Brian Cox and the idolatry of nerds

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Jeroboam's Idolatry. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

A couple of weeks ago, a Twitter war broke out between Deepak Chopra, a well-known proponent of integrative medicine, and Brian Cox, a physicist and TV-star who is famous for science documentaries on UK television. The war was covered in a highly tendentious way in an article in the New Statesman. Here, however, I want to focus on what the Twitter exchange seems to reveal about the appalling state of our culture. To give you a flavor of the exchange, I want to start with specifics. Then, I will move to broader, more generalized commentary.

Specific commentary

The contentious part of the discussion seems to have started with the exchange illustrated in the figure below. Chopra’s point is philosophically sound and quite easy to understand. As Bertrand Russell stated, science can only explain one thing in terms of another thing [Russell, B. (2007). The Analysis of Matter. Nottingham: Spokesman Books]. This way, one can never scientifically explain the primary creation event, for there would be, by definition, nothing else in terms of which to explain it. For example: we can scientifically explain the human body in terms of tissues; tissues in terms of cells; cells in terms of molecules; molecules in terms of atoms; atoms in terms of subatomic particles; and subatomic particles – tentatively – in terms of an imagined Big Bang. But we cannot explain the Big Bang, or whatever else science considers the primary creation event, in terms of anything else. After all, by definition, nothing else existed. Chopra’s intent is clear: with the term ‘Big Bang’ he is actually referring to the primary creation event, whatever that may be called in today’s cosmology. In his necessarily-short Twitter message, he says ‘Big Bang’ simply because that is popularly understood to mean the primary creation event.

Yet, Cox replies to Chopra’s statement as if it had been false and naïve. That he felt the need to add an infantile hashtag is as disturbing as it is revealing but, for the sake of substance, let’s leave that silly detail aside for now. In his reply, Cox refers to the theory of eternal inflation, clearly suggesting that it offers a scientific cause for the Big bang. It’s outside the scope of this essay to elaborate on the theory, but the essential point is this: eternal inflation only offers a scientific cause for the Big Bang if we drop the notion that the Big Bang was the primary creation event; that is, if we assume that there was something else prior to the Big Bang. Indeed, eternal inflation simply pushes the primary creation event further into the past [Linde, A. D. (1986). Eternally Existing Self-Reproducing Chaotic Inflationary Universe. Physics Letters B, 175 (4), pp. 395–400]. It leaves the epistemic hole pointed out by Chopra completely intact. As such, Cox’s reply doesn’t at all refute the essence of Chopra’s message and Cox obviously knows this. Yet, he seems to have willfully chosen to use his authority to – there is no other way to say it – mislead his Twitter audience for the sake of making someone else look like a fool. What can possibly motivate such behavior from a scientist and public educator? Answers later. For now, bear with me.

Cox goes on to throw highly-specialized scientific literature at Chopra. Under different circumstances, this would be an entirely valid attempt to claim the scientific high-ground. But, in this case, Cox obviously already had the scientific high-ground to begin with, for he is the physicist in the discussion. So what is he trying to accomplish? The implicit but clear message seems to be this: because Chopra is not a physicist, he is not qualified to conclude anything from physics in order to interpret the broader aspects of reality. Only physicists, as the new priesthood of modern culture, are supposedly qualified to do that. Yet, this contradicts Cox’s own outreach efforts to explain physics to the common men and women on the streets. The whole point of that effort can only be to equip people to interpret their broader reality on the basis of physics. That Chopra does precisely this is either entirely legitimate or Cox should give up his TV-star role as science educator for the masses. One can’t have it both ways.

I am sure Cox would react to what I just said above by claiming that Chopra’s understanding of physics is simply wrong. He would claim that his reference to technical papers makes this clear. Peer-reviewed scientific papers, as such, seem to be considered by Cox as sufficient to give legitimacy to an ontological position, even if they don’t necessarily prove it. Are there, then, peer-reviewed scientific papers corroborating Chopra’s main claim that reality is not objective but, instead, entirely in consciousness? There are plenty. Here are just some, all of which have been published in the most respected scientific journals in the world:

1. Kim, Y.-H. et al. (2000). A Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser. Physical Review Letters 84, pp. 1–5. The authors show that observation not only determines the reality observed at present, but also retroactively changes the history of what is observed accordingly. This is entirely consistent with the notion that reality is fundamentally a story playing itself out in mind.
2. Gröblacher , S. et al. (2007). An experimental test of non-local realism. Nature 446, pp. 871-875. The authors show that reality is either entirely in consciousness or we must abandon our strongest intuitions about what objectivity means. As far as the practical applications of Chopra’s claims are concerned, the differences between these two alternatives are not so significant. Physicsworld.com, in a related article, went as far as to claim that ‘quantum physics says goodbye to reality.’
3. Lapkiewicz, R. et al. (2011). Experimental non-classicality of an indivisible quantum system. Nature 474, pp. 490–493. The authors show that, unlike what one would expect if reality were independent of mind, the properties of a quantum system do not exist prior to observation. Renowned physicist Anton Zeilinger, in a related New Scientist article suitably titled “Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it,” is quoted as saying that “there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure about a system has [an independent] reality.”
4. Xiao-song Ma et al. (2013). Quantum erasure with causally disconnected choice. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 110, pp. 1221-1226. Again, the authors show that no naively objective view of reality can be true, which is consistent with Chopra’s claim that reality is fundamentally subjective. A less-technical explanation of the experiment in this paper, as well as its results, can be found here.
5. A bunch of others, too numerous to comment on individually:
   Aspect, A. et al. (1981). Experimental Tests of Realistic Local Theories via Bell’s Theorem. Physical Review Letters 47(460).
   Aspect, A. et al. (1982). Experimental Realization of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm Gedankenexperiment: A New Violation of Bell’s Inequalities. Physical Review Letters 49(91).
   Aspect, A. et al. (1982). Experimental Test of Bell’s Inequalities Using Time-Varying Analyzers. Physical Review Letters 49(1804).
   Tittel, W. et al. (1998). Violation of Bell Inequalities by Photons More Than 10 km Apart. Physical Review Letters 81(17).
   Weihs, G. et al. (1998). Violation of Bell’s Inequality under Strict Einstein Locality Conditions. Physical Review Letters 81(23).
   Etc.

So where does this leave us? The conclusion is inescapable: according to Cox’s own values, Chopra’s key message that reality is in consciousness cannot be cavalierly dismissed as New Age woo or nonsense. Rigorous science lends more than merely suggestive support to it. What motivates Cox’s behavior then? Answers shortly. For now, I want to beat this dead horse a little more.

As Carl Jung put it, consciousness – that is, subjective experience itself – is the only carrier of reality anyone can ever know. The very act of knowing is an act of consciousness. Can you know what you aren’t, have never been, and will never be, conscious of? Materialist scientists like Cox infer a fundamentally unknowable, unprovable and abstract universe outside consciousness because they believe that this is the only way to explain empirical reality. If reality is fundamentally subjective, like a dream, how do we then explain the fact that we all seem to share the same reality – that is, the same ‘dream’? How do we explain the undeniable correlations between brain activity and subjective experience? How do we explain the effect of psychotropic drugs or physical trauma to the head, both of which undeniably and reliably alter consciousness? How do we explain the undeniable fact that the laws of physics are utterly independent from our egoic volition? After all, if you jump off of a building you will fall, whether you change your mind about it during the fall or not. How do we explain the fact that the world goes merrily on while we sleep in apparent unconsciousness? Etc.

These are all valid questions. The thing, however, is that they have been answered. The latest, most contemporary set of answers to these questions is in my own book, Why Materialism Is Baloney, where I take pains in 250 pages to tackle each of these points logically, rigorously, and with plenty of empirical substantiation. But I haven’t been the first one to do this. Already in the early 18th century philosopher George Berkeley did it. To this day, he remains a respected figure in philosophy. It’s true that many non-philosophers are put off by Berkeley’s use of the concept of ‘God’ in his argument, which was an entirely legitimate move in his own time. However, as I elaborate upon in the video below, we can very clearly and logically articulate and defend the notion that all reality is in consciousness – a notion called ‘Idealism’ in philosophy – without using the concept of a deity.

Now, the moment we can show that Idealism has enough explanatory power to make sense of all reality, including scientific observations, it must be accepted as the preferred, default ontology. The reason is as simple as it is irrefutable: consciousness is the primary datum of existence; it is the one undeniable element of reality and necessary precondition for all knowledge. If one can explain everything without postulating anything beyond consciousness itself, parsimony comes into play and we must refrain from multiplying hypotheses unnecessarily. Postulating a universe outside consciousness when reality can be explained entirely as complex excitations of consciousness is akin to believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And if Brian Cox thinks that I am deluded in claiming this, I herewith challenge him to debate me publicly on the matter. Since he is gutsy enough to call Deepak Chopra a “whining teenager” while referring to himself as a “rational grown-up,” he should have no problem accepting this challenge and proving to the world that I am a fool.

The apparent counter-intuitiveness of Idealism is merely a reflection of deeply-ingrained, hardly-conscious prejudices embedded in our culture. Often, as I illustrate in the video below, materialists beg the question when disputing Idealism. In other words, they assume materialism in their argument to defend it, which is obviously a fallacy.

Our culture, somehow, has come to completely invert the situation: when we say that all reality is in consciousness, most people believe it to mean that reality is inside our heads. In fact, it is materialism that says that the reality we experience is entirely inside our skulls, since experience is supposedly generated by our brains. If, instead, reality is in consciousness, then our heads are in consciousness – not the other way around – and the world we experience around us is, indeed, outside our heads. Idealism, in other words, grants reality to be exactly what it seems to be. But our culture, somehow, has come to attribute to materialism the intuitiveness of Idealism, while attributing to Idealism the absurd implications of materialism. See the video below.

General commentary

It is this inversion that allows Brian Cox, and others in science, to get away with the dangerous combination of narrow-mindedness and hubris that he displayed in his exchange with Chopra. As I discussed in an earlier essay, science-as-you-know-it has come to deface reason by uncritically co-opting the metaphysics of materialism. By turning itself into a church of materialism, science-as-you-know-it no longer represents an unbiased and ontologically neutral method of investigation. And because our culture mistakenly takes technological success to be evidence for a deep understanding of the nature of reality, we are all guilty, at least by omission, of allowing the new priesthood of science to appoint themselves arbiters of ontological truth. This is as insane as appointing a 5-year-old kid, who happens to break records playing computer games, chief architect at Apple Inc. because the kid’s game-playing prowess must imply deep understanding of computer engineering. Or must it not? The fact that one has figured out, through trial and error, how to play the game of technology does not imply any deep understanding of the nature of reality.

Because of our growing cynicism as a culture, long ago has wisdom been abandoned by our value systems. We have given up on the idea of elders: those who, irrespective of formal education, are firmly in touch with the full spectrum of their humanity and its intimate connection to the universe at large. We have given up on our poets, artists, healers and philosophers as guides. But the archetypal human need to receive guidance and reassurance from an external source remains intact. We naturally need to place our projections of wisdom and superior knowledge onto something or someone else. The gap left had to be filled. And in our technology-obsessed culture, we tragically filled the gap with the spokespeople of science. Having done so, we now find ourselves in the insane position of expecting wisdom and guidance from – pardon my blatant sincerity – semi-conscious nerds; intellectual specialists who can solve abstract mathematical puzzles but are largely disconnected from life and the depths of their own psyche. No teenager would make this silly mistake among his or her own circle of friends, as a visit to any schoolyard will show you. Yet we, as a culture, do it all the time.

Why do we behave like this? What are we getting from this insane projection of wisdom onto some of the least sighted amongst us? A cogent analysis of none other than Brian Cox himself, by James Sheils, helps shed some light on the question. Sheils argues that “Cox’s science documentaries stupefy the public into remembering disconnected and obscure ideas they do not understand.” Yet, the public is fascinated by these documentaries because the obscure mysteries they hint at instigate a misplaced sense of amazement and awe. This “amazement and awe,” Sheils continues, “do not advance a person’s understanding of scientific ideas. And to settle for this response is to encourage your audience to be satisfied with feeling bewildered and overwhelmed.”

Shiels is on to something here. Our progressive abandonment of our relationship with the mysteries of transcendence since the Enlightenment has left a gaping hole in the human psyche. Our culture is desperate to get intellectual permission to believe something else instead, to peek into some new and obscure mystery, so long as it inspires the same amazement and awe previously reserved for transcendence. The new priesthood of science sensed an opportunity and rushed to fill the gap not with real science, but with the science fiction of parallel universes and the like that Brian Cox is so fond of. Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Laurence Krauss, Richard Dawkins: scientists or TV stars? Men of wisdom or priests of misplaced wonder? Here is Brian Cox – whose lectures discuss “obscure quantum mechanical assumptions used to introduce counter-intuitive effects and explain obscure astronomy,” to quote Shiels again – arrogantly blasting Deepak Chopra because of the latter’s obscure appeal to quantum mechanics. How ironic. And here is Neil deGrasse Tyson preposterously suggesting that science has rendered philosophy redundant, a position whose absurdity and danger has been made painfully clear by Prof. Austin Hughes. And they all get away with it! What’s going on?

Conclusions

It is we, as a culture, who project onto figures like Brian Cox maturity, authority and wisdom they’ve never had. And, as any psychologist will tell you, those who receive such projections begin to believe them themselves, in a process sometimes called inflation (no pun intended). They then take their preferred methods, values and particular way of thinking to be the only valid ones, snubbing all others. As a consequence, true intuition, imagination and direct experiential knowledge are disregarded today in favor of purely conceptual exercises in abstraction. Our projections have given semi-conscious nerds the power to impose their idiosyncratic values and dominant psychic functions onto the rest of us. This has been costing more to our culture than we can imagine today, but will realize one day with jaw-dropping horror.

All this said, we can also withdraw our projections and change this tragic state of affairs rather quickly. In doing so, we need not give in to woo, hysteria, intellectual nonsense, or any such drivel. We only need to learn and separate style from substance, personal taste from content, argument from conclusion. Personally, I also have distaste for New Age jargon and style. I’ve always had it and never made a secret of it. I also think that a lot of the New Age ideas and theories are complete and utter bunk; even dangerous bunk. You will find in me no sympathy for lack of intellectual rigor or lack of skepticism; much to the contrary. But my idiosyncratic taste and preferences are no basis for dismissing Chopra’s claim that reality is in consciousness, because that simply is the best explanation around. My idiosyncratic taste and preferences are no basis for dismissing Chopra’s claim that our psychic state is directly related to our physical health because, as I articulated in an earlier essay, that is also quite likely and reasonable. He was saying these things before I ever had the maturity to even contemplate them as possibilities, so I can only respect him despite any difference in style or values. The fact that Chopra may have never articulated his positions with the degree of thoroughness and rigor that I personally require does not mean that he is wrong. By pre-judging the claim based largely on his distaste of the claimant’s style and way of communicating, Cox is committing an ad hominen fallacy whose cost is enormous: he is desensitizing his large audience to hypotheses about the nature of reality that aren’t only very likely to be true, but also essential to our physical, psychological, and spiritual advancement as a civilization.

Finally, if Brian Cox thinks I am foolish or in any way wrong, the least he can do is to accept my challenge for a public debate. Please wipe the floor with me, Brian, if you can. Or, to paraphrase your comment to Chopra, just “shut up.”

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The case for integrative medicine

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

This essay expresses my support for ISHAR.

Integrative medicine encompasses a variety of approaches to healthcare focusing on mind-body interaction. Unlike mainstream materialist medicine, which treats a patient’s body as a biological mechanism, integrative medicine seeks to heal the whole being, including – and often starting from – one’s psychic, emotional functions. It is a more holistic approach to healing that, because of the metaphysical bias carried by our culture’s mainstream materialist worldview, has largely been neglected over the past several decades. In this essay, I want to not only lend my support to integrative medicine, but also elaborate on how a sane and parsimonious understanding of reality provides credibility and strong rational foundations to the integrative approach. The time has come for our culture to overcome the narrow and artificial materialist boundaries that for so long have impaired healthcare. We have suffered long enough.

Let me begin by summarizing the worldview discussed at length in my book Why Materialism Is Baloney. Bear with me, for it isn’t easy to summarize 250 pages in one paragraph. I maintain that all reality is in consciousness, though not in your personal consciousness alone. This way, it is your body-brain system that is in consciousness, not consciousness in your body-brain system. Think of reality as a collective dream: in a dream, it is your dream character that is in your consciousness, not your consciousness in your dream character. This becomes obvious when you wake up, but isn’t at all obvious while you are dreaming. Furthermore, I maintain that the body-brain system is the image of a process of localization in the stream of consciousness, like a whirlpool is the image of a process of localization in a stream of water. It is this localization that leads to the illusion of personal identity and separateness. For exactly the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water, your brain doesn’t generate consciousness. Yet, because the image of a process correlates tightly with the inner dynamics of the process – just like the color of flames correlates tightly with the microscopic details of the process of combustion – brain activity correlates with subjective experience. Motivated by this correlation, materialists naively mistake the image of the process for the cause of the process. Finally, while particular types of brain activity are the image of egoic processes in consciousness, the rest of the physical body is the image of our personal ‘unconscious’ psyche. I maintain that the ego corresponds to self-reflective processes in consciousness – that is, processes that you are aware that you are aware of – while the ‘unconscious’ corresponds to non-self-reflective processes also in consciousness. As such, there is no true unconscious, but simply processes in consciousness that become obfuscated by the ‘glare’ of self-reflective awareness, in the same way that the stars become obfuscated by the glare of the sun at noon. Now, as the body is the image of our personal ‘unconscious,’ the world at large is also the image of a collective ‘unconscious.’ That is the reason we all seem to share the same reality. See the figure below.

The key point in this whole story, as far as integrative medicine is concerned, is this: beyond certain specific types of brain activity that correlate with egoic awareness, the rest of the physical body is the image of our personal ‘unconscious’ minds. The body isn’t merely a lump of matter fundamentally independent from, and outside, our psyche: it is the image of buried emotions, feelings, beliefs, cognitive processes and structures of consciousness that escape the field of our self-reflective awareness. Now, just as blue flames are the image of hotter combustion and red flames the image of colder combustion, so a healthy body is the image of healthy psychic activity and an ill body is the image of unhealthy psychic activity in the personal ‘unconscious.’ This way, if we need to speak in terms of causation, it is fair to say that unhealthy psychic activity in the personal ‘unconscious’ causes all illnesses. This shows the importance of integrative medicine: we can treat all illnesses by influencing ‘unconscious’ psychic activity.

A note of caution is required at this point. Many alternative healing techniques are promoted today that focus on the ego: affirmations, positive thinking, visualization, etc. But for as long as the corresponding psychic activity remains in the ego, it won’t affect the rest of the body. Because the body is the image of non-egoic psychic activity, whatever remains in the ego cannot influence the body. How many people get seriously ill despite assiduously practicing positive thinking and visualizations? How many people continue to suffer from the conditions they try to overcome with their daily health affirmations? Clearly, it isn’t enough to refurnish the ego: the new furniture has to sink into the cellar of our personal psyches if it is to have bodily effect. It has to be assimilated by the core of one’s being.

This isn’t necessarily bad news, for it works the other way around as well: hypochondriacs, for instance, need not worry about ‘attracting’ the very illnesses they are constantly anxious about. Their anxiety resides in their egoic awareness, this being precisely the reason why they suffer. Remaining self-reflectively aware of unhealthy psychic activity causes psychological distress, for sure, but it also prevents that activity from becoming somatized as physical illness. Depth psychology has, for decades, insisted in the need to bring unhealthy psychic activity into the light of self-reflective awareness, where it does less damage and can be more easily treated through talk therapy.

Nobody needs to feel guilty about ‘attracting’ illness due to a negative mood disposition, since such disposition isn’t ‘unconscious.’ If it were, you wouldn’t be aware of it and wouldn’t feel guilty to begin with. Do you see what I mean? Generally speaking, you cannot know at an egoic level whether your psychic dispositions are going to compromise your health, for the dispositions that can do so are, by their very nature, ‘unconscious.’ Case in point: a meta-study has shown that ‘extremely low anger scores have been noted in numerous studies of patients with cancer. Such low scores suggest suppression, repression, or restraint of anger. There is evidence to show that suppressed anger can be a precursor to the development of cancer, and also a factor in its progression after diagnosis.’ [Thomas, S. P. et al (2000). Anger and cancer: an analysis of the linkages. Cancer Nursing, 23(5), pp. 344-9] This is entirely consistent with the explanatory framework I am putting forward here: anger only becomes somatized if it escapes egoic awareness and drops into the personal ‘unconscious.’ But the irony is clear in the quote: it is precisely low anger scores that indicate high internalized levels of, well, anger! How is a patient to tell a healthy lack of anger from internalized, ‘unconscious’ anger? Should people who do not feel angry start worrying about anger-caused cancer? That would be preposterous. Only trained therapists can differentiate between a healthy lack of negative emotions and deeply buried emotions; and even then only tentatively. Either way, worry is illogical.

Another thing to take into account is this: as the image of our personal ‘unconscious’ psyches, the body is connected not only to the ego on one side, but also to the collective ‘unconscious’ on the other side. See the figure above again. Now, since the physical world we perceive around us is the image of the activity of the collective ‘unconscious,’ environmental stressors like viruses, bacteria, exposure to the elements, nutrition, physical trauma, pollutants, drugs, etc., all obviously influence our bodily health. The problem is that this is the only avenue of influence that materialist medicine acknowledges. Therefore, it misses half of the problem and half of the avenues of healing.

The view that all reality is a manifestation of consciousness in consciousness points to the following twin-avenues for effective integrative medicine: first, the patient must be helped to bring all negative psychic activity into the light of self-reflective awareness, so it doesn’t become somatized. The patient’s ego must acknowledge and welcome the patient’s buried, repressed material. Once this happens, the patient can be treated through the oldest, simplest and most effective healing method ever devised by mankind: heart-to-heart personal interaction between patient and healer. Second, healers can influence the psychic conditions in the personal ‘unconscious’ – seat of all illness – through the egoic channel. But for this to be effective, healers must help patients internalize the treatment, so it drops past the ego and into the deeper layers of the psyche. Here is where the art and skill of the healer comes into play, for this ‘dropping in’ must be accomplished through bypassing egoic barriers and defense mechanisms. A form of benign manipulation is required, which may conflict with present-day notions of ethics.

A case in point is the so-called placebo effect. Current practice in approving new drugs and treatments is that they must be demonstrated to be more effective than the proverbial ‘sugar pills.’ A serious problem for the pharmaceutical industry is the growing effectiveness of placebos in combating illness, which makes new drugs increasingly more difficult to approve [Silberman, S. (2009). Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. Wired Magazine, 17.09, 24 August 2009]. The elephant in the room, obviously, is that placebos work, and more so in recent years. Clearly, through the power of suggestion and a form of benign egoic manipulation, a real effect is produced in the patient’s personal ‘unconscious;’ an effect whose image is renewed bodily health. To close one’s eyes to the greatly beneficial implications of this fact is insane. Even the ethical questions often raised (‘Can we deliberately deceive the patient?’) are based on prejudices: there is no deception if the method works. It is hardly relevant, for instance, whether reiki or homeopathy work for the theoretical reasons claimed by their practitioners or for entirely different reasons, as long as they do work. As a matter of fact, the theoretical reasons offered by the practitioners may be integral to the treatment insofar as they provide the patient’s ego with models and images that help lower the ego’s defenses. Without those, the treatment may never fully penetrate the patient’s psyche and drop into the personal ‘unconscious,’ the only place where physical healing can occur. Moreover, even mainstream science depends largely on convenient fictions like, for instance, force-carrying subatomic particles [Okasha, S. (2002). Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Chapter 4]. We claim these convenient fictions to be legitimate because we can build working technology based on them: empirically, things work as if the fictions were true, and that’s good enough. Why not apply the same sensible pragmatism to the healing arts? Maybe acupuncture works as if energy meridians were true and, until we know better, that’s good enough too.

We have every logical reason – not to mention myriad empirical ones – to give ourselves rational permission to embrace and trust integrative medicine. It explores effective avenues of treatment that have been left untouched by mainstream materialist medicine. Today’s healthcare systems treat us as biological robots because the materialist metaphysics defines us as such. Consequently, doctors often behave as mechanics instead of healers. But for millennia prior to modern medicine, it was the sheer strength of the healer’s personal presence, as well as the psychic effects of his or her often-intricate techniques, that helped people heal. Back then, we lacked the avenue of the collective ‘unconscious’ in the form of effective drugs and surgery. Now, the situation has been reversed: we focus solely on the collective ‘unconscious’ methods of drugs and surgery, ignoring the egoic channel. The time has come to explore both of these avenues concurrently. The time has come for integrative medicine. Human health and wellbeing demand no less.

(Regarding this essay in particular, I'd much appreciate your feedback: Is integrative medicine a valid area for applying philosophical insights? Is it an important focus area in the so-called 'culture war'? Is this something you think I should be spending effort on? Please leave a comment below or participate in my Discussion Forum)

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Science and the defacement of Reason

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Kali and Shiva, the destroyer/transformer.
Source: Wikipedia.

Right, this one is going to be controversial. Even as I write these opening words, I still harbor some doubt about whether I should be doing this at all. I'll postpone thinking further about it until the point when there's nothing left to do but to click on the 'publish' button. If you are reading this now, you know that, eventually, I did click on it.

You see, the problem is that I am about to commit sacrilege. I am about to attack my alma mater in the original latin sense of the words. I am about to attack science; or, at least, science as most people know it in our society. I come from the womb of science. Yet, doing what I am about to do is, I guess, the price of brutal honesty. This article has been inspired by private discussions I've had with Alex Tsakiris and Niclas Thörn. I gratefully acknowledge their input. Having said this, I am solely responsible for the opinions I am about to express.

In an earlier article I wrote for New Dawn Magazine, which is now freely available online, I elaborated upon what true science should be and how it differs from how science is presented to the public today. In that article, my concern was to protect an idealized, archetypal view of science from the defacement it is suffering at the hands of those responsible for promoting it. Since I wrote that article, however, I've come to realize that my archetypal view of science is more a personal ideal than an objective reality. More than a kind of Platonic Form, science is what scientists do in practice. As such, the reality of the situation may be the opposite of what I painted in that earlier article: actual science may be the culprit, not the victim. To separate my archetypal, idealized view of science from the reality of science today, I will refer to the latter as science-as-you-know-it.

Archetypal science is ontologically neutral: it is merely a method for unveiling the empirically-observed patterns and regularities of reality, without philosophical interpretations. But science-as-you-know-it implicitly adopts the materialist ontology. Perhaps not all scientists do this; perhaps even only a minority does. But this minority is vocal and influential. They clearly control where the research funding goes, for projects that do not assume the materialist metaphysics collectively get much less funding than projects that do. If you ask me to substantiate this assertion with data, you will be simply revealing your naiveté about what's going on: it's like asking for proof that the Earth is round. Moreover, this vocal minority also controls how science-as-you-know-it is presented in the media, in school curricula, and to the culture at large. Just think of people like Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and others such specialized prodigies of rhetoric and intellectual puzzles, who cavalierly ignore rigorous logic, epistemology, and ontology. As much as it pains me to admit this, the fact is that science-as-you-know-it has become synonym with the materialist metaphysics. Even if, as assumed, only a minority of scientists are responsible for this association, the institutions of science seem to be in no hurry to correct the situation. As such, they and all their members are guilty, at least by omission, of allowing it.

As argued in my latest book Why Materialism Is Baloney, as well as in recent essays and videos in this blog, materialism is a fantasy. It's based on unnecessary assumptions, circular reasoning, and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions. It's not the purpose of this essay to elaborate on this; the references I just provided make my case. The point here is this: the emperors with no clothes that promote the materialist belief on TV, books, and what not, are seen as spokespeople of science-as-you-know-it. When these people promote their flawed logic in the media as an expression of Reason, the irony is distasteful. As such, science-as-you-know-it, with all the funding and respect it has accumulated as enabler of technology, has become the chief promotor of a philosophical worldview that is not only false, but corrosive, demeaning to the human condition, and a threat to a sane and healthy future for your children. As much as its continuing positive contributions to civilization cannot be ignored or dismissed, science-as-you-know-it has also made itself part of a great threat. Allow me to elaborate.

The implicit materialist belief that is now intrinsically associated with science-as-you-know-it limits the horizons of scientific research. Many interesting and promising phenomena do not get studied because, according to materialism, they are a priori decreed to be impossible. Interesting data, which could point the way to entirely unexpected and promising avenues of research, get discarded because, according to materialism, they cannot be valid. By adopting materialism, science-as-you-know-it has surrendered its neutrality and openness; it is now biased. How many healing methods, amazing technologies, and ways of improving our lives will not be discovered because of this? How many new horizons that could bring great meaning, excitement, and unimagined possibilities to the human condition won't be opened? Instead of a force for impartial exploration, science-as-you-know-it is turning into a strait jacket for the human spirit. Instead of working on truly new discoveries, science-as-you-know-it is now busy with fantasies that make for great entertainment but not much more, as cogently argued in a recent Huffington Post essay.

Worst yet, science-as-you-know-it now claims to have rendered philosophy redundant, a philosophical statement recently made by, among many others, Lawrence Krauss. The insanity and danger of this position have been cogently argued by Prof. Austin Hughes. By projecting all reality onto abstract matter, and then by proceeding to deny the value of philosophical inquiry, science-as-you-know-it is sucking the meaning out of the human condition.

Yet, science-as-you-know-it is not the sole culprit of this tragic and dangerous state of affairs. We all are. It is our society and culture that project wisdom onto people who are just smart in their very-highly-specialized-and-narrow fields. To ask Stephen Hawking – someone who had the nerve to state that, 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,' apparently ignoring the quaint fact that the law of gravity is not nothing – about the underlying nature of reality (i.e. ontology) is like asking a chess player about quantum physics. The chess player is pretty smart, alright, but those smarts don't apply to all and everything. Smart scientists can be, and often are, surprisingly foolish when it comes to epistemology, ontology, psychology, art, poetry, and all those things that matter much more to actual human life than mathematical puzzles. Yet we, as the people, still can't resist the temptation to project general wisdom onto them. This projection is what has invested them with the power to speak nonsense and not be either ridiculed or ignored.

But if we have been enablers of this situation, we can also counter the situation by withdrawing our projections. Let's look upon the militant spokespeople of science-as-you-know-it for what they truly are: confused human beings like you and me, potentially beset by hubris, narrow-mindedness, prejudices, agendas, circular reasoning, projections, hidden insecurities, neuroses, unconsciousness, and the entire gamut of human limitations. In doing so, we may lose some of the anchors that ground our lives: we may feel lost in the jungle, without guides. But those anchors were illusory to begin with. We need wisdom, not narrow intellectual prowess. We need guides, not puzzle-solvers. We need people who are conscious of, and in touch with, their humanity, in all its horror and beauty, not unconscious nerds living in denial.

It started with us, but it can change with us.

At the same time, we have to be extraordinarily careful. To simply get rid of science would be a catastrophe for the human condition, setting us back hundreds of years. A quick look at the fringes of the culture shows the dark tides of delusion, hysteria, nonsense, fundamentalism, and sheer madness waiting at the sidelines. But the real risk of catastrophe cannot justify accepting the prospect of slow but sure death that scientific materialism now presents us with. Finding the right balance here is crucial and not at all easy. Our culture will be faced with this critical crossroads not too long from now. The human spirit cannot tolerate the starvation of meaning and the limited horizons that science-as-you-know-it is forcing upon us. The collective human unconscious will rebel. Our challenge will be to channel those erupting energies in a way that balances their destructive and constructive aspects. Shiva and Brahma are both needed; in this order. Vishnu must stand on the sidelines for a while.

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Five ways materialists beg the question

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Hidden but still visible.
Photo by Bernardo Kastrup, hereby released into the public domain.

To 'beg the question' is a logical fallacy in which one takes the conclusion of an argument as a premise of the argument. For instance, if one says: 'God exists because the bible says so, and the bible is true because it was written by God,' one is begging the question of God's existence. As such, to beg the question is a kind of circular reasoning. Although the circularity of the reasoning is obvious in the simplistic example I just gave, one often begs the question in an indirect and somewhat hidden manner. In this essay, I want to summarize some of the common ways in which materialists beg the question: that is, the ways in which they argue for the validity of materialism by assuming materialism in the argument. The circularity of their reasoning becomes clear once it's pointed out, but it is astonishing how often educated, intelligent materialists fall for it. The list below is in no particular order of importance or ranking.

1 - 'Our sense perceptions provide direct evidence for a world outside consciousness.' Whatever else they may or may not be, our sense perceptions are certainly a particular modality of conscious experience. Other modalities are thoughts, emotions, and imagination. The difference is that we often identify with our thoughts, emotions, and imagination – that is, we think that our thoughts, emotions, and imagination are part of us – and seldom identify with our sense perceptions – that is, we do not think that the world we see around us is part of us. Moreover, we often have some degree of direct volitional control of our thoughts and emotions, while we do not have any direct volitional control of the world we perceive around us: we cannot change the world merely by wishing it to be different. Therefore, all we can really say about sense perception is that it is a modality of conscious experience that we do not identify with or have direct volitional control of. That's all. When materialists assert that sense perception is direct evidence for a world outside mind, they are assuming that things we do not identify with or have direct volitional control of can only be grounded in a world outside consciousness. This, of course, begs the question.

2 - 'We cannot say that reality is in consciousness because that would require postulating an unfathomably complex entity to be imagining reality.' The hidden assumption here is that consciousness can only exist if it is generated by something else; by an entity outside consciousness, whose complexity must be proportional to the level of consciousness being generated. This is a hardly-disguised way to assume materialism in the first place: to assume that mind must be reducible to complex arrangements of something outside mind. Naturally, when one claims that reality is in consciousness, one is claiming precisely that consciousness is irreducible, primary, fundamental. Consciousness, as such, is not generated by complex entities or, for that matter, by anything outside consciousness: it is simply what is. To say that irreducible consciousness generates reality requires no more complexity and poses no more problems than to say that irreducible laws of physics generate reality. In fact, it poses less problems, since it avoids the hard problem of consciousness altogether.

3 - 'The stability and consistency of the laws of physics show that reality is outside consciousness.' The hidden premise here is that all conscious processes are necessarily somewhat unstable and unpredictable. This would be true only if all conscious processes were tied to neuronal activity, for neuronal activity is often unstable and unpredictable. But that is an implication only of materialism. There is nothing in the statement that all reality is in consciousness requiring that all conscious processes be tied to neuronal activity. There is nothing in it that precludes the possibility that certain processes in the broader, non-personal levels of consciousness unfold according to very stable, strict patterns and regularities that we've come to call the 'laws of nature.' If all reality is in consciousness, then it is brains that are in consciousness, not consciousness in brains. As such, consciousness is not limited or circumscribed by brain activity. To assume so is to beg the question of materialism.

4 - 'Since our minds are separate and we all experience the same external reality, this reality must be outside consciousness.' The idea here is to suggest that, if reality is fundamentally in consciousness, as a kind of collective dream, how come we can all be sharing the same dreamworld, given that our minds are not connected? How can the dream be shared? Naturally, this begs the question entirely: it is only under the notion that our minds are generated by our bodies that we can say that our minds are separate; after all, our bodies are indeed separate. But if reality is in consciousness, then it is our bodies that are in consciousness, not consciousness in our bodies. The fact that our bodies are separate in the canvas of consciousness simply does not imply that our minds are fundamentally separate at the deeper, subconscious levels. To say so is analogous to stating that, because one has two applications open in a computer screen, one must be using two separate computers! It is the application that is in the computer, not the computer in the application. Separate applications do not imply separate computers.

5 - 'We know that subconscious brain activity can determine later conscious experience. For instance, by measuring brain activity neuroscientists can predict a subject's choice before the subject is conscious of making the choice. Therefore, brain activity generates consciousness.' Here, materialists beg the question by equating neuronal processes outside self-reflective awareness with processes outside consciousness. As I elaborate upon in my book Why Materialism Is Baloney (see this freely-available excerpt), our self-reflective awareness amplifies certain contents of consciousness and, thereby, obfuscates others. This is analogous to how the stars become obfuscated in the noon sky by the much stronger glare of the sun. The stars are all still there at noon, their photons still hitting your retina. Strictly speaking, you are still 'seeing' the stars, but you don't know that you are seeing them because they become obfuscated. Similarly, the contents of consciousness that become obfuscated by the 'glare' of egoic self-reflection are all still in consciousness, but you are not conscious that you are conscious of them; that is, you are not self-reflectively aware of them. There is a strong sense in which not knowing that you know something is equivalent to really not knowing it, this being the reason why we think that we are not conscious of certain things when everything is, in fact, in consciousness. The brain activity that neuroscientists can measure to predict a subject's later conscious choices are simply the image of these contents of consciousness that become obfuscated; not their cause. I have elaborated on this notion that the brain is the image – not the cause – of self-localization processes of consciousness in my book Why Materialism Is Baloney. The argument is briefly summarized here.

I personally believe that most materialists beg the question sincerely. They truly are confused: they can't see the circularity of the ways in which the interpret, and then think to confirm their interpretations of, reality. This happens because we live in a culture that has completely lost objectivity: we can't see past the assumptions and beliefs we are immersed in, and indoctrinated into, since childhood. This is all understandable, even though it remains one's personal responsibility – if one is actually interested in truth – to overcome it at some point.

However, when it comes to militant materialists – often scientists – who make it their mission in life to promote the materialist metaphysics, the stakes are much higher. When these people come to the mainstream media and beg the question of materialism so vocally, arrogantly, and blatantly, they are going much beyond doing harm to themselves: they are doing harm to countless others. It is your children, especially those still going through the educational system, who are listening to them with the openness characteristic of those who trust authority and aren't yet ready to evaluate more critically what's being said. Whether these militant materialists are genuinely confused in their question-begging or not is irrelevant: by making the choice to militantly promote the materialist metaphysics, they take on the responsibility of knowing better. After all, ignorance of the law does not entitle anyone to commit the crime. Their actions are damaging and irresponsible. It would be hilarious to watch these people promote idiocy with the hubris of an emperor with no clothes. However, the reality of it is tragic, and something must be done about it.

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The 'brain as receiver': comments on Steven Novella's post

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

A radio receiver. Source: Wikipedia.

As my readers know, in Chapter 2 of Why Materialism Is Baloney I discuss the 'filter hypothesis' of mind-brain interaction. According to this hypothesis, 'no subjective experience is ever generated by the brain, but merely selected by it according to the perspective of the body ... This selection process is akin to a 'filtering out' of conscious experience: like a radio receiver selecting, from among the variety of stations present concurrently in the broadcast signal, that which one wants to listen to, all other stations being filtered out.' (p. 40) Clearly, the 'filter hypothesis' can be referred to as the 'receiver hypothesis,' since it compares the brain to a radio receiver. Due to several subtleties that escape the scope of this essay, I prefer the term 'filter,' but will acquiesce to the 'receiver' description here in the interest of brevity and simplicity.

This week, Michael Prescott referred extensively to my defence of the 'receiver hypothesis' in his latest blog post. As it turns out, not so long ago a reader had also posted on my Facebook page a link to an article neurologist Steven Novella recently wrote attempting to rebut the hypothesis. The 'synchronicities' seem to be suggesting that I write something about it, so I will attempt to de-construct Novella's position here. I encourage you to read this essay to the end, for there are nuances and turns in my position that you may not expect at first.

As my readers know, my use of the 'receiver hypothesis' is metaphorical. The hypothesis, if taken literally, entails dualism: consciousness as one kind of 'stuff' and the brain (that is, the 'receiver') as another, fundamentally different kind of 'stuff.' I do not subscribe to dualism: my position is what philosophers call 'monistic idealism,' as summarised in an earlier essay and short videos. In a nutshell, I think consciousness and the brain are of exactly the same kind of 'stuff', but I think the brain is in consciousness, not consciousness in the brain. More on this below. For now, I want to comment on Novella's article as if I were a proponent of the literal interpretation of the 'receiver' hypothesis. I want to do this to illustrate what I believe to be the clear weaknesses of Novella's argument. This is important because, as we so often see, materialists tend to argue arrogantly as though they had the rational and empirical high-ground. As Robert Perry brilliantly put in a comment to an earlier post in this blog, 'underneath every argument for materialism is the implicit or explicit statement that materialism occupies the privileged default position, so that it gets the benefit of all doubt.' This is what I want to counter in the first half of this essay. In the second half, I will confess that my own position is, in fact, not so far from Novella's own, but with a big twist...

Novella's argument

Novella summarises his two arguments against the 'receiver' hypothesis as follows:

it does not explain the intimate relationship between brain and mind, and (even if it could) it is entirely unnecessary

He elaborates on the second point first:

When I flip the light switch on my wall, the materialist model holds that I am closing a circuit, allowing electricity to flow through the wires in my wall to a specific appliance (such as a light fixture). That light fixture contains a light bulb which adds resistance to the circuit and uses the electrical energy to heat an element in order to produce light and heat.

One might hypothesize, however, that an invisible light fairy lives in my wall. When I flip the switch the fairy flies to the fixture where it draws energy from the electrical wires, and then creates light and heat that it causes to radiate from the bulb. The light bulb is not producing the light and heat, it is just a conduit for the light fairy’s light and heat.

There is no way you can prove that my light fairy does not exist. It is simply entirely unnecessary, and adds nothing to our understanding of reality. The physics of electrical circuits do a fine job of accounting for the behavior of the light switch and the light. There is no need to invoke light bulb dualism.

The same is true of the brain and the mind, the only difference being that both are a lot more complex.

This sounds compelling at first sight, doesn't it? Yet, it is a completely hollow and misleading metaphor: unlike the solid physics behind electrically-powered lighting, we do not have a causal model for how the brain generates consciousness. In fact, we don't even have coherent hypotheses. The whole power of Novella's metaphor resides precisely in the suggestion that we have for consciousness a causal model like we have for electric lighting. But that is false. You see, it is solely because of the existence of causal models for electric lighting that he can say that light-fairies are unnecessary. We simply cannot say the same about consciousness given the complete absence of any remotely equivalent model for how the brain generates mind. The cogency of Novella's fairies is purely rhetorical and, ultimately, hollow and misleading. It brushes over the elephant in the room: the hard problem of consciousness.

Novella goes on, elucidating his first point now:

The examples often given of the radio or TV analogy are very telling. They refer to altering the quality of the reception, the volume, even changing the channel. But those are only the crudest analogies to the relationship between brain and mind.

A more accurate analogy would be this – can you alter the wiring of a TV in order to change the plot of a TV program? Can you change a sitcom into a drama? Can you change the dialogue of the characters? Can you stimulate one of the wires in the TV in order to make one of the on-screen characters twitch?

 Well, that is what would be necessary in order for the analogy to hold.

The idea, of course, is to suggest that we can 'change the plot' of our conscious experiences by fooling around with brain wiring; that we can change our life from 'a sitcom into a drama' by messing around with the brain; that we can 'change the dialogue' of the people around us by hacking our heads. Well, can we? Here is what he says next:

As we have learned more and more about brain function, we have identified many modules and circuits in the brain that participate in specific functions. ...

Disruption of one circuit, for example, can make someone feel as if their loved-ones are imposters, because they do not evoke the usual emotions they should feel.

Disruption of another circuit can make a person feel as if they are not in control of a part of their body – so-called alien hand syndrome.

A stroke that leaves the ownership module intact but unconnected to the paralyzed limb can rarely result in a supernumerary phantom limb – the subjective experience of having an extra limb that you can feel and controlled (but that does not exist).

Seizures are also a profound area of evidence for the mind as brain theory. Synchronous electrical activity in particular parts of the brain can make people twitch and convulse, but also experience smells, sounds, images, feelings, a sense of unreality, a sense of being connected to the universe, an inability to speak, the experience of a particular piece of music, a sense of deja vu, or pretty much anything you can imagine. The subjective experience depends on the part of the brain where the seizure occurs.

Well? What about changing the plot of our lives by manipulating the brain? What about changing our lives from sitcom to drama? What about inserting dialogues into our conscious experience by hacking the brain? Where is the evidence for all that? Clearly, Novella is using a misleading rhetorical device here. He appeals to a strong and valid intuition at first by making an implicit promise. Then, very subtly, he 'forgets' entirely to deliver on that promise. The trick is that readers may not be critical enough to notice it when they read on. They may stay with the conclusion evoked by the original promise, failing to see that it wasn't fulfilled in the end.

What the evidence does show is that brain hacking (for lack of a better expression) can cause incoherent or limited hallucinations (which Novella refers to when he talks about the brain-induced experience of 'smells, sounds, images, feelings.'). These are a far cry from induced 'plot changes' from 'sitcom to drama.' Moreover, the 'receiver' analogy can easily deal with incoherent or limited hallucinations as well, as anyone who ever messed around with the tuning knob of a radio will know. Other observations Novella refers to can also be accommodated by the 'receiver' analogy. For instance, someone's inability to feel connected to loved ones can be interpreted as the 'filtering out' (or 'tuning out') of the experience of love, which is not a mere detail of our conscious lives but a major 'channel.' One can think of it as limiting the range of the tuning knob along a certain dimension, so one can no longer tune into the 'heart channel.' (Here I anticipate that Novella, if he replies to this, will pick on this very specific statement and create a straw-man... just watch.)

His next misleading point:

If, on the other hand, the receiver model were correct then it would be reasonable to predict that as we investigate the relationship between brain function and mental function in greater and greater detail, the physical model would break down. We would run into anomalies we could not explain, and it would seem as if the brain does not have the physical complexity to account for the observed mental complexity. None of this is what we find, however.

Very smoothly, he is passing for a fact the claim that we don't find those anomalies. One can only conclude this by ignoring all the evidence that contradicts materialism. There are plenty of anomalies. I refer to Chapter 2 of my book Why Materialism Is Baloney for a list.

In conclusion, I think the power of Novella's arguments depends on misleading rhetorical devices. I won't even claim that he is purposefully misleading; on the contrary: I actually think that he honestly believes what he wrote. Once you become too invested in a certain paradigm of thought (as any militant materialist is), you also become unable to step back and evaluate the arguments objectively. You drink your own poison and then go on to sell it as elixir; very sincerely.

Where I agree with Novella

All this said, I actually think Novella does suggest some good points, buried in his misleading rhetoric. Here is a part I like:

A dedicated dualist might still argue that each specific mental function requires its own specific receiver. Brain circuits are receiving specific signals. If you stimulate the circuit it acts as if it is receiving the signal. Eventually, this argument leads to a brain that has all the circuitry necessary to produce everything we can observe about mental function – it leads to the light fairy argument, where the light fairy is simply not necessary.

Indeed, beyond a certain level of granularity, if we can keep on deactivating or stimulating more and more specific cognitive capacities by brain manipulation alone, the 'receiver' analogy breaks down. The 'receiver' model entails that brain activity correlates with experience at the finest levels of granularity, but not that brain hardware has the same level of correlation. Of course, the question is: have we passed that level?

My own position

As my readers know, I think materialism's postulate of a whole universe beyond the only carrier of reality we can ever know – that is, conscious experience itself – is inflationary and unnecessary. Materialism simply isn't skeptical enough, entertaining unreasonable metaphysical abstractions as it does. My claim is that only subjective experience exists. As such, the brain is in consciousness, not consciousness in the brain. Anything beyond consciousness is, by definition, beyond knowledge and concreteness, since both knowledge and concreteness are (qualities of) experience.

How do we then explain the fine-grained correlations between brain activity and subjective experience? Because the brain is the visible image of a localisation of the flow of consciousness, like a whirlpool is the visible image of a localisation of the flow of water. For exactly the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water, the brain doesn’t generate consciousness. Yet, obviously, the image of a process correlates very well with the inner-workings of the process. Flames, as the 'outside view' of the microscopic process we call combustion, correlate very well with the 'inside,' microscopic view of combustion. Yet, flames don't cause combustion; they are simply the way combustion looks from the outside. In exactly the same way, brain activity doesn't cause subjective experience; it is simply the way subjective experience looks from the outside. The simplicity of this interpretation is so self-evident that I find it baffling that materialists don't see it.

Fine, but how do we then explain why physical intervention with the brain can so dramatically interfere with cognition and motor control? For the same reason that a thought can interfere with an emotion. Is there any problem with that? Of course not. After all, a thought is merely a process in consciousness that interferes with another process in consciousness – namely, an emotion. Under monistic idealism, all physical objects, actions, phenomena, and processes are images of processes in consciousness; what else could they be? As such, there is absolutely no problem in the fact that physical intervention in the brain – a process in consciousness – interferes with cognition – another process in consciousness. Seeing a problem here implicitly assumes dualism.

Notice that Novella appeals frequently to parsimony: dualism is unnecessary, because we can explain things without postulating a 'soul' or 'spirit.' I agree with him. But what I find striking is his – and most materialists' – inability to see how their own position makes unnecessary postulates: namely, a whole darned universe outside experience and, as such, beyond knowledge. Parsimony is necessary, and that is precisely why materialism cannot be considered the best explanation for the mind-body problem.

I am aware that what I say above isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, complete enough to tackle all possible objections. That's why I wrote a 250-page book to make my case in a more complete manner. In addition, I have addressed the most common objections to my position in the video below. Please have a look at least at this video before posting your objections in the comments section below.

You might now ask: why do I like the 'receiver' or 'filter' metaphor at all, if I am not a dualist? Because it has much intuitive explanatory power, is closer to reality than materialism, and because it is indeed a proper metaphor for my position: if the brain is a kind of 'whirlpool' of mind, a whirlpool does 'filter out' of itself the water molecules that do not fall within its vortex. A process of mental localisation is, in a way, a process of mental 'tuning.' Dualism may ultimately be wrong, but it surely is a more apt metaphor for the true nature of reality than materialism.

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The top-10 most fallacious arguments of materialists

(A much more elaborate, improved and accurate version of the contents of the video below has appeared in essay format in my book Brief Peeks Beyond, as well as in this freely available paper. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Laughing jester, circa 1500. Source: Wikipedia.

So, what are they? Here is a list...

1. Because we cannot change reality by merely wishing it to be different, it’s clear that reality is outside consciousness.
2. Reality is clearly not inside our heads, therefore idealism is wrong.
3. There are strong correlations between brain activity and subjective experience. Clearly, thus, the brain generates consciousness.
4. Because psychoactive drugs change subjective experience, it’s clear that the brain generates consciousness.
5. Because we are separate beings witnessing the same reality, reality has to be outside consciousness.
6. The separation between consciousness and unconsciousness is dualist nonsense.
7. Because reality behaves according to strict, immutable laws, it cannot be generated by consciousness.
8. To say that a collective unconscious generates reality is equivalent to saying that reality is outside consciousness.
9. The idea of consciousness generating reality is too metaphysical.
10. Why would consciousness deceive us by simulating a materialist world?

And the reasons they are all wrong? Check out the video below... have fun!

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Raving materialists and their nonsense

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Francisco de Goya's The Madhouse. Source: Wikipedia.

Today I did something mildly exciting: I went to a militant materialist website and rattled the cage a bit. I felt the need to expose the scandalously flawed logic of a prominent materialist – a renowned neurologist – who argued that there were survival advantages for the brain to have evolved consciousness. These were his original points:

1. The brain needs to pay attention and subjective experience is required for attention.
2. The brain needs a way to distinguish a memory from an active experience. Therefore, memories and active experiences must 'feel' different subjectively.
3. Behavior conducive to survival requires motivation and, therefore, emotion.

All three are incoherent arguments within the framework and logic of materialism itself. Within the materialist logic, attention has absolutely nothing to do with a need for consciousness. Computer operating systems have the mechanical equivalent of attention (interrupts, priority policies, task scheduling, etc.) while their activity is presumably unconscious; there is no need for subjective experience. Regarding point 2, the neurologist contradicts materialism altogether by assuming that memory and active experiences must 'feel' different in order to be differentiated, which begs the question of consciousness, instead of explaining it. There are millions of ways to classify and differentiate data without anything 'feeling' anything. On point 3: motivation does not require emotion or any sort of subjective experience. Within the logic of materialism, motivation is simply a calculation that aims at optimizing gain and minimizing risk/loss. The neurologist's attempt to present consciousness as something 'natural' or 'advantageous' within the framework of materialism fails the most basic internal logic.

So I went to their site and expressed the above. What followed was an assault by materialists. I reproduce the exchange below, in an edited and re-written form, for your entertainment. The questions were the attempts by materialists to defeat my argument. The answers are my counterarguments. The exchange was useful in that it illustrates very well the situation we face in our culture today: although materialists like to think of themselves as taking the rational high-ground, many suffer from an acute breakdown in simple clear thinking.

Q: There is strong evolutionary adaptive value for attention, for we can only do one thing at a time with our bodies.

A: Attention, as per the definition implied in your question, is simply the ability of an organism to optimize the utilization of its limited cognitive resources. That can be accomplished entirely without subjective experience, for it is merely a computational task. Subjective experience is not required for focusing an organisms resources on priority tasks.

Q: You are assuming a divide between objective/subjective things that does not exist.

A: The neurologist's argument is that there are survival advantages for consciousness to have evolved. If consciousness had to evolve – presumably from something unconscious – then initially consciousness wasn’t there. Clearly, thus, the original argument assumes the divide you talk about: initially everything was objective, and then subjectivity evolved later. Therefore, it's not me who is assuming the divide, but the neurologist who articulated the initial argument.

Q: I also don’t understand this divide between objective and subjective. To me, it’s just a change in perspective: 'objective' is essentially watching a computer’s processes from a second-person perspective. Subjective experience is the first-person perspective of those processes.

A: I don’t think there is a divide at all. I also think it’s all a matter of perspective: observation from within and from without. But now notice: if perspective entails subjective experience, and there is no divide, than idealism follows logically. That said, and to repeat myself, it's the neurologist's original argument that requires the objective/subjective divide. You guys can’t have it both ways. The moment one argues that it was useful for consciousness to have 'evolved' (presumably out of something initially unconscious), you are implying a divide. Otherwise, consciousness was there from the beginning. So you either agree with the neurologist's argument and accept the divide, or you reject the divide and reject this nonsense talk of consciousness having 'evolved.' What evolved were mechanisms of attention and classification, not consciousness. Consciousness was there from the start.

Q: Well, clearly consciousness evolved out of something unconscious: even if you classify all life as conscious, it evolved from non-life, which is clearly unconscious.

A: That’s where you guys contradict yourselves. First, there are all these righteous claims that the divide between consciousness and matter is artificial, dualist nonsense, woo, and what not. Then you turn around and say 'but hey, of course consciousness arose out of something unconscious, since life evolved out of non-life.' I find it all very amusing. You guys can’t have it both ways. Which one is it? Did consciousness evolve out of unconscious matter, or is the divide between consciousness and unconscious computers fallacious woo? The problem here is this: you keep on thinking that consciousness is in the brain, as opposed to the brain in consciousness. And since the brain obviously evolved out of not-brain, then you guys get all mixed up.

Q: Conscious animals evolved from non-conscious ones, though I would speculate this was gradual and there is no woo-divide between consciousness and computers. They are in no way incompatible.

A: A 'very gradual' logical contradiction is still a logical contradiction. If consciousness arose out of unconsciousness, there is a divide in the sense that something new has emerged out of something else, very slowly as the case may be. Otherwise, either consciousness was there all along or it still doesn’t exist today. The latter, of course, is absurd.

Q: What makes idealism meaningfully different from materialism?

A: According to idealism, your body/brain system is in your consciousness. According to materialism, your consciousness is in your body/brain system.

Q: It sounds like a recipe for solipsism.

A: It may sound like it, but it isn’t it. I spend a lot of space in my new book rejecting solipsism.

Q: A subjective viewpoint that can differentiate between memory and reality, illusion and reality, by way of feeling (which is really another way of evaluating) has an evolutionary advantage over one that can’t.

A: If you accept that there is a divide between consciousness and unconsciousness, then differentiation between memory and reality can be done by an unconscious computer. It can be computationally accomplished through tagging, which is done routinely in artificial intelligence systems. This differentiation is no basis whatever for claiming that consciousness provides a survival advantage. Now, if you don’t accept the divide and consider that everything is conscious to some degree, then you are contradicting the neurologist's original argument.

Q: What about the correlations between consciousness and brain states? What does idealism say about that?

A: The brain/body system is an image in consciousness of a process of localization of consciousness. This is analogous to how a whirlpool is an image in water of a process of localization of water. For the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water, the brain doesn’t generate consciousness. Now, the image of a process, obviously, correlates very well with the inner-workings of the process. You can infer a lot about combustion by watching flames safely from a distance. If the brain is the image of a process of consciousness localization, the first-person view of consciousness should correlate very well with what can be seen in that image from the outside, for the same reason that a lot about combustion can be inferred by watching flames.

Q: Why does my consciousness get drowsy when I take a medication that causes drowsiness?

A: Do you have any problem making sense of the fact that your thoughts (processes in consciousness) influence your emotions (other processes in consciousness)? Probably not. After all, what problem is there that a process in consciousness influences another process in consciousness, right? Now, you take a drug and feel drowsy. Under idealism, the drug is a process in consciousness (what else could it be?). It affects another process in consciousness (your alertness). The situation is entirely analogous to thoughts influencing emotions. What’s the problem there? If you see one, you are letting dualism creep in unnoticed.

Q: I’m confused by your terminology. The brain is an 'image'? It’s clearly a physical thing, currently in my skull…

A: Why is the physical thing in your skull not an image? Can you know a physical thing through anything but its images? (Here, I use the word 'image' in the broad sense of any percept.) A whirlpool is a very recognizable thing too. It’s right there in the water. You can point at it and say 'there it is!' You can even delineate its boundaries. It’s a very physical thing. Yet, it’s an image. In that sense, so is the brain.

Q: On what basis do you conclude that everything is conscious?

A: I don’t. I strongly reject that everything is conscious. It is materialists that often believe that. I think panpsychism is animism in disguise; a bad fairytale. There is precisely zero empirical evidence that any inanimate thing is conscious to any degree whatever. I see no reason to believe in that. But I do think that everything is in consciousness, which is a very different thing to say. Why do I believe that? Because it’s the primary datum of knowledge. Anything you knew, know, or will ever know is in your consciousness. Things outside consciousness are abstractions beyond knowledge. I prefer to stick to the most parsimonious explanation of reality that still can make sense of all the data available, and that is that all is in consciousness (not that all is conscious!).

Q: Most inanimate things would be at an extremely low level of consciousness compared to humans, but they do process information.

A: If you say that consciousness is information processing, you’re rendering the word 'consciousness' useless. That’s a rhetorical fallacy. Even Christoph Koch, who endorses Tononi’s Information Integration Theory of consciousness, rejects that consciousness is information processing, although he accepts that it is strongly correlated with information processing.

Q: Living things use their consciousness for survival and reproduction purposes. Computers use their consciousness for other purposes. There is a range of variation in levels of consciousness, from very simple ones up to complex ones like human consciousness. What’s so bad about that?

A: It implies panpsychism. That is, it implies that there is something it is like to be a chair, or a vacuum cleaner. In fact, it implies that there is something it is like to be parts of the vacuum cleaner, and combinations and permutations thereof, and… you get my point. The problem I see with it is that there is precisely zero empirical evidence that vacuum cleaners (or atoms) are conscious. To me, this is an attempt to make nature conform to theory, as opposed to theory conform to nature.

Q: Your idealism doesn’t sound very parsimonious because you’re effectively positing a new, more complex entity seemingly for the purpose of simulating a materialist universe.

A: Do you accept that there is such thing as consciousness? If you do, that’s all I postulate. This consciousness isn’t 'simulating' anything; it's simply doing what it does, and what it does happens to be the universe. This requires postulating no more complexity than materialism, for materialism also requires that irreducible laws of nature create the universe. It's we who invented the metaphysics of materialism as an interpretation of the patterns and regularities of nature. Nature simply does what it does. And clearly, as far as we can ever know for sure, it is in consciousness.

Q: If it's all a simulation playing itself out in mind, why can't we go through walls?

A: You’re projecting your prejudices and misinterpretations onto what I am saying. There is nothing in what I am saying that denies that nature unfolds according to the stable patterns and regularities that we’ve come to call the laws of physics. There is nothing in idealism that denies that, if you jump out of a window, you will fall. Idealism states that everything is in consciousness, not that everything is under the control of your egoic volition. Even large segments of your own psyche clearly aren't under the control of your egoic volition, otherwise nobody would ever have nightmares, or psychoses, or neuroses of any kind.

Q: I find your worldview unnecessarily 'meta.'

A: Materialism is the 'meta' worldview here, in the sense that it postulates an entire, completely abstract universe fundamentally outside the primary datum of knowledge, which is subjective experience. If anything, idealism is a rejection of the 'meta;' that is, a rejection of metaphysical abstractions.

Q: Your theory predicts the same things materialism does. I don’t see any additional explanatory or predictive power from asserting that the universe is mental.

A: Under idealism, when you die the story you call your ego or personal identity will die too, but not your fundamental subjectivity. Under materialism, on the other hand, all consciousness should cease upon physical death. That’s but one difference in the predictions of idealism and materialism. In my latest book, I elaborate extensively on how they differ in their implications, and offer empirical evidence for the predictions of idealism.

Q: Let me see if I’ve got this straight: there’s some complex collective mind-thing that is simulating a world in order to provide us with experiences which are exactly consistent with what they would be if materialism were true, to the point that our consciousnesses are also affected in a manner consistent with materialism.

A: There is no 'simulation' of materialism going on nor any attempt at deception. These are your own complex prejudices that you are projecting onto the very simple things I am saying. My claim is that reality is exactly what it seems to be: a process in consciousness. Colors, tastes, flavors, are all the real thing, and the world we see is not inside our heads. Materialism, on the other hand, states that color, sound, flavor, and all the qualities of experience exist only inside your head. The real world ‘outside’ is supposedly an amorphous, colorless, tasteless arena of dancing fields, akin to a mathematical equation, lacking all qualities of experience. It’s materialism that states that the real world is very different from what it seems. Idealism states the opposite.

All in all, it is useful to engage militant materialists from time to time. It gives striking insight into how a worldview that is so wrong manages to keep such a hold on the intellects of so many: it blinds you, immerses you in an unfathomable but insidious network of abstractions, hidden assumptions, and prejudices that infects every aspect of your thinking and judgement. It literally makes you unable to see simple and self-evident things right under your nose. It makes you project your own preconceptions, expectations, and misunderstandings onto everything others are saying, so you also become unable to listen. Deaf and blind, one can't escape the cage. It's surreal.

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