Trajectory
The development of knowledge structures has either been an exploration of the external or the inner phenomenon. The divergence and the dichotomy between the two are not merely visible in academic circles but also in the trajectories of Western and Eastern Civilizations. However, the advent of scientific knowledge in cognition and neuroscience has tried to overshadow the inner phenomenon under its materialistic paradigms. However, the new-age psychic phenomenon of DMT experiences, NDEs, and psychedelic rehabilitation has baffled the scientific circles. That is why Thomas Kuhn asserted that scientific paradigms are ever evolving and change in a non-linear pattern. Moreover, the limitations of scientific paradigms lie in their inability to form or give any philosophical yardstick for the moral expression of the psyche. This is reflected in the rise of Western father figure Jordan Peterson against the atheistic assertion of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Thus, cautious scrutiny is required before any opaque boundaries are made.
Three questions lie on the bridge between the phenomenon of metaphysical and scientific. First, the question of the origins of the universe and consciousness. Second, what happens after death? Third, what could be a dynamic, coherent philosophical yardstick to live a fulfilled life. Before the revelations of quantum phenomenon, the scientific paradigms based on the deterministic view conceived by Descartes and further substantiated by Newton & Einstein were prevalent. The influence of the deterministic perception was so huge that the expression of the inner phenomenon was claimed to be articulated wholly by Freud through his psychological architecture of conscious and unconscious, driven by biological sexual desires. However, attempts were made to perceive the inner phenomenon as a part of a much larger domain through Carl Jung’s archetypes and the conception of the collective unconscious. Jung and his collaboration with Marie Louise attempted to subtly reignite the Christian dictums through symbols of the collective unconscious. For example, Jung’s four-layered description of animus in the woman’s psyche i.e., the progression of the psyche into a representation of symbols of Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia. However, the Western Christian dictums fell apart, as symbolized by the Nietzschean assertion that GOD is DEAD. As predicted by him, there was the rise of ultra-rationalist ideologies like communism and racist ideologies like Nazism which were headed by their respective Übermensch i.e., Lenin and Hitler, leading to geopolitical distortions. On the periphery, the great game was led by liberal nation-states like Britain and the US, who rejected Descartes’ metaphysics but recognized the mechanistic unfolding of matter, which was instrumental in the development of natural sciences. It is to be noted that western civilization has always asserted or perceived the world as a manifestation of dialectical progression, which is rooted in Socrates’ Elenchus. The perception was reinforced incessantly through Descartes’ dictum i.e., “I think, therefore I am”, Hegel’s dialectical idealism, and Marx’s Dialectical materialism. However, this perception puts an overemphasis on the fact that subjective experience of an individual is rooted in one’s rational functioning.
The overemphasis is to such an extent that the Christian symbols have been reduced to a moral dichotomy of right and wrong in order to sustain the evolutionary prerequisites. This led to power structures in the medieval era, which were ripped apart in the period of enlightenment. Thereafter, morality was enforced by liberal institutions born out of Kantian categorical imperatives. Whereas, any kind of prospective vision or philosophical essence was snatched to bring the individual back to one’s existential expression. The detachment from the prospective vision was essential for the development of natural sciences. Any kind of essentialist ideological quest was undermined by Karl Popper’s advocacy of Falsification as a prerequisite for the legitimacy of knowledge as scientific.
The consequential New Liberal World Order was successful in engaging the Western mind in material development through technological advancements and economic development. The values of society were aligned according to the factual descriptions of healthy, fruitful and material life and were not based upon any metaphysical beliefs. But after few years this lack of belief in metaphysical ideals and its accompanying peripheral moral dictums manifested in the form of a Nihilistic Void in the 1990s. This cultural shift was captured in the movie Fight Club, released in 1999. Where the protagonist highlights the Nihilistic Void left by Materialism, as follows-
An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history man, with no purpose or place, we have no Great War, no Great Depression, our Great War is a spiritual war, and our depression is our lives. We've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact and we're very pissed off.
The Western individual became so free and was made wholly responsible for assigning meaning to life. This responsibility has its bedrock in the contested assumption of the existence of Free Will. But it is difficult for an individual to create any personal meaning in life for two reasons. First, Free Will is a deficit resource and depends on the physiological limitation defined by the size of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex in the brain. Second, if the individual considers the sensory inputs arising out of objective material reality to be real then his values will depend on the precarious and temporary state of existence of its objects. This pushes the Western individual into Kierkegaardian Neurosis, where the individual is trapped in the predicament created by the existence of so many choices. This neurosis was highlighted by Russian Novelist Dostoevsky in his Magnum Opus Crime and Punishment where the protagonist Raskolnikov rationalizes the murder of a pawnbroker as a utilitarian act but later gets tormented by guilt and existential despair. Later, Raskolnikov’s lover Sonia catalyzes his spiritual redemption through total acceptance of his flaws and wilful confession. This neurosis has manifested in a sudden rise in school shootings, drug abuse, and gender dysphoria in America. Against this backdrop, Heritage Foundations’ controversial PROJECT 2025 emerged, which aims to restore Christian Dictums.
The Western attempt to know the inner phenomenon is a tale of excavation in the deeper unconscious layers of the psyche and arguing it to be the archetypical projection of the symbol of GOD. The Western attempt is an introverted approach, also referred to as Depth Psychology. The Eastern literature on the inner phenomenon is strikingly distinct from the Western perception and predates it. The historical trajectory of the East is marked by the reassertion of interconnected universal consciousness by religious movements. The Upanishads and later Maha Geeta termed it as Brahman. Sikhism perceived it as Ek Onkar. Laozi termed it as Tao. This led to the development of the communitarian oriental psyche. Specifically, in India, the rise of caste structures was witnessed, which was based on the belief of coherence between the functional characteristic of structure and the inner psychic temperament, also referred to as Cosmic Order. Consequently, various methods were developed to achieve this state of heightened superconscious awareness. Buddhism’s advocacy for dissolving into nothingness, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and Vigyan Bhairav Tantra aimed at achieving this state. On the periphery, moral codes like the Buddhist 8-fold path were developed. The consequence of the assertion was not merely communitarianism but also the alignment of society to the broader four ashrams of Life. The goal of the Indian psyche became Moksha, which was backed by the theory of Karma and the prospective end of Kaliyuga someday. This alignment stagnated Indian society and pushed it into darker pits of black magic and false discriminatory practices. Moreover, the overemphasis on spirituality pushed material development on the backfoot. All the conceptions of the inner phenomenon in the East were based on the personal experience of the spiritually advanced leaders and relied on those who witnessed the phenomenon. The lack of empirical evidence of the heightened awareness led to the failure of the deliberation on the same in the West.
Present Day Research
The doors of existence of metaphysical realms were once again opened by American Ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna in the 1980s where he elaborated upon the DMT experiences. Consequently, American Psychiatrist Rick Strassman led the naturalistic study of DMT experiences. Strassman reported that the research subjects explained their experiences as going out of the body, seeing metaphysical entities, and witnessing intrinsic geometric patterns. Almost all the subjects argued that the experience was more real than the objective reality itself and denied it to be part of the collective unconscious or mere hallucinations. In the 2000s, with advancements in resuscitation technology, people started to report the existence of awareness after the brain and heart ceased to function. This was followed by Awareness during the Resuscitation (AWARE) study. Subjects started reporting metaphysical phenomena like recalling all their past lives’ experiences, OBEs (out-of-body experiences), other-worldly music, reuniting with deceased relatives and friends, etc. Again, certain scientific models were used to make sense of the NDE phenomenon, like the Depersonalization model, Expectancy model, and Neuroanatomical model, but they failed to explain the immense peace felt by subjects which is detached from any religious bias and the long-term effect, i.e., elevation of Fear of Death. Moreover, the Neuroanatomical and neuroscientific models cannot explain why the subjects experience NDEs despite the flatlining of the brain and its structures.
Another attempt to explain NDEs was made by Dutch philosopher Bernardo Kastrup through his Phantom World Hypothesis, which is based on Analytical Idealism, suggesting that reality is an accumulation of subjective experience of an individual and the other. Thus, reality is experiential in essence and all the cognitive structures are also a part of it. Isn’t this hypothesis merely a verbose reassertion of the Brahman-Atman hypothesis of Upanishad or the non-dualist assertion of Ashtavakra Gita?
Another nail in the coffin was the revelation of the quantum phenomenon. Until the revelation, Scientific Realism asserted that The world is the manifestation of laws of physics which govern the individuals placed in it. The subjective experience of the individual was pushed to the periphery. Quantum Phenomenon highlighted that the manifestation of mechanical physics in nature is dependent upon the observation of the subjective being. This paved the way for radical theories like Quantum Bayesianism, which emphasized the role of the observer. It suggests that quantum mechanics is not about an external world devoid of human interaction, but rather about observers making predictions. QBism opened Pandora's box of theories like many worlds, objective collapse, pilot wave, etc.
Even if we disregard all these possibilities and hypotheses, the hard problem of consciousness still lurks around. One of the prevalent frameworks, i.e., Integrated Information Theory pioneered by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi in 2004, explains consciousness as a phenomenon of arising and processing of information in the structures of neurons. Similarly, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff suggest that the quantum processes within the brain’s microtubules contribute to consciousness. But these theories fall apart in the face of neurological disorders like Aphantasia, i.e., the inability to imagine objects of the material world inside the brain. Many brain scientists like Hakwan Lau called the IIT theory pseudoscience.
Moreover, scientists like Anil Seth and Donald Hoffman shake the very foundation of scientific reality by questioning the perception of the brain responsible for collecting empirical evidence. Anil Seth argues that the brain hallucinates your conscious reality. For example, blocks A & B are the same shades of grey in both figures, but the prior expectation of our brain overshadows the real sensory inputs formed in the Visual Cortex.
Thus, Seth argues that perception is not the accumulation of sensory inputs; rather, it is a prediction projected into sensory inputs. Thus, we don’t passively perceive the world but actively generate it. And these predictions are not merely the outcome of cognitive structures of the brain but a collective informed decision of the whole neuro-biological organism, as illustrated in the Rubber Hand Experiment, where individuals feel a sensation of the strike made on a fake rubber hand.
Similarly, Donald Hoffman questions our perception of objective reality and asks whether the evolutionary assumption that natural selection favors accurate perception is correct. For example, the Australian Jewel Beetle was on the verge of extinction because the male counterpart misperceived round brown beer bottles as females and got absorbed & exhausted by it. Since evolution is a predictive game, Hoffman runs evolutionary simulations in labs and concluded that the survival advantage was inherited by those species whose perception of reality went extinct. Thus, Hoffman argues that evolution doesn’t favor accurate perception and merely provides a limited interface to perceive only space and time. Therefore, he is implying that we don’t see reality as it is.
Road Ahead
To end this dichotomy of metaphysical and scientific, there is a need to segregate the descriptions of paradigms and accompanying rational deductions. Rational deductions resulting from scientific paradigms lead to the conception of life as an evolutionary material pursuit leading to the state of Ontological Nihilism. As highlighted earlier, it results in social distortions caused by a lack of transcendental moral dictum. Whereas rational deductions from metaphysical possibilities result in absurd beliefs in spiritual and psychic science, as observed in the prevalence of psychic markets of channelers and their wrong prediction of the 2024 US election. The metaphysical hypothesis could act as a template for scientific testing, and at the same time, the scientific discovery should be allowed to discard any philosophical ideals. Like Stoicism as a philosophy should be totally discarded as willpower is a deficit resource and constrained by physiological limitations of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex.
There is a need to recognize that the developments in the domains of science and metaphysics are moving towards convergence rather than divergence. Recognition is imperative not merely for material advancement of life but also for psychological advancement and moral-social order that may arise. At the same time, to argue against any kind of moral structure of reality and subtle advocacy of debauchery is evil. For example, psychological studies have proven the importance of the active engagement of family in the psychological development of children. These moral structures are imbibed in the existential religious expression of love, peace, and harmony. A lot could be saved and created if we could, as a collective human effort, move towards this convergence while inheriting religious values. As asserted by Aurobindo Ghosh,
The Spirit shall look out through Matter's gaze. And Matter shall reveal the Spirit's face.
Bridging the Scientific and the Metaphysical