1. This is a book about the nature of reality. It elaborates on the best hypothesis we have today, based on leading-edge science and analytic reasoning, about what reality is.
2. The scientific method can only definitively answer questions of behavior: what nature does, as opposed to what it is.
3. After all, science is based on controlled empirical experimentation: it poses a question to nature in the form of an experiment, which nature then answers by doing something in response.
4. This doing is a behavior of nature, not an unambiguous expression of what nature is, as different hypotheses about the essence of reality may be equally consistent with the observed behavior. Moreover, the litmus test of scientific theories is their ability to predict what nature will do next, which again is a question of behavior.
5. Indeed, in addition to science, this book also leverages the methods of philosophy, particularly metaphysics, the area of philosophy dedicated to questions of being.
6. More specifically, beyond the empirical adequacy of the hypothes is it puts forward, this book also leverages softer truth guidelines such as conceptual parsimony, internal logical consistency, overall coherence, and explanatory power. These guidelines cannot lead us to definitive answers to questions of being, but surely allow us to rank the hypotheses at hand and figure out the most likely one. This is the spirit of this book.
7. This way, Analytic Idealism embraces realism (i.e., there is an external world out there, independent of our individual minds; independent of our observation, volition, fantasies, preferences, rituals, etc.), naturalism (i.e., the phenomena of the external world unfold spontaneously, according to nature’s own inherent dispositions, and not according to external intervention by a divinity outside nature), rationalism (human reason can recognize and model the regularities of nature’s behavior), and reductionism (complex phenomena can be explained in terms of simpler ones).
8. However, Analytic Idealism then infers that the external world is of the same ontic kind or essence as our individual minds. In other words, it posits that the world out there is mental
9. For now, though, notice that technology necessitates no ultimately correct understanding of the nature of reality; it only needs empirically convenient fictions.
10.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.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. We believe that our perception is a kind of transparent window into the world, revealing to us the world as it is in itself.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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).
18. 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.
19. We are airplane pilots who were born in the cockpit of an airplane without windows; an airplane that can only be flown by instruments.
20. 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.
21. But that real world is not the ‘physical’ world that appears on the screen of perception.
22. For the physicalist, the real world is physical not merely in the sense of being describable by physical quantities, but of being constituted by physical quantities.
23. The thing that is ultimately described through its physical representation—i.e., that which is represented—is out there, while the descriptions themselves are ‘in here,’ so to speak. But the physicalist flips this upside down or, rather, inside out: it is only the descriptions that are out there—i.e., the kilograms, the meters, the liters, the seconds, etc.—while the things described somehow arise from, and are given substance by, the descriptions. This is literally equivalent to stating that the map precedes the territory and somehow generates the territory.
24. Let us take memory, for instance: a core premise of Physicalism is that memory is information physically stored somewhere in the brain, just as your files are physically stored in your computer’s main storage drive. This premise has a scientific implication: we should be able to find memory information in physical brain states.
25. Science has been trying to find this secret information storage for well over a century, with results that often contradict the physicalist premise. For instance, in 2013 researchers reported on an amazing study: little aquatic flatworms called ‘planaria’—which have the remarkable ability to regrow amputated body parts, including their head—were trained to navigate an irregular surface to find food. The researchers then decapitated the planaria—thereby removing their neurons, which are in their head—and waited for two weeks until a new head grew.
26. With a brand-new head in place, the planaria maintained their originally trained ability to navigate the rough surfaces to find their food, without additional training. Somehow the planaria remembered their training even after their head was severed, contradicting the premise that memories are physically stored in (networks of) neurons.
27. If a person becomes unable to recall short-term memories because of damage to certain areas of the brain, maybe ‘physical’ structures correlated with memory access have been compromised, not memory storage itself (otherwise, the well-known phenomenon of ‘terminal lucidity’—look it up—wouldn’t be possible).
28. Indeed, we’ve known at least since the late 1940s (arguably even as early as the late 1920s), with the advent of Quantum Electrodynamics, that what we call ‘particles’ aren’t particles at all: they are merely local patterns of excitation of a spatially unbound quantum field. Think of particles as ripples on a river: each ripple has a certain height, thickness, speed, and direction of movement, which are the ripple’s ‘physical’ properties.
29. “There’s a ripple!” Yet, there is nothing to the ripple but the river itself. The ripple is not a standalone entity, but a behavior of the river; it’s not a thing but a doing. This is why you cannot grab a ripple and lift it off the river.
30. At first sight, however, mind-space seems devoid of boundaries: I can seamlessly access my memories, thoughts, emotions, fantasies, ideas, etc., as if all these mental contents were part of a unitary database. I don’t need to open cognitive doors or pass through cognitive walls to access them. Yet, appearances are deceiving.
31. This ‘parking’ of a part of your mental inner life is the creation of a cognitive wall inside your mind. Psychiatrists call it ‘dissociation.’
32. People with DID present with multiple so-called ‘alters,’ or ‘alternate personalities.’ Each alter tends to think of itself as a distinct conscious agent, with its own volition and inner life, separate from the other alters and the host personality. Alters can alternate in taking executive control of the body. Often, they go by unique names and can also claim to have an age and gender different from those of the host personality. They sometimes are aware of the existence of other alters, but sometimes also not.
33. Technically, each alter is a segment of the host personality’s mind so severely dissociated from the rest that it acquires its own unique vantage point and sense of identity. As such, each alter becomes a distinct center of awareness within what is, otherwise, one single mind-space. The dissociative boundaries that separate alters from one another are thus cognitive boundaries, not physical or extended ones; alters are defined by cognitive isolation, not physical separation in spacetime.
34. In other words, according to Analytic Idealism, we are all dissociative processes—‘alters’—in the one mind of nature. The idea is that nature-at-large—which is a mind—undergoes a process analogous to human DID. Just as DID patients present with seemingly disjoint centers of awareness called ‘alters,’ nature-at-large also presents with multiple disjoint centers of awareness that we call us. Analogically speaking, we—and all other living beings—are alters of nature-at-large.
35. Under Analytic Idealism, nature is one spatially unbound field of subjectivity.
36. be. Particular experiential states are merely particular patterns of excitation, or ‘ripples,’ of this one natural subject. Each different pattern of excitation is thus a discernible, countable experiential state. That’s how the unfathomable variety and complexity of natural states is accounted for in terms of the simplicity of one field of subjectivity: just as a single guitar string can oscillate differently so to produce many different notes, the one subject of nature can ‘oscillate’ differently so to produce what is represented on our cognitive dashboard as blackholes, quasars, pulsars, nebulae, galaxies, stars, planets, moons, mountains, volcanoes, oceans, etc.
37. This is how we can visualize dissociation over a field: a particular alter in the mind of nature is akin to a ‘whirlpool’ in the ‘river’ of natural mentation.
38. In precisely the same way, there is nothing to an alter of the mind of nature but, well, the mind of nature. The alter is not a thing, but a doing of nature; and this particular kind of doing is what we call a dissociative process. Yet, we can point at an alter of nature and say, “There’s a person!” We can precisely determine its location and delineate its boundaries, just like a whirlpool in a river.
39. When a DID patient is cured, all alters are reintegrated into the host personality. At that point, the host remembers the memories of the alters, and realizes that each and every alter was the host all along.
40. The patient doesn’t mourn the death of the alters, even though the alters indeed come to an end at the moment of reintegration. The reason why the host doesn’t mourn the death of the alters is that the illusion of dissociation is seen through, and the reality of each alter’s identity becomes evident: the dead alters weren’t actual entities, but mere doings of the host.
41. Here’s another example. When you dream while asleep, you experience a form of dissociation: you identify only with your dream avatar, but not with the rest of the dream. You don’t think that you are the buildings, trees, and people you see around you during the dream. Nonetheless, the buildings, trees, and people you see are being done by you, the dreamer—who else? When you wake up, the dissociation comes to an end and your dream avatar is toast. Yet, you don’t start crying and mourning the death of your dream avatar upon awakening. Why not? Because the end of the dissociation is structurally paired with a seeing through the illusion: immediately upon waking up, you know that your dream avatar wasn’t an entity, but just something you were doing; it was you all along, and you didn’t stop existing because you stopped doing your dream avatar.
42. It is thus reasonable to infer that, when the dissociative alter that goes by your name comes to its end at death, and the true you wakes up, you won’t mourn the death of your waking-life avatar. And you will still have its memories and insights, along with its core subjectivity.