Education and the meaning of life

 

Education is universally recognized as a key prerequisite for a healthy, vibrant, viable society. Hardly anyone would dispute that. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be a broad consensus on what one should be educated for. Although there certainly are many more facets to this question, I will limit myself here to contrasting two of them, which I consider most relevant to our present time: utilitarian education versus philosophical education.

A utilitarian education aims to equip one for the performance of practical tasks that have a direct and relatively short-term function in a society. Electricians fix power distribution networks; engineers build dams, computers and all kinds of handy apparatuses; physicians fix our bodies; diplomats avoid wars by resolving conflicts. The value and importance of these practical tasks to our society is unquestionable: through them, we can live longer, physically more healthily and perform our own tasks more effectively. But they ignore bigger questions: why do we live in the first place? How can we express our full potential in the world? What should we know and understand in order to live meaningful, fulfilling lives?

This is where a philosophical education comes in; an education that equips us to look critically and thoughtfully at the world around and inside us; an education that helps us understand nature, history and the dynamics of the human mind; an education that helps us take the lead in driving our lives to meaningful goals, as opposed to falling reflexively into the role of mindless consumers who only in their deathbeds come around to asking, ‘What has all this been about anyway?’ A philosophical education equips us to make something truly meaningful out of our lives.

We live in an age that – especially after the 1960s – turned so drastically towards pragmatism that we’ve nearly forgotten to ask why we live in the first place. Utilitarian advancements are important in that they extend and optimize our lives at a practical level, but leaving it at that is akin to restoring and turbo-charging your car so you can leave it in the garage. We’re so focused on living longer, optimizing the performance of necessary tasks, communicating faster and more frequently with one another, accumulating wealth and, most visibly, consuming and entertaining our way to depression that we’ve almost entirely forgotten to ask what this is all about. Why do we live? What is love all about? What is art all about? What have philosophers and poets alike been trying to say for the past few thousand years? What is going on?

It’s legitimate to optimize our lives at a practical level, but obviously not at the cost of failing to explore what life is about in the first place. Failing to provide a philosophical education that foments the growth and expression of thoughtful and sensitive human beings, attuned to their own place in nature, cannot possibly be a healthy way forward. Yet, the educational system in most modern societies today is almost entirely focused on utilitarian aspects. Why is this so? It doesn’t take much imagination to understand: a purely utilitarian education tends to turn people into controllable tools; cogs in the machine. Unequipped to even conceive coherently of the higher questions of existence, we’re left with no option but to blindly leverage our utilitarian skills day in and day out, contributing to economic output and wealth generation. From the point of view of entrenched power structures – which stand to gain most from this wealth generation – the benefits may seem to outweigh the risks: not only does the current educational approach favor production, it may be seen to increase social stability, reduce unrest and, perhaps most importantly, ensure the preservation of the power structures. The more unquestioningly one performs one’s tasks in the system, the less commotion and disturbances are to be expected.

Of course this isn’t natural. Human beings aren’t tools. We’re here to express ourselves – what else? – not to be cogs in a mechanism. A civilization of stupefied drones going blindly about their practical tasks is constantly flirting with collapse. But the power structures may believe that this can be managed through the right combination of alcohol, tobacco, television, pornography, commoditized shopping culture and, in more severe cases, cognitive behavioral therapy145 and dependencycreating psychiatric drugs.146The mainstream metaphysics of materialism enables this by rendering culturally legitimate the outrageous notion that unhappy people are simply malfunctioning biological robots.

The way to wake up from this all-too-real nightmare is a form of education that we, worryingly, seem to have lost familiarity with. Only a philosophical education can provide a truly human alternative for our future. Some may argue that, without a strong focus on optimizing the practical aspects of life, we would be so busy with securing food and shelter that we wouldn’t have time or opportunity to consider philosophical questions. Yet, a superficial look at the world’s pre-literate cultures proves this to be simply false: aboriginal societies have always made significant room for philosophy – which, in their case, we call mythology – despite their ever-present and rather formidable survival challenges.147 We look upon them as primitive and unenlightened whilst, in fact, it’s we who have become sick. Unfortunately, our sickness seems to play right into the hands of entrenched power structures and, in this way, self-perpetuate.

From: BRIEF PEEKS BEYOND

by Bernardo Kastrup 

The physicalist worldview as neurotic ego-defense mechanism

 14.1 Abstract

The physicalist worldview is often portrayed as a dispassionate interpretation of reality motivated purely by observable facts. In this article, ideas of both depth and social psychology are used to show that this portrayal may not be accurate. Physicalism—whether it ultimately turns out to be philosophically correct or not1—is hypothesized to be partly motivated by the neurotic endeavor to project onto the world attributes that help one avoid confronting unacknowledged aspects of one’s own inner life. Moreover, contrary to what most people assume, physicalism creates an opportunity for the intellectual elites who develop and promote it to maintain a sense of meaning in their own lives through fluid compensation. However, because this compensatory strategy does not apply to a large segment of society, it creates a schism—with corresponding tensions—that may help explain the contemporary conflict between neo-atheism and religious belief.

14.2 Introduction

A worldview is a narrative in terms of which we relate to ourselves and reality at large. It is a kind of cultural operating system that gives us tentative answers to foundational questions such as ‘What are we?’ ‘What is the nature of reality?’ ‘What is the purpose of life?’ and so on (Kastrup 2014). Although many different worldviews vie for dominance today, the academically endorsed physicalist narrative defines the mainstream, despite its many difficulties (Kastrup 2014, 2015, Nagel 2012). This reigning worldview posits that physical entities outside consciousness are the building blocks of reality. Consciousness, in turn, is supposedly an epiphenomenon or emergent property of certain complex arrangements of these entities. As such, under physicalism, consciousness must be reducible to physical arrangements outside and independent of experience (Stoljar 2016).

Physicalism is often portrayed as a worldview that, in contrast to, for example, religion or spirituality, is based solely on objective facts. The present article, however, hypothesizes that the formative principles and motivations underpinning the physicalist narrative—whether it ultimately turns out to be philosophically correct or not—are partly subjective, reflecting neurotic ego-defense maneuvers meant, as described by Vaillant, to “protect the individual from painful emotions, ideas, and drives” (1992: 3). This becomes clear when one lifts core concepts of depth psychology to the social and cultural spheres. However, as a mostly clinical approach, depth psychology requires some elaboration before being applied at a theoretical level.

The modern understanding of depth psychology can be traced back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the works of Frederic Myers, Pierre Janet, William James, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (Kelly et al. 2009). Its foundational inference is that the human psyche comprises two main subdivisions: a conscious and an ‘unconscious’ segment. The conscious segment of the psyche comprises experiences a person has introspective access to and can report. According to the analytical school of depth psychology, the “ego” is defined as the experiential center of this segment (von Franz 1964: 161), and it is in this specific sense that I use the word ‘ego’ throughout the present article. In contrast, the so-called ‘unconscious’ segment of the psyche comprises mental contents the person has no introspective access to and cannot report. Nonetheless, depth psychologists assert that ‘unconscious’ mental contents can, and do, influence the person’s manifest thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Because the ability to report an experience is a metacognitive capacity on top of the experience itself (Schooler 2002), a more rigorous articulation of the difference between the conscious and ‘unconscious’ segments of the psyche is this: conscious mental contents are those a person both experiences and knows that he or she experiences them. ‘Unconscious’ mental contents, on the other hand, are those the person either does not experience or does not know that he or she experiences them (Kastrup 2014: 104-110). In other words, conscious mental contents fall within the field of egoic self-reflection and, therefore, can be reported, whereas ‘unconscious’ mental contents escape this field and, therefore, cannot be reported. Indeed, the existence of mental contents that are experienced but cannot be reported—even to oneself—is now well established in neuroscience, which has prompted the emergence of so-called “no-report paradigms” (Tsuchiya et al. 2015).

However, as clinical psychologists can only gauge consciousness based on what their patients report, anything outside the field of self-reflection is indistinguishable from true unconsciousness. This explains the somewhat inaccurate terminology choice of the founders of depth psychology.2Some critics have questioned the existence of an ‘unconscious’ segment of the psyche on philosophical grounds (Stannard 1980: 51-81). However, recent empirical results in neuroscience show the presence of broad cognitive activity that individuals cannot report, but which nonetheless causally conditions the individuals’ manifest thoughts, feelings or behaviors (Augusto 2010, Eagleman 2011, Westen 1999). Recent neuroimaging studies of the psychedelic state have also corroborated the depth-psychological view that ego suppression—in the form of reduction of neural activity in the brain’s default mode network—brings otherwise ‘unconscious’ mental contents into awareness (Carhart-Harris et al. 2012, Carhart-Harris et al. 2016, Palhano-Fontes et al. 2015).

On the basis of these empirical results, the core idea of depth psychology—that is, that a segment of the psyche that escapes self-reflective introspection can causally condition our thoughts, feelings and behaviors—cannot be dismissed. And because cultural narratives are the compound result of an aggregation of the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of individuals, depth-psychological insights are valid starting points for an analysis of the psychological underpinnings of our culture’s mainstream worldview.

In Sections 14.3 and 14.4, I review ways in which the physicalist narrative can give us permission to avoid confronting unwanted affects in the ‘unconscious’ segment of our psyche. In Section 14.5, I elaborate on how physicalism can conceivably even nurture its proponents’ sense of meaning in life. This latter section is based on theories of social psychology, rather than depth psychology, but it still leverages the notion of an ‘unconscious’: in hypothesizing that physicalism is an expression of fluid compensation, it presupposes that cognitive processes outside the field of self-reflection influence the feelings, thoughts and opinions subjects express. Finally, Section 14.6 briefly sums up the key ideas defended in this article.

14.3 Ego protection through projection

According to depth psychology, a neurosis is the expression of an inner psychic conflict caused by the ego’s refusal to acknowledge, confront and ultimately integrate unwanted affects rising from the ‘unconscious’ (Jung 2014: 137). To keep these affects at bay, the ego uses a variety of defense mechanisms, among which denial, distortion, dissociation, repression and so on (Vaillant 1992). A particularly common defense mechanism is projection (Ibid.), whereby one circumvents the need to confront ego-threatening forces within oneself by ascribing the corresponding attributes to the outer environment. As such, projections can be said to partly hijack and manipulate one’s worldview in an attempt to prevent short-term suffering. My hypothesis is that, through projection, the physicalist worldview gives us permission to avoid confronting some of what we find disagreeable within ourselves. This can be achieved in a variety of subtle ways.

For instance, we all have a sense of our own existence and identity. Lucid introspection reveals that the root of this sense is our consciousness—our capacity to be subjects of experience. After all, if we were not conscious, what could we know of ourselves? How could we even assert our own existence? Being conscious is what it means to be us. In an important sense—perhaps even the only important sense—we are first and foremost consciousness itself, the rest of our self-image arising afterward, as thoughts and images constructed in consciousness.

From this perspective, the physicalist narrative’s attempt to reduce consciousness to physical entities outside subjectivity is counterintuitive, for it divorces the alleged nature of consciousness from our felt sense of identity. We do not feel as though we were a bunch of physical particles bouncing around inside our skull. Instead, we feel that we are the subjective ‘space’ wherein our experiences unfold, including our ideas about physical particles. Hence, there is a sense in which the physicalist narrative can be said to project the felt essence of ourselves onto something distinctly other. According to it, we are not really ‘here,’ grounded in our subjective sense of being, but somewhere ‘over there,’ in an abstract world fundamentally beyond the felt concreteness of our inner lives. As such, the physicalist narrative entails an emptying out of what it means to be us; a kind of secular kenosis. “I am no ghost, just a shell,” laments the art character Annlee (Huyghe & Parreno 2003: 35), whose predicament is that of many of us in contemporary society.

The kenosis entailed by the physicalist narrative can exonerate its proponents from responsibility for their choices and actions. Consider this passage by Sam Harris: “Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I … could not inspect or influence” (2012a: 7-8, emphasis added). The projection of responsibility here is clear and the corresponding release described by Harris himself: “Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal“ (2012a: 46, emphasis added). Indeed, under the ethos of such a worldview, there is no concrete reason for guilt or regret, for we allegedly are not what we experience ourselves to be. We are not responsible for what happens here because we are not—and have never been—really here. We are not ghosts in the machine but ghosts conjured up by the machine. In a significant sense, we do not really exist.

As a matter of fact, some proponents of the physicalist narrative go as far as to deny that consciousness exists. “Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct.” These words of neuroscientist Michael Graziano (2016) should give anyone pause for thought. Here we have consciousness—whatever it may intrinsically be—denying that consciousness exists. Philosopher Daniel Dennett (1991) also claimed that consciousness is an illusion, a claim that seems to immediately contradict itself. After all, where do illusions occur if not in consciousness?3 By appealing to metaphysical abstractions fundamentally beyond experience, such denials of our felt selves achieve a form of deliverance somewhat analogous to religious absolution. Surprisingly, as we will later see, they even help restore a sense of meaningfulness in life, following what I will call ‘ontological trauma.’

The structure of these denials is fairly clear: first, consciousness weaves the conceptual notion that certain aspects of its own dynamics somehow exist outside itself; then, it projects its own essence onto these aspects. The corresponding dislocation of identity is apparent—and its neurotic character easy to grasp—with an analogy: imagine a painter who, having painted a self-portrait, points at it and declares himself to be the portrait. This, in essence, is what physicalists do, whether it is philosophically justifiable or not.4 Their consciousness conceptualizes self-portraits within itself. Sometimes these self-portraits take the form of electrical impulses and neurotransmitter releases in the brain (Koch 2004). Other times, they take the shape of quantum transitions or potentials (Tarlaci & Pregnolato 2016). Whatever the case, their consciousness always points to a conceptual entity it creates within itself and then declares itself to be this entity. It dismisses its own primary, first-person point of view in favor of an abstract third-person perspective. Consider Dennett’s words: “The way to answer these ‘first-person point of view’ stumpers is to ignore the first-person point of view and examine what can be learned from the third-person point of view” (1991: 336, emphasis added). The contempt for the subject of experience—the primary datum of existence and one’s own felt identity—is palpable here; the kenosis nearly total.

The physicalist narrative may also give us permission to carve out and dismiss—again through the kenosis of projection—the most difficult aspects of our inner lives: our felt emotions. According to it, the feeling of an emotion is the internal perception of an “action program” triggered by certain stimuli (Damasio 2011). Although the action program itself is important insofar as it helps us survive and reproduce, the accompanying feeling of emotion is, in a sense, a mere side effect of the program’s execution. For instance, the sight of another human being facing a predicament is a stimulus that triggers actions meant to help the victim and, consequently, increase the social cachet of the action taker. The feeling of compassion, in turn, is supposedly nothing but the inner perception of this evolutionarily useful reactive schema (Immordino-Yang et al. 2009); it allegedly has no primary or fundamental significance. Under such a narrative, it is easier to go into denial about our emotional lives when the going gets tough. We feel justified to dismiss or repress our traumas and demons, avoiding the often-painful work of psychological integration. The physicalist narrative provides a foundation for rationalizing the choice of living an unexamined, superficial life. To a person desperate to avoid the specter of immediate and pungent suffering, the benefits of this stance may seem to far outweigh its potential long-term implications.

Surprisingly, the physicalist narrative can even offer us reassurance about death. According to it, there is literally nothing to fear about death itself, because it is allegedly the end of all experience, including the experiences of fear and pain. All of our problems and suffering are guaranteed to end at that point. The great and scary unknown of the experiential realm beyond physical existence vanishes in one fell swoop; the greatest angst of humankind is conquered. The psychological allure of this idea is powerful, yet most people do not seem to ever stop to consider it. We have come to take for granted the comforts that our mainstream worldview grants us.

To sum it up, by denying our felt sense of existence and identity, the physicalist narrative creates an opportunity to clear the ego of ultimate responsibility. By denying the fundamental reality of emotions, it creates an opportunity to protect the ego from a confrontation with far more powerful forces. And by projecting our ontological essence onto ephemeral arrangements of matter, it creates an opportunity to protect the ego from what has historically been the greatest angst of humankind: the experiential unknown of the after-death state.

(...)

14.5 The question of meaning

Meaning—in the sense of significance and purpose—is probably the greatest asset any human being can possess. Psychotherapist Victor Frankl (1991), who practiced and led groups while detained in a concentration camp during World War II, asserted that the will-to-meaning is the most dominant human drive, in contrast to Nietzsche’s will-to-power and Freud’s will-to-pleasure. Meaning is so powerful that, as Jung remarked, it “makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything” (1995: 373). Philip K. Dick’s alter ego Horselover Fat, in the novel Valis, embodies the essence of this drive: “Fat had no concept of enjoyment; he understood only meaning,” wrote Dick (2001: 92). Like Fat, many of us see meaning as a higher value than power or pleasure. Our motivation to live rests in there being meaning in our lives. Today, we need meaning more than ever, for as Paul Tillich (1952) lucidly observed, the greatest anxieties of our culture are precisely those of doubt and meaninglessness.And here is where an argument is often made for the impartiality of physicalism: as a worldview that, by turning the universe into a mechanical contraption fueled by mere chance, drains the meaning out of life, it cannot possibly be a neurotic ego-defense mechanism—or so the argument goes. Instead, the physicalist narrative must represent a courageous admission by “tough people who face the bleak facts” (Watts 1989: 65). It must embody an objective assessment of reality, not an emotional, irrational wish-fulfillment maneuver akin to religion. Compelling as it may seem at first, this argument fails careful scrutiny, for its premise is false.

Indeed, according to the Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM) of social psychology (Heine, Proulx & Vohs 2006)—which is perhaps better seen in the context of a broader theory of psychological defense (Hart 2013)—we can derive a sense of meaning from four different sources: self-esteem, closure, belonging, and symbolic immortality. In other words, we can find meaning in life through (a) cultivating a feeling of personal worth, (b) resolving doubts and ambiguities, (c) being part of something bigger and longer-lasting than ourselves, and (d) leaving something of significance behind—such as professional achievements—in the form of which we can ‘live on’ after physical death. A society’s mainstream cultural narrative conditions how meaning can be derived from each of these four sources.

The key idea behind the MMM is that of fluid compensation as an ego-defense mechanism: If one of the four sources of meaning is threatened, an individual will tend to automatically compensate by seeking extra meaning from the other three sources. For instance, threats to self-esteem may cause the individual to reaffirm his or her model of reality, thereby bolstering closure.

As van Tongeren and Green (2010) have shown, a transcendent source of meaning, such as religion, plays the same role in fluid compensation as the other four sources. For instance, individuals tend to reaffirm their religious beliefs following disruption to their meaning system, in an effort to protect the latter. Van Tongeren’s and Green’s experiments have not only empirically substantiated the MMM, they have also shown that even subliminal threats to meaning trigger fluid compensation, strongly indicating that the ‘unconscious’ is integral to the process.

With this as background, my suggestion is that the physicalist narrative, in addition to being a rational hypothesis for making sense of the world,7 may be an expression of fluid compensation by intellectual elites. In other words, instead of a threat to meaning, the physicalist narrative may actually reflect an attempt by these elites to protect and restore their sense of meaning through bolstering closure, self-esteem and symbolic immortality. The disruption that may have originally led to this compensatory move occurred around the mid- to late-19th century.

Indeed, it was at that time that we lost our ability to spontaneously relate to religious myths without linear intellectual scrutiny. “With Descartes and Kant, the philosophical relation between Christian belief and human rationality had grown ever more attenuated. By the late nineteenth century, with few exceptions, that relation was effectively absent,” wrote Tarnas (2010: 311). The myths that had hitherto offered us meaning through the promise of literal immortality and metaphysical teleology became untenable. Taylor, who richly chronicled this historical transition, characterized the corresponding loss of meaning rather broadly and generally as “a wide sense of malaise at the disenchanted world, a sense of it as flat, empty” (2007: 302). He even hinted at fluid compensation when speaking of “a multiform search for something within, or beyond [the world], which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence” (Ibid.).

While acknowledging that this generalized malaise was the matrix of what followed, I submit that a more specific, forceful and personal threat to meaning was necessary to mobilize the extraordinary level of academic and intellectual endorsement amassed by physicalism. After all—as Taylor himself described through what he called “the nova effect”—the malaise, in and by itself, fostered not only physicalism but also an explosion of myriad other worldviews.

I hypothesize that a profound and disturbing change in the intellectual elites’ understanding of the nature of their own being—that is, an ontological trauma—was the specific, forceful and personal trigger that helped congeal the physicalist narrative. Having lost religion, the elites were left with the prospect of physical deterioration without the path to transcendence previously offered by an immortal soul. Hence, they were forced to face the inexorability of their own approaching death. And as we know from Terror Management Theory, mortality salience is a formidable threat to meaning (Pyszczynski, Greenberg & Solomon 1997) empirically shown to motivate investment in palliative worldviews (Burke, Martens & Faucher 2010). Ontological trauma may have thus triggered fluid compensation and ultimately led to the intellectual elites’ championing of the physicalist narrative.

Indeed, many studies have shown that mortality salience leads to a heightened need for closure (Landau et al. 2004). This is fluid compensation in action. Notice also that the physicalist narrative is humanity’s most significant attempt yet to achieve closure in our worldview. As multibillion-dollar experiments like the Large Hadron Collider—whose primary purpose is to ‘close’ the Standard Model of particle physics, with no immediate practical applications—illustrate, physicalism embodies an unprecedented effort to produce a causally complete, unambiguous model of reality. Nothing else in millennia of preceding history has come anywhere near it. I suggest that this is not coincidental: the physicalist narrative may reflect the elites’ ego’s attempt to regain, through heightened closure, the meaning it lost along with religion. Moreover, other modalities of fluid compensation may be at play here as well: by distinguishing themselves as a segment of society uniquely capable to understand facts and concepts beyond the cognitive capacity of others, the scientists and academics who promote the physicalist narrative stand to gain in self-esteem. The cosmological scope of the scientific work they produce and leave behind upon their deaths can also be seen as a boost to symbolic immortality. Finally, recall Tillich’s observation: doubt and meaninglessness anxiety dominate our culture’s mindset. Is it humanly plausible that our mainstream narrative would have evolved to tackle only doubt and leave meaninglessness anxiety unaddressed?

All in all, the physicalist narrative does not necessarily represent a net loss of meaning for the intellectual elites who produced and continue to promote it. The transcendent meaning lost along with religion may be compensated for by an increase in closure, self-esteem and symbolic immortality. Unfortunately, however, this compensatory strategy cannot work for most ordinary people: the men and women on the streets do not have enough grasp of contemporary scientific theories to experience an increase in their sense of closure. Neither do they gain in self-esteem, because they are not part of the distinguished elites. Finally, insofar as ordinary people do not produce scientific work of their own, no particular gain in symbolic immortality is to be expected either.

In conclusion, the physicalist narrative may serve the egoic meaning needs of the intellectual elites who develop and promote it, but constitutes a significant threat to the sense of meaning of the average person on the streets. Perhaps for this reason, a large segment of society seeks meaning through alternative ontologies considered outdated and untenable by the intellectual elites, such as religious dualism (Heflick et al. 2015). This creates a schism—with corresponding tensions—between different segments of society, which may help explain the contemporary conflict between neo-atheism and religious belief.

14.6 Conclusion

The physicalist narrative, in contrast to the way it is normally portrayed, may not be dispassionate. It may be partly driven by the neurotic endeavor to project onto the world attributes that help us avoid confronting unacknowledged aspects of our own inner lives. Moreover, contrary to what most people assume, physicalism creates an opportunity for the intellectual elites who develop and promote it to maintain a sense of meaning in their own lives through fluid compensation. However, because this compensatory strategy does not apply to a large segment of society, it creates a schism—with corresponding tensions—that may help explain the contemporary conflict between neo-atheism and religious belief.

1 As I have extensively articulated earlier in this book, my position is that physicalism is demonstrably inferior to idealism on both logical and empirical grounds. Yet, since the scope of this particular article is restricted to psychology, my tone had to be neutral regarding philosophical matters.

2 See Chapter 9 for a much more extensive elaboration on the nature of the ‘unconscious,’ including the role of dissociation, which I have not discussed in this particular article. In a nutshell, my position is that there is no actual unconscious, but simply conscious mental processes inaccessible to egoic introspection because they (a) escape the field of self-reflection or (b) are strongly dissociated from the ego.

3 In the words of David Bentley Hart, “The entire notion of consciousness as an illusion is, of course, rather silly. Dennett has been making the argument for most of his career, and it is just abrasively counterintuitive enough to create the strong suspicion in many that it must be more philosophically cogent than it seems, because surely no one would say such a thing if there were not some subtle and penetrating truth hidden behind its apparent absurdity. But there is none. The simple truth of the matter is that Dennett is a fanatic: He believes so fiercely in the unique authority and absolutely comprehensive competency of the third-person scientific perspective that he is willing to deny not only the analytic authority, but also the actual existence, of the first-person vantage” (2017).

4 For clarity, and at the cost of repeating myself, my position is that this is not philosophically justifiable, as I have extensively argued earlier in this book.

5 A much more extensive elaboration of this point can be found in Chapter 5, Section 5.10.

6 It cannot be dismissed but it can be refuted on both logical and empirical grounds, as I hope to have done in Parts I to IV of this book.

7 Again, here I am making a charitable concession to physicalism because the limited scope of this particular article—focused, as it is, on psychology—prevented me from arguing against it philosophically.

From: The Idea of the World by Bernardo Kastrup

Meaning in Absurdity or: The most exciting discoveries always entail the loss of previously held certainties

 Prologue

This book is an experiment: an attempt to use logic to expose the absurd foundations of logic; an attempt to use science to peek beyond the limits of science; an attempt to use rationality to lift the veil off the irrational. Its ways are unconventional: weaving along its path one finds UFOs and fairies, quantum mechanics, analytic philosophy, history, mathematics, and depth psychology. The enterprise of constructing a coherent story out of these incommensurable disciplines is exploratory. Yet, finding ourselves confronted with the undeniable contradictions of our culture’s current worldview, we must test untried waters if we are to escape banality and find our way back to the mysteries of existence. The payoff is handsome: a reason for hope, a boost for the imagination, and the promise of a meaningful future.

But it does not come free: this book will ask you to have an open mind and enough mental flexibility to navigate through seas that will drag you out of your comfort zone, wherever it may lie. If you are at home with the wacky, the weird, and the absurd – but can keep yourself engaged when structured thinking is called for – you may find a new world of insights when we explore quantum entanglement, Gödel’s theorems, intuitionistic logic, and the history of science. If, instead, you are comfortable with science and formal philosophy – but can balance your skepticism and cynicism – you may find a breath of fresh air when we explore the serious aspects of UFOs, the Otherworld, and the inner landscapes of the unconscious. If the experiment works, at the end all these disparate threads will come together to unveil a startling picture of reality and of our condition as minded characters within it.

For me, personally, this book represents a difficult critique of previously unquestioned assumptions and values I had held for most of my life; a departure from ingrained structures of thought I had grown so identified with I could hardly conceive of any other legitimate avenue of thinking. Yet, this is precisely what I now believe this book to embody: a previously unthinkable but legitimate articulation of an uncanny scenario about the nature of reality. If my own experience while researching it is representative, this book may confront some of your dearest notions about truth and reason, just as it confronted mine. Yet, it may do so in a way that you cannot dismiss lightly, because the (laboratory) evidence it compiles and the philosophy it leverages are solid in the traditional, academic sense.

The most exciting discoveries always entail the loss of previously held certainties. So here is my invitation to you. This is a short and sharp book, wasting no space on non-essentials or divagations. Making your way through it will not demand any major investment of time or effort. So give it an honest chance, and it may just help you open up entirely new dimensions for exploring that ultimate of all questions: What is going on?

The elusiveness of the absurd

Investigators of calls of the absurd have systematically sought clear, unambiguous, logical, rational explanations for these phenomena. The underlying assumption was so self-evident and natural that it hardly needed to be made explicit: whatever the phenomena were, their causes had to be rooted in logic and physics. Thus the most elusive evidence and the most absurd testimonies – those that demonstrably required a violation of the established laws of physics to hold true, or which were nonsensical on the face of it – could be nothing but fabrications or delusions and were, therefore, dismissed. Naturally, these were also the most peculiar of the cases.

It was not until the 1970s that Jacques Vallée realized that it was precisely the elusiveness of certain pieces of evidence and the absurdity of certain reports – the violation of physics and common sense they implied – that rendered them most interesting for study.1 He understood that if these reports were not outright lies their significance was considerable. Vallée is the true pioneer of the empirical study of the absurd as something beyond mere psychology; the first to open the door to a whole new way of thinking about strange observations of the world ‘out there.’ Our culture may, in the not-so-distant future, have much to thank Vallée for.

In his book The Invisible College, Vallée noted that many UFO observations entailed a kind of ‘recursive unsolvability:’ the phenomenon negated and contradicted itself, whatever explanation for it one came up with. Not only were the testimonies illogical and misleading, even the physical evidence left behind was ambiguous and elusive. He acknowledged that the lack of logic behind the phenomenon made one feel tempted to place it beyond rationality.2 Yet, the inclination to dismiss the weirdest and most illogical cases seemed unwarranted to Vallée. Referring to previous work done by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Vallée noted that the strangeness of a report did not correlate with a lack of reliability on the part of its witness. In other words, often the weirdest testimonies originated from the most reliable witnesses.3 Something intriguing was going on.

Vallée realized, from the study of the countless cases he had privileged access to, that the reality of the phenomenon appeared to be both physical and psychic at the same time.4 In more recent work, he reaffirmed this conclusion and proceeded to lay out a phenomenological classification scheme encompassing six layers: a physical layer, an anti-physical layer (capturing the aspects of the phenomenon that contradict currently understood physics), a socio-psychological layer, a physiological layer (capturing observed alterations of the witnesses’ bodily functions), a psychic layer (in the parapsychological sense), and a cultural layer.5 In this same work, Vallée suggested that the phenomenon indicates the need for new models of physical reality. Indeed, Vallée is well known for taking the position that the so-called ‘extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis’ is insufficient to explain the scope of strangeness of the calls of the absurd.6Perhaps the most controversial of Vallée’s conclusions is that there is a purpose behind the occurrence of these strange phenomena. Having tried in vain to find a closed, sensible, logical explanation for UFOs for many years, Vallée concluded that the right question to ask was not where the UFOs came from, but what effect they were causing. This latter question could be answered empirically based on relatively straightforward research. His conclusion: the calls of the absurd are leading to a shift in human consciousness and our conception of reality. He empirically observed a seeming schedule of reinforcement that works to cement this shift over time.7 Nonetheless, Vallée then left it open whether such a shift is caused by premeditated action by an intelligent agency, or whether it is simply the result of natural laws yet to be discovered.8However, by the time he wrote Messengers of Deception,9 Vallée’s position had become more influenced by conspiracy-related hypotheses. He took the ambiguity, self-negation, and contradiction always present in the calls of the absurd not as natural, inherent properties of the phenomenon, but as devices designed to influence human culture through confusion and misleading signals. Personally, I find this shift in Vallée’s thinking unfortunate. To me, the explanation that requires the least new assumptions is that ambiguity is an inherent and natural aspect of the calls of the absurd, not the result of a Machiavellian intervention in human culture.

Decades after Vallée began his investigations into UFOs and other related phenomena, Harvard’s Dr. John Mack became interested in the so-called ‘alien abduction’ phenomenon. As a psychiatrist, his original interest likely had psychological motivations. However, having failed to uncover a purely medical explanation for the reports of his patients, Dr. Mack ventured carefully into the territory of speculative ontology. His observations are uncannily consistent with Vallée’s own. He talks of the concurrently psychic and objective nature of the phenomenon, as well as of its elusiveness. He speaks of a ‘third zone’ that violates the boundaries between the subjective world of mind and the objective world of matter ‘out there.’10 He even suggests that the phenomenon is ‘designed’ – not necessarily in a teleological sense, but rather in a compensatory and spontaneous manner – to break down this separation between subjective and objective worlds and to force the experiencers to confront the inadequacy of the worldviews they have hitherto held.11 He speaks of ‘ontological shock’12 as the mechanism by which the phenomenon forces an expansion of people’s conception of reality towards a worldview where notions previously held to be absurd become intelligible. In interviews he conducted with shamans from pre-literary cultures of Africa and South America, Dr. Mack asked whether the alien- or fairy-like entities they claimed to have dealings with were supposed to be literal creatures or simply metaphors. He was then told that, according to the worldviews of these pre-literary cultures, there was no difference between the two;13 certainly a very counterintuitive reply for the Western mind to assimilate. Nonetheless, by the end of this book, it will hopefully become clearer what those shamans might have meant when they spoke of an identity between the literal and the metaphorical.

It is remarkable how, based on an entirely different and more recent set of data, Dr. Mack arrived at very similar speculations to those originally put forward by Vallée. Indeed, yet another investigator of ‘funny things’ has also arrived at similar conclusions. His name is Patrick Harpur.

Just like Vallée and Mack, Harpur sees significance in the very absurdity and ambiguity of the calls of the absurd. Unlike Vallée’s later writings, however, Harpur believes such characteristics to be natural – in fact, the most innate – attributes of these phenomena, not devices of premeditated Machiavellian deception. Harpur goes well beyond UFOs and alien abductions, classifying all kinds of visions and apparitions under what he calls ‘daimonic reality.’ (Here, the word ‘daimonic’ is not to be confused with the term ‘demonic;’ it does not have the same negative connotation.) In another similarity with the works of Vallée and Mack, Harpur discerns a ‘goal’ behind the calls of the absurd: he believes they are a spontaneous, compensatory reaction to the very rationalistic, materialistic view of reality that discredits them to begin with.14 This point of view is reminiscent of Jung’s position on the role of dreams as purposeful, compensatory reactions to unnatural psychic conditions.15 Indeed, we will later see that dreams and the calls of the absurd may have much in common.

To Harpur, the calls of the absurd are protrusions into our consensus reality of phenomena anchored in the daimonic realm: a realm that is both material and immaterial; both fact and fiction. Thus, ‘daimonic reality’ is a kind of intermediate realm between the physical and the spiritual, between reality and imagination, embodying characteristics of both. Harpur identifies this realm with what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious,’ although Harpur – more explicitly than Jung – does not restrict the daimonic to the inside of our heads alone. In the realm of the daimonic, the imagination operates in its most natural form: through analogical – not literal – thinking; through metaphor, not causally closed modeling. Indeed, Jung has suggested that parables and similes are an older, more archaic mode of thought than linear logic and rationality. This archaic mode of thinking currently survives mostly in dreams.16Because of its defiance of any literal explanation and its inability to fit into any well-defined category, the daimonic is fundamentally elusive, ambiguous, shape-shifting.17 It is these characteristics that led Harpur to identify the world of fairies – as captured in the folklore of Celtic traditions – as an archetypical example of daimonic reality. After all, fairies are morally ambiguous; their manifestation absurd, yet consistent across the ages.18 Fairies – like UFOs, aliens, and DMT elves – are daimons. Vallée, as we have seen, had arrived decades earlier at similar conclusions.

Yet, the elusiveness of the daimonic does not imply its lack of physicality. Indeed, Harpur stresses that daimonic phenomena can have very physical effects, suggesting that the manifestation of these effects may be linked to what Jung called ‘synchronistic events,’19 which we briefly discussed earlier. However, the physical traces daimonic events leave behind are themselves just as ambiguous and elusive as the original phenomena. These traces can be construed to lend support to different – and mutually contradictory – attempts at explaining the phenomena. Hence, despite encompassing undeniable physical aspects, the calls of the absurd trick our logic and refuse to be boxed or labeled unambiguously. Whatever we attempt to say they are, they show they are not; whatever we attempt to say they are not, they indicate they might just be.20Harpur stresses that, from the point of view of the daimons, their reality is the true ground of existence, the world of ego-consciousness being merely a kind of dream consisting of projected images of what we conceive the daimonic to be.21 He suggests that dreams and other non-ordinary states of consciousness offer us a door into the daimonic; a door we can use to explore a reality operating under different rules, the experience of which may release us from certain ingrained and rusty patterns of thinking; a door that enables us to see through the literal appearances of the world we experience through ego-consciousness.22 If we do not voluntarily open the door to the daimons, Harpur suggests that the daimons then force themselves into our reality through the calls of the absurd. The daimons strive constantly to escape their exile in the unconscious, continuously challenging the literalism of our worldview.

Harpur is self-consistent in his approach to the calls of the absurd: because he believes them to represent a reality that transcends the explanatory power of logic and physics, he does not offer a direct explanation for them.23 Instead, he takes an indirect approach in his books: by discussing different examples of calls of the absurd under the light of philosophy, esotericism, and even poetry, Harpur attempts to convey a roundabout impression – an intuitive way of seeing – that is conducive to the intellectual acceptance of the calls of the absurd without need for a closed, causal explanation. His work is quite remarkable in that he largely succeeds in this formidable and unusual challenge. Yet, it leaves readers with more rational and less poetic inclinations a little frustrated. I confess to be one such reader, for I asked myself after reading Harpur’s work: Wonderful but, at the end of the day, just what is going on then? Just what are the calls of the absurd after all? No straight answer was to be found.

In this book, I set out to tackle precisely this gap: to suggest a direct and explicit explanation for phenomena that defy the very logic grounding such explanation. I will attempt this in the tradition of Kurt Gödel, who defeated an entire system of logical thought while operating within the very system whose defeat he achieved.24 In the next chapter, we will start on the tricky road towards this elusive explanation. Since we will tackle the absurd initially from within the confines of logic and physics, some structured and disciplined thinking will be required of you. Bear with me, for later we will return to the absurd and place it within the framework of an astonishing, yet well-founded, conception of reality.

From:

Meaning in Absurdity

What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us about the Nature of Reality

Bernardo Kastrup

Another nail in the coffin of the superstition of materialism

 Final Musings

In this chapter I’d like to share some open thoughts with you about the worldview laid out in this work, the way it has been conveyed, and how it relates to the present state of our culture. There is a sense in which this chapter is a personal critique of the rest of the book. The points I will attempt to make are subtle and could be easily – as well as unfavorably – misinterpreted. The more intuitive tone of the chapter could also be misconstrued as loose and become detrimental to the book as a whole. Yet, I believe the potential benefits of doing this outweigh the risks. After all, I am not trying to win any beauty contest, but simply to convey ideas in as honest and open a way as possible. The judge, if there is any, is you alone.

Before we get to the more delicate and nuanced parts, let’s start easy.

Split-off complexes

A core idea of this book is the notion that localized segments of mind at large can become immersed in the illusion of being separate from the rest of the broader membrane. The illusion originates from the self-reflective amplification of certain mental contents to the detriment of others. The ego becomes blind to the broader membrane of mind, identifying itself solely with the amplified contents in its own field of self-reflection.

Yet, talking about this with friends, I’ve heard from some that they were uncomfortable with the whole idea. To them, it was counter-intuitive that different segments of the same mind could really become convinced that they were separate entities. After all, we experience our own psyches mostly as single, unified mental spaces. It is hard for most people to imagine that their  psyches could be broken up into seemingly separate and independent identities. Thus, how could that happen to mind at large?

But we know empirically that the fragmentation of the human psyche into multiple and seemingly separate identities happens all the time. Indeed, psychology informs us of countless cases of the phenomenon of ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder,’ in which a single person can display multiple and seemingly disconnected identities and personalities.153 Each of these identities does not identify with the others, considering itself to be a separate entity, a separate center of consciousness. Yet, clearly they are all parts –split-off complexes – of a single, broader psyche. Somehow these complexes forget, through dissociation, what they are part of. And although they may ‘take turns’ manifesting themselves through the ego-body system, there is reason to believe that they exist concurrently in the psyche, at all times, living parallel lives.154When I say that each conscious being is a segment of a broader membrane of mind that somehow becomes dissociated from its true identity, I am appealing to the same underlying process as split-off psychic complexes. There is nothing fundamentally unprecedented about it. All I am doing is extrapolating that well-known phenomenon to a transpersonal and even trans-species level. I contend that each one of us is a split-off complex of the one medium of mind underlying all existence. The feasibility of this basic idea does not require anything that is not already known to happen in mental space.

(...)

Substance dualism

Modern Western society seems to have converged to a highly polarized metaphysical dichotomy: while materialism is the dominant paradigm as far as its deep influence in society’s values and organization, substance dualism is seen as the only mainstream alternative in the form of religious or spiritual worldviews. As discussed earlier, substance dualism is the notion that, apart from matter, there is also an immortal soul that interacts with matter in mysterious ways. Matter and soul are seen to be different and separate types of ‘stuff,’ irreducible to one another.

This polarization of the metaphysical debate between materialism and substance dualism is a cultural victory for materialism. After all, what empirical evidence is there for the existence of a ghost-like soul floating in space-time? Is it the simplest explanation to postulate another type of ‘stuff’ that fundamentally transcends all empirical verification? Moreover, notice that substance dualism also entails realism, therefore causing a key flaw behind materialism to go unquestioned. Indeed, according  to substance dualism, both soul and body supposedly exist objectively, outside mind. Therefore, precisely because substance dualism is perceived as the sole alternative, materialism becomes perpetuated as the only coherent metaphysics from the point-of-view of the intellectual elite; a tragic social situation that reflects a profound lack of metaphysical imagination.

So, does substance dualism have no value at all?

I actually believe it has, despite everything I said above. There is a sense in which substance dualism is closer to reality than naïve materialism: it correctly predicts that consciousness does not end upon physical death and even provides a metaphorical framework for understanding an enduring ‘personal unconscious’ in the form of an invisible ‘soul.’ Under materialism, there is room for neither of these things. Moreover – and I am quick to admit this – substance dualism is much more straightforward to grok than idealism. This is why, in Chapter 2, I used a dualist metaphor to introduce the ‘filter hypothesis.’ So there clearly is social value in substance dualism, given the lamentable state of our metaphysics today.

I will go even further: substance dualism can ‘run on top’ of idealism as an easier-to-digest metaphor for idealist truths. In other words, there is a way to interpret the key points of the idealist formulation of this book with dualist analogies. One of these analogies has already been mentioned in the previous paragraph: the soul is analogous to an enduring ‘personal unconscious.’ But we can systematize the analogy further because, in fact, there is a certain form of duality built right into the worldview developed in this book. Allow me to elaborate on this.

As we’ve seen, freewill is a property of mind at large. It is distributed uniformly throughout the membrane. However, because of self-reflective amplification, we identify ourselves only with a very small part of mind. Only the freewill at work within this small field of amplification is recognized by the ego as its own will. The force – the primary cause – that puts the rest of the membrane of mind in motion is seen by the ego as foreign and utterly outside its control. This way, all patterns of vibration that come from outside the field of self-reflective amplification are seen by the ego as external phenomena: the ‘world outside.’ And here is where a duality is born: I versus the world, inside versus outside, ‘little me’ versus the rest. This is not a fundamental duality, in the sense that it does not entail different kinds of ‘stuff,’ like matter and soul. But it is a duality of mental attitude. When mind does not identify with parts of itself, it creates the entire illusion of an external world, which lies at the heart of realism, materialism and even substance dualism.

The body image, of course, compounds the illusion. The body is simply an image in mind of a process of localization of mind, just like a whirlpool is an image in water of a process of localization of water. The body doesn’t imply anything other than mind and its movements, in exactly the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t imply anything other than water and its movements. But we can look down and see our own bodies. Although the ego, corresponding to closed-cycle processes of information flow in the brain, does not identify itself with the whole body – we even say ‘I have a body’ instead of ‘I am a body’ – it does recognize the body as the vantage point and platform of its interactions with the world. So, in effect, everything happens as if the ego, like a soul, inhabited the body. A whirlpool that could look at itself and recognize its own boundaries would also fall prey to the same illusion of duality: it would see itself as separate from the rest of the stream, including other whirlpools seen at a distance but which clearly did not constitute its own platform and vantage point. Illusion as it may be, there is a strong sense in which this duality is true, even though not ultimately true. It is true in the sense that, on many levels, it provides an accurate metaphor for what is going on. Many things do happen as if we were conscious souls inhabiting physical bodies.

We can, thus, lay out the following correspondences between substance dualism and the idealist formulation of this book: the soul corresponds to the segment of the psychic structure that may remain differentiated after the egoic loop unravels at physical death; that is, the underlying protrusion of the membrane of mind from which the egoic loop arises. The freewill of the soul corresponds to the operation of the primary cause within the psychic structure. The ‘external world’ corresponds to the vibrations of the membrane of mind that are originally set in motion, by the primary cause, outside the human psychic structure and then penetrate it through resonance. The physical body is the partial image of the topological reconfiguration process by means of which the soul becomes (more) self-reflective.

With these correspondences in mind, I consider it fair to use dualist metaphors when one talks about the fundamental nature of reality and of human identity. As a matter of fact, my first book, Rationalist Spirituality, despite establishing my idealist position early on, goes on to use dualist metaphors to convey most of its ideas. In a strong sense, things work as though people had souls, separate from the body and the rest of the world, which survived physical death.

What is it that survives?

A question that is then immediately raised is this: fine, my consciousness will survive my physical death. But my ego won’t. And I identify with my ego, not with the ‘unconscious’ segments of my psyche. Therefore, that which survives is not really me. For all practical purposes, I really will die. Isn’t it so?

The key point here is to separate the ego from the sense of ‘I’ that underlies all of our experiences. Indeed, experience intrinsically entails this sense of ‘I’: a subject that experiences. Therefore, the sense of ‘I’ is inherent to all points of the membrane of mind, regardless of topography or topology, since experiences can unfold anywhere in the membrane. The ego, on the other hand, corresponds to a narrative – a story – consisting of memories, projected self-images, values, attachments, conceptual constructs, explanatory models, etc. It corresponds to the particular set of vibratory modes that gets amplified within the egoic loop. But the witness of this story, who ends up mistakenly believing itself to be the story, is not the ego. It is that sense of ‘I,’ which is distributed throughout the membrane and is inherent to experience. We might call it the ‘amorphous I,’ because it exists even in the absence of all narratives from which form arises. It is a witness without identity, like a newborn.

There is a traditional thought exercise that illustrates this powerfully. It consists of asking yourself who you are and then systematically eliminating every answer you come up with. Am I my name? No, for I could legally change my name tomorrow and still have the same sense of identity. Am I my profession? No, for I could have studied something else, or get another job, and still be me. Am I my body? Well, if I lost a limb or had a heart transplant tomorrow I would still have the same sense of identity, so this can’t be it either. Am I my genetic code? No, for I could have an identical twin with the same genetic code and I wouldn’t be him. Am I my particular life history, as encoded in my brain? Well, wouldn’t I still have the same sense of ‘I’ if I had made different choices or had had different experiences in the past? And so on. It is possible to eliminate every answer conceivable. The conclusion of this exercise is that our inner sense of ‘I’ is fundamentally independent of any story we could dress it up with. As such, it is entirely undifferentiated and identical in every person. It is formless. This undressed, naked, ‘amorphous I’ is inherent to the membrane of mind at large, the sole subject of existence. Not only does every person have the same inner sense of ‘I,’ I contend that every conscious being has it: cats, dogs, fish, etc. At the deepest, narrative-free levels, they must all feel exactly like us.

Another way to see this is to consider that you have always had the same sense of ‘I’ throughout your life, even though everything else has changed: your body has changed, your thoughts and opinions have changed, your memories have changed, your self-image has changed, the world around you has changed, etc. Even though very few – if any – atoms in your body today are the same as when you were a child, you still believe yourself to be that same person. This happens because there has been a continuity of the sense of ‘I’ from the time you were a child up until now. The formless witness has remained the same. It is this continuity of the ‘amorphous I’ that makes you think to be the same person, even though everything about you has become different.

And here is the key point: the metaphysics developed in this book implies that there is an uninterrupted preservation of the ‘amorphous I’ throughout the process we call death. After all, if this inner sense of ‘I’ is inherent to the membrane of mind, there is just no reason to believe that a change in the topography or topology of the membrane would eliminate or interrupt it. There must be a continuity of your most fundamental sense of ‘I’ even as your ego is dismantled and the ‘story of you’ is no longer identified with. Although you will realize, as physical death unfolds, that you aren’t and have never truly been the narratives of your ego, you will never lose touch with the naked sense of ‘I’ that you feel right now. Therefore, for exactly the same reason that you believe yourself to be the same person you were when you were a child, you will feel unambiguously that it is really you that survives physical death. Moreover, because I speculate that the topography of mind corresponding to the ‘personal unconscious’ may be largely preserved, you will likely still remember your egoic narratives and personal history. You will know exactly who you thought yourself to be. In a sense, you will just wake up at ‘home’ without forgetting the dream you are having right now.

From: WHY MATERIALISM IS BALONEY

Bernardo Kastrup’s book