This is why I was referring to the 3 horizon view. In my (limited) understanding, it is exactly trying to spell out the potential relationships between old order, new order, and transitional order, and how they relate, how they can relate.
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OK…I looked that up and I’m not quite sure how it applies, but this is obviously a difficult thing we are talking about so I understand maybe metaphors are the best we can do. I am using them too.
But for me it certainly was an essential part of my own thinking to define exactly what needs to go – the essence of the old paradigm. I concluded that those things are growth-based economics, metaphysical materialism and postmodern anti-realism. We can define the new paradigm in terms of the NED and the need to invent a post-materialistic science, post-growth economics and post-postmodern politics. That only gets us to the point where we know what the paradigms are, and can start asking the right questions, but without it I don’t think we’ve got a viable paradigm shift at all. We’re just avoiding the crucial questions and hiding behind ambiguities which will stop the show.
A useful quote from this article:
“A second important attitude is humility – not giving way to ego-inflation and Messianic grandiosity. Anthony says: ‘If you think you’re Jesus or the Buddha, that’s OK. But you’re also this person. And if I’m the Buddha, so are you.’ You have a glimpse of the infinite Self within you. But it’s within everyone, not just you. Relax. Don’t take yourself or the experience too seriously. You’re not controlling the universe. Have a sense of playfulness. Anthony talks about having an open and curious attitude to one’s experience – what does it feel like? How does this reality behave?”
That is the first post of yours which has irritated me. You have decided to ignore the point I am actually making, and instead combined an ad-hominem with “friendly advice.”
So I will ask you the question again:
Do you think Jesus changed the world by having tact, discretion and flexibility? Or did he fearlessly defend what believed was right and true?
This is a question about personal morality in general, not my personal psychology. What is more important? Politics and diplomacy, or defending what you believe to be the truth or what is morally right?
I have asked you to think for yourself instead of following the crowd to their conferences. You have responded by accusing me of having a messiah complex. I think you wish to avoid a difficult decision.
It’s not an either/or. Regarding the truth vs diplomacy question, Joe Brewer (another of my associates) has a nice statement in a book to the effect that “most people would rather be right than be effective”. Good insight, that. For me, truths that guide effective practice are the most reality-based of all.
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Sometimes it is. And those are the times which matter the most.
For me, truths that guide effective practice are the most reality-based of all.
Is it effective practice to allow parts of the old paradigm to fatally compromise the new paradigm because you don’t want to upset people?
The reasoning here seems to be “UTOK is an effective or important part of R2. We shouldn’t allow anything as peskily annoying as the actual truth to upset this.”
You may be able to tell that I don’t rate pragmatic theories of truth.
Hey Geoff,
I’ve come to similar conclusions as you regarding physicalism and have had similar experiences to yours. I don’t think rational arguments go very far where this topic is concerned, though. Either you have experience or you don’t, and most people don’t (for good reason).
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Hi David(?)
Yes, recognising this is exactly the purpose of Principles 5 & 6 of the New Epistemic Deal proposed in the opening post. Apart from the unique case of teleology in the evolution of consciousness, the only way to know about praeternatural phenomena is via direct subjective experience. Rational arguments can only take us as far as an understanding of what is physically and logically possible.
I like that, and the spirit in which it is presented. I do think @RobertBunge has a good point that people like us, who are inclined to esotericism and mysticism, should take to heart. While Jesus seems to have been a person of irreproachable moral conviction, he was also effective in getting the word out - he was a great marketer (“don’t tell anyone I healed you!”), was economical with time (“don’t cast your pearls before swine”), and seems to have really prioritized questions of connection and intimacy over truth and law (e.g. " So when you offer your gift to God at the altar, and you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there at the altar")
David
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Have you read The Lost Gospel by Burton L Mack?
Geoff, unrelated but related. What role do you think psychodelics have played (are playing) in our psychological development and grasping hard-to-nail concepts? Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary…
There’s two ways to look at that.
On one hand they have a positive role to play, especially for people who have never taken them (and I am specifically talking about psilocybin and LSD, although there are more extreme substances in that class such as DMT (OMG)). For people who have never had that experience, the first time can certainly be life-changing. It opens your mind to all sorts of possibilities about the nature of reality, and the limitations of normal human perception. This can be an important first step – the thing that jolts people out of their safe but naïve way of thinking about reality.
On the other, they don’t provide any answers. When you come down, the world is still the way it was before, and your life is still the way it was before. You still need to actually make changes in the real world, and these will typically seem no easier than they did before. Maybe we could use the metaphor of a locked cage – the psychedelics can break open the lock, but you still have to find your own way out of the cage.
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No, but I just now ordered it.
I think you will enjoy it.
Also if you are interested in the historical Jesus, and haven’t already seen this lecture, then I think you would enjoy this too:
I would be rather wary of 3H as it is rooted in the management consultant gobbelygook of corporate growth culture!
According to Wikipedia " 3H was created in 2006 from an adaptation of McKinsey & Company’s ‘three horizons of growth’ framework"!
Hi Geoff,
I have a few thoughts.
I worry that you are jumping to conclusions about some of the other views in the ecosystem here, e.g. UTOK. But I’m glad you agree that a humble, questioning approach is desirable here.
This seems very similar to the UTOK view. UTOK and related views are about emergence - the idea the biological, mental and spiritual phenomena emerge from the natural world (and are thus compatible with the laws of physics) while not being reducible to them (because they are governed by their own, emergent laws). I can see that there are differences between your view and the UTOK view - for example you seem to suggest that praeternatural phenomena have a causal influence at the physical level of quantum mechanics. But I think it would be helpful both in terms of the clarity of your argument and in terms of the practical effectiveness of persuading people, e.g. from the UTOK community, to recognise where your views align, for example in thinking of free will and teleological evolution as compatible with but not reducible to physical law.
I’m curious how you think these two principles connect. Do you think scientific knowledge is fundamentally based on the subjective experience of consciousness then? I’m aware that there have been efforts to connect the two in the context o empiricism and epistemological foundationalism in Descartes and the phenomenological tradition, but these are highly contentious areas in contemporary philosophy of science, and I personally lean towards a more Popperian approach in which all theories are tested by appeal to rational argumentation as well as conscious experience, and there is no ultimate ‘foundation’ to knowledge.
Also the term ‘Epistemic Structural Realism’ is usually used to refer to something like the idea that “We cannot know the individuals that instantiate the structure of the world but we can know their properties and relations.” (See Structural Realism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)) - in other words it is a view that is very modest about our knowledge of objective reality, saying that while we can incrementally understand the mathematical stucture of the physical world, we need to recognise that our basic ontologies will evolve alongside our best scientific theories. This modesty seems to conflict with your claims to know about praeternatural phenomena.
But then I see that you are saying that science is not the route by which we gain knowledge of praeternatural phenomena. But this leaves me very confused. I thought you said we need recognise the ‘epistemic privilege of science’? What I want to know then is: if we are not using science to gain knowledge of the praeternatural, what is your epistemology of this realm? I don’t think just referring to ‘direct experience’ is very helpful here. The whole of modern epistemology since Descartes is about why appealing to ‘direct experience’ is not by itself a valid epistemology (because of sceptical arguments, for example).
Nothing wrong with being wary of things like 3H. On the other hand, quite often the established order comes up with something that we can adapt to our benefit, and I’d not like to overlook those opportunities. In other words, no preconceptions either way. Have you seen what H3Uni have done with the 3H framework? https://www.h3uni.org/ To me, this is enough to indicate that there is some value in it. As always, let’s try to see the value and leave aside (where possible) the downsides. When a particular approach has unwelcome assumptions baked in hard, then I would agree let’s approach with great caution. I don’t see that as the problem here.
Hi Jonah
This seems very similar to the UTOK view. UTOK and related views are about emergence - the idea the biological, mental and spiritual phenomena emerge from the natural world (and are thus compatible with the laws of physics) while not being reducible to them (because they are governed by their own, emergent laws). I can see that there are differences between your view and the UTOK view - for example you seem to suggest that praeternatural phenomena have a causal influence at the physical level of quantum mechanics. But I think it would be helpful both in terms of the clarity of your argument and in terms of the practical effectiveness of persuading people, e.g. from the UTOK community, to recognise where your views align, for example in thinking of free will and teleological evolution as compatible with but not reducible to physical law.
OK, point taken. If I want to appeal to the UTOK community then finding as much common ground with them as possible would be a good place to start.
I’m curious how you think these two principles connect. Do you think scientific knowledge is fundamentally based on the subjective experience of consciousness then?
That depends what “fundamentally based on” means. All our source information comes to us via consciousness – that much is true. It does not follow that we cannot know anything about a world beyond consciousness. This is of absolutely critical importance, because it takes us back to the precise moment in the history of Western philosophy where the all of our epistemological troubles began – Hume’s writing in the first part of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739). In attempting to provide solid foundations for a science of mind, Hume ran into a logical problem that totally defeated him. He felt he had irrefutable reasons for believing two contraditory things. The first was that we are in the epistemic situation of brains in vats – how can we ever escape “the veil of perception” and know anything about a world of permanently existing objects beyond it? The second was that in order to be able to experience an external world (as we evidentally do), then it must be the case that objects in the external world have a causal effect on our consciousness – there must be some sort of causal connection from beyond the veil of perception.
Hume never found a solution to this problem. His conclusion to that section of the Treatise is one of the most tortured pieces of writing in the whole history of philosophy. He set out with such high hopes, and by the end of it he simply has to admit defeat.
“I have expos’d myself to the enmity of all metaphysicians, logicians, mathematicians, and even theologians; and can I wonder at the insults I must suffer? I have declar’d my disapprobation of their systems; and can I be surpriz’d, if they shou’d express a hatred of mine and of my person? When I look abroad, I foresee on every side, dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny and detraction. When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. All the world conspires to oppose and contradict me; tho’ such is my weakness, that I feel all my opinions loosen and fall of themselves, when unsupported by the approbation of others. Every step I take is with hesitation, and every new reflection makes me dread an error and absurdity in my reasoning.”
What confidence can he have, that in rejecting all previous philosophies, he is “following the truth”? After all his reasoning, he can give no justification as to why the material world is really as it appears to be. The only reason is that it strongly appears the way it is. What we suppose to be the real world “enlivens some ideas beyond others” – our perception of an external world just “feels stronger” than merely internal mental activity. Without this feeling, we’d have no reason to reject solipsism, or Berkeleyan idealism, which is almost as bad.
But feelings are “so inconstant and fallacious” that this sort of principle will surely lead us into errors. It is never going to be scientific, that is for sure. But it is only feelings, experience and habit which makes us “reason from cause and effect” – it is only because we are so familiar with the world behaving as if causality is real that we believe in it. “and 'tis the same principle, which convinces us of the continu’d existence of external objects, when absent from the senses.”
And yet these two beliefs – in the reality of external objects when we are not observing them, and of the reality of cause and effect – are “natural and necessary in the human mind”. How could we function without them?
“How then shall we adjust those principles together? Which of them shall we prefer? Or in case we prefer neither of them, but successively assent to both, as is usual among philosophers, with what confidence can we afterwards usurp that glorious title, when we thus knowingly embrace a manifest contradiction?”
It was exactly this problem that prompted Kant to write the CPR, and make the fundamental move of separating reality into phenomena and noumena instead of mind and matter, and claim that science can only tell us about phenomena. It was the same problem that Kant deals with in a critical section of the CPR called “The Antimonies”, and the modern Hard Problem of Consciousness is another manifestation of the same underlying problem. This was the point where Western philosophy split in two. One path led to Schopenhauer, Hegel and continental philosophy, and the other led to analytic philosophy and materialistic science.
It is very important to understand the context in which Hume and Kant were working. This was at the height of the golden age of materialistic science. Newton’s Principia had blown the old ways of thinking to smithereens and both H and K were trying to bring the subjective world of consciousness, and therefore the whole of reality, onto a similarly secure footing. Nobody – absolutely nobody – had the slightest inkling that one day we would discover that there is something fundamentally wrong with Newtonian physics – that the Principia was not the “correct” description of reality that all serious thinkers of that time has been led to believe that it was.
Now let us imagine that history had played out differently. Let’s imagine that physics had advanced at a much more rapid pace and that in the time between Hume’s Treatise and Kant starting work on the CPR, quantum theory had been discovered. Now, instead of having to find a way to solve Hume’s problems in the Treatise in the light of the undeniable fact that Newtonian physics is the correct description of physical reality, Kant was trying to solve those problems under an assumption that quantum theory is the correct description of physical reality. And by quantum theory I here mean the first complete mathematical description of QM, which appeared in 1932 in a book called The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics by John von Neumann. In it, in order to expel the Measurement Problem from the mathematics, von Neumann proposed a conscious observer outside of the physical/quantum system in order to collapse the wave function – to get us from the mathematics to experienced reality.
In the real history, these philosophers were dealing with a physical model which matched the phenomenal world of “normal” material objects. That was what set the problem up. In the imaginary history the situation is completely different – here science provides a physical model which radically diverges from the phenomenal-material world. Instead of being a world of normal objects, it is the world of the evolving wave-function – the multiverse of MWI or the contents of Schroedinger’s box. A world in a superposition (whatever that is).
If you think about it this way, then Hume’s problem vanishes into thin air. He can now map physics onto reality without any difficulty at all. We can simply say that the unobserved world – the “real world” which is out there “beyond the veil of perception” is literally the world described by the equations of physics. It is the uncollapsed wave function where quantum systems can be in multiple states. When an/the observer interacts with this noumenal world then the wave function collapses, and from this complex system emerges what we call “consciousness”. And it is in that world that normal material objects exist.
So there is the answer to your question. That is how the first two principles connect, and in doing so it provides a beautiful, concise solution to both the Hard Problem of Consciousnes and the Measurement Problem in quantum metaphysics. One solution to both problems, and this solution offers a means of bringing the two halves of Western philosophy back together again. It solves Hume’s problem in a way that does not lead to schism.
This is not the whole of my theory. There is much more, and it all fits together. But you need to understand this part first.
Also the term ‘Epistemic Structural Realism’ is usually used to refer to something like the idea that “We cannot know the individuals that instantiate the structure of the world but we can know their properties and relations.” (See Structural Realism (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy)) - in other words it is a view that is very modest about our knowledge of objective reality, saying that while we can incrementally understand the mathematical structure of the physical world, we need to recognise that our basic ontologies will evolve alongside our best scientific theories. This modesty seems to conflict with your claims to know about praeternatural phenomena.
I hope I have now answered that question. I am using the term ESR to mean exactly the same thing that this encyclopaedia entry describes. I am indeed saying that all we need to know about noumenal reality is its structure – and that’s all we do know. That structure is the mathematical description of the universe which is provided by quantum theory. What we do not know is upon what this structure is instantiated. What is it “made of”? We can’t know, and it doesn’t matter. All that actually matters is that the structure is real. So we might as well go beyond ESR and just say that whatever this thing is, it isn’t normal matter and it isn’t mind either, so we might as well just call it neutral. This leads to neutral monism and/or Ontic Structural Realism (structure is all that is real).
But then I see that you are saying that science is not the route by which we gain knowledge of praeternatural phenomena. But this leaves me very confused. I thought you said we need recognise the ‘epistemic privilege of science’? What I want to know then is: if we are not using science to gain knowledge of the praeternatural, what is your epistemology of this realm? I don’t think just referring to ‘direct experience’ is very helpful here. The whole of modern epistemology since Descartes is about why appealing to ‘direct experience’ is not by itself a valid epistemology (because of sceptical arguments, for example).
From the forthcoming book:
The need for a new epistemological paradigm
Thomas Nagel believes that we must identify teleological processes additional to psychegenesis in order to construct a new systematic theory of the natural order. All praeternatural phenomena are teleological. That is to say – if they exist, then they must be teleological, because they either require the quantum dice to be loaded in order to produce a specific outcome. They are processes which are guided by a goal, such as the evolution of conscious life, the expression of free will, the experience of synchronicity or the unfolding of karma.
Let us consider the epistemic status of four categories of phenomena that should be categorised as praeternatural if real:
1: Psychegenesis is knowable through science and reason. Subjective experience is relevant only to establish that consciousness is real, and therefore in need of an explanation. Having established this, we can justify belief in psychegenesis by applying pure reason to the empirical results of quantum physics.
2: Free will can only be known subjectively, but it is the most mundane variety of experience imaginable. We are all familiar with the subjective experience of metaphysical freedom. In the context of the idea I’ve described, I wonder why anybody would choose to believe that humans lack free will. Why would you believe your choices are entirely the result of the mindless laws of physics and pure objective randomness if there is no good reason to? Why not believe your choices actually matter? Why not believe your intuition is correct in this specific case? The reasoning here is reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager – if it is true then you’ve gained something, in this case because your choices and your life have some sort of meaning – and if it is false then what have you lost?
Footnote: It is worth emphasising that the agent of free will is a human mind, not the Participating Observer. A human mind is a phenomenon which emerges from the complex system formed by the interaction between the PO and an animal brain. The PO on its own can’t have free will, because it doesn’t have any reasons, and doesn’t have any choices to make. Free will, like consciousness itself, requires both the PO and a living brain.
3: Synchronicity is knowable only through subjective experiences which by definition seem extremely unusual to those who experience them. According to Jung, synchronistic processes are going on all around us, all the time. They are as integral to reality as normal causality is – they are Yin to the Yang of normal physical causality. Yang is the expansive part of the dynamic process of the unfolding of reality, which intuitively resembles the deterministic evolution of the wave function. Yin is the contractive part, which resembles wave function collapse. Our experience of synchronicity is restricted to individual events, but in theoretical terms it continually loads the quantum dice, at least anywhere in the cosmos which is causally connected to conscious life. The great many people who have never experienced synchronicity must choose between skepticism and faith, and we can’t expect anybody to have faith in anything at all. I personally have no doubt that synchronicity is real, based entirely on subjective experience. That can justify my belief to me, but there is no reason why a skeptic should care what Jung, myself or anybody else claims to have experienced.
4: All other alleged phenomena praeternatural phenomena, including karma, ESP, telepathy, out of body experiences, near death experiences, divinatory systems, Aleister Crowley’s “magick” and the will God or gods, could only possibly be known through direct subjective experience. They therefore fall into the same category as synchronicity, or perhaps in terms of Jung’s system it might be better to say that all of them are manifestations of synchronicity, or they are all reducible to it. Here “synchronicity” refers to the praeternatural as the entire form of causality we’re talking about (some people will say we shouldn’t call this “causality” at all, but at the very least its something like causality).
Not much of this sits comfortably with Nagel’s new natural order. Perhaps it is a failure of imagination on my part, but I don’t see why any of these things should be governed by laws. Maybe something along those lines could apply to karma, but even though “every moral action produces an equal and opposite reaction” sounds a bit like a law, there’s no way to reduce moral judgements to mathematics. The rest of it just doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that could be governed by laws at all. I would not rule out the possibility of some kind of non-mathematical praeternatural laws, but I struggle to imagine how they could work. If free will is governed by a law then in what sense is it free? Libertarian free will makes no sense if physical reality is a causally closed system, and if there is a non-physical component of the system which is also entirely governed by laws then surely the same problems apply. Is the will any more free because the applicable law governs how the quantum dice are loaded rather than how the wave function evolves? If any of these phenomena exist, then my expectation is that they aren’t fully governed by, or fully describable with, mathematical laws or other naturalistic principles, and they probably aren’t amenable to scientific enquiry at all.
No doubt some believers in of various phenomena in this fourth category will be disappointed with my stance. Some people have spent their whole lives and careers in search of empirical evidence of praeternatural phenomena of one sort or another. Some even believe they’ve found it, and that the skeptics are just stubbornly refusing to accept it because their flawed metaphysical assumptions rule it out a priori. My hope is that this is a situation where we can agree to disagree – to let science be science, let mysticism be mysticism, and stop trying to extend the reach of one of them into the legitimate territory of the other. It is entirely possible that some of these phenomena are real, but they can’t be scientifically tamed, will never be fully understood, and there will always be people who never experience them and therefore remain highly skeptical. Our goal is the westernisation of ecocivilisation, not the establishment of a new mystical metanarrative that everybody is expected to believe in, as we might expect them to believe in science. There needs to be a place for both skeptics and mystics on the path to ecocivilisation. We cannot afford a continuation of an avoidable ideological conflict between science and spirituality. We need both of them.
Where does this leave naturalism? It seems to me that if your goal is to preserve naturalism then instead of looking for a large number of examples of this sort of thing, you might be better off hoping we can restrict it to just the one we have the most objective justification for believing in. Even free will goes beyond naturalism, because it is intentional. It seems to me that the most naturalistic position still available is that psychegenesis was the sole example of a praeternatural process, even though that would be a unique goal-seeking process of exactly the sort Nagel wants to avoid. Perhaps we can think of psychegenesis as marking the boundary between natural and praeternatural, but I don’t think naturalism can be stretched any further.
[section snipped because this post is already too long]
What could not be clearer is that there are some huge questions around here, that we do not have much in the way of answers, and that as things stand we don’t even have any idea now much more objective progress we will ever make. I think that the new paradigm needed to construct an ecocivilisation cannot be the new naturalistic paradigm Nagel is looking for, even though his radical proposal that the evolution of consciousness was teleological is basically correct. What we actually need is a new epistemological paradigm – one which explicitly takes skepticism very seriously, but which reaches beyond naturalism.
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I follow most of your comments here, @JonahW but at this point I feel you may have missed something from @GeoffDann As I see it, science may be “epistemically privileged” (not terms I use) from the point of view where personal meaning is systematically excluded. And I do see that as (usually) a reasonable basis for common ground about what “objectively” can be known. On the other hand, my reading of Geoff’s “praeternatural” is all to do with meaning – teleology even sometimes – and can include personally meaningful “coincidence” or “synchronicity”. These are areas in which we cannot gain knowledge through science, simply in virtue of the scientific method itself. And if we are dealing with events endowed with personal meaning, the only epistemology that I see as possible is one that takes full account of direct personal experience. And I don’t mean personal experience as personal interpretation of “objective” events (like NVC “observation”) but the direct experience of significance, of meaningfulness, of purpose in life, and that kind of thing. Try it, anyway…
(p.s. I wrote this before seeing Geoff’s reply of a few minutes ago)
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Yes. You get it. I’d be interested to here what you think of that long post above.