I am intimately familiar with both the modus operandi and the consequences of old paradigm thinking, because from my mid-teens until the age of 33 I was one of its most outspoken advocates. As a child I had been taken to church, never believed a word of it, and rejected it outright as soon as I was old enough to make that stick. As a teenager, Richard Dawkins was my personal hero. At 20 I experienced a psychological breakdown due to being a science geek who was also into politics, and who had come to understand both the threat that climate change posed, and the inevitability of the political response ending in abject failure. Because I was unwilling to tell myself comfortable lies, I reluctantly concluded that industrial civilisation is going to collapse, and tried to warn people. The medical representatives of the old paradigm responded by declaring me to be officially detached from reality ("psychotic"), and I descended into totalistic nihilism. Nevertheless, even though I had given up on the future, I was still compelled to try to understand what was going on in the world, both in terms of the way civilisation works and the way reality itself operates – a sort of morbid fascination with the grim truth (a state of mind which is sadly becoming ever more common).
In my early thirties I went through another life-changing transition, this time inexplicably finding myself in the mystical deep end, with no idea how to swim. How that happened is too long a story to relate here, but right in the middle of it I was appointed the forum administrator at the Richard Dawkins Foundation website (what a bizarre turn of events, eh?). I am sure you can imagine the resulting disbelief, anger and conflict. In an attempt to construct a coherent version of my now somewhat complicated and potentially self-contradictory belief system, I abandoned a career in software engineering and embarked on a degree in philosophy and cognitive science at Sussex University.
Finding myself unemployable when that was over, I ended up teaching foraging for a living, specialising in the fascinating world of fungi. This provided me with the perfect opportunity to write the most comprehensive book on European mushroom foraging ever published in English, but even before that I had begun working on a book which tried to explain how both science and spirituality could fit into a single model of reality which actually makes sense. It eventually became apparent that I could not separate this topic from that of the collapse of civilisation, which left me with the monumental task of writing a book about the intersection of the Western science/spirituality conflict and the collapse of civilisation (a process which has already begun). The common thread is the viewing of involuntary breakdown as a catalyst for radical transformation. This project turned out to be considerably more difficult than writing foraging books, and it took 17 years to complete. The result is called The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation: From collapse to coherence: integrating science, spirituality and sustainability in the West (RPE), and it was finally finished and published in the summer of 2025.
However, the metaphysical-cosmological model I described in that book has a placeholder instead of the most critical component. The theory was (and remains) dependent on there being something uniquely special about brains which makes them both necessary for consciousness and capable of collapsing wavefunctions. The best candidates available to me were Penrose and Hameroff's Orchestrated Objective Reduction and Henry Stapp's repurposing of the Quantum Zeno Effect as a mechanism for free will, but neither of those quite fits (see chapter 9). Only after RPE was finished, and I went public with my basic system, did it dawn on me that I had been looking for the wrong kind of interface all along. I had been searching for a physical brain property (or structure, or process), when in fact my own ontology suggests an informational threshold is more appropriate. This proved to be a breakthrough which permitted sufficient progress on the rest of my system to justify writing another book, this time focusing on the metaphysics and cosmology. That book is called The Two-Phase Cosmology: Reality, Consciousness and the Quantum Measurement Problem, and it will be available soon. The dark realism of RPE is merely contextual at that book, although at the deepest level, the whole book is about regrounding realism. Reality is not an illusion to be transcended. It has a structure, which is theoretically discoverable and understandable by humans. After all, isn't modelling reality what we do best?
Email: geoffdann@hotmail.com