CHRISTOPHER JONATHAN OTT
Copyright © 2024 Christopher Jonathan Ott
All rights reserved.
PREFACE
THE IDEA AT A GLANCE
WHY START WITH A GLOSSARY?
THE HISTORICAL FALLACY
THE TWO-WORLD PROBLEM
THE HISTORY OF THE TWO-WORLD PROBLEM
REVIEWING WHAT WE COVERED
LOOKING FOR ANOTHER WAY
APPLYING PROCESS TO A PSYCHOGENIC PROBLEM
THE PROCESS BY WHICH THE PHENOMENAL WORLD AROSE
PROOF THAT THIS PROCESS HAD TO HAVE TAKEN PLACE
WHY THE PHENOMENAL WORLD AROSE
WHAT SPARKED THE RISE OF THE PHENOMENAL WORLD?
THE NEW COSMOLOGY OUTLINED IN FULL
REINCARNATION IN A SPECIAL SENSE
FIVE ERRORS IN THINKING
IMPLICATIONS
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX A – QUESTIONING DARWINIAN EVOLUTION
APPENDIX B – DIFFERENCES FROM MY EARLIER WRITINGS
APPENDIX C – KEY TO SEEING OPENING IMAGES
WORKS CITED
PREFACE
A few years ago, I wrote a book titled The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance. It was my attempt to explain an idea that had brewed in my head for a long time. Here is a bit of promotion from its back panel:
Chris Ott considers our current philosophical problems to be the tragic result of psychological fallacies as old as Plato. He offers a new explanation for the universe that relies simply on an evolution of perception. His theory succeeds at accounting for the physical as well as the psychological–including mathematics, natural law, concrete objects, language, thought, and culture. A spellbinding journey to the roots of our assumptions.
At first, I was reasonably satisfied that the book conveyed the bare essentials of the idea. But over time I discovered that many people had a hard time following it. I partially blame the intrinsically difficult nature of some of the concepts it dealt with. But I also blame the terse style I wrote it in. It was only 81 pages. The book you’re reading now is the result of several years of rethinking how to explain the same idea in a more fleshed out, and hopefully more approachable, way. I’ve also added some needed diagrams to aid the reader in grasping what is being said. Hence the title, Evolution of Perception Re-Explained.
I wrote this book mostly in coffee shops and restaurants. Naturally people would ask me what I was writing. Wishing to avoid conversation, my initial response was to attempt to scare them off by saying it was philosophy, technical, and probably wouldn’t interest them. That worked. But in time, as the book began to take shape, I changed to saying, “It’s a new theory about how the universe formed.” This usually solicited a happy response about some theory they had heard or a book they were wishing to write.
What I love about that answer is that it mainly covers what the idea is and yet isn’t hard to grasp. People almost seem giddy that there are still intellectuals thinking about such things. But in actuality there is quite a bit more to this book than simply a novel account for how the physical world arose. First of all, it offers the first ever explanation of how thought evolved. And secondly, we go further than any previous book by reframing what it is exactly that we mean by our world, and the feature of that world we need to explain – which is our perception of it. For when we look around us, isn’t it our immensely complex experience that we mean by our world, and that demands explaining? After all, what other world is there? Is not our world simply a special kind of experience – what I call in this book ‘our world of experience?’ Our goal in this book is to account for how such a manifestly complex experience, that we refer to as our world, might have come to arise.
For older generations, such an approach to discussing our world might seem strange, or even incomprehensible. But not to the young. Due to new concepts and theories that have made their way into our culture as a result of sim games, virtual reality and AI – such as the holographic universe idea (that I point out the problem with in chapter 3) and the often-repeated phrase that this world of ours is some kind of artificial reality – young people are no longer satisfied with the 19th century ideas their parents accepted. Fashionable talk about quantum mechanics and Eastern thought has also contributed to this growing feeling among the young that the world is in some fundamental way more experiential than physical. But no one has actually been able to explain how such an illusory world might have formed ex nihilo, and certainly none have considered what might have caused it to do so and why. This book does all that. And I detect changes in the way people speak in the last quarter century that betray a growing preparedness to contemplate some radically new ways to understand what physical reality actually is and how it arose. The source of my own idea is not these kinds of trendy sources, even though they wind up effectively related. My sources are ancient philosophers. But I expect this book to eventually find a receptive readership among new generations, and especially generations to come.
In this book, rather than ask how the universe formed, we point out that all we really mean by our universe is our experience of it. And it is this experience of the universe that we collectively enjoy, along with all its characteristics, that we work to explain in this book. This is a paradigm shift in thinking about the world’s formation. While some philosophers of the past like George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant agreed that what we mean by our world is merely our experience of it, they never offered any account for its formation. They lived before the concepts of evolution and process theories replaced the magical thinking of leaving it to the inexplicable power of the deity. And the Dharmic religions of the East were no different. The very root of the Eastern word Maya is “magician.” And magic is precisely what Hindus attribute the cause of the illusion they ascribe to the universe, and they argue solely from their scriptures. People don’t think like that anymore and no longer accept such answers.
Rather than beginning by proposing a material out of which the world formed, an approach called ‘materialism,’ we describe the psychogenic evolution by which matter came to exist. And rather than a designer who thinks, we give a process by which thought came to exist. The approach is so radically different from past ones that the result can’t even be discussed in the language of past ideas. Not only is it a new solution to an ancient problem, but one that begins with a new articulation of the question itself, and a new language to answer it. And not only are there arguments for the radical view offered in this book, but there are arguments for the kinds of arguments that we give, and even a discussion of what counts as an undefeatable argument.
Another thing is that, unlike previous approaches to causation, we don’t lay down the question after simply giving a process that explains it. We go several steps further by attempting to tackle the even higher order questions of why it formed, to what end, and what forced it to do so – where we dance about on the brink of mysticism, and even are forced to refer to the words of mystics.
Anyway, much as with my first book, I have put my whole heart into this one. I feel that anyone who reads this book with an open mind and pure motives will find at least something to inspire them to greater thoughts. I would like to give special thanks to my daughter Megan for always being there for me, to my friend Joyce Barison who always encouraged me and never doubted I was on to something, and to my editor Fereshteh Azad who worked tirelessly to keep the narrative as focused as possible.
THE IDEA AT A GLANCE
Look at this picture.
What do you see? There’s more than one way to look at the same image. Some will see a cube viewed from the front. Others will see it as a cube seen from above. Some see only crisscrossed lines in a plane.
What causes this change in how you interpret the image? Nothing changes on the page. Nothing changes in your eyes. The distance is the same and so your focus remains constant. If you think something occurred in your brain to make it happen, you are appealing to a theory called reductive materialism. If you think that, ask yourself what caused your brain to change, and how that changed what you saw.
In this book we refer to this effect as a change in your perceptual schema. A perceptual schema is a way of organizing what you see into something else. It is fundamentally mental. Take this famous example.
Many report seeing Jesus. It’s actually a melting patch of snow. Refer to Appendix C if you need help seeing it as Jesus.
Some see this as the letter A, which in turn they might see as a symbol for the sound ‘ah.’ It’s really just some ink and paper.
In this book we will show how the whole world had to have formed phenomenally out of an evolution of just such schemas. By this single principle of ‘seeing something as something else’ (or seeing something in a different way) we will explain the entire world, including the inorganic, the organic, and the cultural, from mathematics to physical objects to language, thought, and even human judgements. In other words, this is an idea where the universe is apparent only and arises as the result of an evolution of perceptual schemas. The purpose of this book is to explain how and why such a process occurred, and to what end.
This isn’t the first book I have written about this concept. The first one I wrote was in 2004. This one, written in 2020, is merely an updated version, with certain changes and additions. I go over what some of those differences are in the Appendix.
I want to say a few words to put the reader at ease about this book. Whenever I start to explain this idea, people tend to get tense. They might be concerned that what I say may be tedious, uninteresting, or that they won’t be able to understand it. Actually, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. But the road from suspicion to realization, that it’s actually an easy to understand and fascinating idea, is unfortunately long. For much old thinking must be dispensed with first, and this does not happen all at once. I have no choice but to take the reader down a long, sometimes difficult, path at first, for I have no choice but to show what’s broken before I can show how this idea surprisingly fixes it.
To explain why this avenue is necessary, but worthwhile, I have an analogy. Imagine I narrated an alternative history to the Battle of Waterloo. First of all, very few people are interested in battle details. Second, I would sound like a complete lunatic. Don't I know what happened at Waterloo? Why am I wasting people’s time making up all this false stuff? But imagine, instead, I began by telling in some detail the accepted narrative of the battle, and as I went along, I explained convincingly why these accepted details could never have happened that way. Now that might actually begin to pique a listener's interest. He might then want to know what I think really happened. That is what I have to do before I can begin to explain my philosophical solution to certain problems. I have to convey to the reader the narrative that has been accepted up to now, about a somewhat technical subject, and show why that narrative cannot possibly be correct. At that point, if I do a good job of it, the reader will be caught up, and their interest will be piqued to know how it is solved.
Now that is enough prelude. We are going to begin our journey in this book by tackling a particular problem in philosophy and science. It has been called the hardest problem still facing science, and many have speculated that it might never be solved. It’s called the 'mind-body problem.' However, I'm not going to use that term. The words 'mind' and 'body' in this context are relics of an earlier time in philosophy when they had very different connotations than they do today, accounting for why the words draw a blank in many people's minds. The words come from a traditional criticism of the ideas of the 17th century philosopher RenĆ© Descartes, who believed there were two substances: a spiritual substance he called 'mind' and a physical substance he called 'body.' His view was called substance dualism, and the mind-body problem centered on how these two very unalike substances interacted with one other. Today, almost no philosopher believes in substance dualism. The prevailing view today is that there is only a single substance: matter. And yet the problem survives in a different form, which we will discuss. But the term ‘mind-body problem’ is very misleading, as it uses obsolete language that refers to a dualism that is antiquated. We are instead going to call the problem what it actually is but has never been clearly recognized as: the 'two-world problem.' What I mean by this will become very, very clear in this work.
Once the reader sees this problem in sharp relief, vividly and with genuine clarity, they will be ready to follow where the rest of this book leads. Here is the briefest outline of the steps this book will take.
1. First, we will explain the current view in philosophy and science about the nature of the world and our ability to perceive it.
2. We will then show a big problem with this view – and show how the problem was actually always with us since the beginning of thought.
3. We will then review attempts by philosophers in the past to solve this problem, and show the error in thinking that all of them shared, and why such thinking was never going to resolve any problem.
4. We will then describe the nature and genesis of the problem in thinking that underlies this and numerous other philosophical problems.
5. We will then show that by correcting this error in thinking, these problems simply don’t arise.
6. Finally, we will show how this change in thinking touches every aspect of life and thought.
You may love this idea, or you may hate it. But one thing is certain. If you read this book to the end, you will understand it, and you will agree you have never heard anything like it.
WHY START WITH A GLOSSARY?
Over the years, I often find a better word for what I mean. For instance, in my writing of twenty years ago I used the word ‘consciousness’ a great deal, while now I mostly avoid that word, as it has various meanings in philosophy. I prefer to use ‘perception’ or ‘experience’ instead. These cover the same territory as consciousness, since being conscious is a necessary precondition of perceiving or experiencing. Yet these do not have the nebulous quality of the word ‘consciousness,’ as ‘experience’ and ‘perception’ are much closer to our daily lives and feel less abstract.
What I once called 'intuitions,' I now call 'perceptual schemas.' I give a totally different meaning to ‘intuitions’ now, which we will come to.
I have also learned that it is better to choose a single term for an important concept than to switch between several, and I have worked over the years to choose a single one in those cases.
Some of the meanings I apply to words are lifted from other centuries in philosophy. Examples include my use of ‘perception’ and ‘occult.’ I am aware of newer words that a contemporary philosopher would almost certainly use to try to convey what I'm saying. I’m using these older words in their archaic sense specifically because such contemporary equivalents carry connotations I wish to avoid. Such contemporary words are highly 'theory-laden,' and imply metaphysical assumptions I do not share. For instance, I avoid the words 'sense datum' and 'hard-wired,' common in contemporary philosophical jargon, because they invoke a machine model for understanding mental activity, and I don’t want to emphasize such a comparison.
And in a couple of cases, there simply are no clear analogues for certain words anymore in the English language. Consider, for instance, the 16th century use of the word 'occult.' Coming from a root that meant ‘hidden,’ it once carried a very strong sense of hidden, hidden not just from our five senses, but our thoughts as well.
Occult – “not apprehended by the mind, beyond the range of understanding" is from 1540s.
(Online Etymology Dictionary, retrieved Aug. 8, 2020)
There is no extant word for this that I know of. So, I use the archaic word with its archaic meaning intact.
Another term I use in its archaic sense is 'perception.' There is no contemporary English word with the sense that ‘perception’ had as late as the early 19th century. It is as if an entire concept was simply removed from our English vocabulary. Yet this early sense of the word 'perception' is central to any discussion of my own ideas. Today, the verb 'to perceive' is restricted to denoting only sense perception. Originally it was used more broadly, pertaining to any kind of experience.
So, in the Enlightenment you could speak of perceiving thoughts, perceiving a geometric shape in imagination, or perceiving a dream. In fact, we actually still use the word in this broader sense. He perceived her discomfort with the idea. Yet, technically, in contemporary philosophy at least, any such talk is censured. We are confined to saying only things like, He perceived the sweat on her brow. So how could we say the first sentence in current philosophical jargon? We can’t. The result is we are left bereft of a language with which to have an honest discussion about perceiving.
This narrowing of the meaning of the word 'perception,' to refer solely to perception of outer things, was the result of the eō°orts of Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet of Preston (1788 – 1856), a prolific apologist for the writings of Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid. Hamilton's insistence on differentiating a sense of ‘perception proper,’ based on his desire to promulgate Reid's narrow use of the word, eventually found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary, first published serially from 1857 – 1884, and finally in total as a 10-volume set in 1928. The new dictionary relied on the authority of Hamilton that this alone was right ‘in philosophy.’ Such defining by perceived authority is not how lexicography works. Words are defined by usage, not by authority. However, all modern abbreviated dictionaries followed the example of Oxford. In all my writing, however, I remain true to the word’s original meaning, from its root (the Latin percipere, i.e., to gather), and use it exactly as it was in classical English language philosophy.
Perception: "the taking cognizance of” from 1610s.
(Online Etymology Dictionary, retrieved Aug. 8, 2020)
If I ever wish to speak of perception in its restricted sense, as sense perception, I will say 'sense perception.' Otherwise, I mean it broadly, referring to perceiving a memory, a dream, a thought, a relationship, a concept, or anything else internal, as much as outer things like cups and saucers.
Some words I include in the glossary are not unusually defined but are included solely for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with them. I suggest readers review the whole glossary before starting to read the main text of the book. If they don’t, they are bound to make incorrect judgments of what is said, due to a hazy idea of what was meant. I'll also bold glossary terms in their first few appearances in the text to remind readers that they can check if not certain. These meanings are axiomatic to the ideas in this book, and the idea cannot be understood properly without a good grasp of them.
Cause: The word ‘cause’ is often used casually, as if its meaning is already understood. In this book, what counts as cause and what doesn’t is important. For something to be the cause of some thing or event, it must actually be responsible for its presence or occurrence. In addition, a cause should explain what it causes. For a cause to be an actual explanation of something, it must be accompanied by some coherent account of how it brought about its consequent. A mere name for a cause is not a cause at all. It is, at best, a placeholder for one.
For example, when we ask what caused something to fall, we answer ‘gravity.’ Well, that is easy to say, but it tells us nothing about what gravity is or how it causes things to fall. It is thus a cause in name only. It is a placeholder for an explanation of things falling, until such time that someone comes along and explains what it is and how it causes things to fall.
Consciousness: The word ‘consciousness’ can mean many, many things in philosophy. In this book, it simply refers to awareness, and never anything else. There are degrees of consciousness, well-known to anesthesiologists.
Because ‘consciousness’ can denote many things to different philosophers, it is just as important to say what we don’t mean by it. We do not posit that consciousness is a discrete entity, a substance, a field of influence, or a phenomenon of any kind. Quite the opposite, it is a necessary condition for the experience of such things and concepts. Consciousness is not a phenomenon (an object of experience), but a necessary precondition for the ability to perceive phenomena. Consciousness cannot be imagined or conceived, because it is a necessary precondition for the ability to imagine and conceive. Looking for consciousness is thus like an eye going about looking for itself, or a man looking for the source of his shadow.
For this reason, in this book we deny the meaning of modern allusions to things like an all-pervading consciousness, fields of consciousness, or the notion that one can download one's consciousness onto a computer chip in the form of ones and zeros. Such notions make the mistake of conceiving of awareness as analogous to things we are aware of. They confuse conscious- ness with its content.
Epistemology: This is a common word in the field of philosophy, but not common to most people. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It deals with questions such as, is it possible to know something with absolute certainty, and by what criterion would one know if one did? In other words, what exactly do we know and how exactly do we know it? ‘Epistemological’ and 'epistemic' concerns are those related to such questions. Examples of epistemological questions are, ‘How can we know if historical events we read about occurred the way they are described?’ or ‘Can a man know for certain that he was born?’
Enlightenment Era: The Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its precise start and end are defined variously by different fields. In this book we refer to the philosophical movement beginning with RenĆ© Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and ending with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
Entity: An entity is anything that has its own independent existence, apart from other things. Examples of possible entities include a person, place, thing, substance, part, particle, institution, or even something imaginary like Valhalla or the Easter Bunny. We could call these imaginary entities. The entire universe, conceived as the sum of all that exists, is an entity. Some things are not entities. Actions, concepts, numbers, operations of arithmetic like addition and subtraction, laws of nature, states, and attributes are not entities. For instance, a beautiful woman is an entity, but her beauty is not, as it has no existence independent of her. Likewise, a rubber band has elasticity, but its elasticity is not an entity independent of the rubber band. It is merely an attribute of the rubber band.
In this book we will speak frequently of ‘theoretical entities.’ A theoretical entity is a made-up thing, substance, field, or force. The usual reason for inventing theoretical entities is to explain some observed phenomenon that we can’t otherwise explain. When a theoretical entity becomes orthodox, we say it has been hypostatized. We will define hypostasis below.
Historical Fallacy: The historical fallacy is a logical fallacy first described by American philosopher John Dewey. It is too diō°cult to explain in a glossary. It will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Understanding the fallacy is central to understanding this book.
Hypostasis: When we regard or treat an abstraction like it’s a physical entity, we call that invented entity a hypostasis. We hypostatize when we imagine something which could never be a thing as if it was a thing. Examples include properties like number, space, time, and so forth. Extension is the property of occupying space. All physical things have extension. But if we regard extension as a thing in itself, independent of things that have the property, we hypostatize it. We also hypostatize when we imagine an imaginary place or thing like Valhalla is a real place or thing. Abstractions are frequently hypostatized. For example, the abstraction of evil is often thought of as a force or presence independent of things so regarded. In the 20th century, abstractions like space, time, and measurable dimensions be- came hypostatized.
Another example is thinking of a void as something that exists independent of people considering such an abstraction. A void is nothing but the absence of objects, or the space between them. The converse of the hypostasis of void is the hypostasis of being or existence, so highly touted in existentialism.
People who hypostatize their own abstractions, project those abstractions outside themselves, and choose to treat them as entities in their own right. Another word for this habit is reification, the mistake of treating an abstraction as a concrete entity.
"Hypostasize" and "hypostatize" are simply alternate spellings of the same word. We will use the latter spelling in this book.
Idealism: In ordinary speech an ‘idealist’ is one who holds high ideals. However, here when we speak of ‘idealism’ we are referring to certain theories in philosophy. There are mainly two senses of ‘idealism’ in philosophy. In the 18th century the term came to refer to theories of perception in which it was presumed that what a person most directly perceives are his own ideas. We might best think of this kind of idealism as ‘idea-ism.’ The word ‘idea’ in the nomenclature of the time didn’t just refer to thoughts, but any experience in a mind including sounds and sites. The notion included that while we directly see only the contents of our own minds, we could infer from these perceived ideas some source or cause for them independent of our minds, such as archetypal ideas in the mind of God, of which our ideas were mere copies.
The second sense of ‘idealism’ comes from Plato. Plato believed in an unseen world of ideal archetypes, which he called the world of forms. In Plato’s idealism things we see and feel around us are imperfect shadows of those unseen ideal forms. The ideal forms we could not see were more real and permanent than their shadows that we did see. Hence, if the first kind of idealism can be thought of as 'idea-ism,' this second by Plato could be thought of as ‘ideal-ism,’ where the emphasis is on the ideal archetype.
In both forms of idealism, what we see is not the real object, but a copy or representation of it. The opposite of idealism is direct realism, the view that what we see directly with our senses is the real world.
Intersubjective: Private experience that is shared by two or more people is called intersubjective. For instance, if two people are standing in a room and both see the same objects, we call such shared experience intersubjective. It means shared subjective experience. Concepts can also be experienced intersubjectively. An example is a concept that is first thought of by one individual, and then shared with others until several share that concept.
Intuition: A fact that is known by intuition is one that all healthy people acknowledge with absolute certainty upon introspecting about it. One does not need to observe the facts but knows simply from the meaning of the concepts involved. An example is the fact that two parallel straight lines could never intersect. We seem to be born with our intuitions, and we recognize them a priori, for such knowledge cannot be accounted for solely by observation. For instance, that two parallel straight lines could never possibly intersect can’t be learned by literally observing parallel straight lines, as one would need to follow their course forever to confirm it, which is impossible. One of the objectives in this book is to explain the relationship between intuition and reason, to account for how we have intuitions, and to determine why intuitions are so reliable.
In everyday speech, intuition usually refers to quasi-psychic abilities like mild prescience or telepathy. Such powers are thought to convey information about the world or occult realms. This is absolutely not what we mean by the word. Intuition never conveys facts about the world but informs us how to think clearly. Chapter 9 is dedicated entirely to the topic of in- tuition and reason.
Logical anachronism: An anachronism is a thing or idea presented as existing outside of its proper time in history, usually earlier than it actually did. A human walking with a dinosaur is an anachronism, or a painting of Saint Peter wearing spectacles. A logical anachronism is a thing existing before it was logic- ally possible, because the conditions required for its existence did not yet exist. An example would be God creating fish before water. Water is a necessary precondition for fish. Thus, to imagine fish existing in a world before the conditions necessary for their existence is a logical anachronism.
Magic: We say that something occurs by magic when we have no other explanation for its occurrence. An example is Cinderella's fairy Godmother turning a pumpkin into a coach and mice into coachmen. The fairytale is silent about how her Godmother does this. An inexplicable power.
Matter: The word ‘matter’ has two main meanings. One is from common speech and the other from philosophy. In com- mon speech ‘matter’ refers to substances we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste directly by sense. It also implies hardness and weight. Wood, stone, cement, plastic, water, and air are all examples of material substances. This is the original meaning of matter, as the word was used by the ancient philosophers, from the Latin materia, referring to the "hard inner wood of a tree.” By extension it came to be applied to all substances we perceive by sense.
The second meaning of ‘matter’ is from modern philosophical nomenclature. It does not refer to the contents of sense, but to their hidden cause. In the Enlightenment era it was also referred to as the 'substratum' (see John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689). The material substratum is a substance we cannot directly perceive by sense but rather infer from the mental experience we presume to be its effect. Philosophers of the 20th century experimented with many other words for the same concept, including 'causal external object' and 'the external world' that we will talk about extensively.
In this book the word 'matter' is used strictly in its first original sense, as used in ordinary speech, as the materials we perceive directly by sense, and have direct and immediate experience of. Matter is not conceived here as a cause of something, as with the material substratum idea, but as an effect of a process that this book will describe.
Materialism: From the mid-18th century, materialism has referred to the philosophical position that nothing exists except matter. This refers to matter in the second metaphysical sense described above. Materialism is not the view many people think it is, that the world is what you perceive directly by sense. Philosophers refer to that view as ‘naive realism.’ Rather it is the position that you infer matter from your experience, as its occult cause. In materialism, matter is a theoretical entity, and is not known ostensively. The belief in matter in materialism is programmatic, which means its acceptance is not understood, but it is the program of modern materialists to try to see some way to make it make sense. Repeating, materialism is the view that matter is the occult cause of one's experience, not one's experience itself.
Metaphysics: Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the question, ‘What is most fundamentally real, and how does this fundamental reality give rise to our phenomenal experience?' In service to this question, metaphysics necessarily also deals with related concepts like existence, identity, substance, perception, causation, time, cosmology, and epistemology (how we know things). To really oversimplify, we could say that metaphysics is the study of how things came to appear as they do to our senses.
Mind: The word ‘mind’ means different things to different people. To avoid confusion, I avoid the word whenever I can. If I do use it in this book, I mean it in its most colloquial sense. So, I might say, ‘He couldn’t get it off his mind,’ or ‘He mulled it over in his mind.’ But I never mean to imply by these references that I believe there is some unseen metaphysical object that this word denotes. I do not posit the existence of minds as metaphysical objects. In the Enlightenment, a mind was almost always regarded as a thing, often equated with yet other words like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit.’ RenĆ© Descartes defined a mind as a thinking thing, and George Berkeley defined it as a perceiving thing. In this book we propose that what people call their mind, such as thoughts and emotions, are in fact an effect of an antecedent process that does not contain mind. The one exception is if I am discussing the ideas of others who did think of the mind as a thing.
Naive realism: In philosophy, a person who believes he perceives the real world directly with his five senses is called a naive realist. He is called naive because the scientific consensus is that our brains create for us only a representation of the outer world. So, perception is indirect. To make this clear, we all understand that when we watch television, we don’t see the actual actors on the sound stage, but only a representation of them on our TV screens. Using this as an analogy, a naive realist would be like one who thought he was seeing the actual actors. In the opinion of modern science, what we perceive directly is the effect of our brain states, and so our experience of the outer world is mediated and therefore indirect. We know the existence of the outer world by inference from our immediate brain- induced and brain-centered sensual experience. So, we don’t see the world directly, according to science.
Nominal Cause: Nominal means ‘in name only.’ So, a nominal cause is a cause in name only. If someone gives only a nominal cause for some effect, he gives a name for some supposed cause, but no explanation of how it does its causing. It is a kind of temporary placeholder for whatever might actually be making that thing happen. The word ‘gravity’ is actually a nominal cause. The effect of gravity is things falling by a certain known equation. But what gravity is, and how it causes its effect, remains mysterious. As a cause in name only, gravity serves as a handy placeholder in language for whatever its cause might one day turn out to be. By our stricter definition of cause (see above), a nominal cause does not count as an actual cause.
Obtain: To hold, exist, prevail, or be the case. If a shadow obtains, the conditions for a shadow must also obtain.
Occult: Here the adjective ‘occult’ is the opposite of the adjective ‘phenomenal.’ Something that is phenomenal can be perceived, and something that is occult cannot.
Today the word ‘occult’ usually means supernatural or paranormal. Here we use the word in its original sense, as hid- den from the senses and from our cognitions. The word ‘occult’ in this older sense comes from the Latin root occultus, meaning ‘hidden or concealed.’ To say something is occult in this sense means it cannot be perceived by sense, or even imagined or comprehended. It is both insensible and inconceivable. Things that are occult are at most theoretical placeholders for some substance or power we have no knowledge of. We usually posit them to explain some phenomenon we do perceive but can’t otherwise explain. For instance, what the new science calls ‘dark energy’ is a theoretical occult power. Caspar the Friendly Ghost is not occult. Both are made up, but we can conceive of Caspar the Ghost. We only know dark energy by what it is said to do.
Now I must make a distinction between things that are hidden solely by circumstance, and thus not occult, and occult objects that are necessarily hidden. The first include those that are too small to see, like atoms, or too distant, like some stars, or those that are simply hidden from view such as the far side of the Moon. These are not occult in the way we mean it, for they remain perceptible under the right circumstances. If I could shrink myself, I might see an atom. If telescopes improve enough, I might see a star I cannot now.
Furthermore, what can be imagined is not occult, because if you can imagine it, you could, at least in principle, see it if it were present before you. A mouse with a thousand heads is imaginary but not occult, for it is conceivable. Sensations like vertigo are not occult either, because we experience them, even though they are not physical objects.
So, what are some examples of things that are occult? Any proposed theoretical entities that could never be perceived, even in principle. Most theoretical metaphysical substances and forces are occult, such as the aether, gravity, and atomic radiation. An apple falling from a tree is sensible, and its speed is intelligible. But gravity is neither. Likewise, what we perceive is sensible, but the ‘external world’ that philosophers believe is the cause of our experience is a paradigm case of something that is occult.
There are some substitution words I will use in the text to mean the same thing as occult. This is simply to make reading smoother. For example, I may refer to things being ‘invisible,’ ‘unseen,’ ‘imperceptible’ or ‘hidden.’ I think my meaning will be clear in the context.
Perception: In everyday speech the word ‘perception’ can refer to an act or a faculty. Here we are always using it to refer to the act. I wish to be very clear what I mean by the act of perceiving. In this and all my previous writing, I use the word ‘perceive’ in its original classical sense, as it was used by all English language philosophers prior to the writings of Thomas Reid. The word derives from the Latin percipere, which meant ‘to gather’ or ‘to take.’ Originally used to refer to collecting things like rents, by extension it came to mean ‘to take cognizance of.’ It could refer to taking cognizance of any kind of phenomenon, including dreams, memories, concepts, as well as outer physical objects. So, the word applied equally to so-called inner, and so- called outer experience. Today we still use the word 'see' in this way. People understand me if I say, ‘I see the clock on the wall’ and if I say, ‘I see you have an agenda.’ If the word ‘consciousness’ had a verb form, it would mean exactly what we do by perception. So, for instance, I would say, ‘I conscious that.’
Now anything we can consciously attend to or be aware of we call a phenomenon. Thus, phenomena that we perceive include pains, emotions, memories, dreams, hallucinations, imagination, nausea, vertigo, verbal thoughts (internal monologue), as well as outer objects we experience by way of our external sense organs like ears and eyes. Here we will specify the latter as sense perception, as it is a subcategory of perception. We will refer to the object of our perceptions as our phenomenal experience.
There are some substitution words I will use in the text to mean the same thing as perceive. They include 'see,' 'experience,' and 'take experience of.'
Perceptual schema: In psychology and cognitive science, a schema describes a pattern of thought that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. In this book, a 'perceptual schema' is simply a way of organizing our perceptual content. Most educated people are aware that what we perceive is at least partially determined by how we look upon that thing, meaning how we frame or interpret what we perceive. They are also aware that how we frame or interpret what we perceive is very often influenced by assumptions we acquired from past experiences. One person might perceive an object as one thing while another person could perceive it as another. The difference depends on how they are looking upon it, and the way of organizing the experience into something intelligible and discrete we call a perceptual schema. The plural form of 'schema' is correctly spelled either as schemata or schemas. Here we use the latter, because people are not always as familiar with the first.
Phenomenon, phenomenal: Here a phenomenon is anything that is perceived. The adjective ‘phenomenal’ is the opposite of the adjective ‘occult’ (above), which means hidden.
Today the word ‘phenomenon’ often refers to an extraordinary event, and the adjective ‘phenomenal’ means extraordinary. Here it does not mean that. Rather a phenomenon is anything one can be aware of. The following are examples of phenomena we experience.
- A concept we are musing about
- Our private linguistic thoughts, also known as internal monologue
- A picture we imagine in our thoughts like an architectural design
- A dream we have at night
- A daydream
- A physical object in the room we are in that we perceive with our waking eyes
- An internal bodily sensation like pain, vertigo, etc.
- A memory of a melody we play over and over in our thoughts
- A waking vision
- A hallucination
In short, a phenomenon is anything we can take experience of, whether mental or physical, real or imaginary. When we refer to phenomenal objects and events, we are indifferent to the cause of that experience. The word carries no metaphysical assumptions about the source of the experiential content, or how perception occurs. It refers solely to the brute fact that we take our experience of it.
The word ‘phenomenon’ is synonymous with the word ‘percept.’ However, I mostly avoid that word due to some philosophical baggage it carries for some philosophers that we do not need to go into here. The words 'phenomenon' and 'phenomenal' are generally less burdened by such unintended connotations.
Physical: In this book, something that is physical obeys the laws of physics. It is as simple as that. Something that is physical can be observed by sense, and its properties are quantifiable. A physical thing has length, width, and mass.
Physics: Physics is the branch of science that studies the observable properties of physical objects and their observed regular motions. Anything else is not physics proper, but speculative metaphysics.
Properties that cannot be quantified are outside the purview of physics. Therefore, it excludes qualitative, ethical, aesthetic, or teleological judgements, and any speculation about meaning or purpose, which it has no formal method to assess. Sadly, in the 20th century physicists began to ignore this code of conduct, and modern physics has become encumbered by occult theoretical substances, forces, and particles.
Questions of fundamental underlying substance are far out- side the scope of the scientific method and belong squarely to metaphysics. However, this no longer prevents physicists from speculating whole cloth about such things in imagination and awarding themselves Nobel Prizes for their imaginings. Yet they have no criterion or method for such imaginative inventing. Thus, much of what goes under the name “New Physics” after 1900 is not physics at all, but pseudo-metaphysics masquerading as science.
Being limited to empirical facts (observed facts), physics is restricted to recording regular correlations that can be observed. It has no way to determine occult causes of those correlations. For instance, a chemist can point to a chemical change that occurs regularly under specific conditions. But he steps outside the scope of empiricism the moment he begins to speculate about the cause of such correlation. This is why much of today’s science has turned into theoretical metaphysics, which its empirical methods are unsuited for.
Precondition: A ‘precondition’ is a condition that must be fulfilled before something else can happen. In this book we frequently emphasize the logical necessity of certain preconditions by referring to them as ‘necessary preconditions.'
Process: A process is a series of steps that bring about a consistent result. A Rube Goldberg machine is a colorful example of a process. In the cartoon, a series of steps culminates in a man having his chin wiped by a napkin. While the cartoon is humorous, it conveys the notion of a process in very simple terms. Scientists understand much of the mechanics in nature in terms of more serious processes.
Examples of processes now commonly understood in science include nearly all of the human physiological systems, biological evolution, and plate tectonics. In plate tectonics, the current positions of the Earth's continents are understood as the result of processes of vulcanization and subduction under the oceans. Prior to an understanding of tectonic process, the cause of so-called ‘continental drift’ was mysterious. The working out of the underlying mechanics of plate tectonics in the late-20th century is a perfect example of explaining a phenomenon by way of processes.
In a process, the sequence of steps that bring about the completed result do not necessarily need to be separate in time. For instance, a pulley system allows more weight to be lifted than could be lifted otherwise. The increased leverage is a result of the steps inherent in the pulley system. But one pulls the rope of a pulley at the same time that the heavy weight rises. A pulley has a sequence of mechanical steps, but the steps occur simultaneously.
Psychogenic: Something that has a psychological origin rather than a physical one is called psychogenic.
Sensible qualities: Characteristics of physical objects that we experience with our five senses are called sensible qualities. Such qualities include color, sound, scent, taste, and texture. The word is quaint, and was more common in the 18th century, but is still used occasionally. Contemporary philosopher- s prefer terms like ‘qualia,’ ‘sensa,’ and ‘sense data.’ I like the original word because it is more precise and says only what we mean.
Sensible, Sensory, Sensorial: Of or relating to sense perception.
Solipsism: Solipsism is a hypothetical psychological condition, discussed in philosophy, in which a person ostensibly believes the whole world is in his head, and that the world has no existence independent of his mind. Like zombiism and vampirism, it is not a real condition, but a hypothetical one. To say another philosopher’s ideas might entail solipsism is meant as a warning of undesirable unintended consequences of a problematic theory of perception. Philosophers work to avoid the accusation that their theories imply solipsism.
Transsubjective: Knowledge that is 'transsubjective' is knowledge recognized as true by anyone who introspects on it, even if such introspection is done privately. That 2 + 2 is 4 is recognized transsubjectively. Knowledge of natural laws is not transsubjective, for it cannot be determined simply by introspection. Such knowledge is at best intersubjective. In this book we sometimes refer to transsubjective knowledge as 'shared' knowledge.
Umwelt: The way a particular type of organism perceives the world is called its umwelt. Bees have a different umwelt than we do. The concept was coined by the Estonian biologist and philosopher Jakob Johann von UexkĆ¼ll.
Veridical: Veridical means truthful in a special sense, as something that corresponds with reality. Contemporary philosophers of mind are concerned with the degree to which human brain-induced experience is a veridical representation of the external world as it really is. This question of the veridicality of our immediate experience is at the heart of what is today referred to as the 'mind-body problem.' In this book, we don’t propose that our experience represents something else, but rather is the effect of an antecedent process. Hence the question of veridicality doesn't arise.
THE HISTORICAL FALLACY
Historically people have attempted to project something they're trying to explain onto their explanation for it. Consider these examples.
Classical Greek religion attempted to explain the corporeal world of human beings, by positing a second order incorporeal world of immortal human beings called gods in a place called ‘Olympus.’ The gods created us mortals. If an- other kind of people are the cause of people, how does one explain those people?
- The Greek atomists tried to explain objects made of substances like water and air, by positing objects too small to see that coalesced to form them. The problem is that we are left with our atoms to explain. Might they be explained by even smaller 'subatomic' particles? We have seen just such an infinite regress in modern times.
- Plato tried to explain our recognition of objects around us in terms of a recollection of perfect forms of those objects in a higher order reality we once lived in before our birth. But the question remained, how did we recognize those objects in the higher order world? To his credit, Plato himself recognized this problem with his idea in his lifetime.
- At the beginning of the 18th century a theory called preformationism postulated the existence of animalcules in the semen of humans and other animals. The theory held that the sperm was in fact a "little man" that was placed inside a woman for growth into a child, a neat explanation for many of the mysteries of conception. However, it was later pointed out that if the sperm was a homunculus (little man), identical in all but size to an adult, then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum with a chain of homunculi "all the way down."
- One attempt to explain vision was to posit that light from the outside world forms an image on the retinas in the eyes and something (or someone) in the person’s head looks at these retinal images like images on a movie screen. But the question immediately arises of how the homunculus inside you sees his tiny screen.
- Francis Crick proposed that the presence of people on Earth could only be accounted for by positing that people from another planet 'seeded' us here. The theory is called directed panspermia. The problem is that you still have the origin of the people who seeded us to explain.
- The holographic universe theory posits that what we take as our world is really a hologram, created by people of a higher civilization to deceive us. Proponents argue that the chances that our world isn't a hologram are so small that it’s a virtual certainty that this is the case. But by the same reasoning, there must be a still higher civilization deceiving our deceivers, and so on ad infinitum.
- Modern reductive materialists try to explain substances we experience like water and cement, by postulating a metaphysical substance we don’t experience called ‘matter.’ Matter in this metaphysical sense is a theoretical entity. By hypostatizing matter as a higher order reality, they wound up with a big problem. For they had no way to explain how this invisible substance causes visible ones like water and cement. It was invisible after all. How could you know?
- Linguist Noam Chomsky thought he had explained how all cultures are able to develop grammar, when he hypothesized that grammar is ‘hardwired’ in our brains. The problem with his explanation is it was grammar he was trying to explain. He simply made a higher order one we can’t see.
In each of the above cases, the supposed cause is imagined to be like the thing it’s supposed to cause. The proposed cause mirrors what it’s causing.
This method of explaining things doesn’t work. Not only does it fail to explain what it’s trying to, but it actually winds up adding to the sum of things needing explaining. For, while you began with the perceived thing you were trying to explain, you wind up with your theoretical occult cause to explain too. Real explaining would decrease the number of things requiring explaining, not add to them.
I used to explain the underlying problem in these examples by referring to a fallacy described by 19th century American philosopher John Dewey. He called it the ‘historical fallacy.’ He discussed it in his 1896 essay The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology. The fallacy occurs when:
A set of considerations, which hold good only because of a
completed process, is read [back] into the content of the process which conditions this completed result.
(Dewey, 1896)
Dewey's 19th century writing style can be difficult for modern readers, but it’s actually very precise and worth reading carefully in light of the examples of theories I gave above. Here Dewey continues:
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.
(Ibid.)
More simply put, we commit the fallacy when we project onto a cause something that comes about only as a result of that cause.
Over the years I found that people had a very hard time with Dewey’s words. If I quoted him to someone, or even paraphrased what he said, they weren’t able to repeat it back to me. This is what one would expect of a fallacy people had been committing in their theories for millennia. I even found that credentialed academics got confused by it. For instance, The American Psychological Association confuses Dewey’s historical fallacy with ‘reverse causality,’ which is completely unrelated. I think I understand Dewey’s words because the same concept occurred to me by chance before I ever read what Dewey had written about it. And so, I easily recognized what he was saying.
Because people found Dewey’s fallacy so difficult, I began to look for a more accessible way to explain the error in thinking to a 21st century audience. Gradually I came up with two. The first is to appeal to the concept of anachronism, which we’ll discuss next. The second is to appeal to the concept of necessary preconditions that we’ll come to after.
An anachronism is a situation where something is out of place in history. Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactments are deliberate anachronisms. The Society for Creative Anachronism recreates battle scenes for the public to commemorate the anniversaries of certain important battles.
But some anachronisms are logically impossible. Let's look at an example. Imagine you are in Rome in 45 BC and you walk into the palace of Julius Caesar. Imagine you enter Caesar’s office and discover a working Commodore 64 computer sitting on his desk, plugged into an outlet on the wall and turned on. A Commodore 64 was a popular computer in the 1980s. It's not hard to picture this scenario, but it's not actually possible. I think it’s obvious why. There are things that had to happen before a person could assemble and operate a working Commodore 64 computer which hadn’t happened in 45 BC. Here are a few.
- Developments in mathematics had to have occurred that didn’t until the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Modal logic, essential to computer science, had to be developed.
- Discoveries had to be made in chemistry, in order to make plastic out of petroleum.
- Clear glass had to be invented, which didn’t occur until the 13th century.
- Electricity wasn’t discovered until the 18th century and alternating current until the 19th.
- People had to invent operating systems, the science for which didn’t exist until WWII.
- Commodore International wasn’t formed until the 1970s.
These are necessary preconditions for building a working Commodore 64 computer and plugging it into a socket in the wall and turning it on. The principle by which we know a Commodore 64 could not exist prior to its necessary conditions can be stated as follows:
A thing can't exist before the conditions necessary for its existence exist.
We know this a priori, meaning it's true by virtue of the meaning of the words in the sentence. There isn’t any way it can be wrong.
We can call this the principle of necessary preconditions. It’s the same thing Dewey was trying to explain, only it requires fewer words.
More than twenty years ago, I realized that the mistake people have been making since ancient times was imagining causes to be just like the things they caused, or upon analogy from those things. It is a form of circular reasoning, and it fails to recognize the principle of necessary preconditions stated above. There are reasons people failed to recognize this, and we will identify and explore them in this book. We’ll also discuss the seemingly intractable problems of philosophy that this failure caused, and then show how easily they’re solved once we correct our thinking and approach.
THE TWO-WORLD PROBLEM
The following is an account of what most people, including philosophers and scientists, accept regarding perception. It should in no way be construed as my own opinion. The reason I am explaining this current view first is to point out the mistaken thinking in it, so that I can then explain an alternative. We are talking about the view that experience (of mental and physical things, i.e., thoughts as well as physical sensations) occurs inside of our brains. Remember, this is not my view. I’m describing the given paradigm.
Let me make extra clear what I mean. It is normally seen as common sense to say that our experiences (such as of memories, thoughts, and physical sensations) occur in our brains. Where else would they occur, most of us would ask? It would seem quite odd to say they are in the next room somewhere or sitting in a chair. So, it is the natural default position to point to the brain and say they are in there. For nearly everyone, it is accepted that experiences occur, in some sense or other, inside their brain. Even if one chose to refer to the mind, the same conception repeats, at least by analogy, where it is assumed that whatever a mind is, thoughts are somehow occurring ‘in’ it.
Most of us would also not disagree about the categories of mental experiences that occur in the brain, such as emotions, memories, fantasies, dreams, hallucinations, and so on. And the same could be said of bodily sensations like hunger, nausea, vertigo, headache, dizziness, etc. Even if it feels like one's hunger is in one's stomach, most people accept that nerves bring electric signals from their stomach to their brain, and it is really in their brain that the sensation of hunger occurs – regardless of how it feels.
Now we also experience the physical objects around us with our external sense organs. Let me explain how this is currently conceived. If I'm walking in a forest and a tree falls, the current view is that it doesn't produce a sound. Rather it produces a vibration. And this vibration vibrates the air molecules around the fallen tree. A wave of these vibrating air molecules then travels and reaches my eardrums, causing them to vibrate in turn. This vibrating of my eardrums doesn’t produce any sound either. It’s only a vibration after all. But when the nerves behind my eardrums become stimulated by this vibration, they pro- duce an electrical signal that passes a kind of analog signal along nerves to my brain. And when that electrical signal reaches my brain, that excites a chemical and electrical reaction in my brain, and my brain then interprets these chemical and electrical states as the sound of a falling tree. ‘Boom!’ is heard in my head. So, outside my brain, the tree falls and vibrates in silence. The sound I hear in my head is what is called an epiphenomenon. Sound is thus a subjective private experience, though anyone present when vibration occurs will have an identical subjective private experience. Sound is not a thing outside a brain, then. It is believed to be a sensation that occurs in the brain.
What I just described is roughly how philosophers and scientists have understood the sensation of sound at least since the writings of Galileo, with some neural embellishments developed since.
We’ll now repeat the same idea with eyesight so you fully get the sense in which it is believed that experience takes place in the brain.
If I stand on the side of a mountain and gaze at a landscape, I experience colors. Certain arrangements of color I take to be hills, others streams, yet others clouds, and so on. Any artist can explain to you, if you yourself never realized it, that all you really ever see with your eyes is color. Remember, black, white, and gray are colors too. What we think of as the ‘lines around things’ are really only where one color butts up against another. We don’t actually see lines around things. What we take as objects are, phenomenally speaking, no more than various arrangements of patches of color, with different degrees of brightness and saturation.
But color is a sensation, and sensations occur in the brain, or so we think. Color isn't actually an entity independent of your brain. Rather, the distal cause of your experience of colors are frequencies of electromagnetic radiation we call light. No one ever actually perceives light directly. Rather, light, which has no color of its own, is solely a frequency of energy, and can only be physically described in terms of number. So how is the internal sensation of color created in our brains? A frequency of light excites the nerves in our eyes, and then our nervous system produces an electrical signal to represent that particular frequency. This electrical signal, which is produced by our own bodies, then passes down the optic nerve to the region of your brain responsible for color sensation, and a certain color sensation occurs. So, just like with the sound of the tree, there is no color outside a person's brain. Color is merely a brain sensation, not an independent thing.
There are three senses left to talk about: smell, taste, and touch. The same basic principle repeats in each case. For ex- ample, in the case of touch, texture, temperature, shape, or motion believed to be outside of us excites an electric signal in our nerves that is conveyed to the brain where it is reinterpreted as the sensation we associate with that thing. But such tactile sensations occur only in the brain. A thing can be outside your body, but your sensation of it cannot.
Now, summing up, all perceptions of what we take to be the world around us are reducible to sensations believed to occur inside our brains. Each person obviously has his own brain. We don't share brains, and so we can’t experience what is occurring in another’s brain. Hence, all experience of the world is privately experienced by each individual that perceives it in his own brain. Obviously, several people can have similar sensations if they are in the same setting, such as two people standing side by side observing the same event, and this kind of shared experience is called intersubjective, meaning a mutually gotten subjective experience. From the vantage point of each individual, all experience is enjoyed privately, within the confines of his own brain. So, we do not perceive the outer world directly or unmediated. Directly, we only experience our own brain-located sensations and thoughts. And we infer from those sensations that there must be an external world responsible for those brain-centered experiences. In other words, we infer the presence of the outer world from its inner effect, the way a farmer infers that the wind is blowing from the movement of his windmill. But we don't directly perceive that external world. We are forced to only infer its existence. And there is a degree of faith involved in it. About this need for faith, Immanuel Kant once 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.
(Kant, 1781)
Keep in mind that I am not conveying my own theory of perception. This is the classical understanding of it. I am telling it only to make it clear before pointing out the problems in it.
It's certainly natural to infer from one's experience that there is in fact a world outside of us responsible for it. After all, it would be strange to assume the whole world was nothing but the sensations we have in our brains. And we would probably tease someone who questioned the existence of such a world and call him a solipsist, implying he was crazy. But all that such teasing does is keep anyone from talking about the problem. It does nothing to prove the existence of such an external world or prove that such an external world is just like the one we experience. And here’s the shocker. No one has ever been able to formulate any scientific argument that such an external world exists, and philosophers, whose stock and trade is modes of rational argumentation, are painfully aware of this.
Yet in spite of this problem, no one disagrees that experience, if it occurs at all, takes place in the brain. The notion of an experience that can exist outside a brain is quite exotic, and no philosopher would ever posit such a strange thing: “Oh wait right here, I’ll go get my experience. I left it in the test tube.” So, at the moment anyway, no one disagrees that thought and experience occur in the brain, if they agree that they occur at all.
So, here we can state the two-world problem quite nicely. As we’ve just pointed out, if your experience of the room you’re in is in your brain, the question naturally arises how you know there is a second room outside of you. And even if there is, you have no way of knowing if the room you experience is like the one outside your brain. You simply have no way to step outside of yourself to compare them.
Look at the diagram above. A man is looking at a tree. How can the man compare his experience of the tree in his brain with the real tree? That is the problem with the external-world concept. If you are contemplating these questions for the first time, it would not be unusual if you found yourself trying to picture the world outside your mind. But note how impossible that is. Even if you managed to conjure up images of the outer world in your mind, where did you get the images you are picturing if not from images you’ve experienced in your brain? Therefore, all you are doing when you picture such an outside world is mirroring memories, creating a second world when you began with one. So, the more we try to escape the two-world problem through our imagination the more we reinforce it.
It may not be surprising, then, that contemporary neuro- science openly admits that the external world is an occult theoretical entity. Not only do we not have direct experience of it, but we can’t even imagine it. It does seem strange to speak of the real world being only a theory, but this is the consequence of our current way of explaining experience in terms of a hidden second world. So why do I call these two worlds? No one would want to call his experience a world in his head. It’s just experiences after all. It’s true no one is implying there is a physical world in your head, but the world of your experience is normally what you mean when you refer to your world, the world you have enjoyed and suffered all your life, the one you experienced. So perhaps we should say ‘phenomenal world’ versus ‘physical world,’ the world of our experience versus one we read about from philosophers but don’t experience.
But, unless you're a solipsist who thinks the world is literally all in your head, you take it on faith there must be a second external world. You might call that second world the ‘real’ world, or the ‘physical’ world. Whatever you choose to call this second world that you can’t directly perceive, you take it to be a real entity distinct from and independent of your experiential world. And hence I refer to this conundrum as the two-world problem. It is the problem that you have the world of your experience, and a second world you imagine exists in its likeness.
The narrative I just described is not my own. It's the narrative of contemporary neuroscience, though it has roots that go back much further in the past.
There’s an obvious problem with this scenario of two worlds that I’d like to point out before discussing how this type of thinking came about. None of this sounds right to anyone. The reader will feel he’s been tricked somehow into accepting something he knows isn’t right. Something perhaps in the order in which it was explained. When the reader looks around the room he’s in, what he sees and touches and smells and tastes he takes to be the actual real room he’s in. It does not feel at all intuitive that the room is in his head, or that the real physical one is only theoretical, and that he must rely on faith to believe it exists. And it does not feel like he is only inferring its existence from his brain-located experience. To me it feels as if I experience the physical world directly with my senses, and that the colors and sounds and smells that I enjoy every waking moment by way of them are the physical world. It does not feel like they merely represent another one I can't perceive or imagine.
So even before we delve into the way this narrative came to be, we can already say that it is not intuitive. There are post- modern philosophers working today who insist this scenario of two-worlds conforms with common sense. And they even refer to it as 'common sense metaphysics.' But this is gaslighting. These same professors are just as disturbed by this scenario as we are.
By now a reader ought to see perfectly well what I mean by the two-world problem. One world is experiential, the other theoretical. The latter is thought to be the cause of the former. We’ll now explore how this problematic way of modeling the world arose and why no one has ever thought of an alternative.
THE HISTORY OF THE TWO-WORLD PROBLEM
We begin our story in a forest some tens of thousands of years ago. Hunter-gatherers sit around a fire dressed in animal-skins. A wise elder is telling a story to those gathered, many of whom have heard it before. Parents encourage their children to scoot in closer so as to hear better, urging them to pay close attention to what the man says. There is a sense of great importance to the tale being told.
The wise elder explains how all the creatures came into existence, as well as the stars and the moon, the features of the landscape, such as mountains, forests, and streams familiar to those gathered around him. And of course, he explains how the different peoples of the world came into being. In each creation story, the elder describes in a confident voice some human or animal spirit that was responsible for that thing's creation and explains their reasons for creating them. In this way all things of the world are imbued with a sense of purpose and meaning. A feeling of awe arises. All are left feeling they are in some marvelous way in harmony with each other and the world.
Everything that will ever happen in the field of causation is already latent in this elder's story. From the writings of Homer, to the theories of the pre-Socratics on the shores of Miletus, to the great philosophers Plato and Aristotle walking the verandas of Athens, to the scholastics of the Middle Ages, to the rationalists of the Renaissance and the empiricists of the Enlightenment, right up to the current scientists working at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, the same basic method of explaining phenomena never really changed. Men invent things they cannot see to explain things they do, but never say exactly how those things they invent explain those things they see. In the case of the ancient elder, that something was the spirit he said was responsible for a particular observed thing in nature. For philosophers and later scientists, they were other invisible things.
But there is yet another pattern in the elder’s account of nature that never went away. The mental images of these causal spirits he described were lifted from peoples’ memories of the very world of experience the elder was explaining. In other words, the elder selects objects from the world of experience, in his case people and animals, and projects copies of them into his hidden world of causes. He's making a loop. He's projecting attributes of an effect, onto its imagined cause. This is the historical fallacy that we’ve already discussed.
Thousands of years later we come upon the shores of Miletus, an island west of what is today Turkey. It was there that the first attempts to come up with natural explanations for the things we see began, as opposed to positing gods and spirits. Aristotle later referred to these first proto-philosophers as physiologoi (physicists), differentiating them from the earlier theologoi (theologians).
These early thinkers are referred to by philosophers today as pre-Socratics because they lived before Socrates elevated the methods of rational inquiry with his Socratic method. The most famous pre-Socratics each had their own competing theory about what was truly responsible for things in nature, focusing their inquiry on discovering the one underlying sub- stance of which things are made. One of them named Thales chose water, another, Anaximenes, air, and yet another, Heraclitus, decided it was fire. One should at once see what these first explanatory theories had in common with the Elder's narrative around the fire. They were picking objects from their experience, and projecting copies of them onto the world of causes. They assumed that the cause of things they saw was like something they saw. This has the same loop effect as the ancient stories in the forest. An effect that one is trying to account for is recursively imagined back into its supposed cause.
One of the most important pre-Socratic philosophers, from the point of view of our story, was Anaximander. Anaximander also proposed a single cause for everything we perceive, but with a difference. It was invisible. It was an unseen metaphysical substance he called apeiron. Anaximander described apeiron as eternal, not subject to decay, and continually creating fresh materials from which everything we perceive around us is composed. Apeiron also generated opposites such as hot and cold, wet and dry, etc. Everything is generated from apeiron and then decomposes back to apeiron, according to necessity. This was the first truly occult theoretical entity invented to explain things. Yet it was really no more than a nominal cause, i.e., a cause in name only, for Anaximander never bothered to explain how his theoretical apeiron produced these amazing effects. It is also a perfect example of a magical explanation. In all those regards, Anaximander’s apeiron was not unlike many theoretical substances and powers proposed in modern physics, something we will talk more about later.
Now we come to Plato, one of the ancient world’s greatest philosophers, who lived in Athens, Greece. Plato was a disciple of the philosopher Socrates. Socrates was famous for asking questions to excite thought, without resolving the problems himself. Socrates had, on several occasions, brought up a problem that caused Plato to wonder. Socrates would point out an object that people recognized like a cup. He would then pontificate aloud that there were lots of shapes, sizes, and colors of cups. And yet none of us had any trouble recognizing them all as cups, in spite of these numerous differences. How was this possible? How does the mind, which perceives only individual cups, one at a time, conceive of the general idea of cup-ness, and recognize different cups as sharing in this cup-ness?
When Socrates died, Plato gave this problem a lot of thought. It occurred to him that recognizing a cup as a cup was very much like recollection. So, he posited that once upon a time our souls had been in the world of the gods, before we fell into our mortal physical forms at birth. And, in that celestial world, we had seen all the things we now see, but in their original perfect form. When later in our mortal bodies we saw an object like one of those things, whether a cup or a sword or a horse, our recognition of it was due to our vague recollection of having seen the perfect cup or sword or horse in the world of forms. Objects we perceived by sense in the physical world, were really only imperfect shadows of their perfect archetypes in the world of forms. And this is where you get your first formalized philosophical version of the two-world view. We won’t yet call it a problem, since Plato saw no problem in such mysteries.
Now Aristotle was a student in Plato's Academy in Athens starting at the age of 18. Upon arriving at Plato's academy, Aristotle was of course taught Plato's theory of forms as just described, but he did not care much for it. Aristotle reasoned that we recognize things of various sizes and shapes because we understand what their essence is. For instance, the essence of a thing was its intended function, and for a cup that was holding water for drinking. Hence, any implement that served this function was, essentially, a cup, and we recognized it as such on this ground.
But Aristotle did grasp something from Plato's theory of forms. It occurred to Aristotle that our experience of physical (or outer) objects was indeed not identical with those outer objects. If three men stood around an object, each of them would see the same object. Yet the object itself would not be three, but would remain one, and unmoved. Thus, the three experiences in the three men could not be the cup in itself. Aristotle theorized, then, that each man's internal experience of the cup was a phantasm – a kind of copy of it. And what went through one's eyes was the essence of an object, but not its matter. He likened this transmission of the essence of an object to a seal being stamped in wax. The stamp leaves an impression of itself in the wax, but not its matter. Likewise, the phantasms in our mind of external objects are only the impressions of those objects left on our minds.
Now this left Aristotle with a problem. If what one experiences is not the object itself, but only a representation of it, how does one know that his representation of the object is truly like the material object outside of him? He reasoned that it had to be, because, for Aristotle, the sole purpose of the existence of our sense organs was to deliver to us true beliefs. Remember that, for Aristotle, the essence of a thing is its function, what it’s created to do. So, just as the essence of a cup is its intended function of aiding people in drinking liquid, things in nature had purposes too. And the obvious purpose nature created eyes and ears and noses and tongues to fulfill, was that of delivering true beliefs about the world. Hence, however things appear within us must necessarily reflect how things are outside of us. Even if you could not see it to prove it. If your senses gave you false impressions of the world, reasoned Aristotle, it would imply an irrational universe. And that was impossible, according to Aristotle. Such an argument is called a teleological argument, an argument from purpose.
Hence, for Aristotle, sensations like colors and sounds have exact corollaries outside of our bodies. For every red experience, there is some redness outside of us. So, for Aristotle, sensible qualities had actual material existence in the external world. He still had a two-world view, but the worlds were qualitatively identical, much like one's reflection in a mirror. And he felt he had resolved any question of how we knew this by the arguments I just explained.
The Renaissance & Enlightenment
Aristotle's reasoning for why sense perception had to be a veridical representation of things as they are outside us, was accepted on Aristotle’s authority far into the Middle Ages. The one big embellishment was that a rational universe became one created by a rational Creator, which amounted to the same thing. But as the Renaissance began to eclipse the assumptions of the ancient world, this view was challenged by a philosopher named Galileo Galilei. Galileo wrote several arguments why sensible qualities like color, sound, smells, and tastes, could not possibly be in the external world. He argued that they were entirely subjective, and merely represented a world that did not itself contain those qualities. Only quantifiable properties like size and shape were in the external world.
I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds.
(Galileo, 1623)
As people began to accept Galileo’s arguments, it revived the question of what we can know about the external world that Aristotle’s vision of the world had seemingly solved.
But it wasn't until the beginning of the Enlightenment that the two-world problem truly came to the attention of philosophers everywhere. If our sensations are in fact in our mind, as Galileo argued, how could we know if there really was an external world or say anything conclusive about it? This problem was famously dramatized in 1641 by the French philosopher RenƩ Descartes. Descartes highlighted the problem with a dreadful thought experiment. Suppose you had no body but were only an incorporeal mind. And further suppose that there was no actual physical world. Suppose then that an evil demon, equally unembodied, had all your life been implanting in your mind false images of a material world without your knowing it. How could you possibly prove that this was not the case? Well, truth be told, you couldn't.
Descartes' grim thought experiment forced philosophers of the period to really take a look at the problem for the first time. Clearly, if our experience is entirely in us, there is no way to compare it with the external world, or even prove that there is an external world.
The first to try to tackle this two-world problem was an Irish philosopher named George Berkeley (1685–1753). It occurred to Berkeley that the notion of an external world might actually be superfluous. Why would God create two worlds, when one would seem to be sufficient for his ends? Why would God go to the extra trouble, when such an extra unperceived world served no apparent purpose? Wouldn't God, bring infinitely rational, do thing in the most efficient way possible?
Thus, Berkeley posited a theory that there are only two things, minds and the ideas they contain. Ideas were anything that was in a mind. They included thoughts, but also sensible qualities like colors, sounds, flavors and so on. The world was made of these ideas.
God was none other than a perfect mind, with perfect ideas, and our minds were less perfect ones created by God in His own likeness.
God created the entire universe out of ideas in His own mind. The world was nothing more than ideas in the mind of God. God then implanted in each individual imperfect mind copies of just those ideas of his to give to that individual his proper experience of the world.
This is how Berkeley avoided the external world hypothesis, and consequently avoided the two-world problem. His idea was extremely novel, to say the least. However, we need to see how Berkeley’s idea continued to exhibit the exact same kind of thinking that previous theories had when it came to thinking about causes. Minds are imagined on the basis of containers like jars and sacks, and the ideas he said they contain are imagined on the basis of objects like beans that we put in containers. His notion of minds containing ideas, was thus based on the relationships of containers and contents as found in his experience. In other words, the metaphors Berkeley used to explain his experience were lifted from the very experience he was attempting to explain. Hence, as in all cases before Berkeley, he was projecting into his cause of experience things found in experience, i.e. projecting an effect back into its supposed cause (the historical fallacy). It's really no different from the village Elder's story told around the campfire in the ancient forest, where animals found in nature are projected into the elder’s invisible world of explanation. In addition, Berkeley never explained what he meant by God 'implanting copies' of His own ideas in our minds. How does one implant an idea in someone else? We certainly can’t do that. Hence, divorced from any explanation for how this was done, Berkeley’s explanation of perception amounts hardly more than an appeal to magic. In addition, minds conceived of as occult vessels for ideas amount to nothing more than occult theoretical entities, and his cause of experience, lacking any coherent explanation of how ideas are implanted in our minds by God, is at best a nominal cause.
Many philosophers criticized Berkeley's theory as suggesting a kind of subjectivism or solipsism, the view that everything is in your mind. The charge was a bit unfounded, as Berkeley never implied that the sum of all things was in any individual person’s mind. He clearly argued that there was an entire world independent of people's private experience (albeit one composed of ideas), in the mind of God. So, there was an objective aspect to Berkeley’s idea, if by objective one means a world with facts independent of individuals.
Berkeley's theory, which he called immaterialism, caught the attention of philosophers, even if it was often met with a bit of shock and consternation. In time, a German philosopher named Immanuel Kant formed his own kind of idealism. Seeking to distance himself from any potential charge that he himself was a subjectivist, as Berkeley had been accused, he was careful to include in his system a kind of ‘external world.’ He called his theory 'transcendental idealism' to distinguish it from what had come to be called ‘subjective idealism,’ where no such external world existed. I'll briefly explain Kant’s idea.
The best way to understand Kant's weltanschauung (worldview) is to understand his two worlds. For Kant, all our personal perceptions and thoughts are, in fact, in our mind. He referred to all that we perceive in our mind as the phenomenal world. But outside our minds, i.e., transcending anything we could ever imagine (from where he gets his word transcendental idealism), was a second world he called the noumenal world. Although the noumenon was the actual object of our experience (meaning what we are looking at when we look at the world), it was not what we wound up experiencing. For our experience of the noumenon was distorted by the ways our minds organize our experience. For we perceive the noumenal world through a series of mental filters he called intuitions. And these intuitions shape our experience of the noumenon into what we wind up actually experiencing. For example, Kant argued that time and space were not actually attributes of the world as it is in itself but are imposed upon our experience by way of our time and space intuitions. In short, the noumenon transcended time and space, and hence transcended any conception we might have of it – since we can only think of things in terms of time and space. In short, we could not even imagine reality as it is in itself.
A consequence of Kant's idealism was that all of the claims of science, which are of course based on observation and regularly refer to observed relations of time and space, only apply to the phenomenal world, i.e., the world of our immediate experience. The same scientific claims do not apply to the world as it is in itself, independent of our minds. For our immediate experience is an utterly fabricated representation of the noumenal reality, which transcends our mind's ability to comprehend it. And since the noumenal reality is beyond the reach of our minds, we ought to refrain from making any claims about it at all. Kant felt that this would prevent people from making up superstitious claims, while leaving room for religious faith. Kant felt his idea solved all sorts of problems that man grappled with.
However, there are some serious issues with Kant's idea. First of all, Kant's exhortation to others not to make claims about the noumenon that transcends human apprehension, did not, apparently, apply to him. For, Kant not only felt confident in declaring its existence (without the slightest proof), but even made precise claims about its nature, such as that the noumenon transcended time and space.
The second problem with Kant's idea had to do with the plausibility, within its own terms, of divisions of any kind. There are only two ways to distinguish one thing from another or divide something. One is in time and the other is in space. One event can occur before another in time or occupy a different region of space. But if time and space are illusions, how could we speak of any distinctions of any kind, such as that between a perceiver and his perceived object? All would just be one.
One thing we can say in defense of Kant's view is that, while it posited an external world of sorts, it posited no unseen entities to explain our perceived world. The theoretical noumenon wasn't the cause of our experience, it was its actual – though distortedly perceived – object. The true cause of what we wound up perceiving was our own mental intuitions. This was the first real break from the habit of projecting outside of us imperceptible causal objects in the likeness of internal perceived ones, to explain those perceived objects. It was the first attempt at a psychogenic cause of what we see, and closely anticipates gestalt psychology.
After Kant published his ideas, a whole series of novel forms of idealism arose in Germany, collectively called German idealism. The most famous of these was that of the 19th century philosopher Georg Hegel, called Absolute Idealism. Absolute Idealism did away completely with an external world concept, and everything became reducible to the human mind. Absolute Idealism was the only form of German idealism to make it to the English-speaking world, and it dominated philosophy at Cambridge for almost a hundred years – until it was finally challenged by two Cambridge professors, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at the turn of the 20th century. And that's the story we're about to tell.
The 20th Century
Russell and Moore taught philosophy at Cambridge at the beginning of the 20th century. Raised from their undergraduate days on the tenets of Absolute Idealism, they gradually grew frustrated with its increasingly convoluted and complex way of wording things. Many of the things the Absolute Idealists asserted drove Moore and Russell crazy. One can read about these heady times in Russell's 1959 autobiographical book, My Philosophical Development. Beginning with Moore's now famous 1903 paper The Refutation of Idealism the two professors launched what would become a broad rebellion against the whole idealist program of the previous century and this marks the beginning of a full embracing of materialism.
The main criticism of Absolute Idealism was that its language was not only convoluted, but led to absurd counterintuitive claims, such as that 2 and 2 isn't quite 4 and there was no world before human beings. Such affronts to common sense drove Russell and Moore bonkers. Both wrote passionate papers trying to prove the existence of the external world, hoping that a revival of this belief would restore philosophy to sanity by grounding it in something objective and solid. See Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (Russell, 1914) and Proof of an External World (Moore, 1939).
For all their enthusiasm about this revival of the external world concept, Moore and Russell were never able to find any proof of its existence, in spite of the titles of some of their papers. In fact, they struggled to articulate what exactly was meant by it. But due to their frustration with idealism, the great popularity of their essays among other philosophers who had also tired of idealism, and the obvious good intentions of the two authors, ascribing to belief in the external world became associated with a return to common sense. In defense of this movement, even the main progenitor of Absolute Idealism in England, F. H. Bradley, admitted he had failed to create a coherent system of its concepts.
So, the start of the 20th century, at least in the English-speaking world, was marked by a concerted and passionate resurgence of the belief in the external world, and even a dogmatic assertion that it had to exist. This was because nearly everyone in the 20th century felt that two centuries of idealism had established that no attempt to explain our phenomenal experience without an external world would ever work. But we should keep in mind that materialism of the 20th century remained more programmatic than a single defined theory. Essentially anyone who asserted the existence of an external world was, in 20th century parlance anyway, a materialist. And so, faith in it essentially defined what materialism came to be.
The reader should notice that the 20th century transition to materialism was most notably marked by a reassertion of the age-old habit of inventing in imagination an occult entity to explain perceived ones, without explaining how such an occult entity actually explained such perceptions. Many materialists today speak regularly of the ‘causally responsible external object,’ but never stop to explain how such an object causes what it is meant to cause, namely our experience. This they freely admit, and it comprises the modern version of the mind-body problem. In fact, no materialist has ever proposed a theory for how the theoretical ‘external world’ creates our experiential one. That it does so is simply axiomatic, or programmatic. Materialists operate on the faith that one day someone will devise a theory to go with the name. In fact, the word 'materialism' could be described as a placeholder-name for a hoped-for one-day theory, a name in search of a theory. Contemporary materialist philosopher David Chalmers has even written that his best estimate is that materialists will have such a theory in a hundred years. So, to say that one is a materialist denotes, more than anything else, one’s commitment to the assertion that an ‘external world’ really does exist, and that one day philosophers will discover how this explains our experience.
Because materialism is programmatic, i.e., a program for finding a plausible theory, and not an actual theory, since a theory would have to include some account of what it is meant to account for, a great deal of its focus during the 20th century has been on experimenting with various ways to deflect attention from the hard questions. These have included changing the topic to something easier to discuss, such as the language of the questioner, or behaviors or functions normally correlated with perception. We'll talk about each of these in turn.
Linguistic Philosophy
Since materialists have no way to prove the existence of the external world, or explain how it causes anything, or even articulate precisely what it is, beyond that it is the theoretical occult cause of experience, they soon began to find ways to divert attention away from these hard questions, while still managing to come off as profound and germane. In the 1930s an Austrian philosopher at Cambridge named Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced a method of doing this. His method was to redirect attention back onto the questioner, by claiming that any apparent difficulties in answering metaphysical questions were the effect of linguistic confusion in the questioner. Improper syntax, or use of poorly defined or indefinable terms, or confusion over context of words, produced an appearance of metaphysical problems. The problems were actually illusions produced by language, he asserted. This amounted to a claim that philosophical problems could be avoided by keeping language shallow. This allowed materialists to respond to any demand for clarification of materialism by redirecting attention from materialism to the questioner’s language, which could be kept up indefinitely.
This method came to be called linguistic philosophy. It is described in the 1959 book Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy by Ernest Gellner, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, who came to deplore the technique and described it as intellectually lazy.
It should be said, however, in defense of the first linguistic philosophers, that the notion may have seemed much more reasonable in the start of the 20th century, due to the highly confusing and overly metaphysical language still being employed by the Absolute Idealists, and in fact their language probably did have, at that time, semantical problems that gave the illusion of being deeper than it was. In short, England had had an overdose of metaphysics and was sick of it when the temperamental Wittgenstein showed up as a kind of savior. They desperately sought a way to change the subject to something they could manage. However, as language came to be more streamlined and made plainer, the problems that linguistic philosophers had originally hoped would simply vanish as mere language-created illusions, became only more apparent.
Behaviorism
Behaviorism was a second way to deflect attention from the hard problems surrounding the relationship between the inner and outer worlds. The genesis of behaviorism requires a little explaining. Psychology began to become a prominent field in the 19th century as a way to treat the mad. At the end of the 19th century Freud introduced psychoanalysis, the attempt to treat underlying causes of neurosis by talk therapy. But in time the profession began to question if this method was in fact scientific, since reports of distressed people were intrinsically subjective. Science, it was felt, should confine itself to data that can be observed and recorded objectively, and hopefully quantified, rather than relying on changeable reports of introspection by individuals. Applied to psychology this meant observation of outward behavior. An example of such a psychologist was the Russian Ivan Pavlov, famous for his experiments on salivating dogs. His work gave rise to John P. Watson’s methodological behaviorism, which states that only public events can be objectively observed, and therefore the personal inward experience of the subject should be ignored by science.
This method impressed a group of philosophers known as the Vienna Circle, who then put forward a much bolder form of Behaviorism called Logical Behaviorism as a theory of mind. This view held that internal subjective states did not really exist at all and that mental concepts ought to be translated into talk about outward physical behavior.
So, for instance, the statement ‘John has a headache,’ should be restated as ‘John winces and closes his eyes.’ That’s all we can observe of John’s headache, and thus that is what John’s headache amounts to. John’s wincing is his headache. Likewise, human happiness is simply the turning upward of the corners of the mouth, thirst the outward propensity to drink, etc.
Of course, everyone who has had a headache knows perfectly well what John means by saying he has one and that he does not mean he is wincing. Nor is it true that references to John’s pain are simply the product of careless language about outward behaviors. People had headaches before there was language.
There is a really confused idea underlying Logical Behaviorism that I’d like to point out. The behaviorist believes his observation of John’s wincing is objective, while John’s report of his headache is not. But obviously, the behaviorist’s observations of John’s wincing are just as subjective as John’s experience of his headache. How then can the Behaviorist justify discounting John’s subjective experience, while counting his own as objective? The answer is that behaviorists are the victim of a poorly analyzed distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. We will offer a different more accurate way to analyze what these terms are meant to convey that will not have this problem when we come to the alternative approach to perception.
Just as George Berkeley attempted to avoid the two-world problem by denying that there was an external one, Logical Behaviorists tried to avoid it by denying there is an internal world. Each tried to resolve the mind-body problem by denying one side of the dualism. Both Berkeley and the Behaviorists were seeking a form of monism. But both failed, for both Berkeley and the Behaviorists failed to account for something that the other side of the two-world dualism was meant to account for. The theory of the outer world was meant to account for the fact that many of the qualities of our experience (like the number of objects in a room) are shared by all that are present, yet reference to internal subjective reality accounted for where each individual found these shared qualities. The way that Logical Behaviorists solved the problem of how perception arises in us was to deny that it did. This approach was just as implausible to people as Berkeley’s opposite theory that there was no external world.
Identity Theory
Most of the schools of philosophy of mind that followed after Logical Behaviorism amounted to repackaging and rebranding the same approach of attempting to account for subjective experience by saying it was a misidentification of something else. Behaviorists said it was body movements. The next school of thought to try something like this were called Identity Theory. Like behaviorists, identity theorists denied that subjective sensations such as pain and thought existed. What they claimed did exist were neural brain states. They recommended that all talk of experiential states really ought to be translated into brain state talk, such as C-fiber in the brain fires at time T. The idea was that what we had thought of as conscious subjective experiences were, truly speaking, nothing more than brain states and identifying the two is where the term ‘identity theory’ comes from. This identification allows the identity theorist to avoid all talk of the cause of experience as it denies experience occurs at all, just like the Behaviorist.
Almost no one, not even other philosophers, found this solution convincing. Any honest person recognizes that pain or thought is one kind of thing and a neuron emitting an electrical charge in a brain is another. Calling them the same thing was just not plausible.
Functionalism
We now come to the next school of philosophy in the 20th century, the one that has reigned pretty much unchallenged for the last 50 years, called functionalism.
In the 1980s, some philosophers got to playing around with desktop computers that were coming into vogue. As they did, they noticed that computers performed input-output functions. For instance, a computer could be programmed with an algorithm by which it could respond to X input with Y output, and this could perform a function such as solving a mathematical problem. This looked to them a lot like thinking. So, they theorized that what people refer to as thinking, might just be similar input-output functions based on algorithms encoded in the brain. In other words, functionalism is the view that we are basically computer machines.
Most fundamentally, though, it’s a form of behaviorism. The movement of limbs and muscles regarded as what we mean by thought in behaviorism is replaced with the functions that such movements of limbs perform.
The functionalist claims that statements about mental states like perception, belief, and desire can be translated into functional talk. To perform this trick, he redefines certain words to make this seem more plausible. The functionalist defines ‘perception’ as ‘belief acquisition,’ understood as data input such as in the case of a thermostat or an ATM machine. ‘Belief’ is redefined as a physical state apt to bring about a certain behavior, understood as an output function. By such definitions an ATM machine could be said to perceive the data on your ATM card, and holds beliefs so long as it is apt to perform a certain function in response. And by other definitional alterations, we can speak of ATM machines thinking and desiring.
The idea is that this solves the question of how conscious experience arises by claiming all talk of conscious states is really only misidentification of functional states.
Obviously, this is yet a third attempt to deflect attention from the hard question of what causes us to be able to perceive the world. The first was to deflect attention to language issues, then to behaviors, and finally to functions. It does so by changing the subject to the functions that our actions perform when we perceive. This is a form of gaslighting. Gaslighting is when you deliberately say something that contradicts what a sane person can plainly see, in an attempt to make them question their own sanity.
Functionalists are not serious. They are having fun playing the role of bulwark against what they perceive is a threat of unscientific woo-woo talk about perception and conscious states, woo-woo because they have no way to address such talk. We know with certainty that their writing is facetious, because it is filled with references to an 'external world' or a ‘causally responsible external object.’ This sense of ‘external’ is usually defined in contemporary analytic philosophy as ‘independent of experience.’ But to a functionalist, who denies there is experience, what could that mean? Since the functionalist refutes the existence of an ‘internal world’ what could he possibly mean by an external one? External to what? So, by referring to an external world, the functionalist implicitly acknowledges his belief in the existence of his internal world, i.e., his subjective experience. The Functionalist is not sincere. He is gaslighting. Functionalists are just as aware of their private internal states as we are. Their claim that they aren't is simply gaslighting as a method of feigning not seeing the problem with their own theory. In other words, Functionalists feign that they are feigning conscious experience, and that is classic gaslighting – and even a little funny.
Property Dualism
Now I must mention one more school of 20th century philosophy, and I'll be done. These philosophers call themselves property dualists. David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel are famous examples. They have no actual theory regarding perception. Rather, they fill their articles pleading with the behaviorists, identity theorists, and functionalists to admit there really is something that we mean by consciousness, beyond mere outward behaviors, brain states, and functions. It’s a little like pleading that the sky is blue. So that laymen, who obviously have never questioned that they’re conscious, are usually unclear what property dualists are talking about. This is a source of endless delight for their gaslighting colleagues.
Property dualists accept with their colleagues that there is only matter, but feel matter has two kinds of properties. Hence the name ‘property dualism.’ Matter has properties that can be explained scientifically, such as the properties the behaviorists and functionalists describe. But property dualists believe matter somehow also has the ability to develop mental properties like sensation and desire. They believe that consciousness is some kind of unexplained material phenomenon, which they imagine supervenes on physical states a little like electricity supervenes on chemical states in a battery. And they feel the mechanics of how this happens will one day be explained. In other words, property dualists believe that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of material machine states, and it is from them that you get the popular cultural notion of robots becoming conscious. Examples of this miracle portrayed in movies include 2001 (1968), West-World (1973), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. (2001), I, Robot (2004), and Ex Machina (2015).
The property dualists are sincere and mean well. But they fail to recognize that they have no way to prove what they are saying. For matter (in the occult sense it is used in contemporary philosophy) cannot be observed, and neither can consciousness. How, then, can science, using its own empirical method, explain how something we can't perceive creates something we can’t perceive?
REVIEWING WHAT WE COVERED
Since man first began to ask questions about the cause of things seen, his tendency has been to invent things he can't see to explain them. Whether we're talking about the elder in the ancient forest telling his people stories of invisible human and animal spirits, or Anaximander postulating the presence of imperceptible apeiron to explain all the substances and opposites we perceive, or Plato concocting a hidden world of forms to explain our recognition of objects, or Aristotle with his outer world as the distal cause of our inward phantasms, or Berkeley with his notion of an invisible God implanting copies of His own ideas in our imperfect minds, the approach has always been the same. We invent unseen things to explain perceived ones.
By the start of the 20thcentury, philosophers had begun to recognize that this age-old way of explaining things we perceive, by inventing metaphysical ones we don't, was never going to work. For how could one possibly ascertain by any satisfactory method how something one can't observe does anything? But rather than seek another way to explain our experience, philosophers of the 20th century doubled down on this ancient failed approach to the problem of causation. Rather than abandon the unproved and unprovable occult theoretical external causal world, they made belief in it a litmus test of scientific reasoning. Yet, at the same time, their awareness that this would never work was growing so keen, that they came up with ways to change the subject from the hard question of how this unseen external world causes our experiential one, to easier questions, such as what phenomena accompany perception. Among these were language, behaviors, brain states, and functions. Eventually, these philosophers resorted to the incoherent denial that conscious subjective experience occurred at all, claiming that the notion that it does is based on some kind of confusion over language, or misidentification of behaviors, brain states, or functions.
So, if these 20th century philosophers saw no way to answer questions of cause by way of a theoretical external world, to the point where they had to deny the very basis of thought itself, i.e., conscious experience, why did they remain so determined that such a second world had to exist? Their literature is simply brimming with references to it.
There are two reasons. One was bad timing, due to an unfortunate sequence of historical events. Just when new methods of accounting for cause were showing promise in the physical and social sciences, i.e., replacing theoretical occult entities as causes with observed processes, philosophers were entering a reactionary phase against idealism. The other reason is that an underlying thinking error – the historical fallacy – was at play.
In the next chapter we’ll talk about both of these factors. Recognizing the real underlying causes of this strange addiction to a failed approach to causation is of immense value. For when we see what was really driving people to adopt such a strange approach to cause in the first place, and even drove them to stick to it when it demonstrably failed, we will be more open minded when we are presented with a fresh alternative.
LOOKING FOR ANOTHER WAY
Having seen the history and pitfalls of postulating an external world to explain our experience, in this chapter we first look at the fallacy in thinking that underlay such an approach, and then suggest an alternative to it. It’s one we borrow from modern science, the method of positing processes rather than hypostases to explain phenomena.
People innately recognize that all things have a cause. And so, it is only natural that they wonder what the cause of their world is. Now if you ask an ordinary person what he means by his world, he’ll describe to you his world of experience. What other world would a person mean?
It does not occur to ordinary people, when left to their own thinking, that there might be a second world that none of us have ever perceived, or that this second hidden world is the real world. Such a theoretical ‘real’ world would make no sense to an ordinary person. First of all, a theory is supposed to explain something. What would such a theoretical second world possibly explain? And if you suggested to this ordinary person that there was indeed such an unseen second world, and he simply lacked the sophisticated education required to recognize this common-sense fact, he would scratch his head over how that could possibly bring anyone any closer to answering his original question, which was how his world came into being. For even if you forced him to concede that this second hidden world indeed existed, he would then have two worlds to explain, where he began with only one, and yet be no closer to explaining either. For a second world doesn't even begin to explain anything.
So, could it be that the great minds of the past all made a mistake? Every single one of them? Contemporary philosophers would insist they didn't, as all attempts to explain our experience without such a hypothetical second world led to either subjectivism (the idea everything’s in your head), or counterintuitive claims like that the world didn’t exist before the human mind.
In Chapter 4 we carefully went over the thinking that leads to the postulate that there must be an external world. It comes down to this: When you perceive by sense, something of the object you are perceiving apparently ‘goes into your head’ by way of your eyes, by way of your nose, by way of your ears, etc. We prove this each time we cover our eyes and cease to see or hold our nose and cease to smell. Certainly, something was passing through these portals into our heads that our hands prevent. And if your experience is in your head (or your brain) then the objective object that never moves anywhere must still be outside of your head. But you only perceive your internal experience.
Any good theory of perception has to account for these two facts, first that you have your private experience, and second that the source of that private experience has to be public and independent of you.
However, there is one assumption in all this that is not as obvious as it first seems. That is the assumption that experience occurs in your brain. If you go back to chapter 4, you’ll see we wrote, "No one would disagree that their thoughts happen in their brain."
The assumption that perception occurs inside our heads is actually the culprit of the whole problem since the beginning of philosophy of mind. Aristotle was sure we held phantasms, copies or impressions of outer objects, within us when we perceived, which he believed were literally located in a person’s chest.
As a matter of fact, all philosophers throughout history have referred to experience as located inside us somehow. Today we say it is the brain. We've always located our consciousness. But isn't this a strange unexamined idea? It imagines experience as a thing in the likeness of the things in experience?
There's actually a very subtle fallacy at play here, a kind of circular reasoning. Imagine you are in a bank, and you want to know where the bank you are in is. Would you go looking for it somewhere in the bank? This is what we are doing when we go looking for our experience in our head, which is an object in our experience.
This circular thinking is leading to all our hard problems regarding the cause of perception. It's the underlying fallacy inherent in all theorized hypostatic causes of things found in experience, and it’s the real cause of the external world hypothesis. If you postulate your experience is 'in' you, it will always follow that its cause is 'outside' you. But what is all this about 'inside' and 'outside?' Inside what? Outside what? Your brain is in the phenomenal world, is it not? The things outside your body are in the phenomenal world as well, are they not? And by our broad definition of perception, as the taking of experience of anything one can be cognizant of, even our thoughts are in the phenomenal world. So, pray tell, where is this 'outside,' and what is it 'outside' of?
The fallacy is in thinking of a cause (in this case the theoretical occult outer world that is believed to be responsible for our experience) in the likeness of what it is thought to be causing, in this case our experience. Let me say that again, to drive it in. The fallacy is in conceiving of the cause of X in the likeness of X. We are reading attributes of an effect we’re trying to explain into its theoretical cause. And in this case, we are reading the attribute of proximity (i.e., in vs. out), that we abstract from our experience, back into the supposed cause of that experience.
So, having recognized the error in this thinking, from here forward we will refrain from all references to ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ when it comes to experience. Experience is simply here and now, forever in the spatial and temporal present, and these notions of where it is in proximity to some mysterious know-not-what simply have no meaning.
We now see how we got our notion of an 'external world.' Presuming our experience was literally inside of our bodies, by failing to notice that our bodies are actually found in our experience, we naturally projected our theoretical cause for the stuff we imagined was inside us, to be 'outside' us. And over time we came to hypostatize this metaphorical 'outness' as the external world.
But did we ever really need to explain our experience this way? No. There was another way we could have sought to explain our experience that didn't require a hypothetical occult causal thing at all. And that is the method of proposing a process, rather than a thing, to explain it.
Understand that prior to the mid-19th century, scientists had, just like ancient philosophers, posited occult nominal causes to explain observed phenomena. Examples included prima materia, humors, ichor, aethers, alkahest, invisible vortexes, and so on. The great achievements in science that began in the 19th century occurred when scientists began to abandon these occult entities in lieu of a new method of looking for underlying causal processes instead.
Plate tectonics is a good example of a process theory in contemporary science. It explains continental drift, the movement of continents over time, in terms of ongoing, observable, testable, tectonic and volcanic activity. Other processes include molecular evolution, climate processes, the systems of human physiology, study of disease pathology, astrophysics, and so on. The shifting positions of the stars and planets are now explained in terms of an evolutionary cosmological process. Geological features, like the mountains and streams, that the ancient elder explained to his people by positing unseen animal and human spirits, are now explained in terms of observed geothermal, volcanic, erosional, and depository processes. Even modern psychology has abandoned its archaic appeal to demonology and invisible humors in the blood for developmental and chemical processes to explain mental illness.
So why, in the midst of all these advances in science’s ability to explain things, by abandoning its hypostases, did philosophers miss this revolution, and not only continue in their old method, but double down on it? The reason is simple. At the turn of the 20th century, philosophers were so preoccupied with revolting against idealism of the 18th and 19th centuries that they continued their allegiance to this archaic method, and even made such allegiance the litmus test of scientific modernity for philosophers. The irony of this is spectacular.
Processes & How They Work
Now let's go over what we mean by a process, for it's important to see a significant difference between explaining a phenomenon by way of a process and explaining it in terms of an unseen and untestable causal object. Unlike the causal object approach, a process does not require us to add anything theoretical to what is already present at the beginning of the process. To see what I mean, consider how scientists now believe planets form. It is called accretion. A planet begins as grains of dust in orbit around a central protostar. Through direct contact and self-organization, these dust grains form into clumps, which in turn collide with one another to form larger bodies. Gradually these bodies increase through further collisions, growing at the rate of centimeters per year over the course of a few million years.
Notice that in this approach we get a planet out of a solar nebula without adding any occult theoretical entities. In fact, we add nothing to the process that wasn’t already present in the nebula. The substances that were in the nebula simply change their states and arrangements to form a planet. Nothing is added to a process to explain its completed result.
Now, how can we apply this same concept to an explanation of our experiential world as a whole? How can we explain our world as it currently presents itself to us without positing any hypostases like an unseen external world? Before we can answer this, we need to be very clear what it is we are seeking an explanation of.
The process I just described that theoretically created our Earth is obviously a physical one. By this I mean a process that observable particles undergo by way of observable dynamics to bring about some observable completed result. But our question in this book is a little different. We don't want to know what processes are ongoing within the scope of the world we observe, but how such a world we observe is possible in the first place. In other words, we don't want to know the stages things go through to change their condition within the scope of things perceived, but how there came to be a scope of things perceived. How did the world of experience come to be?
Remember, because we posit no hypostases in a process theory, we have to presume that that which we are trying to explain evolved from a simpler state of the same thing. Only the state and arrangement of what was already there changed. To explain something by way of a process, we speculate that that thing we wish to explain was originally in a pure and simple and unified state, and evolved into its present complex state. In our case, that thing is our complex experience. So, we posit an original state of simple experience. We then seek the process by which that simple experiential state evolved into its current multifarious and complex experiential state we call the world.
This includes explaining how the phenomenal world came to take on the features it has, including its feature of containing us in it, experiencing it. If we can’t explain that, we haven’t explained our experience. For our experiencing it is part of that experience that needs explaining.
Public and Private Experience
And such an explanation would be incomplete if it did not include an explanation of a feature of experience that no prior theory of the universe has ever succeeded in explaining. This is the distinction between public and private qualities of experience. This is best explained in an example.
Imagine that in the middle of a room is a single table. Imagine further that five men enter the room and all five observe the table and observe that it is one. However, while the number of tables in the room is the same for all five men, its apparent size and shape is a little different for each one depending on his distance and angle of view. But then let’s say one of the five men confesses that he sees a black cat laying on the table, which none of the other men see. Because only one of the men sees the cat, we say his experience of the table is real, but his experience of the cat is likely a hallucination. Normally we articulate that by saying the experience of the cat is ‘in’ the one man who says he sees it. But this implies that the experience of the table that all five men enjoy is ‘outside’ of them. But as we have explained, such talk is based on a fallacy about location of experience. It’s confusing and leads to the external world hypostasis. We aren't going to fall into that trap, and so we refrain from such ‘in’ and ‘out’ language about the men’s experience. Instead, we’ll speak only of what actually presents itself in the situation. What actually presents itself is that the experience of the number of tables in the room is shared identically by all four men, its apparent size and shape is relative to where each man is standing, and the cat experience is entirely private for the man who has it.
From this more cautious analysis of what the men experience when they enter the room, an analysis divorced of fuzzy talk about occult unseen worlds, we can now frame a very valid question. What is the process that brings about these men’s experience that can account for some qualities of it being shared identically, some shared but relative to the location of their body, and some being totally private? What's smart about how this carefully worded question is phrased is that it's not ‘theory-laden.’ It doesn’t presuppose a theory. It does not imply any theoretical hypostasis or any incoherent notion of interior and exterior experience. All of the qualities (from those of the table to those of the cat) are equally found in the phenomenal world – albeit with different degrees of privacy. We have already established that there is no reason to posit any other world. Being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of something are not part of anyone in the room’s experience, but such notions are simply the relic of a logical fallacy. We seek an explanation of experience as it actually presents itself, and we seek that explanation in the form of a process.
All talk of objective experience is also removed. There are objective facts, meaning ones that everyone can verify. For instance, that there is a single table is objective. It’s independent of any one observer. That the table appears smaller to the man standing furthest away is an objective fact about that man’s subjective experience. But all experience is had subjectively. Whatever one experiences he experiences subjectively, in so much as he directly enjoys only his own personal experience. A person does not perceive another person's experience, only his own. So, talk of objective experience and has no meaning. All experience is subjective (personal). Some facts we determine by subjective experience are objective (shared).
So, we want to propose a process to explain experience that accounts for these degrees of privacy and sharedness. For this is part of the phenomenal world as it actually presents itself to us.
There's one more feature we need to account for by way of such a process. We must explain our intuition that we are perceiving the world directly, and not a representation of another world.
So, when we say we want a process that explains our experience as it actually presents itself to us, there is quite a lot that such a process must account for, if it is to be a truly plausible explanation of experience. If it purports to explain experience, it should explain experience as it is, and not some ideal or theoretical one. That would explain nothing at all.
Remember, we are not seeking merely some process conceived as occurring within the scope of the phenomenal world, but one that explains how the phenomenal world itself came about. A 'Big Bang' theory, then, won't do for us. For, no matter how you conceive of a Big Bang process, it is a process imagined to have taken place within the scope of the phenomenal world, the world of space and time and natural law. We want to know how we got the phenomenal world, not how things work within it. And searching for the cause of the phenomenal world in the phenomenal world just won’t do.
We need to see the difference between looking for a process within the scope of experience and positing a process to explain experience. Seeking processes that occur within the scope of the phenomenal is a legitimate empirical concern for science. But asking for the process that produced that scope is not. It’s a metaphysical concern and within the purview of philosophy.
So how can this modern methodology of seeking processes, that has been so fruitful for science by allowing it to discover the processes responsible for so many phenomena in experience, be applied to the broader metaphysical question of what process might have created the fullness of experience itself?
Notice the care in my language in that question. If I ask how the physical world first came into existence, and then how people came to experience it, I am, in the very phrasing of those words, presupposing the existence of two worlds – a physical world outside of people and hence unseen, and an experiential one inside of them. It implies first a world, and then creatures laid upon it to experience it. But what if these two are part of the same process? And what if even the very thinking of perception in terms of subject and object, seer and seen, is in fact part of what this process will account for?
So, it is the experiential world we want to explain, and explain every aspect of. Science can only observe and record patterns within that experiential world, which they call nature. But its empirical methods are powerless to explain how that world arose in the first place. Such a question is beyond its purview, beyond the bounds of its scientific method. One need only reflect on that method to see this is a fact: Observe some phenomenon, ask a question about it, propose a hypothesis, then form an experiment that can be observed to test the hypothesis. The method provides no way for a scientist to get outside of his experience to form a question about it, let alone test a hypothesis about it.
Almost all my writings over the past twenty years has been about my idea of replacing the external world hypothesis as a cause of experience with an evolution of perception itself. Implicit in the title of my first book on the subject, The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance, was my guess that the substance of our world came into its present apparent condition by way of an evolution of perception. In other words, the world of our experience is the byproduct of an underlying evolution of experience. And the things we perceive, including our own bodies that we find in that experience, and the thoughts we experience, and the nature of our experience as divided into private and shared, and presenting as direct and immediate, are the effects of that process.
The next thing I propose is that we reverse where we look for signs of that responsible process. We certainly don't go searching for signs of the process that gave rise to our experience in that experience. That would amount to looking for the cause of a thing in the thing itself. We don’t look for our cause among the objects in our experiential world or imagine some invisible causal thing in the likeness of those caused objects. These are the mistakes of the past. So where do we look for signs of that ongoing causal process? We look for them in the operations of our own minds.
Now, I understand what I just said could be misunderstood. This is because most people who say things that sound like that mean something different. They mean the world is in our minds. I do not mean to imply any such thing. I don’t think that the world is in my mind or in my neighbor’s mind or even in a collection of minds. I definitely have never said or even implied that. What I have said is that the place to look for signs of the process responsible for forming things we see is in the mental operations that occur when we perceive.
In fact, I’ve listed seven reasons why the view that the world is in minds could never be my view.
- I don't believe in ‘minds,’ and don’t even know what something like a mind would be. See ‘mind’ in the glossary. My reference to ‘operations of our minds’ refers to mind in its colloquial sense, as thoughts and images and how they operate.
- I'm firmly of the belief that heads, as well as the brains they contain, are squarely in the world, and would have no idea what someone would mean by saying the world is in a head. I have explicitly rejected the idea that location, a characteristic of things in our experience, applies also to experience itself. I have even described the fallacy I believe causes such a confusion.
- This is not some kind of subjective idealism. See the Glossary for the two historical senses of this word, neither of which applies to my views. I plainly admit that there are objective given facts about the world, which are true for anyone who takes the time to measure them.
- I believe that if a tree falls in a forest, a tree really does indeed fall in that forest and vibrates the molecules in the air, even if there is no sentient creature present in that forest to convert that vibration to sound. And I agree with Galileo and Boyle that the brain is needed to convert the vibrational frequency of such a tree into a sound experience.
- This is not Kant's transcendental idealism either, for I do not posit an unprovable noumenon, or any other hypostasis.
- Nor is this Absolute Idealism, which is forced to say 2 + 2 isn't quite 4, because nothing is quite what it appears, or that there was no world before the human mind because the world is the human mind’s creation. I believe the world came before people.
- And this is not some recycled phenomenalism, the doctrine that human knowledge is confined to appearances presented to the senses. Nor do I reduce talk about physical objects to talk about bundles of sense-data.
In contrast to these and other past failed theories of perception, what I propose is a form of objectivism, the view that certain things exist independently of human perception of them. For nowhere do I propose that the source of the phenomenal universe is the human mind. My view upholds the natural intuition that there are facts about the world that are true independent of human opinion or interpretation. I also believe in errant identification of perceived objects, as well as their correct identification, and acknowledge that some experiences are hallucinations.
Where the confusion arises is that I do, with almost everyone, accept that mental operations do in fact affect what we wind up experiencing. This is hardly controversial. But I certainly don't believe that perceived objects are the effect of a person's own ego. That is the absurd notion of today’s confused undergraduates who believe we all have our own truth. “Truth? Whose truth?” they demand! That’s not a view I share. I believe some things are true, and others false.
As the reader continues, it is only natural that he or she will wonder how the method of applying process theory to understanding how our perceived world came into being, and what the implications of such a method might be. The answers will be surprising. For in the end, this process is the first ever proposed that accounts for a world with both objective facts and subjective opinions, and accounts for the difference. A world where one's perception of things in one’s environment is immediate and direct, and not a mere representation of some second hidden one. This is not a form of idealism (a view picturing minds containing ideas or portrays experience as shadows of unseen ideal archetypes), but one of direct objective realism, the view that conforms to our natural intuition that we directly perceive the actual physical world.
It is ironic that the modern materialist agenda is to argue for an occult second world when no materialist has ever managed to explain our perceived world in terms of one. Materialism could even be defined as the theory of an occult external world. It is ironic because it is the opposite of what the materialists originally set out to achieve, which was simply a common-sense view of perception.
APPLYING PROCESS TO A PSYCHOGENIC PROBLEM
Before I begin this chapter, I have to go over something I’ve already said in the previous chapter that might have gotten lost in the details. This is really the central turning point of this book, where the actual paradigm in approach happens. In the past we have asked the question, ‘how did the world form?’ And since the world is physical, we sought a physical cause. But we have already spent a lot of time explaining what is wrong with this approach, by going over the historical fallacy again and again. Physicality is part of what we are explaining. How, then, can a physical process bring us any closer to an explanation of a world that contains physical processes?
Here we rethink what we mean by the question, how did the world form? Remember that the ‘external world’ is a theory of a world we don’t see. How in the world could we even begin to ex- plain a world we don’t experience? So, it occurs to us that what we really have always meant by the question of how the world came to exist is how our world of experience came to exist – that world of experience that has both private and shared qualities and that we intuitively feel we experience directly.
This means that we are not seeking to know how some world we can’t see came to be. That seems like an empty question, and chasing it has never led to anything useful. Instead we are seeking a process that can explain how the world of our experience came to be. Experience is, of course, a psychological phenomenon. The moment we fully grasp this, and grasp the inescapability of this fact, is the moment we see with total clarity that the process we must seek to account for that psychological phenomenon must be a psychogenic one.
To understand how this is a game-changer, I repeat a paragraph from the previous chapter:
Remember, because we posit no hypostases in a process theory, we have to presume that that which we are trying to explain evolved from a simpler state of the same thing. Only the state and arrangement of what was already there changed. To explain something by way of a process, we speculate that that thing we wish to explain was originally in a pure and simple and united state and evolved into its present complex state. In our case, that thing is our complex experience. So, we posit an original state of simple experience. We then seek the process by which that simple unitary experiential state evolved into its current multifarious and complex experiential state we call the world.
It is only natural, then, to seek a psychogenic process responsible for our global experience. And this is the big reveal of this book. The cause of our experience isn’t going to be something found in that experience, like in a Rube Goldberg machine. Cutting a string to release a hammer isn’t going to explain conscious experience. It isn’t that kind of question. We don’t want to know how the man’s face gets wiped by the napkin, but how we experience things like Rube Goldberg machines at all!
Now, we have all the pieces to do that. We grasp that we need only find a set of steps by which experience evolved from a perfectly simple and unified state to a complex state to form the complex world of experience we currently share and enjoy. And we know all the pitfalls to avoid. We need only posit that process, and flesh it out. But before we do that, we will go over once again how a process works.
An Example of an Explanatory Process
Plate tectonics is a geological process proposed in the 1960s to explain how the continents of the Earth came to take on the shapes and relative locations they now exhibit. The theory posits that about 200 million years ago, there was a supercontinent called Pangaea.
Pangaea was a single giant unified continent. About 175 million years ago, subterranean magma pushing upward from the mantle of the Earth split Pangaea into separate continental plates, and over time rising magma pushed these plates further and further apart. On the other side of the Earth these plates pressed together, causing subduction, meaning that one plate slid beneath the other. Where those plates pressed and buckled upward caused regions to rise, such as the Himalayas.
Note that this way of explaining change obviates any need for theoretical entities or substances. Looking around the Earth today, the continental boundaries we find are many and complex. But this complexity evolved from a singular unified state. See the progression below.
This aspect of processes, as change occurring over time from a simple unified state to a pluralistic complex state, is how evolutionary processes inevitably work, and why they are so powerful. Instead of proposing extraneous occult entities, that don’t actually explain anything and only wind up adding to the sum of things to explain, they posit an evolution from an original state of singularity to a final state of plurality. We find this in all processes. A baby evolves from a simple zygote, a plant from a seed, the plethora of animals on the Earth from a single one celled organism. We will apply the same principle to our process.
A Psychogenic Process
Before we do, however, we need to be clear what exactly we are trying to explain by such a process in our case. We are not trying to explain how physical things changed their orientation, as in plate tectonics. We are trying to explain our experience.
Let’s try to make the difference clearer. Imagine I look out at a view of a beautiful landscape. The experience is pluralistic and complex. It contains trees, clouds, mountains, etc. I don’t want to know how those physical things evolved. That is a concern for science. I want to know how that complex and pluralistic experience evolved from a simple unified experience. The difference between plate tectonics and our process is that the first is a physical process, and ours is a psychogenic process.
If we take our experience and bracket out any theoretical hypostases (like an unseen theoretical world imagined to be causing our experience), and affirm only what is undeniable, we are left with the fact that the panorama is perceived. It is an experience. In fact, that’s all we can say of it with absolute certainty.
We are thus going to explore the possibility that it was perception itself that evolved, and that all hypostases were unnecessary and problem-producing. In such a view, our whole world is our perception of it and the result of an evolution of perception from a simpler state. We posit an evolution of ways of perceiving, in which each new development in ways of perceiving adds fresh content to the object of perception. And we posit a process by which perception evolved from a unified state (analogous to Pangaea) to its current complex state.
Am I talking about the evolution of the act of perceiving, or an evolution of its content, i.e. that which is perceived? I'm speaking of them as inextricably linked, the way a shadow cannot be understood as a thing independent of the form that casts it. A change in how we perceive produces a corresponding change in what we perceive. Hence an evolution of ways of perceiving gives rise to an evolution of what is perceived. But, most fundamentally, I am referring to an evolution of the act of perceiving, with the rise of its content as its byproduct. Notice, then, that our process is the changing over time of an action, i.e., perceiving, not a thing. So, when I say we begin with an original simple state, I am speaking adverbially. And our evolution is an adverbial evolution, an evolution of how something is done.
Addressing Some Potential Concerns
Speaking of a verb as changing will raise some eyebrows. How can we speak of an action without speaking of who or what is performing it, and what it is being done to? For instance, if I speak of the act of riding, I normally have to specify the subject and object of that action. I might say that a circus bear is riding a bicycle. Grammatically, the circus bear is the subject and the bike is the object. While the requirement of a subject and object is legitimate in grammar, in our context, speaking of how things began, concerns about syntax are not germane. We are going to explain by way of our process how subjects and objects came to exist – in our case as the result of an evolution of perception. So, it’s senseless to speak of such objects existing prior to the process that brought them into existence. Subject and object are part of the complex phenomenon that arises as the result of the process we want to describe. How, then, can there have been such things before the process that produced them?
Another concern could be that there might be some contradiction in referring to how an action is performed when there is nothing for the action to be performed on. It actually contradicts nothing. We’ll take an analogy. Most people have no problem understanding that their brain flips the visual image they see upside down. The light that hits your eye is reverse of how you wind up perceiving it. This perceptual dynamic is continuous and occurs even when there is nothing seen. It occurs whether your eyes are open or closed, or if you’re in the dark or in the light. The visual content does not need to be present for the inverting dynamic to be occurring. It inverts whether or not there is anything to invert.
Second, there is no logical contradiction in speaking of perception divorced from someone doing that perceiving. If I say John is perceiving and yet no one is perceiving, I have contradicted myself. But if I say perception is occurring, what have I contradicted? I might be contradicting a convention of grammar, but we are describing a process that produces the objects that grammar was invented to describe. Since it precedes and produces grammar, the process does not fall within the scope of grammar and thus is not subject to the rules of grammar.
So, there is no real problem applying the method of process to explain our complex experience, beginning with nothing but perception itself.
The Creative Role of Schemas
So how does perception change and evolve, and how does such a change bring about a change in phenomena? To explain this, we need to introduce a dynamic unique to perception. It’s a dynamic we refer to in this book as a perceptual schema. A schema is a way of organizing something and a perceptual schema is a way of organizing perception. The perceptual schema is the sole dynamic of this system, the only thing that actually changes, and is responsible for all apparent change.
The best way to convey what I mean by a perceptual schema is to point to one operating in our experience.
There are two ways to schematize the above black and white spaces. One is to see them as depicting a vase, the other as depicting two faces.
As you examine the picture, pay attention to the moment when you switch from seeing one to seeing the other. Notice the moment of change is instantaneous when it occurs, and is not the result of a thought process that occurs in logical steps over time. Note also that you cannot see both the vase as a vase and the faces as faces at the same time. You see one or the other. But what physically changes to make this experiential switch happen? Nothing. Your eyes needn’t move. The picture itself doesn’t change either. Only the way you organize the experience changes. And this change has a profound effect on what you wind up perceiving.
Each way of organizing the experience is another perceptual schema. We can liken a perceptual schema to seeing through a piece of glass or lens that colors what you see. When you change the color of the glass you change the color of the image.
It's not a mere theory that this dynamic exists. It is foundational to gestalt psychology and is also an important aspect of philosophy of science (Hanson). The only thing I'm contributing to the discussion is a name. If you ask me what this dynamic is that happens in our perception, I’ll say it’s a perceptual schema, and if you ask me what a perceptual schema is I’ll describe this dynamic. That it happens is undeniable. What it is has no answer, for it is not a thing but is rather adverbial. A perceptual schema is not a thing. It is a way of looking upon things. If someone asks where these schemas reside, they are confusing it with things that occupy space, instead of the dynamic that produces qualities like space.
Look up gestalt images on the internet and you’ll be faced with countless examples of pictures one can see in more than one way. They can be mesmerizing. Considering them is like being shown a clue to a great mystery, and we don't know quite how deep its implications go. Here we're going to learn that the perceptual schema is fundamental to the phenomenal. The evasive 'theory of everything' is a predicted theory that could one day come along that could account for all disparate types of phenomena with a single unified principle. The perceptual schema, as we will gradually come to recognize, meets the criteria of that principle.
Note we don't hypostatize this dynamic. We don't reify perceptual schemas into physical objects. Our metaphor of lenses or colored pieces of glass is only that, a metaphor. But it is a metaphor for a dynamic we can actually observe acting in our own experience, as we did with the above image. As you begin to be familiar with this idea, you will find it at work in your experience constantly, as all experience must be organized into some coherence whether we realize it or not. In my first book I said if we did not organize our experience the world would show up as a kaleidoscope of disconnected impressions and events. Looking back, I was too generous. Nothing would show up at all.
If perceiving and ways of perceiving are the only causal dynamic in this process, the natural next question to ask is how they create what we are schematizing. Or, as a young academic once said while listening to me describe this process, "But what is my seeing hitting on that I’m schematizing?" Vision doesn't go out and hit on things, no matter how it might feel that way sometimes. Experience occurs, it doesn't travel. Not only does it not move, but has no location in space. My friend was picturing his eyesight emanating out of his eyes and striking the objects he sees the way Superman’s X-ray vision was depicted in comics as shooting out of his eyes. There used to be theories of vision very much like this. The ancient Stoics had a theory that tentacles of psyche came out of your eyes. But today we understand that light and sound waves influx toward our senses, and nothing leaves our senses to go out and find their objects.
But what these images convey is our intuitive sense that when we see a thing, there must be something outside us to see. And hence when we schematize our experience there must be something outside of ourselves we are schematizing. And then they hypostatize this feeling. What we’re going to discover is that it is the evolution of the schemas that produces their object. So, what my friend was picturing his vision leaving his body to go and find and then schematize is actually produced by the schemas themselves.
To make this even more clear let’s return to the vase-faces diagram again. When we look at the white and black spaces in that diagram and organize our experience of them either as a depicting a vase or a pair of faces, it is fair to ask how only an evolution of perceptual schemas could have created the substance (the stuff) of what we are organizing in the first place. In the case of the diagram that might mean the paper and ink one is looking at when one reads this book. As we go over the process that produces the world, we will see how even the substance of what we schematize arises. This is a process, and it is a process that does not begin with such substance, but one that creates it out of the process of evolving perception.
We'll now proceed to explain the process by which the phenomenal world arose, along with the substance we just described, and us in it as its experiencers, simply by way of a series of perceptual schemas. We'll do this in the form of a story. We’ll repeat this story in much greater detail in Chapter 12. It is abbreviated here so we can go over certain points we need to before fleshing it out more fully in the second telling.
THE PROCESS BY WHICH THE PHENOMENAL WORLD AROSE
There is a peculiarity in how I chose to write this book. I have explained the process by which the world formed twice, first in the abbreviated form below, and more exhaustively in Chapter 12. I realize this may be annoying for the reader. But I felt it was necessary to first give the gist of the idea so that I could discuss certain considerations before laying it all out in detail. Another thing that one could find annoying is that the story begins in a slightly different way in each of these versions. The protagonist in the first is perception and in the second primordial intelligence. The second way of telling is more accurate but more difficult to describe.
Do not try to imagine this. Any imagining is false. Just listen. Before the beginning, there was perception, i.e., the brute act of perceiving. There was no one doing this perceiving and there was nothing to perceive. There was neither subject nor object. Nor were there any perceptual schemas.
Then the first perceptual schema (way of perceiving) began as an (for now) unexplained innovation in perception. This was the perceptual schema of time. It adverbially altered how all subsequent experience organized itself. All that would ever after be perceived would, by virtue of the organizational influence of this first schema of time, be experienced as occurring in time.
Obviously, there was no schema before time, for there was no time in which it could have arisen.
Now when the perceptual schema of time first arose in perception, there was nothing to perceive temporally. Only the potential for such perceiving was there. From that first instant forward, if there ever was something to perceive, it would necessarily appear to occur in time. For it would be organized in terms of the schema of time.
Now what evidence do we have that such a schema had to have psychically formed? Look around you. You cannot perceive except in terms of sequences of experiences occurring in time. Even when you introspect into your thoughts, you find them conditioned by time. Thoughts occur in temporal sequence if they occur at all.
Immanuel Kant was the first philosopher to propose this idea that time is a way of organizing experience. Prior to this idea, some philosophers thought of time as a kind of substance that we are in, like floating down a river. In the 20th century we saw a revival of such a pre-Kantian conception of time, and this once again reified substance came to be called the ‘fabric’ of time. Some have gone so far as to speak of bent time or dilated time. So, they think of time as malleable, like clay. Such thinking is a good example of hypostatization, a relic of the archaic method of explaining things we perceive in terms of things we don’t.
My conception of the perceptual schema of time is, as far as I know, the same as Kant's. Although Kant called time a 'pure intuition' rather than a perceptual schema. However, there are differences between my conception of the world and Kant’s.
- I do not posit a noumenal reality, Kant’s version of the external world.
- I do not posit that the intuition of time is in each individual’s own mind, but believe it precedes and contributes to the creation of all things of the phenomenal world including people in it.
- Kant was a deist. Deists believed that the Deity created the world all at once, largely as we find it. Hence there is no evolutionary process for Kant.
The second perceptual schema to arise, and further condition perception, was the schema of space.
These two schemas, time and space, taken together replace the 20th century hypostasis of spacetime. The effect is the same. Only the way we frame the same phenomena is different. We explain the phenomena of spacetime relations by way of a causal psychogenic process, rather than positing an unseen hypostasis with no explanation. In short, we perceive things as existing in temporal and spatial dimensions because we are perceiving things temporally and spatially, i.e., through the dual schemas of time and space experienced simultaneously.
Again, we can prove that the perceptual schema of space operates in our experience. We need only open our eyes and look around to find proof of its operation in our experience. If you can recognize the relative locations and sizes of distinct objects, you are proving by experiment that the perceptual schema of space is operating. This gives an account for this attribute of our experience, where otherwise there was none. There is no actual alternative, except to be like those who see no need to account for things they experience. Without this, we have only description, but no explanation. Modern thinkers presuppose spatial attributes with no way to account for them. And inventing occult fabrics and hypostatizing them solves and explains nothing.
Just like with the attribute of time, philosophers reify space into a hypostasis. Once again, we hear of bent space. Where is this bent space? Obviously not in space. What is it bent in comparison to? The very idea of it being bent anticipates a second space that isn’t bent against which it is compared.
The perceptual schemas of time and space were originally, when they first arose in perception, only potential, since nothing yet existed to perceive temporally or spatially.
Now, with the phenomenal advent of space and time, the phenomenal advent of mathematical relations became a potential. For both time and space can be conceptually segmented and divided. And the laws of nature, such as gravity, are reducible to numeric ratios of time and space.
And if we apply arithmetic relations to space, geometry becomes conceptually possible, which in turn makes relative size, location, and shape conceptually possible.
We now have all we need to describe an inorganic world in mathematical terms. The inorganic elements and the natural laws that govern them originally evolved in a purely mathematical state. Note we are not talking of living organisms yet, only a universe of solid, liquid, and gaseous features mappable in number. All of inorganic reality, and the laws that govern inorganic reality, by which it also evolves, can be described in number and geometric coordinates. And it is in such terms that the physical sciences describe nature, i.e., divorced from its subjective sensible qualities like color and sound.
This amounts to saying that there was a time when the entire world was nothing but a geometric coordinate system of loci, shapes, sizes, and motions functioning and evolving by natural laws that were in turn describable in number. Obviously, the world still exists in that state, if we bracket out sensible qualities like color and sound. The only difference between this mathematical world as it was in such a primordial state, and the world as it appears to our senses today, is that our neural sensorium (like brains, nerves, and sense organs) cover these inorganic forms and law-governed motions in a 'skin' of color, sound, smell, taste, and feel. So how does that happen? How does a substanceless mathematical world obtain its substance?
To answer this, we must first clarify what we mean by substance when we pick up a physical object and call it substantive. We mean we have a sensation of solidity if we touch it, flavor if we taste it, aroma if we smell it, and sound if we smack it with our hand. We also mean it has permanence, as opposed to something in a dream that is fleeting. And if I say it feels solid to me, what do I mean by solidity? I mean I feel it pressing down toward the earth in accord with the law of gravity, and that its surface resists my hands so that they cannot pass through it. And all these features are the result of natural laws, such as laws of attraction and repulsion. So, what we mean by 'substance' is actually the qualities of sense we experience because we have evolved nervous systems and sense organs that grant these qualities. However, fundamentally, these nervous systems and sense organs we enjoy these qualities with, although they are of made of living tissue, supervene on an inorganic world. So, what is actually most basically present is that inorganic mathematical world.
This explains how perceptual schemas give rise to the substances we find ourselves schematizing. Out of inorganic evolution that is mathematical, in very tiny steps, over a very, very long time, first simple and then more complex nervous systems evolve. And by way of these nervous systems we gradually confer a skin of apparent substance to otherwise substanceless states.
Now when we experience through our sense organs, we still have perceptual schemas at play. If we didn’t, we would experience nothing at all, as sense organs do not perceive any more than cameras see or microphones hear. When we perceive, we are most fundamentally taking experience of our whole body. In this sense our body is like an electrical lens. We experience our body, and through our body the world. As we take experience of our mathematical physical bodies, the electrical states in our brain are schematized as various sensible qualities. So, a certain electrical state is perceived as red, another as blue, another as a musical note. Fundamentally these electrical brain states are mathematical. For each of these states we have perceptual schemas that translate them by regular algorithms. When such and such mathematical state obtains, such and such qualitative state obtains. And this is how we take experience of the world around us. The completed result of this process is the phenomenal world. However, we do not posit that there is any second world apart from such a phenomenal one. Hence the world we experience is the actual physical world presenting as it really is. The mathematical state is not another world, it is the same one. The only difference between the quantitative state and the qualitative sensible state is that we experience the first as the second by virtue of perceptual schemas. This is like seeing the black and white spaces of the diagram as a vase. So, our experience is not a representation of another unseen world. It is direct experience of the world.
So far, we have accounted for both shared qualities like the number of tables in a room, and the relative, qualitative ones unique to the individual like color. We also accounted for the substantiveness of things perceived, by pointing out that what we mean by substantiveness are certain qualities, and then accounting for those qualities. And we’ve accounted for our inborn sense that we experience the world directly, and not simply a representation of a world we can’t see. And we saw that by omitting hypostasis, we never encountered the dreaded ‘mind-body problem’ or ‘two-world problem.’ We even accounted for space, time, and the laws of nature that materialism must presuppose but leave unexplained.
But this still doesn’t describe the full human experience. The evolved perceptual schemas we have so far described can, at best, account for the umwelt of a mountain gorilla. Why do I say that? Here is why: A mountain gorilla looks around himself and experiences all the sensible qualities of his environment, including its aromas, flavors, colors, sounds, and senses the tactile feelings of the objects around him. And, without consciously realizing it, he even experiences the underlying quantitative attributes of those objects like weight, size, shape, and number. But there are parts of a human experience that the schemas we’ve named so far cannot produce. We will call these cultural schemas. They are responsible for completing the process of creation by producing the full cultural world that people uniquely can produce and experience. This requires some explaining.
As man first evolves from apes, he develops the ability to make many distinctions that his antecedents couldn't. First of all, he begins to be able to create and recognize symbols and signs and assign them to their referents. We call this the perceptual schema of reference. By this schema of reference, men can create simple nouns for objects. And gradually by extension, he discovers he can assign certain nouns to abstractions. And this is called the schema of meaning. With reference and meaning he is capable of language, and even inventing alphabets and writing.
So how does such a schema work? How does one assign a name to a referent by way of a perceptual schema?
Look at the above image. You could look at it as depicting a window, as well as many other things. To ancient Egyptians it represented a stylized wicker stool and was used as a symbol (a hieroglyph) for the ‘P’ sound. So, the schema of reference works the same way all other perceptual schemas do. One thing is looked upon as something else. It’s a way of organizing the same experience as something else, in this case a representation for a certain human sound.
Now as humans came to be able to assign names by this schema of reference, a man could assign a name to himself, and then define that name in terms of various abstractions. And by this method he developed a much richer sense of self-identity than any wild gorilla could. “I am Fred. Fred is the hunter who killed the wildebeest.” By the same two schemas, reference and meaning, he is able to create tokens of trade and soon the practice of trade. And as you see, by way of these uniquely human cultural schemas, a uniquely human experience begins to emerge for communities of people. Humanity can form social hierarchies, draw boundaries, officiate treaties, divide labor, create laws, demarcate good from bad, beautiful from ugly, freedom from bondage, rationality from irrationality, and so forth.
A major human development was man’s unique ability to use his perceptual schemas to organize his memories of the past and expectations of the future into a pattern we call history and progress. And all that he knows of life begins to take on the character of a story. And by such a method he begins to further define himself and his community in the context of a shared history, and this in turn produces hope and regrets, and the compulsion to make plans. Each day that the alpha gorilla wakes in the jungle, he wakes into the same day, which we can only call ‘today.’ But a human being wakes into that same experience and sees it as the next day in a long sequence of days leading from the past and toward the ever-receding future. That is a way of organizing the same experience in a rich new way. And almost all of human cultural life is understood and organized around such a historical context.
None of these aspects of life were possible to understand, let alone create, before humans. What makes them possible is the evolved cultural schemas. And by way of cultural schemas, culture itself is made possible, which is essentially the very meaning of human life. And then men can aspire for even higher dimensions of thought, such as why they are here in this world.
PROOF THAT THIS PROCESS HAD TO HAVE TAKEN PLACE
It was 17 years ago that I first spelled out my idea of a series of formative perceptual schemas that I felt sure gave rise to the phenomenal world. It took the form of a short book, The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance, a Simpler Theory of Everything. At that time, I made no claim to have proved that my account was true. While I felt confident enough that it was true, since there seemed just too many reasons to believe it, I could not see any positive proof of it. I was careful, therefore, to refer to the idea at that time as a ‘theory,’ even alluding to it in the title, and I limited my argument for its consideration to appeal to parsimony (greater simplicity of concept). When science is faced with two competing hypotheses, it leans toward the simpler one. There are good probabilistic reasons for this. I thus went about demonstrating the sense in which my theory was metaphysically simpler than material representationalism. As a reader review later put it, my idea had fewer working parts than previous theories.
However, while simplicity is a compelling reason to view one idea as more plausible than another, it is not proof it is true. For it is possible that the truth has more working parts than we expect. So, this did not count as absolute proof I was right. And I was well aware of this at the time.
But in the almost two decades since then, I have gradually come to see how I can prove my explanation of the universe actually has to be true. And not only can I prove that such a process had to have occurred, but I can even show that the order in which the schemas arose had to be precisely as I described it, and I can prove this a priori.
But before I explain that argument, I must say a bit about what we mean by a priori proof of a thing. And that requires a brief overview of the subject of epistemology itself, the branch of philosophy that deals with the question of how we know things. This would ordinarily be a big topic, but I’m going to make it as simple as possible.
Most of what people claim to believe, is, technically speaking, just opinion. Everyone has opinions. Few, however, consider what goes into forming those opinions. Let's start by describing how most of us acquire our basic set of beliefs about the world. Most people would say they believe firstly what they have perceived with their own five senses. But actually, sense perception accounts for only a small amount of what we actually believe. 99% of what we say we believe, we learned from testimony. Every fact you can cite about places you haven't been, or people you haven't met, or events you were not present to observe, is based on testimony. Everything you can say about history, you learned from testimony. Even your belief that you were born is based, not on your own memory, but on the testimony of your parents, or a document serving as testimony of the testimony of someone who witnessed your birth. Almost all of science is grounded in testimony. Most facts scientists learn in school were determined by way of experiments conducted long ago, that those scientists were not present to witness. What religious people believe about God and heaven is based on testimony also, such as the testimony of scripture, which in turn testifies to the words of prophets, who testified to what they claimed to have directly experienced. We could go on and on. But you get the point. Almost nothing we claim to know is based on our own direct observation.
The problem with testimony is that different sources tell us different things. This is even true in science. There is rarely lockstep agreement in any field. The question thus arises, how do we choose whose testimony to believe?
Well there are many factors that contribute to who we decide to believe. One is who we trust. But different people trust different people. Another factor is we tend to choose to believe those things we want to believe, that appeal to our taste or how we prefer to frame the world. A person who distrusts government might choose to believe a conspiracy theory he is told, while a person more trusting of authority might choose to believe an official account. The reasons we have for choosing whose testimony to believe is complex and highly subjective, and is often reducible to facts about ourselves.
Now, it almost never feels this way. Most people feel surprisingly confident that they have some reliable method they relied on to choose one testimony over another. If we ask such people to elaborate on what that is, they often appeal to what they call “facts and logic.” The irony of this answer is that very few could say exactly what logic is, or how they determine what is a fact. For most people, the words “facts and logic” merely allude to their sense of confidence they are right and others wrong, and to some mysterious protocol they feel they use can’t quite describe.
Luckily, however, there really is a branch of philosophy called logic that formally examines and codifies rules of thinking useful in trying to distinguish truth from falsity. Unless you are a professional philosopher, or a lawyer, as lawyers study logic in order to argue cases, you're going to be very surprised when I describe these methods, and they discover how little these methods can tell us about what is true. Let's go over these methods one at a time and see why this is. Only then will we see the real problem in proving something.
Why Logic Can’t Help Us Prove Anything
There are three main kinds of logic: deduction, induction, and informal logic. We’ll first look at deduction.
Deduction is considered the most rigorous of the three kinds of logic, and it is generally agreed that deductive arguments, if formulated properly, can never lead from true premises to false conclusions. We need to understand why this is. Consider the following logical syllogism. A syllogism is a deductive argument consisting of exactly two premises and a single conclusion.
Premise 1: John is a bachelor
Premise 2: A bachelor is an unmarried man
Conclusion: John is unmarried
Another way to say this is, If John is a bachelor, and if a bachelor is an unmarried man, then it follows (from those two facts) that John must be unmarried.
If both of the premises are true, obviously the conclusion has to be true also, simply by virtue of the meaning of the words in the two premises. If both premises are true, the conclusion is true.
The problem is, how do we know if John is a bachelor? We don’t. And so, we are right back where we began, having to rely on testimony, either John's or someone else's. And what foolproof method do we have to choose whose testimony to believe? We haven't one. And no amount of logic can help us either. Deductive logic can only tell us what would be true if our premises were true, but not whether our premises are true. Conclusions in deductive arguments are thus only as true as their premises, and unfortunately there is no form of logic to tell us if the premises are true. So deductive logic can’t actually tell us anything we didn’t already assume.
Let’s now consider induction. Something said to be known by induction is presumed to be true because in the past it was true. For example, if a boy passes by my office every day for a year selling sharpened pencils, I would be using inductive reasoning to expect him to show up again today. However, that the boy brought pencils by my office every day in the past is in no way proof that he will come today. It's only an educated guess based on a past pattern. It presumes that a pattern that presented consistently in the past will continue in the future. But patterns change. It's always possible the boy won't come by with pencils today. Maybe he’s ill. Maybe he found a better job. So, induction isn't an infallible way to know the truth any more than deduction is. It’s a guess based on a perceived pattern, perhaps even an educated guess, but a guess nonetheless. So just as with deduction, inductive logic can’t prove anything.
Now, let’s take a look at informal logic. Informal logic consists of a list of commonly committed reasoning errors. By being familiar with these errors, a person can often avoid making a reasoning mistake or being deceived by someone using such fallacies to trick him. Let’s look at an example.
Appeal to the mob.
It’s common for people to make the false argument that something must be true because so many people believe it. This is a fallacious argument because it is entirely possible for everyone to be wrong about something. In fact, it happens all the time.
The problem with informal logic is that, while such lists of thinking errors might allow us to recognize when some claim is doubtful, it is powerless to tell us if something is true. And so once again, informal logic can’t help us prove anything.
So, there is no form of logic that can lead us any closer to certainty about our beliefs. The forms of logic can at best alert us when something is doubtful, or if there is a contradiction somewhere. But they can’t be used to prove anything is true.
Why Observation Can’t Help Us Either
As we pointed out, people defending their beliefs often claim to be relying on ‘facts’ and ‘logic.’ We've already shown that logic is powerless to help us prove something is true. So, what about facts? Certainly, if I start out with facts I have a big head start. But the question is, how do I determine which of my beliefs are facts? Generally, the closest we can come is to appeal to direct 'observation.' Can't we be certain of something if we were personally present and witnessed it with our own eyes? Well, studies in psychology say no. People on death row are constantly being acquitted on appeal after being found guilty based on witness testimony. There is a very famous classic movie by Akira Kurosawa titled Rashoman. In Rashoman, a crime is committed, which is witnessed by many people. Each person is interviewed about the facts of the incident, and each tells a completely different story. There are well-known reasons that witnesses report observing different things. Apperception is a process in psychology by which a person makes sense of something he observes by assimilating the ideas he has already acquired. Apperception is like looking through a lens of distortion, where what you see in the present is distorted by prejudices you have acquired from the past. In science, the same principle is at play when scientific observations are said to be theory-laden. Scientific investigation is theory-laden when a scientist tends to look for what he expects to find according to his theories. Often this occurs because the scientist actually sets up the procedure for his experiment in a way that anticipates a particular result, causing him to miss alternative possibilities.
There are many other dynamics that effect what people tell themselves they have observed. To begin, what we claim to know from observation is almost always based on memory. Obviously, my belief I own a white Hyundai automobile is not based on my currently watching it and my title, but on my memory of having them. But memory is fallible. In fact, memories can change over time for multiple reasons, including psychological factors like false memory and selective memory. So, ironically, what we say we know from direct experience is, in reality, based on the fallible testimony of our memories. And some memories are better than others. So, we are back where we began, deciding who to believe. And all this is to say nothing of the fact that facts change after we observe them without our knowing it. So, observation alone is not a sufficient justification for certainty, as odd as that sounds.
And there is an even deeper reason that observation can’t help us in our case. We are looking for proof that a theory about how the world formed is true. And what brought about our own existence is obviously outside the scope of what any person can observe anyway.
So, if neither observation nor logic can grant us certainty about anything, and in our case, observation doesn’t even apply, how do I claim to be able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the process of evolving perceptual schemas I've described above had to be how the phenomenal world came into being?
The answer is a priori knowledge.
Introducing A Priori Knowledge
In spite of the limits of both observation and logic in granting proof, there is one category of statements that philosophers universally agree have to be true. These are statements said to be known a priori. The term a priori literally means “from what came before.” A priori truth can be recognized simply by introspecting about the meanings of the words in the previous sentences.
Consider the syllogism we used earlier.
Premise 1: John is a bachelor.
Premise 2: A bachelor is an unmarried man.
Conclusion: John is unmarried.
If John is a bachelor, and a bachelor is an unmarried man, obviously John has to be unmarried. Could we be wrong about that? Philosophers agree that we couldn’t be. The reason is that conclusion follows simply by virtue of the meaning of the words. We learn from the first premise that John is a bachelor. And we learn from the second premise that being unmarried is part of what it means to be a bachelor. So, the conclusion is really no more than an unpacking of what has been said, i.e., what came before. Nothing more.
Of course, the truth of the conclusion of the argument is contingent on the truth of the premises. But nevertheless, it is undeniable that, if they are true, then so is the conclusion. The operative word is 'if.'
But how do I know what I just said is true? How do I know that if the conclusion is implicit in the premises, and the premises are true, the conclusion has to also be true? It is easy to think about it and see that it is the case. But that’s not the question. How am I able to see it’s the case? What is it about us humans that makes it possible for us to recognize a necessary fact? Where does our certainty about it come from? Pointing to a pattern in the syntax of the wording and declaring that such a syntactical pattern always corresponds with truth doesn’t help us either. It only repeats what we recognize, and tells us nothing about how we recognize it.
Because this is initially inexplicable, we call such recognition intuition. When we know something simply by introspection, and have no way to explain how it is we know, we call such knowledge an intuition. For now, it's enough to grasp the concept that the only things we know with complete certainty are those we know a priori, upon introspection, using our natural intuitions. And such intuitions are, perhaps surprisingly, the most powerful guide to truth that we have, and far more reliable than observation or logic alone.
So, there are things we can know with certainty, a priori, by way of intuition. Now the problem is that, what we can know a priori is rarely the kind of thing that can tell us anything about the world. For instance, having certainty that if John is a bachelor he's also unmarried tells us nothing about John. He might be married or unmarried, or he could even be a fictitious person, yet that such a conclusion must necessarily follow from such premises, would not tell us that. To know something about John, we are back to observation and testimony.
But what I want to now show is that there is one innate intuition we all have that allows us to recognize a priori that the explanatory process I have given for the phenomenal universe has to be true. And if that is the case, I will have proved it is true. And hence it would not be a theory at all anymore, but an expository fact. That intuition is that there are necessary preconditions for things. Consider this statement from Chapter 3, where we described the fictitious scenario of coming into the office of Julius Caesar and spying a working Commodore computer on his desk.
A thing can't exist before the conditions necessary for its existence.
Try to challenge this. You can’t, because you would end up contradicting yourself in the very act of denying it. Just as John has to be unmarried if he’s a bachelor, because being unmarried is part and parcel of what it means to be a bachelor, it’s also the case that a thing can’t exist prior to the conditions necessary for its existence, because ‘can’t exist without’ is part and parcel of what it means to be a necessary condition. We know it’s true a priori because it is true by definition of the very words involved.
Let me show how philosophers have missed the power of this intuition. In his 1959 autobiographical book My Philosophical Development, Bertrand Russell wrote about his frustration with the Absolute Idealists that had held sway over Cambridge for several decades. One of their claims that he found especially repugnant was that the world did not exist prior to people. This of course followed from their belief that everything was a product of the human mind, an outcome of their form of mind idealism. This struck Russell as so stupid that he formed a whole school of philosophy to omit such silliness, which he called logical atomism. It was based on an analogy from nuclear atoms as the building blocks of life. Basic ‘facts’ were the building blocks of true belief, and he called these basic facts no one could sensibly deny atomic facts. His criterion for what counted as an atomic fact was anything that he felt was simply ludicrously obvious. And an example he gave was that there was a world before people.
Russell could never explain why he found this so 'ludicrously obvious,' and chalked it up to what he thought was his superior common sense, superior to that of the Absolute Idealists anyway. Poor Russell. He was so honest and endearing that reading his writing can break your heart. What Russell was really appealing to, without realizing it, was his innate intuition of necessary preconditions. Certainly, you could never have people without a world, because a world is a necessary condition for the birth of people.
Here is another example to illustrate the principle of necessary preconditions. A fish is a creature that lives in and breathes water. There could not be an evolution of a world where fish evolved before water, for a creature that existed before water would not be a fish, by virtue of what we mean by a fish. We know this a priori. We don’t need to time travel to the beginning of the world to make sure or dig through paleontological records to know it. We only need to reflect on the meaning of the words involved.
So now let's look back over the order that I said the perceptual schemas evolved.
A necessary precondition for language is the ability to recognize meaning, and a necessary precondition for recognize meaning is the ability to recognize signs and their referents, and a necessary precondition for such referencing is perception of sensible objects we can assign referents to. And a necessary precondition for perception of sensible objects is a nervous system and the ability to correlate neural states with sensible qualities. And a precondition for a neural state is evolution of the inorganic world upon which such nervous systems supervene. And a necessary precondition for inorganic evolution is laws of motion. And a necessary precondition of laws of motion is space, for what is motion divorced of space? And a necessary precondition for the rise of space is time, for time is a necessary precondition for any change at all. And a necessary precondition of an evolution of perception is perception.
The cosmology proffered by science over the hundred years is replete with commissions of the fallacy of imagining conditions existing before their necessary preconditions, and so must be false a priori. For instance, the Big Bang explains nothing if you haven’t first explained how its necessary preconditions of time, space, and the laws of motion it apparently obeyed came into being. Science is forced to not only presuppose these are eternal, but, having no system of perceptual evolution, must hypostatize them and project their real archetypes into an occult second world. And then it is no wonder they cannot explain how we perceive space and time and natural laws. And hence they declare the last great problem of science is consciousness. No, it’s the first and last problem of science.
Also, in ordinary science, our ability to recognize objects in the world is presupposed, without even a passing acknowledgement of the perceptual schemas required to do so, let alone incorporation of their evolution into any account of evolution.
So, we not only prove a priori that our system has to be true, but that previous accounts had to have been false.
Intuition, Reason, & Schemas
This argument from a priori reasoning leans heavily on the concept of innate intuition. What makes something true a priori is that when we reflect on the meaning of the words we intuitively recognize it has to be true. I have spoken a little about what I see as the connection between intuition and reason. Here I want to be very clear what I mean in this regard, and also be clear about what intuitions are and the difference between schemas and intuitions.
Consider this logically valid syllogism.
If all boys had wings,
and Johnny was a boy,
Johnny would have wings.
That’s true as far as it goes. The operative word, however, is ‘if.’ If it were indeed the case that all boys had wings Johnny was a boy, then it would necessarily follow that Johnny would have wings.
However, how is it that we recognize this fact? It's not enough to say we all can just look at the syllogism and see it’s rational. The question is, how do we see that?
The form of the above syllogism has a name in logic, modus ponens. Below modus ponens is shown in its simplest symbolic form:
If P, then Q.
P.
Therefore, Q.
It’s a rule of logic that any argument with the form of modus ponens is always valid. But how did the philosophers that coined the term modus ponens, and declared its validity, recognize its validity?
The answer is that we have innate intuition. An intuition is something you know but don’t know how you know it. Any person that reads the three sentences and reflects on their meaning will recognize by his own intuition that the conclusion follows the premises.
The intuition we use is called the principle of noncontradiction. If we accepted the premises but denied the conclusion that would be a contradiction. We are born expecting truth to be consistent, and not contradictory. This intuition can't be discovered by reason, because having the intuition of the principle of noncontradiction is a necessary precondition for reasoning.
The syllogism is an example of deductive reasoning. In deductive logic, we know something has to be true if the premises are true, simply by virtue of the words involved. Let’s look now at inductive reasoning. There is an intuition at play there too.
In inductive logic we expect patterns that have presented in the past to continue in the future. This allows us to make predictions, and is the main logical form used in science.
But how did we learn that expecting patterns to continue in the future was reasonable? At first that seems like an easy question to answer. Reflecting on our memories from the past, we noted that past patterns have tended to repeat themselves. And so, we came to expect that pattern to continue in the future too. The problem with this answer is that it implies we used induction to discover induction. That would be circular reasoning and is irrational. In fact, this is a famous problem called the traditional problem of induction. Observation can’t possibly be how we learned induction. We have to have been born with it, and thus it is an intuition.
We are simply born with the innate intuition that undergirds induction. We are born anticipating patterns in the world and an innate understanding that patterns, by the very meaning of what it is to be a pattern, tend to continue. Children are born expecting and seeking patterns. If they weren’t, they would never learn anything. Because, just as expectation of noncontradiction is a necessary precondition for reasoning, the recognition of patterns is a necessary precondition for learning.
So, intuition undergirds both deductive and inductive logic. Logic is simply the formalization of the intuitions we are born with and nothing more.
Intuitions have to be innate and inborn. The reason we know this is that they cannot be taught to someone who doesn’t have them. We can’t learn them because they are a necessary condition for learning.
So, what we call reason is actually applied intuition. This ought to come as a surprise. Normally we think of reason and intuition as being at loggerheads, somehow in conflict.
When we use our natural intuitions properly, we are being as logical and rational as it is possible to be. But we must be careful not to confuse our natural innate intuitions with similar feelings. For instance, our evolved perceptual schemas could easily be confused with intuitions. Both affect what we take to be true when we look at the world, but in very different ways. Seeing this difference is imperative.
The Difference Between Schemas and Intuitions
A perceptual schema works as follows. When confronted with some sensate thing or event, a perceptual schema provides us with an algorithm by which we experience that thing as something else. So, for instance, I experience a certain neural state, that in itself is a mathematical state, as a qualitative sensible attribute like red. Or I experience a smudge of ink on a piece of paper as a picture of a rabbit.
Speaking of a rabbit, the image above is known as the duck-rabbit. It’s famous in philosophy and psychology. One can schematize one’s experience of the image either as a duck or a rabbit. But it is really just ink on paper.
Intuitions never alter our experience this way. Rather, the intuitions we are born with allow us to discriminate truth from falsity, harmony from chaos, consistency from inconsistency, and thus guide discrimination. So, for example, if I hear a note, and I recognize that it is sharp, I am using my innate intuition of consonance. It is something people are born with, and while a person can be helped to develop his receptivity to harmony, he cannot be taught it. For he must have it to learn it. Such recognition of consonance in sound is not hearing the sound as something else. It is the ability to discriminate between harmony and dissonance. And in this is the main difference between schemas and intuitions. Perceptual schemas force us to perceive one thing as another. Intuitions allow us to recognize how things ought to be in an ordered world. Schemas deceive us. Intuitions tell us the truth.
How Intuitions Work and How We Know They Are True
The argument I have made in this book is from intuition. Specifically, I have appealed to our shared intuition that a thing cannot exist prior to the conditions necessary for it to exist.
We can formalize this intuition.
If X can only exist if Y obtains,
and Y does not obtain,
X does not exist.
This in turn is an extension of the intuitive rule of logic called modus tollens.
If P, then Q
Not Q
Therefore, not P.
And we know these formulations are true by our underlying intuition of noncontradiction.
Now let’s go over some of our innate intuitions and see how we use them. When a baby is born, it is born with certain intuitions. As it grows we notice that it expects, seeks, and is capable of recognizing certain patterns in how facts are connected. Going over some of these will help us see how these intuitions are essential for making consistent sense of our world.
- Consistency: We are born expecting facts to be consistent, and prepared to reject contradictions. This intuition gives us our innate knowledge of the law of noncontradiction. Without the expectation of consistency as a mark of truth, a person would be incapable of deduction. The expectation of consistency also makes language possible, and by extension, thought. While the perceptual schemas of reference and meaning are necessary for language, they in turn require the intuition of consistency.
- Signs: We are born expecting and seeking signs, i.e., where one thing stands for something else. This intuition allows us not only to recognize signs, but create them, and hence is a necessary precondition of writing and mathematics. It is a requirement of deductive logic, language, writing, money, and pretty much all higher order abstractions.
- Cause: We don't perceive causes per se. Rather we perceive correlations. We interpret certain correlations as causes. For instance, when I release a bow string, the arrow flies to the target. These two events always correlate, and we call this correlation cause. But no one would be able to teach a child what a cause is if he or she wasn’t born with an innate grasp of the sense of the relationship. And that innate grasp even causes the child to expect to find causes, and even seek them out. No matter how many times one pointed to an arrow leaving a bow when the string is released, saying to a child, “Cause! Cause! Cause!” it would indicate nothing to that child but two events with no relation unless that child was born actively seeking causes through an expectation of causes. We are born with the expectation that all things have a cause. We would learn nothing without this intuition. We don't learn cause. But we quickly learn all sorts of things in terms of cause.
- Good: The innate capacity to recognize one thing as better than another allows us to discern, to have preferences, and to make decisions. It also allows us to understand the concept of right and wrong, even if what is right and wrong is sometimes a social construct. The good cannot be a perceptual schema, for a grasp of what good means is a requirement of cultural judgments even being intelligible. It’s one thing to have a cultural schema that setting forks on the left is good, but no schema could tell you what good meant.
- Humor: Babies begin to find things funny nearly as soon as they can perceive them and recognize what is going on. This would be impossible to teach. And it is not a schema that makes you see one thing as something else, but allows you to see part of the essence of a thing.
- Distinction: If someone were born without the capacity to distinguish one thing from another, he could not make the slightest sense of his experience or learn anything.
- Balance: Children are born immediately wanting a version of what their siblings have, expressing an innate sense and expectation of fairness or balance. This allows us to learn mathematics, where an equation is true only if its sides are equal. Our legal system is based on this intuition, along with its underlying concept of justice. So is trade.
- Patterns: We are born anticipating patterns, and immediately recognize them as such. If we did not, we would be incapable of learning. No matter what perceptual schemas we had, without the innate ability to recognize patterns, nothing could be determined in terms of them. When a mother holds her baby and points to an object and says its name, the child only grasps the direction of her finger as pointing to something in terms of a pattern. Language is based on expectation of patterns. Inductive logic is nothing but the application of the intuition of patterns, i.e., expecting patterns expressed in the past to continue to be expressed in the future.
So where do we get these intuitions?
First notice something very peculiar about them, for it holds a clue to the answer. These intuitions are not only in human beings, but a latent understanding of them seems to guide behavior to some degree in all living things, even if only instinctually.
If young birds were not born with the ability to recognize patterns, they could never learn to navigate wind currents and thus learn to fly. In doing so, birds are actually demonstrating inductive reasoning, i.e., expecting the future to be like the past. And in order to recognize patterns, such birds must be born expecting to find them, and actively seeking them. Otherwise, they would never recognize them sufficiently to respond to them. Plants exhibit the same intuition when they send their roots in the direction they encountered water in the past. Sunflowers exhibit it when they turn their faces in the direction they encountered the sun on previous days, and will even anticipate this direction.
An animal could not learn anything if it wasn’t born expecting and seeking causes? If a child pulls on a cat’s tail, the cat spins around and makes a menacing hiss. Note it seeks the cause of the pain to prevent it from happening again.
Now in my past writing, I ridiculed the idea of relying on intuition as a legitimate justification for belief. I did so on two grounds. First, I felt that appeal to intuition was suspiciously anthropocentric, and seemed to be based solely on human conceit that people have some unique access to truth. Why should the world conform to human expectations? I now see that intuition is a much deeper thing, and even precedes the evolution of humans. So, I disavow my previous naĆÆve opinion that appeal to intuition is just human vanity.
The second reason I was averse to appeal to intuition is that I felt such a line of argument was a kind of circular reasoning. After all, what evidence do we have that our intuitions are true besides those very intuitions? For instance, if I were asked how I know all things have a cause, wouldn’t I simply appeal to my sense (intuition) that they do?
But I have changed my mind in this regard as well. Thinking about it more carefully, it occurred to me that if we didn’t have our innate intuitions, we could make no consistent coherent sense of our world. We couldn’t even make sense of the organization that our evolved perceptual schemas potentially grant to experience. For instance, perceiving things temporally through the schema of time requires more than the schema of time. It requires the capacity to meaningfully discern past from future and see the sense in which they are opposites. Our schemas are thus necessary but not sufficient to produce coherent experience. We must see through the schemas with intuition, or we could not make sense of what they grant.
And it began to occur to me that if our intuitions can be traced back to the earliest species, even before proper nervous systems, such as in plants, it seemed possible that the formation of the world was in fact predicated on intuition, and intuition is an intrinsic power of perception to coherently arrange what it constructs. This would explain the veracity of intuition when applied to the world. In other words, if intuitions allow us to perceive coherence, perhaps it is because they are part and parcel of the process by which the world was in fact coherently arranged. And if the world was formed upon the basis of the intuitions, the world would necessarily exist in conformity with them. For those intuitive structures are at least part of the structure of the world itself. This foundational role that intuitions play makes them infallible accounts of reality. In other words, they tell us the true logic of experience because they are the logic by which our experience was and is assembled.
The Limit of What Intuitions Can Tell Us
It’s important to see the limit of what intuitions can be used for. Like the logic predicated on our intuitions, our intuitions tell us no positive facts about the world. For instance, they can’t tell us if Johnny is a boy, only what it would imply if he were. They only create in us expectations of coherence, which in turn allow us to discriminate between true and false inferences. They tell us how to think, not what is true. The intuition that allows us to recognize that Johnny would have wings in a universe where boys all have wings, doesn’t tell us if Johnny is a boy, or if he has wings. It only allows us to recognize what would rationally follow if he did. It allows us to think consistently and rationally.
So how do we account for intuition? If the truth of the intuitions precedes even our own evolution, where do the intuitions come from? I believe that the original state of reality was latent intelligence. I explain this more in Chapter 12 when I go over what I see as the entire formative process again in more depth. It seems to me that intelligence that lacked the intuitions that give the capacity to discern truth could never be called intelligence.
I also expect that some of the intuitions I named above may be reducible to fewer or even a single intuition – a kind of key to the universe. For instance, the intuition of Balance might be based on an underlying intuition of the inviolable unity of Intelligence itself, which is the only reality. The intuition of this fundamental unity, which we unpack as concepts like Fairness, Justice, Mathematics, and Entropy, might actually be an expression of an innate knowledge that things begin and end in oneness. It is an innate knowledge that oneness amounts to the authentic state before apparent division by the schemas, and this innate knowledge is reflected in the intuitions. Another way to say this is, God, who is One and Indivisible, dreams He is many, only to remember His true identity and return to the reality of his own inviolable original Unity. The world is created through this principle, and the compulsion toward reunification compels evolution, and that is why we intuitively seek such unity in the world, which we express in the form of the intuitions. Things divide and separate in appearance but remain one in truth. What we experience as plurality is unity fictitiously unbundled by the schemas.
WHY THE PHENOMENAL WORLD AROSE
Let’s review what we’ve done.
So far, we’ve explained what philosophers never could, how the experiential world came into apparent existence – and why the process we described had to be how this happened. We explained that the human habit of inventing hypostases, under the misguided hope that such imaginary things would explain the world, was actually the obstacle to doing so. Not only did such hypostases fail to explain anything, they added to the sum of things to explain. From this confused way of trying to explain our experience, we got the infamous ‘mind-body problem,’ which we pointed out was really nothing more than an expression of the 'two-world problem,' an inevitable consequence of creating an occult second world to account for the one we see.
We showed what the solution to this problem had two parts. First, we had to clarify what it was we were actually trying to explain when we spoke of explaining the world. Without a hypostasis, we saw that it was actually our experiential world that needed explaining. For there is no reason to think there is any other. And secondly, we saw that we needed to posit a process to explain it. And since it is experience that we are explaining, and hence experience that had to have evolved, the evolutionary process we sought was a psychogenic one, not a physical one.
We then proposed just such an evolution, being careful to account for all the attributes of our experience, including some that philosophers were forced to ignore since they had no way to account for them. We did so by positing a series of evolving formative perceptual schemas. And we saw that we actually know a priori that this process had to have occurred this way, and no other. To show this, we isolated the intuition we use to determine it, most notably necessary preconditions. Then we went one step further and showed that we know – by that same intuition – that the order we proposed for the evolution of those perceptual schemas had to be correct, for order of evolution is determined by necessary preconditions.
We did all this simply by observing the world while at the same time reflecting on the operations of our mind when we did so. No magical thinking was required, such as inventing inexplicable invisible substances and forces, which amount to nothing more than nominal causes.
_______________
At this point we could declare our project finished. We’ve already accounted for much, much more than the old method could. However, I promised to go further than explain how the world came about and take up two higher-order questions. The questions themselves require some explaining.
Suppose someone pointed to something and asked you to explain it. ‘What’s the cause of that?’ he asks. The problem with this is that there is more than one thing that a person could be asking when asking for an explanation of something. He could be asking you to describe how that thing came to be, i.e., the process by which it was made. For instance, I could explain a tree by recounting the stages of its development from a seed. That’s the sense of explaining the world that we’ve already described above, the order of the schemas that one by one added to the content that added up to become the world.
We could call that sense of cause the ‘how’ of a thing, or in our case ‘how the world happened.’
But ‘how’ something happened does not exhaust what we sometimes mean by an explanation. Let’s say I ask a carpenter who has just finished building a house to explain its existence. He might answer by recounting the stages that a house must go through to be built (how it was built). But he might just as easily take you to be asking him to explain the purpose or function of a house, for isn’t that part of what caused it to be built? After all, if there had been no need for a house, would the house have been financed and built? Probably not.
We could call this second sense of explanation the ‘why’ of a thing. Applied to our own subject such a question amounts to asking ‘why the world happened.’
This second sense of what people mean by an explanation is one that the philosopher Aristotle called the final cause of a thing. Aristotle believed that in order for the world to be rational, all things that exist in it must serve some essential purpose or function in the great scheme of things. Knowing what that was, Aristotle believed, was an important part of explaining it – and in fact was the most important part.
Today people don’t think like Aristotle. Today such an approach to explaining things in terms of their purpose or function is known as a teleological concern.
Teleology: In philosophy, explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose such phenomena serve rather than by postulated causes.
Science no longer embraces the concept that we can discover any answer to the question of why things occurred. Science today is of the opinion that things do not have a purpose, but arise out of accidents – a notion known as order out of chaos.
But here we are going to embrace the teleological question, and go even further than Aristotle by asking why the universe came into its apparent being.
We begin by first arguing that there is nothing inherently irrational in asking this question. And then we are going to discuss the problems that arise from failing to ask them. Then we will be in a position to propose a purpose that is consistent with all we have said so far about how the universe came about.
Why the Teleological Question is a Rational One
Obviously, the question of why the universe formed is one that is beyond the scope of the scientific method. The scientific method is based on what can be observed. Science, which prides itself in being empirical, is thus limited to description. While it can observe regular correlations, and record what conditions lead to others, it has no way to say why any of this happens. It’s just not an empirical question. It’s a metaphysical one. Scientism is the 20th century trend in thinking that holds that the empirical method of science is the only legitimate avenue to truth. It holds that questions outside the purview of such a method are simply pseudo-questions. And thus, any question about the purpose of the universe would be relegated as just such a pseudo-question, an illegitimate question with no answer. This amounts to asserting that life has no purpose. Of course, such a claim would itself have no empirical basis. Thus, the claim that life is meaningless is a baseless metaphysical assertion. Those that propagate the attitude of scientism are out of their depth.
Such thinkers assert that their Big Bang, if there was such an event, had no purpose, and that evolution, if there was such an evolution, had to have been a series of random events, with no direction, the product of chance, and to have had no purpose. And yet, anyone who ponders the point will recognize there is no actual scientific basis for such an assertion. It’s simply a doctrine. There could never, even in principle, be an observation or logical argument that could prove there is no purpose for which the universe came into being. It's simply a programmatic position. They posit a world governed by accidents and coincidences and that’s the end of it.
I have wondered if the real reason science has impugned the notion of purpose has nothing to do with the problem of purpose, but is due to concern that such considerations are a slippery slope leading to Intelligent Design, the view in Christianity that the world shows signs of being designed, and hence there seemingly had to be a designer, implying God. If that’s the case, then the disregard for purpose is driven by an agenda, and not by scientific reasoning at all. A clue that this might be the case is in the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, directed by Nathan Frankowski and starring comedian Ben Stein. In the film Stein gets the famous atheist and science promoter Richard Dawkins to make a shocking admission. Dawkins admit he would have no objection to design underlying evolution if the designer were space aliens. His admission suggests that the aversion to Intelligent Design has less to do with design, and more to do with the designer.
I think we’ve established, then, that any assertion that there is no purpose behind the universe has no actual rational basis, and so there is nothing intrinsically irrational about asking what purpose the formation of the universe might serve. This book does not propose a form of Intelligent Design. How could it? It proposes a process by which thinking became possible. How could there have been a design before thought? But, while this book does not posit Intelligent Design, it does posit a reason that the world came into being. Before we discuss what that is, however, I would like to point out some of the problems that arise as a consequence of presupposing a purposeless universe.
Problem with Evolution by Accidents & Coincidences
The prevailing belief that things we perceive around us in nature, including ourselves in it, are the result of chance, accidents, and coincidences, has become so commonplace in our secular postmodern culture, that it has come to sound sophisticated. We wax aloud to our friends about high sounding ideas such as ‘order out of chaos,’ and feel we are talking about some breakthrough concept. I'm going to show that it's not as sophisticated as it sounds. Had Isaac Newton had such a view of nature, he never would have discovered the laws of motion, for his thinking was entirely predicated on his Aristotelian education and his holding that the world has rational order.
The best way to begin to see the problems that arise from accident-based creation is to first explain it properly. Rarely is the reductive materialist view of creation described correctly. The first thing we need to understand is that the world that the materialist is explaining is not the one you and I directly perceive. That world is merely the ‘experiential’ effect of the real world that you don’t directly experience. Your experiences supervene on chemical and electrical states by a process of supervenience that materialists don’t pretend to understand. So, the terms in the following description refer to the formation of an unperceived theoretical know-not-what, imagined in the likeness of its inexplicable experiential effect.
Of this causal external world that we can’t directly see, there was once an explosion called the Big Bang. If you picture this explosion, you are committing the fallacy of logical anachronism, because mental pictures supervene on brain states, which didn’t exist at the time of the Big Bang. Anyway, this explosion of the know-not-what occurred for no reason at all.
A hypostasis is an abstraction we can’t perceive, even in principle, that we treat or imagine like a physical thing. The Big Bang was one such hypostasis. As a result of this Big Bang, the inorganic world formed. The way this is imagined to have happened is that over a long period of hypostatic time, hypostatic particles of hypostatic matter expanded out into hypostatic space, and then gathered and coalesced into large hypostatic bodies in accord with totally inexplicable natural laws that conveniently preceded all this. No account is given for how these hypostases, imagined in the likeness of things we see in our brain states, came into their supposed occult existence. Rather, the materialist conception of creation is described in terms of them. So, the matter and energy and laws arose first for no reason, and then the hypostatic world formed out of them for no reason, by chance, coincidences, and accidents.
Here are some questions about natural laws it would be impolite to ask a materialist, lest one be chided for asking crazy questions. What are the natural laws ontologically? That means, what material do they consist of. If they are immaterial, what does that mean? How did they evolve? If they didn’t evolve, isn’t that a problem? How do such laws “govern” physical objects? What is the connection between an immaterial law and a material object? How does an immaterial law push, pull, or interact in any way with material objects? As natural laws are described in numbers, what are numbers, where are numbers, and how did they evolve? If you explain observed events in terms of laws and numbers, but can’t explain laws and numbers, have you explained observed events? This goes for every other attribute that materialists try to explain their hypostatic creation of the inorganic world in terms of, e.g. time, space, substance, motion, and existence. It’s all presupposed, unexamined, and unexplained.
Some adventurous materialists like to assert that time, space, natural laws, matter, and energy came out of the Big Bang. But the Big Bang is imagined as an energetic event in time and space. It is like imagining a bank robber entering a bank and emerging carrying the bank. And if the laws of nature came out of the Big Bang, by what laws of motion did they come out? Such people entertain themselves with words, but their imaginary creation is as problematic as an Escher drawing, entertaining but impossible.
And most damning of all is that the materialist has no explanation of consciousness, and hence has no way to explain how he consciously experiences the world from which he gathers his ideas. This is no small problem. Science claims to be based on observation yet has no account for the faculty it claims as its foundation. And even worse is the Behaviorist, who feigns his own anesthesia (unawareness) in order to evade this problem. He not only can’t explain his foundation, but, by his own account, has none.
Problem with Natural Selection as Control Mechanism of Evolution
There still is no accepted theory how organic life started. The assumption is that by some unknown set of coincidences certain unspecified chemicals came together, and then by some chemical reaction life began, a bit the way electrolytes ignite electricity in a battery. And then, by a few billion more coincidences, and thousands of inexplicable natural laws, a descendent of the first single celled organism woke up as an ape.
The control mechanism for this evolution was chance mutations coupled with natural selection. A mutation is an accidentally broken copy of a gene. Natural selection is the process by which nature weeds out mutations that are unbeneficial and leaves those with some survival advantage. This process of accidental mutations and undirected natural selection over a long enough period of time, the theory goes, accounts for all the animal species we see in nature, just as a room full of chimpanzees will type the works of Shakespeare if given enough time, paper, and ribbons.
So, from naturally selected birth defects, beautiful specimens evolved. Out of chaos came order, we’re told, and from a quintillion chance-mutations came the works of Homer and Plato. And here we are reading this book.
This emphasis of accidents is not an exaggeration. If even a single step in the 13-billion-year progression of steps that brought about the world was anything more than an accident, it would imply a scheme, a direction, a reason, a purpose, or some kind of intention. And science cannot allow this or it loses its claim of being natural, which in this case literally means ‘by accidents’ and not by providence or predetermination. Science is married to the notion of accidents as a bulwark against a perceived slippery slope toward Intelligent Design.
Now, when we hear materialists speak of the ‘selection’ of certain mutations over others, we mustn’t think they mean ‘select’ in its usual use, as implying a choice that was made. It’s rather a special kind of selecting?
The so-called selection of ‘good mutations’ is really just the effect of a truism about the relationship between biological traits and survival. In the computer game Skyrim there is a caption that sometimes appears on the screen that reads:
The best techniques are passed on by the survivors.
(Bethesda Game Studios)
The somewhat humorous caption reflects the fact that gamers who survive digital battles obviously have techniques superior to those who lose them, as evidenced by the fact that they survived them.
Darwinian evolutionary theory imagines the selection of genetic mutations along much the same lines, and by a similar truism.
The best genes are passed down by the survivors.
Obviously, the genes that are passed down by the survivors in a group of animals were genes conducive to survival.
At first this appears like a powerful argument for the case that evolutionary change might be the natural result of accidents, as opposed to following any predetermined pattern. Its appearance of power comes from the fact that it’s based on a tautology (a truism), and any tautology is known a priori. For instance, ‘a rose is a rose’ can’t really be wrong. Likewise, anyone who reflects on the truism that better traits are passed on more than others, will recognize intuitively that it could hardly be wrong. This is especially true if we define ‘better’ as ‘more survival-conducive.’ After all, anything that is more survival-conducive is obviously more conducive to survival. It’s true by definition of the words.
But there is something misleading in this thinking. While it’s obvious that animals that survive will be more likely to pass down their traits than those that die before they can, it’s not obvious that this has the slightest bearing on changes in shape of species over time.
It is just as possible that the best survivors in a population are the most representative of the paragon of that species. All that the tautology tells us is that the traits of individuals that survive are preserved by being passed down to future generations. There is no a priori reason to suppose that novel mutations will survive better than paradigm cases of the same species. It is not obvious that genetically anomalous specimens will be the most survivable. So it is not obvious that the fact that good traits survive is proof that mutations account for morphological change from one animal shape to another over time.
Let’s now explore how Darwin saw evolution occurring by natural selection. We’ll see how the thinking worked. We’ll then explore where Darwin really got his theory.
Ostensively, the effect of a gene in a population of animals is a physical trait in those specimens that express that gene. Physical traits that promote survival will obviously be more likely to get passed down to subsequent generations than traits that are less conducive to survival. The idea is that ones that lack the survival-enhancing trait will die off at a faster rate than those that have it, and eventually the ones with the superior trait will supplant those without it. That’s the sense of selection the materialists have.
In the 19th century Charles Darwin felt he saw this dynamic operating in nature in a particular way. Habitats of animals, he believed, contained limited resources. Different species competed for those same limited resources. In time, if some new trait appeared in a population that gave those that had it an advantage over its cousins in obtaining more of those resources, those without the trait would be starved to extinction. So, species don’t so much evolve (morph) into others, but rather new varieties with better survival traits replace older ones until the older ones are extinct. And this constant supplanting by better survivors gives the impression of change over time. So, Darwinian evolution is really a competition over finite resources, with winners that multiply and losers that go the way of the dodo.
If this scenario sounds oddly familiar, it’s not an accident. It’s very similar to laissez-faire capitalism. In fact, Darwin got this idea about life as a fight over limited resources from Thomas Malthus (1766 – 1834). Malthus was the chief economist for the East India Company, the world’s first corporation, and one of the most ruthless in history, trading in every vice from slavery to opium. The East India Company was the first to try to inventory the Earth’s resources, in order to more effectively own them, and it constantly sought ways to drive their competition out of business. They saw the universe in terms of an economy of living beings in an existential battle for finite resources.
Malthus’ famous 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he predicted that the world would be out of food by 1890 if its population were not curbed by disease, war, and famine, had a deep impact on Darwin, and greatly colored his interpretation of his observations of nature. The famous German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler explained this connection in his 1918 book The Decline of the West.
Darwin himself had remolded the evolution-ideas of the 18th Century according to the Malthusian tendencies of political economy, which he projected on the higher animal-world. Malthus had studied the cotton industry in Lancashire, and already in 1857, we have the whole system, only applied to men instead of to beasts, in Buckle’s History of English Civilization. In other words, the master-morale of this last of the Romantics is derived — strangely perhaps but very significantly — from that source of all intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory.
(Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West)
In other words, Darwin’s idea of the control mechanism of evolution being reducible to a competition over limited resources was not derived from observation. He projected it onto nature. It was a classic example of what is known in philosophy of science as theory-laden observation, observation prejudiced by one’s theories. The dynamic is eloquently described in Patterns of Discovery by Norwood Hanson (1959).
At the time of Darwin’s writing, very little was known of how ecosystems actually functioned. Biologists did not know the degree of mutual cooperation and symbiosis that different species actually exhibit. Today the notion of species driving each other to extinction the way corporations, driven by the bottom line, do, is a bit rich. The reader is encouraged to look up the Yellowstone Wolf Restoration Project of 1995, in which reintroduction of a natural predator, originally thought to be the cause of extinctions, actually enhanced populations of other species and made them healthier.
Isn’t there natural selection? Yes. We certainly find that weak and diseased specimens are more susceptible to predators than healthier ones. But instead of promoting change, such culling of the weak and defective members of a group actually promotes homeostasis in that group, not change. Consider the dragonfly that has remained morphologically identical for 300 million years though it is attacked by all kinds of bird and reptile predators. Or consider the alligator that has remained the same shape for 275 million years. Darwin never noticed such homeostasis as it didn’t fit his Malthusian narrative he was trying to impose on nature. While it is certainly a fact that all individual living things must struggle for their survival, we find a degree of harmony and homeostasis in nature that people of the 19th century simply never anticipated.
If the anarcho-capitalism envisioned by Darwin was really the control mechanism responsible for change from one species to another in evolution, we would actually expect to find a very different nature than we do. Looked at dispassionately, Darwin is really describing a numbers game, conceived by an accountant no less, where that colony of animals that produces the most offspring, that in turn survive to produce the most offspring, eventually supplants the less prolific breeders. Best breeder wins. In such a world, we would expect a killer-species that lived solely to breed, and needing the least resources, and supplant everything. Driving its last neighbor to extinction it would have inherited the Earth long ago. But no such thing happened.
I once gave an early version of my idea of evolving perception to a professor of mine. As she returned it a few days later she said “It all makes total sense. But why did it happen?” What’s strange about her reaction was that she was herself an atheist who believed in Darwinian evolution, which takes it on faith that there doesn’t need to be any reason for things to have come into being. So why did my account spark in her this question? It was clear she was asking it sincerely. Why did the materialist account of creation never prompt such curiosity in her? What if I had answered her, “Oh, well it was just chance.”? Why would that not have sufficed for my account, yet suffices every day for a Darwinian account? The reason is that no one takes Darwinian evolution seriously. It is so fundamentally grounded in the concepts of accidents, coincidences, chance, and luck, that it amounts to nothing much more than those things. So, the inquiring mind about such profound metaquestions as why and what eventually just shuts off.
With my idea, the curious mind switches back on suddenly and unexpectedly. It resonates so powerfully in the hearer as intuitive, that he can’t help but want to know what would make this happen. He really does want to know. And that wanting to know is a very big part of the idea itself, and hence is part of its confirmation that it’s true.
Are There Signs of Direction in Creation?
It’s strange that so few have asked a glaring question about nature. Might the struggle for survival that every living thing must endure be in service of some more important end, rather than an end in itself? In other words, might we creatures of this world be attempting to survive and produce progeny in order to survive until some higher purpose is achieved? If Darwin's assumed control mechanism of murderous competition is not born out by observation, might more impartial observation reveal evidence of something else compelling change over time? The answer is yes. It has to do with patterns.
Recently I was talking to a mathematician, who was very proud of his knowledge of Darwinian evolution. He felt others didn't understand it properly and was keen to correct them. When I mentioned something about a ‘higher’ species in evolution, he got upset. "There is no such thing as higher in evolution!" Apparently, he was quite tired of plebs claiming to see a progression in evolution, or what is called evolutionary directionality.
I know the concern he’s referring to. There is no assumption of anything being ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ in Darwinian/Malthusian evolution, because its principle of accidents precludes it. In fact, we could sum up Darwinian evolution in three simple concepts: gradualism, random mutation, and natural selection. The key operative word here is ‘random.’ If most new forms appearing during an era of evolution grouped together according to some supposed predetermined pattern, such as move toward bipedalism, and never back from bipedalism to quadrupedalism, that would imply a scheme or direction. It would go against the assumption of randomness. A series of events is random only when it has no direction or pattern.
To understand why my mathematician friend was angered by my reference to certain forms being ‘higher’ than others in evolution, it helps to keep in mind that the essential principle in materialism is accidents. Evolution is accidental, random, and has no pattern or direction. Random chance mutations occur equally among all species all the time, in all ‘directions,’ continually, with no pattern by which to measure anything like ‘progress.’
So, what do we take from this? It’s an inviolable doctrine of materialism that there are no patterns in the evolutionary record. Any perception of them is a case of pareidolia, a psychological condition where someone perceives a pattern where none exists. There is no pattern for there can be no pattern. The supposed control mechanism of accidents precludes it as a mathematical possibility.
The problem is, there is a pattern in evolution. And perception of it cannot be explained away as pareidolia.
Consciousness is constantly increasing from the beginning to present in evolution, and never decreasing. When you look at the fossil record of evolution and consider the actual order in which each species first appeared on the Earth, what we find is an unbroken increase in sentience and capacity to perceive over time. Every form that ever appeared on the Earth was more conscious of its world than its forebears, and could perceive and process more of it, and never, ever less.
That is not simply a projection of some anthropomorphic trait onto nature. There is no counterexample. The fact that consciousness always increased and never decreased is an undeniable fact. Mammals are less conscious than humans, birds less, reptiles less, fish less, grubs less, and plants least. Measured by their electrical responses, plants demonstrate at least some awareness of their environment.
Such an unbroken increase in a single trait over a span of 1.5 billion years of biological evolution is, with no exception, is a pattern.
Pattern: a regular and intelligible sequence
Presented with such a pattern, a Darwinian evolutionist will attempt to the appearance of consciousness gave any species that had it a selective advantage over others, such as giving the creature greater ability to react to its environment than his competitors, and thus live to produce more offspring. But such an after-the-fact theory to save a theory is called an ad hoc hypothesis. No number of such theory-saving hypotheses can explain away the anomaly. It does not explain why the evolution of less conscious dragonflies ceased 300 million years ago, while fully conscious humans arose from the very dumb Australopithecus in only the last 3.
No such constant trajectory of a single trait can be accounted for under Darwinian principles, and even an ad hoc theory about the advantage of increased sentience on survival wouldn’t help. Because those principles include a necessary presumption of randomness and lack of direction, which absolutely precludes the statistical anomaly that a pattern would be stringently adhered to over a billion-year period without exception. The materialist has absolutely no way to address this problem. It is a core principle of Darwinism that evolution is random, directionless, occurs by accidents, and thus cannot, by definition, exhibit long-term steady uninterrupted patterns in particular directions. And that’s why my mathematician friend objected to my reference to a ‘higher’ species in evolution.
We have explained that experience of the world is the world, and its emergence in appearance is only explicable as an evolution of perception itself. Grasping this allows us to see what is actually happening over the span of biological evolution, as new and newer ever-more-complex forms are unfolded. Each novel physiology that arises in evolution, with its improved nervous system, contributes more content to that evolving phenomenal world. Each umwelt is richer than its forebear. First there is inorganic evolution. Then, out of that inorganic substratum organic forms evolve. And then, through the media of increasingly sensitive nervous systems, substance in the form of color, sound, smell, and feel is intersubjectively added to the evolving percept.
The word 'evolve' comes from the Latin word evolvere, which means ‘to unfold.’ The evolution of ever-more-conscious forms, first inorganic and then organic, can be understood, then, as an unfolding of something that was latent, rolled up as a mere potential. Evolution understood this way can be viewed as a rolling out of the phenomenal world. Each increase in the sensory faculty of the evolving form adds detail and clarity to the evolving world – the byproduct of that perceptual evolution. So that not only do these new evolving forms arise in that phenomenal world, but they contribute to the unfolding of that very phenomenal world by way of their increasingly sensitive nervous systems and increased awareness. And by this sympathetic process the world arises and comes into focus, ultimately with us in it.
And with each new development in complexity of experience, the degree of awareness also increases, until, in humans, consciousness is full and complete.
And what do we find in homo sapiens? Human beings are so fully conscious of their world and their presence in it that they can begin to introspect into their own individual thoughts and abstract out of them the byproducts of their own evolution in the form of the mathematical schemas and laws that produced the world and them.
So, was this ‘awakening’ the ultimate purpose of this unfolding of consciousness? Was the goal simply to reach the vantage from which perception could finally, at the apex of its own ascent, turn around and wonder at his own existence? Clearly not. For if that were so, men would feel complete. And men are miserable.
For the ultimate goal and purpose, we will have to look further.
Meher Baba’s Idea of Purpose Introduced here as a Retroductive Proposition
While the unfolding of consciousness does seem to be the best candidate for what drove evolution forward, and the struggle to survive only a secondary aim in service to it but not the end in itself as Darwin and Malthus assumed, it still is not the goal.
Remember that in retroductive logic a person doesn’t begin with observations and come to a hypothesis. Rather he begins with a hypothesis and then looks for observable facts that support it.
But where do we get such a hypothesis?
In such a method it is irrelevant where it comes from. It could be a guess, like Newton's guess about gravity, or it could be an offhand suggestion from a friend. It is the hypothesis that’s important, not where it came from. We are going to take our hypothesis from the 20th century mystic Meher Baba, whose writing is in English and frequently clear, for a mystic. I justify my consideration of his ideas on the basis of retroduction.
Whether or not one believes Baba is a true master of spiritual status is irrelevant. It is his ideas on trial here, not him.
So, let’s look at what Meher Baba had to say about the subject of purpose, which is our current concern.
The subtitle of Meher Baba’s main book is The Theme and Purpose of Creation. If there is another modern book that so directly addressed this topic of purpose I don’t know about it.
Our question is, why did this world come into its phenomenal existence with us in it? Why are we here? Albert Einstein once pondered this very question.
Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose.
(Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies)
Here is Meher Baba’s answer.
He begins by explaining basically the same concept as the perceptual schemas, which he referred to by the Sanskrit word sanskaras. These sanskaras, he says, are psychogenic in nature and color how experience is interpreted and thereby dictate actions. He then describes a progression of forms that evolve over the course of evolution, much as I have done in this book. Like me he says this evolution of higher and higher forms is a byproduct of a more fundamental evolution of sanskaras. The purpose of this evolution has two parts. The first is the production of consciousness, which is achieved fully only in the human form. At the human form he says physical evolution comes to an end, as its first purpose of producing full consciousness has been achieved.
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, Awakener Magazine)
People are conditioned by their Darwinian upbringing, which says that evolution has no direction or purpose. And so, they will object to the claim that physical evolution ends with humans. However, there is quite a lot of evidence this is the case. One is the fact that Human DNA has not changed in 200,000 years, and that there is more genetic variation among chimpanzees than in all modern humans. For more evidence, see Appendix 2.
But according to Meher Baba consciousness is only a necessary precondition for a greater aim. For Baba, in the beginning, there was unconscious God, and by the travail of the evolution of consciousness, God awakens and finds himself (in each person) searching, but not knowing what he’s searching for. Ultimately, after many lives as a man or a woman in various apparent situations, he realizes that it was His own identity as God, the dreamer of the universe, he sought, and it was for such knowledge that the world came into apparent existence. He calls this goal ‘God-Realization.’ This, in a nutshell, is what Baba says is the theme and purpose of creation.
So, it is really God Himself who achieves God-Realization in every individual when he achieves it. Where some theologians describe God as a person, Meher Baba would probably call God the person. Each individual is thus an expression of the single Divinity, and each fresh experience of Realization occurs really for God experiencing Himself as that individual. We could liken this to a man dreaming that he is at a card game with many men. All the while he is experiencing this dream, it is he alone who is the indweller in each card player in the dream. The realization by the dreamer that he is in a dream, and then awakening to find it was he himself and he himself alone that was the sole dreamer, is comparable to God-Realization.
Baba says that many of those great human beings that people take as the masters and teachers of the ages were those that achieved such God-Realization, and who returned to the dream to help others who are prepared to be guided to realize their own divinity.
Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)
So, according to Meher Baba, the ultimate reason that the world came into apparent existence with us in it was God-realization.
The happiness of God-realization is self-sustained, eternally fresh and unfading, boundless and indescribable. It is for this happiness that the world has sprung into existence. (Meher Baba, God Speaks, 141)
Testimony of Facts Discovered by Introspection are Not Unprecedented
There is no way to know if this really is the theme and purpose of Creation. But are there any accepted principles of reason by which we might reasonably consider Meher Baba’s claim and remain epistemologically respectable? I think there are two. The first has to do with testimony, and the second with pragmatism. We’ll discuss each.
What I’ve described above is Meher Baba’s testimony of what he believed was the reason the universe came into being, roughly paraphrased by me. Whether one accepts it or not, it is at least an answer. I have never heard of any other. There are other explanations of how the universe came into being, but I don’t know of another account of to what end it did. So, if we are not to start with a consideration of Meher Baba’s claim, I don’t know where we would otherwise begin. So, considering what Baba had to say is at least reasonable on that ground.
Where did Meher Baba say he got this idea? Had he been asked he would have said he experiences it every moment, and that he was himself God-Realized. His story goes as follows. When he was 19 years old, bicycling home from college, a Muslim Saint named Babajan who made her home under a tree in the middle of the street called him over to her and kissed him on the forehead. He said later he became instantaneously dazed, but made it home to his bed in his parents’ house. Several days later he had a vision in which he saw the whole world made of souls coming out of himself and circling around and coming back into him. The vision makes sense in light of his cosmology, in which the universe is a journey from the Self unconsciously and then a return to the Self in full consciousness, and each soul in Creation partook in this. He then said that Babajan had imparted God-Realization to him through her kiss. Much as Buddha’s mission seems to have been to convey his realization of the eight-fold path he had under the bodi tree, Baba’s appeared to be to convey this sweeping vision.
Later spent seven years in the care of a Hindu saint named Upasni Maharaj, before parting and gathering his own followers in 1922. His fullest expression of this idea of the theme of Creation is in his 1955 book God Speaks.
So, the account is Meher Baba testimony to us of what he claimed to experience. Is there precedence for accepting what others discover internally? Actually, quite a bit. Just as it is traditional to trust the testimony of explorers who go ahead of others, it is traditional to trust the testimony of those who make internal discoveries. Consider for instance the fact that the entire Christian faith is firstly grounded in the testimony of Jesus of his father’s Kingdom. But it is not unique to religion to trust others who report what they find through insight. Men have long relied on the testimony of internal observations of logicians and mathematicians. All of mathematics is based on maxims discovered by mathematicians while concentrating internally about non-physical abstract relationships. And for that matter, the logic of materialism, what little there is of it, is based on the testimony of philosophers like Aristotle and John Locke introspecting about the possible nature of reality.
Remember that 99% of what we claim to know we learned from testimony. Meher Baba claims to be experiencing something that we all could if we introspected far enough. So at least in practice it is not so different than the testimony of the great mathematician, whose realizations we can or cannot personally follow, and often simply accept their conclusions. So, reliance on testimony is not just respectable, it’s actually an unavoidable way of learning. Remember too that logic is silent on whether our premises are true. They can only determine consistency.
Pragmatic Virtue of Virtue
There is another reason to consider what Meher Baba says. There is a school of epistemology called pragmatism.
Pragmatism came into fashion in the 19th century and remains a dominant form of justification of belief when observation cannot help. When choosing between competing beliefs, pragmatists point out that it is entirely rational to appeal to the potential consequences of such beliefs. The maxim of pragmatism is, ‘Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception.’ Pragmatists call the practical effects of a belief its pragmatic virtues. Pragmatic virtues of a system of beliefs include, for example:
Its explanatory power: Does the system explain phenomena better than other systems?
Its simplicity: Does the system explain the same phenomena in a simpler way than its competition? Simpler explanations are more plausible than complex ones.
One possible virtue of a system of belief that I have always felt was missing from the writing of modern pragmatists is the moral implications of a theory. What are the societal moral implications of a belief system? Is widespread belief in a system of explanation more likely to improve or harm the people in a society? Some theories are conducive to unimaginable cruelty and injustice, such as Logical Behaviorism. The United States government hired Ph.D. logical behaviorists to write white papers to justify CIA-developed forms of torture at Guantanamo Bay known as ‘enhanced interrogation.’ The Behaviorists did so by denying that personal suffering is ontologically real because it was subjective. They only counted external tissue damage that could be viewed on the surface of a prisoner as torture, in accord with their reductive materialist belief system. Similarly, Darwinian evolution was used to justify Nazi war crimes including sadistic medical experiments. Yet, other views of life are conducive to harmonious and virtuous existence. Jesus claim that we are all children of God and his entreatment to love one’s neighbor as oneself is a prime example. Baba's description of an underlying divine unity and common purpose of all beings in Creation is another.
I call this the pragmatic virtue of virtue.
Meher Baba’s vision of reality, if embraced by humanity, might have the practical effect of making people feel like part of a single divine whole with a shared purpose, and not enemies and competitors.
And remember that explanatory power is a virtue. Currently there is not even a guess why the Universe came into being, but lots of people pretending to want to know.
While such virtues do not prove the purpose, we have reproductively introduced and considered, they are certainly a perfectly respectable rational justification for their consideration.
WHAT SPARKED THE RISE OF THE PHENOMENAL WORLD?
So, if we accept Meher Baba’s suggestion for the function of Creation being God-Realization, as at least a provisional answer to the question of why the world came into existence, we still have one more question to answer. What might have initiated such a process? This is the second sense of why. If the world came into existence in order for God to realize Himself, what caused this process to begin? What was its catalyst? This is our final question. The rest of this book will be dedicated to covering the process in greater detail and discussing the implications of such a radical new way of looking at reality.
It is an inborn intuition in all of us that things have a cause. I saw a video of a little boy who was born deaf. As the result of an electronic implant in his ear, his hearing was suddenly restored. His sense of hearing came on with the flip of a switch by a doctor. Then his mother called to him. Shocked by the sensation of his mother’s voice, he looked for about for its source, his eyes swelling with fear and hope. Then, seeing it was her, he jumped in her arms and buried his crying face in her shoulder. What a tear-jerker that was! My point in recounting this story is to point out that the boy's very first reaction to a new sensation was to look for its cause. We are born expecting to find causes, and it is by the innately understood principle of cause and effect that we make sense of our world. It is an innate intuition that cannot be learned.
Aristotle was so certain that all change must have a cause, that he denied that the world had a beginning. For if something caused the world, something else must have caused that, and so on in an infinite regress? So, he concluded that the world must have always existed.
But this doesn't conform to our intuitions either. So, what's wrong here?
Consider the notion of a causal chain. This one is from a medieval proverb called ‘For Want of a Nail’:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a nail.
The parable conveys the sense we have that outcomes are explainable in terms of chains of causes and effects.
In truth, the loss of a kingdom is more likely the result of many causal chains intersecting at some point in time. However, if we traced every chain of causes backward, we would expect to come to some first catalyst in the beginning of time, and we might call it the ‘first cause.’ If such a first causal event really occurred, we could reasonably say that it was what was truly responsible for the universe. If God-realization is the aim of all these causal chains, what initiated them? Remember that we are describing a psychogenic world, and hence that first event must have been psychological one. Meher Baba's answer to this difficult question is that the initial psychological event was a ‘whim.’ By definition, a whim has no cause.
Whim after all is a whim; and, by its very nature, it is such that “why—wherefore—when” can find no place in its nature.
(Meher Baba, God Speaks, 83)
Saint Augustine considered the possibility that the reason God created the world was simply that He had a whim to do so. But he rejected this idea on the basis that a whim is irrational, since an act without a reason could never be called a rational act. For Augustine, such irrationality would be a sign of imperfection, and so beneath God.
But Augustine’s definition of relationality was too narrow. Isaac Newton thought of universal gravitation on a whim. Yet none would call him irrational.
As Meher Baba pointed out, whimsicality is uniquely the mark of independence.
To exercise a whim is always the mark of an independent nature, because it is whimsicality that always colours the independent nature. (Ibid.)
When something causes you to do something, you are not really the cause of that act, but that which caused you to do it is. Your act is conditioned. In our system perceptual schemas condition our actions, and hence our responses are determined. We are not acting freely, for our schemas dictate our actions. It follows, therefore, as Baba points out, that the only truly free act is one for which there is no cause, and that is necessarily the act that occurred before there were any schemas to determine it. And that belongs solely to God in his original pristine schemaless state. Before there were any schemas, perception was unconditioned, free, and independent. Our perceptions are conditioned, and our actions determined. So, only a whim could have been free to act in the beginning. And freedom is hardly an imperfection in the way Augustine was concerned.
Thus, according to Meher Baba, no catalyst is required for the original whim of God to seek his own identity.
The infinitude of the God-Is state made God absolutely independent, and by virtue of being absolutely independent it is but natural for God to exercise His infinite whim to experience and enjoy His own infinity. (Ibid.)
Much earlier we brought up the question, ‘How could this whim have taken place before time?’ The answer to this is that it didn't. The impression of time was a consequence of the original whim, and hence it is the one thing that happened that did not happen in time but caused time. And as it did not occur in time, it is occurring eternally. Yes! The whim to know is occurring in every animate and inanimate thing, compelling it, and propelling it forward, according to Meher Baba.
THE NEW COSMOLOGY OUTLINED IN FULL
About halfway into Chapter 8, we gave an abbreviated description of the process that created the phenomenal world, i.e., the world we experience and enjoy. We promised to eventually give an unabbreviated version of the same – and this is it. As has been pointed out, to truly explain the presence of the experiential world we must account for all of the aspects of that experience, and not just a few while leaving others mysterious. This is a big project and cannot be condensed past a certain point. It will thus necessarily be longer than most of the other chapters and be occasionally more difficult.
What are some examples of the kinds of aspects of experience I’m referring to? Obviously, we must account for both the mental and the physical aspects, as both are present in our experience. This means the so-called inner thoughts and sensations as well as outer concrete objects. This includes giving an account of the objective given situation that is shared by all who care to observe, as well our private subjective judgements and interpretations of that given situation. And our account must explain how these two categories of our experience came about.
We must also explain the conditions of attributes. For instance, if we wish to account for mathematics, we must first explain how we got number. To explain geometry, we must first explain how we got space. And to explain our linguistic thought we must first explain how language became possible and what language essentially is. To explain concrete objects, we must do more than explain how we come to experience them but also explain how those things obtained their concreteness and what such concreteness actually is.
And in keeping with the main thesis of this book, we must do all this without resorting to any hypostases. It is not enough to do like the idealists and posit minds or do like the materialists and posit a material substance we cannot see, but we must account for those qualities and dynamics that people assign words like mind and matter to.
If this account sounds different from the first in Chapter 8 it is because we include more.
IN THE BEGINNING, before time and space, before thought, before logic and language, before number or shape or direction or opposites, and before distinction of any kind, there was unlimited intelligence. The reason this intelligence was unlimited was that it came before, and thus did not fall within the scope of, any limiting schema. Since there was no limit, such intelligence was infinite, for infinite means without limit. Hence, hereafter we will refer to Infinite Intelligence.
Though the Infinite Intelligence existed before time and space, it continues to exist. This is because this Intelligence precedes time, and therefore transcends time, and time is a necessary condition for something being and then ceasing. So, this Infinite Intelligence abides in the eternal present. It transcends the scope of the conditions that would allow it to fade, decay, or cease.
To speak of Infinite Intelligence as 'an' intelligence is logically errant. For the indefinite article 'an' implies the Intelligence is one token of a certain type of which there are many. In other words, it implies there are many intelligences. But the Intelligence is infinite, and nothing can displace the infinite, and thus its infinity precludes there being a second. So, it is not 'an intelligence,' but ‘The Infinite Intelligence,’ the one without a second.
The ancient Greeks referred to the Intelligence as Nous or Logos. It is likely that even more ancient people had a concept like it. The age and etymology of both words remain unknown.
The Infinite Intelligence was, is, and will always remain the only Reality. All that we perceive in the world of phenomena, both mentally and physically, is appearance only, and the result of a long evolution of ways of perceiving by the Infinite Intelligence, which we are. Nothing was ever really created by, came out of, or was added to the Infinite Intelligence. All that ever appeared to be created by it or added to it existed in appearance only, just as a dream adds nothing of substance to a dreamer.
There are two things we do not mean by Infinite Intelligence. Infinite Intelligence does not denote the concept of a mind or consciousness. What people call mind (as in, ‘she was on my mind’) is just thought and memory. But the Infinite Intelligence precedes thoughts and memories, and even the distinctions that make them possible, such as time, space, and opposites. And we do not mean consciousness, which here is defined as awareness. In fact, explaining how the Infinite Intelligence becomes aware is a large part of this book. Suffice it to say, then, that the Infinite Intelligence precedes even consciousness, and thus cannot be said to be either conscious or unconscious, as it precedes even the meaning of such a distinction.
We also do not imply that the Infinite Intelligence was the possession of anyone or anything before the beginning of time. Such notions, common to theories such as Intelligent Design, commit the fallacy of imagining something existing before the conditions necessary for its existence. For instance, to have a design one must be able to think and plan, and to think and plan requires language, and language requires the schemas of time and reference, and so on. So, when we speak of the Infinite Intelligence we speak of it as all in all, and not a possessor of intelligence or a faculty of something.
Now, as the Infinite Intelligence precedes time, space, opposites, and distinctions of all kinds, it follows that It is absolutely indivisible, i.e., cannot be divided or segmented. One cannot break intelligence into halves or quarters. There cannot be two or three or four intelligences. For intelligence is not a thing or a substance, which can be divided. Nor is it extended over time or space that can be divided. Rather it is the necessary precondition for the appearance of things and substances and space and time. Hence the intelligence in me, and the intelligence in you the reader, and the intelligence of a worm crawling along the ground, are the same One indivisible Infinite Intelligence.
The Infinite Intelligence is the sole witness to any experience. All perception occurs from the vantage of the Infinite Intelligence, and any apparent separation of witnesses is in appearance only. So, what is it that gives us our appearance of being separate? The answer is the schemas. The same Infinite Intelligence, perceiving through certain schemas, takes itself to be me writing these words, and, perceiving through different schemas, you reading them.
Now before the evolution of the schemas, there was obviously nothing to perceive. Yet even though there was nothing to perceive, intelligence included many capacities, or it could never be called intelligence. These include the capacity to perceive, to frame what is perceived in different ways, to cognize, construe, compare, differentiate, imagine, and so forth. But of course, a necessary condition of all of these capacities being actuated is consciousness. Before the beginning, these capacities were only latent.
So how can there be intelligence that is not awake and conscious, and able to imagine and perceive its imaginings? To conceive of this, think of a baby in its mother's womb. It has never experienced anything, and so has no words or thoughts or memories to contemplate, and yet it has the capacity to experience these things. So, even without hearing or seeing, its capacity to interpret and organize sound and color are latent in it, even though such a capacity will only be awakened when it becomes aware of the world.
So, what caused the first instance of perceiving?
It is the nature of Intelligence to desire knowledge. We would hardly call anything that didn’t, intelligent. But in the beginning the Infinite Intelligence was not aware of its nature. Hence, Meher Baba says, it so happened that there was an original first urge to know in the Infinite Intelligence, and the fact that this urge manifested in the Intelligence should not be surprising, as it is in the nature of Intelligence to want to know. And yet, since Intelligence is all that is, there was nothing for Intelligence to know but Itself. Hence when it so happened that it began to seek to know, it had no way of knowing at that moment that it was itself that it was seeking to know, and would only realize this in hindsight.
And so, when this desire to know awoke in the Infinite Intelligence, it was for no reason other than to express its own intrinsic nature. Hence, there was no external cause to this first seeking, such as an event in time or a motion in space. The original urge to know is, therefore, explainable only in terms of its logical necessity, and not as the effect of some outward catalyst, which could not have existed.
And since it occurred before time, and not in time, it actually occurs eternally and is continually occurring in us. It could never end in time, as the appearance of time itself is its effect. We will explain how this effect occurred in a moment. So, the urge to know occurs eternally, and it goes on reverberating and expanding like ripples in a pond, and we feel it in our own urge to know truth, to the degree that the Infinite Intelligence has awakened in us.
When I speak of the Infinite Intelligence first perceiving a certain way, be aware there is nothing to perceive in that way. If it helps, then, one can substitute the word ‘perceive’ with 'imagine.' Whether one chooses to use the word ‘imagine’ or ‘perceive,’ it is all the same at this stage in the process, as the dimensions that would later make sense of the demarcation did not yet exist at this stage.
The first perceptual schema was time. The schema of time emerged as part and parcel with the initial urge to know. For this initial urge caused the Infinite Intelligence to seek, which one can compare to one who peers into a void. Whether this peering was ‘out’ or ‘in’ has no meaning, as there was no space. This peering was an act of trying to know what there might be to know, i.e., to perceive what might exist. And that first straining into the void gave to the Infinite Intelligence its impression of a first moment in time and a moment that followed, for though there was no actual time the event gave the impression of time, and this new way of framing all subsequent experience was preserved as a kind of lens. For the initiation of the urge gave to Intelligence its sense of before and after it occurred.
In short, as the result of the first urge to know, the first schema of time was formed. The influence of this first schema of time upon all that would ever after be perceived can be likened to a lens that appears before the pupil of an eye.
Meher Baba compares the vantage point from which this initial urge occurred, and subsequent arising of the appearance of time, to the pupil of an eye. The comparison to the pupil of an eye conveys that everything that would ever appear and appear to go on expanding after the initiation of the urge, was a subjective experience from the vantage point of the one witness. So, the point of creation is really a subjective point of perspective from which illusion appears, and not an objective point in space as imagined by proponents of the Big Bang Theory. The creation point only takes on its sense of being a locus in space in our imagination in relation to what later appeared through the evolving schemas. In other words, this sense of a point from which experience “appeared and went on expanding” (Meher Baba, 9) was not a point in space, as there was no space. But as more and more appeared to be created from its perspective it came to experience itself as a point surrounded by its Creation.
All perceiving by every apparent creature in the universe is occurring right now from this single vantage point, although it does not appear to us as such, due to the contribution of the schemas we have since acquired that give the appearance of being many and spread apart.
Since the creation point emerges after the emergence of the schema of time but before the schema of space, it is omnipresent. It is unlimited. This creates a paradox that Meher Baba elaborates on. What we experience as infinite is really nothing and nowhere, and this vantage point that seems almost nothing is the real everything. The point is in fact the true everything, while apparently infinite phenomenal space is really nothing.
So, the first urge to know coincided with the first perceptual schema, which was the schema of time, which thereafter gave to all subsequent experience its appearance of being in time, even though initially there was nothing yet to be perceived as such.
So, from then forward you have not just Infinite Intelligence as all in all, but the act of perceiving in time.
The act of perceiving occurred with no subject or object. Think of seer and seen and then think of what occurs between seer and seen. That is what was. This will make sense later, and will be recognized as necessary, when we show how perceiving produced its own subject and object through the schemas.
So, what is a perceptual schema? The image I use for it, an eye peering through a lens, is only a metaphor. But we have something definite in mind psychologically. A perceptual schema is a way of perceiving. It is nothing more than that. It alters what is perceived by changing how it is framed or organized. We could even define it simply as ‘seeing as.’
The first change in the manner of perceiving was to perceive temporally. We call this the first perceptual schema, the perceptual schema of time. It is the first way of organizing experience. This first schema of time gave rise to the appearance of things occurring in sequence. What appears to us as a succession of events over time, is really nothing more than a way of organizing experience, both experience of thoughts and outer events. And this organization of perception evolved before we evolved, and hence we can be said to have evolved ‘in time.’ What we call the dimension of time is in fact the immediate effect of the schema of time, through which all experience is organized since the beginning of time.
The world was, and remains, nothing but the experiential effect of the Infinite Intelligence perceiving through a congeries of such perceptual schemas that evolved sequentially over the course of time following the advent of time. Each schema adds some quality to the sum of the content of things perceived. Of course, by itself, the schema of time granted no content to experience. As we have already said, when a new perceptual schema emerges in perception, it brings a new quality or attribute to any potential appearance. However, when the very first schema evolved in perception, there was nothing to schematize as such. It would require many more perceptual schemas to be added to the first to begin to produce the first subtle content of experience, but when it would appear, it would appear to exist in time.
So, is there any proof that this schema of time exists? Of course. Every event that we experience in time is evidence that this schema had to have once formed and that it continues to condition all experience for everyone. From the moment you open your eyes in the morning, you experience things as occurring in time. That is the proof of the existence of the perceptual schema of time.
A polemicist might object to my calling our experience of things occurring over time as proof of the schema of time, saying that I presuppose a schema of perception is the cause of the aspect of our experience we call time. He would be correct, in so much as I have simply reframed how we interpret what time is. But what alternative might he have? As an alternative he will have no choice but to argue for the existence of a hypostasis, either a fabric imagined in the likeness of things perceived in time, or a so-called ‘dimension,’ a word that simply means measurement but says nothing of what is measured. Not only will such a polemicist not be able to explain what these words denote beyond an aspect of experience which they clearly are, but he will have no way to explain how such hypostases arose in nature. More importantly, he will be incapable of explaining how such a hypostasis produces in us our experience of things in time.
The difference between my idea of time, as a way of perceiving, and the hypostasis of my polemicist is that I can point out that time persists right where I say it is, in my experience. And he, who imagines it existing beyond the scope of his experience, and independent of his experience, cannot show it. So, since the polemicist cannot produce the fabric or dimension he insists exists, who is it that is really presupposing?
I would like to point out that no experience could ever occur divorced from time. To remove time is to remove experience. For an experience without duration, at least a nanosecond in which it occurs, is no experience at all.
The perceptual schema of time at once gave rise to the potential for mathematics. Time is divisible, and divisibility entails set theory in principle. And all mathematics is reducible to set theory.
The next perceptual schema that evolved was space. The dimension of space was thus added to the overall gestalt. And just as we can verify the presence of the schema of time by discovering it as a condition of our experience, we can verify that space had to have also evolved in our experience for we find it conditioning our experience also. Space entails the possibility of distinguishing size and separation. And this attribute does not just apply to outer objects of sense, but space is found as a condition of our dreams and fantasies as well. Anything that can be pictured in imagination is pictured in terms of space.
If we apply mathematics to space, we get geometry, and mathematical objects and arrangements can be conceived in terms of it.
Inorganic Evolution
The schema of space brought still more organizational content to the original mathematical potential that the divisions of time created. For instance, relations between time and space made the experience of motion possible. For motions can be understood solely as ratios of time and space. For instance, we describe the motion of a car as 60 miles per hour; that is a ratio of space and time. And thus, with time and space mathematical equations governing place, speed, direction, motion, and natural laws became possible. And these laws became added to the congeries of the previous schemas, further enriching the potential for the content of experience.
We find such natural laws governing motion still today, in gravity, electromagnetic fields, the pathways of electrons, and so on. These laws are, in fact, inherent attributes of our perception. Laws of nature are laws of perception. They are evolved perceptual schemas. All we potentially see through their organization conforms to them, and it is not possible to perceive physical objects that don’t. It is only because the laws of nature govern perception that they appear to each perceiver to govern the objects he perceives. Such perceptual schemas are the preconditions of perceiving motion in nature. This is why we can find no external cause for these laws. We can compare this to a man who can't find the cause of his shadow until he realizes that he himself is casting it.
Once again, as before, our evidence that such schemas had to have evolved in perception, is that we cannot perceive any physical object that isn’t governed by them. Try. They survive in our perception today. Pick up an object and drop it. You will perceive it fall in accordance with a precise equation first discovered by Isaac Newton. Newton’s equation is the perceptual schema of gravity operating in your experience.
So, it is the organizational influence of our schemas that produce the laws found in nature. Yet there is another reason that objects and their motions conform to such laws. The objects that conform to those laws actually supervene upon those laws. Those laws are part of what constitute those objects. How could there be an atom divorced from the laws of attraction and repulsion that bind it together? How could there be a moon divorced of gravitation? It is those very laws that arrange and organize these things into the things they are. And so, if we find them operating in accord with those laws upon which they supervene, it should hardly be surprising.
Now it is a material fact that all physical reality can be described in mathematics. Every object can be objectively described in terms of its geometry, every frequency in terms of hertz, every motion in terms of ratios between duration and distance, every natural law in the form of an equation, and so on. Every quantity, shape, size, weight, density, mass, location, or velocity can be described in numbers. In fact, if enough mathematical data were known about the whole physical universe, every happening in it could be predicted in terms of physical laws, which are in turn reducible to number. At the stage of evolution of the universe that we would call inorganic, i.e., the world before the rise of living organisms, no physical fact was outside of such a mathematical realm.
The inorganic world was, then, a purely mathematical one, one devoid of any kind of substantive impression. It was a world without color, taste, odor, sound, or texture. It would only later appear to take on these perceived attributes as the sensoria of living things later began to translate the mathematical into such qualities.
What do I mean by a world with no substance? It is one with mathematical objects, but not tangible or sensible ones. For instance, in purely mathematical terms a cube is nothing but a symmetrical shape, defined in terms of height, width, and length, and composed of six equal squares. It is not a cubical object you can pick up and feel and see.
I have long thought that the younger generations, raised on a diet of virtual reality in the form of computer games, is in a unique position to grasp the concept of a world that, on one level, is nothing but ones and zeros operating by algorithms, and on another level appears as moving colors and sounds. If we spoke of the ones and zeroes on the computer console as a substratum upon which the latter supervenes, I think the younger generation would know what I meant.
In this book I refer to this mathematical substratum, this stage of evolution of the world, as the inorganic world. It is a world of everything from atoms to celestial bodies in motion, along with their terrestrial torrents and winds, all formed out of and arranged in terms of number and natural laws. It is a world without color as a person with a brain and eyes would see it, pitch as a he would hear it, or scent as he would smell it. Such sensible qualities couldn’t exist in a world before pupils, eardrums, noses and tongues existed. For those sense organs are a necessary precondition for experience of such sensible qualities. So, it is a fact that a tree that falls in a forest where there is no nervous system present to organize it into sensible qualities, produces only a vibration, understandable in number only.
This inorganic world was, although devoid of sensible qualities (such as feel or sound), still a form of phenomenon. This is because, by the classical definition of perception we adopt in this book, as the taking of experience of any kind, including abstractions like number, the mathematical states that comprised the inorganic world were perceived by the Infinite Intelligence. The evolving mathematical world was a purely conceptual universe, and these concepts existed in perception. It was a universe without sensible substance. It was mental.
So, what we are effectively saying is that mathematical laws evolved before the substances they would later appear to govern, and these laws gradually gave rise to those very objects in their original mathematical conceptual state. This is the opposite of how we might first imagine evolution to have occurred. Objects, it might first seem, ought to have evolved before the laws, and then such laws somehow came into existence and began to govern them. But that is illogical, since things only become the things they are in terms of laws. It is the strong atomic forces that bind molecules into their shapes, and weak forces that drive collections of these into larger bodies, and those into planets, and planets into galaxies. So, how could you talk about the objects before the laws that created point? The laws of nature are a necessary precondition for the objects forming in the first place, for those objects are formed out of those very laws. Therefore, the laws of nature necessarily evolved before the objects they came to apparently govern.
Whole galaxies with suns and planets, barren of life, evolved without color or sound. If one could perceive the world around us today through only the perceptual schemas of the time in which it formed, one would perceive only mathematical relations, with people moving about and tending to their daily lives, composed of nothing but mathematical laws and quantum probabilities.
On one level, the world remains that way. Just as any computer gamer knows the colorful world on his monitor is only ones and zeros on the hard drive of the console beneath it. Just as every computer gamer knows that his colorful and noisy game is run by ones and zeros inside his game console, the substratum of number and natural laws prevails around us just beneath the veneer of color, sound, and texture we experience around us. The only difference between our sensible world with color, sound, and texture and the insentient world of number that undergirds it, is that we have evolved the nerves and sensory apparatus to process the numeric data into color and sound. This idea of one layer of reality organized by the mind into another is dramatized in the movie The Matrix when the character named Cypher shows Neo the computer matrix on his computer screen and says to him nonchalantly, “All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.” His implication is he has watched the mathematical substratum of the Matrix for so long he learned to convert the base code to its correlating sensible qualities mentally. So, it is our sense organs, nervous systems, and our higher order sensory schemas that convert the mathematical into the sensible and thereby give to the substanceless its appearance of substance.
Organic Evolution
Inorganic evolution is the evolution of the mathematical world before sentient life. At some point inorganic evolution begins to give rise to the physical structures of organic organisms. At this point inorganic numerical evolution ceases, having achieved its end. And then a new era of evolution begins, organic or biological evolution, in which more and more advanced living forms emerge to move about in and experience the world.
What marks this second phase of evolution is nervous systems, such as nerves and brains. These increasingly complex nervous systems put the newly arising organisms into clearer and clearer contact with their environment. This occurs first in the form of roots and stems that reach out into the surroundings and report back, then cilia and antennae which actually give some modest though hard to imagine umwelt, and finally developed eyes, ears, noses, nerves, and brains. These increasingly sensitive sense organs form a kind of partition for perception. While perception is indivisible and can’t be broken into parts, as it is not a thing or substance, nonetheless the sense apparatus itself gives to the Infinite Intelligence its experience of limit and barriers, effectively causing a partitioning. This partitioning is only apparent, yet it grants to perception that identifies with and utilizes an individual body a sense of discrete identity, as its experience becomes ‘walled-off’ as it were from the rest of itself. You could liken such partitioning by the body to the blinders on a quarter horse that limit its peripheral vision without ever actually affecting its eyesight. Hence, from this point forward, the evolution of perception continues forward, but from this point on it is experienced subjectively and individually from the point of view of the recently formed sense of individual identity, as opposed to transsubjectively as in the inorganic phase of evolution. This sense of partitioning is discussed more in Chapters 13. It is enough here to say that from this point forward perception occurs through the media of the body, and the acquiring of additional perceptual schemas is an individual affair.
Keep in mind that all of the perceptual schemas that evolved prior to this juncture, during the inorganic phase of evolution, continue to condition the experience of each individual whose body supervenes upon those schemas. You can understand this better by using the diagram above. Try to be cognizant of the fact that the perceptual vantage point of each individual perceiver continues to be the single witness. Each individual is in a sense none other than that original seer seeing from the vantage point of the original whim to know. So, the underlying laws continue to condition the experience of each individual experiencer. This is why all individuals experience certain qualities identically. When two people enter a room, they count the same number of items in the room and measure the same dimensions of them and between them. This is a natural outcome of sharing a single set of inorganic schemas and therefore the same mathematical substratum. None of the legacy of the first phase of evolution is lost to the newly risen individuals that supervene upon the inorganic and embark on the second phase of their journey as individuals.
Simultaneous with the emergence of bodies and the sense of individuality they impart, a new class of perceptual schemas arises to make use of the newly evolved sensory apparatus. We will call these sensory perceptual schemas. These schemas determine how we perceive by sense, by correlating brain states with qualitative sensible states like color and sound. Remember from Chapter 8 that perceptual schemas work by making us perceive one thing as another, by way of a kind of algorithm. In the case of the perceptual schemas that govern sense experience, they make us experience specific electrical brain states as specific qualitative states.
Note that in this method of explaining our experience, we do not need to resort to inventing any additional theoretical entity. Rather we describe a process by which an aspect of experience arises from what is already present. Look at an object. You see it has a color. The color correlates with a frequency of light radiation. Pick up the object and hold it in your hand. The sensation of coolness or warmth corresponds with a certain molecular vibratory frequency in the object. The algorithms by which we make such interpretations are set by fixed perceptual schemas that we share. Hence, two individuals that share the same sensory schemas experience the same qualities.
We already explained in the first telling of this process in Chapter 8 how the substance of what we interpret came about. It is the product of our sensory schemas, giving the qualities to the mathematical objects around us that we associate with substance, i.e., especially their sensible feeling of texture and hardness. When we speak of something being substantive, what we are really referring to are tactile sensations such as roughness or softness, hardness or malleability, density, weightiness, and permanence. When we say something is a ‘solid object’ we mean our hands don’t pass through it, but that it follows the laws of nature that govern nuclear bonds and repulsive forces. Where these sensations amalgamate in the experience of a single object, such as in a peach I pick up and feel, smell, and taste, I call that amalgamation of sensations its substance. I call it real. I call it tangible. These are all simply the result of sensible qualities caused by the sensory schemas.
Numbers and geometry alone do not have such substantiality. For we cannot feel or sense them. To even speak of our hands passing through numbers has no meaning. So, it is our sensory schemas that give to the insubstantial mathematical world its sense of substantiation. This is one of the things that sets this conception of reality far apart from any ever proposed before. An evolution of ways of perceiving gives rise to the substance of those perceived things. An evolution of perception gives rise to the matter, not the other way around.
The Completed Mammalian Experience
Now let’s look at the world through the five senses of a mammal, let’s say a gray wolf, to understand what aspects of the world have appeared so far. The experience unique to a species is called its umwelt. The wolf has a highly evolved set of sense apparatuses like eyes, ears, nose, and brain, as well as the evolved sensory schemas needed to translate the brain states that such sensorium produce in response to the environment into sensible qualities.
When a wolf sees a tree, its sensory schemas interpret the brain states caused by the stimulation of light striking its retina and electricity running down its optic nerve and it sees color. Each sensory schema corresponds to a similar schematization.
So, the wolf sees the world much as a human would. However, the wolf lacks the analytical schemas that will come along in the human form that allow humans to abstract back out of their experience the mathematical qualities that underlie it. Without such schemas the wolf also cannot abstract the green of a leaf from the leaf, or even conceive of the abstract notion of a leaf. The ability to analyze appearances into their constituent parts, and thus frame experience in terms of different abstractions, comes later with the rise of human perception, due to higher order schemas that in turn require more complex brains. Such faculties will allow people to unpack the process that produced the gestalt of their experience. But none of this exists for the wolf.
The Body as a Lens
In Chapter 8 we promised to discuss the analogy of the body as a lens more in this chapter. As explained, the body evolves out of the substanceless mathematics of the inorganic world. And through the body, that mathematical world is perceived as the substantive world of sensible qualities we currently enjoy. So, looking down at your mathematical hands you see them as substantiated through your mathematical eyes.
Now one of the main ways we orient where we are relative to other objects in our environment is by our sense of touch. To experience touch we need to have not just skin endowed with nerves capable of sending messages to our brain, but a brain capable of storing and retrieving such information in some form, and the sensory schemas to interpret that stored information into sensible experience.
The diagram illustrates that what we call life arises where the common lenses bring about the gestalt of an individual body. The body then acts as a media through which to see things around us from the vantage of an individual. Note that the pink lenses to the left in the diagram cause natural laws and mathematical states, and the effect of all these lenses adds up to form the experience of being embodied. It follows that the shared lenses to the left wind up being part of the body itself. And it is only through the compounding of all the lenses, both left and right, shared and individual, that the gestalt of one’s hands with five fingers and color and texture is perceived.
So, the body is not just the result of the lenses that came before it but acts as a lens in itself. One can liken this dynamic to a compound lens on a camera, a complex lens made up of many simpler lenses that produce the final result.
These biological forms make possible the slowly increasing sense of discrete identity. This sense of separate individual identity begins with the first simple organisms and goes on increasing from form to form over evolution with their increasingly viable sensoria until both the media and the consciousness are sufficiently evolved to grant to the partitioned sense of self full self-awareness in humans. But this sense of full self-awareness takes more than complex bodies, and that is the subject of the next section.
The Fully Conscious Human Experience
By a series of more and more perceptually sensitive media, with more and more sophisticated nervous systems and the sensory perceptual schemas to make use of them, we at last reach the end goal of biological evolution, the completed human form. Normally we hear of the human being as merely one more stepping stone in a long evolution that will continue and leads nowhere in particular. It has no end goal. It has no goal at all. Here that is not the case. Here the human form is the summum bonum of physical evolution and its terminus, because it was only to attain fully conscious self-awareness that evolution occurred at all.
So now let’s take a look at the world as it manifests to a human being, the completed umwelt. Most notably the rise of human experience is marked by three unique characteristics. These are the capacity to be self-aware, the capacity to think, and the capacity to create culture. These three capacities are in turn the result of four new perceptual schemas that are unique to humans. We will discuss each in turn and see how each contributes to the rise of these three aspects of experience.
The hallmark of human experience is that a man is entirely aware that he exists as something apart from other things he perceives around him. He is fully self-aware. And of course, this requires that he is fully aware, i.e., fully conscious. More than anything else it is this full consciousness /self-awareness that sets humans apart from the animals. It is what makes humans the diamond of creation. You could even say that man is created in God’s image, as the fully conscious man is the complete unfolding of the Infinite Intelligence. What makes man so apparently imperfect is that he retains the legacy of the schemas of his evolution, which narrows his experience and prevents him from seeing things as they really actually are, which is limitless.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.
(William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
In spite of this, man is perfect in that he has gained the capacity to discover and shed these limits and consciously experience his own divinity. But this requires a very long period of time, which in turn requires a kind of reincarnation in a very special sense. We postpone discussion of it until Chapter 13 because here the discussing is limited to discussing how all the aspects of experience are formed by the evolving schemas.
Besides the evolution of the body and the sense of partition it grants to perception, there are four perceptual schemas that evolve to make this full self-awareness possible. The first two are simply enhanced versions of the schemas of time and space. In human experience, the schemas of space and time take on a sense of depth relative to the perceiver that they hadn’t before. Rather than simply perceiving objects in space, the human being begins to distinguish a sense of ‘here’ vs. ‘there.’ The distinction between his personal place in space with an abstract elsewhere underlies a person’s ability to demarcate himself from his environment. Similarly, rather than simply perceiving a sequence of events in time, the human being begins to distinguish ‘now’ from ‘then,’ with now marked by his own presence in it. Personal location in space and time, i.e., the sense of being uniquely present in the here and now, is a human invention, made possible by these enhanced ways of perceiving space and time.
Taken together, and applied to the results of the previous schemas, these two higher order perceptual schemas of space and time come close to making full self-awareness possible, but they still are not sufficient. Proto-humans certainly took their presence into account. But they did not fully apprehend the singular importance of the self as the witness of its experience. Such proto-humans continued to understand themselves largely as part of the world around them. For full self-awareness to be 100% complete we needed two more schemas.
Reference & Meaning
The next perceptual schemas to evolve were reference and meaning. Reference and meaning make language possible, which in turn make full self-awareness possible. We will show why. While we have already briefly discussed these schemas in Chapter 8, we will try to be even more thorough here.
Imagine a man utters the sound of the word ‘brick,’ intending it to refer to a red clay brick. Obviously, the sound ‘brick’ has no actual connection to bricks. The only connection between the sound ‘brick’ and the object is one that a man uttering the word ‘brick,’ and others in his community, read into these two phenomena. In other words, people impose the connection between a sign and its referent by how they look upon the two phenomena. We see certain objects as symbols and others as their referents. But what is a symbol and a referent? In order to impose such a connection, we must have some sense of the kind of connection we are imposing. The relation between a symbol and its referent is an abstract relationship created by an evolved perceptual schema, i.e., reference. And this schema makes language possible.
We will discuss how this schema contributes to the invention of language more later. For now, our interest is specifically in how it increases human self-awareness.
The schema of reference, looking upon one thing as a sign and another as its referent, contributes to a person’s sense of personal existence by allowing him to name himself and thereby say who he is. “Me Tarzan! You Jane!” This allows a person to be definite about what he is talking about when referring to himself and what he isn’t, all the other things that have different referents (“You Jane!”). So, the evolution of the perceptual schema of refence accentuated human self-awareness greatly. Yet it would require the evolution of one more schema, also related to language, to make self-awareness truly complete. It is called 'meaning.'
Meaning allows us to do more than give a name and point to its referent. We can define words. Using the schemas of reference, a primitive man could do more than tell you his name. He could define that name in terms of all kinds of qualities. “I am Ug! Ug is the man who lives at the top of the hill. Ug! Is married to the lovely lady in braids.” Now Ug doesn’t just exist in some definite sense, but he’s interesting.
At this point, due to these four new perceptual schemas, enhanced time and space, as well as reference and meaning, human self-awareness is absolutely complete. We will now talk about how reference and meaning give rise to language, and in turn thought, and in turn culture.
Language Evolves as the Basis of Thought
As said, signs and symbols do not have any real physical connection to their referents. Nor is their significance physically located in the brain. Rather, our perceptual schemas produce the appearance of the connection by altering how we look upon the objects. Through the schema of reference, for instance, we produce the relation by seeing one thing as representing something else. In other words, we create meaning in the act of seeing things as having it.
I have a story I like to tell to convey this dynamic. To prepare for writing this book, I spent a lot of time in my local library. The signage on the road showing where to turn for the library wasn’t very clear and I continuously overshot my destination. On a busy highway this was very inconvenient. So, I began looking for a landmark I could use to remember where to turn. One day I noticed that right before the turn there was a green sign for a bar called Martini.
Gradually I got used to recognizing the sign as indicating my turn. After a while just seeing the sign began to invoke in my mind an image of the library. Clearly there was no actual connection between the Martini sign and my local library. The only connection was one I had come to assign to it.
It occurred to me one day that this was an excellent way to explain to others the basis of a very common-sense theory of language, one which included an account of how language evolved, through the fully developed human schemas of reference and meaning.
People tell their children that a dollar is one hundred cents. Children usually take a cent to be a copper coin. Yet an observant child will see that there obviously is no physical connection between pennies and dollars. A dollar doesn't contain any pennies. Any connection between a dollar and one hundred pennies is purely one that we must project onto the objects. But if our children were not born with an evolved perceptual schema that allowed them to see the relationship of reference, they could never make sense of their parents’ words.
On this basis we tell a story to get across the dynamic at the heart of how language evolved.
Long ago we began to assign certain sounds to individual objects, assigning nouns to certain specific objects such as names to our fellow members in our clan. Then, gradually, by extension, we began to name whole classes of objects and their opposites, such as ‘men’ and ‘women,’ old and ‘young.’ These were the first abstract ideas.
After a while a certain verbal grunt was assigned to streams. Then one day someone walking along a stream noticed that his thoughts (memories of such sounds) followed one another as steadily as a stream, and so by extension from the first word, he began to refer to his stream of thought.
Conveying this novel use of the verbal grunt to his fellows, it was gradually adopted, in lieu of any other, and as more and more such abstract meanings were added to language their meaning came to be perceived intersubjectively and this process repeated over and over until it created what we call language.
Some behaviorist materialists in the early 20th century got themselves so divorced from common sense due to a dogma about an unseen and undefined ‘external world,’ that they began to wonder how words could possibly hook onto or hook up with the world. Their absurd question was the result of looking for a material connection. This is like the child shaking a dollar to get the pennies out.
Thought & Reason
In short, reference and meaning, taken together and applied to the results of the previous schemas made language possible, and through language, thought and reason. We don’t only speak outwardly but recall and rearrange in our imagination words spoken and experience this subjectively as thoughts. In other words, perceiving language in our private experience is what we call thought. This is important, for it is saying that thought is a relatively recent phenomenon. It is the result of perceiving outer objects as signs and referents and then internalizing the outer language that results. People have traditionally considered thought to be something inexplicable and independent, and some in the past have even imagined it to be some kind of substance akin to matter. The French philosopher RenĆ© Descartes was famously one such person.
In our conception, thought evolves out of ways of perceiving. It is nothing but internalized language, which is the effect of evolved perceptual schemas, i.e., ways of perceiving things. We do not posit a mind as a thing responsible for thinking. That conception left us wondering what minds and thoughts were, how they came to be, and how they performed their functions. And since we had no answers to any of these, we finally wound up denying subjective thought altogether as a way to avoid the problem. Thought is the result of perceiving some things as signs and others as their referents, and then as signifying higher order conceptual distinctions we call meaning. So, thought is an effect here, like everything else, and not a causal independent occult entity.
Even full consciousness, a necessary precondition of thinking, arises only as an effect of schemas evolving over time, which reach their full term in the human form. So, this is definitely not an Intelligent Design theory where a Great Mind thought up the world, since thought and even consciousness did not exist before the world.
Note that this is the first coherent explanation for how subjective thought became possible.
Writing & Human Progress
The application of reference and meaning are not limited to spoken language but writing as well. By way of those schemas, we are able to denote a sign ‘A’ as standing for the sound ‘ah,’ and over time create phonetic alphabets and ultimately writing. It only requires perceiving shapes as signifiers and sounds as their referents. So, writing is an extension of language.
Writing is significant, for the invention of writing is a necessary precondition for many of the developments civilized people take for granted. The ability to write obviously allows us to record our ideas for posterity, including many of our most difficult ideas that would be impossible to pass down by oral tradition. This includes higher order mathematics, logic, astronomy, and other difficult subjects that one needs time to study and understand. The ability for one generation to leave to the next generation the strides they have made in these areas allows human beings to build upon ideas over centuries and not just years. This ability to build upon the ideas of others over long periods of time allows something very important to happen that could never happen otherwise. Ideas that were too complex to be worked out by a single person in his lifetime, can be left to others to carry on, and thus can continue to be developed by the contributions of other greater thinkers even far in the future, until such ideas reach real practical maturity. Before a community develops writing, each generation is forced to restart the process over, and that is why no population of hunters and gatherers ever invented the wheel. People who do not have writing tend to stagnate in their customs for thousands of years, as we saw in North American Indians and indigenous Australians, neither of which had writing. Due to writing, civilizations rise to spectacular heights of collective innovation. Without writing, progress beyond a certain point is impossible.
Here’s a great example of this process of generations building upon each other’s accomplishments by way of writing. From 1910 to 1913 Bertrand Russell and an American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote a book titled Principia Mathematica. They had three goals: to analyze the ideas and methods of mathematical logic, to express mathematical propositions in logical form, and to solve the paradoxes that still plagued at the time. The final product is massive and famously difficult to read. Such a book would not have been possible if the two philosophers had not been extremely well versed in all that had been written on the subjects of mathematics and logic for two thousand years. The usefulness of Principia was not immediately apparent, but eventually the many developments it contained laid the groundwork for the computer logic that exploded a generation later. Russell and Whitehead had no intention of making computers possible, a concept they could hardly have conceptualized in 1910. The example illustrates how writing is a necessary precondition for intellectual progress and innovation.
Culture
With the advent of thought and writing, a whole new class of perceptual schemas was made possible. We call these cultural schemas, for they are responsible for the perceived distinctions that comprise a human culture. Examples of cultural distinctions made possible by cultural schemas include the culturally invented habit of judging a widow at a funeral in a veil as more decently attired than one arriving in a floral jumpsuit and plumed hat. The only real difference is in how the woman’s clothes are perceived, and that is shaped by the cultural schema. Cultural schemas are possible through the organizational influence of meaning and language. And when a group of people organize their experiences through a shared set of cultural schemas, we call this a culture.
Once man finds himself in the world through self-awareness, he goes to work organizing that world into cultural mores, norms, and customs. He uses language to do this, assigning to objects and actions qualities of his own invention, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Most members of a culture simply acquiesce to new norms. They often live their lives believing such qualities they discern through such schemas are actually immutable qualities of those objects.
The members of a society that are keen enough to recognize that cultural distinctions are man-made, need to be cognizant of their responsibility as gifted observers, and not succumb to cheap temptations to simply become cynics, iconoclasts, or misanthropes. Cultural schemas create a kind of communal lens that a society collectively peers through. They can be used for good or bad. They have the power to unite society and are a necessary glue for societies to cooperate in common ventures. They make harmony, peace, and civility possible, as well as the great collective achievements like law and infrastructure. Not all that is man-made is bad. It depends on the hearts of the men who steer such cultures. The goal of man is not to return to the jungle from which he sprung, but to transcend narrow selfish interest by knowing the essence and ultimate spiritual purpose of the universe that bore him. Human beings have conscious influence over their cultural environment, and therefore inherit responsibility for their cultural world, especially in the moral and aesthetic realms.
The Role of Myth in the Human Psyche
One thing that is part of culture that guides the imagination and actions of man morally and aesthetically is his myths. Myths are stories, usually first told by inspired and respected poets like Homer and Vyasa, and in modern times we could include Tolkien. Myths are unique in that they frequently evoke great feeling in the members of a society that hold them dear. They shape their moral imperatives and taboos and allow people to demarcate what they see as gallantry and heroism from cowardice and villainy. In short, they have a great influence on the values, morals, and even mores of man. Without any myths at all societies are adrift. We see this loss of focus in our own time as scientism and nihilism replace the great myths of our past.
Joseph Campbell was an American academician who spent a great part of his life studying ancient myths, both Western and Eastern. What he discovered was that some myths had strikingly similar expressions in disparate times and locations in the past among peoples that had no known interaction. This was especially true of what he came to call the hero myth. While each culture told their own version of the hero myth using clothes and customs of their own time and place, there appeared to be definite milestones that all these stories reached. Here are some that Campbell recorded in his famous 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell, 1949).
- A call to adventure, where the hero is called to leave his ordinary world
- Crossing of a guarded threshold
- A series of trials where the hero is tested
- The gaining of a boon
- A metaphorical death and resurrection
- A choice to return to the ordinary world, to deliver the boon for the benefit of others
Campbell himself could not account for this synchronicity, attributing it to ‘energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other,’ a physiological process he assumed existed but never developed.
I propose that the reason this story is universal has nothing to do with physiology. It is that the hero myth is none other than the story of the evolution of consciousness and apotheosis described in this book. The full ‘story’ I allude to is better explained in Meher Baba's books, which partly inspired this idea. But I’ve done my best to capture the feeling. It is a story in which Infinite Intelligence is the protagonist in each individual (the hero with a thousand faces), who descends into a dream of Its own making, and after trials dives into himself and achieves Self-realization, and then returns to the dream to impart that gift to other aspects of Himself before crossing the sea to the undying lands, meaning returning to the point of original departure in light of that full consciousness and Self-realization.
The evidence for this intrinsicness of the hero myth is not limited to its cultural universality, but that we find it not just in our myths and religions, but woven into almost every aspect of our lives, from movies and novels to the real-life actions of heroes and villains. And further evidenced by the fact that it resonates in people so strongly. Hollywood writers and producers have long acknowledged that the closer a filmmaker adheres to the benchmarks of the hero myth, the more profitable their films tend to be.
But secondly, the higher myths like the hero myth cannot actually be derived from human experience, because the myth is only recognizable in enactments when such enactments are seen through the influence of the myth itself. In this sense, myths have all the signs of being intuitions, something you know but never learned. Thus, the myth, as an underlying driver of human psychic organization, precedes the creation of the myth, and accounts for why seeing it expressed in life and story moves people’s hearts and why expressions of such myths seems to give direction to human interest and behavior. We use myths to frame and understand our world and our role in it, and to choose noble action. We perceive and live our lives in terms of myths that moved us, regardless of whether we realize it or not. So, myth doesn't just form the psychic matrix that motivates all of human life, but actually is the core of the human psyche. Myths are not in the human psyche; they are it.
To illustrate how myths frame how we see and therefore behave, imagine a crowd of people outside a burning building as a man rushes in with a wet blanket over his head and returns with a crying child wrapped in a blanket, and collapses to the ground to the sound of great applause. The man is at once heralded a hero. But in truth, from a purely physical point of view, a man went into a building that was on fire and came back out. It was in fact bad for his health, and might have even been considered reckless, illogical, or even illegal. Isn’t that the job of the authorities or the parents? Whose permission did he have? The man may be insane? What difference is one more child; there are so many? But seen through the lens of myth, the heroism of the man’s impulsive selfless act is unmistakable.
The Scientist as the New Mystic
Without postulating anything other than what we perceive, but only a process by which it evolved, we've managed to account for number, mathematics, natural law, concrete objects, language, thought, identity, culture, and human motivation. This sums up this account of the formation of our world.
But there is one final amazing implication of this new idea that I'd like to draw the reader's attention to. That is the radical alteration in how we might in the future look at the role of the scientist, both physical and social. Imagine a human being with fully evolved schemas. He grows up and becomes a scientist in hopes he will help humanity. Looking at his phenomenal world through the highly evolved human schemas of language, logic, and mathematics, he finds that he is entirely able to abstract from the physical objects and actions in his experience, their underlying formative mathematical schemas. And, anticipating patterns in his experience, he discovers the underlying formative natural laws that bind those objects and determine their behavior. And socially he is able to abstract the underlying perceptual schemas that cause people to frame their experience as they do, and react to it as they do. But what is it, most fundamentally, that the great scientist is uncovering in such a careful systematic search, using his schemas of analysis, regulated by his natural intuitions? He is revealing the real cause of his own world. The scientist is, then, in a real sense, an archeologist excavating the relics of his own perceptual evolution. He is reaching back into his own origin. And where does he look for it, but in himself? And it would therefore be fair to say that this sincere scientist is now the new mystic. Gone are the days of alchemy and superstition that guided the pseudo-mysticism of the past.
REINCARNATION IN A SPECIAL SENSE
The previous cosmology is not complete without one more layer of complexity. From a certain point forward in the process, which we’ll point out and explain, understanding this evolution of perception requires an understanding of reincarnation in a unique sense. I often postpone talking about this reincarnation because Western readers have been made so confused about this concept. What most people mean by the term I don’t. And I have to make this difference very clear. The first really does not make sense, and the second does.
A common synonym for the usual sense of reincarnation is transmigration of the soul. The term literally implies that something we don’t see, called a soul, migrates from one place to another.
The same concept idea is implied by its synonym metempsychosis. The Online Etymology Dictionary describes its root meaning as follows:
metempsychosis (n.)
"passing of the soul at death into another body, human or animal," from Late Latin metempsychosis, from Greek metempsychosis
(Online Etymology Dictionary)
So, reincarnation usually implies a thing that moves, that comes out of bodies and enters into other bodies. Such a ghoulish picture is anathema to everything I’ve stressed in this book. To begin, the evolution of perception is predicated on an absolute rejection of the whole idea of inventing hypostases as a way of explaining phenomena. An unseen theoretical soul coming in and out of bodies to explain death birth is a paradigm example of that very thing. In the mode of explaining cause in this book we would never observe death and propose an invisible thing moving about to explain it. Expressions like ‘he gave up the ghost’ are harmless, but to hypostatize such imaginings can only lead to insolvable conundrums. Where we began with birth and death to explain, we now have souls to explain also.
In this book what exists of a self is a single indivisible, unmoving, unmovable Infinite Intelligence that has no location in time or space because it precedes both and creates for itself the illusion of both through the perceptual schemas of time and space. The idea, then, of such a self splitting into parts that float about in space makes no sense. How can that which is not in time or space travel in time or space? Space and time are illusions. The Infinite Intelligence is Reality. How can reality be in illusion. So, the idea of a self that migrates from a corpse has no place in this system.
The drawing is meant to illustrate that the Infinite Intelligence does not itself enter the scope of its formative schemas. So, qualities like time and space don’t apply to it. They only apply to appearances.
So, what could I mean by reincarnation if not this?
Take a look at this diagram of the evolution of perception we’ve described in this book. Note that it has a major transition roughly in the middle, where inorganic evolution gives way to biological evolution.
From that point onward evolution occurs subjectively for the newly arisen individual. A collective journey (on the left) gives way to multiple private journeys (on the right).
Preserving the Legacy of the Schemas
But this transition from collective physical evolution to private evolution has a problem, and to solve this problem we must introduce a kind of reincarnation. Let’s first see the problem.
As said, all evolution of new perceptual schemas after the transition to organic evolution is individual. The problem that falls out of this is, if the legacy of this individual evolution, in the form of newly acquired individual schemas, is to add up to anything to cause further evolution, such newly acquired schemas must be passed forward to another life when the biological form dies. If such schemas were not preserved, then there would be no meaning to an evolution of perception from that point forward. For without this retaining of what is acquired by the individual, the whole purpose for which the process was initiated in the first place, which was apotheosis for the individual, would be defeated. The sense of individuality would get started in each protozoon only to just as suddenly end with the death of that first individual form.
Hence, when a living organism dies, here meaning the media of the body it uses as a lens fails, this legacy of individually acquired perceptual schemas must be passed forward, as well as the consciousness produced by such schemas. And as the capacity for conscious experience increases due to the advanced schemas, a more evolved media is required to facilitate the expression such schemas. And that means more advanced media of brain and sense organs must be forged to more fully experience the surrounding world. This reciprocal relationship between increasing media and increasing consciousness is the actual dynamic that drives biological evolution forward, not survival of the fittest. Survival of the fittest among a species merely preserves the status quo of that species, i.e., the fittest.
Notice that in the first stage of evolution, i.e., inorganic evolution, the prospect of death does not come up. Space, time, and natural laws don’t die. Inorganic evolution is like one long life, and so the legacy of the evolution that occurs can never be lost. But with the rise of living organisms, for which evolution becomes an individual subjective journey, death is an unavoidable aspect of life.
With biological evolution there is an evolution of successively higher forms, and the newly acquired sense of self identifies itself with each of these successive media in turn. And the legacy of these schemas, once acquired individually, is retained as the legacy of that individual when the media fails, meaning death of the form occurs. And the taking up of that legacy again, to move forward and evolve yet more consciousness through more complex schemas, we call 'reincarnation.' Reincarnation means ‘born in flesh again.’
How does such being born again happen? It is actually the individual schemas left behind as a result of the experience in the previous life that form the matrix for the new media. These schemas are retained only subconsciously, but affect choices and behaviors in the next life. This explains instincts in lower forms, and otherwise inexplicable neuroses, complexes, and talents in higher ones.
So how is the sense of individuality we call a soul or self ‘connected’ to the body? The answer is identification. If we liken the body that is formed by the matrix of the legacy of the previous life to a lens, what we call birth is the individuality identifying with the schemas and thereby the body. So the sense of individuality formed previously literally takes itself to be its new body; it experiences its body as itself, and through the body, the world.
What we call birth is thus the forging of new media (through the matrix of the previous schemas) and identification with it, in the form of a cell, egg, or fetus. The soul identifies itself as that cell, egg, or fetus, and actually experiences itself as such. And through this taking experience of the fetus, the soul begins to experience the heartbeat of its mother by way of its ears and so forth. So, the connection is formation and identification, and not a coming or going. Death is of course the opposite. It is disidentification from the body when the body fails.
And if there is any afterlife experience, it is solely subjective, like a dream, experienced through the residual schemas but without physical expression. There are no actual occult places such as heaven or hell as are often conceived.
The Continuing Single Self & the Apparent Individual Self
Now here is something vital to bear in mind. It contains the whole difference between this and other conceptions of a soul. From the beginning to the end of this evolutionary process, from the first atom to the last human media in which a soul experiences its teleological end of God-realization, all of the perceiving happens from the standpoint of the original single unified witness, i.e., the unblemished unmoved incorruptible Infinite Intelligence. There is only one witness, that experiences through many lenses. This witness is the self behind every self, or the One in every one.
The kingdom of God is within you.
(Luke 17:20-21)
Meher Baba once said of claims that Jesus said God is in heaven:
What did Jesus really say? To the multitude he said, "God is in heaven; try to go there," and to that end he said to overcome certain temptations and sufferings. To his followers he said, "God is everywhere; try to see Him," and gave explanations to that effect. To the selected few he said, "God is in me and in you, too," and actually revealed this to them.
(Meher Baba, Kalchuri, 1034)
In transmigration of the soul, something we cannot see leaves a corpse at the time of death, perhaps in a morgue, and after some time literally in some netherworld, travels to and penetrates a fetus inside a woman, and proceeds to live inside it as an invisible homunculus. Such a macabre scenario can't happen in our conception, because the soul has no location because it precedes the dimension of space, and remains actually identical with the original vantage of the original witness. Throughout this whole psychic journey, the Self never really goes anywhere, just as a dreamer never enters his dream. In fact, the real Self in every apparently separate self, never even enters into the scope of the phenomenal world produced by its schemas. By this process, experience of reality, i.e., God-realization, is ultimately achieved as the result of a series of illusions. This paradoxical fact is captured in the dedication of Meher Baba’s main book, God Speaks:
To the Universe, the Illusion that sustains Reality
(Meher Baba, God Speaks, Dedication page)
I hope it is clear, then, that while this entire idea of evolution of perception presumes a kind of reincarnation, it is reincarnation in a special sense. It is one that does not rely on invented occult hypostases. Birth and death are psychological identification and disidentification only. And there is no retrograde evolution, as in Indic religions, where bad human behavior may be punished by another life as a dog. The sole purpose of this reincarnation is to retain the legacy of individual consciousness, which once gained, can never be lost.
FIVE ERRORS IN THINKING
In the scope of this book we bring up five fallacies responsible for many of the problems in philosophy, especially problems related to the subject of causation. They are as follows:
- Nominal causes: The fallacy of proposing a merely nominal causes and masquerading it as an explanation. Nominal causes are causes in name only, with no explanation of how they do their causing. They are usually just placeholders for a yet undiscovered cause. Gravity is an example. It gives us a name for whatever dynamic turns out is responsible for things falling, but doesn’t say what that is or how it causes it. In such cases, a name is coined for whatever is the cause of X, and then defined as 'that which is the cause of X,' when in fact no account whatsoever is given of how this supposed cause causes what it is said to cause.
- Hypostatizing: The fallacy of inventing an unseen know-not-what, hypostatizing it, and then claiming it to be the cause of some phenomenon, in the misguided belief that this is a legitimate way of explaining phenomena. This habit of inventing occult unprovable imperceptible unknowable know-not-whats to explain things we see every day has historically been the source of superstition. Yet the same approach to cause continues to be used unabated at CERN laboratories in Switzerland to this day, and many dissonant physicists have been vocal about it.
- Historical Fallacy: Hypostatizing is in turn a consequence of the historical fallacy, that I explain in Chapter 3. The Historical Fallacy is a form of circular reasoning related to how we posit causes. In such cases people trying to explain some phenomenon wind up inadvertently projecting onto their proposed cause something that only comes about as a result of that cause. So, nothing is explained.
- Countermanding Intuition: Rejection of our innate intuitions, and, by extension, rejection of reason itself, has been a growing problem since the end of the Enlightenment, and is an underlying feature of Postmodernism. Part of this is due to people not realizing that reason is grounded in our immutable intuitions. The consequences of this confusion include nonsense literature, unexamined face-value realism such as the flat-earth society, race realism, naĆÆve realism, and subjectivism (the view that there is no objective reality), constant reference to hypostases like extra dimensionality, multiverses, anti-gravity, folded space, dilated time, circular reasoning, and infinite regress.
- Misidentification of Effect: Failure to recognize what it is that needs explaining, which is experience, has led to endless academic resources being wasted on explaining our own imagined explanations. I quote here from my first book as it makes this fallacy clear.
"Long ago, before he had the complicated metaphysical theories that he has today, man had his experience to explain. Over time, he invented theoretical entities to explain his experience. He invented gods, the logos, forms, matter, monads, noumenon, minds, spirit, the ether, spacetime, superstrings, dimensions, etc. Gradually these invented things became the things which required explaining. Great arguments were generated to explain them, to prove the existence of the entities he had invented to explain experience. Gradually man began to question experience itself, since it no longer seemed compatible with his theories. Experience, that event which had once been beyond dispute and the starting point of man's inquiry, was now the theoretical entity, and his invented entities, such as matter and energy, for which he had no direct evidence, were reality. The world was finally totally upside down."
(Ott, The Evolution of Perception)
IMPLICATIONS
In this chapter, I wish to point out some major conceptual and moral implications that such a reality as described in this book portends. This new way of framing the cause of our experience, and our relationship with its creator, and our purpose, has the potential to radically change how we look upon and interpret things and how we act as a consequence.
Unity in Diversity
These days there is an even greater than usual feeling of separation along the lines of sex, race, politics, and class. There seems to be no limit to the ways that people can invent to divide and subdivide themselves from one another and create enmity. This is to be expected among a people who see themselves as intrinsically separate from their fellows. The fact is that we are separate materially, and from a materialist point of view that’s the end of the discussion.
But, for ages, sages have spoken of something deep within us that we have in common. For example, Jesus said:
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)
Imagine a world based on a conception of limitless God as the sleeping indweller in every individual self. And if you add to this conception the special kind of reincarnation we described, each one of those individuals has likely been black, white, and brown many times, and every class and nationality, as well as a philanthropist and a horse thief, a man and a woman. Meher Baba speaks of our having been everything, and mentions the implications of just such an outlook:
The only Real Knowledge is the knowledge that God is the inner dweller in good people and so-called bad, in saint and so-called sinner. This knowledge requires you to help all equally as circumstances demand, without expectation of reward, and when compelled to take part in a dispute, to act without the slightest trace of enmity or hatred; to try to make others happy, with brotherly or sisterly feeling for each one; to harm no one in thought, word or deed, not even those who harm you.
(Meher Baba, The Seven Realities)
And how does a mere change in how we see life bring about such a change?
Spiritual life is a matter of perception, not a matter of mechanical conformity with rules.
(Meher Baba, 6 Messages Meher Baba)
Creative leadership will have to recognize and emphasize the fact that all men are already united with each other not only by their co-partnership in the Great Divine Plan for Earth, but also by virtue of their all being equally the expression of One Life. No line of action can be really helpful or fruitful, unless it is in entire harmony with this deep Truth.
(Meher Baba, Gems from The Discourses)
This also goes for our relationship with nature. In this new way of seeing our world, every living being is one's younger brother, that will one day be like oneself, and in fact is oneself, and is God. And so is worthy of love and protection.
Under the past conceptions, nature was looked upon either as a foe to conquer or elevated to some goddess to worship. Both are impractical conceptions of nature, and place man far outside of it.
And the worst conception was saved for the 20th century, by the proponents of the vision of nature as resources for the elite and proletariat man as a virus attacking those resources, a view so crazy that mad social scientists now sit in think tanks dreaming up ways to depopulate the Earth.
And the Darwinian conception of our relationship to nature is equally perverse with horrendous side effects. It is a view that has always led to the notion of directed human evolution, or eugenics. This thinking is so pervasive now, and our education and entertainment so saturated by it, that it is practically sewn into our language. People no longer speak of humanity and humankind, but speak of us as species, as if men were no more than animals. We, who are actually limitless God, see ourselves as a virus, and God as imagination.
In the new view, all this negativity about man, and idealization of nature based on bad or missing metaphysics is swept away. Meaning and purpose to all life are restored, and we see ourselves as one with nature, and the elder brothers and husbands of nature. And God is within everyone, where the mystics have always told us He has always been. And it is our birthright to find Him there.
God Without Superstition
Imagine a world where faith in God is rational, and based in human intuitions and common sense. Imagine a world where God is not hypostatized as something far away, but understood as the only reality. It is a world where natural rights are rationally supported again, without requiring a sky-daddy. And it is a world where man’s natural intuitions are restored and even asserted as the ground of reason, and not its competitor. And so, things that were once beyond the ken of ordinary men, and only the prerogative of educated priests of academia, become again accessible to every man who introspects honestly. It’s a world where meaning and purpose to life and the universe return. And imagine all that without a trace of superstition.
A world that has gone beyond hypostasis is a world where life without superstition isn’t just possible but an automatic consequence. This is a world where God no longer hides in heaven like a thief, but is within every man, and in you, and discovering Him there is your destiny. Only to be sought through introspection, kindness, understanding, and intelligent moral action, and not promoted at the end of a sword.
Such a world would not require a new religion. Man's highly enlightened daily lives would become the living religion.
The Primary-Secondary Quality Distinction
When we look at the chart above, we see that the reason we have both objective and subjective aspects in our experience, i.e., some shared by all and others private, is due to where those qualities arise in the evolution of perception.
Such an explanation does not require positing a theoretical hypostasis, and therefore never encounters the mind-body problem, which really was nothing more than the two-world problem that the archaic method of explaining things was forced to invent.
The Role of Intuition in Reasoning
Socrates once asked an uneducated slave boy to solve a mathematical puzzle he drew for him in the sand. Without hesitation, the uneducated slave boy saw the answer and conveyed it to Socrates. Socrates turned to his disciples who were around him and explained that in every man is all knowledge. The role of the teacher, he explained, is only to help the student recall what he already knew but had forgotten. Beyond this, Socrates said nothing about this strange form of knowledge that the slave boy demonstrated.
Later, Plato created his famous theory of forms to try to explain this strange recollection of truth. He answered the question of how we are able to recollect such knowledge by inventing a myth of a great fall from a higher world we saw before our birth. Plato was committing the Historical fallacy, projecting into his cause what it was he was explaining. He also later confessed that his answer created an infinite regress of necessary higher worlds.
What Socrates and Plato apparently never guessed was that the slave boy was simply relying on his innate intuition, as geometry is nothing but the expression of such intuitions. Obviously, logic and mathematics are powerful tools, the rudiments of which people know innately. They in turn make science, economics, and architecture possible. But their power comes from the intuitions that undergird them. This has not been properly understood in the past.
The reason these intuitions are true is that that they precede creation in the Infinite Intelligence, and the world was formed in terms of their order. Hence the cohesiveness of the intuitions by which the world was ordered permeates that universe. It is no wonder, then, that those intuitions automatically lead to understanding of the underlying principles of reasoning that govern the world.
In the past, reason and intuition were viewed as being at loggerheads with one another. The source of power of reason was seen as either too mysterious to penetrate or, in the 20th century, as no more than a function of linguistic syntax. The idea that the truth of logic and arithmetic was a function of syntax never explained why the slave boy solved the problem Socrates laid before him, since he had no education in syntax. 20th century philosophers miss the question. While the validity of a proposition can be recognized in its syntax, we still must understand how we recognize this fact. The answer is intuition.
Interestingly, our natural intuitions can only be discovered through introspection. Furthermore, they cannot be taught. It follows that computers can neither discover the intuitions on their own as they have nothing to introspect into, nor can they be taught them. Computers can only be programmed to perform their functions in accord with the intuitions of the programmer, and thus can at best imitate having intuitions.
One of the biggest implications of the change in how we look upon things in this book is that it necessitates a reexamination of intuition. Intuition is something we have largely ignored, or, in recent times, even consciously violated. Take a look at the intentional abandonment of our natural intuitions in critical theory, or the odd postmodern veneration of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the seminal example of nonsense literature. Or consider the last line of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s highly praised Tractatus, venerated by philosophers today as a work of genius, in which the author preens, “My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.” Nonsense literature? Patent nonsense? Is it then any wonder that counterintuitive claims like Einstein’s dilation of time or Schrƶdinger's sometimes existing cat are seen as breakthroughs in human reasoning, when they are actually deformities of intuition. The young are encouraged to admire Einstein’s absurd statement, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ Could anything be less intuitive than that. As Escher’s drawings show, just because you can imagine something doesn’t mean it’s possible in the real world. You can imagine Caesar’s desk having a Commodore computer on it, but that doesn’t make it possible.
If we mark the start of the French Revolution (1789) as the start of this trend away from using our intuition as our guide, and Alice in Wonderland as the start of postmodernism and the end of reason, we can begin to see the effect. I believe this decrease in clear reasoning was due to people not understanding the relationship between intuition and reason, and that reason divorced from intuition is not reason at all. It is, as they say in computer lingo, garbage in and garbage out. My hope is that as a result of this book, we have a chance to restore reason by restoring and making a science of intuition. And I believe we have no such chance if we don’t.
Without intuition, we have no rationality. And without rationality, even the human heart, capable of such inspiring beauty when directed by intuitive understanding, leads solely to opinion and groundless ideologies warring for power, and finally, unless we reverse course, barbarism.
Strong AI is Impossible
The main school of philosophy of mind today is functionalism, originally called machine functionalism. I described it in Chapter 5. It attempts to explain what we call consciousness by redefining it in terms of machine functions performed by the brain and nerves. Strong AI (artificial intelligence) is the conception that machines can become conscious. Here I want to show that this concept isn’t possible because machines cannot have intuitions necessary for real conscious learning.
In the early 20th century radical behaviorism became popular. It includes the belief that thoughts and emotions can be understood as outward behaviors. It was often teased that behaviorists ‘feigned anesthesia.’ In other words, they pretended to have no internal thoughts and feelings, but everyone knew they did.
Then in the latter part of the 20th century, desktop computers came into use. Philosophers of mind, the branch that studies perception and consciousness, noticed that computers could perform functions, and this is a term in computer programming. For instance, a computer can be programmed with an algorithm that created a command that, when faced with X input, perform Y output. From analogy to such computer functions ‘functionalism,’ as a theory of mind, got its name.
Much like radical behaviorism, functionalists theorized that what people had always mistaken as conscious activity (private thoughts, pain, and desire), was actually just brain functions. It’s the same idea as behaviorism, only it avoids the problem of consciousness by a slightly different red herring. Instead of claiming inner states were outer behaviors, they were input-output functions. Machine functionalism remains the dominant school of thought in philosophy of mind today.
The problem with this idea is that it fails to recognize what a computer programmer is capable of that a computer is not. The computer programmer was born with certain intuitions. I have already described some of them, and the kinds of reasoning they allow, in Chapter 11. I explained there why intuitions cannot be learned. The reason is that being born with them a necessary precondition for conscious learning. The only way to discover one’s intuitions is by introspection, something no computer is capable of doing. And no amount of 1s and 0s can encode an intuition.
For example, you could program a computer with an algorithm to perform a certain output function whenever the letters in the word ‘necessity’ are encountered as an input. And this could make the computer look like it understood what it just responded to. But you could never actually explain to a computer what a man with intuitions experiences when he sees or hears the word ‘necessity.’ The computer can only act like it does, after being programmed by a programmer to do so.
So, let’s take a closer look at how people discover their intuitions. I think this will show that a computer never could, because it doesn’t have intuitions and can’t be taught them. Although we are born with our intuitions, we discover that we have them for the first time by introspection, usually guided by a teacher. And introspection can only happen in private thought, by definition. And we don’t ‘see’ the intuition. Rather we grasp it in terms of its effect upon what we feel certain of.
For instance, introspect for a moment about the logical form modus ponens.
If P, then Q.
P.
Therefore, Q.
Any person reflecting on this sequence of symbolic statements will automatically recognize that the conclusion has to follow those premises. No person can explain how he knows this, for it is the inborn intuition that allows him to see the conclusion is right. We seem to ‘just know.’ And that’s the very meaning of an intuition and differentiates it from other types of knowledge that indeed require an input such as sense perception.
Now a computer programmer can program a computer to respond to modus ponens (perform the function) as if it possessed this intuition. The programmer need only give the computer an algorithm to behave in conformity with modus ponens. But the computer could never discover that modus ponens is true on its own.
In fact, the entire core of arithmetic and logic that a computer programmer relies on to program a computer is grounded in human intuitions, and originally discovered solely through conscious introspection.
Introspection is a form of perception, turning our attention inward. This is where we discover our intuitions, and it is the place where a computer cannot follow.
What behaviorists and functionalists propose is what we mistake for consciousness does apply to those who mistake the behaviors and functions of machines as indicators of consciousness. The sort of 'thinking' that machines do is in fact nothing but outward behaviors and input-output functions. And that’s all artificial intelligence is. Machine functionalism is an excellent theory to explain machines, but hopeless to explain human consciousness. So strong AI is impossible.
The sensational 20th century idea that computers will one day become conscious, as portrayed in popular science fiction movies like 2001, Bicentennial Man, The Matrix, A.I., I, Robot, and West World, is just a dream. A computer, no matter how fast its processor is, will only be able to follow commands to feign the intuitions consciousness human beings have innately.
Anti-gravity is Impossible
We hear a lot about anti-gravity in science fiction. But increasingly people believe it is not only possible, but even suspect that governments are hiding anti-gravity technology from us, often in connection with some flying saucer theory.
One of the implications of the idea in this book is that anti-gravity will always belong to fiction. Gravity is the effect of an evolved perceptual schema. This means it is a law of perception that governs our experience of falling objects by an equational algorithm. It is not a force. We simply always perceive things falling at the universal constant of gravity because it is part of our perception itself. So, turning off gravity is impossible. A person could no more switch off his connection to his own shadow as switch off gravity.
Also, all material objects we perceive are created, in part, by such laws of attraction. It is by the laws of nature like gravity that the objects we perceive coalesce. Hence such laws of attraction can never be turned off by man. To turn off gravity would disintegrate the very objects we imagine we would be freeing. Removing laws like gravity would be like pulling on the string in a rug until the rug disappeared, in the confused belief you were freeing the rug from the string.
The confusion is based on the age-old habit of hypostatizing invisible causes of perceived phenomena. It is only natural that gravity is also reified as an invisible force causing things to fall.
But it’s easy and fun to imagine it. And so, we should hardly expect more from a generation raised on the mother’s milk of Einstein’s maxim, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Einstein Was a PSYOP
Most people take it for granted that Albert Einstein was the smartest man in the world, perhaps ever. From the cradle we hear his name used as a synonym for ‘smart.’ We hardly ever notice it’s strange that such an emphasis isn’t given to the names of Jesus and Buddha. Yet few can cite what he is famous for, except to parrot the equation E=MC², without being able to say the significance of this equation for mass and energy equivalence. Most will faithfully repeat what they think they heard, that the equation somehow contributed to the invention of the atomic bomb. Actually, it didn’t. Einstein's only relationship to the atomic bomb was endorsing a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt recommending the US begin research on a bomb before the Germans had it.
People don't actually know why they are constantly prodded in endless ways to revere Einstein. But it is human nature not to buck a trend. For most, it’s enough to parrot the meme that Einstein was the greatest genius. If I were a conspiracist, which I’m not in most cases, I would say that this has all the earmarks of a PSYOP, psychological operation used to promote propaganda to change behavior, usually of an enemy. I think people would be more curious about this possibility if they grasped the psychological and intellectual harm inflicted on the last four generations by this blind idolization of Albert Einstein, and the damage it has done to human inquiry.
If you take a graduate course in physics, and take some time to go over the ideas that made Einstein famous, you will see a pattern. His most celebrated ideas operate in direct conflict with our natural intuitions. Students are encouraged to celebrate this feature as if it portends a breakthrough beyond the previous barriers of human understanding. As if our intuitions were barriers to the discovery of truth, rather than its hallmark.
The natural intuitive way to think of space is as the void between bodies, and nothing more. In fact, the very nothingness of space is part of what we mean by it. Such void is what space has meant to great minds since the ancient Greeks. But Einstein imagines space as a kind of material or fabric. And this fabric of space can bend. Under normal circumstances our natural intuitions would force us to ask, bend compared to what? But if you are an aspiring graduate student, there is pressure to go along with the program, so almost no one asks. It bends compared to what? There’s no answer.
If you have read this far in this book, you will instantly recognize what Einstein did. He created a hypostasis. He reified space into a thing, like the things that occupy space. Remember to reify means to treat an abstraction like a physical thing and in this case that abstraction is space. This kind of thinking is not only not “a breakthrough beyond the previous barriers of human understanding,” it’s a regression.
Einstein did the same to time. He reified time as a fabric, and believed that it could contract or dilate, meaning that time could speed up or slow down. Of course, the same question arises. What might this speeding up or slowing down be compared to? The concept inadvertently presupposes a higher order time that conforms to our intuition that is steady against which shortened time is measured?
For Einstein, the fabric of spacetime can fold, implying to others it could over and meet itself. This is how science fiction novels now justify their imaginary space portals, time travel, interdimensional travel, and wormholes. It all stems from Einstein’s childish belief that imagination trumped the wisdom of our intuitions.
Now I used to trust what people told me about Einstein’s genius. I initially enjoyed the feeling of being freed from my intuitions, as if they had repressed me. How liberating to think the world might actually be counterintuitive. How mysterious and seemingly mystical that sounded. There must be a higher order logic that only people like Einstein were privy to. I even incorporated Einstein’s ideas of light contraction into my first book, imagining I could see a way my perceptual schemas could account for it. But over the years since, as I began to think it over more cautiously, it occurred to me the argument I gave in my book didn’t really work, as it would inevitably lead to self-contradiction. This inevitably happens when you defy intuition. It dawned on me then that there really was something wrong with Einstein's thinking. It wasn’t just that it defied intuition, but that it led to real contradictions, a sign something was wrong.
I was fortunate that during this period when I began to doubt Einstein, I came upon a book titled Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? It was written by journalist Tom Bethell who worked closely with physicist Petr Beckmann to explain in ordinary terms the mathematical objections and alternative answers Beckmann spent years developing. There has never been a rebuttal of Beckmann’s logic from the scientific community, only silence. It turns out that Einstein did not deduce his claims by logic as is thought. They were simply a postulate, one he pulled out of thin air and operated from as a supposition. This is fine, as that is the method of retroduction. Only Einstein made it look like it was deduced. And when it led to contradictions, which ought to have proved the hypothesis wrong, Einstein bent his famous ‘new reality’ to conform with his supposition. That is now how retroduction works. In fact, the postulate Einstein worked from began with a reasoning error described in the book.
So why is this important? Why is it in this chapter on implications?
Einstein was the first scientist to seriously propose counterintuitive claims and get away with it. In any other time in history than the early 20th century, when Einstein published his theory of special relativity, his ideas would have been rejected on that very basis. There were forms of relativity before Einstein, such as a kind of relativity discovered by Galileo. But those earlier forms of relativity were based on introspection using natural intuition and argued based on such intuitions. But not Einstein's. Einstein’s began from the position of defying our intuition and relying on imagination instead, much in the spirit of Alice in Wonderland published 40 years earlier. Those who objected to Einstein, like Nikola Tesla, were ignored as atavists clinging to repressive forms of thinking by trusting their innate intuitions. We don’t get taught this. Ironically those that ridicule naysayers about Einstein believe themselves free thinkers.
Before discussing the negative repercussions of abandoning our intuitions as a guide marker to truth, let's talk a moment of the appeal of denying them, especially for the young. It's fun to think others can’t think outside the box as you can. Einstein inadvertently tapped (or was a victim of himself) the postmodern trend to appear tough-minded by letting go of what feels right. This was one of the early arguments against theism. Theists lacked the tough-mindedness to live without such sense of meaning. The notion was that we were ascending past such anthropomorphic ideas of nature. If we could accept what didn’t quite make sense to our inborn intuitions, what better sign was there that we were free thinkers? So, Einstein was seen as a pioneer and a prophet.
It began to be regarded as wisdom that unfettered imagination trumped all else.
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
(Einstein, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms)
Try to see the irony in Einstein’s words. No person can actually imagine bent spacetime or dilated time, or the front of a beam of light in two places at once. Such declared realities are no more than strings of words that spell out nothing that the mind could ever, even in principle, make any sense of.
But, this trend away from intuition did not end with Einstein. Ambitious acolytes rushed to join him on the counterintuitive train. By the middle of the 20th century, disdain for intuition had nearly come to define what had come to be called the ‘new physics,’ effectively decimating real critical thinking in an orgy of credulousness about Nobel prize winning hypostases.
What is funny, and funny that few seemed to notice, is that many of Einstein's most revolutionary ideas already existed in science fiction. The hypostatization of time as a fourth dimension had already occurred in H. G. Wells’ 1895 The Time Machine, first published when Einstein was 16 years old – the year he later said began to conceive his famous idea.
There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. . . ‘Scientific people,’ proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, ‘know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.’
(H. G. Wells, The Time Machine)
Since Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity was published in 1906, hypostatizing occult entities has become a staple of science. When an observation occurred that didn’t conform with already known laws, scientists invented strange energy. Inventing such nominal causes are then reifying them only adds to the plethora of things to explain. And sadly, the public is so indoctrinated a media that gushes over every Nobel prize winning invention and by ‘tractor beams’ in TV shows, that these are seen as breaking through old boundaries. What it’s breaking through is our intuitions, which gives it a feeling of magic and mystery, and in the process extinguishes reason. Occult entities such as strange energy and dark matter are nothing at all. They are explanations in name only. No one can even speculate how such theoretical occult entities cause the observational anomalies they were concocted to explain, except to go on inventing a whole world of imagined mechanics to go with them.
This new trend of winning accolades for inventing unseen entities to explain reality prompted American physicist Gary Taubes to write:
Nobody ever won a Nobel prize for proving something didn’t exist or by proving that something else was wrong.
(Gary Taubes, Nobel Dreams: Power, Deceit, and the Ultimate Experiment)
There is a new term that has entered our vocabulary called ‘descending down the rabbit hole.’ It refers to beginning down a course of counterintuitive concepts that beggar imagination and is constantly applied to the new science. It obviously alludes to Alice in Wonderland, the first seminal example of nonsense literature for children.
There is an assault on our natural intuitions, and people are embracing, and not questioning it. Those who do are called reactionary. The result is people having an increasingly difficult time using their natural intuitions and detecting nonsense when they hear it. Trending among the ‘free thinkers’ today are conspiracy theories, based on unguided imagination. Many of these strange fad theories I’ve already mentioned. Abandonment of our natural intuitions that allow us to discern justified belief from opinion has been elevated to a virtue, to the point where children aren't even encouraged to discover and see the power of their innate intuitions, but to repress them and think outside them.
A steady diet of aliens, bigfoot, Mayanism, anti-gravity, time travel, and multiverses floods the airwaves on the Discovery and History channels, lecturing us to open our minds. If you don’t believe, faces are aghast at your lack of ‘imagination,’ unable to recognize their own lack of imagination to contemplate a world without these things.
This loss of respect for our natural intuitions, that guided reason for its first two thousand years, is now regarded as a sign of our progress. In my opinion it is actually the scourge of our moment in time, and partially responsible for the radical ideas so easily pushed on our young that are tearing our world apart.
Higher Dimensions are a 19th Century Construct
Hardly anything has been so damaging to the intellectual potential of young people as the hypostatization of dimensions. Throughout history, a dimension was just a measurement. When your tailor asks for your dimensions, he is not asking you what invisible worlds you have visited. The ancient Greeks noticed that when considering solids in geometry, one could describe them in terms of three distinct dimensions, height, width, and depth. In other words, a description of a regular solid requires three measurements. No Greek ever imagined there was a world called the ‘third dimension,’ nor would such a concept have made sense to him.
But around the turn of the 20th century, mathematicians began to play with the idea of conceiving of dimensions as different spaces. In his 1895 book The Time Machine, the science fiction writer H. G. Wells had his main character speak of time headily as another kind of space, one that a person in a time machine could move across the way a person in a balloon could move through space. And he called this space the ‘fourth dimension’ like he was introducing a concept of great importance. This piece of science fantasy was the first inkling I’m aware of that a dimension was imagined as anything but a measure. It was the first hypostatization of a ‘dimension’ as an occult cosmic space. From then forward, dimensions became alternative worlds or realities. And not just ordinary worlds, but supernatural ones that defied our natural intuitions and imagination itself. What this really was, was hypostatizing a measurement or set of measurements, and nothing else. There is absolutely no substance to such talk.
Today well-meaning people will tell you with utmost sincerity and sense of deserved wonder that could make you cry that they have thought it over carefully and see no reason why flying saucers couldn’t be coming from another dimension.
I will say no more.
Multiverses Don’t Exist
Another hero-saint of 20th century science, besides Einstein, was Richard Feynman. Feynman is credited with coming up with the idea of parallel universes. Pondering the enigma of the fact that if you open a single slit in a screen between a photon gun and a phosphorus screen, and fire photons through it one at a time, you will build up a particle pattern on the screen, but if you open two, you will always get a wave pattern, he concluded that the light must attempt to follow every possible trajectory, until it collapsed into a wave or a particle. All these alternative trajectories were in their own separate world. This magical explanation is how we got the idea of parallel universes, or what have come to be known in popular culture as multiverses.
Such an invented hypostasis of a bunch of unseen other universes besides our own has everything in it to make a young scientist into a celebrity:
- It's counterintuitive and has an air of nonsense to it
- It invents an occult theoretical entity to explain a phenomenon and then reifies it
- It's a nominal cause in that it’s a cause in name only for a phenomenon, it has no further clarification how it causes anything
Just about every young physics doctoral candidate today dreams of being the next Richard Feynman or Peter Higgs, inventor of the God particle. Quantum mechanics is populated by the very thinking Feynman personified. How else might science be done, besides reifying all these occult theoretical entities? We will discuss an alternative in the section on Energy below.
Energy is simply the Equations that govern motion
In 1721 George Berkeley wrote an essay titled De Motu, Latin for ‘On Energy.’ In it, Berkeley criticized the rising tendency in science (even then) to postulate invented occult powers to explain regular motions. What he meant were unperceived powers or hidden forces. Examples included the supposed forces of gravity, electricity, and magnetism. Berkeley said he not only couldn’t imagine what these words were meant to name, but couldn’t even decipher what these words were meant to denote. What he said he could easily perceive by sense and understand with his intellect was that certain motions could be predicted in accord with certain fixed equations, called laws of nature, and that he could even grasp the mathematics of these equations. For instance, Isaac Newton’s equation for universal gravitation, known to Berkeley, is F=GMmr2.
I ought to be clear by now that Berkeley was objecting to the very thing that I object to, which is occult hypostases as nominal causes for perceived effects, with no actual accompanying explanation of how they cause what they are said to cause. How does the hidden force of gravity make things fall at that constant?
Berkeley posited an alternative. He proposed that what we really meant by these forces was simply the equations by which they happen.
Berkeley’s solution, predicated on the dismissal of the hypostasis in favor of a description of what actually could be observed taking place, was consistent with my own explanation of how the perceptual schemas produce the phenomenal world. And Berkeley would have agreed that they had. The inorganic world is truly only a set of mathematical laws in the form of equations. Many have thought this.
Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons.”
– Pythagoras, 6th century BC
But thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.
– Wisdom of Solomon, 1st century BC
God created everything by number, weight and measure.
– Isaac Newton, 17th century
That is my opinion as well, although I would qualify those equations as perceptual schemas that arrange experience in accord with number. And I think what we call energy is nothing but such equations that govern motion.
Some have heard me say this, and misunderstood me as saying we can’t talk of energy. There is nothing wrong with talking about energy, so long as we understand that what we mean by it is the observable effect we observe in nature, and not some imperceptible inexplicable power. Gravity is its mathematical description. What else would it be? The problem is in hypostatizing the cause of these effects as hidden 'powers' independent of their description. It is just this kind of thinking that has led to superstitions like anti-gravity, dimensions, and multiverses.
It is also entirely reasonable to speak of fields of influence, as long as we understand them for what they are, part of the schema, and not what they are theorized to be. They are quantifiable ranges, in which certain quantifiable dynamics are in effect, in accord with evolved perceptual schemas, and not occult force fields.
Reductive Materialist Pseudo-Mysticism
For some unknown reason, a large segment of an entire generation of young people in the 1960s became convinced that certain reductive materialists were mystics.
A mystic is a person who seeks within himself by introspection and contemplation a path to unity with God or truth in his own nature, a kind of turning inward. Reductive materialism is the belief that matter is the sole reality, and anything else people talk about is ultimately reducible to some function of material states.
It seems funny, then, that in the 20th century, certain reductive materialists came to be regarded as mystics by the media. It’s especially funny because hardly anything could be more out of sync with mysticism than materialism.
Two examples are Timothy Leary and Joseph Campbell. A simple quote from each will suffice to demonstrate their credentials as reductive materialists, people who explain inner experience as material chemical states.
Campbell wrote:
Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.
(Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)
What Campbell is awkwardly describing is a radical form of reductive materialism known as token-identity-theory, the view that some unspecifiable activity in the brain literally is one and the same as certain states misunderstood as conscious states. Here he repeats the same materialist vision so no one will think this was merely a one-off slip of the tongue.
Like dreams, myths are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently—though derived from the material world and its supposed history—are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, of the human will—which in turn is moved by the energies of the organs of the body operating variously against each other in concert. Every myth, that is to say, whether or not by intention, is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
(Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space)
What's offensive about Campbell, though common among those like him who co-opt mystical curiosity for some other purpose, is how he bundles materialism in sacred language, and fools many. People have been sadly deceived by him into deifying the materialist’s external world, most notably his reified 'energy,' as harped on again and again by Campbell to sound like a scientist, a standard approach in New Age explanatory technique. Everything’s always an energy. It’s their central hypostasis.
We see the exact same approach in the writing of LSD guru Timothy Leary, still idealized as a kind of spiritual hero among many drug casualties today.
The Tibetan Buddhists suggest that the uncluttered intellect can experience what astrophysics confirms. The Buddha Vairochana, the Dhyani Buddha of the Center, Manifester of Phenomena, is the highest path to enlightenment. As the source of all organic life, in him all things visible and invisible have their consummation and absorption. He is associated with the Central Realm of the Densely-Packed, i.e., the seed of all universal forces and things are densely packed together. This remarkable convergence of modern astrophysics and ancient Lamaism demands no complicated explanation. The cosmological awareness—the awareness of every other natural process—is there in the cortex. You can confirm this preconceptual mystical knowledge by empirical observation and measurement, but it’s all there inside your skull.
(Timothy Leary, The Psychedelic Experience)
These thinkers are coming at the same issue we are in our book, explaining internal experience, from an opposite angle, a materialist one. Rather than seeing material states as an effect of an evolution of inner states, the hallmark of genuine mystics throughout the ages, they profess to explain inner experience as the outcome of material states, and try to sound scientific, while being neither scientific nor mystical.
We could add others to this list of reductive materialists who were sold to the public as mystics in the 20th century. The LSD advocate and eugenicist Aldous Huxley is another example.
The Unified Field Theory
The Unified Field Theory was a concept introduced by Albert Einstein. It is a hypothetical theory that could, at least in principle, account for seemingly disparate branches of physics such as macro and micro behaviors by a single principle. It has also been referred to as the ‘theory of everything.’
A very popular candidate is String Theory. However, String Theory relies on a great deal of hypostases like the ones I’ve described in this book, and is admittedly untestable. It is difficult to call String Theory a theory of everything, as it does not even attempt to explain conscious experience of the world. And since conscious experience is, for the majority of us, the only actual world worth explaining, it’s hard to see how a theory that ignores it explains anything.
Isaac Newton, once when pressured to explain how he could propose the mathematical equation for gravity, but not propose some occult thing to account for the behavior, famously wrote:
I feign no hypotheses
– Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, 1713
Newton felt science was empirical, and said what could be observed, and that it was outside the purview of science to speculate on such metaphysical causes. The idea presented in this book, the idea of the evolution of a series of perceptual schemas to account for properties we observe, is not only more elegant than other contenders today, likewise posits no hypostases.
And the evolution of perception is argued from intuitions, even if that first seems surprising. String Theory works by flaunting human intuitions. Quantum theory also prides itself in ignoring intuition. Schrƶdinger's cat is a great example. Anyone can look it up. In 1935 an Austrian scientist, Erwin Schrƶdinger, published a thought experiment that seemed to prove that a cat hidden in a box could both exist and not exist at the same time, depending on external conditions. The thought experiment gives the impression of a magic show act specifically because it defies our intuition of the principle of non-contradiction, which is the basis of logic. It seems profound as it seems to be magic. We've created a whole generation of navel gazers thinking about the implications of fractals and alien visitors who have no idea how to think. How could they?
If there’s one candidate I believe actually fulfills the criteria for the unified field theory, it the evolution of perception. Its single principle is the perceptual schema, which is an event and not an occult entity. But the schemas can be verified in our experience. What’s remarkable about the evolution of perception is that it explains everything while positing nothing.
Hence one implication of the evolution of perception is that it comes closest to fulfilling the requirements of the long-sought theory of everything, or unified field theory. The unified field is the field of perception, a field that cannot be coherently denied without self-contradiction.
Simplicity
In my previous book I emphasized simplicity as a practical virtue of the theory of evolving perception. I wish to clarify this. I was speaking of metaphysical simplicity. Metaphysical simplicity refers to the number of unproven theoretical (metaphysical) entities required in an explanation. A theory that has many unproven metaphysical entities and yet explains very little is less probable than a theory with fewer unproven postulates that explains more. That is common sense.
But the evolution of perception has zero unproven theoretical entities, yet accounts for everything anyone does or ever could experience. Evolution of perception relies only on perception, which is neither theoretical nor an entity. On the other hand, reductive materialism has only unproven theoretical entities, and yet explains nothing we experience, as it has no way to explain the occurrence of conscious experience at all. Thus, the evolution of perception’s probability is incalculably great, and (by the criterion of metaphysical simplicity) the probability of materialism is zero.
Put another way: A better theory is one that posits fewer theoretical entities while explaining more, thus a theory that posited no entities at all while explaining everything that is experienced or ever could be experienced is an ideal theory. Evolution of perception is an ideal theory.
Spiritual Expressions Making Sense
One of the most remarkable implications of the idea presented in this book is that words by mystics through the ages that seemed entirely enigmatic when heard through the veil of our old hypostatic thinking, begin to make sense.
This is especially true of the words of Meher Baba, which I’m quite familiar with, but many others as well.
In Eastern philosophy Maya is a power of the mind to makes the real appear unreal and the unreal appear real. The example that is traditionally given of this power is a man walking at dusk and mistaking a stick for a snake. Notice the similarity to the perceptual schema, i.e., seeing something as something else. The fear of encountering snakes is the condition on the mind that gives to the stick its perceived snake-like properties. The effect of Maya is what produces the phenomenal world.
Meher Baba frequently said that time did not exist. And yet he had a clock he kept track of in the hall in which he worked. Isn’t this a contradiction? Not if one sees that time is a way or organizing experience, and has no existence independent of things seen. In this way there is no contradiction between denying the existence of time (as a substance) and acknowledging its presence in our experience.
Something else that Meher Baba said that has puzzled many people, for it also seemed to bear a contradiction, was, “you and I are not “WE,” but “ONE.” Heard against the backdrop of the charts in this book, that is really not that hard to understand.
And consider these words of Jesus:
At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
(John 14:20)
And Saint Augustine of Hippo, in the 5th century, said many things we can better understand in terms of the ideas presented here in this book, that might not have made sense before.
There also you will rest in us, just as now you work in us. Your rest will be through us, just as now your works are done through us. But you, Lord are always working and always at rest. Your seeing is not in time, your movement is not in time, and your rest is not in time. Yet your acting causes us to see things in time, time itself, and the repose which is outside time.
(Augustine, Confessions)
We can see all those things which thou hast made because they are -- but they are because thou seest them.
(Ibid.)
And one of the finest and most famous examples of allusion to the limiting conditioning of our perceptions is found in the inspired poetry of William Blake.
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, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
And I think this quote by Meher Baba sums up a great deal of what I have said throughout this book about God.
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 . . . Man’s pilgrimage through time and space is but a part of God's pilgrimage from unconscious or latently conscious divinity to conscious divinity. God in his essential nature is unconsciously divine, just as a fetus in its mother’s womb is unconsciously human. And, just as the baby, coming into consciousness, becomes conscious first of its surroundings, so God, coming into consciousness, becomes conscious first of His creation, which begins to evolve simultaneously with the advent of consciousness. And, just as the child becomes aware of itself first through the medium of its physical body, and identifies itself with that, so God becomes aware of Himself first through the medium of the individual soul and identifies Himself with that. Thus the evolution of the individual soul becomes His evolution, and the liberation of the individual soul becomes His liberation.
(Meher Baba, The Awakener Magazine)
The concept of the One behind the many is explained.
There are different ego-minds, different bodies, different forms, but only one Soul. When the one Soul (God) takes different ego-minds and bodies, there are different individualized souls; however this does not introduce any multiplicity within the one Soul itself. The Soul is and always remains indivisible. The one indivisible Soul is the base of the different ego-mind and bodies, which do the thinking and acting or various types and which go through innumerable types of dual experiences. But the one indivisible Soul is and always remains beyond all thinking and doing and beyond all dual experience.
(Meher Baba, Discourses)
Only when Maya is completely overcome does there arise the supreme knowledge that God is the only Truth. God alone is real. All that is not God, all that is impermanent and finite, all that seems to exist within the domain of duality, is false. God is one infinite Reality. All divisions that are conceived within this reality are falsely conceived; they do not actually exist.
(Ibid.)
In the course of a discussion among his followers in 1926, someone asked Meher Baba,
"Why did God create all this?"
"He did not create it." Baba replied. "It started automatically! First there was God and nothing else. In God was everything — Experience, Knowledge, Power and Existence. But He had no consciousness that He was God. All this bother and headache you see around you is to gain that consciousness!”
(Meher Baba, Kalchuri, p. 855)
There is nothing except God! This world is a shadow play! Just like your dreams, this is an awake-dream. When you are really awake, you will know.
(Meher Baba, Kalchuri, p. 6105)
And I think this statement by him carries great ethical import for the future.
For man to have a glimpse of lasting happiness, he has first to realize that God, being in all, knows all; that God alone acts and reacts through all; that God, in the guise of countless animate and inanimate entities, experiences the innumerably varied phenomena of suffering and happiness.
(Meher Baba, Final Declaration)
And the following is from Discourses. It conveys the sense of hope I have that the sense of oneness implied by the evolution of perception could have a lasting positive effect on mankind if ever adopted by us.
The individual soul has to realize with full consciousness its identity with the universal Soul. Man shall reorient life in the light of this ancient Truth and will readjust his attitude toward his neighbors in everyday life. To perceive the spiritual value of oneness is to promote real unity and cooperation. Brotherhood then becomes a spontaneous outcome of true perception. . . The hour is near when man in his eager longing for real happiness will seek its true source.
(Meher Baba, Discourses)
I think I could come up with other examples from other spiritual figures. But I think this is sufficient to convey that this idea adds new meaning to spiritual sayings that have in the past sounded like nonsense.
CONCLUSION
It has taken me a long time to write down, and then finally rewrite, this idea that brewed in my mind since I sat in an anthropology class at the age of 20, and later studied philosophy and developed. Looking over the result I feel satisfied that, as I said at the end of the first chapter, whether a reader loves or hates the concept laid out in these pages, if they have read this book to the end, they will at least understand it.
I don’t know what to add. So instead I have searched for a witty final quote. There is a well-known ominous expression that goes: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”
No one has ever ridiculed this idea. Mostly they haven’t grasped it well enough to see all that it obviates in their canon of beliefs, and so haven’t said a word. I seriously doubt anyone will ever violently oppose such a benign idea either. But you never know. But I have always known in my heart it will one day be accepted as self-evident. The reason is simple. It’s true. And it can’t be intelligently denied.
Researching the attribution of the above quote, I discovered it is actually a bastardization of a much longer and even wittier quote by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) in the preface to his book, The World as Will and Representation.
And now that I have allowed myself the jest to which in this two-sided life hardly any page can be too serious to grant a place, I part with the book with deep seriousness, in the sure hope that sooner or later it will reach those to whom alone it can be addressed; and for the rest, patiently resigned that the same fate should, in full measure, befall it, that in all ages has, to some extent, befallen all knowledge, and especially the weightiest knowledge of the truth, to which only a brief triumph is allotted between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical or disparaged as trivial.
(Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation)
I definitely don’t know what I could add to that.
APPENDIX A – QUESTIONING DARWINIAN EVOLUTION
Part of me wanted to include this material on Darwinian evolution in the main text. I eventually chose to put it in an Appendix. But it is hardly an addendum to my main idea. In fact, the idea in this book began to form in my mind in a college classroom when I was eighteen years old. I was studying physical anthropology and learning the theory of Charles Darwin. I had no difficulty understanding the idea, and even enjoyed its simple logic. However, I very soon began to see problems in it – and to my surprise some of these were even discussed in a Life Magazine I read two years later (Hitching, 1982). I later read another book that discussed the same issues titled Darwin Retried by Norman Macbeth (Macbeth, 1974). It seems after the 70s people simply stopped discussing these issues.
I began to feel that the problem with Darwinian evolution was that it presumed an external cause of change in evolution. More specifically, what was called pressures from the environment (climate, food sources) were viewed as the control mechanism forcing evolutionary change. Yet there was very little evidence of this ever happening. In fact, one of the things that jumped out at me in that first class was how well animals are in fact adapted to their environment, and that they remain the same from the time of their appearance. It even grew obvious that survival of the fittest did exactly what it sounds like, it keeps members of a species fit and prevents devolving; it doesn't cause change. Its role was in fact to prevent change, not to bring it about. There was no example of the environment selecting a change in basic morphology. The only things that changed were color and size. The actual shape that formed the species remained identical over time. The Life Magazine article pointed out this very fact, and said it was important.
These African species are recognizable for their shapes. Color and size have no effect on that shape. The size of alligators has shrunk over the last 250 million years, but their shape has remained identical. The greatest example of evolution given to students is a color change among moths. But where is the evolution? It’s a clear case of bait and switch. “We’ll show you change. See, the color changed.”
Anyway, the greatest objection to the view of creation laid out in this book is that Darwin answered these questions a hundred years before my birth. Here’s my doubtful response.
Is Darwinian Evolution Right?
There are many reasons to believe that the currently accepted theory of evolution based on natural selection is false. It's no longer only Christians that say so. The atheist American philosopher Thomas Nagel has written that philosophers need to begin to take more seriously many of the objections that the Intelligent Design community has put forward against the Darwinian narrative, even if they don’t accept their belief in God. See the introduction of Nagel’s controversial 2012 book Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
I concur with Nagel that one should revisit the intelligent design literature with an open mind, for the many valid arguments they raise. I will not try to repeat them here. There is neither room nor need, as the literature is freely available. But I would like to add a few arguments of my own against Darwinian evolution. I have mainly four: which I call ‘Monkey Tails,’ ‘Survivability,’ ‘The Vitruvian Man,’ and ‘Apex-Local Evolution.’
Monkey Tails
The following is my own twist on a very common argument against evolution. People attempting to refute Darwin’s conception of evolution by natural selection, often point out that there is often no clear reason why a trait, and the gene responsible for it, would be 'selected' by natural pressures (like ability to avoid or fight off predators, obtain food, or breed more), before that trait evolved sufficiently to give such specimens any survivability advantage. What would be the advantage of a half-evolved eye that could not yet see, for instance. Biologists have traditionally responded to this kind of objection by theorizing some advantage the incompletely formed trait might have given. Such answers are called ad hoc hypotheses. In science and philosophy, an ad hoc hypothesis is one appended to a theory in order to save it from falsification. While this manner of addressing objections renders Darwinian evolution essentially unfalsifiable, since there’s no limit to such hypotheses that evolution apologists can potentially think of, there is another way to state this argument that is not so open to post hoc fixes.
In the theory of natural selection, what is meant by a trait being 'selected' is that the trait itself allows a specimen that has it a greater chance of passing the gene responsible for that trait on to its young. This inevitably means producing more viable offspring than others in the colony, either by giving it a greater chance of surviving to gestation age, or by enhancing its chance of finding a mate. The idea is that the better breeder will eventually supersede and replace the other specimens in that community that lack the new trait. That’s natural selection.
Now if we go with this theory for why a change happens in a population over time, the various tail lengths among animals is the result of natural selection. Tail lengths among monkeys, for instance, are the result of nature selecting a certain tail length for its survival advantages. The problem is, there are monkeys with long tails that give them the advantage of an extra hand in climbing, and ones with no tail that gives them the advantage of walking upright more easily.
A single mutation in tail length, by itself, offers no advantage or disadvantage. Only by a series of increases or decreases in length over time, after countless minor mutations in one or the other direction, does it give an advantage sufficient to make it produce more viable offspring than its cousins in the community. Obviously, there is nothing about a tail being a centimeter longer or shorter that would cause a female to choose a specimen that had it as a mate over others. What reason would she have? Nor would such a tiny change in tail length in a female cause her to live longer and therefore have more offspring. Nor would such a slightly anomalous tail provide any extra protection from predators or means to obtain food.
What, then, would cause a monkey specimen with a centimeter longer tail to pass down its trait to future generations even one iota more than a second specimen with a tail a centimeter shorter? Both have equally insignificant changes to their tails. So, neither has an any actual advantage over the other.
But the problem is even worse than this. Clearly there is no mechanism by which one direction of change would prevail over its opposite. But since countless tiny changes in a single direction (longer or shorter) would be necessary for a tail to give an advantage, it would have to. It’s not an option that there not be such a mechanism.
And if this statistical anomaly and lack of mechanism were not enough to make you question chance mutation and natural selection as the catalyst for change of morphology over time, there is an even deeper problem. From a purely numerical statistical point of view, every centimeter of increase in tail length within a population would be cancelled out and made moot by every opposite but equal decrease in tail length in that same population. Statistically, then, this would cause tail lengths on average to remain the same, due to increases being nullified by decreases.
Obviously, this problem can be applied to any trait. There are many types and shapes of sets of teeth in nature. And they must all work by the same best fit if they are to work at all. What mechanism could account for the upper teeth evolving to form a perfect solid bite with the lower? Opposite but equal mutations would constantly cancel each other out, precluding any progress in any one direction. Try to model that by countless chance mutations, and you will see it could never have occurred by chance and natural selection. For there is no advantage to pretty, or beautifully symmetrical, or comfortable dental sets.
Survivability
Darwinian evolution, based on 19th century English capitalism, presupposes that species supplant their successors, either by their superior ability to monopolize food resources, avoiding predators, or outperforming them in reproduction. As explained in Chapter 10, the idea comes from the 19th century factory, where an upstart factory with more efficient method of production could put its competitor out of business – in the constant competition over limited financial recourses.
But this raises an interesting question. Do we actually find evidence for this conception of nature when we look back from 2020 at the fossil record of 4.5 billion years of biological evolution? Well we find animals surviving. But do we find a series of more and more efficient factories, i.e., superior survivors replacing weaker ones? No, we don’t. What we find is a series of species with more and more consciousness, but not better and better survivors. The first is fact, the latter a projection.
I can hardly think of a better example of this than our own evolutionary antecedent, Australopithecus afarensis. Australopithecus arose on the Earth and then subsequently disappeared around three million years ago. They produced few fossils remains and were likely in very small numbers. There’s a reason for this. They were terrible survivors. Far from being superior to the other primates in Africa when it came to survival, Australopithecus had small teeth, no claws, could not run fast, and was an inferior climber due to having no prehensile tail. To top it off, as if to rub salt in a wound, it had the brain of a chimpanzee. It wasn’t smart. The only thing it left to us was our bipedalism; it walked fully upright. Later we’ll show why this makes sense under our conception, and not Darwin's.
The fact that it was a lousy survivor is partly proven by the fact that it frankly didn't. Big cats that shared its environment could outrun and outclimb it and had sharper teeth and claws. A cave in Africa was discovered that was filled with Australopithecus skulls, all of them bearing the teeth marks of a leopard. It was theorized that three million years ago, a leopard dragged its lunch up a tree outside this cave, and the heads simply rolled down into it. Imagine that, a feast of a creature too slow to escape, too feeble to fight, and too stupid to ever figure it out. Australopithecus is our direct ancestor, or the closest we know of. Kind of figures, doesn’t it?
Darwinism operates by the maxim that’s reflected in the battle game of Skyrim, "The best techniques are passed on by the survivors." But how does that maxim account for such a creature as Australopithecus forming, let alone living just long enough for us to evolve from it? It doesn’t and it can’t.
But there’s no greater proof that it can’t than taking a look at the ad hoc hypothesis for why and how bipedalism evolved.
Biologists posit that fragile bipeds like Australopithecus offered an advantage over its neighbors in the African savanna, by giving it the ability to see over the grasses and thus spot predators before others did. The reason this is silly is that it fails to explain why animals that shared the same African savanna grasses, such as rabbits and foxes, made no such adjustment, or why the species that didn’t survive or the bipeds they claimed had such an advantage, quickly went extinct.
Another version of the survivability argument against Darwinism is a hypothetical super-killer virus. If evolution were really nothing more than the result of a numbers-game regarding offspring numbers, then an unstoppable killer disease, capable of surviving solely on carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and sunlight, that replicated faster than anything could react to it, and that simply replaced every competitor in its path, such a monster germ would have inherited the Earth billions of years ago, and prevented anything from arising to supplant it. It would be the only species on this planet. Nothing else would ever spawn, let alone prosper, in a world with such an advantaged survivor. Evolution would have ended before it began, with no chance of igniting. But we don't find that world. Instead we find the Yellowstone Wolf Experiment, life sustained in harsh but robust balance, with so-called ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ living in symbiosis and homeostasis.
It's worth saying that we could easily imagine a human scenario like the one just described. If there were no laws to stop the haves of the human world from taking advantage of the have-nots, all wealth would eventually rise into the hands of a single sociopath, one who would devour its young and die itself.
The only creatures capable of the things the elite project onto nature are the elite themselves. Normal healthy people aren't like that. They are endowed with compassion and empathy, in spite of Darwin’s lecture against such personality traits as ‘ignorant’ (see Chapter 15, the section on eugenics). That's why we do have laws, and idealize men like Jesus and Mohammad and Buddha, who had great compassion for the weak, and spoke openly of it.
The Vitruvian Man
Vitruvian Man is the name of a famous drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci, seen on the right. Vitruvian refers to the proportions of the human body described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.
It is a sign of the sad state of our times that children are not taught the significance of this famous drawing. For most it’s just a naked man drawing, perhaps showing mankind in some ideal form. But what it actually signifies is the fact that the human form embodies some very mysterious geometric features. If a human male stretches his arms horizontally, and holds his legs vertically, he forms a perfect square. The width of his outstretched arms is exactly the same as the man’s height. And if he tips his arms and legs at slight angles from horizontal and vertical, a perfect circle can be drawn around him, using the man’s naval as the focus of one’s compass. Try it. Take a tape measure and you’ll find that the width of your arms is the same as your height. If you read my discussion of evolution in the main body of the text, you saw that there is a pattern in nature that ought not be there. It is the pattern of rising consciousness. In fact, by the principles of materialistic Darwinian imagining, where evolution is solely the product of chance, accident, and coincidence, there ought to be no pattern at all in the final product, for a pattern denotes design. In fact, it’s an inconvenient truth that atheists want to avoid thinking about that human beings ought not have evolved last. Bipedalism is an accident, after all, not an unfolding of something, as the Latin root of the word 'evolution' implies.
Evolution: From Latin evolvere, meaning "to unroll"
No other animal in nature has this symmetry as seen in the Vitruvian man, and it cannot be accounted for by Darwinian principles of chance and accident. In fact, it’s not just global symmetry that needs to be accounted for. Sacred geometry views the square as a symbol for the physical aspect of man, and the circle the sacred. Hence encoded in the Vitruvian Man is the very message of this book, that evolution is not a series of accidents but a themed unfolding of the divine in human form.
These coincidences do not support Darwinian principles but put them in serious question. For the entire reason for a theory of nature is to explain the things we perceive as we perceive them, and not some theoretical way it ought to be.
Meher Baba has an explanation for the Vitruvian proportions, but I will not bother to include it here, due to the time it would take to explain it. But in short, he says that the human form is the final form and was latent from the beginning of evolution. The full uprightness we see exhibited in the human form is a necessary feature of the final unfolded expression, and the form is anticipated throughout the process. This, then, gives us an actual explanation for the bipedalism of Australopithecus afarensis, a feature Darwinians to explain but fail with their tall grass theory. And it also explains why, in spite of being fragile and weak, it wound up surviving just long enough to give rise to us.
Apex-local Evolution
Invertebrates like this snail appeared on Earth around 570 million years ago. Once they appeared, while countless ones went extinct, no new ones evolved. For instance, snails evolved about 541-585 million years ago, and yet are about the same now as they were when they first appeared on the Earth.
That means there was no change, but rather almost perfect homeostasis, for over half a billion years.
And yet in just the last three million years, form evolved from Australopithecus afarensis to Homo sapiens. That means snails stayed the same for 173 million times as many years as it took humans to evolve from apes.
In other words, evolution stopped as soon as less conscious lower forms appeared, and only continued at the summit or apex of evolution, at the tip of the spear as it were. This is a pattern you can see throughout evolution.
Bipeds evolved basically chimps to Beethoven in the last three million years. That is a very extreme morphic and consciousness change. During that same period of three million years, absolutely zero change occurred to millions of species in the same environment, facing the same evolutionary pressures.
This would be predicted by my theory, but inexplicable on Darwinian grounds.
APPENDIX B – DIFFERENCES FROM MY EARLIER WRITINGS
I first began to write about the ideas in this book in the summer of 1999. Over the years since, as I’ve continued to develop them, many of my thoughts have changed and much of the wording I’ve used to express myself has also. Here I wish to point out some of the more significant differences, to clarify how I now use my terms and also to distance myself from any ideas I no longer hold.
1. My first book describing the ideas presented here was titled The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance, published in 2004. It began with a dedication page and a quote often attributed to Einstein.
The significant problems we face today cannot be resolved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Since then, I’ve learned that the quote is almost certainly not by Einstein. The first instance of a quote like it appears to be from 1969, in a book by Ram Dass, who likely attributed the statement to Einstein. People who have checked have found similar statements by Einstein, but with a different intention than the wording by Ram Dass. And so, I wish to apologize for that attribution in my first book.
But I also wish to distance myself from Einstein altogether. My first book actually appealed to his Theory of Relativity, using it as one justification for my own conclusions. I was originally quite proud of that argument and felt it was one of my best. However, I’ve since recanted that opinion completely.
2. In all my earlier writing, I disparaged logic as an infallible source of knowledge. My gripe was that logic seemed to me to be based on human intuitions and nothing else. My thought at the time was that this made arguments from logic far too anthropocentric and amounted to appealing to how feel things ought to be. I saw no reason why people would have such a privileged relationship with truth. I no longer feel that way. It occurred to me that if it really were the case that the intuitions that underlie deductive and inductive reasoning were unreliable, then none of my own arguments would hold up either, as they too are grounded in intuition like the principle of noncontradiction. I now acknowledge the reliability of what I have come to call our ‘natural intuitions’ or ‘innate intuitions.’ I describe what I mean by them and explain why I think they are right in Chapter 11.
3. In a paper I wrote in 2009 titled Essentials of a Spiritual Metaphysics, I said that the only thing a human being can state with certainty is that ‘this (my phenomenal experience I perceive) presents itself as it does.’ We can infer from it nothing about its cause, or who its recipient was. So, I felt that acknowledgment of how things present themselves was the absolute limit of human knowledge. Everything else was theory. Today I disavow such a radical skepticism. I now believe that even to state that such and such is the limit of human knowledge appeals implicitly to intuitions. Hence it is a false claim. I also argued at the time that all statements that do not contain a contradiction are possible, and so possibility is trivial. I would no longer say this. I have since realized that anything existing prior to its necessary preconditions is impossible.
Today, virtually all that I write presupposes the veracity of our natural inborn intuitions. I would even say today that the reason I was able to conceive of many of my ideas, when others weren’t able to, is that I am temperamentally inclined toward my intuitions more than most.
4. In the same paper, I also summarized my idea by saying that all there is is seeing and ways of seeing, i.e., perception and its schemas. I later realized that this was insufficient to explain the fullness of phenomenal experience. Our innate intuitions are also necessary to make rational sense of what we perceive through our schemas, and an intuition cannot be explained simply as an evolved perceptual schema. So, the intuitions had to have preexisted the rise of the schemas and thus the rise of the world, and hence had to have always been in the nature of the underlying Intelligence.
5. In my original thinking, there was only one kind of perceptual schema. I now differentiate between perceptual schemas that occur prior to the rise of individual media that makes individual experience possible, and perceptual schemas that arise afterward in individuals. I call the first ‘natural schemas’ and the latter ‘non-natural’ (man-made) schemas. Examples of the first are space, time, and natural laws. Examples of the latter are national borders, distinctions of class and status, judgments, money, language, manmade laws, etc. Non-natural schemas are perceptual schema that people create, and that communities collectively adopt. They are a necessary condition of culture and give rise to what I call cultural evolution. Communal life is hardly possible without them. Some can be harmful like categories of caste, but the term 'non-natural' is meant to be neutral and not in itself pejorative.
6. In Evolution of Perception, I was still not clear in my thinking as to whether perceptual schemas we share, such as the speed of sound at sea level, are in the individual or somehow precede him. Here is how I stated this conundrum I was still dealing with in that book.
Here we propose . . . a property is the same for every observer because all people share identical perceptual schemata. There are two ways to understand this sharing. The first way is that each individual, having traversed the same evolutionary hurdles, has evolved the same perceptual schemata, much the way they have evolved the same skeletal system. The second way to understand this sharing is that the mathematical schemata are applied by perception from its original indivisible point of view, i.e., from a point of view prior to the rise of individuality. Thus, we literally share the same mathematical schemata. (Ott, 55, footnote)
I now side squarely with the second alternative. I now believe the reason the schemas responsible for primary qualities that can be quantified, such as the speed of sound, is that they evolved before we did, and our bodies even supervened upon these primary qualities. So, it is not a matter of having like-lenses, but we literally see though the exact same lens. See the lenses on the left in the diagram below. These represent the shared schemas upon which we supervene, and hence share. They arose in perception before it was divided among individuals and continue to be perceived from that unified perspective (represented by the eye on the left in the chart below).
The difference between primary (objective) qualities and secondary (subjective) ones is the result of when in the order of perceptual schemas, they arose. Objective qualities are transsubjective (perceived by all individuals, independent of individual perception), while subjective qualities are intersubjective (perceived by more than one, but the effect of those schemas being similar in each individual, such as in the case of a shared language or shared cultural prejudices).
7. In Evolution of Perception, my idea was presented tentatively and cautiously. I never claimed it was more than just another theory competing among many. I said I could not yet see any way that I could prove it with all certainty. The argument I hung my hat on, that it was more likely than many others, was one from Ockham's razor, the doctrine that the simplest explanation is the most likely. I pointed out that an evolution of perception, having no metaphysical entities, was metaphysically simpler than materialism which presupposed the existence of many. In other words, the evolution of perception, I argued, had fewer working parts.
I go much further in this new book. I now do, in fact, offer proof that the idea is true necessarily, and not simply worthy of selection on the basis of its superior efficiency. And the proof is that it conforms with our intuition about necessary preconditions.
Also, at the time of writing the first book, I still didn’t see any way to prove the order of the evolving lenses, and said it seemed to me my order was somewhat ad hoc., yet conveyed sufficiently the general gist of how the lenses work to produce the phenomenal world. I have since recognized that there is, like the idea itself, in fact, a priori proof that the order of lenses is a necessary order, based on our natural intuition of necessary preconditions.
8. In my first book I still followed the thinking of George Berkeley in denying that matter existed. This made my first book an ‘immaterialist’ conception of reality, and thus one that could be categorized as a kind of idealism. However, in the glossary of this book I carefully distinguish between two different senses of the word ‘matter.’ The first is a sense of it as a metaphysical substance, as understood in contemporary philosophy of mind. In this sense matter is conceived of as a theoretical substance in the ‘external world,’ beyond the scope of our experience. We only infer its presence from our experience in the belief that our experience is its effect in some way we don’t yet understand. This is the sense of matter that I would still deny.
But, the second sense of matter I have no problem with. That is matter in its usual sense, the way most of us would use the word ‘matter.’ Here it means what you see with your eyes and feel with your hands, the substance of your immediate direct experience. This is what people refer to when they pat a solid object and say, ‘In this, what I see with my own eyes, I do believe’. Matter, in this ordinary everyday sense, I would admit exists phenomenally. After all, the qualities we ascribe to such matter, like solidity, weight, extension, allegiance to fixed natural laws, and persistence, obviously obtain in the outer things we experience. I acknowledge the presence of matter in this latter sense. And hence evolution of perception can be regarded as a form of materialism, and certainly not idealism.
9. This book goes further than The Evolution of Perception in addressing questions such as why the world arose, and the impetus that sparked its beginning. This new discussion places the developed idea squarely into the category of metaphysics and teleology. To answer these more metaphysical questions I appealed to the testimony of reports of experience of mystics, and argue that this is as valid as reliance upon the testimony of anyone that reports what he perceives in introspection, such as a mathematician.
10. In all my previous writing, I spelled the plural form of schema 'schemata.' While this is right, I discovered that many do not know this is the plural spelling of schema, and become confused by this spelling, thinking I’m referring to two different things. So, in this book I have chosen to spell the plural 'schemas.' They are both valid alternative spellings. Hopefully this minor change will make reading this book a little easier than the first.
11. In Evolution of Perception, I referred to the things we perceive, both mentally and physically, as the 'image world.' The problem is that the word 'image' usually implies just eyesight, and so people could be confused. Phenomenal means anything one can take cognizance of, so in this book I use the term ‘phenomenal experience’ or ‘phenomenal world’ instead of ‘image world.’
12. Similar to the above change, in my unpublished collection of essays Essentials of a Spiritual Metaphysics I used the word 'percept' to mean the objects of experience, as I used the word ‘image world’ in Evolution of Perception. The problem with this word is that some academics in the field of philosophy of mind associate the word ‘percept’ with some kind of implied mysterious metaphysical object. To avoid any such implications, I substitute it with words like the ones named in the section just above.
13. I have moved the glossary from the end of the book, where it was in Evolution of Perception, to the beginning in this book, because I now recognize that the meanings of these words as used in this work are integral to understanding, and not an afterthought. One should read them first, and thoroughly, even before starting on the main text.
14. When I wrote The Evolution of Perception, I assumed that people had a vague idea of the philosophical meaning of the word 'perception.’ In philosophy of mind, the word ‘to perceive’ means ‘to take conscious experience of’ whatever one can be cognizant of, including but not limited to thoughts and dreams, as much as physical objects like cups and plates. Because of changes in how certain words are defined in English staring in the 20th century, dictionaries today define 'perception' narrowly, as denoting perception of outer things with the senses, and some people are even under the impression it only refers to perception with the eyes. I make my own use of the term unambiguous in the opening glossary of this book.
15. This book includes a new theory of language, one that was implied and barely touched on in earlier writing, and is fleshed out here.
16. This book is written with a better grasp of 20th century theories of mind than my previous writing. I spent two years studying in preparation for this book. An earlier draft was much longer and had much more detail included, but I found people did not have the patience to read it. Still I have left it in my daughter’s hands, as it has some good material that did not make it into this book.
17. In Essentials of a Spiritual Metaphysic I mocked American philosopher G. E. Moore for his famous 1939 lecture about the external world. I have since seen Moore in a more positive light and disavow what I said there. My new view is as follows:
Some analytic philosophers may say I describe a sense of 'externality' that no one else has. They might appeal to G. E. Moore's 1939 essay, "Proof of an External World,” one I’m very familiar with actually, in which Moore, reflecting on what philosophers mean by 'external' when they speak of the external world, concluded that they mean 'independent of perception.' This is different from the kind of externality we refer to when we speak of a sign outside a liquor store. However, in a twist, Moore ends his lecture with the bold claim that he could see no better proof of the existence of such an ‘external world’ than raising his hand in the air for the others in the room to see. In other words, Moore felt that demonstrating that one could perceive his hand showed it existed independent of anyone seeing it. Of course, this completely undermines Moore's own claimed definition of ‘external’ as 'independent of perception.'
But what’s ironic is that I would have to emphatically agree with Moore that the external world, in the sense shows us, as the phenomenal world of our immediate experience, exists. What I have always objected to is the external world we cannot perceive; which Moore spoke of but evidently didn’t really believe in wholeheartedly either.
Whether Moore realized it not, he was demonstrating the existence of the experiential world, and not a second theoretical causally responsible one.
In this book, it is accepted as obvious that some things are perceived by all present, as in Moore’s colorful demonstration of his hand before a room full of students. We don't just accept it as a point of faith like Moore, but actually account for it by explaining where and how it arises in the process of perception. I also agree with Moore that the experience of an object is that actual object, and there is no other. In the words of Edwin Holt, his hand is not ‘another thing.’ I have no quarrel with Moore. The sense of 'external' that I impugn is the mysterious one described by philosophers later in the 20th century.
18. On March 24, 2018, I gave a talk in which I discussed my idea that there are no chains of causes, only chains of effects. I said that chains of events that we think of as causes are more accurately thought of as effects, i.e., as all evens are, in a sense, effects of the original event responsible for all subsequent events. My thinking at the time was that, if the original whim to know the self is what was ultimately responsible for all that followed it, and hence the universe, then that original whim was the only cause in the truest sense of anything that ever happened afterward. My error was in holding too strong of a definition of cause.
To see what I mean, consider a series of dominoes, in which one knocks over another and another in succession, in a kind of chain reaction until the last domino falls.
When talking of the last domino falling, while it's true that what's ultimately responsible for it falling may be the pushing over of the first domino, there is an equally valid sense in which the proximate cause of the last domino falling is the second to last domino falling. So, I rescind my thinking of that time.
APPENDIX C – KEY TO SEEING OPENING IMAGES
Below are two ways of looking upon the same lines.
Here is a KEY to seeing the image of Jesus in the snow.
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