No View from Outside

A Reader, 2021

Tim Miller has written a review of the Depending On No-Thing audiobook. In it, he says:

“It’s curious. Robert writes very clearly and lays out his ideas so simply, yet readers who pose questions struggle so hard to put in their own words what they think he’s saying. It’s not because of how or what he writes, I’m convinced. It’s because we’ve all been trained to look at reality in way more complex, convoluted ways than Robert does, piling one metaphysical assumption upon another. And we have so much trouble letting go of all that, even just for a brief time as we try to wrap our heads around his spare and stark ideas.”

Tim has it right, and the part I want to stay with is his last line, the trouble of letting go even briefly. I feel the force of that. What I am describing is simple, but simple is not the same as easy, and the difficulty is not a failure of intelligence. It is that the mind reaches, by long habit, for something solid to stand on, and I am suggesting it stand for a moment on nothing and notice that it can.

My outlook asks very little of the reader. I avoid truth claims, so understanding what I say does not require believing or embracing any of it. It requires only that you look, and that you resist, for a little while, the pull to reach past what you see toward some “Truth” underneath that would make it official. I’ll try now to say it plainly, and slowly, in the hope that the simplicity comes through.

Here is where it starts. Whatever I say about the world, I find I am saying from somewhere, from within some field of sensation, mood, memory, language, thought, and the capacity to reflect. Everything I have learned is in that field too: my sense of physics, psychology, and philosophy. All of it. And when I look for the edge of the field, the place where it stops and something else begins, I do not find it. I find only more of the same looking. Whatever I point to, I point to from within, never from outside. For convenience, I will call this whole circumstance the loop.

The loop is closed, in a particular sense. Anything that seems to lie outside it can only be taken as a guess made from within. Suppose I try to trace the loop’s edges. I have to do it with the same means that built, and keep building, the world I know in the first place—the same senses, the same concepts, the same habits of thought. I see no other instrument to reach for. This is not me confessing to weak eyesight, and it is not a passing mood. It is closer to a plain feature of the situation: whatever can only register its own states, and report them, finds no way to step clear of them and check them against a world standing there on its own.

A few things follow from this. Not promises about how reality is, but limits on what I can honestly say.

The first concerns cause, and here I want to be careful to claim no more than the loop allows, because this is the place I am most often misread. When I look closely at what happens in me, I don’t find a self issuing any of it. Thoughts, moods, and reactions bubble up from nowhere I can point to. The words arrive as I write them. I never catch myself producing them. When I look for the one who authored them, the self that might be the source of a thought rather than the place a thought lands, I don’t find that self. What the looking gives me is arrivals without an author, and no more than that. It does not tell me whether those arrivals are fixed by what came before or simply surface, uncaused. Knowing that is beyond what I can see from in here.

Now I will admit a leaning, and try to be honest about what it is. Faced with that gap, I find myself drawn to the view that the arrivals are caused, through and through, even where the causes do not show. This is what I have elsewhere called determinism. But I notice that my pull toward it is not a finding. It is a basin.

Picture a landscape with a low place in it, a hollow where the ground rises on all sides. Rain anywhere on the surrounding slopes runs down into that hollow and collects there, because that is where the shape of the land sends it. A basin, in the systems sense, is the same idea moved into the mind: a low place that the flow of thought tends to run toward and settle in, not because it was chosen, but because that is how the ground lies.

The scientific frame is a deep basin in my system. From inside it, a cause-and-effect universe feels like the default, and it would take strong evidence to move me. I have to remember that this is the basin asserting itself, not the evidence speaking. A devoted Vedantin sits in a different basin, one where consciousness is the ground of all. From inside that basin, my picture looks as strange as the Vedantin’s picture looks to me. So I keep the word determinism, because it names my inclination. I do not raise it to a truth, because the loop that does the leaning cannot step outside itself to check whether the world leans the same way.

Looking and not finding the author is enough to unseat a figure most of us carry without noticing, the chooser standing outside the loop, working its controls. When I look for that figure, that free agent set apart from the field, directing it from some clear space of its own, I do not find it. I find the loop doing what it does. The felt sense of “I choose” may arrive, or not. But most often, I am simply turning an idea over, and at some point it has taken on weight, without my having chosen it. Sometimes there is a sense of weighing and selecting, sometimes none. Either way, none of that is denied. None of it is controlled from a standpoint outside the arising. Choosing happens when it happens. The chooser, set apart, does not turn up.

The same looking shows me why there is no exit from the loop. Trying to reach past the loop toward an outside turns out to be one more event inside the loop, one more thought, one more conjecture, made of the same material as everything else. I never find the step that would carry the system beyond itself to survey its own border or to inspect a reality standing free of mind. The view from outside is not just missing, as if it were somewhere I have not yet explored. As far as I can tell from here, I find nothing the loop does that provides it, though I cannot rule out that something might.

Here I find myself in agreement with Immanuel Kant on one central point. The world as we know it depends on mind for its form. Space and time are not features I simply come across out there somewhere, already laid out. They are how the loop makes sense of whatever reaches it. Cause-and-effect works the same way. It’s not a brute fact stumbled upon in the wild, but a way of relating one event to another so that experience can hold together as a coherent field instead of a blur. In that sense, the ordinary world, the world of daily life and of science, too, is already a world of appearances—of phenomena, to use the old word. Shaped, through and through, by how the loop operates.

I do not mean anything crude by this, as though my coffee cup were floating somewhere in my head. Kant has a phrase for a commonsense version, “empirical realism,” and on this I am with him. Within the conditions established by our forms of perception and our concepts, Kant said, there is a stable external world, and we can know it as it appears. This is a lawful, repeatable field of appearances, tables and chairs, bodies, oceans, rain storms, instruments of measurement, and the people and pets we love, and it is not arbitrary in the least. It holds together. It shows regularities you can track, model, and rely on, regularities that do not bend to whether you believe in them. Still, this view may not go as far as the strict realist wants. Whatever counts, for me, as the world or reality arrives in the form this loop imposes, and I have no way to know how things might stand if they were not being met through such a form. There is, to put it shortly, no view from outside the hall of mirrors.

The hall of mirrors is not a piece of mysticism, and I do not want it heard that way. It is just what happens when a system folds back on itself. A loop that includes recursion not only takes in input, but can model itself taking in input. Pain does not merely occur; there is also “I am in pain.” A thought does not merely arise; there is “I am thinking.” And then reflection can turn and take that “I” as its own object, “I am the one who notices I am thinking,” and the turning can go on from there, level after level. Or, to stay with the metaphor, reflections wherever one looks.

Each turn sets up another mirror, and not one of them opens onto a space beyond reflection. The whole structure points back at itself. The loop models itself, then models the modeling, and so on inward. And somewhere in all that folding, a stable pattern forms, like a whirlpool in a stream perhaps, and holds — a “me” that seems to sit at the center of what is happening and run it.

This is not a fresh discovery but a model the system builds of itself, stable enough to be recognizably me, yet continually shifting. From the inside, that pattern feels like a source. It says “I decide,” “I choose,” “I know.” But regarded more plainly, it feels like a late arrival. The self shows up after the work and takes itself to be the one who did it.

In calling all this a hall of mirrors, I don’t mean illusion against a hidden reality. That phrase is a reminder, mostly to myself, that whatever I call “me” and whatever I call “world” are assembled through layer upon layer of representation, and that none of those layers ever steps outside representation into the bare thing itself. Even my self-criticism is one more reflection. Even “I see that I am caught in the loop” is an image in the hall of mirrors, not a window out of it. This is where I part ways with much mainstream philosophy, which grants itself a place to stand outside the conditions it describes, a vantage point from which to map them. I do not find that place. And I do not exempt this description from the hall either, since saying I find no exit is itself a report from inside, not a verdict from above.

It may help to set this beside the familiar positions. Classical realism holds that there is a mind-independent world that we can come to know as it is. Classical idealism holds that reality depends on the mind for its very being. Kant threads between them: the everyday world is real and knowable, but its form—space, time, and cause—is supplied by mind, and behind appearances stands the thing-in-itself, which we cannot know. The cup is real, an object you could hand to me, yet the cup as it is in itself is closed to me. So far, I am with Kant. But then he carries this blueprint into morality, where freedom, God, and immortality enter, not as knowledge, but as postulates, axioms that reason must assume to make sense of the moral life. That is the move where, from my vantage inside the loop, Kant’s schema begins to outrun what can be validated.

I accept that the world as known depends on mind for its form. That is the hall of mirrors, the loop’s way of arranging what comes in. I accept empirical realism inside that frame, the stable, workable field we can map and move through together. What I do not accept is the further claim that this workable consistency amounts to contact with a mind-independent reality as it is in itself. The field of experience is consistent and in many ways predictable. What that proves about a beyond, I cannot say.

And I do not swing to the other side either. I do not say reality depends on mind for its being, or that it is all mind, as the idealists do. I am neither the realist sure of his access to an actual outside nor the idealist sure there is no outside to have access to. I say only that I cannot rule any of it out. I stay with the loop and its form, and whatever might lie past it I hold as a blank I refuse to fill in, nothing more.

This is the whole of my caution, and it is worth noticing that it cuts both ways. If I say “there is no outside,” I am pretending to know more about the loop’s border than the loop could ever tell me. If I say “there is an outside,” I am doing the very same thing, just facing the other direction. Both sentences reach past what the system can reach. I decline both at once with the phrase “not ruled out.” This is not a clever dodge. It is the honest mark of a boundary I genuinely cannot see across, and it lets me set the question down where it actually lies instead of pretending to have settled it.

There is a practical edge to this that keeps it from floating off into pure abstraction. Inside the loop, plenty of claims offer concrete ways to check them. “This table holds my weight.” “This drug lowers blood pressure.” “This sentence is grammatical.” Each of those can be tested against repeatable experience, against the constraints of logic, against whatever counts as evidence here, and each can come out right or wrong. Within the hall, they are perfectly truth-apt. They are part of the ordinary, indispensable work of telling one thing from another.

Claims about an outside are a different animal. Nothing the loop can do will test them, confirm them, or knock them down. In my view, they fall outside the range where “true” and “false” have any grip, not because such claims are false, but because they are not even in the arena where those words do their work. They map the edge of my ignorance, not the structure of reality. That, in the end, is why I stay close to what shows up and stop short of metaphysics. Not from lack of nerve, but because the words fail there, and I would rather stop where they give out than keep talking past it.

Looking at metaphysical talk from a slightly different angle, a psychological one, I can regard it as behavior. We are biological creatures. I know some people try to deny that, but, well... Kant. As living beings, we encounter facts we cannot talk our way around: that everything is contingent, that we are fragile, that we age, that we die. Seen in purely physical terms, those facts can look bleak, so the loop responds in a very human way. It generates gods, afterlives, cosmic plans, absolutes, grounds of being, schemes of liberation, and nondual oceans. I do not say this dismissively, although at times I have. Such reaching for succor is among the most human things we do. These constructs can steady a frightened person, give a life its shape, and make suffering into something a person can carry. None of that, though, turns them into knowledge of an outside. What I can actually see is the activity, the reaching itself. What it reaches toward, if anything is there, I cannot see from here.

And I notice, in myself, that I am simply not drawn to that kind of speculation about what the universe “really is” behind the appearances. It never resolves into anything I can test or use, but becomes another layer of story, another strand in the loop’s long effort to manage its own situation. Other people find real joy in that work, and I mean it warmly when I say I wish them well in it. It is just not where my own attention wants to rest.

I see morality that way, too. Concern for others, the recoil from causing harm, the pull toward fairness and toward giving back what we are given, all of that is plainly present in experience, and as far as the evidence reaches, it runs deep in the kind of social animal we are. Cooperation, then, does not have to be obedience to some moral signal beamed in from beyond. It can be seen as an evolving set of answers our species finds to the standing problem of living alongside one another. And cooperation of that kind tends to steady a loop like this one rather than tear it apart. So I do not find that I need to posit an absolute source behind moral feeling to account for it.

Now hear what I am not saying. I am not saying responsibility is a fiction. I am not saying that because no chooser stands outside the loop, nothing is owed, and anything goes. Whenever determinism comes up, that is the angle people hit on, and I think it is a mistake. Concern and obligation are as real as anything else in the loop is real. They are present, they do their work, and they matter. They have consequences in ordinary life, philosophy notwithstanding. What I set aside is only Kant’s extra step, the move that grounds morality in a noumenal freedom he claims must stand outside experience. I set that claim aside for the very same reason I set aside every claim about an outside: I cannot see it from here.

The responsibility stays right where it is. Only the presumed higher realm goes, and that presumption was never what made responsibility binding in the first place. The loop’s own cooperative intelligence is the basis. Morality as it actually works among us, day to day, is not some thinned-out substitute for a real morality that would need a metaphysical foundation underneath it. It is what the word honestly points to. And it is enough.

Moral doctrine is a different matter, and I trust it less. It tends to take that living, flexible cooperative intelligence and freeze it into fixed rules and handed-down values, which can turn coercive, even cruel. And the actual texture of people living together tends, given time, to wear those rules back down.

There is a cost to this perspective, and I would rather name it than pretend it away. It means letting go of certain satisfactions. The satisfaction of believing you have touched reality as it truly is. The satisfaction of treating your own judgments as something close to oracular. The satisfaction of keeping a metaphysical escape hatch in reserve, just in case. Set those down, and “knowledge,” in the grand and consoling sense, shrinks.

What is left is smaller, and I find it sufficient, which still slightly surprises me. Within the loop, patterns can be watched, described, and tested. The form of the world can be spelled out, how space and time work in this kind of cognition, how causality operates, how a self takes shape. The workings of belief and story can be followed where they lead. The limits of what can honestly be asserted can be marked, and marked again. None of that is nothing. It is, in fact, most of a life’s worth of looking, and there is a real ease, not a resignation, in not reaching past it. The reaching is the strain. When the reach is set down, what is left is not defeat. It is more like setting down a heavy thing you had not noticed you were carrying.

So in the end, description comes before speculation, and gladly. I stay with what shows up in the hall of mirrors, and I treat the mirrors themselves as the thing worth studying, rather than straining to see them as the windows they were never going to be.