Hello everybody.
I am returning from a year long suspension. I believe the deep reason that happened was not because of bad intentions or simplistic bad behaviour on either side, but because of a fundamental structural problem with 2R itself. 2R is an attempt to conclusively move beyond the current modern/postmodern impasse and establish a new foundation for Western society, thought and spirituality. The problem is that 2R is also descended from integralism, metamodernism and various other schools of thought which emphasise radical epistemological pluralism – it demands respect for multiple belief systems. So there must be a place for idealists, panpsychists, physicalists, anti-realist relativists and perspectivists, Abrahamic theists, scientific atheists, followers of Eastern religions, etc… I believe these two things are fundamentally and totally incompatible.
I fully agree that we (techno-industrial society in general and Western society in particular) are in desperate need of exactly the sort of intellectual revolution that 2R seeks be midwiving. It needs to end the fragmentation of knowledge, bring subjectivity and spirituality back into the same model of reality as science, bring humans back into ecological balance with the rest of the Earth’s living systems. I have spent the last 20 years trying to find a path to making exactly this revolution happen. Not only that but I now believe we are right on the brink of actually making it happen, because all of the necessary pieces are now in place. The problem is that in order to actually make this revoution happen, we are going to need a new metaphysical-cosmological model of reality. And crucially, this model needs to conclusively resolve the entire crisis in materialistic science. This part of the crisis has three main components:
(1) No credible scientific theory of consciousness (300 years since Hume’s Treatise failed to provide one).
(2) Zero consensus on the metaphysical interpretation of QM. The number of interpretations is now well into double figures, and growing.
(3) Total meltdown in cosmology. At least 20 major anomalies, discrepances, paradoxes and unanswerable questions.
As things stand, the scientific materialists have spent a century (exactly) refusing to acknowledge that (1) and (2) could possibly have anything to do with each other, regardless of the fact that both involve a missing observer and the transition between possibility and actuality. And anybody who tries to link either of them directly to cosmology (Thomas Nagel for example) gets attacked because this is deemed to be “woo”. Nobody in the scientific community is willing to treat these 3 things as components of one single great big problem, let alone permit it to be linked with the other massive problem which needs resolving.
That other problem is the bifurcation of philosophy into Continental and Analytic. Analytic philosophy is still trying to solve the problems first explored by Hume and Kant - it is stuck in an endless doom-loop of physicalism vs idealism vs panpsychism, and is no closer to solving the problems of free will than it was at the beginning. Continental philosophy has ended up in a dead end known as postmodernism. These two schools of philosophy barely acknowledge each other’s existence, and neither of them is willing to engage with the crisis in cosmology.
The end result of all this is total epistemic anarchy. This is the root cause of the “meaning crisis”. We have a veritable smorgasbord of worldviews on offer, both inside and outside of science. Everybody is free to pick any flavour of nonsense they like, and justify it by claiming it is less bad than all the others. Social media amplifies this, and now AI has allowed anybody who wants to to make up their own “personal theory of reality”. These AI-generated theories are 99.99% garbage, but the people producing them don’t care. Just like everybody else in the modern western world, they believe it is their right to believe whatever they like, regardless of whether or not it is nonsense.
My suspension from this forum exactly one year ago was the result of my refusal to accept this radical epistemological pluralism on the grounds that rather than being part of the solution, this is the fundamental cause of the problem. I was therefore on an unavoidable collision course, firstly with the one physicalist who is part of the core 2R team, and subsequently with the whole team, because they rallied to the defence of that physicalist, and the defence of epistemological pluralism. I wouldn’t back down, they couldn’t accept my stance, so I was suspended.
The new model of reality cannot be physicalist, idealist, panpsychist or anti-realist, because all of those models are fundamentally flawed. They are wrong, which is exactly why none of them can command a consensus. Physicalism is wrong because it cannot coherently account for consciousness. Idealism and panpsychism are wrong because they contradict mountains of neuroscientific evidence that brains are necessary (though insufficient) for consciousness. Postmodern anti-realism is wrong because it denies the reality of an objective world (or denies we can have any reliable knowledge of it). Metamodernism is wrong because it sets up an “oscillation” between realism and anti-realism which amounts to more anti-realism: 1 + -1 = -1. What is required is a new, stronger form of realism, not any kind of anti-realism.
The solution, when it comes, must resolve this entire mess cleanly. It must provide a structured model of reality (contradicting pomo) which acknowledges the hard problem of consciousness (contradicting physicalism) but also acknowledges neuroscience (contradicting dualism, idealism and panpsychism). It must also resolve (or open the path to a resolution of) the entire mega-crisis in cosmology, and finally it must heal the rift between Continental and Analytic philosophy by making clear why that rift happened in the first place and why it no longer applies.
That solution is now available. When I was suspended I was still in the early stages of uncovering it. I have since had a year to complete it. I have much more to say about that, but I will save it for another post, later today (I am in the UK). First I must give people some time to respond to this one.