A new kind of paradigm shift is long overdue. This paradigm shift must change our concept of how paradigms shift, and redefine the confused relationship between science and philosophy. For its entire modern history, science has operated by breaking things down into ever smaller pieces, trying to understand and assess each piece in isolation, and hoping that a bigger picture will somehow emerge from the fragments. Sometimes, though very infrequently, something like this does actually happen, but until now it has only ever applied to one part of our model of reality, never the whole thing. Darwinian evolution is a good example of the sort of thing we think of as a major paradigm shift. It transformed our understanding of the origin of species, but the rest of the scientific account of reality was unaffected; there was no corresponding shift in physics or cosmology. In the new paradigm, the priority will be to discover and develop a model of the whole of reality, and the value of that model will be judged by its coherence and explanatory power across the entire spectrum of science, as well as adjacent parts of philosophy.
It is not that there is anything wrong, per se, with paying attention to the details. Far from it; the details absolutely do matter. The problem starts when individual proposed pieces of a potentially completable holistic model are conclusively rejected for inconclusive reasons, even in the absence of any coherent model of the whole. If we are not already in possession of a comprehensive model of reality, free from unresolvable anomalies and unanswerable questions, whose equations add up without the need to posit any unidentifiable "dark stuff", then the strategy must change. Instead of just inventing new ways to zoom in, we need to be prepared to zoom out, and to start thinking outside the boxes we have built. The knee-jerk rejection of ideas we don’t like the sound of must stop. It is time to acknowledge, collectively as well as individually, that the failures of materialistic science have reached breaking point. The scientific community has now spent a century arguing about the implications of quantum mechanics for our model of reality, nearly three centuries failing to provide a credible account of consciousness1, and since the 1990s cosmology has degenerated into a tangle of proliferating paradoxes and deepening discrepancies. Those working within this field are well aware of this, but they are reluctant to communicate the scale of the problem to outsiders.2 Meanwhile, any proposed solution to these problems that isn’t some version of physicalism is dismissed with a contemptuous wave of the hand (no "woo woo" please, we're scientists). And no, I am not attacking science, because the failures I am talking about aren't empirical. They are philosophical failures dressed up in scientific clothing which manifestly does not fit.
The new paradigm begins from the same impulse that gave rise to modern science in the first place: the wish to understand reality as a single, intelligible whole. The difference is that this time, instead of just collecting ever more fragments, we must look for principles that can make the fragments fit together. The central example of what this is the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness. I will start with a relatively unproblematic claim: that quantum wavefunction collapse and consciousness are both processes. More controversially, there are five notable similarities between them.
1: Both have proved extremely difficult for scientists to pin down, define and test.
2: As a result of (1), a significant number of scientists have controversially concluded that they don't actually exist (resulting in the Many Worlds Interpretation and Eliminative Materialism respectively).
3: Wavefunction collapse is typically described as being triggered by an "observation" or "measurement". Consciousness is the internal subjective experience of some kind of external reality. Therefore, both processes fundamentally involve a relationship between a subjective entity (an observer or a conscious subject) and an external, objective reality.
4: Wave-function collapse is famously non-local: the collapse at one location instantaneously affects the entire wave function, no matter how far it is spread across space. Consciousness is equally resistant to strict localisation: there is no single “seat” or moment where a unified field of experience arises; it emerges all at once from processes distributed across the brain (and, I will argue, beyond it). Both phenomena refuse to be restricted to a classical space-time point; both demand a fundamentally holistic description.
5: Consciousness involves the modelling of a mind-external reality, and assigning value to the various possible futures in order to select a best option. Wavefunction collapse involves the reduction of a set of unobserved physically possible outcomes into a single observed actual outcome. Therefore, both processes involve the transition between a range of possible futures or histories, and a single observed outcome in the present.
Now the difference between the old paradigm and the new can be made clear. The old paradigm approach to this is to examine each claim individually, demand irrefutable empirical justification, and consider the alternative explanations which are available. This is likely to result in the rejection of all five, not because of any clear justification for ruling them out, but for inconclusive reasons: there are too many competing theories (some of which are more to our personal taste), empirical confirmation is complicated, elusive or impossible, and the whole thing feels like woo. And anyway, correlations aren't evidence of causation, so even if we accept that there really are five structural similarities, it doesn't prove anything. There the discussion will be extinguished, no new thinking will take place, and we can all go back to our comfortable lack of a coherent model of reality.
The new paradigm takes the opposite approach: instead of breaking things down, it tries to integrate them into a bigger picture. First it takes seriously the idea that instead of being unrelated processes which just happen to share five similarities, consciousness and wavefunction collapse could be two different descriptions of a single process. Perhaps consciousness is the internal, subjective ("view from somewhere") and wavefunction collapse is the external, objective ("view from nowhere"). Then it tries to figure out how this might actually work, not just physically but metaphysically. If a coherent and elegant synthesis starts emerging, then the old paradigm will insist on empirical verification of the synthesis itself, preferably involving shiny new mathematics, before any more integrative thinking is attempted. The new one zooms even further out: it asks how the proposed synthesis might be related to other major problems, especially those in cosmology. For example, could such a model help us to understand why we can't quantise gravity, or shed any light on the Hubble Tension or the Cosmological Constant Problem? The old paradigm forbids this approach3. It actively resists it, places obstacles in its path and tells us that this is the only way science has ever progressed. It insists that every proposed piece of the Big Puzzle must be empirically verified before we can even start to imagine how the pieces might fit together. This is why it so rarely succeeds in even fitting two pieces together, and why it has about as much chance of delivering a grand synthesis as it does of finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The new paradigm simply asks what kind of whole could make sense of the pieces we already have. All of them. Not just the ones that that don't challenge our own assumptions and belief systems.
Western philosophy began when stories of gods started giving to way to reason and the search for principles, not long after the invention of the first alphabet with vowels. Thales of Miletus (626/623-548/545BC) dared to ask not who made the world but what it was made of, and proposed that beneath the flux and form of things lay a single substance. Having asked the right question, Thales then gave the wrong answer – the foundation of reality cannot be water. His successor Anaximander (c. 610– c. 546BC) reasoned that the source of all things could not be any familiar element, for each of these was bounded and defined. The origin, he said, must be the Apeiron – the Boundless, the Indefinite – that which has no limit or form of its own yet gives rise to all forms. The Apeiron is an infinite womb of becoming, eternally cycling through birth and dissolution. It was the first metaphysical concept in the Western tradition. Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495BC) saw number as the key to the cosmos; harmony, proportion, and rhythm were expressions of the world’s inner order. The music of the spheres – the correspondence between number and nature – became the symbol of a living universe governed by intelligible beauty. For Pythagoras, philosophy and mysticism were one: to understand the world was to participate in its divine harmony. From this lineage arose the golden age of Greek thought, but even as it flowered its mystical roots began to wither. Socrates was condemned, Plato introduced eternal forms beyond the mathematical structure, and Aristotle gave philosophy method and substance but stripped away its primal wonder. The Apeiron, and the music of number, began to be forgotten.
Fast forward two and a half millennia, and we still have no clear answer to the question Thales was the first to ask. Science is materialistic, but since the discovery of quantum mechanics there has been no simple scientific concept to line up with our intuitive concept of a material world. There is no agreement on a scientific definition of consciousness either, and not even a consensus that the word “consciousness” refers to anything which actually exists. And yet the function of consciousness should not be a mystery, because whether you ask a neuroscientist what brains are for, or you introspectively ask yourself what your own consciousness spends most of its time actually doing, you should arrive at one and the same conclusion: brains and minds both model a reality beyond what appears to be ourselves, with those selves as an essential part of the model. It is a process of making predictions about physically possible futures, and assigning value to the various options, in order to select a single preference. Almost all of our waking activity is devoted to two general tasks:
(1) Trying to understand the world – both its deterministic processes and the behaviour of the other conscious beings with which we share it.
(2) Trying to coax one potential future into being at the expense of all the others, or the reverse: trying to avoid certain possible futures. This process is goal-oriented and meaning-laden.
This description of the purpose of consciousness applies just as well to the control of the bodily movements of the most primitive conscious animals to a modern human trying to understand what is really going on in the world so they can coherently yearn for something better than the catastrophe that currently plays out. We are the ultimate biological model-makers, and we have more information about the nature of reality than most previous generations dreamed was even possible. You might think, therefore, that we should be closing in on a coherent model of the whole of reality. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: we have arrived some sort of nadir in this respect. We have become accustomed to living within a world whose structure we are unable to grasp. We've gathered a vast collection of puzzle pieces, some of which fit together with some other pieces, others of which don't seem to belong anywhere at all. What we conspicuously don't have is the picture on the box, and that makes it tricky to tell which of the candidate pieces actually belong to the real puzzle, and which are distractions, tempting us away from the only complete solution towards partial pictures which necessarily leave things out.
Scientific materialism, by definition, makes a claim about reality as a whole. It doesn't just say that the objects of scientific study actually exist – that science aims at true knowledge of objective reality. That is the more cautious claim of scientific realism, which leaves open the possibility of aspects to reality which are beyond the reach of science as we currently understand it, and might remain that way forever. Materialism claims that a material cosmos is everything that exists. This map of reality reached a zenith of explanatory power at the end of the 19th century, and has been declining ever since. Its successor is physicalism, which also makes a claim about the whole of reality: that it consists of whatever sorts of ontological primitives ("basic stuff") our best physical theories describe. Unfortunately, our best physics is quantum mechanics and there is no consensus whatsoever about what that can tell us about the structure of reality. As things stand, at least twelve major “interpretations” make rival claims about what reality is made of, how causality works, and what it is theoretically possible know about such things. None of these interpretations qualify as science. They are philosophical theories, each of which is consistent with empirical evidence (at least according to their proponents). The most significant progress we've made in the last century wasn't empirical either, but a logical "no-go theorem", discovered by physicist John Bell. Bell's theorem rules some important things out, but raises more questions than it answers. There's been a steady stream of new interpretations ever since, and for every version of physicalism we could base on a metaphysical interpretation of QM, there's another based on something else entirely. Unsurprisingly, given their abundance, no version of physicalism commands a consensus, even among physicalists themselves. It follows that there's no compelling reason to believe that any of them are both correct and complete. Physicalism is not a single thing but an extensive menu of models of reality, and people are entirely free to choose between them. Some on that side of the debate fall into scientism: the outright rejection of philosophy, with naturalistic assumptions and scientific thinking unapologetically applied to absolutely everything.
These observations aren't new. While some kind of physicalism remains the de-facto dominant paradigm for mainstream science, there is no shortage of people pointing out its deficiencies. However, that is pretty much where agreement among anti-physicalists (or anti-reductionists) ends. And since even comprehensively broken paradigms do not finally roll over and die until an alternative emerges which has sufficient explanatory power to assemble a new consensus, and since there is currently no clear sign of this happening, physicalism remains stubbornly alive. The anti-physicalist camp has a menu of its own, and it is even more exotic. Some of these systems are new, others are rehashes of ancient ideas, and one (animism) even predates civilisation itself. Some of are fully consistent with empirical evidence, while others treat physicalism's difficulties as an implicit failure of science itself, and consequently take certain empirical claims with a very large pinch of salt.
This sort of situation might be acceptable to postmodern relativists, but for scientific realists it amounts to a serious and deepening crisis. If it is the job of science to deliver truths about reality, then why do we find ourselves so far away from a consensus about its top level structure and fundamental nature? If there's a new paradigm forming in the cracks of the old one then it is currently not sufficiently well-formed to be recognisable as such. If we assume that postmodernism and other forms of scientific anti-realism are wrong (i.e. if we assume the puzzle has a single correct solution, and that humans are theoretically capable of finding it), this suggests that at least one critical piece is missing, or that something, somewhere needs to be turned upside-down, inside-out or back-to-front.
The problems with our current paradigm(s) cluster in three main areas. The first of these is the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Central to this is what is known as “the Measurement Problem” (MP): how does a probabilistic range of predictions about future observations become a single observed outcome? The second is consciousness. Why does it exist? What is it? What does it do? How did it evolve? What holds it together as one? Why is it that animals with tiny brains can effortlessly solve certain kinds of problems that even our best computers find immensely challenging? Why does it feel like we've got free will if our behaviour is fully determined by the laws of physics, just like the rest of the universe? The key problem here is known as the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”: If physicalism is true, then why aren't we zombies?
The third problem area is cosmology, and in this case we have a broad selection of anomalies and discrepancies, and it deeply unclear which of them are related to which others. There is no single standout problem like the MP or the HPC, though there are several which are potentially as serious, and in this case at least some of the problems present as explicitly mathematical. In other words, our best cosmological theories cannot account for the increasingly accurate empirical data. Instead, they require us to posit vast amounts of unknown "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" to work, and even this sort of jiggery-pokery cannot resolve the "Hubble Tension" between recent and early universe "measurements" of the expansion rate of the cosmos. We are left asking whether the universe is composed mostly of invisible, unknown stuff, or whether the entire model, propped up by ad hoc mechanisms like inflation, is fundamentally broken.
One of the key points I will make in this book is that these three areas of problems are deeply inter-related. What if these three problem clusters – quantum measurement, consciousness, and cosmology – are not three separate mysteries at all, but three different manifestations of a single, deeper confusion about the nature of reality itself? What if the reason none of them can be solved in isolation is that they all originate from the same hidden fault-line in our metaphysical foundations? What is the true relationship between mind and matter, subject and object, observer and observed? For more than a century, physics, philosophy, and neuroscience have orbited this same impenetrable mystery without recognising it as a shared problem. Each discipline encounters the same boundary where explanation fails: the point at which reality and appearance cannot be cleanly separated. It is precisely here, at this common boundary, that a new synthesis must begin.
This website is about a paradigm shift that has been brewing since Darwin removed purpose from nature, and then Nietzsche revealed that once purpose is gone from nature, it cannot survive in morality either. Darwin destabilised the cosmic order; Nietzsche completed the job by destabilising the moral order. Together they mark the birth of modern nihilism and the search for new foundations: the crisis out of which modernism, existentialism, and later process philosophies emerged. This paradigm shift involves the regrounding of the whole corpus of empirical scientific knowledge from the rotting foundation on which it currently sits to a new foundation which can account not just for material world we observe, but the observer itself and the underlying quantum realm which we can never observe, but which must nevertheless be part of reality.
This paradigm shift is primarily philosophical, not scientific. The main direct and immediate consequences for science itself are the dissolution or reframing of several extremely intractable problems which are currently wrongly believed to be purely scientific. So here is my first empirical prediction: until they have figured out how to fix these philosophical problems, no cosmologist will be able to get their numbers to add up in an elegant and parsimonious manner. The problem, at its core, is deeply entrenched dualistic thinking, including the belief that materialism or idealism offer a legitimate escape from dualism. From the new perspective, each of them is revealed to be one half of Descartes' dualism with the other crudely chopped off. Materialism is like Yang without Yin, idealism is like Yin without Yang, and together they re-enact dualism as a perennial philosophical stalemate. In reality, Yin and Yang only make sense as complementary halves of a deeper unity. The escape from dualism must be neutral.
In the West, we often mistake the Taijitu (the Yin-Yang symbol) for a religious icon or a "holy" emblem. This is a category error. In its original context, the Yin-Yang is better understood as a metaphysical diagram – a topological map of how any "whole" must necessarily divide itself to become perceivable. The diagram does not represent two "things" (like water and fire) struggling for dominance; it represents the functional relationship between the observer and the observed, the potential and the actual. When Niels Bohr was knighted into the Danish Order of the Elephant in 1947, he was required to design a coat of arms. In a move that was remarkably radical for a physicist of his stature, he chose the Taijitu as his central emblem. Above the symbol, he inscribed the Latin motto: Contraria sunt complementa ("Opposites are complementary"). Bohr didn't choose the symbol because he had "gone mystical" or converted to Taoism in a religious sense. He chose it because he felt the Chinese had discovered, centuries earlier, a logical diagram for the very problem he was hitting in quantum mechanics. In the Newtonian world, a thing is either a particle or a wave; it cannot be both. This is the "Law of the Excluded Middle." Bohr’s great contribution to physics was the realisation that at the quantum level, reality requires two seemingly exclusive descriptions to be "complete." You need the particle-picture and the wave-picture.
There is an old parable, originally from the Indian subcontinent, but adopted by many other cultures. It goes like this:
Six blind men came upon an elephant in the dimness of their unseeing world.
Each reached out with curious hands, eager to grasp the nature of this strange beast.One, stroking its broad, solid flank, declared: “It is a wall, firm and unyielding.”
Another, feeling the smooth curve of a tusk, countered: “No, it is a spear, sharp and deadly.”
A third, clasping the restless trunk, cried: “It is a serpent, coiling and alive.”
The fourth, brushing the great ear, smiled: “Surely it is a fan, wide and gentle.”
The fifth, embracing a sturdy leg, proclaimed: “It is a tree, rooted in the earth.”
The last, tugging at the tail, laughed: “It is a rope, rough and dangling.”So they quarrelled without end, each certain of his truth, each blind to the others’.
In the present context, the elephant is reality itself. All previous societies tried to describe it, many believed they had succeeded, and some of them had a firmer grasp on crucial parts of the puzzle than we do. What no previous society had was modern science and technology, so their understanding of reality can only have been based on a mixture of experience, reason, faith and revelation. We are now in possession of a vast amount of reliable information about how reality works, all of which must be taken into account. Unfortunately, science doesn't describe the whole elephant either – it is nowhere near providing a coherent, integrated model of reality, even by its own limited illumination. And while neither faith nor revelation can contribute anything useful to a new foundational paradigm, both reason and experience are indispensable, although neither qualifies as science. Just because an item of knowledge can be acquired before any science begins, or can only obtained subjectively if it can be obtained at all, it doesn't follow that it is as irrelevant as faith and revelation. We don't need science to tell us we are conscious, for example. In fact, science can't tell us this. If we want to know if someone is conscious, we must ask them and evaluate their answer – and it is no use trying to reduce that valuation to computation. If that was possible then we could simply ask an AI to calculate whether it is conscious, which isn't going to work. We have reached a point where our machines can describe the elephant better than we can, yet they still don't know they are in the room.
Science isn't just one of the blind men but several. Cosmology isn't integrated with quantum mechanics, and neither of them make firm contact with any theory of consciousness. Even within these great areas of academic study there is profound disagreement about central questions. Science doesn't know what consciousness is, and doesn't know what quantum mechanics means, and our best cosmological model – Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) – has got more holes in it than a Swiss cheese. There is deep confusion about the expansion rate of the universe, the cosmological constant problem is numerically the biggest discrepancy in the history of physics, we don't understand what gravity is, we can't adequately explain why the early universe was so exceptionally uniform or why the constants are fine-tuned for life, and while our theories suggests that life should be abundant in the cosmos, we can find no sign of it anywhere but Earth. However, what really damns ΛCDM is the direction of travel. Cosmology becomes ever more precise but instead of leading to solutions to the biggest problems, people keep finding new ones. Meanwhile, the discrepancies we're already aware of are being measured to ever greater resolutions. As things stand, ΛCDM cannot even be relied on as an accurate account of just one of the elephant's body parts, let alone the whole thing. Something is fundamentally wrong with it, and cosmologists don't know what. Almost all of their new ideas are proposals for yet more ad-hoc additions to ΛCDM, rather than something that could replace it wholesale. In other words, it is starting to look like ΛCDM is the best materialistic theory available, but as things stand, it is empirically inadequate. Very literally, today's cosmologists cannot find an elegant and parsimonious way to make their numbers add up, and in some situations they can't make them add up at all.
The other blind men, of course, are philosophy and religion. Western philosophy, split into its Analytic and Continental traditions, has long grappled with the elephant by way of reason alone. Analytic philosophers try to tame it with language and logic, dissecting concepts as if the creature could be understood by cataloguing the texture of its skin or the angle of its bones. Meanwhile the Continental philosophers, after much struggling, eventually threw up their hands and declared that the very idea of a single, unified model of reality is not just a wild goose chase but a despised form of oppression. They tell us we must resign ourselves to epistemic chaos, and celebrate the diversity of “mini-narratives”, even if they directly contradict each other or don't even make sense on their own.
Which naturally brings us to religion. The Abrahamic traditions gave us stories of creation, covenant, and salvation, and declared the elephant to be the finest possible work a transcendent lawgiver. Eastern mystical traditions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism – sought instead to dissolve the boundaries of perception, to experience the elephant from within, as an inseparable flow of being and consciousness. These perspectives uncovered profound truths, but as things stand, there is no successful integration of these insights with our scientific models of the structure of reality.
Few people have even attempted a full synthesis of science and spirituality, though there have been some notable exceptions. Ken Wilber is the best known living example, and if I'm looking for recent historic examples then I'd choose three who articulated visions as the quantum age was being born and three from the later 20th century, The three earlier thinkers were responding to the same predicament that QM itself exposed: the breakdown of mechanistic materialism. All three lived through the initial quantum revolution. They can be seen as the first wave of integral cosmologists anticipating what the quantum paradigm would eventually demand: a participatory, processual, value-laden universe.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a philosopher of process thought, who saw reality as a "web of becoming" where science, philosophy, and religion interpenetrate. Science and the Modern World (1925) was written as quantum theory was coalescing, and Process and Reality (1929) came two years after the Solvay Conference where Bohr and Einstein debated the meaning of quantum indeterminacy. Many modern process philosophers interpret Whitehead’s thought as a philosophical parallel to quantum ontology, even though he developed it independently.
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was Indian philosopher-yogi who sought a synthesis of Eastern spirituality with Western evolutionary thought. His main metaphysical synthesis was underway before QM’s formal development but was revised during 1930s. Aurobindo’s ontology of reality as a dynamic manifestation of consciousness, with matter as involved spirit, mirrors quantum indeterminacy’s dissolution of fixed matter. He was spiritually articulating the same shift from substance to process and from object to participation that physics was uncovering empirically.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) was more influenced by Darwinism and thermodynamic cosmology than by QM. He developed his evolutionary cosmology during the 1930s–40s, and like the quantum pioneers, he saw consciousness and complexity as integral to the fabric of evolution. His cosmogenesis anticipated the idea of a participatory universe that later physicists would develop explicitly under quantum influence.
The later three each deepened the integration of scientific and spiritual cosmology in ways that directly reflected the maturing quantum and ecological worldviews of their time. If the first three thinkers anticipated the quantum shift philosophically, this later trio sought to live within it – to think from inside a participatory cosmos rather than about it from the outside.
Thomas Berry (1914–2009), a cultural historian and eco-theologian, gave this participatory cosmology its most elegant expression in the phrase, “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” Berry’s vision placed the human story within the larger unfolding of the cosmos, framing the ecological crisis as a crisis of cosmology – a breakdown in our sense of participation in the great story of creation. He called for a new cosmological narrative, inspired by the emerging insights of systems theory, deep ecology, and quantum interconnectedness. For Berry, science and spirituality are not separate enterprises but two modes of intimacy with the same sacred reality.
David Bohm (1917–1992), a theoretical physicist and close associate of Einstein, provided the most rigorous scientific articulation of this participatory worldview. His theory of the implicate order proposed that the manifest world (the explicate order) unfolds from a deeper, undivided wholeness. In this hidden dimension, every part "enfolds" the whole, and consciousness participates in the "unfolding" process itself. Bohm’s dialogues with Jiddu Krishnamurti and his later work on thought, meaning, and creativity show how far he extended physics into the domain of metaphysics and spirituality. He attempted to dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, offering a scientific expression of the same participatory ontology that others on this list approached through philosophy and theology. However, Bohm's system is entirely deterministic, and I believe it evades, rather than solves, the measurement problem. I shall have more to say about this in chapter 6.
Henryk Skolimowski (1930–2018) was a Polish philosopher of eco-cosmology who developed what he called an “eco-philosophy of participatory mind.” Trained in both science and philosophy, he argued that the universe is not a mindless mechanism but a meaningful, evolving field of consciousness in which human awareness participates creatively. He saw the ecological crisis as a spiritual and epistemological failure: the direct result of viewing the world as dead matter. His alternative was a sacred cosmology grounded in reverence for life and participation in the cosmic process of meaning-making. In this sense, he extended the implications of quantum indeterminacy and observer participation into the moral and ecological domain, proposing that the universe itself is a value-realising system.
Together, these three thinkers represent a second wave of integrative cosmology, which moved beyond mere synthesis toward a new worldview in which science itself becomes a spiritual practice in itself. Each, in his own way, recognised that the participatory universe implied by quantum theory and ecology is not only a description of reality but a call to responsibility: to awaken, to participate, and to co-create the next phase of the cosmic story.
There is one other person I cannot leave unmentioned, because he was such an important influence in my own case. Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) served as the great communicator of this integrative turn. Through works like The Perennial Philosophy (1945) and Island (1962), he distilled the insights of both Eastern mysticism and Western science into a vision of the universe as mind in evolution. Though less a cosmological system-builder than the others I have mentioned here, Huxley did more than anybody else to transmit the participatory worldview to modern culture, making the cosmic synthesis accessible to the broader imagination.
The ideas explored in this book are related to the thinking of all of these individuals, as well as some more recent thinkers whose work focused on getting specific parts of the picture more into focus – most notably naturalistic philosopher Thomas Nagel and physicist Henry Stapp. Between them, Stapp's Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007) and Nagel's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialistic Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (2012) provided me with a new vision of the picture of on the box. On their own, neither would have been enough.
I am an ex-materialist. Once upon a time, in what now seems like a previous life, I was the administrator for the newly-created bulletin board of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. Around the same time, I arrived at the conclusion that materialism doesn't actually make any sense, because the only way to make it internally coherent is to deny that the word “consciousness” refers to anything real. This is known as "eliminative materialism" (or just “eliminativism”) and its logical consistency does nothing to diminish its absurdity: the truth is that it is only through consciousness that we are aware that anything exists at all. That was back in 2002, and I have spent much of the intervening period both exploring what a coherent post-materialistic model of reality might actually look like, and trying to find ways to prise open the minds of people who think like I did until my “defection to the light side” at the age of 33. The first activity has proved very rewarding...eventually; 25 years later I am ready to tell a new story. The second turned out to be almost impossible. I found a way to break out of a materialistic belief system, but nobody could have broken in and rescued me from it, not least because I did not feel I was in any need of rescue.
This raises an obvious question. If materialism can be falsified with a combination of pure reason and an acknowledgement of the existence of consciousness then why has it retained its position as the dominant metaphysical ideology of modernity? Why hasn't it been displaced by a new paradigm? On one level the answer is simple: there is no coherent new paradigm to displace it. Materialists tend to misframe the situation as a straight choice between materialism (which they assume to be an unproblematic default starting premise) and dualism (which is what you inevitably end up with if you add something to materialism). Meanwhile, very few people who reject materialism actually claim to be (or should I say “admit to being”) dualists. Some call themselves “non-dualists” in order to ram this point home, although that term has many different meanings. The clear positions opposed to materialism can be categorised into three main groups: idealists (who believe consciousness is everything), panpsychists (who believe everything is conscious), and “other / don't knows” (mostly people who understand what is wrong with materialism, but aren't convinced idealism or panpsychism are true either, usually because they consider brains to be necessary for consciousness even if insufficient). To materialists, all of it looks like woo, and because there are multiple incompatible alternatives on offer, nothing changes. It's a stalemate: unresolvable metaphysical trench warfare.
That said, there are quite a few parts of this new paradigm coming into focus. Based on the current state of books written on this topic the “whole elephant” should look something like this:
Reality is not fundamentally material but relational and experiential. Matter, mind, and meaning are not separate domains but aspects of a deeper unity.
Consciousness is not an anomaly but a principle woven into the fabric of the cosmos. It is as basic as mass, energy, or spacetime, and perhaps more so.
The cosmos is participatory. Observation, valuation, and relationship help shape what is real, not just passively register it.
Time and process are fundamental. Being is not a static block but an unfolding, in which novelty, emergence, and irreducible subjectivity matter.
Ecology and interconnection are the true grammar of existence. From fungi and forests, brains to quantum events, the world is a web of mutual becoming, not a collection of separate objects.
Meaning and value are ontological, not epiphenomenal. They belong to the structure of reality, not just to human projections.
In one sentence the missing paradigm, according to contemporary integralists, is a participatory, meaning-infused, relational cosmology where mind, matter, time, and life are continuous aspects of one living process: the universe as a communion of subjects.
This is a pretty good start. But if we can get this far, why can't we find a way to agree on the details to a sufficient extent that a coherent new paradigm can emerge, and begin the process of displacing materialism? Is it simply because not enough people have got the message? I don't think so. I think that if a proposed new paradigm actually had enough cross-disciplinary explanatory power, then the paradigms would already be shifting. Something must therefore be missing, and whatever it is has got to be as elegant and conceptually simple as relocating the centre of the Solar System from Earth to the Sun. Is it possible that there is some relatively simple way of re-arranging the puzzle pieces so that everything makes sense in a radically new way? And if so, why haven't we already figured out what it is? Why can't we just get an AI to analyse the whole situation (at which it is apparently so astonishingly effective), and come up with the correct answer?
My answer is this: if we accept that reality is coherent, consistent and comprehensible then it is not possible for the idealists, panpsychists and “other / don't know's” all to be correct. If there actually is a whole elephant then two of those groups will necessarily have to join the materialists in accepting that some of their foundational beliefs need to change. In fact, this sort of situation applies to just about every Western mind currently in existence: as things stand there is no serious candidate for the right answer, so each of us is free to believe whatever we like, and we can justify this at no cost by saying, and fully meaning, that we believe it to be the least bad option on the table. Collectively, this situation suits us. We like it. Sure, it might lead to arguments and meaninglessness, but it is the ultimate manifestation of an individualistic theme that has always run through Western societies. At this point I start to wonder who is left that will still want to consider something radical enough to power a paradigm shift of the magnitude required. Is the loss of a wide variety of incoherent worldviews a price worth paying for a coherent model of the whole of reality?
Most people do not understand the severity of this situation, and therefore neither accept it as normal nor view it as a problem. The fundamental fragmentation – the incoherence between science, philosophy, and spirituality regarding the nature of reality – is primarily an internal crisis debated within academic and intellectual circles. Most people live with an implicit, common-sense materialism (the world is made of stuff, and my mind is in my head) that is never challenged or explicitly articulated. As for the cosmological crisis, while the public enjoys popular science books about the Big Bang and Dark Matter, they generally absorb ΛCDM as a settled scientific fact, not a structure riddled with fundamental, widening cracks. The consensus is presented, the confusion is not. The problems with QM have seeped into public consciousness, but often in a distorted, pseudoscientific fashion. People know about "quantum weirdness" and superposition, and have heard about the controversial role of the observer, but this is often misinterpreted as proof of whatever belief they already hold, rather than understood to be the precise, century-old conceptual failure of the dominant physical theory that it actually is.
The fragmentation is therefore normalised. The most relevant public awareness is not of the academic theoretical problems, but of the consequences for society in general: the lack of a shared, coherent story for living. The average person expects to choose from a variety of belief systems. The idea of a single, coherent model that integrates all these domains is not a common expectation. Meaninglessness is also accepted. Ours is an era of epistemic relativism ("my truth" vs. "your truth") where people think it is normal that collective, objective meaning is impossible. This nihilism, paradoxically, has also become a normalised part of the modern condition. The intellectual stalemate is felt as a kind of cultural and spiritual drift, but the cause is unknown. A coherent model of reality would demand intellectual honesty and a willingness to surrender cherished fragments of supposed truth that no longer fit any potential whole. That’s a tall order. Many people (spiritual seekers, materialists and postmodernists alike) have built their identities around their preferred paradoxes. These contradictions aren’t just tolerated; they’re celebrated as signs of depth or sophistication. Incoherence offers freedom from commitment (you can dabble in ideas without being bound by them), immunity to critique (if your worldview is self-consciously paradoxical, it can’t be “wrong”) and aesthetic appeal (contradictions feel poetic, mysterious, even sacred). Coherence threatens all that. It threatens the buffet of metaphysical options that lets each person pick their own flavour of reality. Except, ironically, the freedom to believe in nonsense is itself a kind of tyranny. It problematises shared understanding, undermines trust in reason, and makes collective meaning-making nearly impossible. We end up with epistemic relativism, cultural nihilism and philosophical gridlock: no paradigm shift can occur because every worldview is protected by the general epistemic anarchy. In this light, coherence is liberation. It’s the promise of a worldview that works, that adds up, that honours experience without collapsing into chaos. What we actually fear is the loss of our metaphysical playground, and I think that fear is misplaced. A coherent model of reality doesn’t have to be rigid or reductive, and it certainly doesn't have to be authoritarian. What it can’t be is endlessly self-contradictory. So is the loss of all those incoherent worldviews worth it? I’d say: only if the new paradigm is rich enough to absorb their insights without their contradictions. The challenge is replacing the menu with something better.
There is a new story available, and it does satisfy the description of the whole elephant given above, but it does so in a way that almost nobody is expecting. And if you think about it, then I hope you'll agree that it always had to be that way.
As should now be crystal clear, the currently dominant paradigm of scientific materialism cannot account for the empirical data in a coherent, holistic manner. This is systematically overlooked whenever I start talking about paradigm shifts (and this applies to both humans and AI). A typical initial response to such suggestions is to ask what novel empirical predictions the new paradigm makes – people immediately demand empirical proof before any new paradigm will even be considered. Which means if you are talking about 30 different problems then that's 30 lots of empirical proof. This demand intrinsically assumes that the new paradigm is ontologically materialistic, methodologically reductionist and primarily scientific. It assumes that what needs to change is the scientific part of scientific materialism, not the materialistic part, and that methodological reductionism is the only legitimate path of scientific progress. It assumes the continuous validity of what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science”, and systematically rejects anything that sounds too revolutionary. Physicalism and reductionism are sacrosanct – you're not allowed to challenge those, because doing so is believed/alleged to threaten science itself. But what if it the broken part of scientific materialism is physicalism and reductive thinking? What if scientists aren't doing anything empirically wrong? What if the real problem is that they're trying to fit valid empirical data into a model of reality which metaphysically broken? What if the real problem is the philosophy and the only possible solution is a Kuhnian revolution which is both scientific and philosophical?
If the currently dominant paradigm could coherently and elegantly account for the existing empirical data (technically, if it was “empirically adequate”) then the demand for empirical proof would be perfectly reasonable. The same would apply if there were two paradigms-in-waiting, both of which could rid us of this enormous list of problems in similarly parsimonious ways, because then we would require an empirical means of distinguishing between them. In fact, neither of these things is true. There is no candidate for a new paradigm, and so a status quo which is empirically inadequate staggers around in no particular direction, steadily losing hope of ever arriving at a consensus resolution of its increasingly miserable existence. Scientific Materialism and its entrenched opposition together comprise a zombie non-paradigm; materialism (or more accurately, physicalism) is kept half-alive only by the absence of a viable replacement. Some of the problems on this list currently have no proposed solution at all, others have an already-large and still-growing list of proposed solutions, none of which stands out as the conclusive answer. It is also the case that most of these proposed solutions are themselves either philosophical rather than scientific, or trying to be scientific but failing. The demand for empirical proof before there is meaningful intellectual engagement with potential alternatives is therefore not reasonable. At this point, if somebody can propose a new model of reality which provides a coherent, integrated resolution to most of these 30 problems – one which is empirically adequate – then it should not only be taken seriously, but should be accepted as a legitimate new paradigm by anybody who believes empirical adequacy should be the first priority in science.
Ultimately, what we should be looking for is something that solves all of them, and does so by removing assumptions and simplifying things rather than by adding even more complexity. In the end, the right paradigm will be the one that makes the whole thing click into place with the quiet obviousness that Einstein was talking about when he said the theory should be as simple as possible but not simpler, because truth has a way of feeling inevitable once you finally stop fighting it.
Western history goes something like this:
The deepest roots of Western civilisation can be found in ancient Greece and Rome. The Greeks invented philosophy, politics and fine art, and though they were great experimenters in civilisation-building, they never scaled it up beyond the city state. The Romans invented the republic, perfected the art of expansionism and sorted out much of the “nuts and bolts” of large-scale civilisation, but their version of civilisation was, even by our own unimpressive standards, deficient in terms of morality and genuine spirituality. Brutality, cruelty and slavery were considered normal, while mercifulness was regarded as a sign of weakness. Then along came Christianity. The details of exactly how and why this happened have become historically obscured by the mythology of Christian origins. Christians generally regard the mythology as history, while non-Christians tend towards the idea that mythology is all there is: that Jesus may not even have existed. What is not in doubt is that the Romans tried but failed to suppress the new movement, and as the Empire stagnated and decayed Christianity became the “new attractor”. When Rome finally fell to the barbarians, Europe entered a “dark age”, the church hoarded power, and the philosophies of the ancients were either forgotten or subsumed into the grand theological synthesis of Augustine and Aquinas. While the ancients emphasised rational inquiry even at the expense of moral and spiritual concerns, the medieval world (at least in theory) placed morality and spirituality at the centre – which required the subordination of reason to theological authority. Nonetheless, Western civilisation had for the first and only time arrived at a common foundational worldview.
The next great revolution was arguably triggered by the socio-economic fallout from the population crash of the Black Death, but is more often considered to have begun with the Renaissance: the rediscovery of important lost works of ancient philosophy, mostly in the form of translations made by Islamic scholars, and the re-ignition of fine art. This ultimately led to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment – the mature fruit of the Renaissance conviction that moderns could surpass the ancients. This was also the time that capitalism began to replace feudalism as a socio-economic system, and when representative democracy began to replace absolute monarchy. It was the birth of the modern Western world – and of the globalised civilisation we currently know (even though that now includes most of the world, not just the West). The common foundation had failed, and there was now a growing number of incompatible and mutually contradictory worldviews. A monumental battle raged between materialistic science and the fractured remains of Christianity. Modern civilisation brought with it many wonderful things. Our world has been transformed in many positive ways – it hasn't all been problems. But certain things have also gone horribly wrong, and there has been a major philosophical and political response these failures. That response is called Postmodernism.
Postmodernism emerged in the twentieth century not as a unified philosophy, but as a broad cultural reaction against the assumptions, aspirations, and blind spots of modernism. To understand its importance in the present context, we must appreciate that this was not mere academic contrarianism, but a necessary reckoning with some of the unintended consequences of modern thought. Modernism, as a philosophical and cultural project, placed its faith in reason, science, universal truth, and progress. It assumed that history had a direction, that knowledge could be built on secure foundations, and that the human condition could be improved indefinitely through technological advancement and rational governance. The Enlightenment had promised emancipation from superstition and tyranny through science and reason, and modernism was its cultural heir. Postmodernism rejected this optimism, finding within it the seeds of domination and exclusion. Thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and others relentlessly attacked the very idea of “universal truth”, arguing that so-called universal values often mask the interests of particular groups (i.e. white, male, heterosexual elites). The Enlightenment promise of reason, they argued, had been co-opted by institutions of power: science had become instrumentalised, rationality bureaucratised, and knowledge weaponised in service of empire, industry, and the state.
Lyotard’s famous definition of postmodernism is “incredulity toward metanarratives”: postmodernism is deeply skeptical of modernism's grand stories about progress, freedom, or objective truth, claiming that these narratives excluded, suppressed, and silenced other ways of knowing. Reason and science were not considered to be neutral arbiters of truth; they were situated, contingent, and interwoven with systems of power. This critique was especially powerful when applied to the ecological crisis. From a postmodern perspective, modernity’s faith in control and mastery over nature was itself the root of our environmental problems. The modern subject – autonomous, rational, and separate from the world – conceived nature as a standing reserve of resources to be exploited. Postmodernism helped expose this anthropocentric delusion, and pointed instead toward indigenous, feminist, and other "marginalised epistemologies" that had long emphasised relationality, reciprocity, and respect for the more-than-human world.
Postmodernism did not merely deconstruct modernism’s assumptions; it also intentionally disrupted its language. Derrida’s analysis of texts convinced many people that meaning is never fixed – that words always carry within them the possibility of contradiction, ambiguity, and slippage. The stable categories and clear boundaries of modernist thought were recast as illusions. Language, and by extension knowledge itself, was declared to be a kind of game: contingent, contextual, and open-ended. This refusal to offer new certainties in place of the old ones has led to the normalisation of relativism and nihilism, but postmodernists will argue that this criticism misses the point: they will say that postmodernism was not a doctrine of despair, but an ethic of humility which has shown us that no system of thought is above critique, and that pluralism, diversity, and dialogue are better foundations for living together than unquestionable monolithic truths or rigid hierarchies. In the context of this broader historical arc, postmodernism must be understood as an immune response to modernity’s overreach. It cleared the ground, exposed the rot, and made space for something genuinely new to emerge. Unfortunately, it did not build anything new, and does not provide us with any of the tools we need to begin that task. Postmodernism was the point where the old epistemic frame lost contact with any possible grounding.
While postmodernism itself is well past its prime, various forms of “post-postmodernism” emerging in its place are not a new paradigm but a further symptom of paradigm exhaustion. They are, at best, a patchwork of tentative proposals driven more by the yearning for coherence than by its discovery. If you want to explore post-postmodernism, then some internet searches that can throw some light are GameB, Metamodernism, Second Renaissance, Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK), the Liminal Web, Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Meaning Crisis, Sensemaking communities, Integral Theory and post-progressivism. That is a long list, and there are all sorts of ideas involved, some of which contradict others (so they cannot all be right). If I had to recommend a starting point it would be the work of Iain McGilchrist. What all of these movements, thinkers, and frameworks are searching for is a new integrative worldview that can move beyond both modernism and postmodernism. This new worldview must reconnect meaning, science, spirituality, and systems thinking in order to navigate civilisational crisis and co-create a sustainable, coherent, and life-affirming future.
The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation was another attempt to make progress towards the new paradigm, and it did so in a way that none of these people or movements have done – not even McGilchrist. I suspect he would view my ideas as overly conceptual and systematising, whereas I view his vision as a profound diagnosis of modernity's epistemic pathology which is nevertheless vulnerable to vagueness and romanticism because it stops short of proposing a rigorous alternative framework. While the historical progression of ancient->medieval->modern->postmodern is undeniable, I am rejecting the idea of this as an intellectual or personal progression. This rejection is also what happens if you apply postmodern thinking to itself, but I have no intention of doing that; I am not interested in declaring postmodernism to be self-refuting and trying to slide backwards into modernism, for that would just ping me back towards postmodernism and set up a metamodern oscillation. Instead, the post-postmodernism I'm advocating rejects the historical narrative described above. I does not acknowledge postmodernism as a paradigmatic improvement on modernism. Rather, it views postmodernism as the ultimate expression of the failure of the old paradigm: the vanguard of the West's descent into collective nihilistic psychosis. In McGilchristian terms it is what happens when the brain's left hemisphere finally loses the plot completely and starts attacking its own flawed creations, but with no attempt to recover the meaning, context and coherence that only the neglected right hemisphere can provide. This is where the Two-Phase Cosmology comes in, because it finally allows us to make sense of quantum mechanics (and it has taken exactly a century). To understand how this can be the key to fixing Western thinking, we must return to the moment when our epistemological troubles really began: David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, which was first published in 1739.
During the Renaissance, reality had been divided into mind and matter first by Galileo, and then by Descartes. This was done intentionally: both of these revolutionary thinkers saw the material world as that which can be quantified and measured, and mind as the realm of that which cannot. It was the business of the new “natural philosophy” to investigate the material world, in an attempt to reduce it to the workings of natural laws, and the method of investigation involved the systematic elimination of everything subjective – indeed, that was the whole point. In the decades that followed, philosophers searched for a way to put the rest of philosophy on as firm foundations as those of materialistic science, but rather than finding an agreement about how this could be done, a long battle was fought between the defenders of two conflicting approaches to grounding that system. The empiricists argued that knowledge must start with observations of reality, the rationalists argued that it must start with pure reason, and Hume was the first person to put his finger on the epicentre of the entire problematic. His goal in the Treatise was to provide solid foundations for a science of mind ("moral subject" here means a conscious human), but even though his analysis was miles ahead of anybody else at that time, he ran into a logical problem that totally defeated him. He felt he had compelling reasons for believing two contradictory things. The first was that for all we know, we could be brains in vats: how could we ever transcend “the veil of perception” and know anything about a world that lies beyond? The second was that in order to be able to experience an external world (as we evidently do), then it must be the case that objects in the external world have a causal effect on our minds – there has to be a direct chain of cause and effect from an external object to the subjective experience of that object. The contradiction appears to be very real: either there are mind-external objects which can causally penetrate the veil of perception, or there aren't, right?
Hume never found a solution to this problem. His conclusion to that section of the Treatise is one of the most tortured passages ever written. After his extensive and faultless reasoning, he could give no justification for believing anything positive at all. He could do no better than say that the world strongly appears to be the way it appears, which in terms of epistemology is scant improvement on Descartes' argument that we should believe what our senses are telling us because God wouldn't deceive us. What we suppose to be the real world “enlivens some ideas beyond others” – our perception of an external world just “feels stronger” than merely internal mental activity or dreams. Without this feeling, we’d have no reason to reject solipsism or subjective idealism, but feelings are “so inconstant and fallacious” that this sort of principle will surely lead us into errors. Such a methodology is never going to be scientific, that is for sure, and yet it is only feelings, experience and habit which makes us “reason from cause and effect”. In other words, it is only because we are so familiar with the world behaving as if causality is real that we believe in it “and 'tis the same principle, which convinces us of the continu’d existence of external objects, when absent from the senses.” The problem is that belief in the reality of causally effective mind-external objects is “natural and necessary in the human mind”. How could we function without it? But how can this be reconciled with the reasoning which forces us towards skepticism?
“How then shall we adjust those principles together? Which of them shall we prefer? Or in case we prefer neither of them, but successively assent to both, as is usual among philosophers, with what confidence can we afterwards usurp that glorious title, when we thus knowingly embrace a manifest contradiction?”
It was exactly this contradiction that prompted Immanuel Kant to write the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87)(CPR), in which he made the paradigm-defining move of dividing reality into phenomenon (reality as it appears to us) and noumenon (reality as it is in itself) instead of mind and matter. Kant argued that science can only tell us about phenomena, and that noumena were forever not just unknowable but uncognisable. For Kant, space and time are conditions for human experience – they are the frame for physical phenomena, and we have no reason to believe they exist in noumenal reality. Kant's masterpiece provided the foundation for modern Western philosophy, but this also marked the point where it began to split into two divergent “traditions”. One branch led via Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to what is now called “Continental philosophy” (which fully embraces contradiction), and the other led to “analytic philosophy” (which attempts to be rational but still hasn't found an acceptable solution to Hume's problem).
It is essential to understand the context in which Hume and Kant were working. This was the golden age of materialistic science. Newton’s Principia had blown the old ways of thinking to smithereens and both of them were trying to bring the subjective world of consciousness, and therefore the whole of reality, onto a similarly secure footing. Absolutely nobody had the slightest inkling that one day we would discover that Newtonian physics is not the “final” description of reality after all, but without that piece of information even the genius and precision of Hume and Kant stood no chance of identifying the correct solution to the philosophical problems of their day.
Now let us imagine that history had played out differently. Let’s imagine that physics had advanced at a much more rapid pace and that in the time between Hume’s Treatise and Kant starting work on the CPR, quantum theory had been discovered. Now, instead of having to find a way to solve Hume’s problems in the light of an apparently undeniable fact that Newtonian physics is the one true description of physical reality, let us imagine Kant was aware of the Measurement Problem. In order to rid science of the “quantum leap” from superposition to a single state, von Neumann had been forced by logic to propose a conscious observer outside of the physical/quantum system. But in the real history, Hume and Kant were dealing with a physical model which was a direct match for the phenomenal world of “ordinary” material objects. That was what set the problem up: what could be more obviously correct than to have a physical theory which describes the reality we actually experience? And yet we now know this assumption is wrong. In the imaginary history the situation is very different – here science provides a physical model which does not describe the phenomenal-material world. Instead of being a classical realm of material objects, it is the non-local realm of the wave-function. If you think about it this way, then Hume’s problem disappears. We can now map physics onto reality with no difficulty at all (although ironically we can do this only if we're willing to abandon physicalism in favour of neutral monism). We can simply say that the unobserved world – the “real world” which is out there “beyond the veil of perception” is the world described by the equations of our best physics: the uncollapsed wave function. In 2PC we call this "Phase 1". Only when reality collapses into Phase 2 does the world of ordinary material objects appear. Hume’s veil lifts not because the wavefunction is the noumenon but because the noumenal/phenomenal split is reconfigured once we recognise that superposition is the metaphysical substrate from which the single actual world is continuously resolved. What Kant called “noumenon” is therefore shown not be so completely unknowable after all. There are some very specific things which we do not know about it, but 21st century technology is built on our knowledge of Phase 1.
The point of this extended detour into the history of Western philosophy is this: if 2PC is right, then we can re-ground realism. This might sound implausible given that I'm saying that before the Cambrian Explosion, reality as we understand it didn't even exist, but why should that matter in the present context? The nature of the reality of the cosmos 600 million years ago isn't what matters if we're talking about regrounding realism for civilisation today. All that matters is that we can find a new way to agree that the reality we actually find ourselves in is real, and not an illusion or a social construction.
This clears a new pathway out of the thicket. Not just the beginning of a new search because we've concluded that we must move beyond postmodernism and don't know what comes next, but more like a final correction and completion of modernism. Postmodern anti-realism isn't a stage which both people and societies need to pass through on the way to some strange promised land where modernism and postmodernism perpetually undermine each other. Instead we need to accept that the anti-realistic relativism of postmodernism was based on a gigantic but entirely unavoidable mistake. In fact, even before the discovery of quantum mechanics, science was always telling us things about an objective world, beyond the veil of perception. Hume's instinct was right: of course we are aware of real objects. What he got wrong, because he had no chance of getting it right, was that instead of being like the Phase 2 material objects we directly perceive, they exist in a way that is non-spatiotemporal, and consists of all physical possibilities at the same time.
We therefore have new scope for a collective agreement that reality is real after all, even if it is not the normal material world that modernism assumed it to be. It means that science is not just another perspective, as laden with power dynamics as political and religious ideologies. It does this not in the reductive manner of materialism, but in a way which affirms the reality of consciousness and everything that comes with it – especially meaning and value. A new kind of Western thinking can be founded on the idea that Cartesian substance dualism and its Kantian solidification into knowable phenomena and unknowable noumena were both epistemological mistakes. Cartesian dualism was a hopeless oversimplification, and Kant was trying to solve a problem without the empirical knowledge necessary to solve it. The real dualism is between possibility and actuality, and this dualism is underwritten by the Void. While the original insight came from Eastern philosophies, this is something new, and something very much Western: a post-postmodern neo-Kantian non-panpsychist neutral monism.
As for the people and movements I listed earlier in this chapter, I believe some will prove to be closer to the mark than others. Beware of attempts to dress the old paradigm up in new clothes. These come in two main forms. The first I’ve already discussed – the metamodern attempt to smuggle (in plain sight) postmodern anti-realism into the new paradigm by framing it as one pole in an “oscillation.” Make no mistake: if you mix realism and anti-realism (or modernism and postmodernism), the result will be postmodern anti-realism. One times minus one equals minus one. Metamodernism is the bargaining stage of grief for bereaved postmodernists.
The second form is exemplified by UTOK, which from the perspective of 2PC is the corresponding stage for bereaved materialists: an old-paradigm-style naturalism that remains fundamentally hostile to genuine spirituality, offering a psychological control system in place of metaphysical insight. If we are to find a true path to ecocivilisation, we must begin by understanding where we went wrong – not only politically or economically, but philosophically. The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation was an attempt to lay the philosophical foundation for a civilisation that can truly endure – because it is grounded not in illusion, but in a reawakened relationship with reality. Endlessly oscillating between the failures and limitations of modernism and the dead marshes of postmodernism is not going to cut the mustard.
1 Starting from Hume's Treatise of Human Nature in 1739, see Chapter 15.
2 See the work of physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who has paid a high price for her willingness to speak openly about this situation.
3 As does academia in general, and not just in the sciences.