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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The strangest possibility: The physical world may be exactly what it seems to be

Is the physical world really made of abstract, mathematically-defined atoms?

Mystery has to do with deeper truths hiding behind mere appearances. What we see and hear is just appearance; the physical world, as it is in itself, consists of unexpected and mind-boggling truths—or so we imagine. Yet, perhaps the greatest of all mysteries is hiding in plain sight, right under our noses. Indeed, if we ponder our situation carefully, we come to the startling realization that the strangest possibility of all is this: the physical world may be exactly what it seems to be. This possibility, if true, would force us to part with our dearest narratives about the nature of reality.

According to the mainstream story, the physical world consists of particles and force fields defined in purely mathematical terms. These particles and force fields have only abstract, quantitative properties such as mass, charge, momentum, position in spacetime, spin, etc. But they entirely lack intrinsic qualities: the physical world out there, in and of itself, has no smell, tone, taste, color or texture. Instead, these qualities are supposedly generated by our brain, inside our skull. The red you see exists solely inside your head; out there there are only electromagnetic fields with a certain—quantifiable—frequency of vibration. The texture you feel exists only inside your head; out there there are only geometric arrangements of molecules. That we attribute color and texture to things out there is merely a projection, a psychological artifact of our cognitive apparatus. All the qualities you perceive around you right now are—or so the story goes—inside your head. Your real skull is beyond everything you perceive, encapsulating your whole experiential world like an invisible eggshell beyond the horizon. This—absurd as it may sound when rendered explicit—is what is supposed to be going on.

What motivates such a counterintuitive story? The main reason is that we all seem to inhabit the same world. If you were sitting next to me right now, we would both describe my living room in a mutually consistent manner. Yet my perception of the room would be different from yours in the details, given our slightly different perspectives within it. There thus appears to be a non-mental environment outside our respective perceptual fields, which is occupied by both of us and modulates our experience of the room. This environment is supposedly the physical world out there.

There are other reasons. For instance, although we can change the world of our imagination by a direct act of volition—I can imagine a pink elephant in my living room right now, if I wish… Oops, just did it—the same is not the case when it comes to the physical world. Unlike the images in our mind, the physical world has an autonomy that seems to place it outside our mind. Ergo, it must have no qualities, for the latter are essentially mental. Moreover, there are undeniable correlations between our inner experiences and measurable patterns of neural activity in our brain. This suggests to some that these experiences are somehow—nobody understands how, not even in principle—generated by our brain.

But the question is: Is there an alternative narrative that honors our intuition that the physical world—concrete physicality itself, as we normally understand it—consists of qualities of experience, such as color and texture? That what is physical is the touch I feel in my hands, the smell I feel in my nose and the taste I feel in my tongue, as opposed to abstract mathematical relationships? Can this narrative also make sense of the facts that we all seem to inhabit the same environment, that we can’t change it through a direct act of volition, and that patterns of brain activity do accompany experience? The answer is yes, as I have extensively and painstakingly elaborated in my book, The Idea of the World.

Available on amazon.

In such a short essay, it is impossible to go into the argument in any depth. But in very general terms, the story goes like this: the physical world is exactly what it seems to be, in the sense that it consists solely of the concrete qualities we experience as physicality—namely, the colors we see, the smells we feel, etc. Therefore, the physical world exists entirely within our mind… But not within our head! Our body is itself part of the physical world, so it is our body that is in our mind, not the other way around.

Does this mean that all reality is our private dream? That would follow only if the physical world were all there is. But we know that, in addition to the qualities of perception—that is, color, taste, smell, etc.—there are other mental categories, such as thoughts and feelings. So even if all perceptions are fundamentally private, we may still be immersed in a shared environment constituted by transpersonal thoughts and feelings.

In other words, the physical world is private, all right, but there is still a non-physical world of transpersonal thoughts and feelings—to which we have no direct access—surrounding us and which we all inhabit. What we experience as our perceptions of the world ‘out there’ is merely the outer appearance of these transpersonal thoughts and feelings; just as our brain and its neural activity is the outer appearance of our own private experiences. The whole physical universe is akin to a brain scan image of the mental activity of a mind at large, in which we are immersed.

So there is indeed a great mystery behind the appearances: What are these transpersonal thoughts and feelings that present themselves to us as the physical world? Although the latter is nothing more than our perceptual experiences—which we merely describe by means of abstract mathematical relationships—it points to something non-physical, ineffable, concurrently immanent and transcendent. While being exactly what it seems to be, the physical world still hints at something beyond itself. Therein lies the mystery.

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Why dismissing philosophy threatens the integrity of science

Bust of Aristotle, second century AD.
Photo by Bernardo Kastrup, hereby released into the public domain.

It has become sadly common for science popularizers to dismiss philosophy as an empty, altogether useless discipline consisting of circular abstractions. Even scientist Stephen Hawking went as far as to declare philosophy dead. I believe this public dismissal of philosophy, rather than reaffirm science, brings harm to its integrity.

To substantiate this claim, I must first discuss the differences between science and philosophy. Of the many areas of philosophical investigation, two are particularly relevant to science: ontology—that is, the study of what things are in and of themselves—and epistemology—that is, the study of what we can know about them and how we can know it.

The scientific method rests fundamentally on empirical observation: we can theorize all we want, but it is by comparing our theories with observations of nature that we can confirm, discard or refine these theories. However, from an epistemic perspective, all we can know from observing nature is its appearance and behavior. Let me unpack this.

Observation, by definition, only gives us access to how things appear to us—through the mediation of measurement instrumentation, as the case may be—not to what they are in themselves, independently of observation. For instance, when you observe another person, her facial expressions may often seem to betray a range of emotions you’ve had before. But you cannot access her emotions in and of themselves, as she feels them, independently of your observation (unless, of course, you become the person).

Because it is fundamentally based on how nature presents itself to our observation, the scientific method provides no direct insight into what things are in themselves. Indeed, assuming that a thing’s appearance directly implies what it is in itself overlooks a host of possibilities and questions, as I shall discuss shortly.

Even when we use giant particle accelerators to smash matter down to its most basic building blocks, all we can access is how the resulting debris appear to us via our measurement instruments. Since we cannot become a quark, a lepton or a boson, the universe as it is in itself—insofar as it is constituted by quarks, leptons and bosons—remains fundamentally inaccessible through scientific investigation.

More specifically, science concerns itself exclusively with the behavior of nature as presented to observation. Scientific theories are predictive: given a sufficient characterization of a system, a good theory anticipates what the system will do next. For instance, if I know the relevant characteristics of a billiard table, balls and cue stick, I can predict what will happen after I strike the cue ball. But predicting what will happen is a foretelling of the system’s behavior, not a direct insight into what the system is.

Available on amazon.

Doing science consists in systematically observing and modeling the patterns and regularities of nature’s behavior, so it can next be predicted. It is this ability to predict how nature will behave that enables the development of technology: if one puts some materials together in a certain way, a certain useful effect can be reliably expected to follow.

Indeed, the key carriers of the value of science for our civilization—and perhaps the key reasons it has accumulated so much cultural currency—are the technologies that address pressing human needs and desires. Analogously to how one can play and win video games without any understanding of the underlying hardware or software, these technologies can be made to work even without insight into what nature is in itself.

But for there to be natural behavior as revealed through appearance, there has to be something that behaves and appears to begin with. In other words, there has to be nature-in-itself. The problem is that comparing behavioral predictions to empirical observations cannot reveal nature as it is in itself, for many different hypotheses regarding the latter are consistent with the same behaviors.

This is why crucial questions cannot be answered by science alone, such as: Are the fundamental subatomic particles merely abstract entities whose nature can be exhaustively characterized in purely quantitative terms? Or do they have intrinsic qualities, such as color, flavor and smell? Are the fundamental subatomic particles the external appearance of conscious inner life at a microscopic level, analogously to how your brain is the external appearance of your conscious inner life? Is all matter in the inanimate universe the external appearance of universal conscious inner life? Or are both matter and consciousness different aspects of a third, more fundamental category, which appears as matter or consciousness depending on perspective? No method of acquiring knowledge based on behavioral appearances can, on its own, tackle such questions of being.

That science gives us insight only into appearance and behavior is the conclusion of an epistemic analysis: an eminently skeptical, meta-cognitive critique of what can actually be known, so we don’t inadvertently take mere belief for knowledge. An attempt to investigate what nature is—as opposed to how it behaves—requires, in turn, the philosophical method of ontology, which is based on principles of internal logical consistency, empirical adequacy and categorical parsimony. This is how philosophy complements science, attempting to address issues that fall—fundamentally—beyond the scope of scientific investigation.

When science popularizers dismiss philosophy, they are making one or more of several mistakes, amongst which: (a) being unaware and uncritical of the intrinsic boundaries of their preferred method of knowledge acquisition; (b) taking one particular ontology—usually, mainstream physicalism—for the self-evident truth, thereby projecting an unexamined belief system onto nature; (c) extending the scope of science beyond what is justifiable by its method, thereby putting the integrity of science itself at risk. All these are errors that can easily be avoided with a minimum investment in self-education.

Just as science needs philosophy to address more fundamental questions about the nature of being and the boundaries of knowledge, philosophy also needs science: any viable ontology needs to be informed by, and accommodate, the patterns and regularities of nature’s behavior discerned through the scientific method. Any theory about the world-in-itself that contradicts—by implication—these observed patterns and regularities isn’t empirically adequate and, therefore, must be discarded.

There is thus a crucial bridge between science and philosophy. On one side of this bridge, there is a method based on observation, modeling and prediction of behavior; on the other side, a method based on explicit, clear, meta-cognitively-informed reasoning. The bridge allows for productive commerce between the two, which—when suitably leveraged—can lead to remarkable conclusions about the nature of reality, such as those discussed in my new book The Idea of the World and very briefly described in the video above. However, negating this bridge and attempting to tackle all questions with one method alone can only overextend and rob this method of its integrity.

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Nothing short of pathetic: The Skeptical Inquirer's "review" of my ideas

Sometimes it's difficult to know whether to laugh or yawn.

It has been brought to my attention that the Skeptical Inquirer magazine is publishing a "research review" of my ideas in its January/February 2019 issue, which is already available. I did a search online to learn more about this magazine and, according to Wikipedia, recognizable figures such as Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, Carl Sagan, Francis Crick, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, Daniel Dennett and Steven Weinberg are counted amongst its past and present fellows.

It's hardly a secret that I am highly critical of some of the figures above, but I have much respect for some of the others too. So I assumed that the "review" would at least provide a thoughtful look at my work and offer substantive criticisms I haven't faced or addressed before. I thus decided to pay the required fee and download it. What I then saw made me concerned not for my work, but for the good name of science itself. Allow me to elaborate on this apparently exaggerated claim.

The "review" focuses solely on a Scientific American essay I wrote with two psychologists, which offers a very brief summary of how psychological dissociation could provide a solution to the so-called 'decomposition problem' in philosophy. It is a brief overview of a much more extensive academic paper published in a leading journal.

It's abundantly clear from the Skeptical Inquirer "review" that its author did not read the academic paper. The main problem, however, is that he didn't properly read even the short Scientific American essay itself. For instance, he claims that "it wasn't long before quantum physics [was] tossed in." Our essay, however, doesn't touch on quantum physics at all; the word 'quantum' never even appears in it. The Skeptical Inquirer author seems to have entirely hallucinated it out of thin air. He also seems to assume that we were endorsing panpsychism, while our essay is in fact highly critical of it.

He proceeds to criticize a third-party academic paper on Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), published in a highly respected journal, which we cited in our Scientific American piece. The criticism, however, centers on a basic issue of experimental design that is certain to have been considered during the peer review process. Going further, the author then criticizes another third-party study we cited: one in which researchers realized that, when a blind dissociated personality was in control of an MPD patient's body, the visual cortex activity normally associated with vision would disappear, even though the patient's eyes were wide open. The author tries to dismiss the "patient's subjective claims of blindness" as mere "functional blindness" or "conversion syndrome," both of which are psychological conditions of a subjective nature, related to suggestibility, stress and inner conflict. He seems to have somehow entirely missed the one point of our claim: that objective EEG measurements were performed, which failed to detect visual cortex activity when a blind personality was in control, even though the patient's eyes were open. These same EEG measurements then detected the appropriate visual cortex activity the moment a sighted personality assumed control. Somehow the significance of this result seems to have completely flown over the author's head, even though it's rather obvious to any mildly attentive and educated reader, this being the reason why the result received significant media attention (see e.g. this extensive Washington Post report).

Clearly, what the author thinks we claim in our essay—and now I have to stop myself from laughing as I write these words—is that one has to have MPD in order to understand life, the universe and everything! No, really, this is nothing short of hilarious. Not even an average high-school student would have misunderstood our point so pitifully.

Be that as it may, most of the "review" is dedicated not to attacking the original ideas discussed in our essay, but third-party, peer-reviewed research on MPD instead. This may have to do with the fact that the author is some retired psychiatrist from Iowa, but the dissonance between claim and substance is striking. As a matter of fact, the author never actually even says what our original ideas are, or how they relate to MPD! Dedicating a single sentence to it was apparently considered unnecessary in an article that claims to review my philosophy.

Interestingly, the author does find it worthwhile to dedicate a significant part of his "review" to emphasizing that MPD patients suffer severely from forms of cognitive impairment and emotional distress. This, according to him, "contradicts the foolish notion that MPD would ever help anyone make sense of life, the universe, and everything" (the title of our Scientific American essay is "Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?"). Clearly, what the author thinks we claim in our essay—and now I have to stop myself from laughing as I write these words—is that one has to have MPD in order to understand life, the universe and everything! No, really, this is nothing short of hilarious. Not even an average high-school student would have misunderstood our point so pitifully.

To his credit, the author himself confesses to not having understood our Scientific American essay: he writes that "several paragraphs ... could only be described as incomprehensible" (for such a short essay, several paragraphs means that he didn't understand perhaps most of it). I can only point out that, if something is incomprehensible to him, it doesn't necessarily make it incomprehensible to the rest of us, attentive and educated readers. (On a side note, what kind of psychological disposition makes one feel entitled to publicly criticize something one has admittedly not understood?)

If the author is reading this post, let me take the opportunity to help him out a bit: Sir, the point of the title of our essay is that MPD, as an observable psychiatric condition, provides hints to something in nature that could help one address the so-called decomposition problem in philosophy. A philosopher who studies MPD is thus in a better position to solve the decomposition problem, without necessarily having to suffer from MPD themselves. Clearer now? You're welcome.

How can a magazine with ambitions to "promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason" publish this kind of juvenile garbage? Where were the editorial controls? This "review" does no harm to me, but to the magazine, its readers and science in general (more on this below).

Here is someone who obviously has no clue of what he is talking about, and yet talks about it proudly. What a peculiar spectacle; what a dramatic illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

What makes the profound ignorance betrayed by the "review" even worse is the conceitedness and pretentiousness that oozes through it. The cognitive dissonance between the two makes the "review" come across as somehow both hilarious and sad; maybe 'pathetic' is the right word. The conceited tone seems to be an attempt to 'play to the crowd,' appeal to some kind of mob mentality by throwing bones to what the author seems to assume are his readers' gullible prejudices. He talks of an "illogical leap into New Age Philosophy" when we argue that MPD can be literally blinding, even though we substantiate our claim with peer-reviewed research. He talks of 'consciousness,' 'panpsychism,' 'cosmopsychism' and 'idealism' as if these terms referred to woo (I am sincerely curious about what goes on in the conscious mind of someone who thinks that 'consciousness' is woo), instead of ontologies discussed in some of the world's most respected academic journals. Here is someone who obviously has no clue of what he is talking about, and yet talks about it proudly. What a peculiar spectacle; what a dramatic illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

If I were a subscriber to the Skeptical Inquirer, I would feel offended by this "review." I'd feel that it treats me as someone who has surrendered their personal capacity for critical thinking to mob mentality. I'd feel that it treats me as a gullible participant of a political rally, eager to blindly cheer to shouted slogans, as opposed to someone who expects substantial and informed analyses.

Needless to say, the "review" reflects very poorly on both its author and the magazine that published it. And yet, one might point out that there are countless other examples out there of people proudly—though cluelessly—displaying the limitations of their intellects for the world to see. So why make an issue of this one instance?

Well, if this were all there is to it, I wouldn't have bothered to publish this post. But here we have a magazine that publicly associates itself with some of the most recognizable figures in science. At the very least, these figures are allowing this to be done and, by implication, allowing the image of science itself to become associated with such publications. To me, this is a serious problem. If the public begins to associate science, reason and critical thinking with the kind of "review" I've commented on above, we risk blurring the crucial difference between science, reason and critical thinking on the one hand, and the lunatic ravings of the fringes of our culture on the other. Once that crucial boundary is blurred, we're lost as a civilization.

Available on amazon.

My ideas may be controversial from the perspective of the current cultural ethos, but they are carefully and exhaustively substantiated. I have published many academic papers in respected journals elaborating on every facet of them. And now, I am publishing a 312-page book painstakingly making my case from an academic perspective. Let this work be my reply to my "critics."

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Why the world is imagined: A summary

To mark the release of the Uniform Reprints of my first six books—a major consolidation of my work—I want to summarize below, in language accessible to anyone, the key points of the philosophy explicated in much more detail in those books. So here we go.

According to the mainstream materialist paradigm, the world out there is made of subatomic particles and force fields outside and independent of consciousness. This world allegedly has no intrinsic qualities—such as color, flavor, smell, etc.—consisting instead of purely abstract quantities and mathematical relationships. The qualities of experience, according to this view, are created inside our skull by our brain: living organisms capture abstract stimuli from the external world through their sense organs, and then their brains supposedly translate these stimuli into the experiences that constitute their entire lives.

The notion that all colors, flavors, smells, etc., exist only inside our heads—instead of in the world beyond our heads—is profoundly counterintuitive. The motivation for believing it is the need to make sense of at least two facts: (a) there are strong correlations between patterns of brain activity and inner experience, which seems to implicate the brain in creating experience; and (b) we all seem to share the same world, so if experience is created by our individual brains, there must be something out there that isn’t experiential in nature, but which nonetheless modulates the experiences of different people through their respective sense organs. This non-experiential ‘something’ out there—that is, subatomic particles and force fields—allegedly is the world we all share.

The problem is that an increasing array of evidence seems to contradict the notion that experience is somehow created by patterns of brain activity. If this notion were correct, one would expect richer experience to always correlate with increased metabolism in the neural correlates of experience. Yet, the opposite has been observed.

The Uniform Reprint Collection

Indeed, psychedelic trances, which represent unfathomable enrichment of experience, are accompanied only by reductions in brain metabolism. Similarly, it has been observed that the brain activity of experienced mediums is reduced during the process of psychography. Patients who have undergone brain damage due to surgery have also been observed to have richer feelings of self-transcendence after surgery. Pilots undergoing G-force-induced loss of consciousness also report “memorable dreams,” even though blood flow to their brains is reduced. Teenagers worldwide play a dangerous game of partial strangulation, because the reduction in blood flow to their head leads to rich experiences of euphoria and self-transcendence. The list goes on, but the point should be clear: there are many cases in which brain function impairment correlates with enriched awareness, which seems to contradict the mainstream materialist paradigm.

To resolve this dilemma, one simply needs a subtle shift in perspective, a different way of seeing what is going on. Consider, for instance, lightning: Do we say that lightning causes atmospheric electric discharge? Certainly not: lightning is simply what atmospheric electric discharge looks like. Similarly, flames don’t cause the associated combustion: they are simply what the combustion looks like. Finally, a whirlpool in a stream doesn’t cause water localization in the stream: it is simply what water localization looks like.

These images—lightning, flames, whirlpools—say something about the process they are an image of: for instance, we can deduce many things about combustion from the color and behavior of the associated flames. More generally speaking, we say that there are correlations between the process and its image, for the latter is a representation—incomplete, as the case may be—of the former.

Returning to the whirlpool example, notice also that there is nothing to a whirlpool but water. You can’t ‘lift a whirlpool out of the water,’ so to speak. Yet, the whirlpool is a concrete and identifiable phenomenon: one can delineate its boundaries, point at it and say: “There is a whirlpool!” Images of processes can, after all, be very concrete indeed.

I thus submit that the brain—in fact, the whole body—is merely the image of a process of localization in universal consciousness; a localization of experience that, from a first-person perspective, makes up our private inner lives. The body-brain system is like a whirlpool in the stream of universal experiences.

The brain doesn’t generate experience for the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. Yet, brain activity correlates with inner experience—the localized contents of the whirlpool—because it is what the latter looks like from a second-person perspective, just as lightning is what atmospheric electric discharge looks like from the outside.

The brain isn’t the cause of experience for the same reason that lightning isn’t the cause of atmospheric electric discharge, or that flames aren’t the cause of combustion. Just as flames are but the image of the process of combustion, the body-brain system is but the image of localized experience in the stream of universal consciousness.

In the same way that there is nothing to a whirlpool but water, I submit that there is nothing to a living body but universal consciousness. Yet, just as one can delineate the boundaries of a whirlpool and say “there is a whirlpool,” one can delineate the boundaries of a living body and say: “There is a body!” This explains the felt concreteness of living organisms under the hypothesis that all there is to them is universal consciousness.

The above is but a teaser of a much more elaborate theory of reality that is discussed in the six books of the now-available Uniform Reprints. I invite interested readers to peruse these books if they find the teaser above intriguing.

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