Responses to Anil Ananthaswamy and Luboš Motl

Facing the storm.
Photo by Selene's Art, used with permission.

A new blog post recently published on Scientific American seeks to rebut another essay I and colleagues published earlier this year on that same venue. The new post is by science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy. Since Scientific American doesn't publish rebuttals of previously published material, Ananthaswamy dresses his post up as a general commentary on the implications of quantum mechanics. But make no mistake: after a trite and verbose introduction explaining—as if it hadn't been explained a kazillion times before—the double-slit experiment, he cites our essay explicitly and then tries to show that its conclusions are not borne out by quantum physics. His attempt, however, is so clumsy that, if anything, it seems to further reinforce the points we've made in our essay. Allow me to elaborate.

There is more to quantum mechanics than just the double-slit experiment

Ananthaswamy denies that "the double-slit experiment ... constitute[s] empirical evidence" for our original claim that, as paraphrased by Ananthaswamy, "a conscious observer may be indispensable to make sense of the quantum realm and that a transpersonal mind underlies the material world."

The problem is that, although we did briefly discuss the double-slit experiment to refute assertions made about it by others, our claim was mostly based on von Neumman's chains, the repeated experimental verification of Bell's and Leggett's inequalities, quantum eraser experiments, etc. (see our essay again for the appropriate arguments and links). As a science journalist, one hopes that Ananthaswamy is well versed with how these things differ from the double-slit experiment, and with the fact that there is a lot more to quantum mechanics than the double-slit experiment alone. So why make it look like our entire argument was based on the latter?

Bohmian mechanics as the savior of realism... No, really?

Be that as it may, Ananthaswamy then proceeds to claim that our reasoning against realism—which underpins our argument for a transpersonal mind—does not refute the "de Broglie-Bohm theory" (or, more simply, 'Bohmian mechanics').

Yes, that's correct! In a recent academic paper, I even wrote this:

Some nonlocal hidden variables theories that preserve non-intuitive forms of realism—such as perhaps Bohm’s—may still be reconcilable with contextuality. However, these theories postulate—often at the cost of mathematical acrobatics—extra theoretical entities that are both empirically ungrounded and unnecessary for predictive purposes.

By granting that, given the experimental results we cite in our original essay, Bohmian mechanics is the surviving hope for realism, Ananthaswamy is implicitly acknowledging that other more popular alternatives indeed aren't viable. And because there are many reasons why Bohmian mechanics has traditionally been rejected by physicists (more on this shortly), Ananthaswamy is ultimately helping my case.

A fellow anti-realist

Enter physicist Luboš Motl. Back in February of this year, Motl published a blog post castigating me for yet another, earlier essay on quantum mechanics that I published on Scientific American. Motl opens his attack quite colorfully for a scientist. I can't resist quoting some of it here:

Lots of people whose skulls are confined in a spherical bubble are imagining that they're creative geniuses who are thinking outside the box. But the reality is inside out. One needs to perform the spherical inversion to see it. They're narrow-minded, intellectually limited losers confined into a bubble while the proper solutions require the realm outside the bubble.

Although I presume that these lively words were meant for me, I confess they drew an appreciative giggle. You see, a common prejudice people have about physicists is that they are boring. Well, Motl clearly is anything but! And because I knew that Motl is a fairly respected physicist—alumnus, like me, of CERN—I kept on reading so to understand what Motl saw in my essay that he considered so wrong and repulsive.

Lo and behold, practically every point of substance that Motl proceeds to make is in agreement not only with my views, but with the very essay he was supposedly objecting to. Like the essay, Motl points out that theoretical extensions to quantum theory meant to salvage some form of realism are artificial and pointless; that quantum theory, as we know it, is the best theory we have to describe reality; that no extensions are needed; etc. These are precisely the points I was making in my essay. Even my reference to Carlo Rovelli's relational 'interpretation' of quantum mechanics doesn't contradict Motl's argument, for Rovelli doesn't extend quantum mechanics in any way; he simply acknowledges the implications of quantum mechanics.

To this day I remain puzzled by Motl's 'attack' on me, which seems more like an endorsement when one looks at its actual substance.

The problems of Bohmian mechanics

Be that as it may, Motl has been one of the most prominent critics of Bohmian mechanics, particularly in this post in his blog. In yet another post, he probably summarized best the problems of Bohmian theory. According to him, the claim that Bohmian mechanics

ends up with the same predictions as proper quantum mechanics ... is a complete lie. The dart always has a clear position which is guided by the pilot wave. Except that it's easy to see that a particle can't have well-defined other quantum numbers, like the spin, because it would pick an objectively preferred 𝑧-axis in space and that would break the rotational symmetry. Also, in quantum field theory, the number of particles is variable – they may be pair-created and pair-annihilated – so it's clearly impossible that there exist specific classical positions of 𝑁 particles. The number 𝑁 isn't even well-defined. Moreover, two particles could never exactly hit each other and annihilate – the probability in classical physics for an exact hit is zero (which is still true even if there is some extra pilot wave affecting the classical particles' motion). Bohmists also fail to explain what happens with the "objectively real" pilot waves when the particle is measured or absorbed and how the initial state of the pilot wave is prepared. Their theory always inevitable contradicts the Lorentz invariance, prohibits one from choosing situation-dependent i.e. Hamiltonian-dependent bases that are relevant for different observations in different systems, and it just doesn't work at all. The Bohmian mechanics is just a sleight-of-hand meant to convince sloppy people that one doesn't need to abandon the pillars of classical physics – even though they have been clearly falsified. ... Schack correctly points out that the Bohmian mechanics is almost certainly wrong because its basic classical object – the guiding wave – is in principle unobservable because a change of it should in principle impact things at a distance but it never does. So one really needs at least to fine-tune infinitely many things to make these a priori observable aspects of the pilot wave unobservable, to match the reality and avoid the contradictions with relativity, and even an infinite amount of fine-tuning isn't really enough to achieve this goal.

This is quite technical, but the underlying idea is this: according to Bohmian mechanics, it's not the case that an elementary physical entity is both a particle and a wave; what is the case is that there is a particle and there is a wave, concurrently but separately. While moving, the particle simply 'rides' the wave. It is this, in turn, that allegedly creates the illusion of wave-particle duality in the double-slit experiment. Clearly, this is an attempt to preserve—as Motl points out—a classical view of reality all the way down to the quantum level. But when one makes the detailed implications of the theory explicit, all kinds of contradictions pop out. Motl attempted to make these contradictions clear in the quote above.

So my critics seem to 'cancel each other out': Ananthaswamy acknowledges that Bohmian mechanics is one of the only realist possibilities that survive the argument we made in our essay, whereas Motl kills Bohmian mechanics for entirely different reasons. So if my critics are both correct, there is no reason to think that I am wrong; much to the contrary. Thanks Anil and Luboš!

Open-ended, promissory arguments are unfalsifiable

To be fair, there is more to Ananthaswamy's case. He points out that there is another surviving theoretical possibility to save realism: so-called objective collapse theories. When I read this, I immediately thought: "Aha, but experiments have now shown that quantum effects persist even for macroscopic objects, which seems to refute objective collapse theories." I immediately knew how I was going to refute Ananthaswamy's argument on empirical grounds. However, as it turns out,  Ananthaswamy didn't wait for me and refuted himself! He wrote:

Collapse theories predict that when particles of matter become more massive than some threshold, they cannot remain in a quantum superposition of going through both slits at once, and this will destroy the interference pattern. Arndt’s team has sent a molecule with more than 800 atoms through the double slit, and they still see interference. The search for the threshold continues. 

Alright! So Arndt has ruled out objective collapse theories for objects as massive as molecules with more than 800 atoms—each comprising dozens, even hundreds of fundamental subatomic particles such as quarks and electrons—but we have to keep on searching! Perhaps we will find the threshold after we shoot a few stars through a solar-system-sized double slit, huh?

If one is going to argue for realism in such an open-ended, promissory manner, then realism becomes practically unfalsifiable.

Before closing this section, allow me to highlight two other experiments that demonstrate quantum effects for "massive" objects, ruling out objective collapse theories all the way to the macroscopic level:

Stabilized entanglement of massive mechanical oscillators
Quantum ground state and single-phonon control of a mechanical resonator

These experiments are mentioned in the essay Ananthaswamy is attempting to refute. Why, then, does he write as if we hadn't addressed the issue and preempted his argument?

Oh, the irony

Ironically, years ago Ananthaswamy himself wrote and published an article making a case precisely against the realism he now seems to be defending. He wrote:

A series of painstakingly designed experiments has since shown that Einstein was wrong: entanglement is real and no hidden-variable theories can explain its weird effects.

This was pretty much our point. Ananthaswamy even titled his article "Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it." Did he since forget that, if "reality is what you make it," you need an observer and objective collapse theories don't hold?

It's about the implications

There is an argument made by Ananthaswamy that I find particularly obnoxious and regrettable. Referring again to double-slit experiments—the only thing Ananthaswamy seems to consider salient in the vast world of quantum mechanics—he claims that

these experiments don’t constitute empirical evidence for [claims of a conscious observer's role in measurement]. In the double-slit experiment done with single photons, all one can do is verify the probabilistic predictions of the mathematics. If the probabilities are borne out over the course of sending tens of thousands of identical photons through the double slit, the theory claims that each photon’s wave function collapsed—thanks to an ill-defined process called measurement. That’s all.

But is that really all? You see, Ananthaswamy's claim above is as strictly accurate as it seems to willfully miss the point, in the interest of building a rather silly straw man. Yes, quantum theory only predicts the statistical behavior of physical systems, passing no judgment about what these systems essentially are. This is, in fact, the difference between physics and ontology. I acknowledge all this, alright.

But the point, of course, is the (ontological) implications of these predicted behaviors. What Ananthaswamy seems to be suggesting is that we should close our eyes to these implications; pretend that we aren't intelligent or observant enough to notice that they refute our mainstream intuitions regarding what reality should be. Here is nature telling us that she isn't what we take her to be. But, hey, we pretend we don't hear her because all we should do is "verify the probabilistic predictions of the mathematics." What a dimwitted, narrow-minded attitude!

I and my colleagues, co-authors of the original Scientific American essay, refuse to adopt this kind of attitude. We aren't blind. We are capable of critical interpretation and we gladly exercise this capability.

We encourage you to exercise it too.

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Idealism and emergent spacetime

"The Rip in Spacetime," by Selene's Art. Used with permission.

Yesterday, a very interesting essay was published on Scientific American by philosopher Susan Schneider. It offers an argument against panpsychism—the notion that experience is a fundamental aspect of all matter—based on the fact that new quantum gravity theories indicate that spacetime is emergent, instead of a fundamental scaffolding of nature.

The key claim in the essay is that experience presupposes time; that the sense of flow we have in experience requires a pre-existing temporal scaffolding. Schneider's intuition informs her that "Timeless experience is an oxymoron." Therefore, if experience depends on time, and time is itself emergent instead of fundamental, then experience cannot be fundamental. Ergo, panpsychism is false—or so the argument goes.

Schneider does take into account the possibility that the flow of time is an illusion, a serious idea in physics cemented by Einstein's Relativity Theory. She writes:

Here, the panpsychist could retort that our ordinary sense of time is an illusion. ... This Einsteinian picture has been called a static, “block universe” view of spacetime because it lacks any sense of a flow or passage of time. As Einstein wrote, upon the passing of a close friend, “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Could the panpsychist appeal to this block universe picture to argue that time is an illusion? If so, perhaps panpsychism and quantum gravity are not at odds, after all.

This admission would seem to refute Schneider's own initial argument: if time is an illusion, then experience—nature's sole given—cannot ultimately depend on it, as she initially assumed. In such a case, experience would actually be timeless, the impression of flow being itself merely a particular, timeless phenomenal state; a cognitive construct in consciousness (there's actually lots of evidence for this). But then she continues:

Suppose that our ordinary sense of duration is just an illusion, and reality is timeless. If this is the case, the point shouldn’t be that the fundamental layer of reality is experiential. The point should be, instead, that fundamental reality is nonexperiential.

I scratched my head with this passage at first, for its conclusion seems to me to contradict the preceding discussion. But upon re-reading the passage, Schneider's intended meaning became clear to me: for her, if time is an illusion, then experience itself must also be an illusion, since in her view experience presupposes the passage of time. And then, if experience is an illusion, the universe must be fundamentally non-experiential—or so her argument goes.

"The trouble with this," in the words of Galen Strawson, "is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be an illusion." In other words, the alleged illusion of experience would already itself be an experience, so the claim actually reaffirms the primacy of consciousness: there has to be something experiential preceding the illusion of time, wherein the illusion itself could arise.

Consequently, the implication Schneider is attempting to establish—namely, that if time is an illusion reality must be fundamentally non-experiential—doesn't actually hold. Schneider unknowingly begs the question already with her very first intuitive assumption: that timeless experience is an oxymoron (I shall attempt to help you see through this faulty intuition below; for now, please bear with me).

Although I don't think Schneider's particular argument here works, I do think it is valid, in principle, to use physical reasoning to question the tenability of panpsychism. I say this because, by positing that experience is a property, or the categorical basis, of matter, panpsychists are trying to insert experience into an evolving theoretical framework in physics. As that framework evolves, valid arguments against panpsychism may congeal.

The more important question for me, however, is this: Does Schneider's argument threaten, in any way, my own idealist view—elaborated upon extensively in my new book, The Idea of the World—that the physical world itself is a phenomenon of, and within, universal consciousness? The answer is no. Allow me to elaborate briefly.

Available on amazon

Schneider's main premise—which she posits as an axiom of intuition, without further justification—is the notion that experience presupposes time; that experience unfolds in time. For an idealist, however, time is itself a quality of experience. In other words, for the idealist time is in experience, not experience in time. This is the precise opposite of Schneider's axiom. So idealism lives or dies for reasons entirely unrelated to Schneider's argument. The latter does not apply to idealism.

As a matter of fact, the entire physical universe—spacetime, matter, energy, fields, the whole shebang—unfolds, for the idealist, in universal consciousness, as a phenomenon of universal consciousness. Unlike the panpsychist, the idealist is not inserting consciousness in the physical universe, as a fundamental aspect of the latter, but inserting the physical universe in universal consciousness, as a manifestation of the latter. The challenge for the idealist is to make this work in a parsimonious, logically consistent and empirically robust way, as I've tried to do in The Idea of the World.

Therefore, the possibility that time is emergent is not at all a problem for the idealist: time emerges within consciousness as a particular class of phenomenal states, consciousness itself being fundamental. Although quantum gravity theories are speculative today, the possibility of their success poses no new issue for the idealist. In fact, these theories help establish a key tenet of idealism: that the spacetime scaffolding is not fundamental.

Nonetheless, since Schneider invokes the intuition that experience presupposes time—think of the sense of flow inherent to experience—my assertion above may sound counterintuitive at first: How can time be merely a quality of experience, if experience itself seems to unfold in time?

Well, think of it: Where's the past? Is it anywhere out there? Can you point at it? Clearly not. So what makes you conceive of the idea of a past? It is the fact that you have memories. But these memories can only be referenced insofar as they are experienced now, as memories. There has never been 'a moment' in your entire life in which the past has been anything more than memories experienced now.

The same applies for the future: Where's the future? Is it anywhere out there? Can you point at it an say "there is the future"? Clearly not. Our idea of a future arises from expectations and imaginings experienced now, always now, as expectations and imaginings. There has never been 'a moment' in your life in which the future has been anything more than expectations and imaginings experienced now.

So the past and the future are just qualities of certain experiential contents experienced now, timelessly. The 'past' is the qualities of definiteness, unchangeability, low resolution, etc., characteristic of memories experienced now. The 'future' is the qualities of openness, uncertainty, vagueness, etc., characteristic of expectations and imaginings experienced now. Past and future and, therefore, time itself, are but qualities of experience insofar as we can directly reference them. Time is a cognitive construct, a story we tell ourselves now. Any other view of time is theory and abstraction, themselves constructed in consciousness.

Timeless experience is not, as claimed by Schneider, an oxymoron. Instead, timelessness is precisely an intrinsic, fundamentally unavoidable property of every possible experience. To see it, one just needs to introspect and reflect a little more carefully and rigorously than ordinarily.

I have elaborated more extensively on this crucial relation between spacetime and idealism in The Idea of the World. There, I also tackle the apparent contradiction between the notion that spacetime is experiential and the analogy I often make between experience and excitations of universal consciousness (after all, excitation, which we usually visualize as vibration, seems to require an a priori spacetime framework within which to unfold).

The ontological status of spacetime is an important issue for idealism; one that is seldom discussed. I try, for the first time, to rigorously and explicitly address it in The Idea of the World. That Schneider now published an essay touching precisely on this issue was a welcome synchronicity, which will hopefully bring more attention to the issue in academic circles.

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The remarkable criticism of Massimo Pigliucci

Apparently I am becoming impossible to ignore. Professor of philosophy, former podcast co-host and self-proclaimed skeptic, Massimo Pigliucci, has now written an essay titled "Does the universe suffer from multiple personality disorder?" in which he attempts to criticize my ideas. In this post, I shall comment on Massimo's essay. I stress the word 'comment' because this isn't really a rebuttal or response: there is little of substance in Pigluicci's essay to actually rebut or respond to.

As a matter of fact, I hope Pigliucci's essay is widely read, for it will likely be taken by thoughtful and honest readers—those I care about and cater to—to constitute evidence for the solidity of my ideas. For if the best a well-known philosopher and public intellectual—who is so clearly motivated to criticize me—can do is that essay, what else do I need to argue? I even feel tempted to remark at this point, though I don't really mean it, that with adversaries like that, who needs supporters?

Unlike Pigliucci, I shall comment based on substance. Yet, I shall also comment vigorously and honestly, not through a smokescreen of passive aggression. My motivation is to highlight what Pigliucci's essay illustrates about the state of our culture today, when it comes to anything that contradicts physicalist intuitions. This is particularly significant here because Pigliucci is an active member of academia and, as such, should be held to higher standards than the ranting online bloggers from whom one would expect this level of criticism.

Pigliucci starts his essay by implicitly labeling my philosophy a form of panpsychism. Whereas this might be justifiable under stretched definitions of panpsychism, I think this classification is inaccurate. Broadly speaking, panpsychism is the notion that all matter is conscious. I, on the other hand, hold to the view that matter is in consciousness, as an excitation of consciousness, insofar as it is only known as a particular category of experience (namely, perception). As a matter of fact, I have even written an essay in this blog denouncing panpsychism as a threat.

Pigliucci derogatorily labels my views "crazy." He "can’t believe [my paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies] passed peer review." Make no mistake, this is a serious accusation: it not only accuses me of incompetence, it accuses a renowned journal of incompetence as well. Coming from a practicing academic, one would fully expect such an accusation to be backed up by substance. So what does Pigliucci back it up with? Amazingly little. Let's look into it.

Of the 1685 words in his essay, he uses 770 (46%) to agree with and/or quote me. After you then exclude the preliminaries, the 578 words left (34%) constitute the actual attempt at criticism. It is based on two extremely general points that could be used against any non-physicalist ontology, and which touch on none (no, really, none) of the particulars of my view:

1. Pigliucci thinks that there is no 'hard problem of consciousness.' Therefore, any attempt to resolve or circumvent the hard problem is, allegedly, redundant and violates Occam's proverbial Razor.
2. There is allegedly no empirical evidence for there being consciousness associated with anything but living organisms.

These points don't constitute an attack on my particular views any more than they constitute an attack on any non-physicalist view to begin with. As such, they contradict a huge body of peer-reviewed work in philosophy spanning at least since Nagel's seminal 1974 paper (to speak of modern academic philosophy alone). Therefore, I hardly need to spend any effort rebuking them. Nonetheless, I shall comment, because I think Pigliucci's attempt is revealing in another way. Bear with me.

Regarding point 1, if Pigliucci thinks that there is no hard problem, then the burden is on him to explain how one can deduce, at least in principle, the qualities of experience—what it feels like to see red, to fall in love, to have a belly ache—from abstract, relational physical quantities such as mass, charge, spin and momentum. If he can't do it, his only alternative is some form of eliminativism: the absurd notion that the qualities of experience actually do not exist.

Pigliucci's appeal to Occam's Razor here is painfully ironic: by postulating that there is a whole ontological class outside and independent of experience—existence's sole given—it is physicalism that violates the principle of parsimony insofar as there are coherent alternatives that avoid such inflationary postulate. I have elaborated extensively on it in another academic paper that Pigliucci would, I guess, also not believe passed peer review (it did).

Regarding point 2, Pigliucci's demand for differentiating evidence for panpsychism or idealism seems to misunderstand the point of these ontology exercises, which is remarkable for a professor of philosophy. You see, ontology is an attempt to interpret all available empirical evidence from a categorical perspective. As such, under ideal circumstances, the evidence is the same in all cases: physicalism, panpsychism and idealism are all attempting to make categorical sense of the world we perceive, including the outcomes of scientific experiments.

And that such a thing as experience exists is also empirical evidence that needs to be made sense of: in fact, it is arguably the only evidence we have, existence's sole given. So one can easily turn the appeal to evidence against physicalism: How does physicalism explain the qualities of experience, which are all we ultimately have? It is not enough to simply dismiss the 'hard problem' or, absurdly, deny that experience exists. As argued above, one needs to offer a coherent logical link between physical quantities and phenomenal qualities; at least in principle. I challenge Pigliucci to do so.

All this said, there is indeed vast amounts of the exact kind of differentiating, scientific evidence that Pigliucci is looking for, to support my views. I have elaborated extensively on it in my new book, The Idea of the World, but will briefly summarize it here by reference to yet other peer-reviewed academic papers I've published.

Available on amazon

For starters, if the individual consciousness of a living organism is indeed a dissociated alter of universal consciousness, one would expect certain types of impairment of brain function to correlate with an expansion of the organism's phenomenal field. In other words, an impairment of dissociation should render the dissociative boundary more porous. And indeed, there is a broad pattern of observations confirming this, as discussed in this paper. In another paper, I've argued more explicitly why these observations contradict physicalism, with reference to the effects of psychedelics. Moreover, if—as I argue—all matter is the extrinsic appearance of inner experience, then one would expect the universe at its largest scales to be, in some structural sense, similar to an organism's nervous system. After all, we know empirically that the latter is the extrinsic appearance of conscious inner life. As it turns out, there are indeed unexplained, "stunning" structural similarities between galaxy networks and neuronal networks. Finally, there are now over 30 years of evidence from quantum mechanics that call into question the tenability of any ontology other than idealism, as discussed in this and this popular summaries on Scientific American of an argument more broadly made in The Idea of the World.

I am elaborating on all this not to rebut Pigliucci's points—as I said earlier, they require no rebuttal—but to give context to the key question of this post: Given all the above, how can an academic and public intellectual go as far as to claim, without any specific substantiation, that he "can't believe" a published paper in a respected journal passed peer review? I don't think this should be taken lightly. There is an ethical issue here.

Moreover, although I am charitably assuming that Pigliucci actually read my full JCS paper—would he really claim it shouldn't have passed peer review if he had not even read it?—his essay offers troubling signs that he didn't. For one, he only quotes from my Scientific American article, which is a popular summary of the key ideas, not an academic piece. He never quotes from the actual paper. Secondly, he conspicuously mistakes the title of the paper (it is "The Universe in Consciousness," not "The Universe is Consciousness"). One could attribute this, of course, to an ordinary and innocent typo. But then, thirdly, there is the fact that he fails to address any specific point of my technical argument, staying with broad generalities applicable to anything that isn't physicalism. I would imagine that, upon having actually read the technical paper, he would unavoidably have something specific to say about it.

Indeed, Pigliucci calls my ideas "crazy" without offering a smidgen of specific substantiation. What gives him the confidence to do so? What makes him believe that he can get away with it, as an academic and public intellectual? I will tell you: it is the brute fact that, given our cultural context today, he can get away with it. Watch it as he does.

The standards do not apply equally here. While I have to publish 13 peer-reviewed papers and a 312-page book laboriously elaborating on explicit and detailed arguments and swaths of evidence—from disciplines as distinct as physics, neuroscience, psychiatry and analytic philosophy—a self-proclaimed skeptic physicalist feels entitled to fire a missive from his armchair, having hardly spent the effort it takes to come to a minimally fair and professional assessment of what I am saying. This says something about the self-proclaimed skeptic; not about my views.

We live in a world wherein physicalists, despite the problems of their position, and while embodying a paradoxical combination of slackness and arrogance, feel entitled to dispense with thoroughness and respect when criticizing other views. Yet, as any thoughtful reader will discern in Pigliucci's hack job, the joke is on them.

To close this post, allow me to address Pigluicci: Massimo, did you actually read my JCS paper? Do you have anything specific to say about its salient points? If so, please do and tag me, so I can react. I do not take lightly the unsubstantiated statements you made about the paper and, indirectly, about the respected journal that published it. I think it is academically irresponsible and reprehensible. Indeed, I call on you to either substantiate your statements with specifics, or publicly retract them.

Better yet, debate me in a neutral online platform, so people could better judge, for themselves, the merits of our respective views. This would give you a much more credible opportunity to show the "craziness" of my position. If we do it online, you can surely find some time in your schedule to participate from the convenience of your own home. I propose, for instance, the Patterson in Pursuit podcast, whose host is well versed in philosophy and is neither a physicalist nor an idealist, so he could be a neutral moderator. I haven't spoken to Steve about it, but I am confident he would accommodate, if we both were willing to do it.

I am.

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Looking back, looking forward, and the "tyrant in me"

Breathing the air of the heights on the Austrian Alps, summer of 2018.

"It is done." This is the thought that comes to me as I sit on my couch this lazy, warm Sunday afternoon in northern Europe, reviewing in my mind the amazing life and writing journey I have undergone over the past nine years. For nine years now I have been elaborating on and promoting a modern formulation of ontological idealism, the view that reality is mental in essence. I have explored it through a multitude of angles, perspectives, starting points and metaphors, all of which converge to the same destination, the same basic understanding of what is going on. Along the journey, I have touched on ideas as varied as body-mind dualism, religious myths, high-strangeness phenomena, visions and hallucinations, so-called 'conspiracies,' the culture wars, the media, free will, etc., relating all these disparate topics to the basic understanding underlying everything I've written and spoken about so far: at the foundation of it all, there is just mind at work, doing what mind does.

Seven books... Seven books in nine years, all ultimately about idealism. But until just recently, something very important was missing: a rigorous, academic articulation of my ideas, based on a strictly analytic approach to my argument and strictly scientific evidence. After all, as compelling and mind-opening as idealism can be, one can always say that, until the academic acid test is passed, one's ideas hold no water. As someone who came originally from academia and the leading fortresses of hardcore science, I can sympathize with this position.

Therefore, since early 2016 I have been working precisely on a broad, multi-disciplinary academic articulation of my ideas, meant to pass the acid test and close all conceivable holes. It has been a very ambitious project, touching as it does on disciplines as varied as analytic philosophy, foundations of physics, psychology/psychiatry and neuroscience. My goal has been to publish in leading academic journals in all these disparate disciplines, for my overall argument for idealism relates to all of them. Nature, after all, does not recognize the artificial boundaries and divisions we impose on our knowledge.

Ambitious as this plan was, it has now been accomplished, with the last paper having just been published a few days ago. Nobody can claim anymore that my ideas haven't gone through the scrutiny of peer review; they have: thirteen times over. Not only are these thirteen papers published, most of them also form the backbone of my seventh and latest book, The Idea of the World. In it, I attempt to weave an overarching, multi-disciplinary argument for idealism that brings all those disciplines together, so to construct as compelling and rigorous a case as I possibly could. It has been an exhausting effort of scholarship, but one I am hopeful will pay off in terms of bringing down barriers to the mainstream acceptance of idealism.

Available on amazon

If anyone now dares to argue that idealism is an old-fashioned and discredited idea, which could not survive modern standards of argument and evidence in academia, I have this to say to this person: you are demonstrably wrong; you literally do not know what you are saying. The Idea of the World demonstrates this (more here). Snippets of the material in it have been picked up by the mainstream science media, as my many contributions to Scientific American attest. Indeed, media outlets from across the world have latched onto the idea, now that it has a solid academic foundation.

The Idea of the World is the book that, I believe, completes my effort to provide a full, solid and compelling articulation of idealism. In this sense, it is my magnum opus; the missing piece of the puzzle. It is the work that should silence any honest critic of idealism, for it rises up to the most rigorous challenges and objections that can be posed against it. The book addresses these challenges with explicit, detailed, almost hair-splitting argumentation, and a vast pool of empirical evidence from disciplines as diverse as quantum mechanics, neuroscience and psychology. If you don't believe it, I challenge you to criticize my case after having read the book.

So this is it. This is my best shot at closing my case as if I were in a court of scientific and philosophical law. Armed with the material in this book, I feel comfortably confident to issue a public, open challenge to any prominent academic who thinks idealism is false: debate me in public in a neutral venue. I would be particularly delighted to debate those who covertly think that anyone who doesn't espouse physicalism is sort of an idiot: come and make a fool of me then.

In a letter to Franz Overbeck, written in Sils Maria in the summer of 1883, Nietzsche wrote:

I have an aim, which compels me to go on living and for the sake of which I must cope with even the most painful matters ... the "tyrant in me," the inexorable tyrant, wills that I conquer this time too.

The "inexorable tyrant," of course, is what Jung, Hillman, Harpur and others have called the dæmon, that impersonal, autonomous driving force within the creative mind, with an agenda of its own and no regard for the circumstances and desires of its victim, which compels us to perform and complete our work. It is the irresistible, brutal natural energy behind what wants to come into the world through us.

Like Nietzsche's dæmon in Sils Maria, mine compelled me to breath "the air of the heights." It forcibly pulled me out of the hole I was in and offered me a "lofty" perspective on the state of human thought today. It was then up to me to descend to the valley and confront our culture with the inherent contradictions and absurdities of its views. The Idea of the World is the result.

Now, after a lifetime of forced labour, my completion of this latest book has finally silenced my dæmon. I am free, though disoriented for lacking the compass that has hitherto guided me. Yet, there's still work to be done: echoes of tasks already completed. I must promote this new work; not out of some twisted desire for personal fame or recognition (goodness knows my deeply introverted character goes counter to all that), but out of an innate desire to make my contribution count.

If you find value in my ideas and feel you can help promote them, I'd surely appreciate your contribution through social media, word of mouth, your own blog, etc. Whatever you can do will help. The intent is noble, the cause just, and the potential impact on the history of human thought certainly positive. All hands, the time is now! As Edward Kelly (lead author of Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism) says in the Afterword of the book, "a major inflection point in modern intellectual history is close at hand!"

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Response to Peter Hankins

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons.

In a recent post in his popular and well respected blog, Conscious Entities, author Peter Hankins discussed my recent paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS), as well as its companion essay on Scientific American magazine. Peter's assessment is largely fair and positive, though he points out a few problems with my approach that he considers "overwhelming." In this post, I'd like to clarify my position and offer a response to Peter's criticisms.

Peter writes:

Does DID have the metaphysical significance Kastrup would give it, though? One fundamental problem, to get it up front, is this: if we, as physical human beings, are generated by DID in the cosmic consciousness, and that DID is literally the same thing as the DID observed in patients, how come it doesn’t generate a new body for each of the patient’s alters?

The equivalent of "different bodies" in the case of literal DID would be different, measurable, dissociative neural processes in the patient's brain. That said, my claim is not that cosmic consciousness has a literal form of DID. As a matter of fact, DID is defined as a human psychopathology, so it cannot apply literally to nature as a whole.

My appeal to DID is thus analogical: I posit that something like DID occurs at the level of cosmic consciousness and that the different "dissociative processes" in cosmic consciousness correspond to different living organisms in nature. The JCS paper, in fact, elaborates with some precision on what is meant by this analogy: a break or cessation of certain associative links across phenomenal contents (see Section 9, starting at page 140 of the JCS paper, particularly Figure 1). Peter understands this:

I would say that the most reasonable response would be to deny that cosmic and personal DID are exactly the same phenomena and regard them as merely analogous, albeit perhaps strongly so.

Precisely. Although my claim is that what happens in cosmic consciousness is merely like DID, I believe the similarities are strong enough that the occurrence of DID in humans provides an empirical proof-of-principle: there are dissociative processes in nature powerful enough to explain the (apparent) decomposition of a unified consciousness into seemingly separate centers of experience. This is extremely significant, for here is nature showing us the way to solve the decomposition problem.

Peter makes accurate inferences from my material:

In Kastrup’s system we begin with a universal consciousness which consists of a sort of web of connected thoughts and feelings. Later there will be perceptions, but at the outset there’s nothing to perceive; I’m not sure what the thoughts could be about, either – pure maths, perhaps – but they arise from the inherent tendency of the cosmic consciousness to self-excite (just as a normal human mind, left without external stimulus, does not fall silent, but generates thoughts spontaneously).

Indeed, I imagine those "pure thoughts," prior to the rise of perceptions, as having a mathematical nature. I further imagine them to be accompanied by an innate aesthetic feeling related to symmetry. This would be consistent with the laws of nature as we know them today.

I’m not clear whether Kastrup envisages all these thoughts and feelings being active at the same time, or whether new ones can be generated and added in.

Both. I think the phenomenal contents of cosmic consciousness, just like our own, can occur both in parallel (as in when a thought occurs together with the emotion it triggers) and in sequence (as in when a perception is followed by a memory).

That said, as an idealist, I think spacetime itself is a phenomenal quality, not an objective scaffolding within which cosmic consciousness operates. This leads to some difficulties for the idealist, which I address in the closing chapter of my new book, The Idea of the World.

Available on amazon

Peter continues:

I think the natural and parsimonious way to go from there would be solipsism. The cosmic consciousness is all there is, and these ideas about other people and external reality are just part of its random musings.

This is subtle, so please bear with me. I do think cosmic consciousness is all there is. Our individual 'consciousnesses' are just dissociated segments of the one cosmic consciousness, never fundamentally separated from it. But is this what is traditionally meant by solipsism? I don't think so. A solipsist is someone who believes that only his or her personal consciousness exists, and that all other seemingly conscious beings exist only as images on the solipsist's screen of perception. In other words, for a solipsist there is nothing it is like to be you or me; there is only something it is like to be the solipsist. All other beings allegedly have no conscious inner lives of their own.

In this sense, my position is antagonistic to solipsism: by looking upon every living being in nature as a dissociated alter of cosmic consciousness, each with a dissociated conscious inner life of its own, I am precisely contradicting solipsism; I am granting that there is something it is like to be you, your neighbor, the ants crawling on your lawn, the bacteria swimming in your toilet and the trees growing in your garden. In fact, the very idea of positing something like DID at a cosmic level aims precisely at explaining the multiple, concurrent conscious inner lives of living beings. If solipsism were true, none of it would be necessary: there would be only the personal consciousness of the solipsist, which in turn dreams up everything and everyone else within its own personal boundaries.

So instead [Kastrup] takes a different view. Somehow (?), islands of the overall web of cosmic consciousness may get detached. They then become dissociated consciousnesses, and can both perceive and be perceived. Since their associative links with the rest of the cosmos have been broken, I don’t quite know why they don’t lapse into solipsistic beings themselves, unable to follow the pattern of their thoughts beyond its own compass.

The alters do lose their ability to "follow the pattern of their thoughts beyond" their dissociative boundaries. But the external thoughts surrounding the alters impinge on the alters' dissociative boundaries from the outside, leading to the phenomenal category we call sense perception. I've tried to explain this in Section 11, starting at page 146 of the JCS paper, particularly with Figures 2 and 3.

In fact, and this may be the strangest thing in the theory, our actual bodies, complete with metabolism and all the rest, are the appearance of these metaphysical islands: ‘living organisms are the revealed appearance of alters of universal consciousness’. Quite why the alters of universal consciousness should look like evolved animals, I don’t know.

According to the internal logic of my view, alters should look like something, which might as well be what we came to call living organisms. Why not? Peter's very question here seems to be motivated by an intuition whose validity I fail to see. My views do not contradict the laws of nature as we know them, so alters (that is, living organisms) look like what they do because that's how the laws of nature, through evolution by natural selection, shaped them. I introduce no new factor or problem here. I am simply interpreting what life is under a metaphysical scheme: life is what dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness look like from across dissociative boundaries.

How does sex between these alters give rise to a new dissociative island in the form of a new human being?

I also do not solve the problem of abiogenesis nor create any new difficulty in this regard: the origin of life from non-life (abiogenesis) was the formation of the first dissociated alter of cosmic consciousness. This may have been very 'difficult' (in the sense of being improbable) for nature to do, but once it was done, organisms (that is, alters) found ways to facilitate the process through biological reproduction. Why did they do it? Because evolution by natural selection led them to evolve this capability. Again, I introduce no new difficulty or factor here. I am merely providing a metaphysical interpretation of these processes.

It seems that Kastrup really wants to have much of the conventional world back; a place where autonomous individuals with private thoughts are nevertheless able to share ideas about a world which is not just the product of their imaginations. But it’s forbiddingly difficult to get there from his starting position.

What Peter calls the "conventional world" is, to me, a composite of empirical facts and established scientific theory. If I were to contradict those, or make them untenable under my ontology, I believe the latter would simply be demonstrably wrong. So, in this sense, I do want "to have much of the conventional world back." As a matter of fact, I don't want to part with it to begin with!

As for it being "forbiddingly difficult to get there from [my] starting position," I just disagree. I don't see why it should be difficult, given that I've attempted to systematically tackle every criticism of my views in this regard (see e.g. this paper).

Peter does have one point, though:

There is a vast amount of metaphysical work to be done on this kind of aspect of the theory – enough for several generations of philosophers – and it may not be fair to expect Kastrup to have done it all, let alone get it all into this single paper.

I concur, and that's why I've written a 312-page book elaborating much more thoroughly on these ideas. Naturally, even that book won't be enough to address all the metaphysical details that need to be worked out, but it is at least a more complete attempt than the JCS paper alone.

I want to close this response by agreeing with Peter on a crucial point:

These are, of course, radical new ideas; but curiously they seem to me to bear a strong resemblance to the old ones of the Gnostics. ... I don’t make the comparison to discredit Kastrup’s ideas; on the contrary if it were me I should be rather encouraged to have these ancient intellectual forebears.

I am! The Gnostic writings, the Upanishads, many ancient myths and even certain interpretations of catholic and mainstream Christian scripture, all hint at, or outright describe, similar ideas. Indeed, I've even written a book about it.

Although I was not aware of these similarities when I began to develop my ideas (shame on me for my ignorance), I feel very happy to acknowledge them today. To me, they provide a confidence-boosting validation and a solid historical foundation for what I am trying to do. I am content enough with the role of trying to frame these ancient ideas in modern language, using modern metaphors, and defending them with modern evidence. I happily make no claims of originality.

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Introducing the Idea of the World

My new book, The Idea of the World, is now available on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, other online retailers and many bookshops as well. To mark the occasion, I am publishing below two of the first sections of the book, which explain what the book is about and the role it plays in the context of the body of my work. I hope you find value in it!

And if you cannot afford the book, remember that the 10 academic papers comprised in it can be freely downloaded from my papers page. You will miss the many additional chapters and the overall argument built around the papers and the added material, but you will get some of the key pieces of the puzzle.

So here we go...

Note to readers of my previous books

Prior to the present volume, I have written six books elaborating on my views regarding the underlying nature of reality. Particularly in Why Materialism Is Baloney and More Than Allegory, in addition to a conceptual exposition I have also made liberal use of metaphors to help readers develop direct intuition for the ideas expressed. My intent was not to win a technical argument in a court of philosophical arbitration, but to evoke in my readers a felt sense of the world I was describing. As such, my work has had a character more akin to continental than analytic philosophy.

I have no regrets about it. Yet, I have also come to recognize the inevitable shortcomings of the approach. Some readers have misinterpreted and others over-interpreted my metaphors, extrapolating their applicability beyond their intended scope. Yet others have simply become overwhelmed or confused by the many metaphorical images, losing the thread of my argument. Perhaps most importantly—given my goal of providing a robust alternative to the mainstream physicalist metaphysics (Kastrup 2015: 142-146)—some professional philosophers and scientists felt they needed to see a more conceptually clear and rigorous formulation of my philosophical system before they could consider it.

The present work attempts to address all this. Starting from canonical empirical facts—such as the correlations between subjective experience and brain activity, the fact that we all seem to share the same world, the fact that the known laws of physics operate independently of our personal volition, etc.—it develops an unambiguous ontology based on parsimony, logical consistency and empirical adequacy. It re-articulates my views in a more rigorous and precise manner. It uses metaphors only as secondary aides to direct exposition. I have strived to make every step of my argument explicit and sufficiently substantiated.

This volume thus represents a trade-off: on the one hand, its mostly analytic style prevents it from reaching the depth and nuances that metaphors can convey. Parts II and III of my earlier book More Than Allegory, for instance, use metaphors to hint at philosophical ideas that can hardly be tackled or communicated in an analytic style. As such, the ontology formulated here is not an expansion, but in fact a subset of the ideas I have tried to convey in earlier works. On the other hand, the present volume articulates this subset more thoroughly and clearly than before, which is necessary if it is to offer—as intended—a credible
alternative to mainstream physicalism.

Incomplete as the subset of ideas presented here may be, I shall argue that it is still more complete than the current mainstream metaphysics. This subset alone—as I elaborate upon in the pages that follow—should be able to explain more of reality, in a more cogent way, than physicalism. By articulating the corresponding ontology precisely, my intent is to deny cynics and militants alike an excuse to portray it as vague and, therefore, dismissible. If the price to achieve this is to write a book as if one were arguing a case in a court of law, then this book represents my case. You be the judge.

Preface

The main body of this work brings together ten different articles I published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Unbeknownst to the journals’ editors, the articles were conceived, from the beginning, to eventually be collected in the volume you now have in front of you. Despite being self-contained, each was designed to fit into a broader jigsaw puzzle that, once assembled, should reveal a compelling, holistic picture of the nature of reality. This book presents the completed jigsaw puzzle. The resulting picture depicts an ontology that squarely contradicts our culture’s mainstream physicalist metaphysics.

Indeed, according to the ontology described and defended here, reality is fundamentally experiential. A universal phenomenal consciousness is the sole ontological primitive, whose patterns of excitation constitute existence. We are dissociated mental complexes of this universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its mentation. The inanimate universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of a possibly instinctual but certainly elaborate universal thought, much like a living brain is the extrinsic appearance of a person’s conscious inner life. Other living creatures are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated complexes. If all this sounds implausible to you now, you have yet more reason to peruse the argument carefully laid out in the pages that follow.

Each of the ten original academic articles constitutes a chapter in this volume, organized so as to present an overarching argument step by step. I have added five extra preamble chapters, as well as an overview and extensive closing commentary, to weave the original articles together in a coherent storyline.

The choice to break up my argument into ten self-contained, independently published articles had three motivations. Firstly, I have been criticized for not submitting my earlier work to the scrutiny of peer-review. I take this criticism only partly to heart: peer-review can be a prejudiced process that stifles valid non-mainstream views whilst overlooking significant faults in mainstream arguments (Smith 2006, McCook 2006, Baldwin 2014). As an author whose ideas systematically defy the mainstream, I had doubts about whether my articles would receive an impartial hearing. And indeed, often they didn’t. Nonetheless, peer-review can also be constructive, insofar as it provides penetrating criticisms that help sharpen one’s arguments. This was my hope and, as it turns out, several of my original manuscripts were significantly improved thanks to insightful comments from reviewers. In the end, peer-review has proven to be fruitful.

Secondly, specialized articles can reach more and different people in academia than a more generic book. The articles collected in this volume span fields as diverse as philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry and physics, each with its own academic community. By publishing the articles in journals specifically targeted at their respective communities, I hope to have reached people who will probably never hear of—or be interested in—this book as a whole.

Thirdly, by having each part of my broader argument receive the specialist endorsement that peer approval represents, I hope to deny cynics and militants an excuse to portray the ontology presented here—antagonistic to current mainstream views as it is—as dismissible.

In the interest of achieving the three goals stated above, the articles collected in this volume were originally published in journals that, at the time of manuscript submission, met the following criteria:

1. Peer-review process;
2. Open-access policy (so to safeguard my ability to make the articles available to a wider, non-academic readership);
3. Their publishers were not included in Jeffrey Beall’s list of potentially disreputable open-access publishers* (Beall n.d.), as of its version of 12 January 2017;**
4. No transfer of copyright required from authors (so to safeguard my ability to republish the articles in this volume).

To the extent possible within these constraints, I have also sought broader geographical exposure for my work by publishing in journals spanning North America, Western, Central and Eastern Europe.

In order to preserve the integrity of the original peer-review process, I am reproducing the ten original articles here without any change of substance. I have only corrected the occasional typo and language inaccuracy, harmonized the terminology and ensured consistency—citation style, section and figure numbering, etc.—across the entire book. I have also consolidated all references in the bibliography at the end of this volume, so to reduce redundancy. Everything else is as it was originally published in the respective journals. Whenever I felt that an update of—or comment on—specific passages was called for, I have done so in the form of added footnotes, so to preserve the original text.

For this reason, and since the original articles had to be self-contained, some repetition of content occurs across chapters. Some readers may consider this annoying, but I think it has a positive side effect: it provides a regular recapitulation of key ideas and context throughout the book, helping the reader keep track of the overarching argument line.

Finally, because the main substance of this work can already be found in ten freely accessible articles, it is important to highlight that the value-add of this book consists in my effort to weave the articles together in a coherent storyline, building up to an overarching ontology. By downloading the original articles one can get the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but by reading this book one gets the overall picture the pieces form when properly connected together.

It is my sincere hope that this picture helps you come to new insights about the nature of reality.


* A study published in Science (Bohannon 2013) concluded, “Beall is good at spotting publishers with poor quality control,” although “al- most one in five [of the journals] on his list did the right thing.” So Beall erred on the side of being overly critical of the journals he evaluated. By contrast, the same study showed that the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which seeks to list only credible publications, includ- ed many journals with poor quality control. Although I understand that the DOAJ has made several improvements to its processes since then, I have nonetheless elected to use Beall’s ‘black list’ instead of the DOAJ’s ‘white list.’
** This was the latest version of Beall’s list available as of the time of this writing. Jeffrey Beall had then just stopped maintaining the list, so this is possibly the last version as well.

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GUEST ESSAY: Musings on Idealism, Advaita and Christianity

By Michael Larkin

(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.)

Crypt of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, Italy.
Photo by Bernardo Kastrup, hereby released into the public domain.

Discussions at Metaphysical Speculations seem quite often to focus on the relationship between Idealism and Advaita Vedanta. The aim of this essay is to widen the scope to include Christianity, which though nominally declining in the West, still possesses values thoroughly embedded in its culture.

Advaita considers there to be identity between Atman (the individual human soul) and Brahman, the ultimate. Moksha, or liberation, consists in the experiencing such identity in this life. One could take the term MAL (Mind-At-Large) or alternatively TWE (That Which Experiences) to be equivalent to Brahman. The Christian idea of the Trinity isn't that far  from that of Atman ("God the Son") and Brahman ("God the Father"). I suspect the third "person", the Holy Spirit, is added to symbolise the principal of communion between Father and Son, which whilst not explicitly mapping to anything in Advaita, I doubt that Advaitists would deny. After all, how is Atman to achieve Moksha without communion with Brahman? I assume that, for example, Advaitists pray in one direction, and hope to receive guidance in the other.

The Christian language is in its own way careful: there are three persons in the Trinity, not three gods; that is, three different aspects of the one God, just as in Advaita Brahman and Atman are two different aspects of an entity that is essentially one. I wonder if one thing that Brahman "gets out" of its relationship with Atman is a sense of the latter's gradual coming-to-understand its true nature – in Christian terms, like the father's delight at the return of the prodigal son. In a way, Moksha for Atman may also be Moksha for Brahman – or as the bible puts it: "Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth".

The difference comes when Christianity not only personifies the Son, but restricts him to one specific human being, namely Jesus Christ. In general, it doesn't see Atman/Brahman as being in all of us, but a special one of us. Not all Christians think this way, however; someone like Gerard Manley Hopkins (a Jesuit priest) in his marvellous sonnet As Kingfishers catch fire, says in its terminal sestet:

I say more: the just man justices;
keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is –

Christ – for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

to the Father through the features of men's faces.

Here it seems that Hopkins was open to the view that everyone is a Son of God, a Christ, as plays out in imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ as a means of attaining salvation. "Salvation" here could be taken as equivalent to Advaita's Moksha or enlightenment. What is the salvation from? From Maya, illusion, or, in Christian terms (with the usual Christian overtones of guilt), sin.

What is sin? I'd say essentially, some degree or other of ignorance of what Atman, the Son, really is. The greater the ignorance, the greater the subjective experience of separation by Atman from Brahman, Son from Father. The doctrine of original sin is something that has often intrigued me. It's quite easy to take the story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall as being confined to a few actors. In typical fashion, Christianity lays the guilt on Adam: he is responsible for the fall of everyone, and that is his original sin, inherited by all his and Eve's offspring. Christianity claims that that this sin has to be forgiven if man is to be able to achieve salvation. However, it apportions the task of achieving that forgiveness to one special Man/God, Jesus the Christ, who has to sacrifice his life to atone for the sin (I note the hint of pagan influence: actual human sacrifice is required to appease a god). The special man has to die, but all will be well in the end because his Moksha, symbolised by the resurrection, will thereby become available to all.

However, I don't see the garden of Eden myth with its few actors, or the crucifixion narrative with its one principal actor, as discreet , one-off events, so much as ones that play out repeatedly in individual lives. The "life" to be sacrificed for each of us isn't a literal life, but the intentional loss of the perceived difference between Brahman and Atman, Father and Son. In conventional Christian terms, anyone accepting Jesus as their redeemer has the potential to be saved. We still have to act in accordance with the way Jesus acted. i.e. engage in imitatio Christi, to ensure salvation. Most Christians make baptism indispensable to salvation, but in my view that's just the usual special pleading of religion; the often irresistible urge to make of ourselves exclusive groups of people. I'd say it's as much a case of the psychological  need for a feeling of unity and togetherness as it is for identifying with truth.

The doctrine of the redemption enables Christianity to set Jesus up as a special – nay unique – individual, who alone was both God and Man. Whilst I can accept he may have been special to a degree, I don't see Jesus as being unique. We are all both God and Man, though most of us don't realise it, not yet having experienced Mosksha/salvation. Christianity has a tendency to make key figures take the burden of action in its narratives. Take the doctrine of the virgin birth, for example. Begetting babies is in my view quite wonderful enough without positing some kind of intervention by the Holy Spirit; moreover, ordinary reproduction unites us all in common humanity – or atmanity, if I may coin the word.

It seems to me that Christianity, in positing Jesus alone as God, inevitably distances the rest of us from the possibility of enlightenment /salvation. At the same time, it attempts to have its cake and eat it by insisting that through the doctrine of the redemption, salvation is rendered possible for all. This somewhat lessens personal responsibility for achieving it, although one still has to join the club (be baptised) and live a relatively blameless life to achieve salvation. It's no bad thing to do good acts, refrain from harming others, and so on, in fact these are probably necessary for achieving enlightenment. But they aren't sufficient, because behind our acts is our motivation for doing them, and this needs to be more than the essentially selfish desire to attain paradise, or to avoid punishment in hell.

Not all Christians think alike. Some of their interpretations can be subtle, and where they are, they might at least in principle be able to be entertain the concepts of Advaita Vedanta such as Atman and Brahman, where one is essentially the same as the other. Idealism, I suspect, is compatible with both Advaita and the more nuanced interpretations of Christianity. The "thoughts" of MAL/TWE (or the various processes occurring within it), generate illusion/Maya when filtered through human perception. What Bernardo allegorises as "dissociation" is what creates that perception, and restricts our capacity to apprehend the true nature of reality; what creates our illusion of an existence independent and separate from MAL. We aren't, I don't think, in any sense to blame for this. For Atman to be a vehicle for Brahman to experience itself as if from a second-person perspective, it's maybe inevitable, all part of the patterns and regularities of MAL.

What I see as interesting aren't so much what one might term noumena (views from Brahman's perspective), and phenomena (views from Atman's perspective), but the way that the two views interact and, possibly, generate the qualia of mental experience. Qualia, in a way, could be considered the lingua franca  between Atman and Brahman: a language they can both understand, albeit that their native tongues are different, the former's being self-reflective, and the latter's (if Bernardo's suspicion is correct), not.

If MAL were like human beings, then it'd be easy to imagine that it's playing some kind of game: it would supposedly know everything in the same kind of way we do, albeit at an inexpressibly higher level. I'm reminded of Alan Watts' piece about what to tell children about God, where it's all a game of hide and seek, of God hiding from himself through us. While for a time I was enamoured of this view, I'm coming around more to the view that MAL isn't just a grander version of us, with essentially the same kind, albeit incomparably more extensive, level of self-reflectivity.

It may be more that human beings (and maybe to some extent other organisms), could be considered as MAL's "organs" for coming to explore itself in a self-reflective, subjective fashion, which isn't its native way of apprehending itself. Thereby, perhaps it's learning and evolving through the Brahman/Atman schema, and perhaps both aspects are necessary for that to occur. By "evolving" I'm not saying that it's enhancing its capacities, so much as refining its appreciation of itself.

Advaita, whilst intellectually sophisticated in comparison to the average run of Christianity, lacks something of the personal. Which is harder? One can understand Advaita, at least intellectually, integrating it into the everyday life of Atman, or accept Christianity with its greater degree of subjectivity, and integrate that into one's intellectual life. It strikes me that there are pros and cons of both approaches, and that either way may prove effective in discovering the truth of what one really is.

All of the foregoing represents my personal musings on Idealism, Advaita and Christianity. I haven't by any means solidified them into personal doctrine. It represents my current thoughts, and of course, those may in time change. I present them for comment, criticism, call it what you will, and if I learn anything from that, all to the good.

Copyright © 2018 by Michael Larkin. Published with permission.

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