BK

 A

Clearly, Analytic Idealism is very different from the mainstream

metaphysical hypothesis of the early 21st-century: Physicalism. The

latter posits that the essence of the world out there is not mental at all

but, instead, physical in a strict sense. What does it mean to say that

reality is strictly physical in essence? It means that reality should be, in

principle, exhaustively characterizable through quantities and their

mathematical relationships alone. In other words, according to

mainstream Physicalism, if you come up with a long enough list of the

right numbers—such as the amount of mass and charge at different

coordinates of spacetime, or the amplitude and frequency of different

field oscillations, etc.—and associated equations, you will have said

everything there is to say about reality; nothing will remain

uncharacterized or ambiguous.

This is clearly antithetical to Analytic Idealism, according to which

nature is made of felt qualities—not only the qualities you, I, and other

living beings happen to feel, but felt qualities nonetheless—as opposed

to abstract quantities. In other words, under Analytic Idealism there is

something it is like to be the world out there; the world is made of

transpersonal experiential states that cannot be exhaustively

characterized in terms of quantities alone. After all, how do we fully

characterize, using numbers alone, what it feels like to, e.g., fall in love?

What quantities can exhaustively capture the quality of falling in love?

We cannot know what it feels like to fall in love merely by reading an

extensive list of numbers and equations; we can only know it by direct,

qualitative acquaintance. Clearly, thus, Analytic Idealism entails a

fundamentally different understanding of the nature of reality than

mainstream Physicalism.

I will elaborate on all this much more extensively in future chapters,

so don’t be discouraged if you can’t wrap your head around it right now.

At this point, I’m only trying to give you a general sense of where I am

going with all this, to preempt the possibility that an early

misinterpretation or prejudice might cloud your ability to grasp my

intended meaning.

The discussion above raises an immediate question: how plausible is it

that our culture, having put a man on the moon, cured countless diseases,

changed our very genes, and created the Internet, is so fundamentally

wrong about the essence of the world we manipulate so effectively

through our technology? How plausible is it that, having accomplished

so much, we are still so mistaken about the basics?

It is more than plausible; it is certain. And the ones among us looking

carefully and thoughtfully at the state of play in science and philosophy

know this.

I shall discuss this untrivial claim at length throughout this book. For

now, though, notice that technology necessitates no ultimately correct

understanding of the nature of reality; it only needs empirically

convenient fictions. To see how, consider that a 5-year-old kid can be

world champion playing a computer game without having the slightest

idea of what the game actually is—that is, of the computer hardware and

software that constitute the game. To be world champion, all the kid

needs is a convenient fiction in terms of which to relate to the game. And

it may go like this: there is a little man inside the screen; I am that little

man; if I shoot those other little men in the screen, I score points; if I get

shot or touch this or that wall, I die; and so on. Each and every element

of this fiction is utterly false: there is no little man inside the screen; you

are not inside the screen; you are not shooting, or getting shot by,

anyone; there are no walls to touch; and you don’t die from playing the

game. Yet, the fiction is convenient in that the game behaves, for all

applicable purposes, as if the fiction were true; and that’s all the kid

needs to play it well and be crowned world champion.

Technological prowess is entirely analogous to this: all it needs are

empirically convenient fictions in terms of which to relate to reality. For

instance, we have put a man on the moon under the convenient fiction

that there are invisible forces, acting instantaneously and at a distance,

attracting a spacecraft to both the Earth and the Moon, in a kind of

celestial tug of war. We even gave these forces a name: gravity. Needless

to say, since Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity we have known

that there are no such forces; what we call gravity is but a curvature of

the invisible fabric of spacetime—our new empirically convenient fiction

—not a force. And although the designers of the Apollo missions knew

this, the earlier convenient fiction—Newtonian mechanics—was a good

enough empirical approximation for their purposes, and so they used it in

their calculations. That fiction was convenient enough for the purposes

of their game, and that’s all that is required for technological

advancement.

Engineers know that, not only is it unnecessary for our convenient

fictions to be true—finite-element modeling is not true, Fourier optics is

not true, discrete-element transmission line theory is not true, even the

notion of subatomic particles is not true, yet we apply them every day

because they work well enough in empirical practice—often we don’t

even need to have a convenient fiction at all. In electronics and

telecommunications engineering, for instance, what we refer to as the

‘signal-to-noise ratio’ is an attempt to quantify the significance of all the

unknown effects for which we don’t have an explicit convenient fiction

(the ‘noise’), in relation to those for which we do (the ‘signal’). As long

as the signal-to-noise ratio is above a certain threshold, our technology

will work, for it is engineered precisely to keep the unknowns—which

are legion—at bay. As such, that our technology works doesn’t mean

even that we have a fiction for everything of relevance; let alone that the

fictions we do have are true. Convenient fictions really are just that:

convenient; their relationship to truth is tenuous.

It is therefore naïve to think that technological success reflects

metaphysical understanding, just as it is naïve to think that the 5-year-old

world champion actually understands what is going on while he plays the

computer game. Add to this the historical fact that every generation

before us has been demonstrably wrong about a great many things of

relevance regarding the nature of reality, and you will realize how

plausible it is that we, too, are wrong when it comes to mainstream

Physicalism. Future generations will know this with crystal clarity, just

as we today know of the mistakes of our ancestors.

Indeed, it would be silly to think that mere human beings, bipedal

primates who have been running around this space rock called Earth for

only about two or three hundred thousand years, and sporting an intellect

—i.e., the capacity to think symbolically, conceptually—for less than

fifty thousand, have evolved a cognitive system advanced enough to

comprehend every salient aspect of reality. Of course we haven’t; for the

same reason that ants haven’t evolved enough to comprehend Quantum

Field Theory. As such, we cannot hope to unveil the ultimate truths, and

cannot be certain of any of our fictions.

But there is something we can be certain of: our current and past

mistakes. For these mistakes entail internal logical contradictions,

demonstrable empirical inadequacies, or fundamental gaps in

explanatory power that rule them out as viable hypotheses. We very well

can discern these errors with certainty, for they are our errors—the

expression of our own primate foolishness—not genuine natural

mysteries. So the game is to unveil our mistakes, correct them through

new convenient fictions, and thereby get closer to a viable understanding

of the nature of reality. The hope is not that monkeys can discern the

ultimate truths of existence, but that monkeys can be less wrong over

time. This we can do; and this we must do, for acquiescing to known

errors is morally unacceptable.

To take steps forward, however, we must face up to the fact that

mainstream Physicalism is not only a fiction, but one that isn’t even

convenient anymore. In the early days of the Enlightenment, it did serve

a sociopolitical purpose as the tensions between a nascent science and

the Church grew. By carving out a metaphysical domain outside

‘spirit’—a translation of the Greek word ‘psyche,’ which also means

‘mind’—early scientists hoped to be able to operate without being

burned at the stake, as Giordano Bruno was in 1600. The notion of a

physical world fundamentally different from, and outside, psyche must

have sounded ludicrous and harmless enough to Church authorities at the

time that they left scientists alone.

As a matter of fact, it isn’t a secret that the founders of the

Enlightenment were well aware that Physicalism was a political weapon

first and foremost, not a plausible account of the nature of reality. Will

Durant, in The Story of Philosophy (Simon and Schuster, 1991), points

out that Denis Diderot—one of the authors of the Encyclopédie, the

founding document of the Enlightenment—acknowledged that “all

matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the

unity of consciousness to matter and motion; but materialism is a good

weapon against the Church, and must be used till a better one is found”

(page 300). Diderot had clarity and honesty about what he was up to,

which we can’t say of most self-appointed spokespeople of Physicalism

and ‘Scientism’—a naïve and fallacious conflation of science and

metaphysics—today.

Later, in the second half of the 18th century, the industrial revolution

—with its railways, steam engines and machine tools—was picking up

steam and the emergent commercial class, the bourgeoisie, was accruing

social influence. As a consequence of this process, by the time of the

July Revolution of 1830 the zeitgeist of the Enlightenment had shifted

from edifying art and philosophy to down-to-earth technology and the

practical applications of science. At this point, the same notion of a

physical realm distinct from psyche not only justified the growing

dominance of bourgeois intellectual elites over the clergy, but also

provided a psychological handle—a convenient fiction—to help

scientists extricate themselves from the phenomena they observed. This,

in turn, may have helped increase the objectivity of empirical

experimentation at a crucial early juncture for science.

But by the second half of the 19th century, the original Enlightenment

clarity that Physicalism was mostly a political weapon—instead of a

truly plausible metaphysical hypothesis—had been lost, as chronicled by

Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007). Yet

this, too, came with a payoff; in fact, the biggest psychological payoff of

all: understanding phenomenal consciousness—i.e., our very ability to

experience—as a mere by-product of physical arrangements eliminated,

in one fell swoop, the single greatest fear humankind had had

throughout its history; namely, the fear of what we will experience after

death. For if our minds are generated by living brains, then there will be

no consciousness to experience anything after death. The angst of the

great unknown—codified in Christian mythology as the fear of Hell—

was suddenly gone, along with all the moral responsibility that had

hitherto oppressed the lives of Christians. All of our worries, regrets,

anxieties, etc., were now guaranteed—whether we liked it or not,

believed it or not—to come to an end at the moment of death. It is hard

for us today to imagine what a profound liberation this must have felt

like, for we now take this liberation entirely for granted. Perhaps only the

Reformation, a couple of centuries prior, could be compared to it. The

fear that had allowed the Church to singlehandedly control practically

the entire population of the European continent for over a millennium

was suddenly off the table. It’s no wonder that Physicalism accrued so

much cultural momentum ever since, despite being perhaps the worst

metaphysical hypothesis—in terms of explanatory power, conceptual

parsimony, empirical adequacy, internal consistency, and overall

coherence—ever to gain mainstream status in any society on the planet.

The historical, sociopolitical, and psychological convenience of the

physicalist fiction is almost impossible to overestimate. Through most of

the 20th century, it was even used to justify itself, in a surreal feat of

circular reasoning. For the greatest embarrassment of mainstream

Physicalism is its fundamental inability to account for phenomenal

consciousness—i.e., the existence of experience—which is nature’s sole

pre-theoretical, given fact. Indeed, phenomenal consciousness precedes

theory epistemically, in that all theories arise and exist within it. But by

pronouncing phenomenal consciousness an epiphenomenon of the

physical world—a mere by-product of brain processes, devoid of causal

powers of its own—without any explanation as for how this could

possibly be so, mainstream Physicalism eliminated consciousness from

the agenda of human investigation; it suppressed the very thing that

could expose its own most fundamental shortcoming. To put it simply,

the idea was that, since we assume that consciousness is epiphenomenal

and absent from the causal nexus anyway, we don’t really need to bother

about finding out how it comes about—how utterly convenient! One can

clearly see this circularity in the development of, e.g., Positivism and

Behaviorism in the 20th century. And it took until 1974, with Thomas

Nagel’s seminal paper titled “What is it like to be a bat?”, for

consciousness to (very) slowly return to the investigative agenda.

Our culture’s confidence in mainstream Physicalism is a historical

psychosocial phenomenon largely unrelated to reason and evidence. The

only reason most of us don’t see this is that our lives are too short for us

to discern the relatively slow, subtle ebb and flow of cultural history in

which we are immersed. We spend almost the entirety of our ephemeral

existences surrounded by learned elites who seem very confident in their

internally inconsistent, empirically untenable, and explanatorily hopeless

views. And thus, we think that mainstream Physicalism must be true;

how could all these people be wrong? Yet, history shows that ‘all these

people’ have always been wrong before, while reason and evidence show

that they are wrong now too. Already in the next chapter, we shall see

precisely how.

Analytic Idealism—the subject of this book—represents a correction of

our known metaphysical mistakes; a step forward. As I shall soon argue,

it offers the most plausible and parsimonious hypothesis we have today

about the nature of reality. Herein lies the value of what you are about to

read.

I have written ten earlier books and a PhD thesis on the subject, not

to mention a number of technical papers in academic journals, blog

posts, and popular science & philosophy essays in major publications.

So, what is new in this particular volume? As the title of this book

indicates, here I attempt to summarize, in an informal but direct manner,

the key salient points of Analytic Idealism and the argument that

substantiates it. Ideas from several of my previous writings are revisited

here, but often in a new form, from a different slant. And they are

brought together so to give you the briefest and most compelling

overview of Analytic Idealism I could muster.

In addition, as I’ve found myself having to explain and defend

Analytic Idealism in countless interviews, Q&A sessions, panels,

debates, courses, and other public events over the years, I’ve had to

distill a more optimal way to bring forth the core ideas. I’ve learned over

time what the main difficulties are that different people have with

Analytic Idealism, and refined ways to explain it so to meet people

where they are, honoring their intuitions and tackling their hidden

assumptions more explicitly. All these learnings and refinements are

built into the present volume.

Stylistically, my previous ten books were meticulously documented.

The same goes for my second PhD thesis and my many technical papers

in peer-reviewed academic journals. I thus believe that I have earned the

right to discuss Analytic Idealism now in a less formal, less documented,

but more fluent and easy-to-read manner, capturing the most salient

points in more intuitive, colloquial language. This is what I try to achieve

in this book. Unlike previous writings, here I shall thus deliberately

avoid formal literature citations, bibliography, and notes. Whenever a

literature reference seems particularly productive or unavoidable, I shall

mention it in the running text, just as I already did above.

This book is meant to be as close as possible to a verbal discussion of

Analytic Idealism, as if I were explaining it to you in person. The tone

adopted deliberately reveals more aspects of my own humanity and

emotional state to the reader, which can be contrasted to the drier and

more objective character of my technical writings. For those readers who

prefer or require a technical and more rigorously documented argument,

I recommend my earlier output, much of which—such as the academic

papers and thesis—is freely available online.

Chapter 2

What you see is not what you get

When we look around, we see a world of objects with particular shapes,

as well as events unfolding in defined locations. We then automatically

assume that the world around us is constituted by these objects and

events; by these shapes and locations. In other words, we believe that our

perception is a kind of transparent window into the world, revealing to

us the world as it is in itself.

But can we conceive of perception as something other than a

transparent window into the world? Of course we can. Take an airplane,

for instance: it has a number of sensors—such as air speed, pressure, and

orientation sensors—which measure the states of the sky outside the

airplane. The resulting measurements are then displayed to the pilot in an

encoded manner, in the form of dial indications in the airplane’s

dashboard. As such, the airplane’s dashboard conveys accurate and

important information about the sky outside, albeit in an encoded form.

The pilot must take this encoded information seriously, lest the airplane

crashes.

Nonetheless, the dashboard looks nothing like the sky outside: dozens

of dials on a flat instrument panel look very different from the 3D

clouds, air flow patterns, precipitation, and distant horizon outside the

airplane. Clearly, that the dashboard conveys accurate and relevant

information about the sky doesn’t entail or imply that it must look like

the sky; as a matter of fact, it doesn’t, and we all intuitively understand

why this isn’t a problem.

Just like the airplane, we, too, are equipped with sensors to collect

information about the world surrounding us: our retinas, eardrums, taste

buds, mucous lining of the nose, and outer surface of the skin make

measurements of the states of the environment surrounding us. The

results of these measurements are then represented on the screen of

perception: what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. As such, the

screen of perception is entirely analogous to the airplane’s dashboard:

both display information about our environment that was collected by

our sensors.

Yet, as we’ve just seen, the airplane’s dashboard does not need to

look like the sky to convey accurate, relevant, and actionable information

about the sky. By the same token, neither does our screen of perception:

its contents do not need to look like the world in order to convey

accurate, relevant, and actionable information about the world. Put in a

different way, to do its job properly the screen of perception does not

need to be a transparent window into the world; instead, it can be just

like the dashboard of dials in an airplane, which looks nothing like the

sky outside. The world around us, as it actually is in itself, independently

of perception, can in principle be as different from what we perceive as

the clouds in the sky are different from dial indications on an airplane’s

dashboard. What we see is not necessarily what we get; it doesn’t need

to be.

Let us now ask a more consequential question: although the world

doesn’t need to look like the contents of perception, can it look like what

we perceive? Can perception be a transparent window into the world,

even if it doesn’t need to?

The answer is a categorical ‘No’: perception cannot be a transparent

window into the world. For if it were, our internal cognitive states would

need to mirror the external states of the world, as this is what is entailed

by the ‘transparent window’ hypothesis. But since there is no a priori

upper bound to the dispersion of states of the world—i.e., the entropy of

the world—there would also be no upper bound to the dispersion of our

internal cognitive states, insofar as the latter mirror the states of the

world. In other words, if perception were a transparent window allowing

us to see the world as it actually is, there would be no upper bound to our

internal entropy. Physically, this means that by merely looking at the

world we could literally melt into hot meat soup; for unbound internal

entropy is incompatible with structural and dynamical integrity. And

since we have never witnessed anyone spontaneously melt after taking a

look around, it is safe to say that perception does not mirror the states of

the world; it is not a transparent window that allows us to see the world

as it is. Why would it?

Instead, perception is like a dashboard of dials: it contains

information about the world only in an encoded form, thereby limiting

the entropy of our internal states, just as a dashboard of dials intrinsically

limits the entropy of information pilots have to contend with

(incidentally, this is why flight manuals, despite being thick, are finite in

length and do not have to tell the pilot what to do for every possible

configuration of the sky). All this has been worked out rigorously by

Karl Friston and his collaborators, particularly in a paper called

“Cognitive dynamics: From attractors to active inference,” published in

the Proceedings of the IEEE in 2014.

Another team has arrived at the same conclusion independently, through

an entirely different line of reasoning based not on thermodynamics, but

game theory instead. Our perceptual apparatus has evolved for survival

fitness, not to show us the world as it actually is; the latter is entirely

irrelevant as far as natural selection is concerned. In other words, we

evolved to perceive the world in whatever encoded manner helps us react

most effectively to environmental challenges and survive. Perceiving the

world as it actually is isn’t effective for survival, as Prof. Donald

Hoffman and his collaborators, from the University of California at

Irvine, have been showing mathematically for many years now.

To gain intuition into why a transparent window into the world would

“swiftly lead to our extinction,” as Prof. Hoffman likes to put it, consider

one of his favorite analogies: that of a computer desktop. In it, your files

are represented as icons: little colorful rectangles. But do your files, as

they are in themselves, actually look like colorful rectangles? Not at all.

Computer files are giant sets of millions of microscopic electronic

switches, some open and some closed, in non-volatile memory chips

made of silicon, metals and oxides. Little could look more different from

these files than rectangular icons on a screen. But if we were forced to

see our computer files as they actually are—i.e., as millions of

microscopic electronic switches—it would become impossible for us to

use the computer; we wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of what we

see. Instead, we would be overwhelmed by non-actionable information,

in which the salient properties of the files would be indiscernible.

To avoid this dysfunctional scenario, the computer’s operating system

represents the files not as they actually are, but in an encoded form that

conveys what is salient about them in an actionable manner; i.e., as little

rectangular icons. The same goes for perception: if evolution had built

our perceptual system to cognize the world as it really is, it stands to

reason that we would be driven to extinction because of non-actionable

information overload. Instead, our perceptual system captures and

represents the world in an encoded and actionable manner. The contents

of perception—the objects, shapes, and events we see around us—are

mere ‘icons’ in the ‘graphical user-interface’ entailed by the screen of

perception. We never become directly acquainted with the world as it

actually is, because doing so would make it more difficult for us to

compete and survive in our ecosystem.

We are airplane pilots who were born in the cockpit of an airplane

without windows; an airplane that can only be flown by instruments. We

have never left the cockpit to see the world outside as it actually is. All

we have ever been acquainted with is the dashboard of dials that we call

‘perception.’ It is thus psychologically understandable that we should

mistakenly take the dashboard for the world: we’ve never had anything

else. Even our language and our very thoughts have evolved to ‘speak

dashboard,’ not ‘reality.’ In other words, because our interactions with

the world are always mediated by the dashboard, we think and speak in

terms of the parameters and scales of the dashboard, not in terms of the

actual elements of reality. The entire paradigm of our worldview tends to

be the paradigm of the dashboard; it follows the way information is

organized and displayed by the dials, not the ontic structure of the world

itself.

To clearly grasp this is the first necessary step in the journey towards

a less-wrong understanding of reality. Every time you look around and

see a world of ‘physical’—in the colloquial, not the strict sense—objects

and events, you are not seeing reality as it actually is; all you are seeing

is a dashboard representation of reality, constructed by evolution for the

benefit of your survival. Reality, as it is in itself, stands to be as different

from what you perceive as the clouds in the sky are different from the

dial indications on an airplane’s dashboard.

Taking the contents of perception for reality is as silly a mistake as a

pilot who looks at his dashboard and declares it to be the sky outside.

Just as the dashboard conveys accurate and important information about

the sky outside without being the sky, so does perception convey

accurate and important information about the reality outside without

being that reality. You never get to see reality; all you see is an encoded

representation thereof, meant to convey actionable information about

your environment, while limiting your internal entropy and improving

your chances of reacting effectively to environmental challenges and

opportunities.

What we colloquially refer to as the ‘physical’ world—i.e., the

perceived world of objects, colors, shapes, and events around us,

occupying the scaffolding of spacetime—is the dashboard, not reality as

it is in itself. ‘Physicality’ in the colloquial sense—i.e., the contents of

perception—is an internal cognitive representation of reality, which we

create ourselves, given the cognitive apparatus evolution has equipped us

with. There surely is a real world out there, independent of perception; a

world that would still be there even if we were not here to perceive it; a

world that doesn’t care whether we like it or not, believe it or not, wish it

to be different or not; a world that doesn’t change merely because we

fantasize about its being different. But that real world is not the

‘physical’ world that appears on the screen of perception. The latter is a

mere representation of the real world, which we create. The thing that is

represented is not created by us, but the representations themselves are.

As such, does the moon exist when nobody is looking at it? If by ‘the

moon’ we mean the aspect of reality that is represented as that shiny

white disk up in the night sky, then yes, it exists whether or not anyone

or anything is measuring or observing it. But if by ‘the moon’ we mean

that shiny white disk itself—the colloquially ‘physical’ entity up in the

sky—then no, it doesn’t exist if no living being is observing it, for the

experiential qualities ‘shiny,’ ‘white,’ and ‘disk-shaped’ are cognitive

representations created by the act of observation.

An analogy may help make the point clearer: when there are no

airplanes up in the sky, there are no dashboard representations; nothing is

being measured and displayed on a dashboard. Similarly, when there are

no living beings observing reality, there is no ‘physical’ world, for the

‘physical’ world is a set of perceptual representations arising from

observation. But none of this means that there is no sky in the absence of

airplanes; the clouds are still there; the states of the sky—its air pressure,

wind direction, etc.—are all still there, even when not being measured

and displayed on a dashboard. Analogously, the reality that would be

represented as contents of perception—i.e., as ‘physical’ objects and

events—in case someone were observing it exists independently,

irrespectively of observation. The thing represented exists independently

of representation, but the representation itself obviously doesn’t.

The ‘physical’ world displayed on the screen of perception is

representation, not the thing represented; for we associate physicality

with the contents of perception. These contents of perception, in turn, are

not the world as it actually is in and of itself, for perception is not a

transparent window into reality. Therefore, we have no grounds to extend

the notion of physicality beyond perception, towards the thing perceived;

not any more than we have grounds to say that the clouds in the sky are

‘dashboardical.’ As such, we cannot say that the real world is physical.

In fact, under any recognizable sense of the word physical the real world

is not physical, for the very meaning of physicality is anchored in the

parameters and scales of the dashboard.