If you feel you don't have time to read it all, at least check out the sections called "The law of consistency" and "The simulation metaphor". I'm probably biased, but I think they are a work of genius!
Intuitive Idealism vs. Analytic Idealism (II)
An alternative formulation of idealism
In the first part of this essay, I tried to show the problems inherent in Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism. My critique has been based on direct intuition, but also on the study and practice of Eastern and Western wisdom traditions, which (at least in my view) provide a much deeper insight into the nature of consciousness than anything contemporary Western philosophy and science can deliver.
The alternative formulation of idealism that I’m proposing here (Intuitive Idealism) shares a same basic tenet with Analytic Idealism: consciousness is fundamental; it is an ontological primitive, uncaused and irreducible. It also shares the recognition that all reality exists only as experience, and that experience is excitation in the boundless field of consciousness. There is no subject-object separation.
However, I depart from Analytic Idealism in two crucial points: I reject the notion of dissociative boundaries. And I reject the idea that the physical world we perceive is the extrinsic appearance of something else, or a simplified user interface, or anything other than what it appears to be.
I’m rejecting those notions not only because they are counter-intuitive: they are also, as far as I can see, completely unnecessary. It is perfectly possible to explain from an idealistic perspective all fundamental facts about reality in an intuitive and straightforward way, with no need to resort to any sort of far-fetched mental contrivance. This is Intuitive Idealism.
The main facts that need explanation from an idealistic perspective are these three:
a) Why do we all (seem to) share the same physical world?
b) Why does physical reality (our sense perceptions) follow regular, predictable patterns?
c) Why is there a close correlation between conscious experience and brain activity?
Easy-peasy. Let’s begin with the first one.
The law of consistency
If consciousness is all there is, if nothing exists outside consciousness (if consciousness is the “ontological primitive”), how can we explain the consistency of our perceptions of the world, the fact that we all seem to perceive the same physical universe?
Intuitive Idealism offers a ridiculously simple answer to this question. The reason for the interpersonal consistency of our perceptions of the physical world is that, without this consistency, there would be no physical world. If the sense perceptions of all living organisms weren’t perfectly consistent with one another, there would be no physical universe to begin with.
In other words, to ask “why are our perceptions of the world consistent?” is equivalent to asking “why does the physical world exist?”. The only possible answer to that would be something like “because universal consciousness has infinite creativity and curiosity, and it loves experiencing and knowing itself in all imaginable ways”. But maybe it would be wiser to just humbly appreciate the existence of the physical universe as an unfathomable mystery.
Intuitive Idealism doesn’t explain the ultimate purpose of the physical universe, but it explains what the physical universe is: the physical universe we inhabit is the result of the perfect consistency of the sense perceptions of all living organisms. That’s what it is. Nothing more, nothing less.
There is no pre-existing reality out there, causing our perceptions. There is only our perceptions. Our perceptions create the physical world. But this is only possible because our perceptions are consistent. This consistency is the fundamental and necessary condition for the existence of the physical world. In Intuitive Idealism, this is called the law of consistency.
The law of consistency accounts for all the regularities we observe in the physical universe. The predictability of physical phenomena is nothing but the unavoidable result of the law of consistency. All the laws of physics can be reduced to this single law, which is the only real, objective law underlying physical reality.
To help visualize all this, I can offer the following metaphor: the physical universe as a simulation (please beware: it’s only a metaphor!).
The simulation metaphor: the law of consistency in action
Imagine you are a genius computer game designer, with unlimited computing power at your disposal. You want to create a multiplayer virtual reality game where players can interact with each other and with their virtual environment. And you want to make the game so immersive that players will experience it as completely real.
The most obvious way to achieve this would be to create a virtual environment that all players can share. This virtual environment would consist of nothing but computer code, but it would be rendered on each player’s user interface as three dimensional shapes, colours, sounds, etc. (given that you have unlimited computing power, you could also introduce smell, taste, etc.). This model corresponds roughly to Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception (ITP). The only difference is that, in this thought experiment, the user interface wouldn’t be the result of natural selection, but of “intelligent design”.
But there are several problems with this approach. First, you would need to do a huge amount of engineering. You would have to carefully design every rock, every flower, every tree, every hill on that virtual world, in great detail, and make sure that everything would be rendered realistically on each player’s interface, without any glitches. This sounds like a lot of hard work.
Second, no matter how much work you put into the design, the virtual world you are creating would be limited. There is only a finite number of rocks, trees, hills, etc., that you would be able to create (let’s assume that although you have unlimited computing power, you don’t have unlimited time at your disposal).
Third, and most importantly, your players would be hopelessly trapped inside your virtual world. You could give them some limited capacity to transform their virtual environment as they interact with it (for example, they could cut down trees, use the wood to build houses, etc.), but there would be no way for them to escape the fixed set of rules (the “laws of nature”) encoded in your design. They would effectively be prisoners in your virtual reality game. Your virtual world would be a prison.
In short, you realize that this solution (designing a virtual environment that players would share) would be rather depressing. Even worse: it would be insufferably boring.
Luckily, you are a genius, so you have a brilliant idea: you won’t design anything. There will be no virtual environment in your virtual reality game. You will instead introduce one single rule, a rule that will apply to every player who enters your game: their perceptions have to be consistent with the perceptions of every other player. This is the law of consistency.
Every player will be wearing a helmet-like headset and full-body suit resembling a spacesuit, capable of reproducing all possible external stimuli: colours, sounds, three-dimensional shapes, tactile perceptions (texture, density, temperature, etc.), smells, tastes, etc. By default, this “game suit” or “VR suit” won’t provide any differentiated stimuli, but only a completely enveloping cloud of “white noise”.
Since it is, for obvious reasons, the easiest sense to visualize, let’s concentrate on vision. The default display on the headset would be that of three-dimensional multicoloured noise. We can picture it as a stereoscopic display of tiny pixels randomly fluctuating through all colours of the rainbow. To the player, this would look like an impenetrable, chaotic, iridescent fog.
Let’s assume that the players, struggling to find their way in this strange environment, would try to recognize patterns or regularities in this ever-changing multi-coloured fog. This would be akin to gazing at clouds, trying to find recognizable shapes.
We all know that if we look long enough at the changing contours of passing clouds, we will eventually see the vague likeness of a face, a horse, a fish. For the players in this virtual reality game, it would be like beginning to discern some faint, hazy forms half-hidden by the fog.
Here is where the real magic of the VR suit kicks in. It turns out that this super-advanced suit is not only a displaying device. There are special sensors at the back of the helmet that can detect any instance of “pattern recognition” performed by the player’s brain, and subtly reinforce it by echoing or mirroring it in the display (it doesn’t matter if this sounds rather unlikely: remember that this is only a metaphor).
So for example, if at some point a player would imagine to see the blurry shape of a tree wavering in the fog, the game display would mirror exactly that blurry image of a tree. This would encourage the player to try to discern more detail, starting a feedback loop that would eventually result (given that the player employed enough attention) in the crystal-clear three-dimensional image of a tree. Add touch, smell, etc., and we would have a tree that would seem completely real.
The game suits of all players are wirelessly interconnected, so that, following the law of consistency, the patterns or forms perceived by any player will instantly be potentially mirrored in the displays of all other players. Let’s see what we mean by “potentially mirrored”.
To simplify the thought experiment, let’s say that you are introducing a virtual space-time framework in your game, so that each player will find themselves at a particular location in that virtual space-time. This location will be randomly assigned to each player as they log into the game. Now, the location of one player relative to another will determine the degree to which the perceptions of one will be mirrored in the other’s display. If player A, say, is fifty (virtual) miles distant from player B, the trees or rocks that A sees won’t be mirrored in B’s display. But if A sees a full moon in the sky, that moon will also appear in B’s display… if B happens to look at the sky.
This is what “potential mirroring” means. A and B could be standing next to each other, but looking in different directions. Or B could be sitting reading a book, while A is gazing at the surrounding landscape. The law of consistency doesn’t limit in any way the freedom of the players to focus their attention wherever they choose. It only ensures that, if A and B happen to look at the same point in space-time, they will perceive the same (virtual) objects, as viewed from their respective locations. Their perceptions will be mutually consistent.
This perfect consistency will be maintained not only in space, but also in time. If A and B see some object (e. g. the moon) behaving in a certain way at some point in virtual time, C (located, say, at the same spot in virtual space but ten years later or earlier in virtual time) will perceive it behaving in the same consistent way.
This is how the law of consistency gives rise to the regularity of the observed world. At the beginning of the game, the players would be free to perceive the world around them behaving in any possible way they could imagine. As the game progressed, those perceived behaviours would become “natural laws”. The freedom of the players to perceive whatever they might would diminish, but their impression of being in a “real world” would accordingly increase.
So this is your completely immersive virtual reality game. It would enhance the players’ freedom and creativity. They would be unwittingly creating their own virtual world as they played. There is no way to predict what kind of world they would create. Each new set of players (you could relaunch the game as many times as you liked) would probably end up in a completely different universe. You, as the game designer, would save a lot of work. You could just sit back and watch. And the game would be anything but boring.
Back to reality
This simulation metaphor illustrates how the law of consistency is enough to explain the fact that we all share the same physical world (fact a), and the regularity and predictability we observe in that physical world (fact b). It won’t help, though, in explaining the correlation between conscious experiences and brain activity (fact c). To understand this third fact we need to abandon the metaphor and look at our actual situation.
We are not living in a simulation. We are living in reality. This is what our intuition tells us. This world we live in is real. And we obviously are not wearing special VR headsets or suits.
What do we have instead? Well, we have our physical bodies. To understand what this means, we need to answer two questions: What are our physical bodies? And who or what are we?
Let’s begin with the second question, which from the point of view of Intuitive Idealism is the easy one: We are consciousness. Universal consciousness. That’s what we are.
There is only one consciousness. In essence, we are all one. This unity of consciousness is what underlies the law of consistency. The law of consistency is not an arbitrary principle postulated to explain the unexplainable (the consistency and regularity of the physical world). It is a necessary corollary of this fundamental truth: there is only consciousness, and consciousness is one.
Done. We can now tackle the first question. What are our physical bodies? According to Intuitive Idealism, the answer to this is quite straightforward too: The physical bodies of all living organisms, taken as a whole, are the measurement apparatus consciousness uses to observe (and thus, create) the physical world.
I have explained in detail what this means in my essay “The Observing Universe”. In it, I propose a new (idealistic) interpretation of quantum mechanics, which I can summarize here as follows:
1. The physical world is the observed world. There is nothing to the physical universe but observation.
2. There is only one observer: universal consciousness.
3. Consciousness is nonlocal. In order to observe the physical world, it needs the localized physical bodies of living organisms, which as a whole configure a universal measurement apparatus. In other words, consciousness can’t directly observe the physical world. It can only observe the physical bodies (sensory systems) of living organisms.
4. Every time a living organism interacts with the physical world, it is making a measurement.
5. Every time a living organism interacts with a physical system, its physical body becomes entangled with that physical system.
6. The universe is a vast, complex chain of entanglement.
7. Entanglement is a particular aspect of the law of consistency. In physical terms, it means that, when two physical systems (A and B, say) become entangled, there is a precise correlation between the probabilities of measuring physical system A in certain states and the probabilities of measuring physical system B in corresponding states. In other words, when two physical systems become entangled they coalesce into a new, larger physical system.
8. The physical bodies of living organisms constitute a special class of physical system. What distinguishes them is that they can be observed directly by consciousness.
9. The collapse of the wave function is caused by entanglement between physical systems and the physical bodies of living organisms. In other words, whenever there is a precise correlation between the possible states of a physical system and corresponding states of the physical body (sensory system) of a living organism, that physical system is no longer in superposition: it “collapses” into a definite state.
10. The universal chain of entanglement enables consciousness to observe the universe from the point of view of all living organisms at once. Particular acts of measurement are irrelevant. Universal entanglement is enough to provide consciousness with a clear and definite picture of the physical universe. Measurement is local. Observation is nonlocal.
From this perspective, it becomes clearer what our physical bodies are. In very abstract terms, we can define the physical bodies of living organisms as localizations of qualia.
All qualia are experienced by the one universal consciousness. Every living cell is the localization of a particular set of qualia in a particular location in space-time.
Every living cell, and every living organism, is characterized by two elements: the potential for registering a given range of qualia, and the actual localization of a particular arrangement of qualia (within that potential range) at any given point in space-time.
To visualize this very abstract idea, we can picture our physical bodies as a sort of “registration device” used by consciousness to observe and create the physical universe. This utilitarian perspective may help us understand the relationship between consciousness and the physical brain: If our physical bodies are measurement tools capable of registering qualia in the form of raw sensory data, then our brains are information processing devices capable of organizing those sensory data in more or less sophisticated ways.
Yes. I’m afraid what I’m saying is that our brain is, after all, a sort of computer.
Brains are like computers
The notion that brains are “biological computers” is, with few exceptions, the default assumption in mainstream science (particularly in computational neuroscience). It may seem surprising that we could come to a similar understanding from an idealistic perspective. But if we use our intuition, there’s no doubt about it: there are obvious similarities between brains and computers.
Physicalists, though, have used those similarities to jump to absurd conclusions. Here is how their reasoning goes:
a) Brains are like computers.
b) Therefore, it must be possible to build a conscious computer.
This is a pathetic example of faulty logic. The correct reasoning is this:
a) Brains are like computers.
b) Therefore, either computers are conscious, or brains are not.
We all know, by direct intuition, that computers are not conscious. We have no ethical qualms about unplugging them when we don’t need them, or throwing them away when they stop working. Physicalists may argue that computers are not conscious “yet”. But if achieving “artificial consciousness” is a matter of degree (more complexity or whatever), then our current computers should be already somewhat conscious. And if it requires some yet unknown qualitative jump, then our current computers are nothing like brains.
From the perspective of Intuitive Idealism, the conclusion is clear: Brains are not conscious. Therefore, “artificial consciousness” is impossible.
Brains are not conscious. They are information processing devices, computation machines. Like machines, they can get damaged and malfunction. Like computers, they don’t produce anything. They just make calculations, computations, information processing. They certainly don’t produce consciousness.
Consciousness uses our brains in the same way we use our personal computers. The analogy is almost perfect. When I look at my computer screen, there is an exact correlation between the shapes, colours, words, etc., displayed on the screen and the content of my conscious experience. Since what appears on the screen is the result of the inner state of the computer, we must conclude that there is an exact correlation between the inner state of the computer and the content of my experience. This doesn’t mean that the computer produces my conscious experience. It produces the content of my conscious experience.
This is a crucial distinction. All the misconceptions about the nature of consciousness and absurd fantasies around the possibility of creating conscious artificial intelligence come from the inability of most Western scientists and philosophers to distinguish between consciousness and the content of consciousness.
Localization of qualia
When I look up at a clear blue sky, I experience the qualia of blueness, brightness, vastness, etc. Those qualia are not produced by the sky. They aren’t produced by my eyes, my optic nerves or my visual cortex either. They aren’t produced by anything. Qualia are a fundamental property of consciousness. Like consciousness, they are eternal, universal, uncreated. What the blue sky, my eyes and my visual cortex produce is a localization of qualia. They register a particular set of qualia in a particular location in space-time.
Consciousness has two fundamental properties: awareness (the experiencing of qualia) and basic knowing or discrimination (the direct recognition of qualia, which gives rise to information). It is possible (although rare for us) to have pure awareness, without discrimination (experiencing qualia without the recognition of those qualia): this is formless awareness, pure consciousness without content (only experienced in special states, like deep meditation). But whenever discrimination arises, there is content in consciousness, forms that can be registered as information.
There can be discrimination of qualia without localization, like in dreams. There can also be abstract discrimination without qualia, like in conceptual or mathematical thought. These are different types of content, different types of forms that can appear in consciousness. But there is one particular type of content of consciousness that gives rise to the physical universe: localization of qualia in space-time.
We can visualize this with the traditional metaphor of waves or ripples in water. Consciousness is like water, and localization of qualia is like ripples in water.
Consciousness has an infinite potential for experiencing qualia. Pure consciousness is a boundless field of undifferentiated awareness, an infinity of potential qualities of experience. (This can be directly witnessed in deep meditation or deep psychedelic states, as an infinite ocean of multicoloured light, multi-textured feel, multilayered sound. The “white noise” or “iridescent fog” displayed by the “VR suits” in my simulation metaphor provides an analogy for this experience.) When localization of qualia arises, particular qualia are registered in particular locations in space-time. These localized qualia constantly and harmoniously change their spatial location along the time axis, like in the movement of waves or ripples.
This wave-like movement of qualia is more than a metaphor. It can be experienced directly in altered states of consciousness. These altered states can be reached through concentration practices, or with the help of psychedelics.
I’ll try to describe here what this experience looks like, focusing on the visual dimension. Imagine that, rather than tiny cube-like three-dimensional pixels (like in the simulation metaphor), what we have is an infinity of luminous threads. These threads have no beginning and no end, they seem to span the whole universe. They cross your visual field, coming from infinity and disappearing into infinity. Wherever you look, these luminous filaments fill your whole visual field. There is nothing else. Each luminous thread seems to be made of multicoloured light. Without knowing how, you know this is the light of awareness. These threads are made of pure awareness, awareness aware of itself. They are in constant movement, a harmonious wave-like movement, like a dance. And as they move, the colours change their distribution along the length of each thread.
That is pure awareness: a boundless sea of iridescent filaments of light. Imagine now that, as you watch, these multicoloured luminous fibres begin to display a landscape before you. The colours along every individual thread begin to adjust according to that landscape. A filament will turn from blue to white to dark green to bright green as it crosses the sky, a drifting cloud, a tree, a grassy hillside. Since the threads are constantly moving, the colours constantly change along them. At first the effect is of a rippling, wavering, somewhat blurry landscape, but gradually the synchronization between the individual fibres increases, until you reach a sharp, clear, perfectly solid image of a real landscape surrounding you. You are back in the everyday world. Back in your ordinary state of consciousness.
This is not a metaphor or a thought experiment. It is a fairly accurate description of a very real experience that can be corroborated by anyone willing to do so. A sufficient dose of psilocybin or LSD would do the trick. The catch is, of course, that the visual aspect I described is only a relatively innocuous part of the total experience: it is accompanied, inevitably, by a poignant and often terrifying sense of losing one’s mind, and even one’s body. It feels like dying, like witnessing the end of the world. The psychological effects and ramifications of this experience, positive or negative, are impossible to predict. But that’s the price to pay. The only alternative is years of concentration practice, without any guarantee of success. Nature doesn’t reveal its secrets easily.
What brains do
The physical universe we perceive is nothing but the localization of qualia in space-time. This localization follows regular wave-patterns, evolving in space-time in consistent, harmonious ways, like ripples on water. It is important to realize that space-time is not fundamental: it doesn’t exist prior to or independently from the localization of qualia. It is the localization of qualia what gives rise to space-time. In other words, pure awareness is not exactly like water, because it isn’t located in space-time. Pure awareness is a boundless field of infinite potential for experiencing qualia. This infinite potential exists in all points of space-time. At any given point of space-time, only a particular set of qualia is actualized. Water ripples are created by the movement of water molecules in space-time. Awareness ripples are created by the evolving actualization of qualia in space-time. These awareness ripples constitute the physical universe.
The physical bodies of living organisms, like everything else in the physical universe, consist of localizations of qualia. The best way to visualize this is to start with the simplest example, unicellular organisms. A single-celled organism is nothing but a particular arrangement of qualia localized at a particular position in space-time. Imagine one such organism, capable of perceiving light, temperature, certain smells or tastes, etc. The physical body of this organism is defined by the actualization of certain qualia at precise locations within or outside it. Qualia pertaining taste and inner temperature will be located inside the physical body of the organism. Qualia pertaining touch, smell and outer temperature will be located on a boundary (the “cell membrane”, in biological terms) surrounding the physical body of the organism. And qualia pertaining vision will be located anywhere in space around the physical body of the organism.
The fact that visual qualia are located outside the physical body of the organism, and not inside it, may seem counter-intuitive at first glance. This is the result of the materialistic notion, ingrained in many of us through cultural indoctrination, that all the qualia we perceive must be located inside our heads. But in reality it is intuitively obvious that the visual qualia we experience are located at the exact positions where they appear to be. By perceiving those qualia, we are simply locating them in space-time.
The evolution of life saw how simple unicellular organisms became specialized in localizing precise sets of qualia, and how these single-cell organisms combined to form multicellular organisms like us. Every cell in our bodies is capable of locating a specific range of qualia. For example, the different types of photoreceptor cells in our retina are specialized to locate different colours and different intensities of light. To organize all these localized qualia into a coherent, complex mental image, multicellular organisms developed nervous systems and brains.
This is what brains do. They combine all the qualia actualized by the sensory cells of the living organism into a coherent whole. (Brains are also responsible for the coordination of locomotion and other functions of the physical body, of course. But let’s concentrate on perception here.) To achieve that, nerve cells (neurons) translate the localization of qualia performed by sensory cells into electrochemical signals. These electrochemical signals are nothing but qualia themselves. It’s difficult to imagine how it feels like to be an excited neuron, but it must feel like something; certainly something different from a neuron at rest. We can get a sense of this if we pay attention to the physical sensations inside our head: our brain feels quite different when there is a lot of thinking going on (a lot of neurons firing) than when we are in deep, silent meditation (most neurons at rest). This physical sensation of neural activity is very subtle and we usually are not aware of it, but it’s definitely there. However, the quality of these neuronal qualia is irrelevant. What matters is the information they transmit.
The nervous system uses these neuronal qualia as signals to convey information. The brain processes that information, creating a mental image, a computational model of the world. This representation of the world can be extremely simple, like in small invertebrates, or as complex and sophisticated as the models that human scientists create.
It is important to remember that human scientists and brains don’t actually do anything. It is consciousness, universal consciousness, that uses the sensory systems and brains of living organisms, including humans, to observe the physical world and create these representations.
Our mental representation of the world constitutes the main content of our everyday conscious experience. We usually pay more attention to our mental images, our ideas about the world, than to the actual qualia we are experiencing. This mental representation of the world includes our ideas and mental images about ourselves. Most of us see ourselves as physical entities, objects existing in a world of physical objects. We identify with our own mental model of ourselves, our self-image. This is ego-identity. All these concepts, ideas and representations are the result of computational information-processing happening in our brains. But they are not experienced by our brains. They are experienced by consciousness. Again: consciousness uses our brains in the same way we use our computers.
This explains the close correlation between brain activity and conscious experience. It also answers the question posed by some critics of idealism: “If everything is in consciousness, why can’t I know your thoughts? Why can I experience only mine?” This is like asking “Why can’t I look at two computer screens at the same time?” Well, of course, from the perspective of consciousness, which is our true I, there is no problem in experiencing two (or two million) different points of view at the same time, since consciousness transcends space-time. Consciousness knows the thoughts of all of us. But from the limited perspective of our individual consciousness, which is localized in space-time and linked to one particular body and brain, it is the content produced by that particular brain what gives form to (informs) our experience. There’s nothing mysterious in this. We don’t need to postulate dissociative boundaries, or anything else of that sort.
This computational understanding of the brain shouldn’t be confused with computational theories of consciousness, as proposed by cognitive scientists like Joscha Bach. The computational model explains very well how the brain creates our representation of the world and of ourselves. But we shouldn’t confuse the brain-created representation with the thing itself, the map with the territory, like all physicalists do.
The virtual model of the world created by our brain is not akin to the “user interface” postulated by Donald Hoffman. It is only a pale reflection of our actual experience of the world. To see this clearly, it is enough to do a simple experiment. Let’s assume that you are sitting in a room with a window. Go to the window, open it, and look out. Take in the view with all the attention you are capable of. Now close the window, sit down, close your eyes, and try to visualize that view you just saw through the window. Here is the question: is there a significant difference between the two experiences?
The answer is obvious: Yes, there is. There is a huge difference. For some of us (those with aphantasia), it will be completely impossible to evoke any mental image of the view from our window at all. There will only be the conceptual memory of what we saw: there’s a house to the left, a tree to the right, etc. The rest of us will be able to visualize the view to some degree, but it will only be a pale reflection, a comparatively vague and dim version of the real thing.
Let’s suppose that there is a blue sky. When I look through the window, I experience the quale of blueness. When I visualize the blue sky, there is still some pale blueness in my experience, but it is very dim in comparison. Mental images do have qualia, but these are only weak reflections, dim echoes of the qualia we experience when we look at the real world.
Neuroscientists probably have some understanding of how visualization works. It presumably involves the voluntary activation of the neural networks responsible for the processing of visual information in the visual cortex. If this is correct, visualization gives us a good insight into the nature of this information processing: into the nature of what brains do.
Brains don’t produce our experience of the world. They produce our thoughts and mental images, our representations of the world. The world we see, touch, smell, hear, taste, exists all around us, in consciousness. It is as real as can be. It is objective, since it is the same for all of us. It isn’t fundamental, because it exists in space-time. But it isn’t an illusion. It isn’t the image or user interface of something else. It is what it appears to be. It is real.
On the other hand, our thoughts and mental images of the world exist only in our brains. They are subjective. They are only a pale reflection of the real world.
The difference in nature between these two aspects of the physical world, direct experience and mental representation, is so obvious that it seems astounding how physicalist scientists and thinkers could get it so wrong. Physicalists believe that our experience of the world is created by the brain and exists only inside it. And they believe that our mental, conceptual representation of the world is the ultimate, objective truth, and exists out there, independently from our brains.
They got it completely backwards.
Sensation and perception
It’s always fun to jibe at physicalists, wondering at how stupid they can be. But they aren’t stupid, really. There is always a logical explanation for the errors in their thinking. In this case, there is a very good reason for the mistaken notion that our experience of the world is generated by our brains: the difficulty in separating the qualia we experience from the mental interpretation of those qualia.
When we look at the world, we have a direct experience of a large amount of qualia localized in space-time. Our nervous system instantly translates those qualia into sensory information (raw sensory data), and our brain swiftly organizes that information into a coherent picture. This happens so fast that it is almost impossible for us to separate the qualia (which are fundamental and objective, exist everywhere and, when localized, give rise to the physical world) from the mental image, the mental interpretation of those qualia (which is generated by our brain). When we move about the world, our brain is constantly projecting a mental image into the actual world of experience (the world of localized qualia). It does it so thoroughly that we are usually unable to distinguish the mental projection from the real thing.
In other words, our brain doesn’t generate our experience of the world, but it shapes it, it organizes it according to mental concepts and images. This is the actual meaning of perception.
In everyday usage, we often don’t distinguish between sensation and perception. This is obvious in the common term “sense perception”, which conflates both. But in our current discussion, it’s crucial to make a clear distinction between these two elements of our experience. Sensation happens at the level of our sensory cells (the photoreceptor cells in our retina, say), and it consists in the direct experience of localized qualia. Perception happens in our nervous system, and involves the translation of that direct experience into sensory information and the organization and interpretation of that information in the brain.
It is possible to make a distinction also between these two aspects of perception: organization and interpretation. Interpretation involves (at least in the human brain) conceptualization, and constitutes the most elaborate and sophisticated level of perception. It is culturally conditioned. Different human cultures interpret the world they perceive in different ways. In other words, on some level they perceive different worlds. Children learn from their parents and teachers how to interpret their sensations.
Organization of sensations, on the other hand, is the most basic aspect of perception. It is a natural process, biologically conditioned. It involves the organization of sensations coming from different cells in the body into a coherent whole.
We can stop the interpretation aspect quite easily, through concentration practices. With a little effort, it is relatively easy to gaze at a landscape, for example, without interpreting it in any way, without projecting any mental image into it. This provides a very interesting experience, in which an ordinary landscape transforms into something deeply mysterious and awe-inspiring.
In order to bypass the organization aspect of our perception, a much greater feat of concentration is required. This may take years of consistent practice. The only alternative is to use psychedelics as a shortcut. Let’s have a peek at how this may look like.
You are sitting on a grassy hilltop, waiting for the mushrooms to kick in. Gradually, the landscape around you begins to wave. The trees, the mountains, everything around you is waving, like an image reflected on the surface of a rippling sea. And the colours begin to run into each other. The green of the trees blurs into the blue of the sky, and vice versa, like watercolours on wet paper. The usual image of the world seems to be falling apart, dissolving in front of your eyes. The colours you see are brighter and crisper than ever, but they don’t form a coherent picture anymore.
This experience can be understood as the sensations (localizations of qualia) happening in each of your visual cells getting out of sync with each other. The brain, impaired by the psilocybin, can no longer organize them in a perfectly coordinated picture.
Something similar (maybe identical) can happen as a result of mental illness. A famous case is Van Gogh: some of his paintings depict in a quite poignant manner this unsynchronized movement of qualia all over the field of vision. Yet we don’t need to have suffered from mental illness or have tried psychedelics to recognize, at least on an unconscious level, that slightly chaotic visual experience: this is quite certainly the way small infants (whose nervous systems are still developing) see the world.
