Criticism 3: Because we are separate beings inhabiting the same external world, reality has to be outside consciousness.
Rebuttal 3: The idea here is that if reality were a kind of collective dream, how could we all be sharing the same dream world, given that our psyches aren’t connected? Naturally, this begs the question entirely: it is only under the notion that our psyches are generated by our bodies that we can say that they are disconnected; after all, our bodies are indeed separate. But if reality is in consciousness, then it is our bodies that are in consciousness, not consciousness in our bodies. The fact that our bodies are separate in the canvas of consciousness simply does not imply that our psyches are fundamentally disconnected. To say so is analogous to stating that, because one has two applications open in a computer screen, one must be using two separate computers! It is the application that is in the computer, not the computer in the application. Separate applications do not imply separate computers.
Criticism 4: It is untenable to maintain that there is no reality independent of consciousness, for there is plenty of evidence about what was going on in the universe before consciousness evolved.
Rebuttal 4: This, of course, assumes materialism – the notion that consciousness is generated by, and confined to, biological nervous systems – in a circular argument for materialism. If all reality is in consciousness itself, then it is nervous systems that are in consciousness, not consciousness in nervous systems. Nervous systems are images of particular localization processes in consciousness, which could and did evolve later than other, earlier processes in consciousness. Those earlier processes weren’t biology, but corresponded to everything that happened in the universe before life arose. A living being is like a whirlpool – a localization of flow – in the stream of transpersonal experiences, while non-biological phenomena are like ripples. As such, nothing in monistic idealism precludes the possibility that there were plenty of ripples long before the first whirlpool ever formed (more on this in essay 2.5). The fact that there is evidence for the existence of the universe before nervous systems simply does not invalidate monistic idealism. The circularity of this criticism is self-evident. Yet, well-known biologist, author and militant materialist Jerry Coyne actually argued it when attacking my work.12
Criticism 5: It is not parsimonious to say that reality is in consciousness, because that would require postulating an unfathomably complex entity to be imagining reality.
Rebuttal 5: The assumption here is that consciousness can only exist if it is generated by something else; by an entity outside consciousness, whose complexity must be proportional to the level of consciousness being generated. This is a hardly disguised way to assume materialism in the first place: to assume that mind must be reducible to complex arrangements of something outside mind. Naturally, when one claims that reality is in consciousness, one is claiming precisely that consciousness is irreducible, primary, fundamental. Consciousness, as such, is not generated by complex entities or, for that matter, by anything outside consciousness: it is simply what is. To say that irreducible consciousness generates reality poses no more problems than to say that irreducible laws of physics generate reality. In fact, it poses less problems, since it avoids the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ altogether (see essay 3.1). For the same reason that materialists believe that simple laws of physics generated the unfathomable complexity of today’s universe, fairly simple ‘laws of consciousness’ could – and did – generate the phenomenology of all existence. In both cases, very simple rules generate unfathomable complexity, something well understood in complexity science.13 The difference is that materialism postulates these complexity-creating rules to exist fundamentally outside consciousness and, in some totally non-understood way rather akin to magic, to generate consciousness. Monistic idealism, on the other hand, sticks to the obvious: the complexity-generating rules are the intrinsic regularities of the unfolding of consciousness itself. This is not only much more parsimonious and empirically honest, it avoids the artificial and unsolvable ‘hard problem of consciousness’ altogether.
I personally believe that most materialists beg the question sincerely. They can’t see the circularity of the ways in which they interpret, and then think to confirm their interpretations of, reality. This happens because we live in a culture that has completely lost objectivity: we can’t see past the assumptions and beliefs we are immersed in, and indoctrinated into, since childhood. This is all understandable, even though it remains one’s personal responsibility to overcome it at some point.
However, when it comes to militant materialists – often scientists – who make it their mission in life to promote the materialist metaphysics, the stakes are higher. When these people come to the mainstream media and beg the question of materialism so vocally, condescendingly and blatantly, they are going much beyond doing harm to themselves. It is your children, especially those still going through the educational system, who are listening to them with the openness characteristic of those who trust authority and aren’t yet ready to evaluate more critically what’s being said. Whether these militant materialists are genuinely confused in their question-begging or not is irrelevant: by choosing militancy, they take on the responsibility of knowing better. After all, ignorance of the law does not entitle anyone to commit the crime. Their actions are irresponsible. If it weren’t for the damage they cause, it would be entertaining to watch these people promote idiocy with the hubris of an emperor with no clothes. However, the reality of the situation is rather serious.
And it doesn’t stop at question-begging. Some of the most common arguments used by materialists contradict materialism itself! Indeed, these arguments seem to be made by people who completely fail to understand the internal logic and implications of materialism. Unfortunately, such confused individuals – who can often be found in so-called ‘skeptical’ discussion fora on the Internet – tend to be the most tireless champions of materialism. Oh, the irony. The following are two of their favorite lines.
Criticism 6: Reality is clearly not inside our heads, therefore monistic idealism is wrong.
Rebuttal 6: I blush to have to refute this point but, since it comes up so often, I felt I couldn’t ignore it. You see, it is materialism that states that the reality you experience is inside your head. After all, experience is supposedly the product of brain activity. Your actual skull is allegedly above the stars you see at night, a point acknowledged by materialists in a formal academic paper.14 The actual reality outside your head purportedly has none of the qualities of experience – no color, flavor, melody, texture or odor. After all, if the qualities of experience are somehow squirted out by brains, there is absolutely no reason to believe that they exist anywhere else but inside skulls. On the other hand, monistic idealism states that the reality you experience is indeed outside your head. It does entail that it’s all in consciousness, but then it is your head – as a part of reality – that is in consciousness, not consciousness in your head. Remember: it is your dream character that is in your dreaming consciousness at night, not your consciousness in your dream character. Under monistic idealism, your head occupies a tiny ‘space’ in the canvas of transpersonal consciousness, the rest of the world occupying other ‘spaces’ in it. As such, the world you see around you is just what it seems to be: it indeed exists outside your skull and has qualities like color and flavor. Monistic idealism does justice to our most concrete and visceral intuitions about reality, while materialism flies in their face.
Criticism 7: Monistic idealism is too metaphysical.
Rebuttal 7: No ontology in the history of humankind has been or is more metaphysical than materialism. Unlike all spiritual or religious ontologies – which postulate transcendent realms that can presumably be directly experienced through meditation, ritual or, in the worst case, physical death – the strongly objective realm of materialism is, by definition, forever outside experience. It is pure abstraction. It can never be known – since knowledge exists onl
y in consciousness – but only inferred. All the properties we attribute to reality – like solidity, palpability, concreteness – are qualities of experience and, as such, not applicable to the real world of materialism. Monistic idealism, on the other hand, grants actual reality to the solidity, palpability and concreteness of matter. It doesn’t postulate the felt concreteness of a rock to be a mere product of brain activity; instead, it states that the rock really is concrete in and of itself. If anything, monistic idealism is the ultimate acknowledgement of the physicality of the world as known through experience. It embodies a sane return home from the mad abstractions with which materialists attempt to replace reality.
The majority of the materialist arguments against monistic idealism simply reflect a partial or distorted understanding of monistic idealism itself. Because materialism has attained the position of mainstream worldview, materialists seem to feel that they don’t really need to properly understand what they are criticizing before they start shooting. Protected by the clout of the mainstream, some don’t even seem to feel that they need to think straight: many materialist arguments reflect obvious misapprehensions of the empirical evidence or clear failures of simple logic. Nonetheless, and in the spirit of dialogue, here are a few clarifications.
Criticism 8: There are strong correlations between brain activity and subjective experience. Clearly, thus, the brain generates consciousness.
Rebuttal 8: There are strong correlations between the colors of flames and the microscopic details of combustion. Similarly, there are strong correlations between lightning and the patterns of atmospheric electric discharge. Does lightning cause atmospheric electric discharge? Or is it simply what atmospheric electric discharge looks like? Aren’t flames simply what combustion looks like from the outside? In exactly the same way, active neurons are simply what subjective experience looks like from the outside. An active brain is merely the image of a process of localization in the flow of transpersonal consciousness, like a whirlpool is the image of a process of localization in a stream of water. The brain doesn’t generate consciousness for exactly the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water.
Criticism 9: Unconscious brain activity precedes the awareness of certain decisions, showing a clear arrow of causation from purely material processes to experience.
Rebuttal 9: The idea here is that, in certain laboratory experiments, neuroscientists could predict the choice a person was going to make by measuring activity in the person’s brain. Neuroscientists could make this prediction before the person was aware of making the choice.15 On this basis, materialists conclude that unconscious brain processes are the cause of the experience of making a choice. This seems reasonable at first sight; but only at first sight. Materialists mistake different degrees of consciousness for a total absence of consciousness. Right now, for instance, you are lucidly aware of the letters on the page in front of you. But that doesn’t mean that you are unconscious of your peripheral vision: of the things going on somewhat behind and around the book in your hands. You’re just less conscious of them. Materialists unwarrantedly equate lack of lucid awareness – a particularly high degree of consciousness – to lack of consciousness. As I elaborate upon in essay 2.1, our lucid awareness results from a reverberation phenomenon that amplifies certain contents of consciousness. Neuroscience knows this reverberation as back-and-forth communication between different brain areas, which correlates well with lucidity.16 The moment the reverberating contents of consciousness become amplified, they obfuscate all other contents, the way the Sun obfuscates the stars at noon. The stars are all still there at noon, their photons still hitting your retina. Technically, you are still seeing the stars. But you don’t know that you are seeing them because they become obfuscated. Similarly, the contents of consciousness that become obfuscated by the ‘glare’ of reverberation are all still in consciousness, but you are not lucidly aware of them. Instead of conscious and unconscious neural processes, what we have are highly amplified and severely obfuscated contents of consciousness, respectively. There is no actual unconscious. What neuroscience today calls ‘consciousness’ is simply a particular, amplified segment of consciousness. As such, the experiments in question reveal simply this: people first make a conscious choice in an obfuscated part of consciousness; later, that conscious choice becomes amplified through mental reverberation; only thereafter do people become lucidly aware of the earlier conscious choice. There is no arrow of causation between unconscious processes and experience, because there are no unconscious processes to begin with.
Criticism 10: Because psychoactive drugs and brain trauma can markedly change subjective experience, it’s clear that the brain generates consciousness.
Rebuttal 10: The people who argue this implicitly assume some form of mind-matter dualism. Because drugs and trauma can clearly alter consciousness through physically interfering with the material brain, then – the argument goes – the brain must generate consciousness. But notice that the entire rationale assumes that drugs, trauma and brains – matter in general – are outside consciousness, which is precisely what monistic idealism denies. You see, if all reality is in consciousness, then a pill or a well-placed knock to the head are simply the images of processes in consciousness. They are ripples in the stream, which can upset the ordinary balance and dynamics of a whirlpool. As such, drugs and physical trauma are also in consciousness; where else could they be? What is a pill but what you see, touch and otherwise feel in your fingers? It has color, flavor and texture. It’s a set of subjective perceptions with the qualities of experience. As far as you or anyone else can ever know for sure, a pill is in consciousness. Therefore, that a pill or physical trauma to the head can alter one’s state of consciousness is no more surprising than the fact that your thoughts can change your emotions. Thoughts and emotions are both in consciousness, so we are perfectly comfortable with the fact that they can influence each another. For that exact same reason, we should be perfectly comfortable with the fact that drugs and physical trauma also influence our subjective states. As there is nothing to the brain but consciousness, so there is nothing to a pill and physical action but consciousness.
Criticism 11: During dreamless sleep, or under general anesthesia, we are clearly unconscious. Yet, we don’t cease to exist because we become temporarily unconscious. Obviously, then, reality cannot be in consciousness.
Rebuttal 11: The best one can assert upon waking up is that one cannot recall any experience during the preceding hours; not that experiences were absent. Indeed, it is impossible to distinguish between the absence of a memory of an experience and the absence of the experience itself. What we refer to as periods of ‘unconsciousness’ – be them related to sleep, general anesthesia, fainting, etc. – are simply periods in which the formation of memory access paths is impaired. The very disruption of mental processes induced by anesthetics or sleep compromises our body’s ability to lay down coherent links to the corresponding memories. As a result, later recall becomes difficult or impossible, since the links aren’t available (see essay 3.3). For all we know, we may wander into rich phenomenological landscapes during sleep or narcosis, but be unable to remember any of it upon returning to a lucid state. Think of how elusive dreams can be: at the moment you wake up, you may still remember an early morning dream; five seconds later, you already forgot it, but still remember that you had a dream; by the time you stand on your feet, you can’t even remember that you dreamed at all. Or reciprocally: you may remember nothing when you wake up – declaring yourself to have been unconscious all night – and then suddenly recall, hours later, that you actually had a very intense dream. How can you know that you are ever truly unconscious? One could claim that the absence of dream-related brain activity in several periods during the night, as measured by electroencephalography, proves that there are phases of true unconsciousness during sleep. But this fails to notice that there are always plenty of other types of activity in a sleeping – or otherwise ‘unconscious
’ – brain, which may well correlate with non-recallable experiences different than ordinary dreams. In fact, materialists themselves appeal to the explanatory power of subtler types of brain activity when trying to make sense of rich and intense near-death experiences.17
Criticism 12: The stability and consistency of the laws of physics show that reality is outside consciousness.
Rebuttal 12: The hidden assumption here seems to be that all conscious processes must necessarily be capricious and erratic. This could be true in some sense only if all conscious processes were tied to neural activity, for neural activity tends to be somewhat unstable and unpredictable. But that is an implication only of materialism. There is nothing in monistic idealism requiring it. There is nothing in monistic idealism that precludes the possibility that processes in the collective, transpersonal but obfuscated levels of consciousness – mind-at-large – unfold according to very stable, strict patterns and regularities, which we’ve come to call the ‘laws of nature.’ To say that all nature is grounded in consciousness does not imply that all nature is grounded in the whimsical segments of consciousness that we call our personal psyches.
Brief Peeks Beyond Page 4
