Consciousness Materialism and Spirituality

Advances in Social Science and Culture, 2022

Contemporary approaches to explaining the connections and reconciling perceived differences between spiritual and scientific interpretations of reality have tended to accept mainstream interpretations of physics, cosmology and biology. The resultant putative combinations of ideas-seeking to equate materialist with non-materialist worldviews-display anomalous, artificial and deeply problematic features. Instead of accepting the validity of scientific materialism-expressed in accounts offered, for instance, by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, and, in a more secular context, Deepak Chopra and Fritjof Capra-the central thesis of this paper is that it is more plausible to question the foundations of materialism and argue for an idealist interpretation of both science, reality and spirituality as suggested in recent work by Bernardo Kastrup, Steve Taylor and Donald Hoffman. After exploring the central claims of these new interpretations of idealism-and their principal critiques of scientific materialism-arguments that such perspectives offer a richer, more cogent and more parsimonious method of linking Eastern and Western worldviews than the flawed materialist perspectives will be explained and justified.

Philosophy of Education Society Blog, 2021

Like individualism and the belief in free will, the materialist worldview derived from mainstream science represents a sort of hidden curriculum of contemporary belief, the telos of Western (though not Eastern) culture. Scientific materialism – which holds that our experience of the world is generated by the brain yet somehow remains outside of us and is separate from and indifferent to human purposes – informs all aspects of life yet remains largely unquestioned. In recent years – thanks to the severe difficulties surrounding the hard problem of consciousness highlighted by David Chalmers (1996) – this uncritical acceptance has been challenged by thinkers who propose forms of neo-idealism. Arguments developed by Bernardo Kastrup (2014, 2021), Donald Hoffman (2019) and Steve Taylor (2018) – respectively labelled analytic idealism, conscious realism and panspiritism – claim that forms of idealism which locate the mental as the only source of reality and experience provide a more parsimonious and philosophically satisfactory explanation of our knowledge about the world.

International Journal of Humanities Social Sciences and Education , 2023

In response to the intractability of the hard problem of consciousness, a number of scientists and philosophers – in particular Bernardo Kastrup, Steve Taylor, Donald Hoffman, and Iain McGilchrist – have advanced arguments for new forms of idealism which challenge the basic tenets of scientific materialism. The central claims are that – in spite of the impressive achievements of contemporary science and technology – the metaphysical basis of scientific materialism is not justified by these achievements. Moreover, in addition to the many flaws and shortcomings of materialism – chief amongst which is the abject failure to solve the hard problem of consciousness – idealist perspectives which propose that consciousness is the sole ontological primitive provide a more cogent and parsimonious foundation for our knowledge of the world than scientific materialism. These new conceptions call for a radical transformation of our beliefs and experience of the world and – following an examination of the principal neo-idealist arguments – the implications for education, in particular in the realms of epistemology, ethics and spirituality will be investigated. Keywords: materialism, consciousness, neo-idealism, spirituality, science

Philosophers' Imprint , 2019

Each well-known proposed solution to the mind-body problem encounters an impasse. These take the form of an explanatory gap, such as the one between mental and physical, or between micro-subjects and macro-subject. The dialectical pressure to bridge these gaps is generating positions in which consciousness is becoming increasingly foundational. The most recent of these, cosmopsychism, typically casts the entire cosmos as a perspectival subject whose mind grounds those of more limited subjects like ourselves. I review the dialectic from materialism and dualism through to pan(cosmo)psychism, suggesting that explanatory gaps in the latter stem from assuming foundational consciousness to be perspectival. Its renunciation may yield the notion of an aperspectival, universal, ‘non-dual’ consciousness that grounds all manifestation and is unstructured by subject, object or any differentia. Not only is such consciousness suggestive of a natural successor to cosmopsychism, it has also been reported to be the direct experience of mystics who claim to have transcended the individual perspective. Their purported insight – that our aperspectival conscious nature is identical to the ground of all being – has been termed ‘the Perennial Philosophy’. Believing this Perennial Philosophy to offer the most promising way forward in the mind-body Problem, I construct from it the foundations of a metaphysical system that I call ‘Perennial Idealism’. This attempts to account for manifestation in terms of dispositional, imagery-bound subjects. I then address an age-old ‘Parmenidean’ conundrum that I refer to as ‘the problem of the one and the many’: how can an undifferentiated substratum ground differentia without the ground itself differentiating? The proposed solution takes its cue from mystico-philosophical writings in the Advaita Vedānta tradition, known as the ajāta doctrine.

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 0969725x 2014 920637, 2014

Central Asian Journal of Literature, Philosophy and Culture, 2023

The article discusses spiritualistic approaches in Eastern philosophy and their religious-philosophical essence. According to him, religious-philosophical and spiritualistic teachings prioritize divinity, while scientific-philosophical currents focus on humanity and humanism.

I shall attempt to identify some of the main features of 'religious materialism', as I understand it, and indicate some of the thinkers and themes within modern European thought that I have drawn upon in my effort to formulate it thus far. My project of articulating such an ambitious, seemingly oxymoronic, philosophical perspective is still, it must be said, very much in its infancy and remains decidedly partial, arbitrary and incomplete as regards the thinkers upon which it draws (including a number of those discussed by my co-panellists!). Furthermore, at least in my case, the philosophical stance in question consists of an odd amalgam of thinkers and 'Schools' within post-Kantian European philosophy that are often considered to be radically incommensurable -in broad terms, post-Husserlian phenomenology and post-Nietzschean philosophical naturalism.

International Journal of Theology, Philosophy and Science, 2018

“I am me”, but what does this mean? For centuries humans identified themselves as conscious beings with free will, beings that are important in the cosmos they live in. However, modern science has been trying to reduce us into unimportant pawns in a cold universe and diminish our sense of consciousness into a mere illusion generated by lifeless matter. Our identity in the cosmos is nothing more than a deception and all the scientific evidence seem to support this idea. Or is it not? The goal of this paper is to discard current underlying dogmatism (axioms taken for granted as "self-evident") of modern mind research and to show that consciousness seems to be the ultimate frontier that will cause a major change in the way exact sciences think. If we want to re-discover our identity as luminous beings in the cosmos, we must first try to pinpoint our prejudices and discard them. Materialism is an obsolete philosophical dogma and modern scientists should try to also use other premises as the foundation of their theories to approach the mysteries of the self. Exact sciences need to examine the world with a more open mind, accepting potentially different interpretations of existing experimental data in the fields of brain research, which are currently not considered simply on the basis of a strong anti-spiritual dogmatism. Such interpretations can be compatible with the notion of an immaterial spirit proposed by religion for thousands of years. Mind seems that is not the by-product of matter, but the opposite: its master. No current materialistic theory can explain how matter may give rise to what we call “self” and only a drastic paradigm shift towards more idealistic theories will help us avoid rejecting our own nature.

George H. Doran Company, 1919

' a little eamest attention to the matter was bound to admit that, making every allowance for fraud, there was xx INTRODUCTION response introduced the idea of intelligence into what had previously been a mere chaos of noises and movements. The American mind is open to new impressions, and probably the cult spread more rapidly there than it could have done elsewhere. But the biggest brain which tumed itself upon this new subject and drew others behind it, was not American but French. Allan Kardec, with his spiritualist philosophy, differed in some details from the Americans, but founded his conclusions upon the same phenomena. When the whole story comes to be told, however, there is no doubt that it is to England that the new branch of science owes most, and, indeed, that it is due to England that it can be called a science at all. Cambridge University will always be the Mecca of systematic psychic investigation, which is the avenue that nearly always leads eventually to complete acceptance of the spiritual hypothesis. There have seldom, if ever, been a more brilliant set of minds than those which engaged themselves upon this subject.