He is writing about the nature of reality, and how it is currently perceived in terms our conceptual understanding, and how the latter predetermines our ongoing observation of the natural  world, to the point that the notion of being able to look at the world objectively – something that should be at the core of all scientific inquiry – may no longer make sense. When I read this,  the first thing that came to mind was something that Nietzsche once said: There is no immaculate perception.

In this context Kastrup invokes Tomas Kuhn’s  idea of the paradigm shift – first introduced in 1962 – when it becomes necessary to start questioning the accepted model of a scientific theory or concept on the basis of an increasing number of observations that are deemed anomalous when they don’t  fit within the prevailing model. You need to read Kastrup’s complete article to see the specific anomalies he is referring to for his argument.

The Kastrup article boils down to the the distinction between mind  and matter – the experiential or mental world and  the material or physical world  – and the  need to question the belief “that nature consists of arrangements of matter/energy outside and independent of mind.”  The anomalies he cites in the article question this independence, and while the issue arises at the Quantum level of observation, the inference is that there are implications for the larger view of the nature of reality.

I am interested in the nature of the distinction between mind and matter, or, if you will, the mental realm and the physical realm. The traditional view of mind and matter is that, while our physical bodies are  part of the material  world, our conscious minds minds  are something over and above the material world, in the sense that consciousness as a phenomenon cannot be explained in terms of its underlying material complexity.  As a result a duality has been introduced which has been less than helpful in trying to understand how the mental realm and the physical realm are related.

The distinction as taken mutually exclusive led Immanuel Kant to postulate the “ding an sich” – or “thing-in-itself” – as something fundamentally unknowable as a cause behind the experiential world, and something that Schopenhauer faulted him for because it would take the concept of cause and effect beyond what it could deliver, logically, in terms being able to infer a cause from an effect.

However, instead of postulating an unknown and in fact  unknowable really behind the world, Schopenhauer himself proposed a different kind of duality, by giving the world an inside and an outside, with the outside being the objective experiential world of our knowledge, and on the inside the true nature or essence of the world. The latter is not directly knowable as object of knowledge, yet we are conscious of its presence within our bodies as something that is over and above our actions and motivations that guide our interaction with the world.

I have some sympathy for the Schopenhauer position, if only because it is a less complex view of of the world. As well, we can reconcile it to some extent within the Spinoza one substance view which holds that both the mental and physical are part of the same substance – God –  and without the  distinction between the inside and outside of matter, but suggesting instead that humans could only apprehend two attributes of this one substance, namely thought and extension.

We are left with the suggestion that there is only one way for us to be in the world, and if there is any duality to it, it is within ourselves and a function of how we see the world and are able to interact with it.  This is the duality that is implicit  in the distinction between subject and object, the observer and the observed, between the  mind and its experiential content. In the end, however, these are  false distinctions, as it is the world looking at the world, creating the illusion of separate and ontologically distinct realms – the mental realm and the physical realm – while in fact both of them are one and the same reality. The conclusion has to be that there is no other reality, thus belying the  notion that “nature consists of arrangements of matter/energy outside and independent of mind”.

Given this line of thought  I suspect that  Mr. Kastrup’s Quantum Anomalies  are features of the mind-matter / subject-object distinction, when – at the QM or subatomic level – there appear to be  limits to what can be observed seemingly  independently from the observer, when the very process of observing bleeds into the object or event  being observed  and has become a case of the mind looking back at itself when it is  no longer being able to hold on to the distinction.

The truth about man is that he is not a pure knowing subject, not a winged cherub without a material body, contemplating the world from without. For he is himself rooted in that world.  (Schopenhauer – The World as Idea)

Today I am revisiting the views held by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea (1818), and his rejection of naïve realism, or what has been called scientific materialism, that the things we observe in the world are what they appear to be, absolutely, and forever, and not in anyway all or part a function of human perception and experience in the sense that they can be modified based by the very act of perceiving or experiencing them

Thus,  scientific materialism would reject the distinction between how things are independently from human observation versus how they are perceived by our perceptual and conceptual processes.  At the same time,  a scientific materialist would have to accept the the distinction between subject and object, i.e., the distinction between the observer and the thing being observed.

But if we  have no other means of accessing the world other than perceiving or experiencing,  is it in fact a meaningful exercise to even refer to it as a matter of some significance? To all intents and purposes, if we never refer to it again, what would be lost in our discussions about the nature of the world?

To deal with this alleged problem the German philosopher Immanuel Kant  (1724-1804)  introduced the “thing-in-itself”, or “ding ansich” in German – to suggest that the true nature of  the world is fundamentally unknowable as we can only grasp the nature of things indirectly through perceiving them as objects in relation to ourselves – how we have experienced them.  I believe Prof. Kant may have gone too far, in the sense that is is contradictory to say that something is fundamentally unknowable as to make such an assertion implies some knowledge about  it. Existence is not an attribute that can be asserted independently of the qualities through which it is instantiated.   In other words, the distinction serves no useful purpose, when at most the existence of the “ding ansich” might be implied as an essential element in a theory of perception. And maybe that is all what Kant had in mind.

Moving on,  it is one thing to experience the world through one’s senses – it is another thing to experience it logically, e.g., to experience such things as cause and effect, time, space and the various ways in which objects relate to us and each other. If these relationships are permanent features of the physical universe, it wouldn’t matter in what form you encountered them in your experiences, your conclusions about them would be same. But in the end, it would be less important what the world looks like versus what can be abstracted from it simply from interacting with it. And this would lead me to say that the nature of the world is about function (a method that relates an objective to its instantiation) –  and not form (the manifestation of matter and energy), the latter being  incidental to the process, and a means to an end in terms of being the medium that allows the function to be enabled or expressed.

This is an important view for me and consistent with my argument that we should perhaps be less preoccupied with the makeup of the material  universe, by poking into the furthest and oldest region of the universe, looking for clues of sorts and so on. Instead, we should look look more closely at what the logical or functional nature of the various cosmic events appear to be about,  such as the manifestation of a directional and seemingly intrinsic teleological process leading to ever higher degrees of material complexity and organization and where this particular process would seem to want to take us to.

And so the question should be: What has been accomplished to date by the process of material evolution?  As such, the cosmos appears to be a  work in progress, and that is at least some concrete information we have about the nature of the world as we have encountered it.

This introduces an important distinction into the discussion, namely, (a) the object, and (b) the knowledge we have of it based on our perception of it. We can make this distinction on the basis that, if we have knowledge of an object, it presupposes the existence of it, and that its existence is a function of the way it exists in the world through its various attributes, e.g., attributes related to its spatial dimensions, shape, color, etc., and that it has these attributes regardless of anyone being able to perceive them or not.

Consider that our perception of objects is, in the first instance, a function of two things. Firstly, an object being the causal element in the act of perceiving it, and secondly, the ability of our perceptual apparatus to process the sensory information in a manner that is assumed to be reliable in being able to reproduce the object accurately as a discernible event in one’s stream of consciousness. The latter would form the basis on which variable degrees of knowledge of the object can be formulated, depending on the quality and nature of the experience, and whatever else might have been know about the object prior to the particular perception of it at a given moment in time.

The latter is relevant as there are going to be differences between perceived objects on the basis that we may already have beliefs about them. In short, people sometimes see what they want to see, or are expecting to see. On this topic Nietzsche said in 1887:

As soon as we see a new image, we immediately construct it with the aid of all our previous experiences, depending on the degree of our honesty and justice. All experiences are moral experiences, even in the realm of sense perception.

This is a whole topic on its own, and we won’t go there just now, but it is just another reminder that our perception of objects might be suspect when it comes to their accuracy. But for the current exercise we’ll proceed on the premise that sensory perception is by and large a reliable enterprise, and see where it will get us.

Having said that, there is in fact some manipulation going on by the time the object arrives in our stream of consciousness as a perceptual event. Before it arrives there, it will have been processed by our brain’s neural network on the basis of the nature of the data received from the sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc.) and – as I inferred earlier – we give this process the benefit of the doubt in being able to reproduce the object exactly as it was presented to us at the moment of perception. As much as the act of perceiving is entirely transparent to the perceiver such that it would appear we have direct access to the object, I’m merely stating this as a reminder that, in fact, we do not, as we are always one step removed from it.

Finally, in addition to there being a neurological process to convert objects being perceived into mental objects in one’s stream of consciousness, human beings – as all other creatures that live on earth – will have had their sensory organs evolved to the degree that this was necessary for them to survive as a species. As such we can point to significant differences between species in how objects are perceived in terms of their properties. Think about the highly developed sense of smell that a dog has versus what the average human nose is able to detect. When faced with the same object, this would produce a different object for the perceiver with respect to at least one of its properties. To a lesser degree there are going to be (however subtle) differences between the perceived version of the same objects between humans on the basis of their individual physiologies.

So the question for us here is: Regardless of the degree of knowledge we have of an object – e.g., we only know some of its properties, do we have any reason to believe that objects in the world are in fact not what we perceive them to be? What else could they be other than what we perceive them to be? Does anyone care? Why do philosophers worry about this? Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) introduce such concepts as the “thing-in-itself” (“ding ansich”) to suggest that the true nature of things in the world is fundamentally unknowable as we can only grasp the nature of things indirectly through perceiving them as objects in relation to ourselves – how we have experienced them. As I attempted to point out earlier, our knowledge of the world is – so to speak – tainted by human perception, i.e., as Nietzsche says, there is no immaculate perception.

Let it suffice that (a) objects exist regardless of anyone having any knowledge of them, and (b) if we do have knowledge of an object, it would be reasonable to assume that it exist as perceived, but that (c) we will never know that it exist exactly in the manner in which we believe its exists – as that level of knowledge is simply not available to us as it cannot be verified outside the act of perception.

This leads me to conclude that – while we can make the distinction I made earlier – between (a) an object, and (b) the knowledge we have of that object, it is in fact a logical distinction as well as an ontological distinction, and that to all intents and purposes the knowledge we have of an object is in fact knowledge of its mental replica we carry around in our stream of consciousness , and that – as such – the subject defines the object to the extent that this is the only way an object is available to the subject.

So now I would be tempted to say that, whatever knowledge we have of the physical world and derived through the senses (is there any other way?), this knowledge may not be entirely truthful with respect to what it is telling you about the world and everything in it. This is what French Philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) concluded about the reliability of sensory experiences:

Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.

Now “deceived” is a strong word – implying an intentionally malicious act – and I would have preferred to say that discrepancies might occur between (a) the object being perceived and (b) our perceptual apparatus being able to reproduce it accurately as a mental object in the stream of consciousness. Such is the nature of reality.

(I’m leaving some other problems alone here, e.g., in philosophy 101 we should have all learned that you cannot deduce a cause from an effect – that to do so is a logical fallacy. In the movie The Matrix they made that work by placing hapless human minds at the receiving end of a causal chain that made them interact with objects in a virtual reality that was entirely software generated. So, again,  even if you  have a mental construct of an object in your consciousness, there is no guarantee that it does in fact exist in the world in the manner that you believe it to be, and you may only have been  led to believe that it was there.)