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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.