‘…to decide what our sentiments ought to be towards things in general without taking any account of human experience of life, would be most foolish’ ~ C S Peirce, Philosophy in Light of the Logic of Relatives.
Introduction
The aim of this essay is to make the case for a type of philosophical idealism, which posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence. Idealism is usually distinguished from physicalism — the view that the physical is fundamental — and the related philosophical naturalism, the view that only natural laws and forces, as depicted in the natural sciences, account for the universe. Physicalism and naturalism are the assumed consensus of modern culture, very much the product of the European Enlightenment with its emphasis on pragmatic science and instrumental reason. Accordingly this essay will go against the grain of the mainstream consensus and even against what many will presume to be common sense. However I hope to present an argument that shows that common sense and this formulation of philosophical idealism are not necessarily in conflict.
Adopting a predominantly perspectival approach, I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise. In so doing I will draw on phenomenology as well as perspectives from non-dualist philosophy — an approach that will hopefully be become clear in the subsequent sections.
All in the Mind?
In philosophy it is customary to address objections after making your case, but I will mention two of the most frequent objections to idealism at the outset. First is the criticism that ‘idealism says that the world is all in the mind’ — the implication being that, were there no mind to be aware of an object, then it would cease to exist. Even very eminent philosophers have (mis)understood idealism in this way: that things pass into and and out of existence depending on whether they’re being perceived or not. G.E. Moore, for example, once said that idealism must entail that, when the passengers are all seated on the train, the wheels would go out of existence for their not being perceived.
The second objection is against the notion that the mind, or ‘mind-stuff’, is literally a type of constituent out of which things are made, in the same way that statues are constituted by marble, or yachts of wood. The form of idealism I am advocating doesn’t posit that there is any ‘mind-stuff’ existing as a constituent in that sense. The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although I’m well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics).
At this stage I will only note these objections, as to counter them now would be premature, but I hope it will become clear in what follows that these objections are misplaced.
A Thought Experiment
Let’s start with a simple thought-experiment, to help bring the issues into focus.
Picture a tranquil mountain meadow. Butterflies flit back and forth amongst the buttercups and daisies, and off in the distance, a snow-capped mountain peak provides a picturesque backdrop. The melodious clunk of the cow-bells, the chirping of crickets, and the calling of birds provide the soundtrack to the vista, with not a human to be seen.
Now picture the same scene — but from no point of view. Imagine that you are perceiving such a scence from every possible point within it, and also around it. Then also subtract from all these perspectives, any sense of temporal continuity — any sense of memory of the moment just past, and expectation of the one about to come. Having done that, describe the same scene.
“Impossible!” you object. “How can I imagine any such thing?! It is really nothing at all, it is an impossibility, a jumble of stimuli, if anything — this is what you are asking me to imagine! It is completely unintelligible.”
But that is my point. By this means I am making clear the sense in which perspective is essential for any judgement about what exists — even if what we’re discussing is understood to exist in the absence of an observer, be that an alpine meadow, or the Universe prior to the evolution of h. sapiens. The mind brings an order to any such imaginary scene, even while you attempt to describe it or picture it as it appears to exist independently of the observer.
These are the grounds on which I am appealing to the insights of philosophical idealism. But I am not arguing that it means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.
Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis ¹. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.
A corollary of this is that ‘existence’ is a compound or complex idea. To think about the existence of a particular thing in polar terms — that it either exists or does not exist — is a simplistic view of what existence entails. This is why the criticism of idealism that ‘particular things must go in and out of existence depending on whether they’re perceived’ is mistaken. It is based on a fallacious idea of what it means for something to exist. The idea that things ‘go out of existence’ when not perceived is really their ‘imagined non-existence’– your imagining them going out of existence. In reality, the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it².
So How Does Mind ‘Create Reality’?
So this is the sense that I’m arguing for the fundamental role that the mind plays in creating reality.
Let me address an obvious objection. ‘Surely “the world” is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’?
As already stated, I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth³.
By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. And although the unified nature of our experience of this ‘world-picture’ seems simple and even self-evident, neuroscience has yet to understand or explain how the disparate elements of experience , memory, expectation and judgement, all come together to form a unified whole — even though this is plainly what we experience⁴.
By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums. And that is the subject of the remainder of this essay.
A Neuroscientific Perspective
This kind of argument can now be supported by an appeal to science, which itself has obliged us to re-consider the kind of direct realism with which it is often naively associated. Today there is a growing awareness in science of the role of mind in constructing what we might previously have assumed to be real independently of any mind whatsoever.
It might be thought that a neuroscientific approach to the nature of the mind will be inclined towards just the kind of physicalist naturalism that this essay has set out to criticize. But, and perhaps ironically, that is not necessarily so. Many neuroscientists stress that the world we perceive is not an exact replication of external stimuli, but rather is actively constructed by the brain in a dynamic and interleaved process from one moment to the next. Every act of perception involves the processes of filtering, amplifying, and interpretation of sensory data — physical, environmental, somatic — and in the case of h. sapiens, refracted through language and reason. These are the constituents of our mental life which constitute our world. The world is, as phenomenologists like to put it, a lebenswelt, a world of lived meanings⁵.
This point is central to recent book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, by Charles Pinter⁶, published by Routledge in February 2021. Pinter is a mathematics professor emeritus, whose previous publications were about abstract algebra, but who has also developed a deep understanding of neurological modelling and cognitive science. The topic of his book is the relationship between mind and world. It opens with a thought experiment of its own:
“Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies — but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life — and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer (p. 1)
(Notice the similarity to our unobserved meadow!)
Pinter goes on to argue that what the observer brings to the picture is ‘the picture’. He says that when we gaze out at our surroundings, we don’t see featureless space. Instead, our perception registers distinct entities, arrayed in spatial relationship with each other. We recognize these entities, can identify and name them. This act of apperception interprets the world as a collection of distinct items. Without the instinctive ability to make these distinctions, comprehension would be impossible and we couldn’t think or act⁷.
The way the mind structures sensory experience of objects is organised into units, called Gestalts. This refers to the ability of minds to recognise wholes and to understand them against a background, or context, and Pinter presents evidence that this feature of cognition is present in even very simple organisms:
‘A deer must instantly recognize the form of a cougar (and vice-versa), a squirrel must see the separate branches on a tree, a honeybee must know different kinds of flowers each having a distinctive design. Birds must tell the difference between nourishing and poisonous butterflies by subtle differences in wing design and markings. (p. 29)
So we might believe that the world naturally just consists of these discrete objects, these Gestalts, just as we observe them. We assume the universe presents itself to us in pre-segmented pieces. But it is the act of perception that makes the distinctions, that singles out and recognises Gestalts, and our visual processing is so adept at doing this, that we can’t help but see the world as combinations of separate entities, without us needing to be aware that it is the mind that is doing it. That is the ‘taken-for-granted’ aspect of realism that I noted above.
The first four chapters of Pinter’s book are devoted to expounding the cognitive powers that generate the world as Gestalts, before turning his attention to where in this model the scientific method fits. He makes the point that the scientific method derives from analysis of the formal relationships of objects and forces devoid of any actual features:
“…with no color, appearance, feel, weight or any other discernible feature. In fact, every feature which might impact the senses — hence produce an impression of some kind — is absent because in this hypothetical universe there is no life and there are no senses. Everything material may be there, but not the senses. As Kant said about the noumenal world (which is the same as the mind-independent world), nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist.” — op cit., p.118
The Gestalts that comprise unified objects of cognition do not figure on this level of analysis, which is concerned with the identification and addition of ‘simples’, for example, the objects of classical physics, the behaviours of which can be fully described by mathematics. Indeed modern science has made enormous strides by the ability to discern these mathematical simples and quantify the relations between them in the language of mathematics. But it is not until all of these disparate elements are synthesized into Gestalts that meaning emerges.
Pinter discusses the way in which cognitive processes generate the Gestalts on the basis of the ‘simples’ described by science, so as to discern their meaning. This is the level on which thought is real, although in a different sense to the formal objects of scientific analysis:
“Sensations, beliefs, imaginings and feelings are often referred to as figments, that is, creations of the mind. A mental image is taken to be something less than real: For one thing, it has no material substance and is impossible to detect except in the mind of the perceiver. It is true that sensations are caused by electrochemical events in a brain, but when experienced by a living mind, sensations are decisively different in kind from electrons in motion. They are indeed “figments” because they exist nowhere except in awareness. As a matter of fact, they exist only as claims made by sentient beings, with no material evidence to back up those claims. Indeed, brain scans reveal electrical activity, but do not display sensations or inner experience.” — p. 52.
As for the nature of the physical, Pinter points out that it originates ‘with the sense that it acts in opposition to our will and constrains our actions’ — push it, and it resists, or lift it, and it is heavy. But then, ‘since sensation and thought don’t require overcoming any physical resistance, we consider them to be outside material reality’ — in other words, non-physical. However, contrary to the popular understanding, the so–called ‘immaterial’ acts of cognition are fundamental to any conception we can form of ‘the physical’, as physics itself is inextricably intertwined with mathematical concepts. But again, the primacy of mind has been deprecated because of having been relegated to the so–called ‘immaterial domain’, which does not objectively exist. To put it another way — our cognitive construction of the world is not itself amongst the objects of the natural sciences, and so is deprecated by physicalism, even though, in a fundamental sense, the physical sciences depend on it. This points towards the fundamental contradiction in the physicalist conception of the world.
Conclusion
Phenomenology, commencing with Husserl, has always recognised the sense in which the world arises as a dynamic interplay (or ‘co-arising’) of subject and object. Phenomenological philosopher Dan Zahavi says:
‘Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.’⁸
However, this is often difficult to discern, precisely because of the way in which our technology– and science–dominated culture accentuates the division between mind and world, self and other. Coming to understand the sense in which ‘mind creates world’ offers a radically new perspective and way of exploring this division.
__
References and Bibilography
[1] This insight is central to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kant has been described as the ‘godfather of modern cognitive science’ for his insights into the workings of the mind.
[2] ‘By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “non-existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one.’ ~ The Buddha, Kaccāyanagotta Sutta
[3] This is very much in line with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology. In some respects he was a philosophical descendant of Kant, but introduced the method of ‘phenomenological reduction’ which was more concentrated in obtaining insight into the nature of first-person experience.
[4] This is known as the subjective unity of experience and is the subject of the ‘neural binding problem’, an outstanding issue in cognitive neuroscience. This refers to the fact that neuroscience is not able to account for the neural process or centre which co-ordinates all of the data of perception so as to give rise to a the subjective unity of perception. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3538094/#Sec3title
[5] See Big Think video ‘Is Reality Real?’ which elaborates on the theme of this essay:
[6] Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter, Routledge, February 2021.
[7] This is made abundantly clear in the vivid writing of neurologist Oliver Sacks, in such books as The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, which provides accounts of how neurological disorders give rise to profound dislocations of subjects’ sense of what is real and how to navigate it.
[8] Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy, Dan Zahavi
Bibliography
Feldman, J. The neural binding problem(s). Cogn Neurodyn. 2013 Feb;7(1):1–11. doi: 10.1007/s11571–012–9219–8. Epub 2012 Sep 1. PMID: 24427186; PMCID: PMC3538094
Pinter, C. Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics, Springer 2021
Zahavi, D. Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy
