About this blog, anew

 There is nothing more real than information. – Tom Campbell

Introduction

I’ve changed much since I started this blog over a decade ago. This post is an update regarding that change and how I’m now using Econosophy. It’s possible the change in tone and subject-matter emphasis my writings evidence since the covid spectacle burst onto the world stage requires explanation; this article is that explanation.

A core principle of my efforts here at Econosophy is that I do not write to persuade people to agree with me. I cannot emphasise that strongly enough. I write to make some currently controversial matters a little less controversial. Why? To help facilitate constructive conversation between ‘opposing’ camps. 

We are divided and conquered, beaten far down from the natural authority our sovereignty, set free and nurtured, would encourage. The lines of division between our various groupings, as between us as individuals, and even within us, are as several as they are toxic. Rich diversity is one of life’s many prerequisites, but bitter division across multiple fomented fault lines makes social life unnecessarily fractious and barren for most of humanity. The more fractured and barren humanity’s sense of itself and its place in reality is, the more destructive and abusive relationships between Self and Other become, just as between human and non-human worlds. 

Generally speaking, then, it is this impediment, this block to every individual’s loving and natural authority that I try to address, to highlight, to explore. To that end, the root problem to be addressed is, in my view, dualism, the flawed heart of humanism and its unintended offshoots, materialism and scientism (and much else besides). 

For me, dualism’s roots are far older than Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am”; they reach down into Greek atomism and deeper still, I assert, into pivotal human accomplishments like taming fire and domesticating seeds and animals. I.e., once we have notionally split reality into The Tame and The Wild, we have unwittingly set civilisation in motion and made a ‘dualistic’ reflex fundamental to how we organise, defend and sustain ourselves across generational time. 

Indeed, this Self-Other split is far older still, is in fact a necessary property of experiential existence itself. An experience requires an experiencer. This ‘split’ between subject (experiencer) and object (experience) is the almost irreducible core of reality. However, as Darren Allen is at pains to point out in Self and Unself, the subjective and objective are only possible within a whole he terms “the context”, which for him is the “panjective” perspective that ‘binds’ or ‘unites’ the two apparently opposing functions, subjective and objective. 

Dualism, then, is this fundamental aspect of reality brought into the foreground by Descartes’ dictum and work (and also the work of other contemporaneous philosophers), dug up from some deep cultural substrata and into the light via philosophical analysis. It has subsequently become culturally fixed as the distilled essence of a previously hidden, foundational property of reality favoured reflexively over a fuller and more organic perspective for millennia, that more organic perspective we are now, I believe, bringing into being as a species (see, e.g., The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein).

But dualism remains the defining reflex of all global commerce and governance systems. Yes, all: despite Eastern philosophical variations, efficiency has been massively overvalued by the systems instituted globally on dualism’s watch. Efficiency is a logically necessary High Good of dualism. As global players fight over what they perceive as scarce global resources – viewed through the lens of Malthusian analysis, a lens that is the direct result of the measurable material world that is the object of scientific enquiry – efficiently conducted campaigns and strategies win out, commercially and politically. Historically, this strongly favours efficiency over resilience, a dynamic that makes for increasingly fragile and over-complicated systems. We are now at such an advanced stage of this dynamic, that the grossly overweighted ‘efficiency’ of our systems is tripping itself up every which way, finally exposing itself as the busted flush it was always going to be. 

What to do? As always, dig deep and see what we find…

Dualism is the soil I choose to dig. The insoluble conflict I see as inherent to dualism can be captured in a single bicameral question: 

What is mind (“I think”) and what is matter (“therefore I am”)? 

This article sets out, in some detail but by no means exhaustively, my reasoning on this pivotal ontological issue. It is very far from a complete work; its objective is merely to provoke and share rather than brow beat and bedazzle.

Previously

The global financial crisis that surfaced in 2007 ignited in me an overpowering need to understand. But understand what? Money quickly became the answer to that question, which is why this blog, and my life, orbited that subject matter for so long.

From October 2013 on, and in fact earlier though in more subtle ways, a profound spiritual awakening began in force whose effects continue to change me as deeply now as at its outset. I will not detail its individual events, but, in an attempt to convey its profundity, simply list a handful of prior ‘certainties’ that have been refashioned in me already: the nature of reality, science, democracy, authority, suffering, love, trust, expertise. 

By way of disclosure and contextual backstory, I read Capra’s The Turning Point in my late teens (if memory serves). I was romantically attracted to and heavily influenced by its dismantling of key academic disciplines. Being young, I did not see the weighty ramifications flowing from that dismantling in any depth or clarity. About three decades later, I read Capra’s The Web of Life, which added needed muscle to the skeletal intellectual framework placed in me by The Turning Point. 

Very crudely speaking, these two works bookend my intellectual departure from the acquired, culturally reflexive ‘knowings’ I had about reality, which had been essentially Newtonian in the shallowest sense of that term, a departure that guided me towards a more nuanced, systems-theory sensibility of the Santiago School variety, best captured by its famous ontological phrase “World and mind arise together”. 

This information lived in me almost entirely as material I wielded and appreciated intellectually. My spiritual awakening – how I hate that phrase! – has strongly foregrounded my intuitive and feeling-based modes of perception; they continue to deepen and enrich my relationship with and appreciation of that material, as of everything else. 

If I were to choose a phrase to replace the platitude “spiritual awakening”, it would be something like “deepening and broadening of consciousness”, similar to “individuation” as described by Carl Jung. Because we experience consciousness operating in modes, such as intuition or thinking or feeling, it does make more sense to describe our maturation in terms of becoming increasingly familiar with the totality of what we are. Maturation, or individuation, or awakening, is a constant process of expanding your horizons to accommodate ever more of reality, and thus of your self. Expressions like “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know” also capture this process; it is a process that is necessarily humbling.

Right about now

Now, I stand in God, deliberately, with focus, in service, to the best of my ability. I am oh so slowly learning what that entails and how to share it – I feel strongly called to share it. It is a turbulent fits-and-starts process that seems to even out over time.

Among innumerable other effects, my spiritual awakening has settled the dualism issue for me. At least, that’s my experience of it. I now confidently assert the most effective path through this deepest of all modern issues is non-dualistic – unsurprisingly –, one that best begins with a single-faceted question: either “What is matter?” or “What is mind?” Separated out and pursued ruthlessly, these philosophical lines of enquiry quickly lead the seeker to that most hallowed of grounds: I Don’t Know. That’s the ground we must return to if we want to own or develop a take on reality – Wahrnehmung rather than Weltanschauung – that is true to how we are. 

Why take on this odd-sounding task? Because being confronted, moment by moment, intimately and immediately and even deliberately, with the rich and instructive consequences of being who we are authentically and openly is a very healthy state of being. Certainly it is humbling, and Lord knows we need more humility in the world! 

When humble and open, we allow in more information. Obviously, this is required if we are to expand our knowledge of ourselves and reality. But to avoid becoming a weather vane turned this way and that by every new piece of information on the breeze, healthy skepticism and discernment must be developed. This is at least a lifetime’s undertaking; probably it is endless.

(Every time I try to do justice to this nature-of-reality material, to set out my own Wahrnehmung of All That Is, I am reminded how intractably difficult it is. Which is why I increasingly prefer poetic or rhetorical expression over academic or scientific or ‘fact’-based modes of communication. In the end, it isn’t facts that persuade, it’s something else. And that “something else” differs from person to person, moment to moment. But anyway, here I go again…)

In my view, each of us is a living, or organic, expression of our context. You could say: evolving manifestation of our context. We come at the world – perceive the world, relate to the world – constituted of ever evolving ideas we did not create solo and ex nihilo. In other words, each of us is a conscious/semi-conscious constellation of inherited and learned/imbibed interconnecting ideas – aka systems – that determines how we perceive reality. The systems we are structure how we perceive; systems structure perception. Reality is therefore organically constituted of us “perception constellations”, each of which is unique, where “unique” is a necessary consequence of the dizzying complexity of the all-embracing context as it expresses through the dizzying complexity of each ‘individual’ that constitutes it. (What I mean by “us”, as well as how the all-embracing context – All That Is, God – is itself akin to an ‘individual’, I tackle below.) 

The preceding tortured paragraph is tortured precisely because we modern humans are trained to perceive a world of discreet objects rather than one of intimately interconnected and ever changing beings that constitute a conscious whole. Remedying that training is not an easy task. Doing justice to my more ‘spiritual’ perspective in any kind of academic language – rather than poetic or mythical, or as film, etc. – goes against the grain of what academic writing has evolved to do; draw distinctions, analyse, define terms in meticulous detail, compartmentalise, stay ‘neutral’, etc.

To proceed yet deeper into this difficult subject matter and try to draw into relief the all-embracing context, I have to point out that I include the biochemical, and indeed the ‘physical’, as part of the perception constellations that together are reality, while nevertheless deliberately using an ‘insubstantial’ word like “ideas” to encompass those modes, for several complex reasons. 

Firstly, and somewhat impishly, we humans can analyse and reflect on what we feel and mean and experience, and my readership is exclusively human. Hence, the idea of “biochemistry” – by which I mean all that biology and chemistry contains as knowledge and how much each of us knows thereof – structures to some extent how we experience the effects ‘actual’ biochemical processes have on us – eating a delicious meal, for example. (This point is not as peripheral as it first might seem.)

Regarding non-humans: While I cannot communicate with you from the perspective of actually being a wolverine, an amoeba or a rose, it remains true that any attempt I make to communicate their experience of reality – whether scientific or poetic or simulation or National Geographic documentary – must be subject to the same filtering effects that belong to the unique and ever-changing constellation of ideas I am, as must your reception of my attempt. I see this as inescapable; we are what we are at every given moment, human and non-human alike, and our attempts to assert what it is to be a non-human – free will or no free will, conscious awareness or biochemical robots, intelligent or autonomic – must occur ‘within’ our own fields of perception and interpretation.

Essentially then, every experience must occur ‘within’ – as part of – some constellation of ‘ideas’ that wholly defines the experiencer, while also changing that constellation by some amount, minuscule or mighty. I assert that this principle holds all the way down, which brings us to the next complex reason.

Secondly, I argue all the above holds for wolverines, amoeba and roses – and everything else –, despite there being nothing obviously semiotic available to them – such as human language and the type of abstracted analysis it permits – that can structure their perceptions in what we might think of as an ideational way. They are, put crudely, ‘pure’ biology and chemistry untainted by the medium of intellectual/cerebral ideas. 

And yet they do experience their perceptions – their relational interactions with themselves and the rest of reality – in some fashion. Their perceptions are, as ours are, necessarily experiences, and experiences themselves are, for want of a better phrase, non-material, or non-physical. Their experiences thus belong to the realm of ‘ideas’ in the narrow but fundamental sense of their occurrence ‘within’ consciousness, ‘within’ the non-material. 

Further, the biochemical events underway in a rose or amoeba, for example, occur non-mechanistically ‘within’ an accommodating or enabling framework we call God, aka the totality of consciousness as an all-encompassing ‘system’. 

Not dualistically, however! This point is absolutely pivotal. It is not that something fundamentally different to consciousness – matter – somehow occurs spatially ‘within’ consciousness. Nor is it that something fundamentally different to matter – consciousness – rises like steam or ether or energetic fields from matter-energy interactions. Rather, it is that what we conceptualise as matter is in fact of consciousness in the form of information being ‘processed’ by consciousness. I’m arguing that conscious ‘processing’ accommodates, or enables, or sustains, what we call biochemical, or geological, or physical, or astronomical, etc., phenomena. As such, it all partakes of perception to some degree.

In other words, the physical world is an ever evolving constellation of experiences of – or ‘within’ – consciousness.

(This is, you could argue, a rephrasing in modern terminology of that old philosophical chestnut that asserts God as ultimate perceiver enabling and sustaining all reality by His perpetual perceiving. The important but subtle addition is the insistence this is non-dualistic, or monadic, a position that is conceptually supported by modern physics, which can reasonably be interpreted as demonstrating that reality’s foundations are composed of rules, or information, rather than ‘matter’ and ‘energy’.)

Thirdly, information is to data as meaning is to consciousness. This metaphorical pairing exists as a symbiosis, in a manner of speaking. Its fundamental relationship makes ‘ideas’ of everything that can be experienced in our ‘physical’ reality, including mountain ranges, the magma below and the stars above. Consciousness is, in part, the process or ability or even reflex of making meaning out of what happens. And the meaning made is in fact the experience itself, but as an ever changing flow of experience some like to call The Now. Because we so often translate experience into words, we consider language-based meaning to be the very fabric of meaning. But simply asking the question, “What does ‘mean’ mean?” exposes how problematic that reflexive belief is. I feel it is more instructive to see meaning and experience as roughly synonymous.

Thus, if everything is monadically consciousness, and consciousness makes meaning in a constant process of perceiving or interpreting itself through all its manifestations, it experiences ‘being’ mountains, magma, stars and petunias synonymously with how we humans experience our lives.

Finally, our strong impression that we are isolated from the rest of reality (no action at a distance), is a deep misconception. Everything is of consciousness, there is nothing but God, thus we are one: humans, wolverines, amoeba, roses, mountain ranges, Ford Fiestas … everything. Everything is organic, everything is God. A Ford Fiesta is organic in that its totality – its changing through time – occurs as part of the organic, the ultimately unpredictable, i.e. its exact rate and vector of decay, the minute details of its use, its immeasurable effects on its environment, etc.

So to the degree that our minds and interpretation of the data sent to us by our five senses – are there only five senses? – might be repelled by the logical steps and supporting ideas I’ve just walked us through, one way or another we are faced with a stark choice, a frustratingly dualistic choice: Either there is nothing but matter and energy (whatever they are), or there is nothing but consciousness (whatever that is). 

If it’s the latter, we are all one; even mountain ranges are of consciousness and thus experienced ideas in some way, however tangentially. 

Or, if it’s the former (materialism), we are still all ‘one’, but in a very different way. Further, if all reality is composed of matter and energy, there can be no consciousness in the sense of experiencing what happens to us; consciousness, by materialism’s tenets, can only ‘exist’ as some kind of self-deception. The fatal problem with this position is: What is capable of being deceived? What, exactly, experiences the illusion that it is experiencing an illusion? ’Dead’ matter? ‘Dead’ energy? A ‘dead’ network of neurons in the brain?

Making it all seem normal

Calm reflection of the preceding material might lead us to ask, “Well, what’s the difference, then?” And it’s a good question. None of the above equates with solipsism, none of the above means we can instantly turn mountain ranges into cavernous shopping malls with the flick of a thought. The ‘physical’ reality we ‘inhabit’ or participate in is bound by laws, by rules, those that science has unearthed over the centuries. It’s just that dualism falls by the wayside, not the findings of science. It’s just that materialism falls by the wayside, not the findings of science. The sun still rises and sets, I still eat my breakfast just before noon, you still go through your routines. As Einstein put it, it is a persistent ‘illusion’. The rules governing our ‘physical’ reality, however, like all rules, are of consciousness, are information. The foundations of reality are thus ‘made of’ information. 

So “all is of consciousness” does not equate with a free-for-all dream in which everyone is a God commanding all outcomes. Free will is sacred, yes, but as constrained by the all-embracing context. When we fall asleep and dream, we experience a domain of that all-embracing context defined by the rules governing how dreams work. When we wake, we experience a domain of that all-embracing context defined by its rules, and so on. Reality can manifest in several ways; there is also lucid dreaming, for example, and near-death experiences.

Furthermore, asserting everything is of consciousness does not mean everything that occurs ‘within’ consciousness must itself be conscious in the sense of directly experiencing its existence. A simple example would be thoughts; thoughts themselves are not conscious of themselves even though they are self evidently of consciousness.

Note that it makes no sense to describe thoughts as being ‘made of’ something. Indeed, asking what a thing is ‘made of’ is a regressive line of inquiry that quickly highlights the paucity of materialism: What is gravity made of? What are gravitons made of? What are quarks made of? What is a dimension made of? The very character of materialism requires, or at least suggests, the need for a regressive, atomistic sequence of made-of questions that cannot, however, lead the inquirer to anything ‘solid’ or fundamental in the sense of discreet building blocks. What we do discover at the foundations of ‘physical’ reality is a set of rules: the properties of subatomic particles and of the various forces that bind them. We cannot ‘physically’ pick out tangible things or ‘objects’ at that tiny scale; protons and electrons and quarks and photons are far too small to be apprehended as such. Instead, they are deduced via mathematics and experimentation, the results of which yield information in the form of equations and constants one could theoretically program into a computer to simulate – or evolve – a virtual universe from a virtual Bing Bang. To illustrate this metaphorically, a spherical depiction of a photon is about as accurate as a muscular man with a flowing white beard depicting God.

That we have thoughts at all gives rise to fascinating logical derivations. For example, despite the fact that consciousness is not ‘made of’ anything, the fact that we do indisputably think means that consciousness must be capable of patterning, memory retention and recall. In other words, consciousness can arrange and rearrange itself. This begs an obvious question: What is it about consciousness that permits patterning of itself? 

One (metaphorical) answer I’m aware of (from Tom Campbell) that makes most sense to me is the granularity resulting from its ability to focus, a granularity we could metaphorically think of as ‘bits’. This is a slippery concept so I’ll give two examples. Imagine grains of sand so small you can just barely see them. You can therefore work with them, make patterns with them. Anything smaller is invisible to you and is thus unworkable by you; they lie beneath your capacity to focus, to see. We can say the same thing about an emotion. If you feel anger, you could focus on that anger and feel out some number of distinct qualities that compose it, but only up to a point. Beyond that point is beyond the capacity of your focus. Each emotion you feel thus has a granularity determined by your ability to focus on it. For want of a better word, these are the ‘bits’ consciousness can work with to make or experience patterns.

However, these bits (aka the ‘resolution’ of consciousness) do not ‘constitute’ consciousness any more than letters ‘constitute’ thoughts. Consciousness’ ‘bits’ are a necessary consequence of its ability to focus; they are neither cause nor precursor. And its ability to focus, just as meaning making or experiencing, is simply one of several necessary properties or functions of consciousness. I find argumentation of this type to be insightfully simple and richly provocative.

Part of contemplating the ramifications of simple observations of this type is the phenomenon of attention, or directed awareness (I think of focus as the intensity and detail of attention). I can close my eyes and direct my awareness to a memory of being on a beach on Bohol in 2018. Indeed, people can get so good at this sort of reverie that it becomes close to what we think of as ‘real’. Some of my dreams seem as real as waking reality, to put it redundantly. They can even involve mundane things like watching television or brushing my teeth. 

Where we direct our awareness shapes what we experience. And yet there is far more to reality, and to ourselves, than where we direct our awareness. This logic implies the unconscious: those parts of what we are and what reality is of which we are not aware, even though they are of consciousness. It thus also means there is more to consciousness than awareness alone, which is another pivotal point. However, in the interests of brevity, and because it’s not my intention to present a watertight thesis, I’m going to leave that point hanging and wrap things up.

Conclusion

To repeat what I stated in the introduction, I set all this out not to persuade anyone to adopt my perspective, but to present it as an alternative that is at least plausible. My primary intentions are to encourage an acceptance of the exciting “I don’t know” attitude to reality, and more open-minded, open-ended dialogue. It is my conviction that we need far more of that.

Similarly, this article begs more questions than it answers – assuming it answers any. But that’s the point: regardless of how often high priests and scientists and experts have bragged that we are this close to knowing everything, we are still at the exciting foothills of our journey into understanding All That Is. And one delicious reason for this is that our understanding alters All That Is. Everything that happens alters All That Is: change is the only constant; reality is ‘made of’ constant change, while also made coherent by constant rules.

It’s paradox all the way up.

My undertaking at Econosophy is, to a large degree, to teach myself how to communicate what appears to me the most feasible ontology, how that ontology offers riches in the domain of economics and governance, and to reach out to others in a spirit of contribution and mutual discovery. There may well be very hard times ahead, but what I do not want to contribute to is blind acceptance of what the ‘globalists’ are up to as they surreptitiously lead us in a direction most do not want: totalitarianism, hierarchy’s insane swan-song. I prefer open dialogue, experimentation with different money types, experimentation with money-free social forms, with anarchism, etc. as it becomes increasingly apparent history requires this experimentation of us. I don’t want establishment experts wielding The Science to assert through their media outlets what is and what is not ‘fact’. I don’t want the establishment instructing us on what forms of society are and are not going to happen. 

I do want to see their version of events, their narrative, their desired future, publicly put to the test, just as science puts its theories and assertions to the test.

Total control is an illusion, whether of the materialist mechanical-technical variety that transhumanists seem hell bent on foisting upon us, or of the reclusive solipsistic variety, or of the God-will-intervene-and-fix-everything-4EVA variety. We humans are here to learn how to love in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. We do not incarnate on earth simply to submit our freedom to authorities and experts we barely understand. That is cowardice, apathy. We did not incarnate to live cowardly, apathetic lives. 

This blog is one of my contributions to that most holy undertaking; to cooperatively discover our self-governance potential and divine sovereignty in a spirit of open and humble inquiry and deed. Yes, embarking on that journey is a daunting prospect. But rather that than fearful acceptance of our ever shrinking, garishly glittering prisons!