The Tertium Quid Emerges

Beyond the False Choice

The Impasse and the Opening

The preceding analysis reveals the modern intellectual predicament in stark terms. We have inherited a worldview that offers what appears to be an impossible choice: accept a materialist framework that renders consciousness, meaning, and value as illusions, or embrace supernatural explanations that require abandoning scientific rationality. This false dichotomy has created what the philosopher Thomas Nagel identifies as “one of the most important intellectual problems of our time”—the need for a conceptual alternative that transcends both reductive materialism and supernatural intervention.¹ What if what is needed is what philosophers call a tertium quid, a “third something” that can honor both scientific rigor and the undeniable reality of consciousness?

The urgency of finding such a tertium quid becomes clearer when we consider the biological puzzle that has been swimming in our oceans for tens of millions of years. The convergent evolution of massive, complex brains in both terrestrial primates and marine cetaceans presents a profound challenge to any worldview that treats consciousness as an unlikely accident. What if subjective experience is not merely an emergent byproduct of survival pressures? The stable presence of dozens of large-brained cetacean species across geological timescales invites us to consider whether something more fundamental might be at work—a principle that may be woven into the very fabric of reality itself.

Fortunately, the intellectual resources for constructing such a tertium quid are not absent from Western thought. While the mechanistic worldview achieved cultural dominance, alternative frameworks continued to develop in the margins, often anticipating by decades the problems that would eventually bring materialism into crisis. These approaches share a common insight that parallels the complementarity principle from quantum mechanics: what if the bifurcation of nature into separate realms of mind and matter is itself the source of our conceptual difficulties?

A Hidden Lineage: Philosophers of Complementarity

Rather than representing isolated voices or eccentric departures from serious thought, the thinkers we will explore form what we might call a “hidden lineage”—a suppressed tradition that has been groping toward the same insight that quantum mechanics would eventually formalize: that complete description of certain phenomena requires complementary frameworks that appear contradictory but are actually necessary aspects of a unified reality.

William James and Radical Empiricism

The American philosopher and psychologist William James, writing at the turn of the 20th century, was among the first to articulate a systematic alternative to the Cartesian split. His doctrine of “radical empiricism” proposed that relations and experiences are as fundamental to reality as the objects they connect. For James, consciousness was not something that emerges from matter, but rather the medium through which we directly encounter reality. In his 1904 essay “A World of Pure Experience,” he argued that both mind and matter are constructions from a more fundamental reality of “pure experience”—a flowing stream of immediate, relational encounters that precedes any division into subjective and objective realms.²

What emerges from James’s approach is not a rejection of scientific materialism but its complement. This perspective invites us to explore how a particular form of experiential reality might express itself through the remarkable neural architecture we observe in cetacean brains. Rather than asking how consciousness emerges from the complex machinery of a dolphin’s brain, we might explore how a sophisticated biological instrument enables participation in dimensions of experience that remain largely invisible to our current frameworks.

Henri Bergson and Creative Evolution

James’s contemporary, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, developed a parallel but distinct approach that placed creative evolution at the center of reality. In his masterwork Creative Evolution, Bergson argued that life itself represents a fundamental cosmic force—what he called the élan vital—that drives reality toward ever-greater complexity, consciousness, and freedom.³ For Bergson, evolution was not a mechanical process of random variation and selection, but the expression of a creative intelligence working through matter.

This framework provides a compelling context for understanding the rapid evolution and long-term stability of cetacean intelligence. The transition to fully marine life, accomplished over approximately 15 million years, followed by roughly 10-15 million years of remarkable morphological stability, suggests exactly the kind of creative breakthrough that Bergson envisioned. What if large brains represent not expensive evolutionary accidents, but expressions of life’s fundamental drive toward greater consciousness and complexity?

Alfred North Whitehead and Process Philosophy

Perhaps the most comprehensive alternative to mechanistic materialism was developed by the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. His “philosophy of organism” proposed that reality consists not of static substances, but of dynamic events, each with both external, physical aspects and internal, experiential dimensions. In Whitehead’s framework, everything from electrons to ecosystems to human societies are composed of “actual entities” that possess both objective features (accessible to scientific measurement) and subjective features (known only from within).⁴

This process ontology offers what amounts to a complementarity parallel to the hard problem of consciousness. Rather than treating experience as mysteriously emergent from matter, Whitehead’s approach suggests that consciousness, in its various forms, might be a basic feature of reality—not something that appears when matter reaches sufficient complexity, but something that was present in rudimentary form from the beginning and achieves increasingly sophisticated expressions through evolution.

Applied to our cetacean puzzle, Whitehead’s framework invites us to consider whether the massive brains of dolphins and whales represent an evolutionary path for navigating a reality that is experiential “all the way down.” These beings may have evolved neural architectures that allow them to participate more directly in what Whitehead called the “creative advance” of the universe—the ongoing process by which reality becomes ever more complex, conscious, and interconnected.

The Depth Psychology Connection: Jung and Pauli

One of the most intriguing developments in 20th-century thought was the decades-long collaboration between the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Their decades-long correspondence and joint investigations led to a remarkable hypothesis that anticipated the complementarity approach we are exploring: what if psyche and matter are complementary aspects of a deeper, unified reality they called the unus mundus—the “one world” of medieval alchemy?⁵

Jung and Pauli’s collaboration suggests that the fundamental structures of physical reality and psychological reality mirror each other because they are two sides of the same coin. Pauli, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, was struck by the fact that atomic physics required the inclusion of the observer in any complete description of reality. Jung, meanwhile, had discovered that the unconscious psyche seemed to operate according to principles of meaningful connection (synchronicity) that transcended simple causation.

Their work points toward the possibility that the apparent dualism of mind and matter might be resolved by recognizing both as manifestations of a deeper order that is neither purely physical nor purely mental, but something more fundamental that encompasses both. This anticipates contemporary discussions about the role of information or consciousness in quantum mechanics, but grounds them in a broader understanding of reality as an indivisible whole.

Such a framework offers profound implications for understanding cetacean consciousness. The highly social, acoustically-mediated reality of marine mammals might represent a biological expression of the kind of holistic, interconnected awareness that Jung and Pauli theorized. The three-dimensional acoustic environment in which dolphins and whales live—where sound travels efficiently across vast distances and can convey complex information about both the external world and the internal states of other beings—may foster forms of collective consciousness that are literally inconceivable to terrestrial, visually-oriented creatures like ourselves.

David Bohm and the Implicate Order

The most scientifically grounded approach to resolving the mind-matter dualism may have emerged from the work of the theoretical physicist David Bohm. Bohm, a protégé of Einstein and one of the most important interpreters of quantum mechanics, developed a comprehensive alternative to the standard materialist interpretation of physical reality. His theory of the “implicate order” proposes that the familiar world of separate objects—what he called the “explicate order”—unfolds from a deeper, invisible dimension of undivided wholeness.⁶

In Bohm’s framework, consciousness and matter are not separate substances but complementary aspects of a single, underlying reality. Just as quantum mechanics reveals that particles can be “entangled” across vast distances, Bohm argued that consciousness and the physical world are “entangled” at the deepest level. Mind and matter are like two sides of a coin—distinct aspects of something more fundamental that encompasses both.

Bohm’s approach is particularly compelling because it emerges directly from rigorous analysis of quantum mechanics, the most successful theory in the history of science. Unlike purely philosophical approaches, Bohm’s implicate order is grounded in mathematical physics while remaining open to dimensions of reality that materialist interpretations systematically exclude.

For our understanding of cetacean intelligence, Bohm’s framework suggests that the evolution of large, complex brains in marine mammals might represent a biological development of the implicate order’s tendency toward more sophisticated forms of conscious participation in reality’s deeper wholeness. The acoustic, social, and apparently non-technological orientation of cetacean intelligence might reflect forms of consciousness that are more directly attuned to the relational, holistic dimensions of reality that Bohm’s physics reveals.

Rudolf Steiner and Spiritual Science

While less well-known in mainstream academic circles, the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner developed one of the most comprehensive attempts to create a rigorous methodology for investigating non-physical dimensions of reality. Steiner’s “spiritual science” (Geisteswissenschaft) proposed that human consciousness could be systematically developed to perceive aspects of reality that are invisible to ordinary sensory experience, much as telescopes and microscopes extend our perceptual range into previously hidden domains.⁷

Steiner’s approach is relevant to our investigation not because it provides easy answers, but because it exemplifies the kind of methodological expansion that may be necessary for understanding consciousness in its broader cosmic context. What if consciousness is indeed fundamental to reality? Then developing more sophisticated methods for studying it—methods that include rather than exclude the experiencing subject—may be as necessary for future science as the development of instruments was for past scientific revolutions.

Applied to the cetacean question, Steiner’s framework suggests that understanding forms of consciousness radically different from our own may require developing new capacities for empathetic or intuitive knowledge that complement but do not replace rigorous empirical investigation.

Common Threads: Toward Complementary Description

Despite their differences, these approaches share several crucial insights that point toward what we might call an “experience-inclusive, expansive naturalism”—not as replacement for materialist science, but as its necessary complement. First, they all treat the Cartesian split between mind and matter as a false dichotomy that creates more problems than it solves. Second, they approach consciousness or experience as fundamental features of reality rather than late-arriving accidents. Third, they view evolution as a creative process that tends toward greater complexity, consciousness, and meaning rather than a purely mechanical sorting mechanism. Fourth, they suggest that scientific methodology, while invaluable, may need to be expanded to adequately address the full spectrum of reality.

Most importantly for our purposes, these frameworks provide conceptual space for understanding why evolution might repeatedly invest in the kind of massive, complex brains we see in both humans and cetaceans. What if consciousness is fundamental to reality? Then the drive toward greater awareness, more sophisticated experience, and richer forms of meaning becomes not an unlikely accident but a natural expression of the universe’s deepest tendencies.

The Biological Evidence Reconsidered

When viewed through the lens of these complementary frameworks, the convergent evolution of large-brained intelligence takes on new significance. Rather than asking how mindless matter accidentally generated conscious experience twice, we might explore how a cosmos that includes consciousness at its foundation expresses itself through biological evolution. The rapid emergence of cetacean intelligence following the K-T extinction event, followed by roughly 10-15 million years of morphological stability, and the apparent orientation toward rich social and experiential rather than technological development all become comprehensible as expressions of what Bergson called life’s creative advance.

The cetacean lineage might represent an evolutionary experiment in developing forms of consciousness that are more directly participatory in the relational, qualitative dimensions of reality that materialist science systematically overlooks. While human intelligence has proven extraordinarily effective at analyzing, categorizing, and manipulating the external world, cetacean intelligence may have evolved to navigate the internal, experiential dimensions of existence with equal sophistication.

This is not to romanticize or anthropomorphize cetacean consciousness, but rather to recognize that there may be forms of intelligence and ways of being conscious that are as legitimate and as cosmically significant as our own, even if they remain largely invisible to our current conceptual frameworks.

The Complementarity Principle Applied

What emerges from this survey is not a new metaphysical doctrine but the application of a well-established scientific principle to a broader domain. Just as quantum mechanics taught us that complete description of light requires both wave and particle models, understanding consciousness may require both materialist and experiential descriptions. The materialist account—neural networks, evolutionary pressures, biochemical processes—captures essential features of how consciousness manifests in biological systems. The experiential account—subjective awareness, qualitative dimensions, meaningful relationships—captures essential features of what consciousness actually is.

Neither description alone is adequate. A purely materialist account can predict and manipulate but cannot explain why there is subjective experience at all. A purely experiential account can describe the richness of consciousness but struggles to explain its biological substrate and evolutionary development. Together, they may approach the kind of complementary completeness that quantum mechanics achieved for atomic phenomena.

The Path Forward

The emergence of these philosophical alternatives creates space for a more adequate response to the central question that opened this investigation: Why does the universe build such minds? The complementary perspective that emerges from this survey suggests a narrative in which the universe builds minds because mind, in some fundamental sense, may be what the universe partially is. Consciousness is not something that emerges from sufficient complexity, but something that complexifies through evolution, finding ever more sophisticated expressions in the biological realm.

This framework requires neither abandoning scientific rigor nor embracing supernatural explanations. Instead, it calls for an expansion of what we consider natural to include the qualitative, experiential dimensions of reality that have been systematically excluded from mechanistic science. It suggests that a truly comprehensive science of the future may need to develop methods for studying interiority, meaning, and value with the same precision that current science brings to the study of matter and energy.

As we will explore in subsequent sections, this expanded naturalism finds unexpected support from the very cutting edges of contemporary science, from quantum mechanics to systems biology to neuroscience itself. The mechanistic worldview, rather than representing the final word on reality’s nature, may prove to be a crucial but ultimately incomplete description—one side of a complementary account that humanity is only beginning to construct.

The cetacean lineage, swimming in our oceans for tens of millions of years, may represent not just a fascinating biological curiosity, but a living reminder that consciousness takes forms that we are only beginning to imagine. Understanding these other minds may be essential not only for completing our picture of terrestrial intelligence, but for preparing ourselves to recognize and relate to the forms of consciousness that almost certainly exist throughout a universe that appears to be organized around the principle of building ever more sophisticated minds.