brief introduction
The story of how science and metaphysical materialism became intertwined is a curious one. In the seventeenth century, when science as we know it today was taking its first steps, scientists based all their work – of course – on perceptual experience: on the things and phenomena around them that they could see, touch, smell, like or hear This starting point is, of course, of a qualitative nature. After all, the perceived concreteness of the proverbial apple that fell on Newton's head, as well as its red color and sweetness, were felt qualities. Everything that appears on the screen of perception is necessarily qualitative. In fact, the starting point of science – then and now – is the world of qualities that we perceive in our environment. Even the result of perception-enhancing instruments is only useful to the extent that it is perceived qualitatively.
However, scientists did not take long to realize that it is very opportune to describe this eminently qualitative world by means of quantities, such as weights, lengths, angles, speeds, etc. These quantities capture the relative differences between qualities. For example, from a qualitative point of view, an anvil feels heavier than a feather, and this difference in perceived weight can be conveniently described by a quantity: a given number of newtons. Today we have units – quantities – to describe any discernible aspect of the world, including frequency, amplitude, mass, charge, momentum, spin, and so on.
But then a strange thing happened: many scientists seemed to forget where it all started and began to attribute a fundamental reality only to quantities. Since only quantities can be objectively measured, they began to postulate that only mass, charge, momentum, etc., really existed out there, qualities being somehow ephemeral epiphenomena – side effects – of brain activity. that existed solely within the confines of our skull. This was, in a nutshell, the birth of metaphysical materialism, a philosophy that – absurdly – confers a fundamental reality on mere descriptions while denying the reality of what is first described.
What's more, at some point between the beginning of the 17th century and the end of the 19th century, we began to replace reality with its description, and the territory with the map. We now say that there is only matter—that is, things exhaustively defined solely in terms of quantities—while the qualities of experience, which are all we ultimately have, are supposedly secondary, reducible, and epiphenomenal. And so we are faced with the so-called "difficult problem of consciousness": the impossibility of explaining qualities in terms of quantities. The astonishing thing is that we are surprised by the intractability of this "problem": to begin with, we define matter as something purely quantitative – that is, not as a quality; it is not surprising, therefore, that we cannot reduce qualities to matter.
Hoping that one day we will solve the difficult problem of consciousness is as absurd as hoping that the territory will be reduced to its map, or a painter to his self-portrait. The difficult problem is to be identified and circumvented, not solved. Our current metaphysical dilemmas—plus the history that has led to them, as we have outlined it—would be comic if they were not tragic. In just a couple of centuries we have become entangled in hopelessly abstract conceptual knots and have managed to lose all contact with reality.
If science is about progressing beyond the dilemmas of the present – from those related to the neuroscience of consciousness to those having to do with the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, which are rooted in the same conceptual misstep described above –, we have to undo the knots and put our feet back on firm ground. This book is meant to help you do that.
Cutting-edge empirical observations are increasingly difficult to reconcile with metaphysical materialism. Laboratory results obtained in quantum mechanics, for example, indicate beyond doubt that there is no self-contained material world of tables and chairs out there. This, along with the inability of materialistic neuroscience to explain experience, forces us to reexamine our initial assumptions and consider other alternatives. Analytical idealism – the notion that reality, while also amenable to scientific investigation, is fundamentally qualitative – is the leading candidate to replace metaphysical materialism.
This book analyzes in an accessible way the vast body of empirical evidence and arguments in favor of analytic idealism. The volume consists of a selection of articles written between 2017 and 2020. The original versions of most of them were published in prominent magazines and journals, such as Scientific American, Journal of Near-Death Studies, IAI News (the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas), Blog of the American Philosophical Association, and Science and Nonduality, as well as on my own blog. They have been assembled here in a suitable format, ordered and grouped for ease of understanding.
The articles have been revised and updated, and in some cases have been expanded. Often the original versions had to accommodate editorial preferences that were not my own, while the ones in this book are my preference: they would be the director's cut, if you will, reflecting my true tone and style. Two previously unpublished articles are also included: "Why does nature reflect our reasoning?" (ch. 23) and "Is life more than physical?" (ch. 24).
The texts gathered here often – although not always – address issues already covered in my previous books. However, they incorporate greater clarity in the argumentation developed since then. This volume has given me the opportunity to deal with old subjects in a fresh, more insightful and concise way. In a sense, it is a great compendium of my ideas: each chapter contains a distillation of at least one of the ideas that define analytic idealism. The resulting argumentation anticipates a historically imminent transition to a scientific world view that, while elegantly accommodating all known empirical evidence and predictive models, considers mind—not matter—as the foundation of reality.
More than any previous book of mine, this one includes critiques of metaphysical materialism, consciousness denial, Pampsychism, and other prevailing philosophical and scientific views. In a certain sense, it is a concentrated and stinging reproach – without consideration – to the madness that characterizes our vision of the world at the current historical juncture. I am launching this rebuke in the hope that it will help change our most dysfunctional ways so that we can live closer to the truth.
