Further Reflections

A discussion of the concept of the evolution of perception
with a deep dive into the subject of causation

CHRISTOPHER JONATHAN OTT

Copyright © 2024 Christopher Ott

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9798300661984

 

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE EVOLUTION OF PERCEPTION

SENSES OF CAUSE

TRADITIONAL WAYS TO SPECULATE ON CAUSE

MODERN PROCESS THEORIES

THE PARISIAN CAFÉ

THE PROCESS ORDER FALLACY

APPEAL TO POSSIBILITY AND OTHER CHEATS

SUMMARIZING WHAT WE’VE SAID

THE REQUIREMENTS OF AN ANSWER

THE ALTERNATIVE AN EVOLUTION OF PERCEPTION

TESTING THE IDEA

THE EVOLUTION OF PERCEPTION LAID OUT

INTELLIGENCE VS. CONSCIOUSNESS VS. PERCEPTION

THE LOGOS

NOT QUITE IDEALISM

WHY IS THE INTELLIGENCE INFINITE?

HEAVEN AND HELL

THE ‘NEW PHYSICS’

GOOD VIBES

GHOSTS AND GHOULS

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

Epistemology is the field of study in which we inquire about what counts as genuine knowledge and what we actually know. There are different ways people justify their beliefs, and some of these ways are considered stronger than others. For instance, witnessing something is considered a strong justification for holding a belief. Careful reasoning is another. The science of distinguishing true from false reasoning is called logic. 

But what about those cases where we have no strong justification for holding a belief? What if the only justification we have is that we imagine a thing, and imagining such a thing is a time-honored convention and deemed highly respectable. Great men have always believed it, we might point out. In such a way we might say that consensus gives us confidence that such a belief must be true. Or some famous esteemed person might have said such and such, and in him we confidently place our faith?

Sometimes it is even customary to imagine a certain thing, and it comes to feel more comfortable to imagine it than not to. Would we call that a good justification for holding a belief? Most of us would probably say not. In fact, some might even say that that is a pretty good description of superstition.

That is what this book is about. It is about beliefs that experts conventionally hold that are not justified by observation or reason. We will especially be focusing on invisible things that human beings have over millennia felt compelled to invent and believe in adamantly in order to account for certain effects in nature that we can’t otherwise explain.

___________________________

In this book I continue my quarter century long project of conveying a new idea about how the world may have formed. Nearly since the beginning of my writing about it I’ve referred to it as the evolution of perception. A person who read my first book once pointed out that the idea has fewer working parts than previous ideas that attempt to address the same problems. Those working parts are simply perception and perceptual schemas, a concept I’ve explained several times in my previous books. In this sense of having fewer working parts, it can be said to be a simpler theory of everything, which in fact was the subtitle of my first book. But there is a difference between an idea that is simple in essence and an idea that is just simplistic. If I said that the world had been created by a magic turtle, well that would not only be simple, but simplistic and implausible. For there is no reason to think that. 

The concept of the evolution of perception is actually complex in that to understand it one needs to first gain a working knowledge of a few basic principles and a bit of history about the issues it addresses. Only then could one actually appreciate the elegance of the idea in light of its power to solve, with fewer assumptions, the problems that have historically haunted human beings and resisted solution.

Aside from its fundamental simplicity, the idea is also a potentially important one. How important, one might ask? Put in perspective, if this idea were to turn out to be true, it would follow that a great deal of philosophy, theology, and science throughout time have amounted to hardly more than superstition — meaning here belief without warrant, in magic and the make-believe. 

It might seem strange, then, that this idea has received almost no attention in the years since it was first presented. I’ll save my thoughts on why I think that is for the conclusion. 

I hope the reader will find this book not just interesting but even enjoyable. I’ve done everything I could think of to frame these thoughts in as plain terms as possible, avoiding jargon whenever possible, and kept it short so it ought not be a burden.

For additional books and essays on this and related subjects, including links to dozens of video-talks I’ve given online, be sure to visit my website at 

sites.google.com/view/chris-ott-hub.

THE EVOLUTION OF PERCEPTION

The idea of the evolution of perception struck me on a campus bus ride in March 2000 while I was studying for my master’s degree in philosophy. I still have the notes I wrote that morning. At its heart the idea is very easy to state. In fact, it can be summarized in just eight words.

There is only perceiving and ways of perceiving.

I can imagine a person asking me, if it is that easy to say, why am I sitting here right now writing a third book about it? Well, obviously it’s not as simple as saying those eight words. They leave lots of questions unanswered. What about the things that we perceive? Mustn’t they exist before we can perceive them? Wouldn’t it follow that everything is in a person’s mind? Why do we perceive the same things? Don’t we need a brain to perceive?

These are good questions. But before we can begin to address them we first need to understand some of the problems in philosophy, religion, and science that this idea, fleshed out and not misconstrued as saying what it isn’t, actually solves. We also need to know the many ways that philosophers over the past 2,600 years have tried to address those problems, and the underlying assumptions that ultimately doomed their efforts. Only then will we begin to not only understand the idea, but see the potential that would be released were humanity to transition to reinterpreting reality in terms of it.  

We’ll begin now with the main problem this idea addresses. And the best way to do that is to go back in time to the beginning of mankind’s thinking about it.

We start with a fictitious caveman. We’ll name him Ugg. Ugg lives in the Pleistocene and is more inquisitive than his neighbors. Before Ugg began introspecting about higher things, cavemen sought answers to questions such as what plants are good to eat and what kinds of shelter best withstand inclement weather? These are practical material questions that are important for human survival and comfort. But they are not philosophical questions. Eventually some caveman was bound to seek out a secluded spot to sit and ask himself some more profound questions. And that person was Ugg.      

What are the kinds of deeper questions Ugg might have asked himself? The first and most obvious kind of question he might have asked are questions about causes. Where do the rivers and trees come from, the moon and stars? How did they come into existence? Did they always exist, and if not, who or what made them? Eventually Ugg was inquisitive enough to ask such questions even of himself and his fellow villagers. “Where do we come from?” Ugg asked under his breath. “Who or what made us?”

It stands to reason that such questions about cause were probably the first philosophical questions. Obviously, this was also the start of thinking that would eventually lead to religious answers. And if we’re honest about it, questions of cause are also at the heart of what would eventually be called ‘science.’ The scientist wants to explain the phenomena of nature, and this is just another way of saying he seeks its cause. 

Before we get into the issues that arise in thinking about cause and the many attempts to address them and the problems with them, we should first talk a bit about cause itself. For what exactly counts as a cause?

SENSES OF CAUSE

Most people assume that ‘causation’ is a rather straight forward concept. They might assume that two people could never disagree about what we are talking about. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Causation is a complex, many-faceted topic in philosophy.

About 2,500 years ago the Greek philosopher Aristotle spoke of four senses of what we mean by cause. Briefly they are:

1. The material cause - meaning that which a thing is made out of, such as wood or bronze.
2. The formal cause - meaning what a thing is. For example, the image a sculptor has in mind that is part of what brings a sculpture into being.
3. The efficient cause - meaning who or what is responsible for producing a thing. For instance, the wind shaped the trees, a carpenter built a house, a sculptor carved a statue.
4. The final cause - meaning the ultimate end or purpose for which something exists, the function that it performs.

Since Aristotle’s time, a couple of additional senses of cause have also been considered.

1. The first cause - meaning the catalyst or spark that set into motion the chain of events that led to a completed result.
2. The proximate cause - meaning the immediate or last cause - for example the second to last domino that fell in a line of dominoes would be the proximate cause of the last domino falling. 

But there is something that these senses of cause miss. That is how something came to exist. To show what I mean, imagine you are shown a lovely statue of an angel in a great cathedral. To be told by your guide that a sculptor named Alfonzo was the efficient cause, his chisel was the proximate cause, marble was the material cause, inspiration was the first cause, an angel was the formal cause, and a beautiful piece of decoration for this cathedral was the final cause tells you precisely zero about how the sculptor made the statue. It seems to me that these senses of cause omit the very essence of what we want from a cause, which is an explanation of how a thing came to be. Thus, in this book we add one more sense of cause.

1. Process.

TRADITIONAL WAYS TO SPECULATE ON CAUSE

Since the beginning of philosophy, and until quite recently, there have been mainly two kinds of answer to the question of what caused some phenomenon, the kind of question Ugg asked himself. The first has been to propose something invisible and the second to give the cause a name but say no more about it. We’ll call the first an invisible cause, and the second a nominal cause. Both of these answers leave much to be desired in terms of actually explaining the phenomenon being asked about. We’ll cover each in turn and see what I mean.

Remember Ugg’s initial question. What caused the rivers and trees, the animals, the moon and stars, and us people? Did all this always exist, or did something or someone create them? Note the mental phrasing of the question. It is phrased as a what question. Ugg, having seen an endless parade of things in his life, assumed that whatever was responsible for these objects had to itself have been an object. What never occurred to Ugg to ask is how it did so.

It is ordinarily assumed that the earliest people originally proposed first animal and then human spirits who created the things they observed around them. While there were entertaining and evocative myths about the spirits who created those things, missing was any explanation of ‘how’ such spirits accomplished this.

In time, stories of individual animal and human spirits yielded to complex pantheons of human gods. Each god or goddess was responsible for some phenomenon we observe or feel, with no explanation of how they created such phenomena. It’s fascinating to learn that Zeus created Perseus by turning himself into a shower of gold. But how did Zeus turn himself into a shower of gold? 

Eventually such pantheons faded from popularity and gave way to a single deity that we call simply ‘God.’ But the same problem persisted. In Genesis God creates Eve out of a rib. But how does one create a person out of a rib? We aren’t told. Consider this very famous, and admittedly moving, line from Genesis. 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. (Genesis 1:1-3)

Here we learn that God is the sole cause of the heavens and the Earth, as well as light. But besides telling us that He commanded them to be by speech, Genesis is silent about how God made this happen. Naturally we are left to assume that God is all powerful and can do anything He pleases. This is not to mock the Bible, or the ancient Greek poets either. It is simply a pattern common among ancient people when addressing causes that I am trying to point out.

We can summarize this pattern. In answering the question “What caused X?” we wind up only pointing to something, or asking others to imagine it, and simply giving it a name. In this case that name is ‘God.’ But we are given no explanation of “how” such phenomena were brought about — only who or what made it happen.

To make matters more complicated, these things tend to be conceived as being invisible. And since all these things are invisible, e.g. spirits, pantheons, and God in heaven, we have no way to discover how they did so. We just have to take the word of scripture or a priest. Again, my intention is not to put down scriptures or priests, many of whom I have great respect for, but solely to point out the apparent absence of curiosity in ancient people when it came to causes.

The second way that people have attempted to answer questions of cause is to propose a nominal cause. A nominal cause is a cause in name only. With spirits and God, we are at least given something we can picture in our imagination, usually a copy of something we have seen. But in the case of a nominal cause, we are given only its name.

An ancient example is psyche that the ancient Milesian philosopher Thales (624 BC - 547 BC) proposed as a cause of motion. In modern times a good example is gravity. If you ask a scientist what it is that causes objects to fall toward the center of the Earth, he will tell you it is gravity. But what is gravity? Gravity is a name for that which causes things to fall toward the center of the Earth. That’s about the sum of it. He can also give you the equation that tells you the speed at which it will fall, given all the parameters. Analytically, then, this does answer our question, in so much as it tells us the name for whatever it is that causes things to fall. But it brings us no closer to knowing how it accomplishes this.

Notice, then, that just as with invisible spirits, we are given no explanation of how psych or gravity perform the functions they were made up to explain. And, also like divine entities, they are conveniently invisible. So, not only do we not know how such invisible forces cause their effects, but we have no way to learn it since they are invisible. 

It is also naive to think we can solve this problem simply by saying that gravity is a “force” or “power,” or a “natural law.” For what is a force or power or law, but another word for that know-not-what which causes the regular occurrence in nature that we observe, with no mention of how. For how do objects that fall toward the center of the Earth at a speed determinable by the equation F=Gm1m2/r2, which we call a ‘law,’ come to acquire this information, or go about obeying it? Or, to reverse the question, how does this ‘law’ control the objects it ‘governs?’ And, while we’re asking such strange questions, where do mathematical laws come from, where do they abide, what do they consist of besides some math, and in what state do they obtain in and of themselves? And, finally, and most importantly if we are to explain anything, how did they emerge?

Such concerns ought to be sufficient to show how complex the topic of causation really is. As we move forward, then, keep in mind that neither invisible nor nominal causes actually explain anything. For in the first case we are only told “what” caused a thing, but not how it did so, and in the second case we are only told a “name” for whatever the cause might someday turn out to be, but not how it causes it. And in neither case are we able to observe how such a cause is doing its causing, as both are invisible.

MODERN PROCESS THEORIES

Now in the last two centuries, science has made considerable progress in terms of actually explaining observable phenomena. Beginning in the 19th century, a few pioneering scientists began to go beyond the habit of simply proposing invisible or nominal causes, and began to seek actual observable processes to account for conditions. Remember, process was our 7th sense of cause. Naturally, people have always been familiar with processes for things like cooking, metallurgy, carpentry, and so forth. But, for whatever reason, it only occurred to people to apply such thinking to fundamental causes in the 19th century. Perhaps it was because it was easier to appeal to some hidden force or spirit. And even the scientists and philosophers of the Enlightenment were primarily theists and deists who, often for lack of any known alternative, were satisfied with the account in Genesis to explain how things were formed. 

So, let’s talk about processes and how they work, before delving into the problems that continue to afflict some of them. A process is a set of stages that conditions pass through until a certain completed result is achieved. Baking bread is an example. To make a loaf of bread you must go through a set of steps in a particular order. You cannot begin baking the ingredients of bread before kneading them together. You must add yeast at a certain point, and not at any arbitrary point. In short, a process is usually described as a kind of evolution, where certain stages must occur in a certain order to achieve a result over a period of time. The stages that make up a material process not only have the advantage of often being observable, but they actually tell us how something came about — not just what made it come about or what it ought to be called.

Some examples of processes include the following. 

1. Biological evolution - a process originally conceived in the 1800s by Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin. It is a theoretical set of stages by which simple organisms gave rise to more complex ones over a very long period of time.
2. Geological evolution - this is the theory that continuously occurring processes such as vulcanism, precipitation, and erosion forged mountains, gorges, rivers, and seas over very long periods of time.
3. Plate Tectonics - a process that takes place under the surface of the oceans in which magma rises from the mantle forming continental plates, which are pushed under other plates on the other side of the Earth, accounting for continental drift.
4. Processes by which all the major bodily systems perform their necessary functions, including nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, urinary, and reproductive systems. These are all understood as processes today.

Such physical processes that have been proposed over the last 200 years represent a clear development in comprehending causality over the invisible and nominal causes of the past. In fact, many of the best understood of these processes can be observed occurring in real time. This is as close to true explanation of an outcome as a cause could be. 

However, in spite of this significant positive development in the approach to thinking about causation, there still remain vestiges of the past thinking, and these recalcitrant habits continue to hold back progress. The most problematic of these habits, which continues to bedevil certain process theories, I’ll refer to as the ‘process order fallacy.’  This refers to the habit of some scientists who, in proposing a possible causal process, conceive of a set of steps that could not have logically occurred in the order imagined. Certain conditions are imagined at the beginning of a process that only come about as a result of the process. What could be the cause of such a problem?

The process order fallacy has antecedents in the thinking about causes we’ve already talked about from the past. To recognize the source, let’s go back to Ugg. From Ugg’s first musings about the cause of things around him, and speculating about animal and human spirits, he was committing a version of the process order fallacy. Taking something he wanted to explain, he read a copy of it back into its imagined cause. Inevitably his cause was an invisible copy of what it was he was trying to explain. In a phrase, he projected his effect back into its cause. 

This habit becomes even clearer when we think of ancient people inventing entire pantheons, such as the Greeks conceived the gods in Olympus. What is the cause of people we see? People we don’t.

Consider a common example of such thinking in modern times, although generally not by scientists. How do we explain the fact that our bodies appear to have free will and movement? We believe in a second body we call a soul or spirit that we imagine animates our bodies and departs from it at the time of death. 

 

How to explain our body with its power to move and think? A second invisible body just like it that moves and thinks.

If we were to formalize this habit, we would say:

To explain what we see, we posit something just like it that we don’t. 

What’s at play is a kind of mental arch. Here are some examples from history where this arch in thinking has been applied to the problem of cause. 

1. Democritus (460–370 BC) proposed atomism, a theory that clumps of matter that we perceive are assemblages of tinier clumps of matter too small for us to perceive.
2. Plato (427–348 BC) proposed the theory that the objects we perceive are the imperfect shadows of ideal archetypes much like them that we don’t, which he called forms.
3. Aristotle (384–322 BC), recognizing that we don’t perceive the world directly by our senses, theorized that our internal experience represents an outer world just like it that we can’t perceive. He postulated that these internal ‘phantasms’ we experienced had to be just like the external objects they represented because the sole purpose for the existence of our senses was to grant us true beliefs. If not, the world would be irrational, which, for Aristotle, was inconceivable.
4. Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656–1725) proposed preformationism, the theory that people and animals developed from miniature versions of themselves. Sperm cells were believed to contain complete individuals called "animalcules". Development was therefore a matter of enlarging an animalcule into a fully formed being.

Notice the arch back upon itself in this form of thinking about causes. An invisible duplicate of the phenomenon being explained is simply repeated backward into its cause.

This approach to conceiving of causes is the source of the much-discussed mind-body problem in philosophy. For one of the unintended consequences of this habit of reading effects back into their cause is that we wind up unintentionally inventing a hidden parallel world. We imagine that a second world we can’t see is ‘causally responsible’ for the one we do. I have found that two-world problem is a more expressive name for this problem. We see the strange consequences of the two-world problem dramatized in the 1999 movie The Matrix.

THE PARISIAN CAFÉ 

Hasn’t science moved past this two-world problem? Actually, no. To show this, let’s consider an experiential story about a coffee shop and the way a modern neuroscientist would explain it.

 

Imagine walking into a Parisian Café. As you enter you hear the chiming of the bells over the door and catch the glance of a waitress. You feel the coolness and weight of a wooden chair as you pull it back and take a seat. Reading the menu, you order a pastry. When it comes you smell its aroma even before you taste its creamy filling. You hurry to pay the check out of your anxiety you might miss your plane. 

Hearing, seeing, feeling, interpreting, smelling, tasting, and worrying. Where do these experiences occur? If you ask a modern neuroscientist, he will tell you that these experiences take place inside your brain. It matters not whether you substitute “brain” with words like “mind” or “spirit,” the consequence is the same. Your entire world, which for you consists solely of such experiences and nothing else, takes place in your head, which implies there must be a second world outside that you do not directly perceive, but simply infer from your experience. 

And what can we say about this second ‘outer world,’ or what contemporary philosophers call the ‘external world’ or ‘causally responsible outer object?’ What rational method do we have to affirm its existence or know something about it? 

Essentially, humans have only three methods to acquire knowledge. They are observation, deductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning.

1. Obviously, observation can’t tell us anything about an unperceived outer world. The only thing we can directly observe are our own internal neural or mental states. We can’t see, hear, smell, taste, or tactically feel a theoretical hidden outer world. And since we can’t perceive it we can’t even imagine such a world, as our imagination is based on our past memories of such internal experiences. 
2. Deductive logic can’t help us either. For deductive logic only allows a person to confirm that his premises and conclusions do not contradict. It can’t tell him anything he didn’t already assume in his premises. Thus, humans can’t learn anything new by deductive logic. 
3. And finally, inductive logic can’t help us either. For induction relies solely on observation. We induce conclusions by assuming that patterns we discover from past observations will continue in future observations. Since a theoretical outer world can’t be observed, induction is inapplicable. 

In short, the outer world is a total know-not-what.

Speaking of this fact, the English philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704) wrote of the material substance we presume exists beyond our faculties:  

  

The idea of corporeal substance in matter is as remote from our conceptions and apprehensions, as that of spiritual substance, or spirit. (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke, 1689).

And the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), speaking of the outer world, wrote:

It still remains a scandal to philosophy . . . that the existence of things outside of us . . . must be accepted merely on faith, and that, if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof (Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, 1787).

And the contemporary philosopher of mind Christopher Hill, who currently teaches philosophy at Brown University and who received his Ph.D. at Harvard, concedes in his lectures that matter is purely a “theoretical entity.” (Lecture notes from the University of Arkansas, Christopher Hill, 2000)

Now I think both the two-world problem and its troubling consequence ought to be clear, as well as the fact that it persists into modern times. The problem stems from the human inclination to invent unperceived objects that mirror the objects they do perceive as a way to explain the ones they do. Ultimately this inclination forces people to invent an entire unperceived world to hold their unperceived causes. The consequence is the two-world problem, which is pervasive in human thinking.

So, how does this human habit of inventing a duplicate of a thing being explained, and projecting it back into its explanation, continue to haunt certain modern process theories? That’s what we’ll discuss next.

 

Figure 1 The external world is theoretical. We have no way to compare our brain-centered sensory experience with its external source. In fact we have no way to know if there even is an external source.

THE PROCESS ORDER FALLACY

We can now discuss the process order fallacy. It is in fact an extension of the previous arch in thinking, where an outcome is projected back into its cause. It is how the same thinking problem continues to plague some modern process theories.

As we’ve already explained, the process order fallacy refers to an unintentional habit by some scientists who, when proposing a possible causal process to explain some perceived phenomenon, conceive of a set of steps that could not have logically occurred in the order imagined. More specifically, it occurs when someone imagines something that could only arise as a result of a proposed process back into the process itself. It creates a kind of logical anachronism. This will become clearer when we give some examples. But notice as we cover these examples that the same arch I described of reading an effect backward into its cause repeats in this fallacy of processes. 

A good example is the Big Bang theory. This is the theory that matter and energy, as well as space and time, and the laws of nature, all gushed out of a tiny compressed spot in space around 14 billion years ago, and then self-assembled into the Universe we see around us. This is proposed by some scientists as an explanation of our Universe, i.e. its ultimate original cause. 

To be clear, the Big Bang is imagined to be the cause and the perceived Universe is imagined to be its effect in this process theory.

Let’s stop and reflect on some of the things this theory forces us to imagine existing before or at the time of the Big Bang, for they are conditions that would be necessary for it to occur.

1. Obviously, space would have to be present before the Big Bang. Otherwise the concept of a point in space where this event took place would have no meaning. Thus, space is a necessary precondition for the Big Bang.
2. Obviously, time also had to be present. For the very notion of an event occurring presupposes the existence of time. Divorced from time, what could we possibly mean by something happening? So, besides space, time is also a necessary precondition of the Big Bang.
3. Obviously, the laws of nature had to have been present at the time of this enormous event. Remember that the idea of the Big Bang is that matter and energy, that had been compressed into the zero point before the Big Bang, exploded outward and self-organized. Obviously, this had to have occurred in accord with the laws of nature. Otherwise there would have been no forces by which such an event could have rationally occurred. So, the laws of nature are also a necessary precondition for the Big Bang. 

Now, if a person championing the Big Bang theory wanted to say that at the time and place of this imagined event there was no space, time, or laws of motion, then he would have to concede that we aren’t actually talking about anything physical. For the very notion of physicality presupposes extension and duration. And the laws of motion are only fundamentally describable in terms of ratios of time and space. 

And if such a scientist championing the Big Bang wanted to claim the event was non-physical, then it is mysterious — as opposed to explanatory. And if it is said to be metaphysical, then we are within our rights to ask for a metaphysical explanation. But the whole advertised appeal of the Big Bang theory is that it is a material one.

But these concerns don’t begin to address ones that are the most germane to the theme of this book, which is the explanation of our experiential world. The Big Bang theory not only fails to solve, but outright ignores, the two-world problem. For, in which world did this timeless, spaceless, lawless event take place? Did it occur in our experiential world, which, according to modern neuroscience, takes place solely inside a brain, which could not have existed at the time of the Big Bang? Or did it occur in the so-called outer world that we cannot, even in principle, perceive, and about which science is necessarily silent, for the methods of science (observation, deduction, and induction) don’t apply to it? 

In other words, it isn’t clear what the Big Bang was invented to explain. Clearly it is something that some enthusiastic and sincere scientists have imagined to have occurred. But neuroscience tells us that the images and sounds produced by human imagination occur in the human brain. Such imagined things therefore belong to the effect we are trying to account for. So, just as in ancient thinking, effects are read backward into causes. For the objects of imagination are read into the cause of the conditions of imagination. Like Ugg, the progenitors of the Big Bang theory have projected copies of the contents of their own brain-centered imaginations back into their imagined cause. That is a paradigm example of the process order fallacy.     

If we imagine this Big Bang as the catalyst of a physical process, we have unintentionally projected a copy of qualities like space, time, and laws (not to mention explosions), that we discovered in conscious experience and duplicated in our imaginations, back into the start of the process that produced them. 

About this fallacy, the 19th century American philosopher John Dewey once quipped. 

A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been in existence, there would have been no necessity for the process. (The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology, John Dewey, 1896)

The Big Bang theory is obviously not the only theory that suffers from this primitive form of thinking. Directed panspermia is another.  

In spite of Darwin and Wallace’s 19th century theory of a process of natural selection to explain how simple organisms might have evolved into more complex ones, there remained no accepted theory for how such a process might have begun. So, the question remained, how did life begin?

In response to this question, in the 1960s two scientists, the American Carl Sagan and the Russian Iosif Shklovsky, proposed their own version of intelligent design. Known as directed panspermia, it is the theory that life began on Earth when an alien civilization visited it in some ancient time and ignited and directed our evolution. See Intelligent Life in the Universe, by Carl Sagan and Iosif Shklovsky, 1966. The notion was dramatized in the 1968 movie 2001: a Space Odyssey and the 2012 movie Prometheus. The idea holds some appeal for those who find it more scientifically respectable to believe in a physical designer than a metaphysical one like God. 

 

Figure 2 A flying saucer on the cover of a 1929 science fiction magazine

However, the thinking arch in which effects are projected back into imagined causes is just as present in this theory as it is in the theory that we were created by a pantheon of gods. For the notion of aliens seeding life on Earth imagines a civilization obviously based on our own. Even the character and motives of the imagined aliens mirror those of the scientists Sagan and Shklovsky who originally proposed the theory, e.g. a love of rocketry and a desire to colonize space. In other words, to explain what we see, Sagan and Shklovsky posited something like it that they didn’t. An effect, our civilization, was projected backward into its imagined cause.

But it’s important to notice that this isn’t even a satisfying answer to the deeper questions about the formation of life on Earth. For how did these imagined aliens accomplish the feat of triggering life on Earth? And, for that matter, how did life begin on their planet? Did a third civilization ignite and direct their evolution too? And how did such aliens implant consciousness in biological matter, the second most important question that scientists on Earth have been unable to answer, after the formation of life?

No matter how well-intended Shklovsky and Sagan were, their theory of directed panspermia repeats the same old habits. It’s a projection of effects back into their causes and it commits the process order fallacy. We obviously don’t perceive these aliens, so we aren’t likely to discover how they seeded us, and Shklovsky and Sagan aren’t telling us either. In the movie Prometheus, directed by Ridley Scott, an alien comes to Earth in ancient times, stands on a shore, and then inexplicably disintegrates so that his DNA pours into the ocean. How did he do that? Ridley Scott doesn’t tell us. 

These aren’t serious explanations of anything.

APPEAL TO POSSIBILITY AND OTHER CHEATS

Every trained philosopher is acutely aware of the two-world problem, which they prefer to call the mind-body problem. There is a Wikipedia article on it by that name. Philosophers refer to a person who is unschooled in philosophy or neurology, who assumes that we simply perceive the world directly as it is with our senses and who is unaware of any problem with this, a “naive realist.” I should add that philosophers are also in general agreement that the problem is a serious one, and that it is quite possibly intractable.

I like to call it the two-world problem because that name accentuates the most troubling aspect of the problem, namely the issue of the unseen real world. How do we know it is like the world of our experience, and for that matter how do we know it exists? Yet, in the history of philosophy to this day, philosophers tend to agree it must. This raises the question of what arguments philosophers use to justify their belief in such a world. There are two main ways of arguing for it. Neither one is particularly convincing.

The first is to appeal to “common sense.” Many philosophers have pointed out that the notion of common sense, while it can be appealing as a justification for some beliefs, is a double-edged sword when it comes to arguing for something we cannot prove exists like the external world. Often two sides can make claims that their opinions are common sense, depending on each’s point of view. And some philosophers, like the American philosopher of mind David Chalmers, have pointed out that appeals to common sense often amount to no more than mud-slinging contests. 

However, in spite of misgivings that common sense can be a legitimate justification for belief, it is commonly used as a defense of the external world hypothesis. In fact, the belief in the external world has been called ‘common sense metaphysics.’ To dramatize the problem with this we’ll take a look at the original, and still most famous, appeal to it as an argument that an external world much like the one we experience must be responsible for the one we do. It was proposed in 1764 by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid.

Thomas Reid (1710 – 1796) founded what is called “The Scottish School of Common Sense.” In his book, Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Reid argued that we had an inexplicable knowledge that there is an external world like the one we perceive, and that this knowledge was a kind of magic that God has bestowed on us. 

In the following quote from that book, by the phrase “the thing signified,” Reid is referring to the unperceived outer objects that our internal experiences signify, as “signs.”

Even if we never before had any notion or conception of the thing signified, the signs do suggest it—conjure it up, as it were, by a natural kind of magic—and at once give us a conception of it and create in us a belief in it. (Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, Thomas Reid, 1764)

If there was ever a better example of magical thinking I can’t think of it. However, I have given the source of the concept and the reader is free to look deeper into it and render his own opinion.

In contrast to Reid’s assertion that belief in an unperceived outer world is common sense, a contemporary of Reid, George Berkeley (1685 – 1753), made the exact opposite argument. Berkeley pointed out that if you were to ask any ordinary person, unschooled in philosophy as most people are, to tell you if he believed that he did not perceive his real hand, but that his real hand existed somewhere he could not see, he would call you insane, let alone agree that such an assertion was common sense. Berkeley was in effect saying that what other philosophers condescendingly referred to as “naive realism” was in fact the natural way to look at things.

So, who is right about common sense? Was it Reid or Berkeley. In the end, it doesn’t actually matter, for there is no agreement about what we mean exactly by common sense. Do we mean beliefs that a common person would reasonably be expected to have, or beliefs that academic philosophers have long convinced each other of? 

Now for the second way philosophers argue for the existence of the external world. It is to appeal to possibility.

Anyone who has watched my videos may have noticed that I talk a lot about the concept of possibility. Here I’ll explain why it’s relevant to this discussion of the external world. Some people, on hearing about this problem of the outer world, including some philosophers, appeal to possibility. They will point out that it is certainly possible that an external world exists. Such an argument seems to equate the point that we have no proof for an external world with a claim that an external world can’t possibly exist. I want to address this. 

First of all, it has long been agreed to by philosophers that any proposition that does not contain a self-contradiction is technically possible. It follows, then, that the number of propositions that could possibly be true is limitless. For the number of propositions that one could make that do not contain a self-contradiction is potentially limitless. Because of this, the claim that such and such is possible is trivial. And if a proposition is only trivially possible, since virtually anything is possible, then nothing of interest can be logically inferred from it. For instance, the claim that we are all hallucinating and are really living popsicles in another world is possible (since it doesn’t contradict itself), but that is no argument that we are popsicles. Because it’s trivial. This is why some cautious speakers who have training in logic will refer to something being non-trivially possible. They are referring to those possibilities for which there is a considerable amount of evidence. But as we have already explained, we have no evidence that an external world exists. So, any claim that it does, while possible, is only trivially so. And so, this is not a logical argument.

So, no matter how appealing the notion of an external world is to those who profess that one exists, the burden of proof will always rest with them. And appeal to possibility will not help them. For it also remains possible that in the next moment a new system will be proposed to explain the world without one. And so, if our only argument for this second world is that it seems possible, which is an argument one could make for nearly anything, from unicorns to mermaids, the very existence of this book puts that argument to rest. For this book will present a system in which an external world does not exist, and this system is also possible.

SUMMARIZING WHAT WE’VE SAID

Let’s summarize what we’ve said so far. An ancient unintended habit in thinking about the cause of something was to project what we are trying to explain back into its cause. The first manifestation of this was to come up with invisible causes that mirrored the phenomenon being explained, such as the ancient idea that mortal humans were created by invisible immortal humans. A form of the same habit survived in thinking and found its way even into modern process theories, where aspects of a phenomenon being explained, that ostensibly only came about as a result of a process, were read back into the process that produced that result. 

The unintended consequence of these habits is superstition, from Valhalla to ancient aliens. And the same thinking extends into processes like the Big Bang theory, where stages leading to a supposed result are imagined occurring before the conditions necessary for their occurrence were present. In fact, looking at it this way, nearly all thinking on cause, from Ugg to modern times, has amounted to barely more than superstition — if by superstition we mean belief in invented invisible things producing inexplicable outcomes. For since no philosopher or scientist has ever given any explanation for how the invisible world causes our visible one, what else are we to attribute such a belief to? 

The modern exceptions, such as Plate Tectonics, based on genuine observation and informed by inductive reasoning, are limited to only material processes. On how life was created or consciousness formed, science has had to be silent. 

There is another consequence of this form of thinking about cause. Such a way of thinking about cause only winds up adding to the sum of things mankind is left to explain. For example, before the theory of directed panspermia, we only had life on Earth to explain. But subsequent to it we have life on the alien world, from which our seeders came, to explain also.

So, what’s the solution?

THE REQUIREMENTS OF AN ANSWER

Before we delve into the alternative proposed in this book, we should establish what we are ideally looking for in an answer. What we are looking for is,

1. An explanation that gives us an actual account of how the world might have emerged, not just a name for what might have caused it (a nominal cause) or a description of an unperceived duplicate of what we are explaining (an invisible cause). In other words, we want a process theory.
2. We want a process that does not commit the process order fallacy, meaning things that come about solely as a result of our process must not be read backward into the process itself.
3. We want a process that accounts for our experiential world, and not some theoretical world we do not perceive. In other words, we want to avoid creating another two-world problem.
4. We want a process that leads to the view that the world we perceive with our senses is the actual, real, physical world, where we are not left musing about some second world we have no way to know anything about. Only such a direct realism would conform to what most of us would call a natural way of looking upon the things we see.

Acknowledging our sources

We should also say where this alternative idea came from. I did not come up with it out of the blue on my own. I had been studying philosophy when it occurred to me. I had been introduced to many philosophers including two thinkers, George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant. I was also familiar with the teachings of the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba. The idea we’re going to lay out that surmounts all these problems is really an amalgamation of the writing of these three men, plus my own musings. Let’s go over the contributions these three people made here and afterward I’ll show how they came together to form an answer. 

George Berkeley

George Berkeley wrote in Ireland in the early 1700s. He was concerned about the two-world problem and the skepticism it fosters. In his time there was no better dramatization of it than in a book called Meditations by the French philosopher René Descartes. In it, Descartes described what is now called his evil demon hypothesis. Descartes pointed out that because we have no way to compare our experience with the real world, it is just as possible that there is none and our experience is implanted in our minds by an evil demon. 

So, at the young age of 26, Berkeley sat down and wrote his own theory about how it is we perceive. Like Descartes, Berkeley did not propose the existence of an external world, but proposed that the world was none other than our direct and immediate perception of it. This was not simply naïve realism on Berkeley’s part, because he was entirely aware of the problems he had to address by defending this view, and he began his discussion by pointing out it was the natural way we look upon things.

The following may seem like an unnecessary aside, but experience has taught me that it isn’t. In philosophy, the word “perception,” as Berkeley is conventionally using it, refers to becoming aware of anything, regardless of its presumed cause. So, it is just as appropriate to refer to a person perceiving his private thoughts and feelings as shared external objects like cups and saucers in his environment. It does not simply mean sense perception as it sometimes does today.

So how did Berkeley argue that we perceive things directly? He began by pointing out that when you asked a person what he meant by a particular object, he pointed to his direct experience of it, i.e. ‘that which I see, feel, taste, etc.’ Such an ordinary person would obviously not launch into a philosophical diatribe about some second object he could not see. Hence, Berkeley argued that direct realism was common sense - meaning the view people innately have.

But that was not the limit of his arguments that there was no such thing as the external world. Berkeley also argued that an unperceived substance was not only incoherent, as John Locke had pointed out before him, but that it had no actual explanatory power. How would an inert substance produce our experience? In my master’s thesis I discussed Berkeley’s many arguments for this, as well as the many ways people have tried unsuccessfully to refute them. To this day, most philosophers admit no one has ever seen a clear way to refute Berkeley's objection to the existence of an external world.

So, if the world is our immediate perception of it, how did Berkeley explain the fact that when two people enter a room they see the same objects, and that such objects persist when they leave? If objects are simply our subjective perception of them, wouldn’t they vanish the moment we left the room? Berkeley, who was devout, speculated that the world was first-most a set of ideas Created in the mind of God, and hence the objects in the room and the room itself persisted in God’s mind when we were not there. This conforms with a line by Augustine. 

We can see all those things which thou hast made because they are -- but they are because thou seest them. (Confessions, Saint Augustine, 400 AD.) 

The ideas by Berkeley that struck me, and that I later amalgamized into the idea in this book, was first his claim that our perception of things was the world itself, and second, his arguments against the rationality of an unperceived substance. In case a reader is interested, my thesis on this topic is titled Refutations of Idealism and can be downloaded at sites.google.com/view/chris-ott-hub. 

Now for our next contributor.

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who wrote in the city of Königsberg (today Kaliningrad, Russia) around the end of the European Enlightenment. While Kant was aware of the ideas of Berkeley, he had a different solution. 

Rather than ideas in the mind of God, Kant speculated about a transcendental perceiving subject that was beyond any mental conception. This transcendental subject perceived through a set of lenses that Kant called pure intuitions. There was no time or space independent of these organizing intuitions, which conditioned experience in terms of them. Thus, for Kant, time and space were ways of perceiving. How we experience was at least partially responsible for what we experience, rather than the other way around.

The notion that how we perceive impacts what we perceive is one of Kant’s most lasting innovations. Such a reversal in thinking about perception was extremely influential and gave rise to gestalt psychology in the 1800s. In the 20^th century it influenced philosophy of science, inspiring the writings of American philosopher Norwood Hanson. (Patterns of Discovery, 1958). 

The contributions of Berkeley and Kant profoundly influenced my own thinking, and the reader might begin to understand the words at the start of this book, There is only perceiving and ways of perceiving.

However, there was still one concept missing in Berkeley and Kant’s work. Living in the times in which they did, neither man could have conceived of process theory. Remember that a process theory is one in which stages of an evolution occur over time to bring about an outcome and hence explain it. Philosophers of their day still presupposed that the world had to have been created in essentially the way it is stated in Genesis in the Bible – where however things operate in the world we observe, they have always done so in basically the same way since God Created the world. Their theories were thus essentially steady state theories. Such thinking only began to give way to modern process theories in the start of the 19th century. 

Let’s now turn to the final source, from whom we add process to perception.

Meher Baba

Meher Baba was born Merwan Irani in India in 1894 to Zoroastrian parents. After what he later described as an intense spiritual experience at the age of 19, he dropped out of college and was schooled in all things metaphysical by a Hindu teacher. At the age of 27, after seven years with his teacher, he gathered disciples of his own and began a mission of fasting, meditating, broad travels, and helping the poor. Over the course of his lifetime he also wrote several books. I read these when I was very young and they had a strong influence on me. Meher Baba’s teaching is unique, although we can find potential hints of it in some ancient sources.

Meher Baba taught that instead of God conceived as a person residing somewhere where we couldn’t see Him, all that actually exists is God. All else is an illusion, a dream in the imagination of God. In one important work, often simply called the Intelligence Notebooks, Baba refers to God as “the Infinite Intelligence.” The term is represented by the pronoun “It” (with a capital “I”) instead of “He.” The concept of Infinite Intelligence as the true underlying reality corresponds in certain ways to the transcendental subject of Immanuel Kant as well as the ancient Greek concept of Logos — which we’ll discuss more further on.

While the Infinite Intelligence (or God) always existed, It originally existed in a dormant latent state. And yet, in spite of being originally dormant, it always had latently the many capacities we associate with intelligence, such as the capacity to become conscious, to seek truth, to imagine, to perceive Its own imagination, to discern false from real and realize truth. To explain this, Baba gave the analogy of a fetus that has within itself many capacities, and yet such powers remain latent until it is born, and these then only slowly manifest.

Unlike God imagined as a completed “person,” who thinks and designs and judges, the Infinite Intelligence undergoes a slow process of awakening and passing through ten principal states. The living things slowly gaining consciousness over the course of the many stages of evolution, are in one of these states that he associates with evolution. Human beings passing through the course of their many lifetimes are in one of these states he associates with reincarnation. The saints are in another. And Avatars like Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus are God in the ultimate and tenth state.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (John 1:1-14).

So, instead of God being a person we cannot see who created the world, God manifests as a person we can see, out of an evolutionary process in which we all share our being.

The primary book where Meher Baba schematized his cosmology is God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose (1955). In it, Baba presents many ideas that no other person has, at least not so directly and forthcoming. The four that most deeply influenced the thinking that went into my concept of an evolution of perception, which I will soon describe, are the following. 

1. God is Infinite Intelligence.
2. There is only God. All else is an illusion in God’s imagination.
3. A series of evolutionary stages of this Intelligence that God imagines He passes through, in a kind of Divine dream, culminates in God consciousness, rather than the other way around as portrayed in Genesis and other cosmologies.
4. Each of us is an expression of this solely existing Infinite Intelligence and therefore there is really only (fundamentally) a single witness that experiences itself as separate witnesses in the various stages of waking from latency.
5. Like in Kant’s concept, where how we perceive influences what we perceive, Baba presents the concept of the sanskara, a Sanskrit word for a formative shaping of experience over time based on gathered past impressions.

In Baba’s view, like in the view of Berkeley, the Universe is simply our experience of it. And like in Kant, the how of experience is responsible for what we experience. What is new in Baba is that it is a process.

What is unique about his process, however, is that it offers us a way to avoid the process order fallacy. For the effects of the process, such as people and minds, are not projected back into the beginning of the process as its cause, as in other forms of theism. 

Unlike Berkeley or Kant, Baba’s cause is a process, an evolution that occurs by stages over a great span of imagined time. Every being in evolution and reincarnation is really an expression of a single transcendental Self, the Infinite Intelligence, i.e. God.

The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:20-21).

So, there is one major Self that sees through all minor selves, including our neighbor.

Love thy neighbor as thyself. (Matthew 22:39)

I’ve always noticed that Jesus does not say, “Love they neighbor the way you love yourself” but literally “as thy self.”

It should be noted that, understood properly, Baba’s process of evolving stages by which the world, including us in it, came into their apparent existence, are the stages of a psychic evolution – one of increasing perception and consciousness.

And, in regard to the evolutionary process, it is well to remember always that the beginning is a beginning in consciousness, the evolution is an evolution in consciousness, the end, if there be an end, is an end in consciousness. (Meher Baba, The Awakener Magazine, vol. VIII, no. 4, 1962. p. 11) 

The states of God are not things or places. And what we call biological evolution is a byproduct of what he says is essentially a consciousness factory.

Putting it Together

I said that we find our alternative to the ‘two-world view’ by way of an amalgamation of the ideas of these three writers. I also said we’d bring these ideas together in a way that would meet the criteria outlined above in Establishing the Requirements of an Answer. 

Let’s review those requirements once again. 

1. A process that explains how things came to be, not simply a name for some invisible thing that caused it.
2. A process to account for our experiential world, without appeal to a second causal one we don’t experience. 
3. A process that upholds direct realism, the view that the objects we perceive are the actual objects, not representations of ones we don’t perceive. Only such a direct realism conforms with our natural intuitions about perception.
4. A process that avoids imagining stages of that process occurring before they could have logically occurred, due to necessary conditions not being present. 

Before describing how evolution of perception works, and how it meets all four of these criteria, the reader may already begin to see that they will be met. That is because they are already partially achieved by what we have just derived from these three authors.

• From Berkeley we dispensed with the confusing and non-explanatory notion of a second hidden world, borrowing from him arguments why such an idea is incoherent and unnecessary.
• From Kant we dispensed with the problematic idea that qualities like time and space are metaphysical dimensions or fabrics independent of perception, as imagined by many physicists today. In place of such reifying, we borrow from Kant his idea that the way we see produces at least part of what we see, introducing the idea of the formative lenses I’ll talk more about later.
• From Meher Baba we dispensed with the habit of imagining God as an invisible man hidden somewhere who created us. In its place he introduced the idea of an Infinite Intelligence, which we actually are. In this way he avoided the problem of projecting something from an effect back into its supposed cause.

We’re now ready to tie these ideas together into a new explanation of our experiential world.

THE ALTERNATIVE
AN EVOLUTION OF PERCEPTION

I’ve explained my idea of an evolution of perception many, many times, both in books and talks online. Much of that material can be linked to from my website at sites.google.com/view/chris-ott-hub.

Therefore, instead of just regurgitating what I’ve already said, I’m going to approach it in a new way. But first I need to explain some terms.

When I use the word “perceive” I am using the word in its classical sense from philosophy, as previously described, as the experience of anything one can be aware of, from outer objects like tables and chairs to internal ones like thoughts, memories, and imagination. 

When I speak of “the Universe,” I refer to all that we perceive or ever could conceivably perceive, either internally or externally. We’ll call this the experiential world or the phenomenal Universe. In philosophy, “phenomena” refers to the objects of experience. 

In this view there is no Universe other than our phenomenal experience. Naturally that does not mean you experience the whole Universe at once. You experience one part at a time, and yet all that one can experience is the phenomenal Universe. If we accept that a clairvoyant or visionary might experience things others don’t, it is no contradiction to include his experience as part of the phenomena Universe. For anything that can be experienced is also part of the experiential world as we mean it.

This phenomenal Universe is the experiential effect of “perceptual schemas.” Perceptual schemas are ways of perceiving that can be likened to lenses.  

 

The phenomenal Universe came about as the result of a sequential evolution of these lenses. New lenses are either epiphanies in ways of perceiving or conditioned by past experiences. Each new lens adds some new aspect to experience, a process that created up the phenomenal Universe over time.

Originally these schemas were not personal, for personal individuality had not yet arisen in the beginning. Rather they evolved in perception itself - which we can also liken to the imagination of the Infinite Intelligence. Out of this slow and gradual formative process, individual consciousness arises and begins to have its own unique share of experience.  

 

So, what one experiences is partly formed in the one transcendental Soul and partly in the individual. 

Once an individual perceiver arises in this process, we call that a ‘soul’ and that ‘soul’ begins to accumulate its own individual lenses. Note that this ‘soul’ is not an invisible object, but a way of perceiving.

 

For each individual soul, once the experiential world is formed, and full individual consciousness is complete, eventually all lenses are dropped and the soul experiences that it is none other than the original Infinite Intelligence, an experience mystics call sacred union, Christ-consciousness, and many other names. 

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern (William Blake, 1790, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

TESTING THE IDEA

Let’s now see how this explanation measures up to our four requirements?

1. First, this is a process theory. It is not just a nominal or invisible cause. 
2. Second, it is a process of the formation of our experiential world, which is what demands explaining. The only thing we can’t perceive is our perceiving itself. But we know it is occurring immediately.
3. Third, this is a process that results in direct realism. For the things we perceive are the actual archetypes of whatever there is to perceive of them. No second world is required. Since the Universe is literally the outcome of ways of perceiving, we perceive the true Universe directly – even if it is a kind of illusion.  

What we have left to explain is how this idea avoids the process order fallacy? How do we avoid the problem of projecting aspects of our experience back into stages before the conditions necessary for their existence?

The answer is as follows. 

A feature of the concept of the evolution of perception is the concept of necessary preconditions. Some conditions necessarily precede others. When we say that a condition is necessary for the appearance of something, we mean it is logically necessary. 

For example, a fish is, by definition, a limbless cold-blooded vertebrate that lives in water. It follows that the presence of water is a necessary precondition for the arising of fish. That’s analytically true by virtue of what is meant by a fish.

So long as we allow the principle of necessary preconditions to guide us, we can easily avoid the kinds of logical anachronisms that plague some theoretical processes of the past. 

This is especially true when applied to determining a system of evolving perception. For instance, the intuition of space had to arise before things could be perceived spatially. 

So, in determining the order in which lenses had to have arisen in the formative process, I frequently found myself trying to imagine backward, from effects back to necessary precondition.

Go back from effect to cause until you are compelled to believe. (Katha Upanishad)

1. So, that completes the fourth requirement. We have a process that does not commit the process order fallacy. 

We now see that such a process of evolving perception meets all four requirements of an ideal system. 

THE EVOLUTION OF PERCEPTION LAID OUT

So, very briefly, let’s describe the process of the formation of the experiential Universe by way of evolving perceptual schemas. 

The way we organize this, we must think of mathematical laws that govern nature as lenses, or ways of perceiving. Hence, the laws of nature are in fact laws of perception. 

Begin with your body, most importantly your nerves, brain, and sense organs, which you need to experience the world. Think of these, taken as a whole, as a kind of lens. You experience your brain states, and by them the world. So, your body is a kind of electrical window through which you perceive the world.

The necessary preconditions for such a body include the mathematical natural laws by which it evolved and by which it holds together and which it obeys.

Since the natural laws are reducible to equations involving ratios of time and space, obviously time and space are necessary preconditions for the formation of the natural laws. So, before the laws arose as ways of organizing experience, the lenses of time and space had to arise.

Obviously, the lens of time had to arise before the lens of space, as the very notion of one event following another implies time.

So: time, then space, then natural laws, then your body. The following schematic shows it at a glance. 

 

 

So, how does the transition from the unified witness on the left of the chart (representing perception itself) to individual perceivers perceiving by way of their individual bodies occur?

 

This important transition occurs as follows. A world describable solely in terms of natural laws and mathematical accidents like motion, location, and orientation of objects is at best a description of a mathematical world. We obviously don’t experience number with our five senses. And yet it is in this purely mathematical state that the world first evolves, including our bodies. So, how do we explain our phenomenal experience of sound, color, weight, heat, and so on. 

The answer, ironically, is nicely described in the 1999 Wachowski brothers movie The Matrix. The world is firstly composed of binary code of 1s and 0s. Out of these arise higher mathematics, out of which arise laws applied to time and space. 

Where is such code stored? The question is ill-formed, for number is not a physical thing located in space. Number is an evolved abstraction, a way of organizing data in a coherent way. The laws of nature evolved as permanent equations that organize the physical world of objects and motions. And the accidents like relative location and motion, conceived mathematically, flow freely, and are continuously changing in accordance with such laws.

Fundamentally your brain, nerves, and sense organs are also evolved out of such code in accordance with such mathematical laws. These, of which your body is composed, capture and store this continuously changing mathematical data in electrical form. The Intelligence then evolves lenses that interpret X mathematical data as a particular color, Y as another – and this repeats with sound, smell, taste, and tactile sensation. If it helps, one can imagine a paint by number set in which lenses perceive mathematical states as sense qualities. So, by way of your mathematical body you perceive a mathematical world as a world of color, sound, and texture, including your own body. 

 

Figure 3 Images from the immersive computer game Skyrim, Wikimedia Commons

Your body then ends up being your window into the mathematical world.

So, your body functions as a kind of complex lens through which you see the Universe, much the way Neo in The Matrix becomes immersed in the mathematical world of the Matrix. The difference is that there is no second, ‘real’ world, as there is in the film. If you have seen the movie, you may remember that this ‘real’ world that Morpheus shows Neo by giving him a red pill, is a copy of Neo’s experiential world, the only difference being that it was dilapidated by a past apocalypse. This of course is yet another example of the mental habit when it comes to conceiving of causes that we’ve exhaustively talked about. 

That pretty much sums up the alternative idea, the evolution of perception, that does away with the external world hypothesis. For more on it visit my site sites.google.com/view/chris-ott-hub. All my work is freely downloadable there. But there are still some subjects I would like to address here that I have not in any of my previous works. 

INTELLIGENCE VS. CONSCIOUSNESS VS. PERCEPTION

I usually talk about an evolution of perception. But I often speak of consciousness and intelligence also. How are consciousness, intelligence, and perception related?

Obviously, consciousness is a necessary precondition for perceiving. For what is perception without awareness of its object? But my chart does not show consciousness as a lens to the left of the large eye on the far left, representing the start of the evolution of perception. 

 

Why not? The reason is that perception and consciousness are so interdependent that they must necessarily arise in tandem, almost like one thing. But they are not the same thing. And the difference is important.

According to Meher Baba, it was to attain full consciousness that the Universe came into existence. That is the meaning of the subtitle of his principal book, God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose. However, according to Baba, in the end, perception ceases, having fulfilled its function, and consciousness alone remains. This end state of permanent objectless awareness, he says, is the goal of Creation, and is called in some traditions nirvikalpa samādhi.

Such concerns over the reason the evolution occurred from a spiritual point of view are beyond the scope of this book, and beyond my ability to comment on. I try to limit my own speculations to what I can consider by reason and intuition. But the notion is interesting. In regard to the evolution of perception the pertinent thing that Baba points out is that concomitant with the evolution of perception, consciousness also increases. And so, the two developments are interconnected, even though fundamentally they are different things. 

For me it is enough to say that consciousness and perception are interdependent, and that by an evolution of perception I am naturally always speaking of an evolution of conscious perception. So, the issue of dividing them simply does not arise for me.

But it is also the case that both have one necessary precondition, and that is the existence of some kind of intelligence. And that is only logical. For what besides intelligence could ever have the capacity to develop the ability to consciously perceive? And this would be my argument for the necessary existence of God, where, by ‘God,’ I mean this Infinite and original underlying Intelligence.

Now by my use of the word “intelligence” I have in mind several necessary capacities. These include the capacity to imagine and the capacity to perceive what is imagined. That such two capacities are necessarily features of intelligence can also hardly be rationally denied, for one could never call intelligent that which lacked the capacity to imagine and discern that which had been imagined. I do not mean that the Infinite Intelligence, in its original state, was imagining, but that it had to have had the capacity to imagine latently. 

It follows from all this that the Infinite Intelligence is a necessary precondition for the evolution of perception. However, if such capacities were originally only latent in the Infinite Intelligence, and only manifested after the start of its awakening, it follows that when we speak of an evolution we are really only speaking solely of an evolution of perception, and not an evolution of the Infinite Intelligence, which in its original state is changeless. So, it does not evolve. I point this out to explain why my focus mainly stays on the evolution of perception. It is perception alone that evolves and is ever-changing. The Infinite Intelligence is, at least in my mind, only its necessary precondition.

THE LOGOS

The idea of the Infinite Intelligence may seem foreign to modern thinkers. But in fact, the idea has its antecedent in Western philosophy, for long ago the ancient Greeks had a concept much like it that they called the Logos. 

Most Christians in the West are taught that the word “logos” means ‘word.’ They are taught this in respect to the Gospel of John, which begins:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:1-14).

The translators of the King James Bible translated John’s use of the Greek word “Logos” to “Word,” and understood it as a reference to the embodiment of Jesus Christ.

However, the word Logos had in Greek a richer and more complex meaning than simply ‘word.’ The following is from the Online Etymology Dictionary.

"word, speech, statement, discourse," also "a computation, account," also "reason, judgment, understanding. . .”

The word “logic” is derived from logos. Logic is the science of distinguishing true from false reasoning.

And the following is from the 1942 Dictionary of Philosophy edited by Dagobert D. Runes. All emphases are mine.

Logos: (Gr. logos) A term denoting either reason or one of the expressions of reason or order in words or things; such as word, discourse, definition, formula, principle, mathematical ratio. In its most important sense in philosophy it refers to a cosmic reason which gives order and intelligibility to the world. . . The conception is developed more fully by the Stoics, who conceive of the world as a living unity, perfect in the adaptation of its parts to one another and to the whole, and animated by an immanent and purposive reason. in the system of Plotinus, where it appears as the creative and form-giving aspect of Intelligence (Nous), the second of the three Hypostases. . .  

These definitions of Logos come close to what I believe Meher Baba was referring to by the Infinite Intelligence. In other words, the notion of an underlying, uncreated Intelligence is not a brand-new notion that ought to shock anyone. Nor is it simply an ‘Eastern’ idea. The concept of an original underlying intelligence behind the organization of the Universe is as old as philosophy itself. 

The following dialogue between a boy and his mother is from a Netflix series titled Young Sheldon. Young Sheldon goes out onto a porch where his mother is sitting on a bench looking very pensive.

MOM: 

Faith means believing in something you can't know for sure is real. I am struggling with that. 

SHELDON:

So you don't believe in God anymore? 

MOM:

That isn't something for you to worry about. I need to figure this out myself. 

SHELDON:

Can I help? Maybe I could provide a fresh perspective. Did you know that if gravity were slightly more powerful, the universe would collapse into a ball? I did not. Also, if gravity were slightly less powerful, the universe would fly apart and there would be no stars or planets. 

MOM:

Where you going with this, Sheldon? 

SHELDON:

It's just that gravity is precisely as strong as it needs to be. And if the ratio of the electromagnetic force to the strong force wasn't one percent, life wouldn't exist. What are the odds that would happen all by itself? But the precision of the universe at least makes it logical to conclude there's a creator. 

The emphasis is mine. Does logic actually compel us to conclude from these facts about the Universe that there is a Creator? Are coincidence or a mind coming up with a design and then making the world according to it the only possibilities.

The first, dumb luck, appears very implausible and statistically it probably comes close to impossible. But a designer, as Sheldon seems to want his mother to infer from his words, does not appear to me to be the only alternative possibility. Ancient Greek philosophers like Heraclitus and Aristotle did not believe in a Creator as the Hebrews in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean did at the time. But they were convinced that the world was rationally ordered, and they explained this in terms of an underlying organizing influence they called the Logos.

NOT QUITE IDEALISM

I did my thesis on idealism, the view that the world is in some way mental. I wish to say why I believe the concept of an evolution of perception ought not be categorized as a form of idealism. Berkeley and Kant are both considered idealists and we’ve already discussed their views. So, let me explain my point.

There are a few senses of what we mean by idealism. One is the view that the things we perceive with our senses are representations of more ideal archetypes outside the scope of our experience. For Plato such archetypes were his forms hidden from us in the unseen world of forms. For Berkeley they were ideas in the mind of God, and the objects we perceive copies of those ideas planted in our minds by God. For Kant the objects we perceive are our mind’s representations of what he called the noumena, a name he coined to differentiate it from the phenomena that we perceive. 

All of these forms of idealism are fundamentally two-world systems where the objects we perceive are less real than the unseen reality they represent. Obviously, the evolution of perception does not posit a second real world.

Another sense of idealism is any system where mind is considered most real, and the things we perceive are ideas in a mind. To be honest, I have a hard time understanding what that means. Where does such a mind come from, and in what sense does it contain ideas? 

Yet, I must admit that there is a third sense of idealism that might apply to the evolution of perception. In this third sense, the objects of perception are held to be in some way dependent on the activity of mind. This does partially describe the evolution of perception. After all, aren’t perceptual schemas operations of the mind? However, in the evolution of perception the objects of perception are the effects of evolving modes of perception by the indivisible Infinite Intelligence. Whereas by ‘minds,’ I think the proponents of this kind of idealism, such as Georg Hegel and F. H. Bradley, are referring to our individual egos. That is something I definitely would not agree with.

WHY IS THE INTELLIGENCE INFINITE?

This Intelligence is infinite, which means without limit. Why would this be? It is because it precedes the limiting factor of the lenses it imagines. In other words it does not itself fall within the scope of the limiting lenses.

If you look at my charts, you will notice that while each new lens contributes to the overall complexity of the Universe, they do so by limiting perception. For instance, the lenses of time and space are delimiting factors. Something that is delimited is bound, defined, and delineated. The Infinite Intelligence itself is not confined to the limiting factors of time and space. If we removed all of these lenses that we now see through we would see reality as it is. Consider once again the words of Blake. 

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

So, though we see more as we evolve greater more lenses and greater awareness over the course of our evolution, we see less of the limitlessness of existence. 

Meher Baba integrates this principle into his cosmology. He refers to the final stages in his process, which he calls the theme of Creation, as an involution, a word coined to imply a process reverse to the one that developed the lenses that formed the perception of the Universe in the first place. In such an involutionary process, these formative lenses are unwound or discarded, and consciousness returns to its original state while retaining full consciousness. 

I want to say a few things about how I personally understand the concept of an underlying and original and causally responsible Infinite Intelligence. The concept changes much theologically. 

This Infinite Intelligence existed before the beginning of time, exists now, and will always exist. It is eternal, which means existing forever, without end or beginning.

Also, nothing but this Infinite Intelligence did or ever will exist. Not only this, but nothing but the Infinite Intelligence ever could exist. Because it is the original omnipresent all-encompassing existence, nothing could ever in principle come into existence that was not, in hindsight, also it.

This Infinite Intelligence is not a person. People, with their newly evolved individual consciousness, find themselves in the world as such only as the result of a long evolutionary process. So, it is a mistake to project the image of a person back into the original state prior to the process that created him. 

This Infinite Intelligence has no faults. Any fault would bespeak a limit to intelligence. 

This Infinite Intelligence loves and could be said to be love, as Christians rightly say of the Father. For, in this system, if love exists, it is the Infinite Intelligence, since the Infinite Intelligence is all that exists. And love could never evolve, for love is a necessary precondition of creativity. But it can manifest from its latency, just as a baby is born seeking to love and be loved. Hate, in contrast, is born of ignorance, of lenses, and obviously ignorance is by definition absent in the Infinite Intelligence. 

Now it is not difficult to reflect on what intelligence means. For we have experienced others who are intelligent, and each of us experiences a degree of it in ourselves. It is the reader’s own native intelligence that parses the meaning of the words on this page, and it is intelligence that measures their veracity, and we call that faculty discernment, which is a property of intelligence.

By reflecting in such a way, we can pick out several capacities that must be in the nature of Infinite Intelligence, for such capacities are the necessary preconditions of discovery, and anything that lacked such capacities we would never call intelligent. Some examples are:

1. The capacity to be conscious
2. The capacity to imagine
3. The capacity to perceive the contents of imagination
4. The capacity to discern
5. The capacity to love
6. The capacity to desire truth, to seek truth, and to discern truth from falsity and hence to realize truth
7. A natural propensity to love the good, the pure, and the beautiful, to recognize and admire courage, and the capacity to embody and express these qualities
8. The capacity to awaken and achieve Self-realization, and to express its natural proclivity toward truth, love, purity, beauty, and fairness

What I do not mean to denote by the term Infinite Intelligence is what is conventionally called “a mind.” Some philosophers have described God as a perfect mind. Not only did Descartes and George Berkeley do so, but even the late quantum chemist Lothar Schäfer, who wrote in his 1997 book In Search of Divine Reality: Science as a Source of Inspiration, ‘If there be a God, what could He be but a mind?’

To me, such notions imagine an invisible cause that cogitates, makes plans, designs outcomes, and so on. Such tasks require language and pictures, that come about later in the evolutionary process. It is from imagining God as a mind that we get our notion of intelligent design, where there is an eternal conscious designer. How could such an idea possibly explain how things like consciousness and language, which are requirements of the capacity to design and plan things, come from? In the concept of evolution of perception what we mean by mind (thinking in terms of pictures and word definitions), is a very late development in the evolution of perception, and only fully manifests in the human state. So, the notion of God originally being a mind, in my opinion, is a projection of ourselves backward into our own cause, which of course – as said throughout this book – is a logical anachronism.

HEAVEN AND HELL

What does the evolution of perception have to say about the many so-called places we are said to go after we die, as described in our religions, folklore, and even some modern accounts of near-death experiences? The Christian Heaven and Hell are only two examples of such places. Here are some more.

• Shambhala (Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist traditions) 
• Avalon (Arthurian legend)
  
• Valhalla(Norse)
  
• Fólkvangr (Norse)
• Niflhel (A misty hel in Norse mythology)
• The Happy Hunting Grounds (Great Plains tribes of American Indians, including the Oglala Lakota)
  
• Aaru (fields of reeds in Egyptian mythology)
  
• Olam ha-Ba (a heavenly afterlife in the divine Presence in Jewish eschatology)
  
• She'ol (where people go as shades in the Talmud)
• Elysium (a heavenly afterlife conceived by some ancient Greeks, depicted at the end of the movie Gladiator) 
• Gehinnom (Hebrew place often equated with Hell or Purgatory)
  
• Jahannam (In Islam a place of punishment for evildoers in the afterlife, equated with hell)
  
• Planes of existence (Described by Meher Baba that people pass through in involution)

Where such places actually exist, I take allusions to them to refer to states of consciousness, or ways of perceiving, that souls temporarily suffer and enjoy for a short time after they disassociate from their physical bodies at death. I think they are misconstrued as denoting literal places that we travel to.

This again is not original. I surmised it from the following brief conversation Meher Baba had with the Hollywood screenwriter Garret Fort.

Garrett Fort: Is there really the place known as Shambhala, the Astral centre where the Masters dwell in disembodied form? 

Baba: It is presumed that you already know that planes are not places. The state and stage connoting Shambhala exists. There is difference of terminology only. This is also known as Vidnyan (The Answer, pp. 26-28).

However, a recent experience led me to want to say a bit more about belief in such places. I recently watched a series of videos on YouTube in which people reacted to the ending of the 2000 movie Gladiator, a film that won several Academy Awards, including for Best Picture. It is the story of a Roman general who becomes a slave and winds up giving his life to save Rome. He then passes through a symbolic gate into the Roman version of the afterlife known as Elysium, where he rejoins his lost family who were murdered at the start of the film. As I watched these reactors respond to this final scene, I was taken by the fact that many burst into genuine tears as they watched the brave general pass away, or laughed and cried as they spoke to the screen. What I noticed is that everyone instantly grasped what was happening and where he was going, whether they were Muslim or Christian or Hindu. The images were simply that universal. I found even myself fighting tears at the moving scene, sharing these emotions. 

My point in bringing this up is that such concepts are a powerful genuine part of the human psyche, and are very moving. However, after thinking about it, it seems to me that nothing is actually lost by reframing such a powerful and resonant scene as depicting the hero transitioning to a different state of awareness, rather than a different place, as he gives up his physical body.

THE ‘NEW PHYSICS’

I wish to say something about the quasi-mystical occult entities constantly being invented in the so-called “new science” or “new physics.” An occult entity is something you cannot see, the word “occult” here meaning hidden. Examples of such invented entities include dimensions, parallel universes, wormholes, dark energy, strange matter, dark matter, and so on.

If you examine the charts of the evolution of perception, you will see that there is a stage in the evolution where things are describable only in mathematical terms. This includes the equations of the natural laws, but also incidental locations, motions, sizes, and orientations of physical objects. 

Later in the process, the brain evolves and begins to assign color, sound, and other sensorial qualities to these otherwise purely mathematical states.

The mistake I believe certain contemporary scientists have made is, when faced with some anomaly that cannot be immediately explained in terms of known natural laws, they resort to inventing invisible and nominal causes to explain those anomalies. These are then reified in the imaginations of those scientists. To reify means to treat something abstract, like a number, as if it were a physical thing. This reification is made even more problematic as science fiction movies begin to depict these entities like they are depicting cutting edge science. The result is a culture bombarded with all sorts of magical scenarios attributed to “science.” And this is a form of superstition.

In his 1996 book The End of Science, science journalist John Horgan referred to these flights of fancy in science as “ironic science,” which he demarcates from the earnest efforts to discover the underlying mathematical laws of nature in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

I can see many possible reasons for this. 

After the Enlightenment we entered a period known as Post-modernism or the Post-Enlightenment era. In this period, imagination came to be emphasized over epistemology, the study of what things we actually know and how we know them. Exemplifying this change, in 1934 Albert Einstein wrote:   

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution (The World as I See It, 1934, Albert Einstein). 

Coming from a scientist his words are disgraceful, and betrays the entire project of science. While exciting and evocative, statements like this exemplify the post-modern mindset. I find it somewhat depressing that young people know no better than to applaud such thinking in our time, and then go out and use their imagination to do “science.”

GOOD VIBES

Sticking rigorously to certain fundamental principles helps me to keep the theory of the evolution of perception from devolving into just another post-modern flight of imagination. A principle is a rule that always applies.

The first of these principles is to avoid the process order fallacy. A thing cannot exist prior to the conditions necessary for its existence.

The second is that no other working parts ought be added to perceiving and ways of perceiving when discussing the formation of the world.   

I have had numerous occasions where well-intended people, either not knowing about these principles or not understanding why they are necessary, have tried to ‘help’ me with my theory by suggesting an entity they feel would improve it. Such added entities inevitably break the system by introducing logical conundrums that can’t then be solved. The inclination in people to want to add something else is so common and so heartfelt that I’ve decided I need to say something to explain why such additions are counterproductive.

One of the most common things people propose adding to perceiving and ways of perceiving is vibration. This has some kind of New Age or New-Science appeal. The problem with it is that a vibration is, at its heart, the regular and continuous movement of something back and forth. Obviously, the necessary conditions for motion of any kind include time and space. So, vibration cannot be inserted in the system prior to them.

Another common example is people feel the need to add energy. So, the world is perceiving and ways of perceiving, plus energy. My daughter is very smart. So, I once asked her why, in her opinion, the New Age is so attached to the idea of energy. I’ve even heard people refer to consciousness as “a kind of energy.” After thinking it over, she said it was probably because you can’t see energy, and they associate invisible things with spirituality. The habit of spiritualizing things we cannot see has its roots in the old methods of explaining cause that I’ve discussed. But the subject of energy is worth talking a little more about.

I want to explain how what we call ‘energy’ is explained under the principles of the evolution of perception. From the point of view of the evolution of perception, what people call “energy” is actually nothing more than the mathematical laws, which, as ways of perceiving (lenses), govern our perception of motion. Finding that these laws apply to their observations, but not knowing they are witnessing the effect of laws of perception, people wind up reifying those laws as ‘forces.’ In other words, from the point of view of the evolution of perception, there is no such thing as energy independent of ways of perceiving — any more than there is such thing as matter or substance independent of ways of perceiving. These come about in experience as an effect of the evolution of perception. They are not co-causes of it. 

As already mentioned I’ve thought a lot about why people are so inclined to want to add entities and forces to perception and ways of perceiving when they hear the idea explained. Then it occurred to me why it is. It’s due to the way people are taught to speculate today. 

The evolution of perception is a non-metaphysical hyper-rational system. What I mean is that it avoids relying on imaginary imagery that gets reified as metaphysical substances and powers, and relies instead on purely logical principles. For instance, how do we know that perception is occurring in us? We know this not because we imagined something called perception, and reified it into an invisible thing somewhere, but because we cannot coherently deny it is occurring in us without contradicting ourselves in that very denial, for its denial would be a report of perceiving something. So that perception is occurring is not a theory, but is self-evident. In fact, perception is simply what is left when we remove all conjectures from our system. The one undeniable fact is that perception is occurring and things appear as they do. 

The same is true of the ways we perceive. One can find perceptual schemas, like time and space and natural laws, operating in their own experience. It is not a theory that these govern our experience. It is undeniable. Furthermore, the in which we lay out the rise of these ways of perceiving is guided by the a priori principle of necessary preconditions. It is not simply a theory that a thing cannot exist before the conditions necessary for its existence exist. It is practically a tautology.

However, due to how people are taught to seek answers to questions about causes, they resort to inquiring into their imaginations. And what do we find when you inquire into our imagination? We find collections of memories of past experiences. And these are part of phenomena. In fact imagination itself is part of our phenomenal experience as well. It follows then that if we look to our imagination for the cause of phenomena, we will wind up projecting effects back into their cause.

There is no doubt that the human imagination is a wonderful thing. I used to be a filmmaker and ought to know. Imagination is how we enrich our lives and move the hearts of others. But it does not belong in science. And it is the seeping of imagination back into science in the post-modern era has produced endless new problems in the guise of progress in metaphysics. 

I once said to a friend who long supported my work that I’m not really a philosopher. I’m an un-philosopher. For once you discard all those imaginary things that reason does not support, what you are left with is the evolution of perception.

GHOSTS AND GHOULS

Many people considered clairvoyants report seeing ghosts. Even some animals like dogs and crows, I’m told, appear to see the spirits of the recently deceased.

A principle of the evolution of perception is that the Universe is the world of all that we perceive or ever could perceive. But this is not to say any one of us perceives the entire Universe. 

There are many reasons why one might not be able to perceive something with one’s own senses, and yet it still exist. You may have a headache that I cannot perceive. Yet, I would still offer you an aspirin. We cannot see objects in the dark or those covered over by something else. And yet we would not say those things didn’t exist. Likewise, we cannot perceive things that are too small or too distant for our senses to detect. But we wouldn’t say there are no atoms or stars beyond the reach of the Hubble telescope. 

We can’t perceive events that took place in the past or that will one day take place in the future. But it doesn’t follow that they didn’t or won’t. Examples of things we believe exist, or did exist, or may one day exist that we cannot perceive with our senses are too many to name.

Likewise, there may be ways of perceiving that are rare. And those who have such unusual faculties may see things the rest of us do not, such as ghosts or other subtle things. 

Ultimately, if people say they perceive ghosts, whatever such ghosts may be, then there is nothing actually in that proposition that is inconsistent with the principles of the evolution of perception. For the first principle is that the Universe consists of all that is perceived or that ever could be perceived. So, if ghosts are indeed perceived by some, even if rarely so, such ghosts belong to the experiential Universe. For under certain conditions, or with special faculties, some can apparently perceive them. Something that few perceive is not what I meant by an invisible cause. The color-blind cannot perceive certain colors and yet those color remains part of the phenomenal world.

I must say, though, that a ghost is not a soul. A soul is a point of view of consciousness, and not a thing within the phenomena.

CONCLUSION

It’s time to conclude this short book. I feel satisfied that I’ve conveyed a few points I hadn’t gotten around to concerning the concept of the evolution of perception.

I can imagine that some may find this idea hard to accept. Admittedly, it’s a radical one, although as I've said it has its antecedents. But no matter how hard it is to get your head around, ask yourself if it makes more sense to say that when you hold up your hand you don’t see your real hand, but only a copy of one you will never see. And that your real hand lives in a second world outside your experience. If it were me I would find the idea described in this book reasonable and plausible by comparison.

If the only justification one can give for the external world hypothesis is that it seems possible, I think an evolution of perception is at least as much so.

I said in the beginning that I would save for the conclusion my thoughts on why I think the evolution of perception has gotten so little attention.

First, there is a saying, sometimes attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer, that a new idea is often first ignored, then opposed, and finally accepted as self-evident. I have always written my books with those words in mind.

Second, it has been pointed out by academics that the function of official academia is not to solicit novel ideas, but to preserve and pass forward to new students the received ones. The science historian Thomas Kuhn once wrote that scientific revolutions never come from within the system, but from revolutionary thinkers outside the establishment.

Third, I think there is a reason people are not particularly interested in subjects of this nature at the moment. In the eternal search for solutions to humanity’s problems, the attention has, in recent years, fixed itself on politics. It seems people are waiting for a political golden age that never arrives. In contrast, there was once a time when developments in metaphysics drew enormous attention from intelligent people. I once read that people would press to fill the halls in Heidelberg to hear a lecture by the idealist philosopher Georg Hegel. Something like that is hard to imagine today.

And finally – I think there is another reason people pay so little attention to my ideas. I make no secret that the idea of an evolution of perception would not have arisen in my mind had I not read the works of Meher Baba when I was young. I don’t think the world is ready for a Zoroastrian mystic. 

Baba himself sometimes made startling predictions. Two of them have always tempered my expectations and kept me going even when others paid little or no attention to what I wrote.

In 1937 Baba said to the press in Nasik, India, "I have come to bring about a revolution in man's thinking, the slowest of all revolutions.” And about twenty years later, in 1958, while standing next to the tomb where his body would one day be interred, he said to the men who had accompanied him to the top of the hill, "Seventy years after I drop my body, this place will turn into a place of pilgrimage, where lovers of God, philosophers and celebrities will come to pay homage.”

It always struck me that ‘philosophers’ was the only profession he chose to mention. I’m pretty sure it will sound superstitious for a philosopher who prides himself in reason to say, but I can’t help agreeing with him, that an idea like the one described in this book would require “a revolution in man’s thinking.” 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Ott was born in Woodstock, NY July 23, 1959 to artists Lynfield and Phyllis Ott. In 1964/65 his parents met Meher Baba in India, were very impressed, and subsequently, in 1966, moved their family to the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, SC.

Chris grew up there until he was 20, when he moved to California to work in the film industry. Ott worked as a camera assistant in an animation studio from 1980-1982, and then studied film at the University of Southern California where he received his Bachelor of Arts in cinema production. In 1987 Ott established Caravan Films, Inc. in Wilmington, NC and wrote and directed films.

In 1997, Ott moved to Fayetteville, AR, where he studied philosophy at the University of Arkansas, receiving his MA in 2001. During this period, he developed his theory of perception, consulting with members of the University faculty, including the late quantum chemist Lothar Schäfer. In 2004 he wrote and published The Evolution of Perception and The Cosmology of Substance: A Simpler Theory of Everything. In 2012 Ott began a YouTube channel where he uploaded many talks on the subject. In 2021, he published Evolution of Perception Re-Explained: A Radical New View of Reality and in 2024 Two Philosophical Works, which combines his two previous books and adds a new introduction. 

His papers, talks, and websites are available for free at sites.google.com/view/chris-ott-hub.