This is a swell article, but I think it the takeaway should be that Neptune sucks as a planetary body and is terrible and we should grind it into a fine powder and give Uranus rings or something worthwhile. It's stupidly far away, it's old, it's slow, and it doesn't even have the cool weird spinny-ness of Uranus. Besides, it's lost it's fancy blue color so now we're stuck with a discount Uranus floating around the edge of our lil star going "HEY I'M STILL COOL DON'T FORGET ABOUT ME" while we all know that Neptune would be forgotten in the grand annals of history if it evaporated from this fine reality one cheery summer morn.
If I had one wish related to astronomy, is that Uranus would've been called "Sidus" as it was originally. Persuading etymology is very difficult however.
What a great piece! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what is lost when only the countable matters. You illustrate the effect of science very clearly.
Another domain is culture. When we only value the easiest metrics to obtain then the ultimate benchmark, money, becomes the most important factor. It bums me out.
Great article. But we don’t need to wait even one day to know the answer.
I hate to ruin your poetic ending, but there’s no maybe’s about it. Science definitely won’t be reducing the subjectivity it’s intentionally relegated to the mind to a colourless blob.
Cleaning the room by sweeping the dirt under the carpet has limits. You can’t then use that method to get rid of the dirt under the carpet. If you intentionally place all subjectivity “inside” our heads, you can’t then get rid of it using the same method.
Not in the universe, not in our heads... we’ve run out of places to hide it.
Maybe one day we’ll wake up from our enthralment with scientism and realise it’s not telling us the universe is meaningless.
Science has never known about those colours inside our heads. It never will. As far as scientific knowledge is concerned, those colours don’t exist.
Fully agree with your first point, I think it's very hard to conceive of a satisfying reductive explanation for subjectivity. I think it's very likely, as you say, that "sweeping the dirt under the carpet has limits" and that effectively we are in a particular historical period where science is considered strictly to deal with the objective - and therefore that the subjective might not even really exist - but it only appears that way because we've done so much sweeping.
It’s an astonishing example of the power of ideology over humans that people are speculating that subjectivity may not exist.
Some like Dennett and the eliminativists are even saying it doesn’t exist. Yet even that isn’t enough to make us wake up and realise we’ve gone terribly, tragically wrong somewhere.
But subjectivity scales according to perceptual scope, does it not? Our composite organic structure means little in the way of subjectivity until we consider ourselves, the organism, as a whole. We are not and cannot be dualistic in mind and body, as our mental processing is a constituent of our body.
Subjectivity reduces down to the physical components we possess as abilities to filter reality, at which point the subjective becomes meaningless data. But as it is incorporated in our complete perceptual experiences, this data is compiled in such a way that we are able to give a meaningful accounting of phenomena we perceive. Subjectivity is an accounting of the objective, they are necessarily interrelated.
Pretty much sums up why I hold to the unpopular view that religion is more interesting than science. Religion deals with meaning, science doesn't. That doesn't mean ignoring science - but the questions religions pose have always struck me as more compelling than the ones science does. Science does a good job of disciplining the way you can go about answering those questions, but "why are we here" isn't a question in search of the mechanics of "how we are here."
I think you’re describing philosophy, or perhaps theology more specifically. Religion is the prescription of ideological beliefs as an answer to those questions.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that theology is endlessly fascinating. I just also think science is a secular pursuit of answering philosophical questions. Or in other words, science without philosophy is limited in its meaning.
Religions evolve/change too much historically for "prescription of ideological beliefs" to work as a definition. There's a basic framework, or starting point, that's accepted to hold an identity together - but I find it hard to see a common ideological belief at work in Martin Luther King and Jerry Falwell, to take just one example.
Mmm yes. I should have clarified religion as a social and cultural institution as it functions from the top down, not necessarily as a personal pursuit or as a consequent result of collective effervescence from the bottom up. I think the latter fits what you’re describing.
Man, I love this essay. It's wonderful on its own, but it also happens to pair interestingly with a number of the themes in Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel The Wolves of Eternity that I've grown somewhat obsessed with recently: science taking the form of religion, Russian cosmism, consciousness in nature, the pursuit of immortality and what is effectively scientific resurrection via biotech and whatnot, and so on.
All of that said, there's a particular passage about color early in the novel that I've thought about every day since reading it. See below.
Colours were something I couldn’t grasp either, even when I’d had them explained to me. Because if colours didn’t exist in themselves, but were actually different wavelengths of light that the brain turned into colours, what was it we saw when we saw colours then? Colours were an illusion, they didn’t exist, and yet we saw them, so they did exist, not outside, in the world, but inside us.
But how did they get there?
Colours are all in the head, my teacher had told me when I’d asked about it. Colours are a product of our sensory system.
But where in the head?
‘Now you’re being belligerent, Syvert,’ he said. ‘Light entering through the pupil is detected by the retina and converted into electrical signals that are sent to the visual cortex at the rear of the brain. There are cells in the retina called cones and rods, which react differently to different wavelengths of light, and the electrical signals they send out determine whether we see colours or black and white. But we don’t actually see colour until those signals are processed in the visual cortex.’
‘But I see colour,’ I said. ‘Not signals.’
‘It all happens in the visual cortex,’ he said. ‘Now, no more questions about the eye. Everything’s perfectly well explained in your textbook.’
But it wasn’t.
The world was outside us, it was something we were in. But seeing it, it became a part of us. So wasn’t the world then inside us? If it was only on the outside and nothing of it got in, everything would just be dark. The same surely applied to hearing and smell and touch. Our senses took what was external and turned it into something internal. If the world couldn’t get inside us, it wouldn’t exist.
That would be like the way a stone existed in the world. Nothing in the world got in, the stone couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste or feel anything, so the world as far as it was concerned didn’t exist. A stone didn’t even know it existed itself. Was that what life was?
Was that what set it apart from what was not living? What was living was living because it internalised the world? And both the world and what was living were thereby felt to exist?
That had to be it.
But how did the visible world get inside us?
That was the bit about light entering through the pupils.
It was from there on it got hard to grasp.
The world came in as two narrow beams of light, and that light contained so much information that the brain could construct for us an identical image of the world on that basis alone.
Where was that image?
It seemed like it was outside us.
The river was down there, not inside me.
And then there was the fact that colours were something added on. Like some kind of emotion.
Was everything in the world colourless?
It had to be.
Could there be other things that were added on too? Things that didn’t exist, which we constructed and believed to exist?
Wow, that's a great excerpt. Love that it pairs so well with Knausgaard - one of my favorites, and I have a new unread copy of The Wolves of Eternity that I will absolutely be picking up now.
The real universal acid isn't the scientific method, it's the idea that you should have true beliefs and not false ones. Very few systems of belief can endure the demand for truth unharmed.
The reductionism of science, the way it breaks large concepts down into small facts, is just a symptom of our desire for the truth.
I've often wondered at colorization in space. Great read. The bit on Ahab and the white whale is just gravy. Good writing today on The Intrinsic Perspective.
What a beautiful piece of writing. I used to be a hard philosophical materialist - everything was just matter and math. But, after cultivating a meditation practice, I'm now agnostic on this question, precisely because conscious experience is so completely inexplicable. Consciousness is (to quote Sam Harris) the only thing that cannot be an illusion, and yet it is a truly hard problem. How do we get this first-person experience of color and complexity from dead matter? That's a complete mystery.
So I retain hope that everything isn't as white as Neptune, and that our first-person conscious experiences hold secrets to the genuine mysteries of reality.
Nice to be reminded of Melville's philosophizing to which you do justice and more, thanks! That colors can't be found in the world itself is indeed a shock to naive realists and raises the hard problem of consciousness: why do just certain neural goings-on entail phenomenal colors (and other sensations) available only to the conscious system? Is your red anything like mine? A fair question that I don't think we'll ever be in a position to answer.
Yup, and if you frame neuroscientist's struggle with consciousness as "find the real colors!" it's easy to see how hard it actually is. Like no one else has to find real colors, they can just say "oh it's subjective, whatever" and wave their hands.
Wouldn’t a more interesting, and answerable, question be “what can be said of the components of the mind that process particle wavelength along the spectrum of visible light?”
What do you mean? Our eye’s ability to filter light across some spectrum of particle wavelengths that processes such phenomena as colored light is an evolutionary adaptation to give us an advantage according to our environmental conditions. Your red doesn’t have to be the same as mine, as you possess a body that is unique. The wavelengths of light still remain, regardless of who sees them.
Agreed that our reds don't need to be the same, they just have to reliably correspond to external states of affairs. But the fact that we're not in a position to compare them presents a problem for physicalizing consciousness: our reds are categorically private phenomena, unlike our brains. Attaching a link to a paper on that - if not good form I trust Eric will let me know.
That abstract looks interesting, and I roughly agree with parts of it, but not the complete thesis. Could be because I’m an adherent of Marxist philosophy.
I wouldn’t say that we aren’t in a position to compare variant conscious experiences, but that in doing just that, comparing multiple instances of phenomenological observation, we’re capable of greater approaching the limit of objective reality through scientific practices.
I would say that regardless of how personal an individual experience of “redness” may be, it must be true that conditions of physical reality exist to constitute any possible experience of “redness.” Our eyes may be tuned to such experiences in a way that another sentient creature’s are not, but that does not mean the physical conditions that make it possible do not exist in relation to said other creature.
Right, the fact we can't compare our reds suggests that what's real (conscious experience in this instance) may not always be observable in spacetime: we're up against "the limit of objective reality through scientific practices." And I also agree that the apple we both observe as being red is physically real and locatable in spacetime.
No, what I’m saying is we do compare our reds to further understand the commonalities and differences between them, as such a perception is a developed ability, to understand how such a thing (the part of the spectrum of light we see) definitively exists in reality. But yes I do agree that our perceptual limits create challenges for what we observe in spacetime and how we do so.
In regards to consciousness, I’d say that by the very nature of our observation that we are aware of our awareness, it obviously exists in reality. Neuroscience is the way in which we describe how such a phenomenon arises, and the means by which we experience it.
The only thing whiter than Neptune is Erik Hoel. The only thing whiter than Erik Hoel is Erik Hoel's writings on emergence. Keep up the wonderful work. I'll always read your thoughts, even if you don't read mine! (which could have come from your head, ironically)
Thanks Bobby! Although just to say, I believe I have read some of your thoughts at various points. Didn't I give feedback on your book The Wonder of Reality?
It's a great example to bring up, but in my opinion I think Dawkins is being pretty obtuse here. Disenchantment clearly can happen without something being rendered nonexistent!
I agree. Probably relates to something else he said "science is interesting, and if you don't think so you can fuck off!", a kind of "suck it up, the truth should be interesting enough for you!" without needing help. I think it's easier to say if you do have that natural fascination, which though it can be inculcated is not universal.
I think the comparison with fantasy/scifi clearly shows where reality doesn't stack up to our ideal for it. Space is too far apart and travel is too slow, so introduce ftl drives and illustrate the planets close and colorful. The night sky is too dark and empty, so show lots of alien inhabited moons and rings and purple nebulas in your videogame or marvel movie.
We want motion and color in general- artists depictions and falsely colored electron microscope photos holographs and UIs with spinning gizmos and bubbly green chemistry erlenmeyer flasks with human drama at it's center. Some of us still F*cking Love Science regardless, but for the rest at least there's fiction.
my god, you are a phenomenal writer. truly. i take off my hat to you. the ending and your repetition and your re-inclusion of melville's words gave me chills. truly beautiful work. thank you for writing.
Super interesting article that reflects the underbelly of scientific progress.. the relegation of the experiencing self in favor of measurable truth. I’m intrigued and wonder if the field will be able to accommodate experience without sacrificing truth.
Maybe it will become more of a personal challenge to find beauty in our own conscious experience while knowing that almost all of it is illusion.
Neat, I had thought of all this before. And there's even a book about this and much more called The Reign of Quantity and Signs of the Times. It's a little schizo, but boy, Guenon has such an interesting angle on reality. Your vision at the end reminds me of Guenon's statement that next to the Infinite, the world of the senses is strictly nil, for what else is one positing when one says nature is devoid of quality? And Advaita Vedanta, the tradition Guenon considered the purest, asserts that the Infinite and consciousness are one.
Really, the hard problem of consciousness is the reason I got into spirituality to begin with, so it's neat that there are traditions where consciousness is central.
Science gets us to the base truth, but I don’t think we’re designed to live in base truth. We need stories, meanings, purpose, etc… to mediate between us and harsh reality
This is a swell article, but I think it the takeaway should be that Neptune sucks as a planetary body and is terrible and we should grind it into a fine powder and give Uranus rings or something worthwhile. It's stupidly far away, it's old, it's slow, and it doesn't even have the cool weird spinny-ness of Uranus. Besides, it's lost it's fancy blue color so now we're stuck with a discount Uranus floating around the edge of our lil star going "HEY I'M STILL COOL DON'T FORGET ABOUT ME" while we all know that Neptune would be forgotten in the grand annals of history if it evaporated from this fine reality one cheery summer morn.
I didn't expect this take but I like it
It still has one thing going for it, though -- it isn't named Uranus.
If I had one wish related to astronomy, is that Uranus would've been called "Sidus" as it was originally. Persuading etymology is very difficult however.
You don't need Uranus?
What a great piece! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what is lost when only the countable matters. You illustrate the effect of science very clearly.
Another domain is culture. When we only value the easiest metrics to obtain then the ultimate benchmark, money, becomes the most important factor. It bums me out.
One wonders if the success of science has made economics have to pretend to be scientific and therefore focus more on the quantitative than it should
Economics, psychology, anthropology… there’s no shortage of fields that masquerade as hard science.
That was Mises and Hayek's view.
Great article. But we don’t need to wait even one day to know the answer.
I hate to ruin your poetic ending, but there’s no maybe’s about it. Science definitely won’t be reducing the subjectivity it’s intentionally relegated to the mind to a colourless blob.
Cleaning the room by sweeping the dirt under the carpet has limits. You can’t then use that method to get rid of the dirt under the carpet. If you intentionally place all subjectivity “inside” our heads, you can’t then get rid of it using the same method.
Not in the universe, not in our heads... we’ve run out of places to hide it.
Maybe one day we’ll wake up from our enthralment with scientism and realise it’s not telling us the universe is meaningless.
Science has never known about those colours inside our heads. It never will. As far as scientific knowledge is concerned, those colours don’t exist.
But those colours know all about science.
Fully agree with your first point, I think it's very hard to conceive of a satisfying reductive explanation for subjectivity. I think it's very likely, as you say, that "sweeping the dirt under the carpet has limits" and that effectively we are in a particular historical period where science is considered strictly to deal with the objective - and therefore that the subjective might not even really exist - but it only appears that way because we've done so much sweeping.
It’s an astonishing example of the power of ideology over humans that people are speculating that subjectivity may not exist.
Some like Dennett and the eliminativists are even saying it doesn’t exist. Yet even that isn’t enough to make us wake up and realise we’ve gone terribly, tragically wrong somewhere.
But subjectivity scales according to perceptual scope, does it not? Our composite organic structure means little in the way of subjectivity until we consider ourselves, the organism, as a whole. We are not and cannot be dualistic in mind and body, as our mental processing is a constituent of our body.
Subjectivity reduces down to the physical components we possess as abilities to filter reality, at which point the subjective becomes meaningless data. But as it is incorporated in our complete perceptual experiences, this data is compiled in such a way that we are able to give a meaningful accounting of phenomena we perceive. Subjectivity is an accounting of the objective, they are necessarily interrelated.
Pretty much sums up why I hold to the unpopular view that religion is more interesting than science. Religion deals with meaning, science doesn't. That doesn't mean ignoring science - but the questions religions pose have always struck me as more compelling than the ones science does. Science does a good job of disciplining the way you can go about answering those questions, but "why are we here" isn't a question in search of the mechanics of "how we are here."
I think you’re describing philosophy, or perhaps theology more specifically. Religion is the prescription of ideological beliefs as an answer to those questions.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree that theology is endlessly fascinating. I just also think science is a secular pursuit of answering philosophical questions. Or in other words, science without philosophy is limited in its meaning.
Religions evolve/change too much historically for "prescription of ideological beliefs" to work as a definition. There's a basic framework, or starting point, that's accepted to hold an identity together - but I find it hard to see a common ideological belief at work in Martin Luther King and Jerry Falwell, to take just one example.
Mmm yes. I should have clarified religion as a social and cultural institution as it functions from the top down, not necessarily as a personal pursuit or as a consequent result of collective effervescence from the bottom up. I think the latter fits what you’re describing.
Man, I love this essay. It's wonderful on its own, but it also happens to pair interestingly with a number of the themes in Karl Ove Knausgaard's novel The Wolves of Eternity that I've grown somewhat obsessed with recently: science taking the form of religion, Russian cosmism, consciousness in nature, the pursuit of immortality and what is effectively scientific resurrection via biotech and whatnot, and so on.
All of that said, there's a particular passage about color early in the novel that I've thought about every day since reading it. See below.
Colours were something I couldn’t grasp either, even when I’d had them explained to me. Because if colours didn’t exist in themselves, but were actually different wavelengths of light that the brain turned into colours, what was it we saw when we saw colours then? Colours were an illusion, they didn’t exist, and yet we saw them, so they did exist, not outside, in the world, but inside us.
But how did they get there?
Colours are all in the head, my teacher had told me when I’d asked about it. Colours are a product of our sensory system.
But where in the head?
‘Now you’re being belligerent, Syvert,’ he said. ‘Light entering through the pupil is detected by the retina and converted into electrical signals that are sent to the visual cortex at the rear of the brain. There are cells in the retina called cones and rods, which react differently to different wavelengths of light, and the electrical signals they send out determine whether we see colours or black and white. But we don’t actually see colour until those signals are processed in the visual cortex.’
‘But I see colour,’ I said. ‘Not signals.’
‘It all happens in the visual cortex,’ he said. ‘Now, no more questions about the eye. Everything’s perfectly well explained in your textbook.’
But it wasn’t.
The world was outside us, it was something we were in. But seeing it, it became a part of us. So wasn’t the world then inside us? If it was only on the outside and nothing of it got in, everything would just be dark. The same surely applied to hearing and smell and touch. Our senses took what was external and turned it into something internal. If the world couldn’t get inside us, it wouldn’t exist.
That would be like the way a stone existed in the world. Nothing in the world got in, the stone couldn’t hear, see, smell, taste or feel anything, so the world as far as it was concerned didn’t exist. A stone didn’t even know it existed itself. Was that what life was?
Was that what set it apart from what was not living? What was living was living because it internalised the world? And both the world and what was living were thereby felt to exist?
That had to be it.
But how did the visible world get inside us?
That was the bit about light entering through the pupils.
It was from there on it got hard to grasp.
The world came in as two narrow beams of light, and that light contained so much information that the brain could construct for us an identical image of the world on that basis alone.
Where was that image?
It seemed like it was outside us.
The river was down there, not inside me.
And then there was the fact that colours were something added on. Like some kind of emotion.
Was everything in the world colourless?
It had to be.
Could there be other things that were added on too? Things that didn’t exist, which we constructed and believed to exist?
—Knausgaard
Wow, that's a great excerpt. Love that it pairs so well with Knausgaard - one of my favorites, and I have a new unread copy of The Wolves of Eternity that I will absolutely be picking up now.
The real universal acid isn't the scientific method, it's the idea that you should have true beliefs and not false ones. Very few systems of belief can endure the demand for truth unharmed.
The reductionism of science, the way it breaks large concepts down into small facts, is just a symptom of our desire for the truth.
I've often wondered at colorization in space. Great read. The bit on Ahab and the white whale is just gravy. Good writing today on The Intrinsic Perspective.
What a beautiful piece of writing. I used to be a hard philosophical materialist - everything was just matter and math. But, after cultivating a meditation practice, I'm now agnostic on this question, precisely because conscious experience is so completely inexplicable. Consciousness is (to quote Sam Harris) the only thing that cannot be an illusion, and yet it is a truly hard problem. How do we get this first-person experience of color and complexity from dead matter? That's a complete mystery.
So I retain hope that everything isn't as white as Neptune, and that our first-person conscious experiences hold secrets to the genuine mysteries of reality.
“Nothing ruins my childhood more than finding out Neptune isn’t dark blue”???!?! WAIT TIL YOU LEARN ABOUT PLUTO NOT BEING A PLANET!!! 😹
Nice to be reminded of Melville's philosophizing to which you do justice and more, thanks! That colors can't be found in the world itself is indeed a shock to naive realists and raises the hard problem of consciousness: why do just certain neural goings-on entail phenomenal colors (and other sensations) available only to the conscious system? Is your red anything like mine? A fair question that I don't think we'll ever be in a position to answer.
Yup, and if you frame neuroscientist's struggle with consciousness as "find the real colors!" it's easy to see how hard it actually is. Like no one else has to find real colors, they can just say "oh it's subjective, whatever" and wave their hands.
Wouldn’t a more interesting, and answerable, question be “what can be said of the components of the mind that process particle wavelength along the spectrum of visible light?”
What do you mean? Our eye’s ability to filter light across some spectrum of particle wavelengths that processes such phenomena as colored light is an evolutionary adaptation to give us an advantage according to our environmental conditions. Your red doesn’t have to be the same as mine, as you possess a body that is unique. The wavelengths of light still remain, regardless of who sees them.
Agreed that our reds don't need to be the same, they just have to reliably correspond to external states of affairs. But the fact that we're not in a position to compare them presents a problem for physicalizing consciousness: our reds are categorically private phenomena, unlike our brains. Attaching a link to a paper on that - if not good form I trust Eric will let me know.
https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/consciousness/locating-consciousness-why-experience-cant-be-objectified
That abstract looks interesting, and I roughly agree with parts of it, but not the complete thesis. Could be because I’m an adherent of Marxist philosophy.
I wouldn’t say that we aren’t in a position to compare variant conscious experiences, but that in doing just that, comparing multiple instances of phenomenological observation, we’re capable of greater approaching the limit of objective reality through scientific practices.
I would say that regardless of how personal an individual experience of “redness” may be, it must be true that conditions of physical reality exist to constitute any possible experience of “redness.” Our eyes may be tuned to such experiences in a way that another sentient creature’s are not, but that does not mean the physical conditions that make it possible do not exist in relation to said other creature.
Right, the fact we can't compare our reds suggests that what's real (conscious experience in this instance) may not always be observable in spacetime: we're up against "the limit of objective reality through scientific practices." And I also agree that the apple we both observe as being red is physically real and locatable in spacetime.
No, what I’m saying is we do compare our reds to further understand the commonalities and differences between them, as such a perception is a developed ability, to understand how such a thing (the part of the spectrum of light we see) definitively exists in reality. But yes I do agree that our perceptual limits create challenges for what we observe in spacetime and how we do so.
In regards to consciousness, I’d say that by the very nature of our observation that we are aware of our awareness, it obviously exists in reality. Neuroscience is the way in which we describe how such a phenomenon arises, and the means by which we experience it.
The only thing whiter than Neptune is Erik Hoel. The only thing whiter than Erik Hoel is Erik Hoel's writings on emergence. Keep up the wonderful work. I'll always read your thoughts, even if you don't read mine! (which could have come from your head, ironically)
Thanks Bobby! Although just to say, I believe I have read some of your thoughts at various points. Didn't I give feedback on your book The Wonder of Reality?
I remember reading in a Richard Dawkins book he criticizes the Keats poem:
>Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wing
>Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
>Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
>Unweave a rainbow
By pointing out that unlike gnomes and angels, rainbows still exist once you understand them.
It's a great example to bring up, but in my opinion I think Dawkins is being pretty obtuse here. Disenchantment clearly can happen without something being rendered nonexistent!
I agree. Probably relates to something else he said "science is interesting, and if you don't think so you can fuck off!", a kind of "suck it up, the truth should be interesting enough for you!" without needing help. I think it's easier to say if you do have that natural fascination, which though it can be inculcated is not universal.
I think the comparison with fantasy/scifi clearly shows where reality doesn't stack up to our ideal for it. Space is too far apart and travel is too slow, so introduce ftl drives and illustrate the planets close and colorful. The night sky is too dark and empty, so show lots of alien inhabited moons and rings and purple nebulas in your videogame or marvel movie.
We want motion and color in general- artists depictions and falsely colored electron microscope photos holographs and UIs with spinning gizmos and bubbly green chemistry erlenmeyer flasks with human drama at it's center. Some of us still F*cking Love Science regardless, but for the rest at least there's fiction.
my god, you are a phenomenal writer. truly. i take off my hat to you. the ending and your repetition and your re-inclusion of melville's words gave me chills. truly beautiful work. thank you for writing.
Super interesting article that reflects the underbelly of scientific progress.. the relegation of the experiencing self in favor of measurable truth. I’m intrigued and wonder if the field will be able to accommodate experience without sacrificing truth.
Maybe it will become more of a personal challenge to find beauty in our own conscious experience while knowing that almost all of it is illusion.
Neat, I had thought of all this before. And there's even a book about this and much more called The Reign of Quantity and Signs of the Times. It's a little schizo, but boy, Guenon has such an interesting angle on reality. Your vision at the end reminds me of Guenon's statement that next to the Infinite, the world of the senses is strictly nil, for what else is one positing when one says nature is devoid of quality? And Advaita Vedanta, the tradition Guenon considered the purest, asserts that the Infinite and consciousness are one.
Really, the hard problem of consciousness is the reason I got into spirituality to begin with, so it's neat that there are traditions where consciousness is central.
Fantastic article.
Science gets us to the base truth, but I don’t think we’re designed to live in base truth. We need stories, meanings, purpose, etc… to mediate between us and harsh reality
Always a pleasure to read your work, Erik