What is the "outside world?"

We understand that the objects that seem so solid to us, including our own bodies, are mostly empty spaces, sparsely filled with atoms and molecules if viewed on a finer level of magnification. Zooming in further into those atoms and molecules, we also find mostly empty spaces apparently inhabited by even tinier entities we call quarks. However, no one knows what a quark “really” is or even if a quark is there at all in the way objects like pebbles, roses, and human bodies seem to be.

Quarks exist in a notional world of probability—a conceptual realm whose objects cannot be said to be physical exactly. Still, quarks are believed in because quantum mathematics can make predictions involving quarks that prove helpful in our ordinary world. For instance, our ubiquitous phones rely on the predictions of quantum mechanics about the behavior of quarks. No quantum math, no 21st-century tech. Nevertheless, from our human perspective, a quark can never be a perception. No one can experience a quark directly.

The world of the supernatural, mysticism, and religion—call it what you will—is like that too—not perceptual but conceptual. There is, however, a difference. The accurate predictions that support quantum theory have no counterpart in spirituality. No verifiable prediction comes from mysticism—only convictions that may be believed in but neither demonstrated nor tested.

Often, religious or spiritual people try to deny this, claiming to have direct experiences that prove to them that the universe is conscious, that there is a cosmic plan, that God or “Oneness” is in charge, that the body is only a “meat suit” for the so-called soul, that death is not the end of the personal self, etc.

Two hundred years ago, Hegel pointed out that to perceive sensations or reality directly is ultimately impossible or incoherent because perception always takes place in a cognitive/conceptual context, and then went on to discuss how this impinges upon the “certainties” in spirituality derived from so-called direct experience.

If one understands this, one will see that reifying a concept as “Truth” just because one claims to have had a so-called “direct experience” of something or other--or even worse, that some spiritual teacher did, and now you believe him or her--is a bit rich.

That lack of skepticism about one’s own perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, along with naivete about the reported perceptions of others, opens the door to low-level magical thinking (something is true because I want it to be) and the kind of cognitive gullibility that has one person sitting at the feet of another. Why take someone’s head and put it on top of the one you already have? Find your own mind.

The idea of one indivisible, overarching consciousness—whether it is called “God” or by another name—that is the source and cause of everything we see and know is a conjecture, not a fact, albeit this is routinely denied, ignored, or finessed by “spiritual” people.

Due to confirmation bias, once someone takes philosophical idealism, such as Advaita Vedanta and its sisters, as capital “T” Truth and claims to have “realized” it, one might be stuck in that posture for a long, long time.

The Conversation, 2024

Antara: Robert, From Hagel’s statement and your further explication, where does the “outside world” fit into this? I know you don’t consider it an illusion in the sense that it doesn’t exist, but it could be considered an illusion in that we can only see it through our own context and perceptions, right?

I Would love to hear you talk more about this, Robert. I love the clarity that you present here.

Thank you, Antara.

You asked for it, you got it (Toyota)!

Yes, I am not convinced that the only thing that exists is consciousness, which is philosophical idealism. I used that technical term above to encourage interested people to investigate it. If one has an open mind, it is easy to find out that many bright people have considered these matters deeply—not just Ramana Maharshi or Adi Shankara—and that the Vedic view taught by the Indian gurus and their Western imitators is not a set of facts about “reality,” although it claims to be, but rather a traditional religious philosophy that goes back to the Upanishads 2500 years ago. Other points of view may be more valid.

As opposed to philosophical idealism, I find philosophical naturalism more likely. Naturalism holds that the mind (conscious awareness) emerged over the vast span of time since the Big Bang, naturally, according to the laws of physics, from material things—from atoms and molecules. I find this more persuasive than idealism because as science marches on, the evidence for how this could have happened grows, although I don’t know how it happened, and no one else does either. We must admit that nobody knows what any of this is, how it got here, where it’s headed, what it means—none of that. For all I know, angels and demons may be battling over my soul. I have no reason to think so but you cannot prove a negative.

In naturalism, awareness or consciousness is said to be an emergent property that arises from a combination of elements of sufficient complexity. Those elements could be biological, such as in a human brain, but don’t necessarily have to be. Perhaps non-biological silicon-based AIs will gain conscious awareness. That remains to be seen. The concept of emergence is essential in understanding the naturalistic point of view. Water is made of two elements, oxygen, and hydrogen, neither of which is wet, but when they combine, a new property, wetness, emerges. In an ant colony, no individual ant is an intelligent architect or planner, but somehow, when they combine forces, complex structures that could not have been predicted emerge.

I understand that many people just want to feel better, quiet their anxieties about life and death, or seek spiritual handholds in a life that can feel pointless or chaotic, and so glom onto beliefs uncritically in hopes of attaining salvation of some kind. If that is where someone is, OK, whatever gets you through the night. But if that’s the impetus, there is no hope at all of being clear on these questions.

We humans have no access to capital “T” Truth. We do not know what is real. What we see, think, and feel as the world or reality, including oneself, are representations of sensory data that are interpreted pre-conceptually prior to awareness and converted somehow into sight, sound, tactile sensations, etcetera. A creature with a different nervous system---a bat, for example—perceives a very different world using echolocation, not eyesight.

To claim that one can become aware of “reality” through “direct experience” is a vain hope. Even our thoughts are only representations expressed in languages that have biases built into them perforce. We learned those languages before the age of reason and never fully shook their biases. For example, the usual subject/object sentence structure implies a doer who is separate from what is done and causes what is done to occur.

Even if one tries to get beyond all conditioning, and relies upon seemingly “deeper” thoughts than ordinary, or upon intuitions, visions, psychedelic adventures, etcetera—which are so-called “direct experiences”—one has no compellingly good reason for trusting them as accurate representations of reality.

So the illusion is not in what we see, but what we make of what we see. In the naturalistic view, what we see has evolved along with the evolution of the human body, so what we see is not so much “real” as adaptive and useful.

For example, if the energies reflected from the surface of an object appear to me as a ripe red apple, and I am moved to pick it and eat it, that nutrition promotes survival. If I feel disgusted at the smell of a rotten egg, and so avoid food poisoning, that will promote survival. So one way of understanding what we see, feel, and otherwise experience is that we perceive what evolution has conditioned us to perceive.

We don’t know what is “out there” or “in here” either. We know what our human primate minds have evolved to perceive, think, and believe, modified in each of us by how we were brought up and all subsequent experiences.