Here is how anyone can understand the true nature of reality

My latest book, The Idea of the World, is undoubtedly my most rigorous and academically solid volume to date. This is its strength, but also its Achilles' heel: although still accessible to any educated person, its elaborate argumentation demands more effort from the reader. However, my previous six books are easier to digest, and together cover considerably more ground than The Idea. I have recently revised them all, in the form of the so-called Uniform Reprints, which I discussed here.

To gently introduce you to those earlier—but quite up-to-date—volumes I've given six interviews to Jeff Mishlove, as part of the renowned Thinking Allowed series that began back in the 1980's, originally airing on PBS. Each interview generally covers one of the books (although Jeff and I discuss a variety of other topics as well). Below, I provide links to the respective videos and brief commentary on each book. Don't let the books' original publication dates put you off: they are all freshly revised and rendered consistent with one another, so they form a coherent whole.

Why Materialism Is Baloney

This is my best-selling book so far, although The Idea will probably soon catch up with and overtake it. It provides an accessible argument for the claim that there is no objective material universe; that the entire universe is in mind, although not in your personal mind alone. I seek to show that we, as individual subjects of experience, are like whirlpools in an ocean of mentation that both contains and surrounds us, and which presents itself to us as what we call the 'physical' universe. The book's argument is based on visual metaphors that are easy to grasp and follow. Its tone is informal but combative, as suggested by the cheeky title, for one of its key claims is that materialism is a preposterous metaphysical view.

More Than Allegory

Every author probably has a favorite book amongst his own output. More Than Allegory is my favorite. This is my most far reaching work yet, even with some revealing—though highly stylized—autobiographical segments. In it I discuss the ways in which religious myths across the ages have probably hinted at very true aspects of reality. I take you along a thought line whose inevitable conclusion is that spacetime is an illusion, and help you gain direct insight into how you create this illusion 'from moment to moment.' As a bonus, I expose the 'Big Bang' for what it actually represents; and no, it isn't what you've been told. Finally, part III of the book doesn't hold anything back; no, really, nothing. It goes as deep as possible into the rabbit hole we call the nature of reality. The story told there, despite its rather fantastical overtones, is, in fact, true in the ways that really count. You may doubt it after you've read it, but hey, I wouldn't want to fool you, would I?

Meaning in Absurdity

Everything we consider true about reality is ultimately based on layers and layers of belief systems, some more reliable or justifiable than others. At the bottom of this edifice of belief is Aristotelian logic: a set of statements that are, supposedly, so self-evident that they dispense with substantiation. We all know they are true; or do we? What if we were to critically examine the edifice of our beliefs and discover that reality, in fact, has many more degrees of freedom than we dare grant it? What if our very logic isn't, after all, as self-evident as we suppose? Could this explain the so-called 'high strangeness' phenomena that have been reported throughout the ages, such as UFOs, 'alien abductions,' psychedelic hallucinations, spontaneous religious visions and so forth? Could our own deeply hidden and unexamined belief systems limit what we are actually able to perceive or otherwise cognize of the world around ourselves? Could the world around us right now entail much, much more than we dare imagine? These and many other related questions are explored in this short but daring and intense book.

Dreamed up Reality

Together with Part III of More Than Allegory, this is one of my most personal books, for in it I relate—with abundant details and extensive a posteriori commentary—my own private experiences with (highly) altered states of consciousness. That's it; enough said. If you want to know more, read the book! Its subject matter is sensitive; it's the kind of thing that one doesn't want to discuss in brief, for one risks being drastically misinterpreted. And I don't want you to think I am a nutcase!

Rationalist Spirituality

This was the first book I wrote, the one that received the most extensive revision recently, and probably the most accessible route for anyone interested in dipping their toes into my philosophy. Although I make clear upfront that my position is monistic idealism—i.e. I hold the view that consciousness is all there ultimately is—the book uses dualism (body/soul, subject/object, mind/matter, etc.) as its running metaphor. Since most people are used to dualist concepts, following the argument line in this book should be fairly straightforward. It's a short and direct volume. I do make explicit, however, how to port the dualist metaphor onto my actual idealist philosophy, so readers won't be ultimately restricted to a dualist mode of thinking. Those interested in looking deeper will be able to see how dualism sort of 'sits on top' of idealism, like an application running on an operating system.

Brief Peeks Beyond

This is my most varied book. In consists of a number of essays—organized in chapters according to their subject matter—tackling topics such as the mind-body problem, how research on memory is distorted and misportrayed by the media, the rampant misrepresentation of psychedelic research that sometimes is unashamedly encouraged by the researchers themselves (!), the psycho-social dynamics underlying how the metaphysics of materialism is promoted on the basis of scandalous double-standards, how materialism underpins consumerism and the suicidal pillaging of the planet we have been bearing witness to, the politics of it all, and even how to live a decent and meaningful life informed by straight philosophical thinking. I also discuss at length—and this book is the only place where I allow myself to do it—the implications and applications of the metaphysics of idealism, which I espouse. Despite the variety of themes tackled, the book does offer a coherent overall message built out of seemingly incommensurable pieces of one overarching jigsaw puzzle.

I hope you enjoy the books and find value in them!

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GUEST ESSAY: Radical skepticism, revived

By Aditya Prasad

(This is a guest essay submitted to the Metaphysical Speculations Discussion Forum, reviewed and commented on by forum members. The opinions expressed in the essay are those of its author.)

Radical skepticism gets a bad rap. Sure, it's possible to question everything about your reality, but what's the point? Countless freshman philosophy majors and enterprising potheads have done just that, and look where it got them. Better to face up to the cold, hard facts!

But maybe they simply didn't know how to wield the tool properly. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole and see if we can't do better...

Ompha, Lompha

Young Earth creationists believe that the earth was created in the past ten thousand years. According to their so-called Omphalos Hypothesis, dinosaur bones and other seemingly-old artifacts were planted there by God as a test of our faith.

As ludicrous as this may strike you, it contains no logical contradiction. In fact, there is no way to disprove that the universe sprang into existence, fully formed, last Thursday. Mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell takes it one step further (as mathematicians and philosophers are wont to do):

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past.

But why stop there? For all we know, this may all have appeared freshly in this very moment. But while such a claim is not logically impossible, it is certainly very improbable. Right?

To help answer that, let's look at a technique called Bayesian inference.

Bayesian inference

Suppose I am hiding a coin from you. I tell you it is either a (US) penny or nickel, and you have to guess which. What kind of evidence would help you decide?

If I tell you that there is a US president on one side of the coin, that is no help at all, because it applies equally well to both coins. Whatever you thought the relative odds were before, they should remain unchanged after.

On the other hand, suppose I tell you that I flipped it and it landed on its edge. Both coins can theoretically do this, but because the nickel is thicker, it is probably more likely to land that way. Depending on how much more likely, this evidence should nudge your bias toward the nickel to a corresponding degree.

So we see that evidence is one crucial component in determining your beliefs. The second, equally important piece, is something that we hinted at earlier: your pre-existing bias, technically known as your prior.

If you're like most people, you probably started with the assumption that both the penny and nickel were equally likely. And why not? In lieu of any information, this seems like a reasonable starting point. But you don't have to start at 50-50. You might look up some stats on the number of pennies and nickels in circulation, and use that ratio as your prior. Or perhaps you know that I secretly love pennies, and use that to inform your initial bias. It's totally up to you.

Whatever your prior, you must combine it with evidence, to get an updated bias (called the posterior). You can either stop there or use this posterior as a new prior, to be combined with further evidence (generating yet another posterior), and so on. Over time, as the evidence accumulates, any mistakes in your initial prior will get ironed out.

In this way, Bayesian inference is a formal framework for doing something that's already very natural to us. We may start off uncertain about something, but we allow the weight of evidence to bring our beliefs into closer alignment with reality.

Let's apply this to our question about the past.

Evaluating the past

First let's try to pick a good prior.

Basic physics tells us that fully-formed worlds are very unlikely to just pop into existence. Therefore we should a priori be very biased against this possibility, right? Unfortunately not: we could only have learned about physics in the past, which we cannot trust without resorting to circular reasoning.

Okay, what about Occam's Razor? It tells us that we should prefer simpler theories to needlessly complicated ones. But this is a statement about preference, not likelihood. Moreover, it runs into the same problem as before: when, exactly, did we collect evidence that justifies the Razor?

Try as we may, we cannot logically justify any particular prior. So let's throw up our hands and start at 50-50. The evidence should settle it, right?

Well, this picture I took yesterday seems like pretty good evidence at first. But remember that our hypothetical sudden-world is designed to provide such fabricated evidence. So this supposed "picture from yesterday" fits both models equally well, and it is therefore of no use. By design, neither is anything else. Drat!

A final attempt might be to say fine, let's accept that maybe the world sprang into being five minutes ago (or whenever you began this exercise). But since then, you've been collecting evidence that justifies your trust in physics, Occam's Razor, and the rest. This ought to restore your faith, right?

But notice that you can repeat the thought experiment right now. How do you know that this is not the first moment? When you try to work out the answer, you will find that your supposed "evidence from the past five minutes" goes out the window just like our supposed "picture from yesterday." So this approach fails, too. There's nowhere to get a grip!

Strange as it may seem, we are not rationally justified in saying that a real past is "more likely" than a fake one. It certainly feels like the real past is more rational, but this is an illusion. For now, simply notice how powerful this illusion is. We will return to it later.

Choosing our beliefs

We do not necessarily need to rely on reasoning to choose our beliefs. Discussing a different skeptical hypothesis, physicist Sean Carroll points out:

There is no way to distinguish between the scenarios by collecting new data.

What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities.

Radical skepticism is less useful to us; it gives us no way to go through life. All of our purported knowledge [...] might very well be tricks being played on us. But what then? We cannot actually act on such a belief [...]. Whereas, if we take the world roughly at face value, we have a way of moving forward. There are things we want to do, questions we want to answer, and strategies for making them happen. We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.

Russell also recognized this:

Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it.

In other words, given that evidence cannot help us, we might as well pick whichever belief is most helpful. And our commonsense notion of time is the most helpful of all.

But is this really true? Have you ever been genuinely free of the belief in a real past, in order to make a fair comparison? Is such a state even possible or desirable? Wouldn't you be like a proverbial goldfish, totally unable to function?

As it turns out, that is not what it is like to be free of conviction about the past. It is entirely possible—though not easy—to drop your belief in a literal past while retaining the ability to function as though it were real. You can (and should) try to enter that state right now, but unless you've cultivated exceptional facility with your most subtle mental processes, you will attain at best a vague facsimile of it. Something deep inside you is unwilling to genuinely and completely let go. It protects itself by telling you "well, our belief is the best one anyway!"

The authentic state of not-knowing belongs to the purview of mystics and contemplatives. It is unfair to expect mathematicians, physicists, or even philosophers to find the time to explore it properly.

The future

Let's visit another oddity. 18th-century philosopher David Hume popularized something called the Problem of Induction. Roughly, it goes as follows.

It seems painfully obvious that the past provides good evidence for the future, right? But why do we believe this? Well, it has certainly been true in the past. Okay, but so what? We'd like to say "... and therefore it will be true in the future," but then we are assuming what we set out to prove. There's that nasty circularity again! So we cannot justify our belief that the past will continue to provide evidence for the future.

Thus, the fact that the laws of physics have faithfully operated for billions of years gives us no reason at all to believe that they will continue to operate even one second from now [1]. As before, notice how ridiculous and illogical this feels, despite being impeccably rational. This is a powerful clue, if used properly!

Unfortunately Hume, too, loses his nerve before fully taking on board the implications:

Should it be asked me whether I sincerely assent to this argument which I have been to such pains to inculcate, whether I be really one of those skeptics who hold that everything is uncertain, I should reply that neither I nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion. I dine, I play backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends and when after three or four hours of amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strange and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further. Thus the skeptic still continues to reason and believe, though he asserts he cannot defend his reason by reason.

The nature of reality

It does not stop with time. Consider the hypothesis that this world is a simulation—and further, that its creators are clever enough to hide all evidence of this fact from us. Then, by assumption, there is no way to test the hypothesis, and we are again free to discard it on the basis of practicality, even if not on pure rationality. In fact, there are an infinite number of strange and seemingly-pointless possibilities that we can cut away with one fell swoop in this way. This can make us feel supremely confident in our default worldview. But there is at least one strange possibility that comes away unscathed.

Consider the hypothesis that the world is a dream of sorts. This possibility may seem inconsequential, as with the previous examples: if the dream behaves exactly as a physical world would, then there's no point in pursuing the belief further. On the other hand, if it actually is a dream—and moreover, your dream, in a sense—then your participation might be pivotal in gathering evidence of the fact. How might this work?

In a nighttime dream, naively questioning your surroundings is often insufficient to expose the dream's unreality. In most cases, the dream will fabricate an explanation that—despite being nonsensical from a more awakened perspective—will nonetheless suffice to quell your suspicion. Nothing to see here, move right along! To expose the sham, you must question the dream in just the right way, at which point you might become lucid.

So how does the analogy extend to this reality? How would one question it in "just the right way?"

The mind doth protest too much

You might begin by noticing how illogical it is to feel so dead certain about the past despite having no rational basis for the belief. Next, watch as your mind tries to wriggle out of this accusation: "well, such a belief is evolutionarily adaptive, so it's probably embedded deep in our ancient limbic system, beyond the reach of higher cognition..." Bam! In a finger snap, circular reasoning again magically restores your faith: I believe in the past because the past made me do it, duh. Whew! Nothing to see here!

This should trigger a great deal more suspicion in you than it probably does.

If you were to sit and grapple with this conundrum very sincerely—not just thinking harder about it, but experientially penetrating the very heart of the discrepancy—you might have a mind- and reality-shattering "aha!" moment, not unlike what Zen Buddhists call kensho or sudden awakening. It might reveal that you've been taking life utterly for granted [2], subtly (but erroneously) assuming that you have the slightest inkling of what it is and how it works. Side effects may include an overwhelming flood of gratitude, awe, wonder, love, joy, and humility, beyond what you believed possible. There may even be insights about the nature, purpose, and evolution of this dream, though they may be hard to prove or even communicate via the standard channels.

Why is it impossible to prove that the past really happened, or that it's even likely? Sure, maybe this is all just sophistry and there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. Or maybe something much more curious is going on, right under your nose but hidden by a cleverly self-protective veil.

If this all sounds like too much for you, well, then, luckily you have the option to continue to blindly trust your default beliefs. And why not? After all, some Very Smart Scientists have assured you that being too skeptical would be "ridiculous," "frivolous," and "paralyzing." And who are you to question that? Nothing to see here, move right along...

Copyright © 2019 by Aditya Prasad. Published with permission.

Notes

[1] http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2012/10/problem-of-induction-explained-simply.html

It’s a good test of whether someone has actually understood Hume’s argument that they acknowledge its conclusion is fantastic (many students new to philosophy misinterpret Hume: they think his conclusion is merely that we cannot be certain what will happen tomorrow.) ... [But] if Hume is right, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is as unjustified as the belief that a million mile wide bowl of tulips will appear over the horizon instead. We suppose the second belief is insane. But if Hume is correct, the first belief is actually no more rational. ...

[T]he onus is on these defenders of “common sense” to show precisely what is wrong with Hume's argument. No one has yet succeeded in doing this (or at least no one has succeeded in convincing a majority of philosophers that they have done so).

[2] Notice that to take something "for granted" can mean either to be unappreciative of it, or to logically presuppose it. Here it takes on both meanings: we are quite confident that we've been experiencing life for a long time, which is why this moment feels so mundane. And now notice that "mundane" means both "pertaining to physical reality" and "tedious, repetitive, dull." Again, this is not a coincidence.

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Meditations on Sleep and Cyclicality

Jitish Kallat, the book.

This is an essay very dear to me, written at a time when I was attuned to life and the world in a different way; a way less linear, flat, logical, rational than the one that has dominated my life since I embarked on the project of doing The Idea. Make no mistake, authors pay a very real, living price for the mental ethos they have to put themselves in in order to carry out their work. But I digress. The point here is that I will be presenting this essay to you in a very unusual format, but for a good reason...

First, let me tell you the background story. A little over three years ago, a friend of mine, Jitish Kallat, perhaps one of the most important artists of my generation, asked me to contribute a piece to a book that was being prepared about his work. I love Jitish's work. He has an extraordinary sensibility for the metaphysical backdrop of life and world, an ability to capture it with a subtlety that eludes most of us. His work reflects life and world back to us in a way that unveils what he sees, but we don't. And so I enthusiastically agreed to contribute something.

Soon enough, however, I realized the magnitude of the challenge I had embarked on. To provide prose to accompany Jitish's work was a tall order. My usual Apollonian approach wouldn't do his art justice. I ruminated on the task for days, until one rainy morning, as my girlfriend still lay asleep, I sensed that I was in the right mental space... an elusive space I don't visit often, but which I value above almost any other. What you will read below is the result.

The production of Jitish's book is a gem of refinement, care, aesthetic sensibility and attention to detail. It would be a crime to reproduce my essay here outside the context of the book. So, with Jitish's kind permission, I made photos of the relevant pages, which I am reproducing below. To read the text you will need to click on each photo to enlarge it.

I hope you enjoy the ride! And if you weren't acquainted with Jitish's work before, here is your cue...

(For more on the themes explored in the essay above, see my book More Than Allegory, where these themes are elaborated on with much more depth and detail.)

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GUEST ESSAY: Reality is a hyperdream

By Jason Barr

(This is a guest essay submitted to the Metaphysical Speculations Discussion Forum, reviewed and commented on by forum members. The opinions expressed in the essay are those of its author. For my own views on the subject of this essay, see my book The Idea of the World.)

Does reality 'seem' mental?

I understand that this might raise more questions than it answers. However, it is important to know that reality does in fact appear mental, even though it is a common criticism that "reality obviously does not seem mental, look at me kick this rock!" A good analogy to understand the plausibility of reality being mental is dreams, so you can look upon reality as a 'hyperdream.'

Reality while asleep? These are dreams constructed mentally from emergent unstable minds and reality while awake is a hyperdream, which is more vivid and consistent while being constructed mentally from a fundamental stable mind. Philosopher Erik Haynes:

This philosophy argues for a unified consciousness at the core of reality. Humans are primarily conscious beings (or souls) with a tangible sense of reality provided by, and connected through, God's consciousness. This can be compared to the way in which the dream world seems to incorporate everything that reality does yet one would not say that the dream world contains matter since dreams exist completely in the mind. Since the mind is capable of producing a tangible reality in the dream world, then how much more so would God's mind be capable of creating a tangible reality for His creation?

The category of mentality, or 'consciousness,' is all that is needed to explain reality. We know that this category of being has to exist and even honest physicalists ('materialists') admit this. Neuroscientist Sam Harris:

Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that can’t be an illusion. Consciousness is the fact of experience, the fact that something is happening, the fact that the 'lights are on' in some basic sense even if we don't understand anything. So even if I'm a brain in a vat, what I'm calling consciousness is still a manifest fact of reality, and is the basis for every other fact.

In other words, we only believe objects exist because we are conscious of them. We only know things because of mentality. You cannot doubt it because even doubt is mental. You really cannot get 'behind' mentality.

Reality can be explained just as well with less explanatorily useless postulates, as there is no need for a reality beyond the category of mentality. Also, philosophical problems dissolve, such as the hard problem of consciousness that the physicalist has to deal with, and the interaction problem that the substance dualist has to deal with.

The category of non-mentality (or, a 'reality beyond consciousness') is therefore explanatorily superfluous and one of the biggest violations of Occam’s Razor I have encountered. It should, in my opinion, be tossed in the graveyard with the aether and Russell’s tea pot, even if it cannot be 'disproven' with absolute certainty. Leo Gura:

Notice that in your sleeping dreams, they have narrative arcs, they are always story based; it's always a sequence of events that happened to you just like ordinary life (in a spatiotemporal reality, controlling a body, interacting with objects etc.). Doesn’t that make you suspicious about ordinary life? Are you noticing all these similarities? This should make you very suspicious.

The fallacy made by the vast majority of people in the world is confusing differences in degree with a difference in kind. The degrees of vividness and consistency are higher pertaining to waking reality, but that does not magically make waking reality non-mental. In fact, what it most likely means is that waking reality is a more vivid and consistent dream that we all share from different perspectives... Simple.

In conclusion, reality clearly does appear mental. It seems precisely to be a more vivid and consistent dream that we experience from our own first-person reference points.

Copyright © 2019 by Jason Barr. Published with permission.

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GUEST ESSAY: Eben Alexander's review of 'The Idea of the World'

By Eben Alexander

This is a review of The Idea of the World: A Multi-disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality, by Bernardo Kastrup. Hampshire, UK: Iff Books, 2019.

Tremendous tension is building in the world of neuroscience over the relationship between mind and brain -- just what is the true nature of consciousness? A building consilience from the fields of psychology, physics and neuroscience supports the primacy of consciousness in the universe, or a top-down organizing principle at the heart of all reality. One of the strongest new elements of this bridge comes from the physics perspective of Bernardo Kastrup in support of the reality of ontological or metaphysical idealism. His revolutionary and insightful book, The Idea of the World, connects the dots brilliantly through a series of masterfully-woven articles, making an elegant case for the advantages of idealism over physicalism, especially in the face of contextuality in quantum physics, the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, and the subject combination problem in philosophy of mind. The result is a must-read book for anyone seriously interested in the modern neuroscience of consciousness, and its broad implications for humanity. Bravo, Bernardo!

Eben Alexander, MD, Neurosurgeon, author of Proof of Heaven, The Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe.

Available on amazon

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The dawn of a post-materialist academic worldview

Since the ascendence of materialism in academia during the Enlightenment, no other theory of the essential nature of reality has truly been taken seriously in academic circles. Implicitly, to be an academic has, since then, presupposed a professional materialist stance—regardless of what one's private views might be.

Since the end of the 20th century, constitutive panpsychism and property dualism have garnered some modest momentum in academia. However, these ontologies are basically extensions of materialism: they add irreducible mental properties to what is essentially the same old objective substrate. Their modest level of success, instead of foreshadowing a significant shift in our worldview, in fact betrays the formidable inertia of the latter: although nobody has ever been able to articulate how physical quantities—such as mass, charge, momentum—could possibly explain the qualities of experience, in lieu of discarding the untenable concept of objective matter we've grudgingly resorted to applying bandages to it. The result is a Frankenstein monster whose sole appeal is to perpetuate a clumsy error: that of imagining an objective material world, outside and independent of mentation, to begin with. Future generations will look upon this embarrassing charade with merciless scorn.

Throughout the two or three centuries of materialist hegemony in academia, religious and spiritual movements have competed for the hearts and minds of ordinary people. New Age, non-dualism, Buddhism, and a host of other related worldviews have certainly achieved a degree of influence in our culture. However, their acknowledgment in academia is limited to some of their practical applications, such as e.g. helping to relieve stress. The metaphysics underlying these spiritual traditions, however, has achieved no recognition in academia, and often for good reasons: as much as their appeal to feeling, intuition and direct experience is legitimate when it comes to ordinary people, in academia different rules and standards apply.

I've bitten the bullet fully and made my case according to the exact same rulebook and value-system that underpins the case for materialism. The goal has been to win the duel using the weapons chosen by the opposition.

Having initially written six books meant for ordinary people, over the past three years I've focused on academia instead. My hope has been to legitimize and promote idealism—the view that objective matter doesn't actually exist, reality consisting purely of excitations of transpersonal consciousness—as a viable and coherent worldview, more tenable than materialism itself. I've subjected myself to the rules of the academic game, rigorously arguing on the basis of logic, parsimony, coherence and evidence. I've made no appeals to anything that could be construed as a handwaving excuse for lack of substance or rigor. I've bitten the bullet fully and made my case according to the exact same rulebook and value-system that underpins the case for materialism. The goal has been to win the duel using the weapons chosen by the opposition.

The result of this effort is The Idea of the World, a book that collects a number of academic papers I've published in leading peer-reviewed journals. Although the peer review process has often been critical—sometimes outright unfair—the force of my argument has prevailed. Besides these articles, the book is enhanced by many new chapters meant to weave the different papers together into a coherent, complete, accessible argument for idealism; an argument that, although targeted at academia, can be understood by any educated person with a bit of patience.

The Idea of the World is probably the first and only academically-legitimized, uncompromising articulation of idealism since Hegel.

Academia may be plagued by skewed metaphysical intuitions, but it has one thing going for it: as long as you play the game by their rules, if your case is strong it will not be dismissed. Because of this kind of honesty, and based on the strength of my case according to their own value-system, my effort has met with success in academia.

The Idea of the World is perhaps the first and only academically-legitimized, uncompromising articulation of idealism since Hegel. None of the truly non-materialist ontologies discussed today has—insofar as I am aware of—received comparable treatment in terms of rigor and completeness. Their proponents usually don't even bother to engage in the academic game of logic, coherence and evidence, limiting themselves to vague appeals to feeling and intuition. This, I believe, is precisely the reason why these non-materialist views continue to be consigned to the fringes of our culture. It is also the reason why vulgar and loud proponents of materialism—who, while lacking basic understanding of materialism itself, often feel childishly emboldened by the academic hegemony of the view they purport to endorse—ridicule the followers of non-materialist views.

Available on amazon

But things may have begun to change: we now see a worldview thoroughly and bluntly antithetical to materialism being taken seriously in academia; a worldview legitimized by the very rules and values that materialism relies on. I say so not only because of the dozen peer-reviewed academic papers that underpin this worldview, but also for the fact that The Idea of the World has a very special companion volume.

This companion volume is a doctoral dissertation I am going to publicly defend at the end of April at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands' best classical university according to the most recent polls, and one of Europe's best. The dissertation itself has already been unanimously approved by an academic committee (you can freely download it here and here), only the formalisms of the defense still pending. If successful, this will be my second doctorate, 18 years—almost to the day—after my first one.

Materialism has hidden behind the argument that no alternative metaphysics has ever passed the stringent tests of coherence, rigor and empirical grounding reigning in academia. But this is no longer the case.

My doctoral dissertation is not as complete as the book; for instance, it doesn't cover the idealist interpretation of quantum mechanics that constitutes one of the core parts of the book. It is also more technical and less accessible to a general readership, lacking the "preamble" chapters that make the book much more approachable. Moreover, because it is meant only for academics, the dissertation uses more jargon and presupposes more technical background. So it doesn't replace the book. But it surely reinforces it, lending it yet more legitimacy and credibility. After all, if the admittedly polemical ideas discussed in the book are well substantiated enough to grant me a second Ph.D., it becomes very difficult to dismiss them.

Materialism has hidden behind the argument that no alternative metaphysics has ever passed the stringent tests of coherence, rigor and empirical grounding reigning in academia. But this is no longer the case. So if committed materialists have ever dismissed your non-materialist views on the basis of this argument, you can now give them a copy of The Idea of the World, perhaps accompanied by a copy of my doctoral dissertation. Show them how out of date they are.

It is my hope that this book, and its accompanying doctoral thesis, will give you ammunition to advance your views on the basis of the same set of values, and according to the same rules of argument, which supposedly privilege materialism. Please use it liberally and help get the word out. We may be on the cusp of significant change; on the verge of consigning materialism to the waste bin of history (it isn't soon enough). However, in the era of social media, this change depends on you, individually. The Idea of the World is the weapon I offer you. It's up to you to shoot with it.

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GUEST ESSAY: The idealistic model

By Adur Alkain

(This is a guest essay submitted to the Metaphysical Speculations Discussion Forum, reviewed and commented on by forum members. The opinions expressed in the essay are those of its author. For my own views on the subject of this essay, see my book The Idea of the World and a Scientific American summary of one of the book's core contentions.)

Source: Wikipedia.

I’m proposing an idealistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is not an original idea, but my purpose is to formulate it in a clear, simple way. This is the essential outline:

1. There is no “physical world” (understood as a world of objects that exist outside observation). There is only observation.
2. Quantum mechanics doesn’t describe a hypothetical world of very small objects (subatomic particles, waves, fields, etc.). Quantum mechanics describes the probabilities of future observations.
3. Observation can be defined as a special modality of conscious experience that is bound by the laws of physics.
4. The laws of physics are the laws of observation.

Please note that this idealistic interpretation is slightly different than the traditional “consciousness causes collapse” interpretation. It is not that consciousness somehow influences the physical world. There is no physical world. There is only consciousness.

According to this interpretation, all observers see and experience the same world because they all are bound by the same laws of observation, the laws of physics

This interpretation is also distinct from panpsychism. It is not that “subatomic particles” like electrons or quarks have minds, or some kind of mental properties. There are no subatomic particles. Quarks and electrons are nothing but mental constructs derived from an inaccurate interpretation of what the laws of physics (the laws of observation) actually say about the world. In other words, quarks and electrons only exist in human minds as vague mental concepts, or in the virtual world of the laws of physics as mathematical abstractions.

In my understanding, this very simple idea solves all the apparent paradoxes and problems of quantum mechanics, like the measurement problem, wave-particle duality, etc. It also solves the main objection that has been traditionally made to philosophical idealism: the fact that all observers seem to perceive the same world. According to this interpretation, all observers see and experience the same world because they all are bound by the same laws of observation, the laws of physics.

Ultimately, the reason why we all perceive the same world is that we all are “entangled”. In quantum mechanics, the moment a system (it could be a single electron, or a complex observer) interacts with another system, both systems get entangled. That means that we all are entangled. Maybe I never interacted with you, but I surely interacted with somebody that interacted with somebody that interacted with somebody... that interacted with you. That's why we see the same moon.

In other words, the laws of quantum mechanics apply to the whole physical universe as a unified system, including all observers. There is only one wave function. The idea is that a single wave function describes in principle the whole universe.

The primacy of the fundamental laws of physics precludes solipsism.

Three levels of reality

To illustrate the implications of this idealistic interpretation, I will comment on Einstein’s famous objection (originally directed at the Copenhagen interpretation): “Do you really think the moon isn’t there if you aren’t looking at it?”

If we look closely at the word “moon”, we can recognize that it refers to three different realities:

1. The observed moon: the moon as it appears to an actual observer.
2. The mental moon: the moon as a thought or mental concept.
3. The physical moon: the result of the physical laws that predict the probabilities of the moon being observed by any possible observer at any given point in spacetime.

We can call these three distinct realities moon1, moon2 and moon3. In answer to Einstein’s question, we can say that moon1 only exists when it is being observed by at least one conscious observer, moon2 exists independently of any observation, but only in our minds, and moon3 exists in the virtual realm of the fundamental laws of physics, the laws of observation. This moon3 or “physical moon” exist only as pure potentiality (the probabilities of moon1 occurring), but its existence is as reliable and objective as the hypothetical “material moon” postulated by materialism. There is no added “fuzziness” in this interpretation. All the known laws of physics stay in place.

If we apply the same analysis to “elementary particles”, we find a slightly different result. Let’s take a quark, for example. We can see that:

1. quark1 doesn’t exist as such: quarks can’t be observed directly; they can only be “detected” through a complex process of applying mathematical calculations to actual observations (under very specific conditions of measurement).
2. quark2 (“quark” as a mental concept) doesn’t exist as such, either; it is not possible for the human mind to have a clear and consistent concept of such a thing as a “quark”. Like electrons and all other “elementary particles”, quarks are sometimes thought of as particles, sometimes as waves, sometimes as fields, etc.
3. quark3 (“quark” as defined by the laws of physics) is the only real meaning of the term “quark”. Quarks (like all other “particles”) are nothing but mathematical abstractions, described in the standard model of particle physics.

Thus, we can distinguish three distinct levels of reality:

Level 1 is the level of observation. This is the “classical world”, the world that we perceive. It doesn’t exist outside our observation. Therefore, it is subjective. On this level, each observer inhabits a different world (seen and experienced from a particular location and perspective). But all those worlds are connected through entanglement, and therefore are consistent with each other (all observers are bound by the same laws of observation, the same wave function.)

Level 2 is the level of thought. This is the world we create in our thoughts. It can take the form of pure imagination and fantasy, or the form of a mental model based on observation, the mental model of a hypothetical world that exists “out there”.

Level 3 is the level of pure potentiality and mathematical abstraction. This is the world of the laws of physics, the laws that describe the probabilities of observation. It is an objective world, but it only exists in virtuality.

Many scientists tend to confuse these three levels, which results in all kinds of misunderstandings.

We can postulate the existence of a more fundamental level of reality, level 0. This would be the level of Platonic ideas and of pure consciousness or “mind-at-large”. We can speculate that, from the point of view of mind-at-large, all the multiple worlds of level 1 appear as unified into one. This would be an objective, unified, real world, the sum of all observations. In this view, individual observers could be understood as the sense organs of mind-at-large. But these metaphysical speculations lie outside the realm of physics, and therefore outside the scope of the present essay. Physics deals solely with the three levels of reality described above.

Implications of indeterminism

According to this interpretation, the laws of quantum mechanics are fundamentally indeterministic and probabilistic. This indeterminism leaves open the question of what “decides” the result of any given quantum-level event (collapse of the wave function). I will venture to suggest two opposed and verifiable hypotheses:

• the stochastic hypothesis: the results of quantum-level events are purely random, strictly obeying the probabilities described by the wave function.
• the volitional hypothesis: an inherent quality of reality that we can tentatively name “volition”, or “will”, decides the outcome of quantum-level events, within the range of probabilities described by the wave function.

This could be tested by repeating a quantum-level experiment as many times as possible, while the experimenters-observers tried to influence the result with their “will”. For example, a very simple system with two possible outcomes of 50%-50% probability should give results with a 50-50 distribution, according to the stochastic hypothesis. A statistically significant deviation from this expected distribution would support the volitional hypothesis. A 50-50 distribution would not necessarily invalidate this hypothesis, though. Volition, or will, could be a property of the underlying reality (mind-at-large), not accessible to individual observers.

Copyright © 2018 by Adur Alkain. Published with permission.

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