somehow linking an LCD screen to someone’s brain to display the triangle while it is dreamt of. This would certainly be remarkable, but it doesn’t touch the fundamental problem at hand. Perhaps one day someone could hook up a screen to my brain to display a triangle isomorphic with the triangle I am dreaming of, but what matters is the fact that the dream triangle would still be manifest without a screen being plugged into my brain (and therefore without the dream triangle being instantiated physically, as a triangle). What is crucial here is that a triangle, whether on a screen, in a dream, or as a shadow, retains certain geometric properties that we categorise as being triangular. Yet only in the case of a dream triangle is this triangularity not instantiated physically. The dream triangle appears within the dream, independent of any physical instantiation. The possibility of externalising this experience through technology does not negate the fact that the dream triangle, as it is manifested in the dream, exists without being physically instantiated.

Even if a computer were conscious and had its own internal dream triangle, this wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. If the computer were a conscious being and saw the triangle in its mind, just like we might do, then now the question would be “where is the dream triangle in the computer’s mind physically instantiated?” The response might be “in the code” or “in the activity of the hardware,” but then of course the point is that triangles are always physically instantiated as triangles. If we opened up the computer, we would not see the triangle it is dreaming of instantiated, as a triangle, in its circuit boards. It seems we are left with either having to accept that the dream triangle doesn’t exist in some sense, leading to some kind of particularly strong eliminativism (a price I suspect many wouldn’t be willing to pay), or that it does exist, but isn’t instantiated, as a triangle, in the physical, therefore making dream triangles exceptional from all other manifestations of triangles. For those who claim that there is nothing more or less than the physical, it is difficult to accept that the latter could be considered anything other than special pleading.

Why is it special pleading? Because it allows that there could be a triangle whose physical instantiation is without the geometric properties that constitute a triangle, something that does not occur with triangles anywhere else in reality other than in the case of a dream triangle and its neural correlates. As we’ve established, it’s not comparable to a triangle simulated on a computer. Of course, this lack of isomorphism doesn’t exclusively apply to triangles, or shapes of any kind, and there is no need for any kind of realism about shapes for the thought experiment to work. It’s just that the triangle happens to be a nice and simple concept, and it seems less meaningful to talk about a ‘re-presentation’ of the shape we call ‘triangle,’ as a ‘re-presentation’ of the shape we call a triangle could more simply be understood as just a triangle (unlike a drawing of a horse, which wouldn’t usually be understood as actually being a horse). This hopefully avoids getting into the weeds with questions about representation. In essence, the dream-triangle thought experiment is just a very simple way of making a point that could be made with horses rather than triangles. The problem is that someone could argue back that a dream horse isn’t a real horse, but just the representation of one. It’s true that you could then counter this by saying that, although the dream horse isn’t a real horse, there is still a question of how its representation is instantiated physically in the case of the dream and its NCCs (Neural Correlates of Consciousness). But this would potentially be a much more convoluted way of presenting the argument. The point of using the example of the dream triangle is simply that saying a triangle isn’t really a triangle seems very strange, if not so contradictory as to be meaningless.

Another counter argument might be something along the lines of “but no triangle is really a perfect triangle.” But this would be to miss the point, which is to use the triangle as an example only because it is very simply delineated. Theoretically, you could substitute it with anything, as the thought experiment is simply intended to illustrate that the lack of isomorphism between NCCs and mental phenomena is highly exceptional, or even unique. I picked triangles because it seems intuitively less meaningful to speak about a ‘re-presentation’ of a triangle, given that a representation of a triangle is simply a triangle (or at least no less a triangle than anything else with the geometric properties we would usually take to constitute a triangle). It might be meaningful to refer to a representation of a particular instance of a triangle (for example a drawing of a particular triangle painting in a gallery), but it wouldn’t seem to make sense to say of any triangle that it is a ‘re-presentation’ of the shape known as a triangle. In short, there is no other reason I use the example of the triangle other than to avoid confusion about questions of representation.

Another response might be something along the lines of, “But for someone who thinks that everything ultimately boils down to physical things and their interactions, and yet has already accepted that neural activity doesn’t have to be isomorphic with mental activity, surely this isn’t a problem?” The strangeness of such a view is illustrated by the point that, if the brain is analogous to a computer that renders a triangle on a screen, there is no physical counterpart to the screen in the analogy. Or in other words, there is a lack of physical instantiation of the dream triangle as a triangle (with the geometric properties of a triangle). Given that all other triangles that exist ‘externally’ are physically instantiated as triangles, to suggest that this doesn’t apply to dream triangles seems like special pleading.

Finally, another counter argument might be that, in fact, a triangle is instantiated as a triangle in a computer simulation, even without it being outputted to any visual display. Yet, I see no reason to believe this to be the case. For example, in a 2D graphics framework, the instruction for a triangle would be something like: ‘triangle(x1, y1, x2, y2, x3, y3).’ Essentially, this is just a way of instructing the software to take three sets of ordered pairs, make three points on a grid, and draw lines between them. Or, to simplify it even further, the user is doing little more than writing an instruction to make specific pixels light up on the computer’s monitor. These instructions only make sense if you have a visual display that is set up in a rectangular grid with pixels arranged in a certain order. Furthermore, it only works or even makes sense if there is a display device designed such that the human eye can perceive and interpret it.

A further way of clarifying this point is to imagine a simulation with several triangles moving randomly in a 2D framework. The simplest rule of the simulation is, “If a point of a triangle touches another, it disappears. The last triangle that survives is shown on screen.” Would it be correct to consider the triangles that have disappeared as currently ‘instantiated’ as triangles? The answer is no. Thinking the instructions for rendering the triangles are triangles themselves is akin to thinking you can feed someone with a recipe rather than actual food.

While I’m aware that this thought experiment cannot be considered to conclusively prove any metaphysical thesis to be true or false, my hope is that it might trigger a change of aspect.

Here is a brief summary of the argument, broken down into bullet points:

In a computer simulation, what we perceive as a triangle is the result of programming code that defines behaviours and properties, but it does not create a triangle within the computer’s memory or processing units.
The simulation contains the potential for a triangle, but this potential is not realized as a physical shape until it is rendered on a screen.
When the simulation is run and the image is displayed on a screen, the pixels align to create the visual form of a triangle. This is the moment when it can be said that the triangle exists physically, as a pattern of light on the screen.
Unlike the triangles in simulations, which are physically instantiated on screens or other visual displays, triangles in dreams do not have a physical form or location.
The dream triangle, while it may have neural correlates, is not instantiated as a triangle in the brain or anywhere else in physical space. Here, there is no equivalent to the screen in the computer simulation analogy.
This distinction reinforces the argument that not all experiences of triangles are physically instantiated.
It supports the position that the mind can experience dream triangles in a non-physical way.
This of course does not necessarily solely apply to dream triangles, but potentially myriad mental phenomena.

Or, even more simply:

It is contradictory to say a triangle isn’t a triangle.
It is tautologous to say a triangle is a triangle.
Therefore a triangle in a dream is a triangle.
A dream triangle is not instantiated, as a triangle, in the physical.
Therefore a dream triangle is a triangle, but it is not physical.
Therefore there is more to reality than the physical.

Imagination is closer to truth than you think

Posted on 2024-06-30 by Natalia Vorontsova, MA

Imagination is closer to truth than you think

Seeing | Philosophy | 2024-06-30

Natalia Vorontsova, MA

Tom Cheetham, PhD

Natalia Vorontsova talks to Dr Tom Cheetham about active imagination, consciousness and life-changing experiences in the context of the philosophy and theology of Henry Corbin, Ibn Arabi and Surhawardi. Tom offers a unique perspective on post-materialist science, having come full circle from scientific materialism through Jungian psychology and Sufi mysticism to the realization that science is not an obstacle to accessing the transcendent. It’s a thought-provoking conversation about the nature of reality and what it means to be human. You can find out more about Tom’s work at https://www.tomcheetham.com/.

All matter is a cognitive ‘hallucination,’ even the brain itself

Posted on 2024-06-232024-06-24 by Aditya Prasad

All matter is a cognitive ‘hallucination,’ even the brain itself

Reading | Neuroscience

Aditya Prasad | 2024-06-23

Neuroscience has conceded that the same cognitive structures that generate dreams also generate our experience of waking reality. It’s just that, unlike in the former case, in the latter the ‘hallucination’ is modulated by external factors. Be that as it may, the implication is still that all we colloquially refer to as ‘matter’ is a cognitive construct of our minds. However, as Aditya Prasad highlights, despite such acknowledgment most neuroscientists still surreptitiously seem to assume that the chunk of matter we call a ‘brain’ is special: unlike all other matter, which is ‘hallucinated,’ the brain is the thing that generates the hallucinations. But for the account to remain consistent, we must understand that the brain, too, as a material object, is part of the hallucination. The implications of this consistency, Mr. Prasad argues, are ineffable.

We hallucinate our perceived realities. If you haven’t encountered this idea before, then I encourage you to watch this TED talk by neuroscientist Anil Seth (titled “Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality”). Beneath the video you will find numerous highly-upvoted comments along these lines:

Ah yes watching this during an existential crisis in the middle of the night was a great idea.

and:

That’s the type of title that causes an existential crisis in my mind before I even click on the video.

Yet, typically, shortly after making such comments, people go right back to living their lives as though everything were completely normal and their worlds, as experienced, were external to them. Why? Because our minds won’t easily let us internalize this knowledge deeply enough for us to see its full implications; to ‘peek behind the curtain,’ as it were. Indeed, Dr. Seth himself has apparently not done so. How do I know?

Because once you experience the trick firsthand, you see that even brains are hallucinated constructs—and therefore cannot be the actual things doing the hallucinating. Afterward, you would make sure to title your talk ‘Your mind hallucinates your conscious reality,’ so as not to reinforce the mistaken notion that brain = mind. That equality is itself part of the hallucination—perhaps its most fundamental trick.

The title of the talk (as well as its content) induces a ‘trippy’ feeling in viewers, only to quench it by reassuring them that at the basis of the illusion is something solid and familiar: good ol’ brains. But what are brains, if not physical structures made of the very stuff whose existence was just called into question? In this way, the rug that was yanked out from under our feet is very neatly placed back there, almost without our noticing.

Dr. Seth would no doubt contest these claims. Surely it doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen ‘behind the curtain’ firsthand, or merely understood the process intellectually. In both cases, your objective knowledge is the same. If such an experience were to radically alter your worldview, we should chalk it up to your (very real) brain tricking you into doing so. Therefore, why bother to experience it firsthand?

This question—namely, why bother?—is precisely how your mind tricks you into never ‘peering behind the curtain.’ There is something that it does not want you to see. After all, it is generating this hallucination for a reason.

The truth is that most of us have never actually looked our experience fully in the face before. There is an astonishing miracle unfolding before (or more accurately, within) us in every moment, whose glory is impossibly beyond measure. Yet we somehow never notice it. To borrow a line from the Bible: “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see My face, and live.” I do not believe this line is alluding to physical death, but instead to a process that psychonauts sometimes refer to as ego death. It is impossible to perceive the infinite glory of Reality and still maintain the illusion of being a separate self lost in a fundamentally external reality. It is only to preserve our egoic structure that our minds make us perceive a mundane, intrinsically lifeless physical reality.

Elsewhere, the nature of God is said to be that of an uncreated light. In what sense is it ‘uncreated’? The infinite Light of which your reality is made actually precedes your notions of time and causality. It is possible to directly experience this fact just prior to your mind constructing a model of how your reality came about, what it is for, etc.; prior to any notion of creation and destruction. Such a perception is often described as timeless.

Until we see this clearly, we are always subtly looking away from our direct experience, by feeding ourselves clever stories about how we already know what it is and how it came to be, thereby convincing ourselves that we don’t really have to look. Meditation is nothing more than the practice of undoing these stories, culminating in a moment of looking directly at what has always been right under our very noses without our noticing it. It is described as en-light-ening for a reason.

But why should such a perception alter your worldview? And why would you take it seriously even if it did? This is the hardest thing to communicate—and I believe it is the root cause of the endless debates in which materialists and idealists continually talk past each other.

At the heart of such metaphysical debates is, of course, the question of what is real. They seem to be about which of two things (consciousness or matter) is more real, but they’re actually about what the word ‘real’ ought to refer to in the first place.

If you have not directly experienced the fact that your reality is a hallucination, then you can still harbor the illusion that your model of reality is grounded in something solid and dependable: that it points to reality. But if you have had the experience of entering your perception prior to the point that your hallucination of reality has fully formed—and, crucially, you had enough presence of mind to clearly see what was going on in there—you will have discovered firsthand that your model of reality has no such solid basis.

That it has no such basis isn’t a controversial point, even amongst materialists. To quote arch-materialist Sean Carroll: “We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.” In the context of his writing, he is explaining why we should trust materialism even though it is (in a very precise sense) no more likely to be true than competing hypotheses. Namely: since it is logically impossible to prove any model of reality correct (or even to put accurate probabilities on them, absent external information that is by definition inaccessible), we are free to pick what we consider real.

It is possible to maintain this position right up until the point when you look your experience fully in the face for the first time. In that moment, you finally realize how comically absurd it is to use the word ‘real’ to refer to something that you have literally no reason to believe in. You were only doing so to maintain a particular illusion; to hide something from yourself. In a flash, that word—namely, ‘real’—gets repurposed to refer to that-which-is-completely-unmistakable—the only thing that word could possibly deserve to mean.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Philip K. Dick

It is impossible to put too fine a point on this. If it is unclear what I mean when I say that you have “literally no reason to believe in” physical reality, please read this piece. I mean it in a precise sense; one that philosophers (materialists included) have already fully conceded. Yet it is not enough to understand this fact intellectually, because there is a deep aspect of your mind that will still sneakily hide its full import from you. It is protecting your egoic structure (for which you should thank it).

For the same reason, it might be difficult to see what I’m pointing to when I reference “this-which-is-completely-unmistakable.” It is literally the only thing you have ever encountered (or ever could encounter) and yet our minds reduce it to just another thing; no big deal. This reduction will continue to occur until the rug is firmly pulled out from under your reality for long enough to see what remains. Only at this point are you forced to confront the infinite splendor that never began and never lets up—that which properly deserves the exalted designation ‘real.’

For this reason, these two groups—those who have fully penetrated the illusion (even once) and those who have not—are fated to talk past each other. It is inevitable; a tragicomic joke that Reality plays on us (or really, that we play on ourselves). Luckily, it is possible to transition from one group to the other—but be forewarned: that transition is a one-way street.

Quantum fields are consciousness: A groundbreaking new theory by the inventor of the microprocessor

Posted on 2024-06-162024-06-16 by Hans Busstra, MA

Quantum fields are consciousness: A groundbreaking new theory by the inventor of the microprocessor

Seeing | Quantum Theory | 2024-06-16

Hans Busstra, MA

Federico Faggin

A new groundbreaking theory of consciousness proposes that qualia — for instance, the scent of a rose — reside in quantum fields. Federico Faggin is one of the greatest luminaries of high technology alive today. A physicist by education, he is the inventor of the microprocessor and the MOS silicon gate technology, both of which underlie the modern world’s entire information technology. With the knowledge and experience of a lifetime in cutting-edge fields, Federico now turns his attention to consciousness and the nature of reality, sharing with us his profound insights on the classical and quantum worlds, artificial intelligence, life and the human mind. In this discussion, he elaborates on an idealist model of reality, produced after years of careful thought and direct experience, according to which nature’s most fundamental level is that of consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, while the classical physical world consists merely of evocative symbols of a deeper reality.

Order “Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature” on Amazon

00:00 Intro
02:15 Announcing Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature
03:28 Core Message of Irreducible
05:23 Bernardo Kastrup on Irreducible
13:17 Introduction at ASML by Hans Busstra
18:55 Interview with Federico at ASML
21:37 When did you realize consciousness cannot be computed?
25:43 On the distinction between intelligence and consciousness
36:04 Federico’s theory in relation to The Matrix
37:35 You have to start with consciousness and free will as postulates
42:42 Are emotions a product of consciousness?
43:30 What about a person who is brain-dead?
47:54 Federico on the fact that his theory is speculative but needed
49:24 On the order of consciousness, life, computers, human nature
50:57 The universe wants to know itself
52:37 Quantum theory and pre-modern intuitions
53:55 The evolution of life is cycle of meaning to symbol

The ‘Fall of Man’ as the Freudian original loss

Posted on 2024-06-092024-06-09 by Dr. Ludwig Sachs

The ‘Fall of Man’ as the Freudian original loss

Reading | Psychology

Dr. Ludwig Sachs | 2024-06-09

The biblical story of the Fall of Man is a symbolic representation of our universal experience of primordial loss, the Freudian pure lack, or “das Ding,” argues Dr. Sachs. The fall into the phenomenal world of perceptual experience appears from this psychoanalytical perspective as the “I” development of the human being. The subsequent expulsion from paradise and the loss of the immediate presence of God are the trauma of this fundamental loss.

Analytical Idealism’s assumption that the mind is the fundamental basis of the world raises profound questions about the relationship between structure and subject. A useful approach to discussing these questions can be found in structural psychoanalysis, as developed by the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan.¹ It conceptualizes “the unconscious” as a language-like structure from which the subject emerges. By bringing structural psychoanalysis into dialogue with the principles of Analytic Idealism, we open up new ways of exploring the complexity of human experience.

This essay is also intended to make a complementary contribution to Arsanious’ profound analysis of the biblical Fall of Man, in which he considers the Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal.² I build on his argument that the misrecognition of these levels raises central questions about our experience of the world. By integrating structural psychoanalysis, I try to shed light on how unconscious processes influence this misunderstanding and shape our experience of reality.

Introduction

Structural psychoanalysis, which emerges from the therapeutic experience of treating symptoms by speaking, assumes that the unconscious has a language-like structure. To say that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” from the point of view of psychoanalysis, is the same as saying that “the unconscious is structured.” For structural psychoanalysis, a structure is always the structure of a language. The material of the unconscious is therefore of a linguistic nature: it consists of signifiers.

Subject and structure

What is the difference between a signifier and a sign? The signifier, in contrast to the sign, is not that which represents something for someone, but that by which the subject is represented for another signifier. The sentence “the unconscious is structured like a language” does not just mean that the unconscious consists of signifiers; it is about the unconscious and the relationship between structure and subject. This is where psychoanalysis differs from the natural sciences and linguistics, which exclude the subject. If psychoanalysis is about structure, then it is about the relationship between structure and subject. This is the strange thing about it, because it implies that the subject is inseparable from every structure. Or can you imagine a structure without a subject being involved?

The Signifier

“The signifier is that by which the subject is represented for another signifier.” This formulation is a deliberate departure from the classic definition of a sign, which states: “A sign represents something for someone.” A sign is about representing a consciousness. Structural psychoanalysis, on the other hand, eliminates this direct reference: the signifier does not represent something for someone, but for another signifier. This relational structure of representation eludes consciousness.

Interaction between signifiers

In structural psychoanalysis, it is not the individual signifier that represents the subject, but a chain of signifiers. The subject is indirectly contained in this chain. The chain continues from one signifier to the next. In a simple sentence such as “I love you,” the subject is represented by the signifier “I” for the signifier “love.” And “love” leads to the signifier “you.” What is important here is that the subject is not the signifier “I” but instead only represented by it, and that the representing signifier refers to another signifier. The subject is determined by this concatenation of signifiers, it is the product of this connection and not what controls the concatenation. The subject is a subjectum, a subordinate.

The unconscious as knowledge

In structural psychoanalysis, the unconscious is understood as a chain of signifiers. Since it is about the relationship between signifiers, the unconscious is a knowledge whose simplest form is the difference between the signifiers. The subject appears twice here: as that which is deciphered in this knowledge and as that which deciphers this knowledge. The process of deciphering the unconscious takes the place of what is commonly referred to as self-awareness. This definition also sets itself apart from the idea that psychoanalysis is concerned with the “subject” in the everyday sense, a subject that communicates with another—i.e., with “intersubjectivity.” The relationship at issue here is one between signifiers, not subjects.

Differentiality of the signifiers

In structural psychoanalysis, the signifier is seen as an elementary component of the (language) structure, which is not defined by its own substance but by its relationship to, and difference from, other signifiers. Signifiers have no inherent meaning or substance; their meaning arises solely from their position and function within the structure of the signifier network. The signifier is nothing but the difference from all other signifiers.

The ultimate basis for the functioning of the language structure as a system of signifiers is therefore the difference, the difference as such, the absolute difference. This difference is the difference that underpins the signifier system.

Structural psychoanalysis shares the emphasis on a fundamental difference, for example, with the concept of the “Ur-alternatives” of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912–2007),³ a renowned German physicist and philosopher who argued that the basis of the physical world consists not of material particles or waves, but of fundamental binary decisions—the Ur-alternatives. These decisions, similar to bits in digital computer technology, represent the simplest form of information: the choice between two options. Von Weizsäcker saw in these yes/no decisions a primary ontology and argued that physics can be understood as a form of information processing.

The narcissism of small differences

The concept of differentiality is based on what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” This narcissism refers to pure difference—to a “single trait.” The difference is so small that it is reduced to differentness, to a difference that indicates nothing more than just the presence of a difference. The “single trait” in Freud’s sense is based on absolute difference, on difference per se. It is difference reduced to empty diversity. By adopting a “single trait”—by constituting a small difference—the I (-ideal) is created through identification, which gives the subject a sense, a meaning. The single trait is therefore both identity and difference.

The “single trait” can be visualized with a tally. Each tally mark is both identical and different in relation to the other tally marks. It is identical to the others in that each can be exchanged with any other, it differs from the others in that it occupies a different position.

The subject is thus not located on the level of the one in the sense of totality, but of the countable individual. Identification with the “single trait” is identification as a single person, as a countable individual. This identification is at the same time the creation of a difference, the differentiation from others.

Trauma and primal repression

Why does the subject identify with the “single trait”? From a psychoanalytic perspective, the reason is that the subject insists on producing an experience of satisfaction that is exactly the same as an earlier one: the first foundation of the subject is the so-called primary identification and the associated experience of satisfaction that was connected with the first inscription of a marker, with the first inscription of a “single trait.” The erasure of this first foundation—the primary identification—is, in Freud’s terminology, the result of repressed trauma: “Urverdrängung,” the primal repression. In structural psychoanalysis, the primally repressed belongs to the order of the Real. The Real is that which absolutely resists verbalization and visualization in the course of psychoanalysis, that which cannot be symbolized and made conscious. Structural psychoanalysis thus refers to Freud’s fundamental concepts with which he attempted to explain certain profound psychological phenomena. Therefore, when interpreting dreams, one often encounters a critical point at which an entanglement of thoughts occurs that cannot be further unraveled. Freud referred to this point as the “navel of the dream.” This refers to the Real and bears witness to primal repression, a process in which the very first, fundamental psychological contents are repressed.

The concept of the Real is similar to Kant’s idea of the noumenal, as a reality that lies beyond our sensory experience. According to Kant, the noumenal remains unknowable to us, since our knowledge is based on the sensory experience of the phenomenal world—i.e., the contents of perception. Structural psychoanalysis agrees that the Real is unknowable, but emphasizes that the Real is inevitably involved and intervenes in our experience of the world, for which the analogy of linking Borromean rings⁴ can be used. It emphasizes the irrevocable presence of the Real for the subject by marking the boundaries of the symbolic and the imaginary and pointing to the unavoidable confrontation with that which eludes complete comprehension and representation.

Freud described what is originally repressed as the “ideational representation” of “das Ding,” the Freudian thing. What is “das Ding”? It is pure lack, original loss, although not a lost object in the conventional sense. The idea is the following: as soon as the subject refers to something as an object, something is already lost at the same time, “das Ding.” All possible real and ideal objects in their capacity as objects are only a vain substitute for “das Ding,” which is the name for the vain desire to return to a world before trauma, in which there was still no difference between the subject and his objects.

That which absolutely opposes symbolization by the unconscious can be determined more precisely on the basis of psychoanalytic experience. According to Freud, the unconscious cannot conceive of its own death or of sexual difference. The subject attempts to symbolize sexual difference and death, but is unable to do so.

The need for repetition

The subject now attempts in vain to repeat the original experience of satisfaction. Insistence in the form of repetition aims to reproduce the first foundation of the subject and thus produce an experience of satisfaction that is exactly the same as an earlier one. However, the repetition of a certain experience of satisfaction is only possible if the latter is identified in some way. This particular experience of satisfaction is identified by the single trait; it cannot be repeated other than by means of this marker, this absolute difference.

The marker abstracts the experience by labelling it as repeatable. However, it is precisely the uniqueness or specificity of the original experience that the subject longs for. The achievement of the same experience of satisfaction is therefore structurally impossible, because the marker transforms the experience into a repeatable state and thus eliminates its specific uniqueness.

This paradox—i.e., that the marker simultaneously represents the access to and the blockage of the specific experience of satisfaction—leads to the subject remaining trapped in a cycle of repetition. The structural impossibility of reproducing the repressed experience of satisfaction maintains the dynamic of repetition and drives the subject to try to achieve the unattainable.

The expulsion from paradise

Shouldn’t these basic structures of the subject also be found deep in the collective myths of humanity, and not only as pictorial metaphors, but as direct manifestations of the primally repressed itself? In this context, the narrative of the expulsion from paradise proves to be not only an allegorical tradition, but also a testimony to our “collective subject structure,” the archetypal anthropos that reveals the nature of human existence. It penetrates consciousness as a narrative that seeks to articulate the unspeakable and to grasp the fundamental core of our being. This story reflects the fate of humanity, which goes far beyond what could be understood as a metaphorical interpretation.

Man, as the image of God, as the ideational representation (“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’”⁵), embodies the primary identification, the original experience of satisfaction (“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good”). In this original state, man is in perfect, indiscriminate unity with the living Word of God, which contains no idea of death (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”⁶).

The creation of Eve from Adam’s ribs, the single trait of the “bony tally,” marks the difference between the sexes, which, however, man is not aware of (“So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.”).

The snake, as the embodiment of difference in itself, as a single trait in the form of a line and with a split tongue, introduces the desire to be equal to God. This is about the woman—i.e., the side of the human being that emerged from the single trait. The desire to be equal to God refers to the desire for the first experience of satisfaction via marking and identification (“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”). However, this means that the dynamic is subject to the above-mentioned structural impossibility or is inevitably associated with the loss of “das Ding.”

Man eats from the tree of knowledge, the capacity for binary differentiation of the “Ur-alternative” of good and evil. Good and evil for whom? For the “I”: by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the subject enters the world of signifiers and symbolic differences as an “I” through identification with the single trait. This action marks the beginning of the subject, but also the loss of immediate unity with the divine, which is now unattainable as “das Ding,” because it lies beyond the significant differences from which the subject emerges. This is how Adam and Eve recognize their difference, of which they had no idea beforehand (“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”).

The unity with God is broken, man disappears as a split or dissociated subject in the form of a question addressed to the “I” (“But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’”). God has become the Other, of which the “I” is afraid (“And he said, ‘I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.’”).

The fall into the phenomenal, which Arsanious refers to very aptly in his essay, therefore appears from this psychoanalytical perspective as the “I” development of the human being through the entry into the symbolic order. The subsequent expulsion from paradise and the loss of the immediate presence of God are the trauma of this fundamental separation. The access to paradise, to God and to the tree of life is lost, repressed (“He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.”). God becomes “das Ding,” the unattainable object of desire.

From then on, the subject circles around this lost “Ding” of the primal repressed. And since humans, as the subjects of the unconscious, have no concept of death and their own sexual differentiations, it is impossible for them to symbolize death and sexual differentiations. Thus, the subject is condemned to encounter death in incessant procreation, a death it does not understand, in an endless attempt to approach the inexpressible, hoping for redemption.

Bibliography

https://www.lacanonline.com/ or https://lacan-entziffern.de/ (German)
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/the-fall-into-the-phenomenal-how-idealism-can-help-the-creation-story-converge-with-deep-scientific-truth/reading/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_von_Weizs%C3%A4cker or https://youtu.be/txkh9xvpQAg?si=KjT3fWQqCUdeJnnn (German)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borromean_rings
Old Testament, Genesis online https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%201&version=ESV
New Testament, Gospel of John online https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%201&version=ESV

The social pay-off of Idealism (The Return of Idealism)

Posted on 2024-06-01 by Prof. James Tartaglia, PhD

The social pay-off of Idealism (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Philosophy

Prof. James Tartaglia, PhD | 2024-06-01

Prof. James Tartaglia advocates for a revival of metaphysical idealism, arguing that it is misunderstood and often unfairly dismissed by the scientific establishment. By clarifying common misconceptions, Tartaglia reveals how idealism could offer significant social benefits, encouraging a more philosophical society focused on the primacy of experience. His new book, Inner Space Philosophy: Why the Next Stage of Human Development Should Be Philosophical, Explained Radically (Suitable for Wolves), comes out on the 28th June 2024. This essay is the latest instalment of our The Return of Idealism series, produced in collaboration with the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI). It was first published by the IAI on 29 May 2024.

These days, metaphysical idealism is an immediate turn-off for most secular, scientifically minded people, who start to think of gods and spirits, maybe even Ouija boards. I think that’s a shame, because it’s a prejudice that results from some straightforward misunderstandings—misunderstandings which have greatly benefited the fortunes of idealism’s ancient metaphysical rival, materialism. To understand the potential social benefits of idealism you need to be able to take the view seriously, so let’s start by clearing away some of those misunderstandings.

Firstly, idealism has no commitment to gods or spirits, only to the existential primacy of conscious experience—or, at least, that’s the kind of idealism I’m talking about, there are others. The 19^th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was no less ardent in his commitment to atheism than to idealism. I’m not denying that if you’re a believer then you’re better off with idealism than materialism—a physical God is a weird idea—but my point is simply that the two don’t necessarily need to go together. I think the idealist interpretation of reality is the best we’ve got, and I have no religious beliefs and do not believe in anything supernatural; never have, and unless something very unexpected happens, never will.

Secondly, materialism is not science, it’s not even close—materialism provides a metaphysical interpretation of what science tells us about the world, just as idealism does. Materialism originated in the 5^th century B.C. in Greece and India, back in the days when you were allowed to define your own “atoms,” the materialist’s building blocks of reality. Materialism and idealism are competing metaphysical interpretations of our reality, as are dualism, panpsychism and all the other more esoteric options. Maybe you’re suspicious of metaphysical theorizing in general (in which case I think that on closer examination you’d find your suspicions were ungrounded)—but in that case you should be just as suspicious of materialism as of idealism.

Thirdly, idealism is not saying that solid things, like rocks and pebbles, are wispy and immaterial things, akin to clouds or puffs of smoke. For a start, that comparison doesn’t even make sense, since clouds and puffs of smoke exist in space, and according to idealists, experience doesn’t. And if idealism really were saying that rocks and pebbles are clouds of immaterial stuff, then it would be making a scientific hypothesis, one which would need to be empirically tested. Idealism simply isn’t in that kind of business.

Okay then, so what is idealism saying about rocks and pebbles? It’s saying we are part of a universe of pure conscious experience, and that believing in the physical existence of rocks and pebbles allows humans to get their bearings in that ocean of sentience. Rocks and pebbles are a way of making sense of experience, they are posits within an explanatory model—the experience exists, it’s independently there, and we understand it by thinking of it as experiences of things like rocks and pebbles. Rocks and pebbles don’t independently exist, but the nature of experience is such that they seem to—that’s why the explanatory model works, that’s why we came up with a specifically physical model. The materialists instead say that the rocks and pebbles independently exist, but then they have a problem with what to say about experience, a problem they’ll never solve, in my view—instead they’ll endlessly oscillate between the two nonsensical options of saying it doesn’t exist or that it mysteriously arises from the brain. But that’s another matter—if you want to know what convinces me of idealism you can look at my book, Philosophy in a Technological World: GODS AND TITANS (the warring gods and titans of the story I tell in that book are idealism and materialism, by the way). What I want to concentrate on here are some possible benefits of a societal turn to idealism.

The main benefit I’m going to talk about, one which might have all kinds of knock-on effects, is that idealism tells us we live in a reality consisting of all we ever really cared about: experience. What do I mean by saying that experience is all we care about? And why would believing that have societal benefits? To start with the first question, consider the following. Three things that people might very seriously care about are: owning a new Italian sportscar, becoming a famous YouTuber, and not getting seriously ill. But suppose you knew that the moment you first climbed into your shiny new Lamborghini Huracá (yellow), you would fall into the most terrible depression ever, one that would last for as long as you owned the car—you wouldn’t want it then, because all you ever really wanted was the experiences associated with owning it, elation, pride, excitement, that kind of thing, none of which is available when you are seriously depressed. The same applies to becoming a famous YouTuber—if it made you feel awful then you’d regret it immediately. And in the case of getting seriously ill it’s even more obvious—you don’t want the pain, you don’t want the fear, and you certainly don’t want your experiences to be brought to an end by death. Experience, I maintain, is all we really care about: love, contentment, excitement, interest, satisfaction, tingles, all that kind of business. And there is nothing remotely selfish about that either, since we can care about each other’s feelings, love would be impossible otherwise.

Our attraction to experience makes perfect sense, according to idealism, because we’re experiential beings. But even if that’s true, why does it matter? Why would being more in touch with the metaphysically ultimate nature of reality benefit us practically? Well, the way I see it is that if the idealist view is indeed correct, but you don’t believe it, perhaps because you’re a materialist, then you’ll end up with a strange mismatch between what you say you believe and what you act as if you believe. You’ll be someone who spends their life in pursuit of experiences even though experience has little or no place in their conception of reality. Ask most people about their conception of reality and their thoughts quickly turn to outer space or infinitesimally small particles—experience completely drops out of the picture. But then, after they stop thinking about “reality” and return to their everyday lives, experience once again becomes their main focus.

I don’t think letting our officially sanctioned conception of reality become so completely out of kilter with our lives is a good idea. To be fair, it may be unavoidable, because materialism might be true even though science cannot explain experience at present—but I don’t think this is the case. But either way, the societal effect of this mismatch is that general, philosophical reflection on the nature of the reality you’ve found yourself born into has been seriously disincentivised. Reality has become something for experts to concern themselves with, something interesting to hear about on science podcasts, perhaps, but remote from your everyday concerns with experience. So, people become less inclined to actively, creatively and critically reflect on their existential situation, that is, they become less philosophical.

Now, suppose that while people were becoming less philosophical, their technological capabilities were rapidly developing, and that this development wasn’t directed by a philosophical vision of a desirable human future, but rather by the ingenuity of scientists and technologists making whatever new, previously unmakeable things they could. Is that not essentially the situation we find ourselves in? I think it is, and yet look where our technology is heading, however unintentionally—to experience! Our technological development, driven by the market, is chasing after experience, just as we chase after it in our everyday lives.

We have very rapidly gone from the passive experience of television to the active control over non-natural experience provided by video games; and now virtual reality is developing fast, when they get that right how are we ever going to stay outside of it for long? As these “experience machines” have become better and better, they have taken up more and more of our lives; as far as our younger generations are concerned they seem to be completely taking over. And now we are trying to make autonomous experience machines too, artificial intelligences, because whether through the fog of materialism or just lack of reflection, they seem like created minds—and to be able to create minds suggests godlike control over experience.

These directions of technological travel—natural to us, an idealist would say, but not reflective of any wisdom—have not been decided through philosophical reflection on how we want human life to develop. That is not how it happens at all. What happens is that scientists and technologists compete to make breakthroughs, then the breakthroughs get commercialized and people buy into the new tech—society then benefits from the upsides while trying to deal with the downsides, until the next big tech development comes along.

But think what might happen if idealism starts to catch on. For more and more people, what they care most about is what they consider to be most real. A population like that, of the kind that has not yet existed, would be a lot more philosophical. Imagine yourself believing that idealism is true—if this were a genuine new belief for you, then the world you thought you were familiar with would suddenly seem very odd indeed, you’d think about it a lot! After all, you’ve just realised you’re swimming in that ocean of sentience I spoke of earlier. While you’re trying to get to grips with the enormity of it all, your thoughts will likely spin off in all kinds of new philosophical directions.

As our population becomes increasingly philosophical, thanks to idealism, people could be expected to take much more interest in technological development and how it is being used to shape the human future. They might start taking a view on how technological development ought to be happening, views which might feed into democratic politics. Then, the next thing you know, the human race is coordinating their technological development, which has become firmly focused on refining and improving our experiences, so that there’s more love, beauty, ecstasy, and cleverness around, but less hate, ugliness, boredom and stupidness. Since we now think we’re experiential beings, identities such as gender and race seem less important, at the ultimate level we know we’re all alike and we find cooperation easier. When we first make contact with extraterrestrials, they remark that humans are a remarkably philosophical species. They’re impressed by the kind of experiences we have and emulate us. Our good influence starts to spread around the galaxy.

Reality is the tapestry of perception (The Return of Idealism)

Posted on 2024-05-26 by Dr. Helen Yetter-Chappell

Reality is the tapestry of perception (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Metaphysics

Dr. Helen Yetter-Chappell | 2024-05-26

The materialist worldview robs reality of its colour, temperature, smell, leaving us with a picture that is radically at odds with our common sense understanding of the world. Helen Yetter-Chappell proposes an alternative: reality is made of experiences, woven together into an experiential tapestry that persists even when we aren’t looking. This essay is the latest instalment of our series ‘The Return of Idealism,’ in partnership with the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI). It was first published by the IAI on 20 May 2024.

Snow is white. Fire is hot. What could be more obvious? Yet a surprising number of philosophers do not think these things are true in the way that we ordinarily presume.

What is it for something to be hot? You know this. You’ve felt heat before. It’s warm, then it’s unpleasant, then it burns. It feels … hot. But when scientists look around, they don’t find the hot feel. What they find is molecules bouncing around rapidly. So scientists (re)define heat as molecular kinetic energy.

What is it for something to be white? You know this, too. It looks… white. But when scientists look around, they don’t find this whitish “look.” They find objects with different molecular structures, reflecting and absorbing different ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. So white is (re)defined as having a molecular structure that reflects all electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths from 380 to 700 nanometers.

It would be absurd to deny that hot things have high molecular kinetic energy or that white objects reflect light in a certain wavelength. It is the business of science to reveal the structural features of the world around us. And it is amazing at doing so. But many philosophers go a step further. They take these structural features to be all that the world contains of heat and color. The whiteness that I thought was part of reality is but an illusion generated by my brain.

These are extreme simplifications of a rich philosophical literature on the nature of color. The key point is that the standard scientific image of the world depicts a radically alien place, leached of all warmth and color that infuses our experiences. The world is made into a blank dot-to-dot with no substance.

But does it have to be this way? Could the structures revealed by science themselves be infused with qualities like warmth and color? And what would the world have to be like, for this to be possible?

Berkeley’s Idealism

Enlightenment philosopher George Berkeley famously pushed back against this stark materialistic view on which reality is bereft of “sensible qualities”:

[I]t is my opinion that the real things are those very things I see, and feel, and perceive by my senses. These I know; and, finding they answer all the necessities and purposes of life, have no reason to be solicitous about any other unknown beings. … It is likewise my opinion that colours and other sensible qualities are on the objects. I cannot for my life help thinking that snow is white, and fire hot. (Third Dialogue)

Berkeley argued that nothing but an experience can be like an experience. (If you’re unsure, try denying it. Try imagining something that’s not an experience but is qualitatively like a tickle. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Berkeley thinks the same is true for the experience of heat and whiteness.) If this is right, it’s no wonder most philosophers embrace a conception of reality as radically alien to us. Most philosophers are materialists. That is, they hold that reality is mind-independent. But the world as we know it is the world we experience. All that we know of reality – even all that we know from science – comes from our experiences of the world we live in. If the external world does not include experientiality, and nothing but an experience can be like an experience, the world we live in is nothing like the world we think we live in.

I’m actually very sympathetic to the idea that our knowledge of the world we live in is radically impoverished. But it is a sufficiently alienating view that I think it’s worth exploring alternative conceptions of reality to see whether we can’t embrace both our intuitive understanding of the world and the lessons science teaches us about the structure of reality.

Berkeley’s answer was the world around us is a collection of ideas—which we can roughly think of as mental images. This is a view known as idealism. Think about the chocolate cake you baked last night. What do you know of it? It’s brown and spongey; sweet and chocolatey; it’s got lighter colored, gooey buttercream frosting. According to Berkeley, the cake just is a collection of the experiences one has when one encounters the cake (brownishness, sweetness, etc.). There could also be far more to the cake than what I or you experience. Your friend with covid may not be able to taste the chocolatiness that you taste. Your blind friend may not be able to see the brownness that you see. Conversely, you can’t smell the complex overtones that the dog smells or sense the infrared that the snake senses or see the molecular structure that a scientist looking through a microscope sees. But Berkeley can accept that all of these are equally real features of the cake.

So idealists hold that reality is fundamentally mental: a structured collection of experiences. A problem immediately arises for such a view. If reality is a bunch of experiences, what happens when no one’s there to experience it? Suppose you put your chocolate cake in the fridge overnight. There’s no one there in the fridge to experience it. When I open the fridge in the morning, there it is. But what happened to it in the meantime? Did it pop out of existence and then pop back? Worse still, what if there’s no one behind my cake, looking at the other side of it? Does the other side not exist? Does its sweetness exist when no one’s eating it, or just pop into being when I start eating?

To have to answer yes to these questions would be an embarrassment, particularly for a view that is predicated on capturing common sense. And the challenge points to a more general worry: the worry that (in taking reality to be mind-dependent) we’ve done away with reality, making it nothing more than an elaborate imagination.

Fortunately, Berkeley has an answer: God. The details of Berkeley’s account are debated. But one simple interpretation (likely not Berkeley’s actual view) is captured by a famous limerick:

There was a young man who said God,
must think it exceedingly odd
if he finds that the tree
continues to be
when no one’s about in the Quad.

Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.

The cake doesn’t pop in and out of existence. Why? Whether it’s in the fridge or on my plate or in my stomach, God is always perceiving it. Likewise, the cake’s attributes (its backside, its sweetness) also remain constant. The same is true for the world more generally: It persists and unfolds, regardless of our thoughts, attention, or experiences, in the mind of God. Reality may be mind-dependent, but is not my mind dependent or human mind dependent.

Berkeley has not done away with reality: He’s given an account of the nature of reality. He has not made reality insubstantial. If anything, he’s given us substance—filling in the blank dot-to-dot embraced by materialism. As Berkeley quips, “a piece of sensible bread, for instance, would stay my stomach better than ten thousand times as much of that insensible, unintelligible, real bread [materialists] speak of.”

Nontheistic Idealism

I myself am agnostic. If idealism requires a traditional Judeo-Christian God, that strikes me as a cost. My book, The View from Everywhere (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), argues that idealism does not require such a God.

God is traditionally taken to be an omni-benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient agent. But none of these features are essential for God’s role in sustaining your chocolate cake. God could harbor occasional wicked thoughts or be unable to perform miracles and still sustain your chocolate cake. And God needn’t have beliefs (and hence knowledge) to sustain the cake. What is essential—at least on the view embodied by the limerick—is simply God’s sensory experiences: The experiences of brownness, chocolatiness, sweetness, and sponginess, as well as the structural relations between these experiences. I proposed peeling away the inessential attributes for a more minimal non-theistic form of idealism.

God’s mind is like a “black box” to us. For the traditional theistic idealist, a huge amount of work is concealed from us inside of this black box. Non-theistic idealism invites us to peek inside the black box and uncover the mysteries of how it all fits together.

I suggest that reality is a sort of “experiential tapestry” woven out of experiential threads. The central work is to explain (i) what makes up the threads, (ii) how the threads are structured or “woven” into a world, and (iii) how we relate to the experiential tapestry… and, finally, (iv) to show that we don’t need to abandon our scientific worldview to do so.

The experiential threads that make up our world go far beyond the experiences that you or I have. The experiential tapestry extends into my closed refrigerator (just as God’s experiences would). And the threads that make up the tapestry go far beyond the experiences that human beings are even capable of having. Bees, with their ability to see ultraviolet, snakes with their ability to detect infrared, and migratory birds, with their ability to detect the earth’s magnetic field, all experience aspects of reality—of the experiential tapestry—that we do not.

A wool tapestry isn’t merely a pile of yarn. The yarn is woven—structured—into a whole. Likewise, the experiential tapestry is not a jumble of disconnected experiences. Reality has structure. What structures reality is not over-under relations, but the same sorts of relations that structure our minds. Think about the experience of sitting outside on a hot summer day, sipping a cold drink, and watching a cardinal hopping about the branches of a tree. Your experience includes heat, cold, red, and green. But these experiences aren’t a disorderly jumble. The coldness seems bound up with the cup, the ice cubes, the liquid. The redness seems to inhere in the bird shape; the greenness in the leafiness overhead. Philosophers and psychologists have done a lot of work teasing out how to make sense of the relations that structure our experiences. On the view I develop, these same relations that structure our minds—the unity of consciousness, property binding, and spatiotemporal relations—also provide the structure of the experiential tapestry.

Non-theistic idealism, like Berkeley’s idealism, offers a picture of reality that is as it appears, building sensible qualities into its most fundamental nature.

But one of the aspects of the view that I find most exciting is that it opens up a new way of thinking about our relation to the world we live in. We are all well acquainted with our own feelings. When you stub your toe, you don’t have to infer that you’re in pain. You know it directly. Your pain is a part of you. I argue that our minds can overlap with the experiential tapestry, such that we can be as intimately related to the world we perceive as we are to our own pains. The sweetness you taste as you bite into the cake is literally a part of the cake (and the experiential tapestry). But when you taste it, it also becomes a part of your mind. We are not disconnected from reality, but embedded within and enmeshed in it.

Finally, I argue that idealism is compatible with contemporary science. Science tells us about the structure of reality. No experiments can reveal to us the ultimate nature that exhibits this structure. Idealism, by contrast, is a view about the ultimate nature of reality. Science tells us about the gravitational effects of black holes, the processes by which nuclear fission works, the particles that make up atoms, the forces that bind these particles together. And to this, the idealist replies “yes, and it’s all experiences.”

This is just an outline of the view I develop. I cannot say enough here to fully develop it or to defend it (though I discuss the view in more detail here and in recent articles). But I think it’s clear that it gives a radically different conception of reality and our place in it—a picture on which the world we inhabit is not divorced from the world we experience.

None of this is a knock-down argument for idealism. I don’t think there is a knock-down argument for idealism. I don’t think we should expect to have unquestionable insight into the nature of the world we live in. Perhaps reality is stark and alien after all. But we are not forced to accept the alienating view of materialism. Idealism offers an enticing alternative, which is worth taking seriously.

What happens to consciousness when clocks stop?

Posted on 2024-05-19 by Hans Busstra, MA

What happens to consciousness when clocks stop?

Seeing | Physics | 2024-05-19

Hans Busstra, MA

Prof. Bernard Carr, PhD

Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhD

Hans Busstra sat down with Bernard Carr and Bernardo Kastrup to discuss all presentations given at our ‘Time and Mind’ conference and elaborate further on their own ideas. For instance, both Carr and Kastrup agree that, if you take an idealist perspective, you need multiple time dimensions to account for the decomposition problem: the mechanism by which consciousness with a big ‘C’ resolves itself into consciousness with a small ‘c’.

Bertrand Russell’s failure to refute Idealism (The Return of Idealism)

Posted on 2024-05-112024-05-11 by Prof. Michael Della Rocca, PhD

Bertrand Russell’s failure to refute Idealism (The Return of Idealism)

Reading | Metaphysics

Prof. Michael Della Rocca, PhD | 2024-05-11

While history suggests that the founder of analytical philosophy, Bertrand Russell, won the fight against the idealists led by F.H. Bradley, Yale philosopher Prof. Michael Della Rocca argues that Russell failed to even address Bradley’s central argument. Ignoring Bradley’s timeless message puts in serious jeopardy not only our basic understanding of ethics, but also the ultimate nature of reality itself. This essay is the latest instalment of our series ‘The Return of Idealism,’ in partnership with the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI). It was first published by the IAI on 29 April 2024.

In 1910, an event took place in the pages of the journal Mind that would turn out to be pivotal for the entire subsequent course of philosophy. This was a debate spread over two consecutive issues between the British philosophers F.H. Bradley and Bertrand Russell about Bradley’s version of monism and idealism. These articles had rather boring titles—Bradley’s “On Appearance, Error, and Contradiction” and Russell’s “Some Explanations in Reply to Mr. Bradley”—but the exchange proved revelatory.

This showdown was over Bradley’s central argument for the view that relations are not real. In other words, for Bradley, such ordinary claims as “I am five meters from the door” or “Bradley was born before Russell” are not strictly true. Of course, almost all of us believe that claims of this kind are true and that there really are relations between distinct things. But not Bradley.

This is not surprising for Bradley, who—like a small proportion of philosophers previously and an even smaller proportion of philosophers subsequently—was no respecter of commonsense. Bradley devoted the whole of his 1893 book, Appearance and Reality, to arguing for and drawing out the implications of this non-commonsensical denial of relations.

And the implications are as vast as they are troubling. For if there are no relations, then there are no relations of distinction and there cannot be a multiplicity of distinct things. And if there is no multiplicity, then there is at most one thing. This is called monism. Further, if there are no relations, then there are no relations of distinction between thought and the object of thought. Such a view, which effaces the distinction between thought and object, is a version of what has been called idealism. Further—and perhaps most alarmingly—if relations of distinction are eliminated, then there is no distinction between what is the case and what ought to be the case. That is, there is no distinction between normative facts and non-normative facts, and without such a distinction it is difficult to see how morality itself is possible.

Before 1910, Bradley—despite, or perhaps because of, the extreme nature of his views—had achieved an exalted status as one of the leading philosophers in the English-speaking world. Appearance and Reality and his previous writings had attracted many followers, including one Bertrand Russell who was a card-carrying Bradleyan in his youth—until he wasn’t. And it is, to a large degree, Russell’s rupture with Bradley that set the stage for the dominance of so-called analytical philosophy, which has been ascendant ever since then in the English-speaking world and beyond. (For a wonderful account of the setting and significance of Russell’s debate with Bradley, see Candlish’s The Russell/Bradley Dispute.) Thus, at stake in this debate is not only monism, idealism, and ethics, but also the whole subsequent history of philosophy and the analytic tradition in philosophy itself.

From this distance in time it is hard to discern all the considerations at play in this showdown. But I would like to extract one important point of agreement that emerged between Bradley and Russell, a point of agreement that provides us with a valuable way of understanding how Bradley argues, or could argue, for his extreme position and how Russell (and his many followers, i.e. almost all of analytical philosophy after Russell) at least implicitly sees Bradley. Thus, at a crucial moment in the exchange, Russell says that Bradley’s argument for the non-reality of relations turns upon “some law of sufficient reason”—the venerable principle of sufficient reason (the PSR)—according to which each thing or fact has an explanation.

It’s clear that Russell is right: Bradley is, in fact, relying on the PSR. Moreover, I believe that Russell and Bradley are right: the PSR does lead to the denial of the reality of relations, or at least a limited version of the PSR does so.

Let me briefly offer a PSR-infused argument for the rejection of relations. This is an argument in the spirit of Bradley, though not all of the particular steps I make are Bradley’s. The fullest presentation of my version of a Bradleyan argument can be found in chapter 3 of my book The Parmenidean Ascent.

Thus, consider things a and b which are related. Let’s say that R is a relation between a and b. For example, a is me, b is the door, and R is the relation of my being five meters from the door. It is important to note that this relation cannot be free-floating. It must be explained by, or grounded in, some thing or things. That is, it wouldn’t make sense to talk about “being five meters from” without mentioning myself and the door. We can only talk about relations intelligibly if we include their relata (the things that stand in each relation). Take away the relata and you take away the relation. Thus, R depends on, or is grounded in, (at least) a and b.

Here’s the first key claim in my Bradleyan argument:

1) R is grounded in a and b.

Thus, the relation, R, stands in a grounding relation to a, and also in a grounding relation to b.Let’s focus on the grounding relation between a and R, and let’s call this grounding relation R’ (R prime).

The second key claim is that:

2) R is grounded not only in a, but R is also grounded in R’, the relation of grounding between R and a.

To reach this second claim, note that not only is it the case that R grounded in a, but it is also the case that it is essential to R that it be grounded in a. It is part of the nature of R to be grounded in a. That is, it is part of the nature of R to be grounded in—to stand in grounding relation R’—to a. Because it is essential to R to stand in R’ to a, R depends in part—i.e. R is partially grounded in—R’.

So what follows from (1) and (2)? Because of (1), R is grounded in at least one of its relata, say, a. Because of (2), R is grounded also in R’, the relation of partial grounding that R stands in to a. But then, in order to fully answer the question, “What explains R?”, we must—since R is itself grounded in R’—first ask what grounds R’?

Well, R’ is a relation between a and R. So, given (1), R’ is grounded in the relata, a and R. But, given (2), R’ is also grounded in another relation of grounding, R’’, between a and R’. Thus, before we can explain R, we must first explain what R’ is grounded in, and so we appeal to R’’. But since R depends on R’, which, in turn, depends on R’’, before we can explain R, we must first explain what R’’ is grounded in (here I am relying on what is known as the transitivity of grounding). And we can see that we’re off on an infinite regress. The regress in this case is vicious since—unlike a tame infinite regress, such as that of the number series (1, 2, 3…)—it involves a claim of explanatory priority. That is, we need the additional relation R’ to explain R, and a further relation R’’ to explain R’, and so on ad infinitum. Since we need to keep generating new relations to explain the previous ones in the chain, the entire chain is totally foundationless. And so it turns out that we haven’t been able to explain the original relation R, the thing we first sought out to explain.

It turns out, then, that R—and relations in general—cannot be properly grounded or fully grounded. Relations cannot be explained, even though, because relations cannot be free-floating, the nature of a relation seems to demand an explanation. In this way, relations are incoherent by their very nature, and thus there are no relations.

Bradley’s insight, and Russell’s and mine, is that some version of the PSR leads to the denial of the reality of relations—indeed, it leads to the incoherence of the very notion of a relation. Actually, a full-blown PSR—to the effect that each fact or each thing that exists has an explanation—is not needed. All that is needed is the claim that relations, in particular, require explanations. And this claim seems hard to deny—otherwise one would be in the situation of espousing the dreaded free-floating relations—relations that exist or obtain without depending on anything, not even their relata.

So what’s the upshot? No relations, no distinctions, but a monism of a particularly radical form and also a version of idealism. And, as I warned at the outset, another upshot is the undermining of normativity itself and of ethics, as typically understood. In the dispute between Bradley and Russell, not only is the existence of relations at stake, not only is the existence of a world distinct from and independent of thought at stake, but normativity as such, mattering as such being at stake itself is at stake. No debate could be more significant than this debate over the reality of relations.

Because so much is at stake here, you can see why philosophers, such as Russell and his many followers down to the present day, are so bound and determined to dismiss Bradley’s arguments and arguments of the kind that I have advanced here in my own way.

Precisely because a powerful argument for the momentous Bradleyan conclusion has been offered, a philosopher like Russell had better have a good reason for rejecting Bradley’s argument—and mine. Since the Bradleyan arguments turn on some form of the PSR, you would expect, then, that Russell has a good argument against the PSR and against that limited form of the PSR that Bradley’s argument and my argument rely on.

So what is Russell’s response to Bradley? At the key moment, Russell identifies something like the PSR as the heart of Bradley’s argument, and his response to this Bradleyan move is quite interesting. Russell says simply, “it appears to me … that the search for a ‘sufficient reason’ is mistaken.” That’s it; that’s all he says in response to Bradley’s argument. Well, that’s nice, but it’s no argument against Bradley. It’s just a simple denial of the main claim that drives Bradley’s argument.

Russell is suffering here from the dire philosophical malady known as “loss of argument.” And the thing is: philosophers have more or less blindly followed Russell in thinking that he has defeated Bradley or a Bradleyan argument, even though Russell has done no such thing. He has simply denied Bradley’s conclusion and simply rejected the very tool—the PSR—that Bradley uses to reach his conclusion. Thus, the Bradleyan argument and conclusion are still alive and well and—because of its ethical implications—never more threatening.

Russell’s complacency in the face of Bradley’s argument—and philosophy’s complacency more broadly—is misguided. Instead, Russell and we should be afraid. We should be very afraid indeed.