Notes toward a more capacious worldview

Most of us with an interest in science have absorbed the conception of the universe as exclusively physical, accidental, and indifferent. Our felt experience is out of place in that conception, a secondary or derivative aspect of the underlying fundamentals. We’ve been told that the feeling of self, caring about things, or finding meaning may even be illusions that the brain creates for some adaptive purpose.

In many settings, saying out loud that consciousness may be more than neurochemistry can feel like a confession of unscientific thinking. There is a cultural pressure to keep such intuitions to oneself.

But the reductive worldview that produces that pressure is increasingly being challenged. Researchers in biology, physics, and philosophy of mind are showing how it is just one of several narratives, and not obviously the strongest.

This project is for readers who have sensed as much and want grounding for that intuition. My current focus is Worlds of Awareness, a book-length essay on part of what a more capacious worldview may include — first-person experience as legitimate evidence about the world, and minds beyond the human (odontocetes most strikingly).

It’s a work in progress, a story that’s taking form as it proceeds. If you have comments, criticisms, or if something here strongly resonates, I would like to hear your ideas.

scott (at) 137fsc.net