Under Rupert’s gentle but decisive guidance, you have just explored the underlying nature of reality through the primary – yet most neglected – avenue of knowledge available to us: introspection. Rupert’s mastery of introspection, and his ability to take us along with him as he explores the foundations of Self and World, reveal what our cultural indoctrination has laboriously kept hidden from us: that there is, in fact, no difference between the two. Self and World are one, a conclusion as contrary to our mainstream cultural narrative as it is self-evident upon lucid introspection.
How can there be such dissonance between the basic tenet of our culture and direct introspective experience? Even if this book has succeeded in helping you truly understand that the World is an excitation of the Self – in Rupert’s words, ‘a movement of mind’ – no more distinct from the latter than ripples are distinct from water, the power of the mainstream cultural narrative may still instigate a lingering discomfort. ‘Is it plausible that our entire culture could have gotten it so wrong?’ you might ask yourself. In this brief Afterword, I will attempt to show you that, because of an imbalance in our culture’s approach to knowledge, not only is this plausible but it is to be expected.
You see, we can acquire knowledge through three distinct avenues: empirical observation, rational thought and introspection. Empirical observation consists in the subset of our experiences associated with the five senses. As such, if we define the World as encompassing everything we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell, then empirical observation consists in knowing the World directly. Notice that, defined in this way, the World is simply a set of experiences qualitatively equivalent to, for instance, personal imagination. Yet it differs from personal imagination in that it is collective rather than idiosyncratic: after all, we all seem to share the same World. Empirical observation of this collective World is thus an avenue of knowledge orthogonal to the imagination, as history painfully illustrates. Aristotle, for instance, imagined that heavier objects fell to the ground faster than lighter objects,1 an idea that persisted for almost two millennia. Only when Galileo decided to empirically observe whether that were really the case – by famously dropping two canon balls of different weights from the leaning tower of Pisa – did we realise that the World is, in fact, different from what Aristotle had imagined it to be. Thanks to empirical observations such as Galileo’s, we have now been able to know the World well enough to put a man on the moon and robots on Mars, and even land a probe on a comet.
By empirically observing the World we can discern its patterns and regularities during observation. But to infer how the World behaved before observation and predict how it will behave in the future, we need to model those patterns and regularities in the form we have come to call the ‘laws of nature’. And here is where the second avenue of knowledge comes in: rational thought enables us to deduce unobserved – and even unobservable – aspects of the World from observed ones. It allows us to connect the dots and extrapolate the boundaries of our knowledge beyond what can be directly apprehended through the five senses. It is rational thought that, for instance, enables engineers to know which building design will stand firmly and which phone design will communicate reliably without having to try out every possible variation. It is also rational thought that enables us to infer explanations such as the Big Bang and hominid evolution, even though we cannot empirically observe either. Rational thought provides the template along which both explanatory and predictive models are woven.
The third and final avenue of knowledge is, of course, introspection. By introspecting, we turn our attention from the World to the knower of the World and the process of knowing. We ask: Who or what is it that knows? How does it know what it knows? As Rupert says, ‘What is it that knows or is aware of my experience? What is the nature of the knowing with which all knowledge and experience are known?’ Knowledge only has meaning insofar as these questions are answered. After all, as a state of the knower and the outcome of the process of knowing, knowledge is secondary to both. Everything we believe we know through the other two avenues – empirical observation and rational thought – is thus ultimately conditioned by introspection. Whatever information we derive from observation and thought only has meaning insofar as we understand the nature of the knower and how it knows. Without such understanding, the natural patterns discernible through observation and thought are akin to ripples without water, choreographies without dancers, spin without tops. They delineate an empty mould whose actual substance can only be filled through introspection.
And here is where the problem lies. Introspection requires an intimate engagement with the subject of experience, as opposed to its objects. But science – whose values and methods have informed our mainstream cultural narrative for the past two centuries or so – must stand clear of subjectivity. As Rupert explains, ‘In its search for the absolute truth, science rejects subjective experience on the grounds that it is personal and therefore cannot be validated by anyone other than the person having the experience.’ This is entirely appropriate insofar as one chooses – as science does – empirical observation and rational thought as one’s sole avenues of knowledge. After all, as discussed above, the World is defined as the shared subset of our experiences, as opposed to the figments of one’s personal imagination. So to properly assess the World, science must indeed set aside idiosyncratic reports and focus on experiences consistently shared by multiple individuals.
But whilst internally consistent, the scientific method is incomplete in that it disregards true introspection. As such, it is ill-equipped to answer any of the fundamental questions about the nature of the knower and the process of knowing. Correctly understood, science merely models the patterns and regularities of the World without providing any insight into its underlying nature. It doesn’t tell us what the World is, only how it behaves. It characterises the choreography without saying anything about the dancer. It predicts the ripples without saying anything about the water. It describes the spin without saying anything about the top. In Rupert’s words, ‘Most people believe that science is gradually inching its way towards an understanding of the fundamental reality of the universe. However, until consciousness itself becomes the focus of scientific interest, researchers will still be seeking the fundamental reality of the universe in a thousand years’ time.’
Be that as it may, it seems difficult for most scientists to acknowledge the inherent limitations of their method. As a former professional scientist myself, I base this assertion on my own personal experience. Scientists have a natural tendency to believe that they are unveiling what the World is, not just how it behaves. Believing otherwise would detract from much of the romantic allure that brought scientists to their profession in the first place. Moreover, it is admittedly difficult – at a psychological level – to do science without at least a working hypothesis for interpreting the patterns and regularities discerned through experiments. Stanford physicist Andrei Linde, renowned for his theories of cosmological inflation, explained it best:
Let us remember that our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with perceptions.… Later we find out that our perceptions obey some laws, which can be most conveniently formulated if we assume that there is some underlying reality beyond our perceptions. This model of a material world obeying laws of physics is so successful that soon we forget about our starting point and say that matter is the only reality, and perceptions are only helpful for its description. This assumption is almost as natural (and maybe as false) as our previous assumption that space is only a mathematical tool for the description of matter.2
So what was originally a mere working model to facilitate the interpretation of scientific observations has now hardened into the dogma of a material world outside mind. This hasty jump was driven by the psychological need to fill a vacuum: scientists couldn’t operate without a way to think about the World in terms of its underlying reality. While constructing abstract characterisations of the choreography, they needed a way to visualise the dancer. And then, because proper introspection had never been part of their professional skillset, they simply took the World at face value. To this day we pay the price for such a lazy blunder. Indeed, if scientists knew what you now know after having read this book, they would surely have thought things through a little more carefully.
In and by itself, the blunder of associating science with materialism would probably have been of limited consequence. But in conjunction with a second blunder, it has had the devastating effect of causing our culture to dismiss all legitimate paths to true insight. This second blunder is our culture’s elevation of science – an incomplete method – to the position of ultimate arbiter of truth, as opposed to a pragmatic approach for producing technology and informing philosophy.
You see, because we tend to conflate what works with what is true – an error easily seen when considering theories that work in practice yet aren’t actually true, such as Newtonian mechanics and Fourier optics – we mistake the technological success of science for evidence that it provides insight into the underlying nature of reality. This is akin to believing that a five-year-old kid who plays computer games very well understands the underlying nature of computer hardware and software. Mistaking effectiveness for understanding, our culture proclaims that the scientific method is the best way to figure out what the World is, not just how it behaves. Consequently, we now have a one-eyed pilot overloaded with the heavy baggage of materialism trying to guide our flight towards truth. The baggage is so heavy one must wonder whether we can even leave the ground, let alone find our way.
Science’s emphasis on empirical observation and rational thought, at the cost of true introspection, is the imbalance in our culture’s approach to knowledge that I alluded to in the beginning of this Afterword. But as the root cause of the problem, the imbalance is also the obvious place to apply a fix. Indeed, restoring some lucid introspection to science can initiate a far-reaching domino effect by revealing how both empirical observation and rational thought themselves indicate that Self and World are one. Allow me to elaborate on this perhaps surprising claim.
In a famous 1960 paper titled ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’,3 renowned physicist Eugene Wigner discussed what he described as ‘the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics’. Indeed, mathematical methods and results envisioned purely in abstraction have, again and again, turned out to precisely describe concrete aspects of the World. For instance, non-Euclidean geometries, whose axioms assume space to be curved, were developed at a time – the early nineteenth century – when everyone ‘knew’ that space was flat. So these non-Euclidean geometries, although mathematically rigorous, were considered fictions, models of imagined things whose validity resided only in the minds of mathematicians. Within only a few decades, however, Einstein found out that space is, in fact, curved, a fact confirmed through empirical observations. Non-Euclidean geometries then turned out to describe the World itself with uncanny precision and accuracy.4 Their validity thus somehow extends far beyond the minds of mathematicians.
Why and how entirely abstract creations of rational thought – based solely on axiomatic intuitions – turn out to describe the structure and dynamics of the World at large remains a profound mystery to this day, at least under the materialist paradigm.5 In Wigner’s words, ‘It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions.’ The ‘miracle’ (Wigner uses this word twelve times in his paper) is perhaps most pronounced in quantum mechanics, where – as reflected in the famous admonition ‘Shut up and calculate!’ – only the mathematics is clearly understood, not the actual World it so accurately models.
It is tempting to try to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and simply proclaim that the axioms of logic and mathematics should be applicable to the World at large. But lest we fall into the fallacy of circular reasoning, we cannot logically argue for the validity of logic beyond our minds, so the World might as well be absurd.6 By the same token, under the postulate that Self and World are distinct there is just no reason to think that the World should comply with abstract mathematical truths devised in mentation. Why should it? Yet we know empirically that it does, which baffles – as it should – the materialist mind-set.
Under the non-dual view expressed in this book, on the other hand, the correspondence between the intuitive foundations of rational thought – as reflected in the axioms of logic and mathematics – and the way the World works is perfectly natural. Indeed, it couldn’t be any different. You see, that we take the basic tenets of logic and mathematics to be self-evident truths betrays their archetypal nature in the Jungian sense: they are irreducible psychological templates according to which thought unfolds.7 As a matter of fact, Marie-Louise von Franz went as far as to argue that the natural numbers themselves are archetypal.8 Then – and here is the key point – the fact that these archetypes extend into the World clearly indicates that the World itself is mental and continuous with the Self. Even modest introspection suffices to see this. If there is no separation between mind and the objects of perception, of course these objects should comport themselves in a way consistent with the psychological archetypes of mind. Perceptual objects should be an expression of archetypal patterns in the same way that thoughts and emotions are, so the World should be consistent – as it is – with our logic and mathematics. The apparent eeriness of Wigner’s ‘miracle’ thus melts under the non-dual view articulated here by Rupert like butter under the sun. The alleged mystery is revealed by introspection to be a mere artefact of the confused materialist paradigm. That our culture at large still hasn’t taken the hint is a reflection of the appalling state of our collective ability to introspect.
Not only the empirical validity of rational thought suggests the unity of Self and World; empirical observations also point to this unity, even more directly. Indeed, a key implication of the posited separation between Self and World is that the properties of the World should not depend on observation; that is, a perceptual object should have whatever properties it has – weight, size, shape, colour, and so on – regardless of whether or how it appears on the screen of perception. But this has statistical implications that can be directly tested.9 On this basis, Gröblacher and others have shown empirically that the properties of the world do depend on observation.10 To reconcile their results with materialism would require a tortuous redefinition of what we call ‘objectivity’. And since our culture has come to associate objectivity with reality itself, the science press felt compelled to report on this study by pronouncing, ‘Quantum physics says goodbye to reality’.11
Other statistical implications of the posited separation between Self and World12 have also been experimentally tested, empirically demonstrating that the properties of physical systems do not even exist prior to being observed.13 Commenting on these results, renowned physicist Anton Zeilinger has been quoted as saying that ‘there is no sense in assuming that what we do not measure about a system has [an independent] reality’.14 Finally, Ma and others have again shown, in 2013, that no naïvely objective view of the World can be true, in view of empirical observations.15
Critics have deeply scrutinised the studies cited above to find possible loopholes, implausible as they may be. In an effort to address and close these potential loopholes, Dutch researchers performed an even more tightly controlled test, which once again confirmed the earlier conclusions.16 This latter effort was considered by Nature News magazine the ‘toughest test yet’.17
Another implication of the posited separation between Self and World is that our choices can only influence the World – through our bodily actions – in the present. They allegedly cannot affect the past. As such, the part of our story that corresponds to the past must be unchangeable. Contrast this to the sphere of mind, wherein we can change the whole of an imagined story at any moment. In mind, the entire narrative is always acquiescent to choice and amenable to revision. Now, as it turns out, Kim and others have shown empirically that observation not only determines the physical properties observed at present, but also retroactively changes their history accordingly.18 This suggests that the past is created at every instant so as to be consistent with the present, which is reminiscent of the notion that the World is a malleable mental narrative.
Already back in 2005, renowned Johns Hopkins physicist and astronomer Richard Conn Henry had seen enough: he penned an essay for Nature magazine wherein he claimed that ‘the universe is entirely mental’.19 As we have seen, empirical observations since then overwhelmingly corroborate his case. Yet many physicists refuse to acknowledge it. They postulate all kinds of unprovable invisible entities and try to develop tortuous mathematical acrobatics to find a way around the evidence. In the words of Conn Henry: ‘There have been serious [theoretical] attempts to preserve a material world – but they produce no new physics, and serve only to preserve an illusion.’20 The illusion he was referring to was, of course, that of a World outside mind; a World separate from the Self. The inability of many physicists to acknowledge what observations are telling us reflects, once again, a failure of introspection. The identity of Self and World is indeed hard to accept if one cannot look within to see it, getting stuck instead at face-value appearances.
In conclusion, when informed by even modest introspection, both rational thought and empirical observations indicate, in and of themselves, a unity between Self and World. All three avenues of knowledge thus point in the same direction. It is the lack of introspection in our culture’s way of relating to reality that prevents us from seeing this. My intention in this Afterword has been to highlight the insidious effects of this lack, so as to help you recognise the critical importance of the present book. By masterfully restoring introspection to the cultural dialogue, Rupert addresses the root cause of our predicament. And by having read this book, you now find yourself in a privileged position to help tip the balance of things in favour of truth. Goodness knows we need it.
Bernardo Kastrup
September 2016
1. Aristotle, Physics.
2. Linde, A., ‘Universe, Life, Consciousness’, a paper delivered at the Physics and Cosmology Group of the Science and Spiritual Quest program of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, California, 1998 (emphasis added).
3. Wigner, E., ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences’, Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics (1960).
4. See, for instance: Wilson, E. and Lewis, G., ‘The Space-Time Manifold of Relativity. The Non-Euclidean Geometry of Mechanics and Electromagnetics’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1912).
5. In 2015, PBS released a documentary film in its NOVA series, titled ‘The Great Math Mystery: Is math invented by humans, or is it the language of the universe?’, that showed many surprising ways in which mathematical thought corresponds to the World.
6. For a more rigorous argument, see: Albert, H., Treatise on Critical Reason (Princeton University Press, 1985).
7. An analogy may help explain what psychological archetypes are: If mind were a vibrating surface, then the archetypes would be akin to the constraints that determine the natural modes of vibration of the surface. For more elaboration, see: Jung, C., The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Routledge, 1991).
8. Franz, M.-L. von, Number and Time (Northwestern University Press, 1974).
9. Leggett, A., ‘Nonlocal hidden-variable theories and quantum mechanics: An incompatibility theorem’, Foundations of Physics (2003).
10. Gröblacher, S. et al., ‘An experimental test of non-local realism’, Nature (2007).
11. Cartwright, J., ‘Quantum physics says goodbye to reality’, IOP Physics World (2007).
12. Bell, J., ‘On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox’, Physics (1964).
13. Lapkiewicz, R. et al., ‘Experimental non-classicality of an indivisible quantum system’, Nature (2011); as well as Manning, A. G. et al., ‘Wheeler’s delayed-choice gedanken experiment with a single atom’, Nature Physics (2015).
14. Ananthaswamy, A., ‘Quantum magic trick shows reality is what you make it’, New Scientist (2011).
15. Ma, X.-S. et al., ‘Quantum erasure with causally disconnected choice’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (2013).
16. Hensen, B. et al., ‘Experimental loophole-free violation of a Bell inequality using entangled electron spins separated by 1.3 km’, arXiv:1508.05949 [quant-ph] (2015).
17. Merali, Z., ‘Quantum “spookiness” passes toughest test yet’, Nature News (2015).
18. Kim, Y.-H. et al., ‘A delayed choice quantum eraser’, Physical Review Letters (2000).
19. Conn Henry, R., ‘The mental universe’, Nature (2005).
20. Ibid.