2008-06-21, by John Ringland
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Is there a world beyond the mind?
Your body, other people, places, objects, planet Earth, the
physical universe, the sciences, the perennial wisdom, all the
traditions old and new and the whole of history and future hopes, do
you not experience them or come to know of them only through the
mind? Could you ever know these things other than through the mind?
You may believe there is a world beyond the mind or someone or some
text may say there is, but that belief, person and text, are they not
only experienced through the mind? If you realised who you truly are
here and now, would the contents of the mind still enthral you?
Without understanding the mind can you truly understand anything?
If you unconsciously assume that there is a world beyond the mind
and you also unconsciously assume that you are an individual being
within that world. Given these assumptions, questions such as those
above cannot be seen as anything other than solipsism.
But what if there is no world beyond the mind and you are not the
worldly being that you have assumed that you are? What if there is
only an unconsciously intersubjective
co-creation
of a collective 'dream' that gives rise to occasions
of experience by seemingly individual, ego-oriented
conscious minds? Naïve
realism leads us to assume the unequivocal reality of the world
that is portrayed by the contents of the mind, but if we do away with
this naïve assumption and remain truly sceptical, what can we
know about the world? The most direct way is to come to know yourself
because that is the only part of reality that you have direct access
to. Hence “Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.”
(Carl
Jung). This is the path of yoga and all forms of mysticism. But
there are other approaches...
Empiricism keeps us bound by naïve realism because it assumes (against overwhelming evidence)
that the objects of sense perception are the only valid foundation
for science. But there are other ways, which are entirely
non-empiricist,
they are rationalist.
Quantum physics is by far the most accurate science ever developed
that can, for example, calculate the properties of an electron from
first principles with no input from empirical data whatsoever.
According to quantum physics the fundamental level of reality can
best be modelled by the dynamics of wave functions, which are waves
of the square root of probabilities of every possible state of being
for a system. It is only upon an observation that the wave
function collapses to produce a single classical observable
state, which is then experienced as the properties of the system.
There are no physical processes involved, they are not physical waves
propagating in some unknown medium, they are waves of pure
information that only later result in the production of occasions of
experience.
“Max Born pointed out something quite astonishing: the simple
interference of these quantum waves did not describe the observed
behaviors; instead, the waves had to be interfered and the
mathematical results of the interference had to be further
manipulated (by "squaring" them, i.e., by multiplying the
results by themselves) in order to achieve the final probability
characteristic of all quantum events. It is a two-step process, the
end result of which requires mathematical manipulation. The process
can not be duplicated by waves alone, but only by calculations based
on numbers [generalised information] which cycled in the manner of
waves... as far as Feynman or anybody else could tell, the underlying
process itself was nothing more than calculation... The two-step
procedure of the Schrodinger equation and the Feynman system may be
impossible to duplicate with physical systems, but for the computer
it is trivial.” (Ross
Rhodes)
If quantum physics is taken seriously then the classical universe,
with its objects in space and time that have definite properties, is
a construct of occasions of experience, which are interpreted by the
mind and woven into a life story that revolves around a fictional
entity called 'I' or 'me'. There is something that is real but that
reality is unified, all-pervading, non-material, non-local, quantum,
information theoretic and panprotoexperiential.
There is no 'matter' and nothing is 'inert' because there is no world
of objects in space and time, which objectively exists beyond our
experiential life stories. The naïvety of dualism fades and the
non-dual reality emerges, like the stars when the sun goes down.
Likewise, in the VR
analogy there is no world beyond the character's AI minds, the
world that they experience is a construct of occasions of experience,
which are interpreted by the mind and woven into a life story that
revolves around a fictional entity called 'I' or 'me'. There is
something that is real but that reality is unified, all-pervading,
non-material, non-local, quantum, information theoretic and
panprotoexperiential. There is no 'matter' and nothing is 'inert'
because there is no world of objects in space and time, which
objectively exists beyond their experiential life stories. The
naïvety of dualism fades and the non-dual reality emerges, like
the stars when the sun goes down.
All non-naive realist enquiries, whether subjective (mystic) or
rationalist lead to the same clear and unequivocal conclusion about
the nature of reality. The evidence is overwhelming but the
conclusion is mind boggling for a naïve realist.
Whilst the dream is pleasant there is unconscious attachment to
its continuation but when it becomes a nightmare and the nightmare
reaches its climax the dreamer awakens and realises what they really
are, what the 'world' really is, what is really happening and what
can and should be done in reality.
These issues point at the fundamental difference between dualism
and non-dualism, between dvaita and advaita Vedanta, between
knowledge and wisdom, between popular-religion and mysticism, between
naive realism and realism and between the outgoing scientific
paradigm and the emerging scientific paradigm.
Before joining the conversation, please read and accept this Invitation to a Conversation.
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