Mind-Produced Reality?

There is a mystical line of speculation suggesting that beyond the border, that side of life, what we see is the creation of our own minds. Suppose you, an elderly lady, die, and, having been brought up in the Christian tradition—and your conscience reasonably clear—you expect to be in heaven. Heaven is all things good and beautiful—hence you behold beauty, harmony, see lovely lights, hear splendid music. Or suppose that you’ve just been shot dead in a store that you were holding up, but you didn’t see the owner in the hallway, holding a rifle, and just as you try to pistol-whip the clerk, by way of saying “I mean business,” you’re shot, fall to the ground, crawl to the door of the store, and die on the sidewalk. Got it? Good. Now you, a hoodlum, old enough to know that hold-ups are a no-no, a vague conception of Christianity alive in your noodle too, over there, beyond the border, you don’t anticipate the best. Rather the opposite. This mystical speculation therefore suggests that you’ll see devils advancing on you, a sea of flame behind them silhouetting horns and three-pronged spears. You would say “Woe is me!” but, alas, you haven’t read enough to know that phrase. Instead you say, “Oh, shit.”

Now what about this notion that the mind creates reality?

I’m fairly convinced that the idea arose because we do seem to create reality in dreams. I’ve had the experience countless times, usually in quite banal dream situations. Here is one that I recall. In this dream I had to cut something out, a picture from a printed piece of paper. I was standing at a table then and, in dream memory, there was nothing on that table except a cup, pencils, and the sheet. But now I just reached to the left, over there, and sure enough a pair of scissors in my hand, but, I swear, it materialized, manner of speaking. It wasn’t there before. I noted this fact in the dream itself. Indeed that thought caused me to awaken. And I lay there thinking about it—and that’s why I even remember this snippet. But I’ve noted this phenomenon many times before. I think of people, and there they are. But other things far more outrageous also happen, not least—and everybody has experienced this—the scene suddenly changing, without any transitional state. People will say: I was gardening, and the next thing you know I’m in this, like bazaar…

Dream reality, in the dream, a little less so when remembered, precisely for the reasons just outlined, seems very real. But the progression of events convinces me that what we experience as concrete reality is thoughts expressed in three-dimensional picture form. Thus when I think of scissors, I hold them because I thought of them. The gardener is in a bazaar because an association, perhaps a memory, brought a bazaar to mind, a place where once she’d seen some tool she needed at that moment. The reason why scenes change abruptly is because they do. They do so in our head. I just thought of Kroger, a big fruit display. If I were asleep, I might be in that Kroger.

The thinking behind this theory—based on the dream although it is—is that outside of bodies our mind becomes our only home and that, in consequence, we are subject to its spontaneous productions whether we will it or not. The good will enjoy heavenly pleasures, the evil will be tortured forever. End of story.

Something in me dislikes this notion. Let me look and see what it is. The notion has no anchorage in anything except dream experience, and that I’ve managed to explain that to my own satisfaction. Furthermore, why would that be so? What, if anything, would that have to do with galaxies, say, or shells on sandy shores? For any real life beyond this frontier, the other side would have to have some kind of immovable, resistant reality by means of which we should be able to orient ourselves. Without an objective over-against, our own minds would have no meaning whatsoever. Do I think that the elderly lady and the hoodlum will have identical experiences over there? No, I don’t. But the notion that this whole fantastic universe exists merely so that, having spent a lifetime doing—whatever, you fill in the blanks—so that, thereafter, I can spend it reliving my brief jaunt at Woodstock in 1969—Naw. I find that preposterous.

Oh, by the way, just a figure of speech. Too old for Woodstock. And had I been the right age, I’d have been too busy doing something really fun…

Weird Squared

Let me now attempt to sketch how, say, a crocodile, might be explained by the weird theory that an order of intelligence, an order of souls, may have invaded the order of matter. Crocodiles are a neat and also difficult example because they appear (to us) as vicious and ugly creatures that prey on innocent zebras and wildebeests. I think you know where I am going.

Serious problems arise when we contemplate this theory in any kind of detail—indeed the same problems arise no matter how we picture the agency behind living, embodied entities. One is that intelligence seems to be required for the arrangement of matter into effectively functioning and self-reproducing chemical machines. The only alternative explanation we have, if not intelligence, is the operation of sheer chance in a cosmic space where movement is possible. But the complexity of life is so great that the odds against this explanation are impossibly high, the time demanded impossibly long. Quite an extensive literature is available critiquing the theory of evolution based on chance. In popular parlance, this is the problem of a hundred monkeys, pounding a hundred typewriters, accidentally producing the collected works of Shakespeare.

Instead of belaboring an explanation based on probability, let’s assume that intelligence must be at work. The dictionary defines it as a power to apprehend facts and their relationships. If you unpack that definition, you ultimately get consciousness. But what we actually see in nature is end-seeking entities that seem to operate without consciousness, at least as we understand that word. How can these observations be reconciled?

I would propose that seeing things at the right scale might turn out to be helpful. I offer an analogy. Would you say that the City of Detroit is intelligent? Obviously by Detroit I don’t mean any official representative of it—not its mayor or its city council. I mean the city itself. The City of Detroit itself is most definitely real. But it is not, actually, in the category of things usually thought to be possessing or lacking intelligence. Next question. Could the City of Detroit have come into being without intelligence? It is literally made of objects all of which clearly testify to the presence of intelligent agents. I think you also suspect where I am going here.

Now to extend this. I claim to be an intelligent agent, but my effective reach diminishes a great deal away from my immediate surroundings. I’m served by highly developed modern transport and communications systems, but I can only form the vaguest comprehensive consciousness of anything as big as Detroit. If asked what Detroit needs or what may be wrong with it, I’m capable of speculation, but individually I cannot do much about it. And if we enlarge the scope, my already nonexistent powers diminish at each step: Michigan, the United States, the Western civilization… I’m less than a molecule at these scales.

Now I turn to an order of intelligence interfering with, or invading, the order of matter. Suppose that this process began at a very small scale—say at the atomic or subatomic level. Why there? Well, it may have begun there because a very subtle power, the power of immaterial intelligence, may only be strong enough actually to influence matter at its lower manifestations, down there where minute quanta of energy are moving. Let us say that souls, intelligences, encountered matter down there in the tiny, examined it, differentiated this from that, drew inferences, understood this, understood that—and, again at the very small scale, began a process of experimentation. Let’s further assume that they found this environment difficult to work in—too much flux, huge, coarse, violent energies, etc. And let us assume that an entire community of such beings, attempting to get a foothold, messing with matter as best they could, fascinated by it—or, alternatively, unable to escape it—at last succeeded in delimiting the disturbance of the material flux by building a spherical container inside of which the flux is low. Here, inside the proto-cell, they next began to optimize this interesting world. The first problem, of course, would be to continue to maintain the wall that keeps things relatively peaceful inside. If we image the scale in the right way, the agencies would be small compared to the proto-cell. And in the same way in which I barely understand Detroit so they, also, barely understood the cell but, collectively they maintained it for their own purposes.

But how do you get from here to crocodiles? It’s not a very great jump. It strikes us as outrageous to imagine an intelligent order creating a biosphere that is hierarchically organized so that the higher feed on the lower—so that crocodiles waste innocent wildebeests so that the green, ugly, scaly things can laze in the sun satiated. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” It’s entirely possible that an intelligent order, limited in its ability to perceive, can produce vast structures that live destructively on others, the others also created by other groupings of the same intelligence. The inhabitants may not be aware of what they’re doing. The crocodile, of course, is a later creature, but its machinery, thus its brain, is still quite limited. The information that flows from it to the inhabitants is not very useful.

Another analogy. When our military in the righteous pursuit of that sacred duty, national security, vast distances away, in brightly shining aircraft (don’t they resemble a little the white teeth of the crocodile?) rain death and destruction on villages in the border zones of Afghanistan and Pakistan, hunting some Al Qaida operative, and producing regrettable collateral damage in the process, is the beast that does this, the United States of America, really conscious? Is any collective really conscious? Are there, perhaps, awakening souls inside the crocodile who mildly mourn the wildebeest?

Defining a Border

All thought ultimately rests on evidence, another way of saying that it rests on truth. The root of truth is experience—for the simple reason that you have to start somewhere safe, and experience, at least in the raw, thus separated from any interpretation of it, is beyond questioning. Descartes’ cogito is simply one example of an experience that suited one kind of mind. What distinguishes philosophy from metaphysics is that philosophy is closer to evidence than metaphysics. Or that, at least, is a thesis worth examining.

I arrive here because I thoroughly enjoy well-argued philosophical propositions. I always feel the urge to apply a similar approach to the matters that interest me. But then I discover that my questions invariably concern the why of things, the purpose or the explanation of X. And here philosophy becomes deficient. It is good at explaining how things relate—and by thing I don’t mean material phenomena necessarily. It can analyze a concept and accurately find its limits, appropriate use, illegitimate application, etc., but it cannot deal with meaning unless the meaning is an intermediate term in a series: why does the rider use as saddle? No problem there. It can’t deal with ultimate meaning. Why is the rider there?

An example is the two-fold nature of the human: body and soul. What purpose does a body serve if, as we can reasonably demonstrate, using philosophical approaches, souls are in their very essence different in kind, thus radically different, from bodies. To answer this question rationally calls for explanations of the soul and of its purpose, of the material realm in the same respects, why they both exist, how they relate, and the nature and purpose of the realm in which they are each a manifestation.

Here we effectively cross a border. We can’t resolve the question without speculation, using that last word to mean an activity which cannot yield hard answers for lack of evidence—at least while we’re inside vile bodies. No system of thought, however elegant or probable, can compel agreement—as philosophy can indeed compel while it remains on the firm ground of experience. I put this out by way of saying that I’m fully aware, in all that’s said in these pages, of the limitations under which I labor. And the tone of certainty I sometimes produce must not be mistaken for authority of any kind.