Consciousness And The Universe

The main focus of the book 'The Sapient Cosmos' is to assess the viability of a consciousness-only view of reality. In other words, how can we understand the recent renaissance of metaphysical idealism in the philosophy of mind? To this aim, the doctrine of physicalism, idealism’s antithesis, is scrutinized. Physicalism posits that everything in the universe can be reduced to and explained by physical entities, their properties, and interactions. It is a metaphysical proposition, assuming a materialist-reductionist ontology.

Interestingly, physicalism has unwittingly been adopted by most scientifically-minded people who believe it to be a scientific claim. This, however, is a category mistake, as it conflates the descriptive scope of science with a metaphysical claim about the ultimate nature of reality. By definition, metaphysics begins where physics ends. So, while the latter inquires about the 'how', the former contemplates the 'what'. As a result, most academics have uncritically internalized the metaphysical assumptions of physicalism, severely tainting the lens through which the Western mind examines the nature of consciousness and reality.

It is very conceivable that the stagnation seen in fundamental physics, the inexplicability of subjective experience, and the mystery shrouding the emergence of complexity in the cosmos are all rooted in faulty implicit metaphysical assumptions that have never been critically assessed. In short, the current limits to scientific knowledge could simply be cultural, an artifact of a worldview that was established before the ground-shattering discoveries of physics were made in the 20th Century.

Contrasting physicalism, idealism posits that reality is fundamentally and exclusively mental. In other words, it claims that consciousness is the essence of existence, with everything physical being derived from a ground of purely transpersonal, a perspectival, and unconditioned consciousness. Such a metaphysical outlook greatly dismays the physicalists.

Idealism is impossible to grasp rationally. However, it is a perspective that can be fully experienced and always has been. Since the dawning of the human mind, people have encountered immaterial levels of reality firsthand, either spontaneously or deliberately. At last, the shamans, mystics, meditators, and psychonauts, long ignored by the Western mind, get to have their say in decoding the nature of existence. Accounts of their transcendental explorations can now be understood in a larger context. Indeed, the great wealth of alternative modes of sentience, conjured up by non-ordinary states of consciousness, renders sober waking consciousness just one competing state in the vast transcendental multiverse of experiences.

James B. Glattfelder is a researcher at Zurich University. With a background as a physicist and then as a researcher at a Swiss hedge fund, James B. Glattfelder researches complex systems, a subject he holds a Ph.D in from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

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