What is "Real"?
What is "Real"?
Understanding What is Being, Insanity, or Living in a Simulation (Vol. 4; Issue 11)
Individuals suffering from psychotic conditions like schizophrenia struggle to perceive what we “normals” call reality. I met some persons with these conditions while working in an inpatient psychiatric hospital years ago. Reading about psychoses differs radically from encountering persons with them. I remember feeling frightened by individuals claiming—with terror and absolute certitude—that FBI agents were chasing them, their food was poisoned, they governed Nebraska, or similar delusional thoughts. One man, who I got to know quite well, told me:
There’s a bilking machine in orbit around the Earth. It searches for me, attacks me, and takes all of my money.
(No time for a tangent today, but I found it significant that, even in his floridly psychotic state, this fellow still spoke a kind of truth: international corporations intentionally influence people around the world to purchase their products regardless of their capacities to financially do so.)
Recently extending prior forays into the intractable mind-body problem (Karbelnig, 2021), I find myself sitting on a metaphorical fault line, questioning reality. I fear infecting you as I share these ideas, and for that I apologize in advance. The mind-body controversy opens up questions regarding the nature of reality itself. Is reality just a matter of mutual consent writ large? A psychiatrist I met at that hospital told me he helped psychotic patients “to fake it.” In other words, he said, they needed to learn to keep ideas of government agents tapping their phones, mysterious persons poisoning their food, or bilking bodies circling the earth, to themselves.
Before proceeding, a few ideas require brief explication. The word, ontology, refers to philosophies dealing with the nature of being. Materialism (or physicalism) holds that everything in the world—including consciousness—is ultimately reducible to matter, objects, substances. For materialists, the nature of being, ontology, is grounded in concrete things. Idealism, in stark contrast, believes that consciousness forms the foundation of being. All human knowledge, including how we identify things like trees, bricks, houses, or trains, begins with consciousness. People invented language, perceived “things,” named them, spread the information widely, and took these “objects” as physical. However, idealists believe, they are not.
And now, beware, we drop deeply into Alice’s rabbit hole. Questioning the nature of reality leads us next into deeper arguments over materialism versus idealism. I begin with what Australian philosopher David Chalmers (1996) calls the hard problem of consciousness. In brief, philosophers of all ilks, ask:
How does mind emerge from matter?
No one has the answer. No one knows why any physical state is conscious rather than non-conscious. The most recent findings in the neurosciences, for example, cannot explain why you have the experience of tasting chocolate, smelling a skunk, or seeing a sunset. Chalmers (1996) writes that, even after understanding perceptual discrimination, internal access, categorization, and similar brain processes, neuroscientists are still left questioning:
Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by [subjective] experience? (p. 202)
Materialism has been a master narrative gripping humanity since the scientific revolution three centuries ago. Idealists complain that it holds so tightly to our thinking that most of us never question it.
A staunch believer in idealism, Bernardo Kastrup (2019) explains that:
idealism entails that mind is nature’s fundamental ontological ground, everything else being reducible to, or grounded in, mind. Mainstream physicalism posits that nature’s fundamental ontological ground is matter outside and independent of mind, everything else being reducible to, or grounded in, matter. (p. 21)
Adopting idealism makes the hard problem of consciousness vanish. Scientists, philosophers, and other persons disturbed enough to ponder the question have a new solution. They no longer need to wonder about quantum states, electrical impulses, or epiphenomena to form mind from matter. Mind no longer needs to be reduced to a thing, to a variety of meat. And, idealists like Kastrup believe consciousness is the fundamental nature of the universe. One’s individual consciousness is, in fact, a subset of “universal mind.”
The idealist enterprise resembles ancient Buddhist and Taoist belief systems. Kastrup, using dissociative identity disorder (DID) as an analogy, proposes that your experience reading this sentence right now, for example, is a manifestation of your “alter.” Your conscious experience is one dissociative angle of the universe’s mind. By extension, then, animals (like dogs and cats) have less sophisticated alters, plants have still less developed ones, and so on. Panpsychism, also enjoying a renaissance of late, holds that all objects, even atoms, have consciousness to some degree.
In critiquing materialism, Kastrup offers up this example:
The glaring artifact of thought here becomes apparent with an analogy: imagine a painter who, having painted a self-portrait, points at it and declares himself to be the portrait. This, in essence, is what physicalism does. (p. 45).
Get it?
We humans invented the idea of physical matter. We bought it, and then we sold it to all global citizens. Everyone thinks matter exists. They assume it is the building block of the universe. There are, in fact, things.
Rupert Sheldrake (2020), an Oxford trained biologist, is another believer in idealism. He thinks scientific explorations are inhibited by the lingering adherence to materialism. Sheldrake writes that, since the nineteenth century,
a belief in materialism has indeed been propagated with remarkable success: millions of people have been converted to this ‘scientific’ view, even though they know very little about science itself. They are, as it were, devotees of the Church of Science, or of scientism, of which scientists are the priests. (p. 27).
Lest you think Sheldrake or Kastrup, who most have never heard of, as kooks, consider how the major philosopher of science, Karl Popper (1977), reached the same conclusion. He thinks that the findings of modern physics transcend materialism, writing:
Matter turns out to be highly packed energy, transformable into other forms of energy; and therefore something in the nature of a process, since it can be converted into other processes, such as light and, of course, motion and heat. Thus one may say that the result of modern physics suggest we should give up the idea of a substance or essence. (Popper and Eccles, 1977, p. 5).
Relinquishing the idea of substances or essences means adopting idealism. As suggested above, Kastrup believes universal mind—experienced in some part by the alters who we are—is the sole basis of reality. Physical systems, like our own status as “human organisms,” consist of our perceptions of segments of universal mind. We can observe one another, and name a friend, relative, or colleague. Their status as “physical” beings are essentially illusions. We “create” the physicalism, if you will.
Neither Kastrup nor Sheldrake would deny that head trauma, or acute alcohol intoxication, would alter your perceptions. They believe we sophisticated human organisms have acute perceptual capacities. We take in sensory data, organize it, name it, and consider it concrete. These idealists think that, basically, what we see are organized bits of universal mind. (I’m way out of my league here, and please refer to either of those two scholars for more detailed explications of idealism.)
Ever since Nick Bostrum (2003) questioned whether we live in a computer simulation, philosophers, physicists, technologists and even we mere lay persons have grappled with the possibility. His idea is a variation of idealism. Bostrum proposes that a technologically advanced civilization might have created the experience of being human subjects existing in what we consider “reality.” Instead of the universal mind considered the ultimate truth by idealists, our conscious experiences are created by computer simulation. Apparently, no way exists to test whether or not this is the case.
Hopefully, this complex journey left you, at least, puzzled, curious, and standing on unstable ground like me. The puzzlement should be obvious; the curiosity lies in just what is meant by reality. Is it nothing more than agreed-upon concepts? Could a universal mind exist? Idealism holds that our perceptions of ourselves are known as the phenomenal self. You’re able to reflect on it as a phenomenon. Leaving you readers with a final thought, is that self-perception created by something physical, e.g., your brain, or by a unit of the universal mind? And, in final conclusion, are you also standing on tectonic instability?
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References
Bostrum, N. (2003). Are you living in a computer simulation? Philosophical Quarterly, 53(211):243-255.
Chalmers, D.J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. London: Oxford University Press.
Karbelnig, A.M. (2021). The Embodied Psychoanalyst. (Ch. 14). In J. Mills (Ed), Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem. New York: Routledge.
Kastrup, B. (2019). The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality. Hampshire, UK: John Hunt Publishing.
Popper, K, and Eccles, J. (1977). The Self and Its Brain. Berlin: Springer International.
Sheldrake, R. (2020). The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry. London: Coronet.