The mind–matter conundrum

Plus: spiritual longtermism vs materialist longtermism

What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.
(Punch, July 14, 1855)

All the same, the matter of mind has mattered to a good many minds. At one end of the spectrum of opinions there are the materialists, to whom everything is matter; at the other end there are the idealists, to whom everything is mind. In a footnote to my last post I wrote:

If everything is nature, as naturalism holds, then saying so is less informative than saying that everything is cottage cheese. For we know the meaning of “cottage cheese” while “nature,” on this account, has no meaning at all. The term owes its meaning to the opposition between nature and something that transcends it, as does the denial of anything beyond nature.

The same applies to both materialism and idealism. Here is how Bertrand Russell made this point in A History of Western Philosophy:

Many idealists say that the object is really the subject, and many materialists say that the subject is really the object. They agree in thinking these two statements very different, while yet holding that subject and object are not different.

Neither party makes sense. Like day and night, mind and matter presuppose each other, as do subject and object. If either were reducible to the other, what would remain is not a single fundamental category but none at all.

When it comes to philosophical conundrums, my go-to authority is Sri Aurobindo. In his framework of thought, neither mind nor matter are fundamental. Both are stops along two opposite routes: one downward from something above mind to something below matter, the other upward from something below matter to something above mind. (No apologies for taking recourse to our mind’s unavoidable spatial tropes.)

The involutionary route starts from a supramental consciousness (Supermind, for short) to which knowing is the same as being—by knowing all it constitutes all—and it ends in an inframaterial inconscience or Inconscient. By knowing nothing the Inconscient (per se) constitutes nothing. And yet it is a thing, and a most powerful one at that.

Along the involutionary route, matter is the penultimate stop prior to the plunge of consciousness and being into inconscience and non-being. Along the evolutionary route, matter is the first stop. “The first emergence from the Inconscient is Matter,” Sri Aurobindo wrote [LD 629], and again: “Out of the Inconscient, Existence appears in a first evolutionary form as substance of Matter” [LD 710].

Elsewhere I have described the coming into being of matter in the following terms:

By entering into reflexive spatial relations, the One gives rise to both matter and space, for space may be defined relationally, as the totality of existing spatial relations, while matter may be defined as the corresponding (apparent) multitude of relata.

Because the relations are reflexive (i.e., self-relations, relations between the One and the One), the corresponding multitude of relata—the contemporary physicist’s “ultimate constituents of matter”—is an apparent multitude. What is real is the multitude of relations, as are the material forms which the relations constitute.

What I didn’t clarify then was that “the One” here does not stand for the self-existent Conscious Being to which everything owes its consciousness and/or being—referred to in the Rig Veda as “That One” (tad ekam, X.129.2)—but to the Inconscient, the “inconscient ocean” (apraketaṁ salilam, X.129.3) of the Rig Veda, whence

by the greatness of its energy That One was born. That moved at first as desire within, which was the primal seed of mind. The seers of Truth discovered the building of being in nonbeing. ...their ray was extended horizontally; but what was there below, what was there above? ...there was self-law below, there was Will above. [Rig Veda X.129.3–5; LD 254]

Right there, in a text recorded thousands of years ago, we have the cornerstones of Conscious-Being’s adventure of evolution. We have the building of being in nonbeing, the evolution of life (epitomized by desire) and of mind out of life. We have “self-law” below (the physical laws governing the relations that constitute matter, by which the stage for the adventure was set), and Will above—the supramental consciousness which, as described by the Veda,

determines a wholly effective will-power that does not deviate or falter in its process or in its result, but expresses and fulfils spontaneously and inevitably in the act that which has been seen in the vision. Light is here one with Force, the vibrations of knowledge with the rhythm of the will and both are one, perfectly and without seeking, groping or effort, with the assured result. [LD132–33]

Yet even if by the greatness of its energy the One is born out of the Inconscient, it remains concealed by fragmentation (tucchyena, Rig Veda X. 129. 3)—concealed first by fragmentation into an apparent multiplicity of relata associated with a real multiplicity of relations, and concealed even today

by a fragmentary separative existence and consciousness ... in which we have to piece things together to arrive at a whole. In that slow and difficult emergence a certain semblance of truth is given to the dictum of Heraclitus that War is the father of all things; for each idea, force, separate consciousness, living being by the very necessity of its ignorance enters into collision with others and tries to live and grow and fulfil itself by independent self-assertion, not by harmony with the rest of existence. Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations. [LD 299–300]

The evolutionary route is not simply the involutionary route in reverse. The involutionary descent of Conscious-Being gives rise to a series of non-evolutionary or typal worlds, as we have seen in this post or mailing. What is worked out along the evolutionary route is a progressive integration of the salient features of those worlds.¹ This process, consummately laid out in the Rig Veda,² entails a battle between luminous (but also not-so-luminous) Powers seeking to descend from their supraphysical homes and dark Powers seeking to pull us back towards matter’s inconscient base.

Seen in this light, mind suffers two kinds of impairment: one arising in the process of involution, the other arising in the course of evolution.

All knowledge is founded on the identity between the knower and the known. Ultimately there is but one all-containing consciousness and one all-containing substance, and they are one. Saying that all is contained in this consciousness is the same as saying that all is constituted by this substance.

The first step towards the involution of supermind in mind is individuation: the One adopts a multitude of standpoints from which it experiences and expresses its inherent Quality/Delight. It is at this point that the subject/object dichotomy becomes a reality, for an individual conscious being is both a subject to itself and an object to others. It is also at this point that the familiar three dimensions of our perspectival experience of space (viewer-centered depth and lateral extent) come into being. (See this post for details.)

If the One adopts a multitude of localized standpoints, knowledge by identity takes the form of direct knowledge. There are two aspects to this. The first is that each individual knows the others directly, without the need for mediating representations. The second is that each individual experiences the others not as we do (i.e., as the surfaces of three-dimensional objects which move and talk) but as expressions of what they are within, in a deep psychological sense of “within.” Each individual knows every other individual’s svabhāva, its essential or intrinsic nature, which includes the specific delight that it experiences and the specific quality it thereby expresses in the world.

A world that more closely resembles ours comes into existence when the individuating concentration of consciousness becomes exclusive. This entails a horrific loss, for if the inhabitants of a world lose sight of their mutual identity, they also lose sight of the infinite Quality/Delight at the heart of Reality. Concomitantly, each being ceases to be conscious of the specific quality/delight at its own core and at the core of every other being.

If the One identifies itself with each individual to the exclusion of the others, each individual’s knowledge of the others is reduced to an indirect knowledge. It is at this point that the involutionary route intersects with the evolutionary one.

As direct knowledge is made possible by the underlying identity between the knower and the known, so indirect knowledge is made possible by an underlying direct knowledge. Direct knowledge contributes in two different ways to the makeup of human knowledge.

In a separative consciousness like ours, things appear to have an existence independent of each other. There will therefore be “natural” processes by which things affect each other, for otherwise they wouldn’t coexist in one and the same world. If someone (A) is to be indirectly conscious of someone or something else (B), A must be affected by B (via some of those “natural” processes) in a way that creates in A a representation of B. A is then directly conscious of this representation. This doesn’t mean that A is directly conscious of those patterns of electrochemical pulses in her brain that make up the representation. For there comes in a second kind of direct knowledge, subliminal to A, belonging to a subliminal self directly conscious of B, which interprets or decodes the information encoded in the physical representation, turning it into a mental representation for B. (You may want to refer to the graphic and its explanation in this post.)

Here is how our cognitive situation has been described by Sri Aurobindo:

In the cognition of external things, our knowledge has an entirely separative basis; its whole machinery and process are of the nature of an indirect perception.... [N]ot only identification lacks, direct contact also is absent.... [W]hat we get by our sense is not the inner or intimate touch of the thing itself, but an image of it or a vibration or nerve message in ourselves through which we have to learn to know it. These means are so ineffective, so exiguous in their poverty that, if that were the whole machinery, we could know little or nothing or only achieve a great blur of confusion. But there intervenes a sense-mind intuition which seizes the suggestion of the image or vibration and equates it with the object, a vital intuition which seizes the energy or figure of power of the object through another kind of vibration created by the sense contact, and an intuition of the perceptive mind which at once forms a right idea of the object from all this evidence. Whatever is deficient in the interpretation of the image thus constructed is filled up by the intervention of the reason....

[S]ince the image or vibration is a defective and summary documentation and the intuition itself limited and communicated through an obscure medium, acting in a blind light, the accuracy of our intuitional interpretative construction of the object is open to question or at least likely to be incomplete. Man has had perforce to develop his reason in order to make up for the deficiencies of his sense instrumentation, the fallibility of his physical mind’s perceptions and the paucity of its interpretation of its data....

Power has come with knowledge, but our imperfection of knowledge leaves us without any idea of the true use of the power, even of the aim towards which our utilisation of knowledge and power should be turned and made effective. This is worsened by the imperfection of our self-knowledge which, such as it is, meagre and pitifully insufficient, is of our surface only, of our apparent phenomenal self and nature and not of our true self and the true meaning of our existence. Self-knowledge and self-mastery are wanting in the user, wisdom and right will in his use of world-power and world-knowledge....

It could not be otherwise since our awareness of the world is born of a separative and surface observation with only an indirect means of cognition at its disposal; our knowledge of ourselves, though more direct, is stultified by its restriction to the surface of our being, by an ignorance of our true self, the true sources of our nature, the true motive-forces of our action. [LD 547–549]

If there is one concept of Vedantic/Upanishadic philosophy that best describes our mental kind of knowledge, it is Avidya. By this is meant the essential ignorance that makes us see Many where in reality there is but One playing at being Many. For us travelers on the evolutionary route, this ignorance takes on several aspects, of which Sri Aurobindo has listed the following seven. (Reposted from a previous Aurocafe mailing. Numbering and emphases are mine.)

1. The crux of that [sevenfold] ignorance is the constitutional; it resolves itself into a manifold ignorance of the true character of our becoming, an unawareness of our total self, of which the key is a limitation by the plane we inhabit and by the present predominant principle of our nature. The plane we inhabit is the plane of Matter; the present predominant principle in our nature is the mental intelligence with the sense-mind, which depends upon Matter, as its support and pedestal. As a consequence, the preoccupation of the mental intelligence and its powers with the material existence as it is shown to it through the senses, and with life as it has been formulated in a compromise between life and matter, is a special stamp of the constitutional Ignorance. This natural materialism or materialised vitalism, this clamping of ourselves to our beginnings, is a form of self-restriction narrowing the scope of our existence which is very insistent on the human being. It is a first necessity of his physical existence, but is afterwards forged by a primal ignorance into a chain that hampers his every step upwards....

2. The conquest of our constitutional ignorance cannot be complete, cannot become integrally dynamic, if we have not conquered our psychological ignorance; for the two are bound up together. Our psychological ignorance consists in a limitation of our self-knowledge to that little wave or superficial stream of our being which is the conscient waking self....

3. Any such evolutionary change must necessarily be associated with a rejection of our present narrowing temporal ignorance. For not only do we now live from moment to moment of time, but our whole view is limited to our life in the present body between a single birth and death. As our regard does not go farther back in the past, so it does not extend farther out into the future; thus we are limited by our physical memory and awareness of the present life in a transient corporeal formation. But this limitation of our temporal consciousness is intimately dependent upon the preoccupation of our mentality with the material plane and life in which it is at present acting; the limitation is not a law of the spirit but a temporary provision for an intended first working of our manifested nature....

4. At the same time we get rid of the egoistic ignorance; for so long as we are at any point bound by that, the divine life must either be unattainable or imperfect in its self-expression. For the ego is a falsification of our true individuality by a limiting self-identification of it with this life, this mind, this body: it is a separation from other souls which shuts us up in our own individual experience and prevents us from living as the universal individual: it is a separation from God, our highest Self, who is the one Self in all existences and the divine Inhabitant within us....

5. In the same movement, by the very awakening into the spirit, there is a dissolution of the cosmic ignorance; for we have the knowledge of ourselves as our timeless immutable self possessing itself in cosmos and beyond cosmos: this knowledge becomes the basis of the Divine Play in time, reconciles the one and the many, the eternal unity and the eternal multiplicity, reunites the soul with God and discovers the Divine in the universe....

6. If our self-knowledge is thus made complete in all its essentials, our practical ignorance which in its extreme figures itself as wrongdoing, suffering, falsehood, error and is the cause of all life’s confusions and discords, will yield its place to the right will of self-knowledge and its false or imperfect values recede before the divine values of the true Consciousness-Force and Ananda....

7. This transformation would be the natural completion of the upward process of Nature as it heightens the forces of consciousness from principle to higher principle until the highest, the spiritual principle, becomes expressed and dominant in her, takes up cosmic and individual existence on the lower planes into its truth and transforms all into a conscious manifestation of the Spirit. The true individual, the spiritual being, emerges, individual yet universal, universal yet self-transcendent: life no longer appears as a formation of things and an action of being created by the separative Ignorance. [LD 756–70]

This emergence

is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of ‘inconscient’ Matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability. [Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga I, p. 287]

In the words of the Mother,

Sri Aurobindo came to tell the world of the beauty of the future that must be realised. He came to give not a hope but a certitude of the splendour towards which the world moves. The world is not an unfortunate accident, it is a marvel which moves towards its expression. The world needs the certitude of the beauty of the future. And Sri Aurobindo has given that assurance. [Message dated 27 November 1971]

Needless to say, this is a very-long-term project. One might think of it as “spiritual longtermism.” These days there is much talk about another kind of longtermism, a topic I considered in two previous posts (here and here). This materialist longtermism is the overarching component of a bundle of interconnected ideologies which have become massively influential within Silicon Valley. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have coined for it the acronym TESCREAL, which stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.

A longterm viewer (generated with Bing/Image Creator)

The aim of transhumanism is to technologically reengineer the human species to create a superior new race of “posthumans.” As Torres writes, tech billionaires are pouring huge sums of money into realizing the transhumanist project and see “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) as playing an integral part in catalyzing this process. Extropianism, which aims to counter entropy in order to extend the human lifespan indefinitely if not infinitely, is part of this techno-utopian project, as is singularitarianism, which looks forward to the “singularity” popularized chiefly by techno-evangelist Ray Kurzweil, who currently heads AI research projects at Google. The singularity is defined as the point where the development of technology is taken over from humans by technology itself, leading to an irreversible explosion of “intelligence.”

“If transhumanism is eugenics on steroids,” Torres writes, “cosmism is transhumanism on steroids.” While Torres attributes cosmism to Ben Goertzel, who in his “Cosmist Manifesto” foresees the merger of humans with technology as resulting in “a new phase of the evolution of our species,” Dave Troy associates cosmism with ideologies advanced by Russian scientists and philosophers including the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. Prominent Russia scholar Marlène Laruelle found cosmism to be so fundamental to Russian nationalism that she made it the subject of the first chapter of her book on the subject.³ According to Troy, one of the two prongs underlying Vladimir Putin’s economic strategy against the West is to implement the esoteric ideas of Vernadsky (later popularized in the West by Pierre Teilhard De Chardin) which centered on the concept of a noosphere (or mind-sphere). Their respective conceptions share the thesis that reason and science are creating a new geological layer atop the biosphere (or life-sphere). Goertzel, for his part, anticipated the development of spacetime engineering and a “future magic” which “will permit achieving, by scientific means, most of the promises of religions—and many amazing things that no human religion ever dreamed.”

Rationalism is the established philosophical doctrine that reason alone should be the source of and basis for knowledge—as if reason unprompted by irrational impulse or suprarational intuition could be the source of or basis for any kind of knowledge besides mathematics. Effective altruism in turn advocates to “to get filthy rich, for charity’s sake,” as private historian Adam Fisher put it. Sam Bankman-Fried, who famously squandered billions of dollars in a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme and now faces up to 110 years in prison, was a notable member of the Effective Altruist community. Lastly, longtermism concerns itself with the maximization of future “intelligences” in the universe, not only by colonizing space but also by harnessing planets inhospitable to biologic life to build giant server farms from hypothetical materials like computronium—a sort of programmable matter that could host vast pools of digital Einsteins.

“If all of that sounds outlandish and orthogonal to solving the debt ceiling crisis, dealing with Earth’s climate problems, or otherwise improving conditions here on this planet, that’s because it is,” Troy writes.

So, what is going on here? For key insights check out Jean Gebser’s inquiry into the evolution of human consciousness. According to Gebser, this is anything but a gradual process. It involves discrete transitions from one consciousness structure to another. Each structure comes with its own ways of making sense of the world and of being effective in it. And each structure passes through two phases, one efficient, the other deficient. A consciousness structure becomes deficient as soon as a novel structure irrupts into it, rendering the old modes of cognition and action inadequate for dealing with phenomena caused by the novel structure.

To each consciousness structure there corresponds a world. When a sufficiently widespread change in consciousness leads to a corresponding change in the world, the consciousness responsible for the change enters its efficient phase. When a change in the world precedes the change in consciousness required to adequately deal with it, the consciousness that resists this change has entered its deficient phase.

An important characteristic of a consciousness structure is its dimensionality. Consider, by way of example, the structure that immediately preceded the present, still dominant but now deficient one. One of its characteristics was the notion that the world is enclosed in a sphere, with the fixed stars attached to its boundary, the firmament. As I pointed out in a previous post, we cannot but ask: what is beyond that sphere? Those who held this notion could not, because for them the third dimension of space—viewer-centered depth—did not at all have the reality it has for us. The world experienced by them was in an important sense two-dimensional. This is why they could not handle perspective in drawing and painting, and why they were unable to arrive at the subject-free “view from nowhere,” which is a prerequisite of modern science. All this became possible with the consolidation, during the Renaissance, of our characteristically three-dimensional consciousness structure.

The ability of the mental structure to integrate the outlook of a characteristically two-dimensional consciousness into an effectively subject-free world of three-dimensional objects paved the way for its distinctive ways of knowing the world (philosophy and science, the offspring of “natural philosophy”) and of acting in it (science-based technology). And for several centuries humanity made a decidedly efficient use of them. But this is coming to an end (or has ended already, unbeknownst to most of us). We are witnessing the irruption of the supramental or integral consciousness structure. (While Gebser considered his term “integral” conterminous with Sri Aurobindo’s term “supramental,” the former term is also a fitting synonym for the latter, inasmuch as the supramental structure is the only one that is capable of integrating the efficient aspects of all preceding structures.)

At the same time we are witnessing a panoply of deficient manifestations of the mental structure, including prodigious travesties of some natural consequences of the evolution of the supermind.

One of these consequences will be the appearance of a new species, which transhumanists aim to achieve by technologically reengineering the human species, and which cosmists hope to bring about by the merger of humans with technology. Another consequence is—not the in(de)finite extension of the human lifespan which forms part of the techno-utopian project of extropians—but “a physical life fit for a divine inhabitant and, in the sense not of attachment or of restriction to our present corporeal frame but an exceeding of the law of the physical body, the conquest of death, an earthly immortality.” [LD 275]

If there is going to be a singularity, it is not the event popularized by some techno-evangelists, when technology takes over from humans. It consists in the supersession of technology by the supermind’s spontaneously effective will-power. The supramental consciousness will bring about every one of the worthwhile promises of the religions “and many amazing things that no human religion ever dreamed”—but certainly not by scientific means, as Goertzel imagined. Intelligence is not quantifiable as longtermists believe, but supramental and inexhaustible, and value is not something that can be measured or maximized. At its origin, it is the infinite Quality/Delight that is intrinsic to Reality itself.

1. See Chapter XVIII of The Life Divine; https://bit.ly/SriAurobindo-TLD.

2. See Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, https://bit.ly/SA-SV.

3. Marlène Laruelle, Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields (Taylor & Francis 2018): Open Access.