This Website

This website is a tool for helping me clarify my thoughts about the way the world appears to be, and some very rough ideas about how changing our perspective on consciousness might increase the (sadly, very low) prospects of long-term thriving of human cultures. Some of it deals with basic realities that all educated persons agree on, things that we can be certain are true. These are well-established physical facts, the incontestable results of scientific investigation. The earth does in fact make one revolution around the sun, a sidereal year, in approximately 365.25636 days. The speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second, and Planck’s constant is exactly $6.626 \times 10^{-34}$ joule·seconds. But most such facts are by themselves rather trivial. It is only when those facts are used to create things that the magic happens. Quantum mechanics (QM) is by itself just another mathematical framework (albeit an extraordinary one), a way of solving puzzles about how things work at an atomic level. But QM enabled an entirely new level of tool-making: the entirety of our electronic civilization, nuclear weapons and power, and many other modern technologies were only possible through the discoveries of QM.

None of that, however, has or ever will contribute to meaning, a sense of deep connection, or any other things that are (at least as some of us believe) the essence of higher intelligence– the stuff that many of us believe fundamentally and forever separates us from machine replication. and, perhaps, from most other animals (there are reasons to think that Odontocetes–dolphins, orcas, sperm whales–also possess them). At the root of all this is consciousness. We have no idea what it is or how it works, other than at an extremely coarse level (anasthesia, fMRI imaging, etc.). But human consciousness is arguably one of the most powerful forces on earth, as any cursory observation of modernity shows. Sadly, it is a force that from a planetary perspective is highly destructive. The price of modernity appears to require the wholesale destruction of much of our environment (or at least it has so far).

The prospects of turning that around do not appear to be good. Unlikely as it may be, perhaps technological solutions can be found for the problems that technology has created and enabled; artificial intelligence may save us from ourselves. But probably not. It seems highly unlikely that we will turn that around, that we will somehow mobilize technology to solve the problems that technology has enabled. We can, however, begin thinking about what the non-technological conditions might be for long-term thriving of human cultures.

Just about everything of significance derives not from the things we can measure, but from the stories we tell and the meaning we extract from them. Science, however, does not, cannot, deal with meaning. There is no meaning to planetary motion or Planck’s constant. And for those of us who reject the idea that technology will save us, a fascinating aspect of quantum physics is that it introduces questions of meaning. Many, perhaps most, contemporary scientists and philosophers disregard significance of questions about meaning raised by quantum mech

I’ve long been intrigued by the concept of melding ideas about fundamental mind, broadly-interpreted hylozoism, findings of modern physics and other scientific disciplines, and an imaginative expansion from investigations of non-human animals, particularly Odontocetes (toothed whales such as orcas, dolphins, etc.) At its core, the idea is that the fundamental nature of reality includes both qualitative and quantitative properties—extending beyond what is merely measurable. Once we have escaped from the narrow view of the universe as exclusively physical, the horizon of worldviews worthy of serious consideration expands tremendously.

This is hardly a new way of thinking, as hylozoist and similar monist views have been argued for by philosophers, esoteric authors and other thinkers throughout history. For several centuries, the dominance of science—particularly its reductive materialist framework—overshadowed these perspectives. However, with the increasing recognition of consciousness as a fundamental issue in science and philosophy, holist perspectives are gaining more traction.

Evidences that appear to support the conceptions of holism and fundamental mind can be found in many places, but they remain somewhat piecemeal. Pulling some of them together is what I try to do here. Trying to express and integrate such wide ranging ideas in a coherent manner, however, is very humbling for someone who knows so little about any of them. As C.S. Lewis wrote: “I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.“ C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964)

My goal is not to argue for a single worldview but to broaden the conceptual space for discussing alternative narratives and perspectives. The term “conceptual space” was used by Lorraine L. Besser and Shigehiro Oishi in “The psychologically rich life.” The articles here are a mosaic of ideas about a few select areas of the immensely broad but yet barely explored territory of a holistic cosmos and fundamental mind. Once we get past the myopic notion that reality, which is to say consciousness, See “Jerison’s take on reality” is exclusively physical, the horizon may extend beyond what we can even imagine.

Expanding a conceptual horizon inevitably brings with it speculative and unconventional ideas. While this calls for thoughtful discernment, we should be careful not to dismiss unconventional perspectives too quickly. It seems safe to exclude Pastafarianism in serious discussions about spirituality. But the idea that religions are a form of mental illness should be seen as equally absurd, as claimed by Sam Harris in The End of Faith.

The articles here are all works in progress, varying in their level of completion. I tend to prioritize exploring more material, even if it’s roughly stated, rather than refining fewer pieces to a higher degree. This approach can sometimes result in inconsistencies or unfinished ideas. If you have suggestions for improvement, please let me know– I look forward to good criticism.

Edward Tufte style

The site was built with a GitHub Hugo theme based on Edward Tufte’s ideas, and the very strong tutelage of ChatGPT (no way I could have done this on my own). The Tufte CSS package was developed by Dave Liepman “to style web articles using the ideas demonstrated by Edward Tufte’s books and handouts.” Tufte is revered by many for his simple, elegant approach to presenting information, particularly data visualization. Many of his books, all self-published, Tufte was turned down by numerous publishing houses, finally deciding to mortgage his house and self-publish his first book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information in 1983. are widely considered classics by technical editors and professionals whose job includes communicating technical information. Tufte has a particularly low regard for Power Point presentations. His 2003 eBook The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within argues that Power Point presentations may have contributed significantly to the Columbia shuttle disaster through jargon-heavy, carelessly structured bullet points by Boeing engineers in presentations about the potential for foam debris to have damaged the shuttle’s wing.