Notes toward a more capacious worldview

Most of us have absorbed, often without noticing, a particular picture of the universe: physical, accidental, and indifferent. Within that picture, our own felt experience — the quality of being awake, of caring about things, of finding meaning — is a kind of secondary phenomenon, perhaps even an illusion the brain is running for some adaptive purpose.

Saying out loud that consciousness might be something more than neurochemistry — that first-person experience might be, in some sense, basic to the world rather than incidental to it — can feel like a confession of unscientific thinking. The cultural pressure to keep that intuition private is real.

It needn’t be. Across physics, biology, and the philosophy of mind, researchers are building accounts of the world in which qualitative experience is not the embarrassment it became in the twentieth century. The reductive picture is just one option among several, 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 very much 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.

rsm (at) 137fsc.net