I would like to advance the discussion, and so I am going to do something I have never done before, which is to explain in public what this is really all about. This post isn’t supposed to be an argument. I can’t prove any of it. But it might just help people to understand what I’ve been trying to say. All sorts of things are missing from this description, so please do not jump to conclusions – do not insert your own definitions and assumptions into my system and then use them to attack it. There’s been too much of that already. Instead, please ask questions and I will do my best to answer them.
How do I know these things if I can’t prove them? The answer is that I have direct experience of what other people call “the supernatural”. And I am not just talking about synchronicity. I am talking about a wide-ranging reconfiguration of the timeline I belong to. In Jungian terminology synchronistic processes are going on around us all the time – we just usually either don’t notice them, or we are so familiar with them that we don’t question what they are. But Jung’s terminology is unhelpful in that “synchronicity” means both individual experiences of meaningful coincidences and a whole category of causality (or something that looks like causality but isn’t, depending on your definition). I have gone from being a hardcore Dawkinsian materialist-naturalist to experiencing the most profound “supernatural” phenomena imaginable, and I did it in the space of about two months. I then quit a career in software engineering to study philosophy in an attempt to understand what the **** had happened me, and spent the subsequent 16 years trying to put it down in a book so that people who still think in the way I used to might be able to understand it.
We need to retire the term “supernatural”.
Naturalism (or “metaphysical naturalism”) is a metaphysical view that everything happening in reality can be reduced to (or explained in terms of) the laws of nature (including laws we are yet to discover). Naturalism is logically entailed by materialism (all materialists are naturalists) but the reverse is not true (some naturalists aren’t materialists, eg Nagel). If the material world is the only thing that exists, then there is no theoretical or conceptual space for anything else that could affect it (an agent of free will, for example, or God) so naturalism is logically entailed. Naturalism differs from determinism in that it can accommodate objective randomness – the future does not have to be fully determined, but anything not determined must be random (really random in every case, not just apparently so or only in some cases).
You might think that supernaturalism could just be defined as “not Naturalism” – in other words something else is going on – not everything can be reduced the laws of nature. And until the discovery of quantum theory this worked perfectly well, but QM changes everything. The different interpretations of QM are different ways of explaining how we get from deterministic laws which describe a multiverse, to the experience of a single timeline. The Many Worlds Interpretation does this by saying that all possible outcomes occur in diverging timelines, and we just don’t notice all the ones we don’t end up in. If we reject MWI – and assume there is only one timeline (or perhaps only a few) – then we have to explain what the apparent randomness is – we have to explain what decides which of the physically possible timelines actually manifests. One possibility is that it is objectively random – that nothing makes this decision – that God plays dice with the universe. Another is that there are hidden deterministic processes (hidden variable theories) that decide the outcome. These are the three options most people consider, and all three of them are wrong. What actually determines which outcome manifests is the entire realm of causality Jung called Synchronicity. I call it the praeternatural.
Instead of “supernatural”, I define “praeternatural” to refer to “supernatural” phenomena which are compatible with the laws of physics, but not reducible to them. They do not breach physical law, but they aren’t explained by physical law either. They are probabilistic – they involve things happening which are exceptionally improbable but physically entirely possible. I define “hypernatural” to refer to supernatural phenomena which breach physical laws – things which aren’t possible no matter how much the quantum dice are loaded. Examples include the feeding of the 5000, and Young Earth Creationism. These things do not happen in our reality. It is not just that I haven’t experienced them, but that what I have experienced makes not the slightest bit of sense if the hypernatural is real. If the hypernatural was real, solving our problems would be easy.
Along with synchronicity, praeternatural phenomena include free will (which everybody experiences all the time), karma, and the teleological evolution of conscious organisms Thomas Nagel proposes in Mind and Cosmos but leaves entirely unexplained. These aren’t the only ones, but they’ll do for starters.
This is the heart of spirituality. It’s what it is all about. Praeternatural phenomena exist as a means for Reality to try to develop itself. They are what decides which of the physically possible MWI timelines we collectively end up in, and they are directly associated with spirituality because Reality is seeking a spiritual solution to the problems humanity is facing. That is why spiritually advanced people experience a lot of synchronicity – what is happening is that Reality is prioritising their will over that others who are less useful for this decision process.
For me, 2R is how we incorporate this into a theory which is capable of uniting enough of humanity to manifest the paradigm shift we’re all working towards. This has to include people like Thomas Nagel, because he’s carving out a place for naturalists in the new paradigm. They don’t know it yet, but he’s their leader. He understands what all of the materialists and physicalists don’t, and he’s trying to both break the news to them that materialism is false, and blaze a trail to a new naturalistic theory of everything. He cannot succeed, because he’s looking for teleological laws to explain not only teleology in evolution but potentially other forms of natural teleological process. No such laws exist. The praeternatural is not determined by laws. It is determined by will, by closeness to Truth, and by passion. It will never be made scientific. These are pearls; they are not for swine.
My conclusion is we need a new epistemological agreement to sort out not just this but all of our other ideological problems at the same time – those caused by growth-based economics and postmodern antirealism. We need a “peace treaty” which can unite as many of the ideas within the current “2R ecosystem” which are already compatible with, or can be made compatible with, a new epistemological system. Naturalists like Nagel are never going to believe what I’ve just written, and there’s no way we should expect them to.
My book is both an argument that we need a New Epistemic Deal, and a specific proposal that we might start from. It is offered not as a finished product, but as a basic idea of what the way forwards needs to look like. I want to provoke an entirely new sort of debate – I am not trying to enforce the conclusion of that debate. We need input from all sorts of people. I am just trying to get the ball rolling. PROPERLY rolling.
Here is the whole NED:
1: Ecocivilisation is our shared destiny and guiding goal.
Ecocivilisation represents a vision of a society that harmonises human activity with ecological principles. This is not a utopian ideal but a necessity dictated by the realities of ecosystems and evolution. The claim that ecocivilisation is our destiny is pre-political, transcending specific ideologies or systems. The precise social, political, and economic structures of ecocivilisation are not part of this definition, but the core premise is clear: civilisation must work ecologically to endure.
This realisation, however, is insufficient on its own to inspire a mass movement. The challenge lies in how we navigate the path forward. Choosing a “least bad” route demands careful thought and collaboration, as well as a willingness to embrace complexity. Yet, despite the uncertainties and debates about how to proceed, we can and must agree on this: ecocivilisation is our ultimate goal – a commitment to creating a world where humanity thrives within the limits and laws of nature.
2: Consciousness is real.
Consciousness – our individual interface with reality – is the one thing each of us can be absolutely certain exists. It is through consciousness that we perceive existence and recognise that anything exists at all. As such, consciousness must serve as the starting point for exploring what exists beyond our subjective experience and for discerning the boundaries of what we know and what we don’t.
3: Epistemic Structural Realism is true.
Scientific knowledge tends towards truth. We acknowledge that there is such a thing as an objective reality, external to human minds, about which science provides structural knowledge that is reliable, albeit with certain qualifications. We reject the idea that all scientific knowledge is merely provisional, or as subjective as non-scientific forms of knowledge. We affirm the epistemic privilege of science.
4: Both materialism and physicalism should be rejected.
Materialism cannot account for consciousness. Physicalism either suffers from the same problem, or it implies things that most physicalists reject, in which case it is not much use as a piece of terminology. Both materialism and physicalism restrict our models of reality in such a way that they are never going to be able to satisfactorily account for everything we have justification for believing exists.
5: The existence of praeternatural phenomena is consistent with science and reason, but apart from the unique case of psychegenesis, there is no scientific or rational justification for believing in it/them either. The only possible justification for belief is subjective lived experience.
6: We cannot expect people to believe things (any things) based solely on other people’s subjective lived experiences. There will always be skeptics about any alleged praeternatural phenomena (possibly psychegenesis excepted) and their right to skepticism must be respected.
Principles seven and eight are closely related, but sufficiently different to warrant the inclusion of both.
7: There can be no morality if we deny reality.
If there actually is an objective reality, and we can actually know things about it, then if we start our moral reasoning with anything other than reality then we’re in engaged in fake morality – we will be arguing about what would be morally right and wrong in some ideal reality rather than the real one that we have to figure out how to share. And if the people we are having moral disagreements with are actually dealing with reality, while we are not, then they are engaged with real morality and we are claiming moral high ground we have no right to claim. Attempting to put morality before reality should be rejected as virtue signalling.
8: Science, including ecology, must take epistemic privilege over economics, politics and everything else which purports to be about objective reality.
Principle seven is specifically about morality. Principle eight is about everything else that matters – it is about practical reasoning as well as moral reasoning. It is a statement that the whole of science, including the whole of ecology, the limits to growth and the reality of ecological overshoot, must be acknowledged before serious discussion starts about anything at all. It should be considered immoral to come to any negotiating table demanding concessions from others before you are willing to accept reality. Growth-based economics and politics is not just dangerous nonsense but, for anybody who understands that that is exactly what it is, engaging with it without persistently challenging its false assumptions is an immoral act.
I would like to think that it could not be clearer why these last two principles are necessary. This is a proposal for a new epistemological framework to facilitate the construction of a western ecocivilisation. That process is going to require all of us, at every level of society, to face up to some of the most practically and morally difficult realities that humans have ever faced or will ever face. How can we do that if some of us don’t agree that there even is any such thing as reality and/or demand that either our practical reasoning or our moral reasoning begin from somewhere else?
Edited to add…
Why UTOK is an “Endo-Natural” Worldview | by Gregg Henriques | Unified Theory of Knowledge | Medium
UTOK is concerned with getting the natural into social science into subjective psyche picture of the (endo-)natural world correct. The division between endo- versus exo- allows UTOK to not get bogged down into potentially distracting debates about the world outside the natural world. By making this division, we can simply state that if you are interested in the confederation of aliens or in life after death or the higher dimensions that result in parapsychological phenomena, you can go explore Exo-studies with Sean or other similar endeavors that are concerned with such entities. And if you are interested in a second Enlightenment that scientifically and philosophically gets the right relationship in the natural world between matter and mind and subjective and scientific knowing, then come join the UTOK Community.
Can you see now why I think UTOK is not just completely wrong but a huge, damaging distraction? Gregg Henriques thinks “the paranormal” involves aliens, “higher dimensions” and the afterlife – bullshit, in other words. The “division” he’s making relegates the praeternatural to an irrelevance, because Henriques doesn’t know that it is real. He doesn’t know synchronicity exists, he doesn’t understand why Nagel has been forced to conclude that evolution is teleological, he doesn’t know what free will is or how it works, and he’s got no idea how quantum mechanics is connected to consciousness. That’s for fools who want to explore Exo-studies with Sean, not for deep thinkers like him who have got it all worked out. “Exo-studies” means “stuff from another reality” – stuff that is “out there”. The praeternatural is very much part of this reality. It’s right in here.
The more I learn about UTOK, the less I like about it. I don’t question Gregg Henriques motives. The problem is he’s an old-paradigm naturalist who knows the old paradigm is broken but doesn’t understand what the new one needs to look like. As a result, his proposal for the new paradigm doesn’t work, because it misses all of the key insights needed to sustain 2R. Nagel is a new-paradigm naturalist, or at least he is pointing people in the right direction.
