Brief Peeks Beyond

by Bernardo Kastrup

  But where is this collective segment of consciousness? It’s easy to see. As our personal psyches are like whirlpools in a broader stream, so the broader stream itself is a transpersonal form of consciousness that underlies all reality and unites all whirlpools. The broader stream is the ‘collective unconscious.’ Aldous Huxley ably called it ‘mind-at-large,’7 a more accurate terminology that I will adopt from this point on. For the same reason that the experiences of another person appear to us as a seemingly objective phenomenon – namely, an active brain – the seemingly objective world around us is what experiences in mind-at-large look like from the outside. In other words: for the same reason that a neuroscientist can know that a person has conscious inner life merely by measuring the person’s brain activity, we can know that mind-at-large exists merely by observing the world around us. The empirical world itself is the overwhelming, concrete evidence for the existence of mind-at-large.

  Think about it for a moment: an active brain is a structured collection of so-called subatomic particles. Yet we know that an active brain is what conscious processes look like from the outside. Likewise, consensus reality is also a structured collection of subatomic particles. Therefore, it, as a whole, must also be the outside image of conscious processes. But whose conscious processes? Those of mind-at-large, of course; whose else could they be? Personal experience is to brain activity as the transpersonal experiences of mind-at-large are to the world we observe around us. The correspondences that lead to this conclusion are clear: consensus reality is the framework where active brains arise as local structures, just like the stream – that is, mind-at-large – is the framework where whirlpools arise as localized patterns of water flow; whirlpools are made of nothing but the stream’s water, just like active brains are made of nothing but the subatomic particles of consensus reality; there is nothing to an active brain but those particles, just as there is nothing to a whirlpool but water; etc.

  Interpreting reality as excitations of mind-at-large allows the world to be exactly what it seems to be: to have colors, flavors, smells, textures and melodies. It acknowledges that those colors, flavors, smells, textures and melodies exist outside our head. After all, it is our head that is in consciousness, not consciousness in our head. The materialist metaphysics, on the other hand, states that all qualities of experience – all colors, flavors, smells, textures and melodies – are generated by our brain. Therefore, they can only exist inside our skull! It is materialism that says the reality you experience is inside your head. According to it, the actual reality ‘out there’ is a purely abstract realm of concepts and associated quantities. Matter, as such, has no intrinsic qualities: it isn’t hard or rough, or cold, or concrete; it’s just an abstract concept to which we attach numbers. You can’t even visualize what that might be like, since visualization necessarily entails the qualities of experience.

  Recently, renowned physicist Max Tegmark acknowledged the awkwardness of this situation by deeming the metaphysical conceptualizations of materialism, like atoms and subatomic particles, to be unnecessary ‘baggage.’8 The obvious next step in this line of reasoning is to acknowledge the sufficiency of experience, but Tegmark isn’t ready to go that far: he still insists on some form of reality outside consciousness. He drops the conceptual part of it but keeps the quantities. In other words, he postulates that it is all just numbers out there; no particles to attach the numbers to. At first sight, this seems to be just an extreme version of the materialist endeavor to replace reality with abstractions. But if you look carefully, you will notice that, by being so ready to embrace abstraction all the way, Tegmark comes full circle: after all, mathematics – quantities and their relationships – is a mental construct. ‘The fool who persists in his folly will become wise,’ said Blake. By stating that the supposedly objective world consists of pure mathematics, there is an important way in which Tegmark is at least flirting with the views expressed in this essay.

  The key to the consciousness-only ontology I am proposing is the realization that there can potentially be two angles, or facets, to an experience: the necessary first-person but also a possible second-person perspective; the inside and the outside views. This way, what I feel when I watch erotic material is a first-person, inside perspective of the experience of arousal. But if I am placed in a brain scanner while watching erotic material, the neuroscientist operating the brain scanner will gain a second-person, outside perspective of my arousal in the form of patterns of brain activity. Notice that the second-person perspective is also an experience: the neuroscientist sees my brain activation patterns; he just doesn’t feel arousal. Indeed, the first-and second-person perspectives, despite being correlated, are different experiences: observing brain scans is anything but arousing! To say that there is a second-person perspective to an experience means only that valid information about it is carried by another experience in another part of the broader stream of consciousness. Naturally, there can be experiences in the stream that have no second-person perspective at all. An ‘experience’ without a first-person perspective, however, is a contradiction in terms.

  It is the localization of flow in the broader stream of consciousness – the formation of whirlpools – that gives rise to a second-person perspective and, with it, the illusion of a world outside consciousness. Let’s unpack this slowly, step-by-step.

  Neuroscience has found out empirically that our ordinary awareness correlates with reverberating brain activity, involving back-and-forth communication between different brain areas.9 As a phenomenon of the nervous system, this reverberation is a direct consequence of the localization of experiences. Now, just as it does with sound in a room, reverberation amplifies the localized mental contents caught in it. Analogously to how the stronger glare of the Sun obfuscates the stars at noon, the amplified, reverberating mental contents in the ‘center’ of the whirlpool obfuscate everything else, to the point of rendering it all seemingly unconscious. This is the reason why depth-psychology has come to adopt the misnomer ‘unconscious.’ What psychology and neuroscience mistakenly consider unconscious neural processes are merely the outside image of obfuscated mental contents in the periphery of the whirlpool, which don’t get caught in the reverberation. They correspond to what analytical psychology calls the ‘personal unconscious.’ Of course, the amplification of reverberating mental contents in the ‘center’ of the whirlpool also obfuscates everything going on outside the whirlpool itself; that is, in mind-at-large. In the terminology of analytical psychology, the obfuscated processes in mind-at-large are called the ‘collective unconscious.’ All these obfuscated mental contents, both inside and outside the whirlpool, are still in consciousness – for exactly the same reason that the stars are still in the sky at noon – but not in the field of ordinary, lucid awareness. As neuroscience has empirically determined, the latter only arises from reverberation.

  There’s no true unconscious, for all reality is in consciousness. But because the conscious activity unfolding in mind-at-large becomes seemingly unconscious from the point of view of a whirlpool, every human being effectively turns into a dissociated personality – an alter – of mind-at-large. People with Dissociative Identity Disorder, for instance, can exhibit multiple alters, each experiencing itself as separate from the rest of the psyche and having its own stream of thoughts, imagination, memory, skills, emotions, self-image, etc.10 Alters arise because they become seemingly unconscious of – and therefore dissociated from – the mental activity in the remaining parts of mind. This is easy to see when we turn it around: if I were lucidly aware of your entire inner life, and you of mine, we would be effectively the same conscious entity, wouldn’t we? We feel that we are separate precisely because we are seemingly unconscious of each other’s inner lives. This is how obfuscation leads to dissociation. It is thus easy to see that the reverberation/amplification of mental contents in the ‘center’ of his whirlpool can dissociate a human being from the rest of mind-at-large. Essentially, mind-at-large suffers fr
om Dissociative Identity Disorder; and we are its alters.

  Finally, the key point: the formation of an alter delineates a boundary between mental activity inside and outside the alter. This boundary is what creates the second-person perspective of experience and the illusion of an outside world: conscious activity unfolding outside the alter can only become accessible to it from a second-person perspective. After all, the first-person perspective becomes obfuscated by the reverberation/amplification mechanism in the whirlpool.

  How exactly does this process work? To visualize it, let’s get back to the stream metaphor. Each whirlpool corresponds to a person and each person to at least one alter of mind-at-large. The rim of the whirlpool delineates the boundary between ourselves – including our thoughts, fantasies, emotions, bodily sensations, etc. – and the outer world, which we perceive through our five senses. The whirlpool’s rim is our sense organs: skin, eyes, nose, ears and tongue. Let us now imagine that experiences are disturbances of the water flow in the stream – that is, excitations of consciousness. Dynamic processes creating disturbances inside a whirlpool can become amplified and lucid: these are our thoughts, fantasies and emotions, which all constantly arise within ourselves. However, because of obfuscation, we become seemingly unconscious of similar dynamic processes creating disturbances outside our respective whirlpools.

  Very well. Now, some of those outside disturbances create ripples that penetrate our whirlpools through their rim. This is what our sense perceptions are. We call those incoming ripples ‘photons,’ ‘sound waves,’ ‘scent molecules,’ etc. Once they penetrate the whirlpool – that is, engage our sense organs – the incoming ripples may also become amplified, reaching our lucid awareness. But the ripples that penetrate a whirlpool are just traces of outside dynamic processes unfolding in mind-at-large; the wake of the ship, not the ship itself. While the original outside disturbances that generated the ripples correspond to the first-person perspective of experiences in mind-at-large, the incoming ripples correspond to a second-person perspective of those original experiences. Indeed, it is for this reason that the second-person perspective of an experience feels so different from the first-person one: the incoming ripples aren’t the outside disturbances that generated them in the first place; the wake isn’t the ship, although it corresponds to the ship’s movements. Active neurons aren’t arousal, but merely the trace left by arousal.

  The second-person perspective of an original experience is the result of amplification, within a whirlpool, of ripples generated by the outside disturbance of consciousness that is the original experience. The second-person perspective is always itself an experience within a whirlpool, which carries information about a disturbance of the stream of consciousness outside the whirlpool. When you see another person, what you perceive are the ripples that the whirlpool corresponding to that other person has generated. If you close your eyes, you can no longer see the person because you are making it impossible for the ripples to penetrate your own whirlpool.

  In conclusion, we can explain personal awareness by a process of localization in the flow of a broader, transpersonal stream of experiences. We can explain the so-called ‘unconscious’ psyche by the obfuscation of mental contents that results from reverberation of experiences within localized awareness. We can explain the divide between thoughts, emotions and imagination on the one hand, and perceptions on the other hand, by the dissociation that results from this obfuscation. We can explain the correlations between brain activity and subjective experience by the first-and second-person perspectives of experience that result from the dissociation. And, finally, we can explain consensus reality as the shared second-person perspective of mental activity unfolding in a collective, obfuscated segment of consciousness. In short, we can explain all reality without postulating anything but consciousness itself.

  Philosophers call such a worldview monistic idealism. All we need to do to make monistic idealism work is extrapolate consciousness beyond the limits of personal psyches. This is entirely reasonable for at least two reasons: first, there is significant empirical evidence for transpersonal states of consciousness;11 second, regardless of any empirical evidence, inferring that the boundaries of a known ontological category extend beyond face-value limits is much more parsimonious than inferring a whole new ontological category, like a universe outside consciousness. Even if there were no extra empirical evidence in its favor – though there is plenty – monistic idealism would still trump materialism on grounds of parsimony alone.

  This essay is an attempt to summarize a worldview described in detail, and substantiated rigorously, in my earlier book Why Materialism Is Baloney. Naturally, I can’t really do justice to an argument originally laid out in 250 pages when squeezing it into only a few paragraphs. Many important points had to be left out. Therefore, I urge those interested in a more in-depth understanding of this worldview – as well as those inclined to dismiss it on the basis of what this essay fails to cover – to read that more complete work before final judgment. For understanding the views expressed in the remainder of this book, however, the present essay provides sufficient background.

  2.2. Materialist arguments and why they are wrong

  I am a proponent of the philosophy of monistic idealism: the notion that all reality is grounded in a transpersonal form of consciousness of which we, as living beings, are merely dissociated complexes, or alters. I maintain that inferring a whole universe fundamentally outside consciousness is unnecessary: we can explain all reality purely as excitations of consciousness itself. Moreover, I also maintain that inferring this universe outside consciousness is insufficient to make sense of reality: it fails to explain consciousness itself, the most present – and arguably only – fact of existence, as discussed in essay 3.1. My argument for monistic idealism is summarized in essay 2.1. Here, I’d like to tackle some of the most common materialist counter-arguments to it.

  This essay is organized as a series of criticisms and rebuttals, with interspersed commentary. The criticisms are the materialist counter-arguments to monistic idealism. The rebuttals are my respective refutations. For ease of reference, criticisms and rebuttals are organized in numbered pairs.

  There are different ways in which the materialist criticisms listed below are fallacious. A common fallacy is a kind of circular reasoning called ‘begging the question.’ One begs the question when one takes the conclusion of an argument as a premise of the argument. For instance, if one says: ‘God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible is true because it was written by God,’ one is begging the question of God’s existence. Although the circularity of the reasoning is obvious in the simplistic example I just gave, one often begs the question in an indirect and somewhat concealed manner. In the next five pairs of criticism and rebuttal, I explore common ways in which materialists beg the question, arguing for the validity of materialism by assuming materialism in the argument. The circularity of their reasoning becomes clear once it’s pointed out, but it is astonishing how often educated, otherwise intelligent materialists fall for it.

  Criticism 1: Our sense perceptions provide direct evidence for a world outside consciousness.

  Rebuttal 1: All we can assert with certainty about our sense perceptions is that they are a particular modality of experience. Other modalities are thoughts, emotions and imagination. The difference is that we often identify with our thoughts, emotions and imagination – that is, we think they form part of who we are – and seldom identify with the contents of our sense perceptions. Indeed, we do not ordinarily believe that the world we see around us is part of us. Moreover, while we have some degree of direct volitional control of our thoughts, emotions and fantasies, we do not have any direct volitional control of the world we perceive around us. We cannot change the world by merely wishing it to be different. Therefore, all we can assert is that our sense perceptions represent a modality of experience that we do not identify with or have direct volitional control of. That’s it; nothing more.
When materialists assert that sense perceptions are direct evidence for a world outside consciousness, they are at best begging the question. If not, then they are necessarily concluding that experiences we do not identify with, or have direct volitional control of, can only originate in a world outside consciousness. Such a conclusion is, of course, illogical and betrays a surprising incapacity to see alternatives. See the next rebuttal.

  Criticism 2: Because we cannot change reality by merely wishing it to be different, it’s clear that reality is outside consciousness.

  Rebuttal 2: This begs the question in roughly the same way as the previous criticism, but let us elaborate on the answer in a different way. The fact that certain contents of consciousness fall outside the control of our volition does not imply that they originate outside consciousness itself. After all, there are plenty of examples of undeniably mental phenomena that we do not identify with and cannot control: our nightmares, schizophrenic hallucinations, spontaneous visions, certain obsessions and compulsions, etc. A schizophrenic does not identify with and cannot control his hallucinations; he experiences them as an external phenomenon. Yet, his hallucinations are entirely mental. Similarly, we do not identify with and cannot control the part of our psyches that generates our dreams and nightmares, otherwise we would never have the latter. We experience the scenarios of our dreams and nightmares as if they were external to us. Yet, they are entirely mental. Schizophrenic hallucinations and dreams clearly aren’t perceptions of a strongly objective world outside mind. They are generated subjectively by and within mind. The only difference that can be empirically asserted between dreams and hallucinations on the one hand, and ordinary waking reality on the other hand, is that the latter is a shared experience, while the former are usually personal, idiosyncratic experiences. But they are all experiences in consciousness.