Celebrate the New Paradigm!

Graduating from Materialism

The Future of Consciousness seminar starts at 1 pm today. You can still join and catch our opening session with Bernardo Kastrup and Jude Currivan.

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Below is an excerpt from The Idealism Option, the first research paper put out by our think tank, The Elevator, which makes the case for a fundamental paradigm shift from physicalism or materialism to monistic or analytic idealism, which recognizes consciousness as the “ontological primitive,” the foundational layer of reality.

Change the Story

WHILE TECHNOLOGY CONTINUES TO ADVANCE IN SOME AREAS, WE NO LONGER MOVE TOWARD A BETTER LIFE FOR THE MASSES – TOWARD INCREASING LEVELS OF SHARED ABUNDANCE. THE DREAM OF INFINITE MATERIAL PROGRESS THAT GUIDED OUR WORLD OVER THE LAST TWO CENTURIES IS NO LONGER TENABLE. INSTEAD, MUCH OF THE WORLD REGRESSES. AROUND THE WORLD, PEOPLE CONFRONT DEEPENING ECOLOGICAL CHALLENGES; GOVERNMENTS ANTICIPATE THE PROSPECT OF SOCIAL COLLAPSE DUE TO SCARCITY OF NATURAL RESOURCES INCLUDING WATER.

This regression is revealed by the failure of countries to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as part of Agenda 2030. According to the UN :

World leaders made a historic promise to secure the rights and well-being of everyone on a healthy, thriving planet when they agreed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 SDGs in 2015. However, the combined impacts of the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, a gloomy global economic outlook and lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed systemic weaknesses and significantly hampered progress towards the Goals… Of the approximately 140 targets that can be evaluated, half of them show moderate or severe deviation from the desired trajectory. Furthermore, more than 30 percent of these targets have experienced no progress or, even worse, regression below the 2015 baseline.

Statistics reveal more poverty, hunger, and a growing number of refugees fleeing from failed states. As knowledge advances—as digital networks become increasingly sophisticated and AI evolves in real-time—our political and financial systems are increasingly unstable, in danger of failing us. Once-optimistic commentators now see darkness closing in. Some believe post-industrial civilization has already started to collapse as a result of the “polycrisis,” which The Financial Times defines as a “collective term for interlocking and simultaneous crises of an environmental, geopolitical and economic nature.”

As a response to deteriorating conditions, authoritarian, Far Right and Neo-Fascist movements gather force in countries around the world, attracting the support of irate, disaffected masses ready to reject democracy and abandon the civil rights protections won, through hard struggle, over the last centuries. Gigantic forest fires, “once-in-a- century” super-storms, and historic droughts are the new global norm, threatening the future of farming while contributing to rapid declines in global biodiversity.

By now we know that climate change does not follow the gradual, linear projections of mainstream climate science, represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Instead, as “doomer” climate extremists warned for many years, ecosystem breakdown can intensify quickly. As nonlinear feedback loops in the climate system engage, climate change gathers ferocious momentum. Last year was the warmest in recorded history by a significant margin, suggesting that climate change is intensifying quickly.

In 2023, we passed the threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels: Something that was not supposed to occur for several decades. Scientists have warned this will unleash a cascade of negative effects, potentially causing a “multi-breadbasket failure”—agricultural depletion leading to food shortages—in the next few years. According to an ancient saying, “Crisis is opportunity.” If we step back to understand what humans have unleashed on the Earth and how we have reached this precipice, we can fundamentally reassess our current situation as well as our prospects for the future.

As we will explore in what follows, this reassessment must start with what is most basic: Our understanding of the nature of reality. Ontology is the invisible underpinning upon which cultures, societies, and civilizations, effloresce, fade, and decompose. The consumerist, materialist ethos of secular societies over the last three centuries was informed by the dominant paradigm of reductive

materialism: The theory that mind evolves out of matter. According to this hypothesis, the universe is essentially random. Life is purely the result of a particular set of material conditions occurring due to a haphazard succession of cosmic and geophysical events. Human self-awareness, language, and culture is an extraordinary, ultimately meaningless, accident. “Selfish genes” zip themselves up in meat suits to compete for the opportunity to propagate.

The idealist paradigm argues, on rational grounds, that consciousness, not anything material or physical, is the foundation of reality. Consciousness—not matter or any physical or energetic substrate—is, in philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s phrase, the “ontological primitive.” This makes sense of the discoveries of quantum physics over the last century, including the experimental proof that the universe is “not locally real” which won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2022 . Idealism also dissolves the “hard problem of consciousness,” which continues to bedevil materialist philosophers and neuroscientists.

The thesis that the physical world is, ultimately, an expression or a projection of

consciousness reverses the current, materialist understanding of reality. The secular ideal of reductive scientific materialism is the basis of our political and economic orientation. The materialist bias shapes our approach to developing and implementing technologies, whether Artificial Intelligence or synthetic biology. This new paradigm is like a new foundation for rebuilding our human house on stable ground. It may also lead to a different understanding of the global meta-crisis, as the necessary preconditions for a collective metanoia: A transformation of worldview leading to a reversal of values and priorities.

The value in our all-encompassing polycrisis, which threatens almost all forms of life on the planet down to the tardigrades, is that we must reassess the entire paradigm which has guided modern civilization for the last few centuries. Many find themselves open to radical new ideas and proposals—prospects they would never have considered while the old system seemed functional, unassailable, and air-tight. The sudden mass acceptance of psychedelic substances—taboo, legally and culturally suppressed for a half century—offers one example of this new opening. The growing popularity of esoteric practices and mysticism is another indicator of a deep shift in values and priorities that the mainstream still ignores or ridicules.

What is Consciousness?

CONFRONTING THE CONTEMPORARY “META-CRISIS,” “POLY-CRISIS,” OR “ANTHROPOCENE,” MANY PHILOSOPHERS AND SOCIAL THEORISTS BELIEVE THAT THE ROOT OF THIS EMERGENCY MUST BE FOUND IN HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS. AFTER ALL, WE HUMAN BEINGS UNLEASHED THIS ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION VIA OUR EXPLOITATION OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND OUR RACE TO BUILD GLOBAL INDUSTRIAL CIVILIZATION.

Along with the meta-crisis, we face the “meaning crisis:” Perhaps the most important, and certainly the foundational, element. At this point it is clear: Underlying the mass civilization we built over the last centuries as we expanded our scientific knowledge and technical powers, something was missing. The race toward technological mastery led to a profound disconnection and alienation.

We can ask whether it was our progressive alienation from nature, our development of abstract symbol systems, or religious zealotry and hubris, patriarchy and left-brain dominance, willful ignorance, or some other aspect of the human psyche (like the psychopath problem) that caused us to disregard the limits of natural systems. Many indigenous and aboriginal cultures understood and honored those limits. Based on thousands of years of trial-and-error, they had learned how to live in symbiosis with nature. With modernization, we attached excessive importance to the “left brain,” the hemisphere associated with rational thought and logic that separates the world into distinct objects and categories. We de-emphasized the more holistic right hemisphere, linked to intuition, vision, and what is traditionally considered the feminine aspects of consciousness.

A central subject we will explore in what follows is “consciousness.” The word gets used often, in different ways. Let’s take a moment to define it. When we speak about our individual consciousness, we refer to the state of being aware of and able to think about one's surroundings, sensations, thoughts, and activities. From an individual perspective, consciousness encompasses our self-awareness,  perception, and the experience of the world. While even microorganisms possess some primitive level of awareness, we would not consider them conscious as we are. In some sense, to be considered truly conscious, you must have meta-cognition: be aware that you are aware.

On its most basic level, consciousness—as functional awareness and responsivity to the environment—is a property found in many living beings. It is generally thought that our particular human capacity for self-reflection, our ability to remember the distant past and plan for the future, to manipulate abstract symbols, reveals a more developed or “advanced” consciousness than other species on Earth.

By “collective consciousness,” we generally refer to the set of beliefs, ideas, attitudes, and knowledge shared by a social group or society. These elements inform and shape the individual's sense of belonging, identity, and behavior. Collective consciousness includes social forms and ideologies we internalize personally, influencing psychology and behavior on both individual and collective levels.

Our language remains limited and imprecise when we seek to define various subtle aspects of consciousness. The same word can refer to a vague social or ecological awareness or to metaphysical ideas about primordial awareness preceding any physical or material manifestation. We probably need as many words for different aspects of consciousness as the Persians had for love, or the Eskimos for snow.

As social thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari , among many others, have noted, human beings are motivated to act by stories and myths. In fact, beyond our basic biological functions (such as breathing), everything we do reflects the narratives and mythic structures in which we are embedded. To develop greater consciousness, then, means becoming more aware of the often-invisible stories and myths that provide structure and meaning to our experience. We cannot escape myth-making; even the philosophy of nihilism and the idea that life is meaningless is, in the end, another story humans have constructed and endowed with their belief.

What guiding stories have led us, invisibly, to this crisis point?

The Myth of Materialism

ANGLO-EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION SHIFTED FROM A PREDOMINANTLY RELIGIOUS, CHRISTIAN ORIENTATION TO A MORE SECULAR AND MATERIALIST OUTLOOK OVER SEVERAL CENTURIES. INDEED, AS JOHN HIGGS WRITES IN HIS BOOK ON THE ROMANTIC POET WILLIAM BLAKE , SOMETHING AKIN TO ANALYTIC OR MONISTIC IDEALISM WAS THE DEFAULT PHILOSOPHY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD:

For most of the world’s great religions, mind preceded matter. The immaterial came first. This immaterial thing was God, or the universal spirit, or Brahman, or the Tao, or whatever name individual cultures preferred. After an eternal period of solitude, this immaterial spirit eventually decided to produce the world of matter. This physical world was usually described as an ‘emanation’ from the fundamental immaterial reality.

During The Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers like Voltaire, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant advocated for reason, individual rights, and skepticism of religious authority. They laid the intellectual groundwork for questioning established norms and undermined the authority of religious institutions. Enlightenment ideals also influenced the American and French Revolutions, which defined a new form of government based on the separation of church and state.

The growth of a secular society in Western Europe and America was connected to the growth of the new mercantile middle-class, fueled by successive technical breakthroughs from the printing press to the steam engine to the internal combustion engine. Social developments ran parallel to the increase in scientific and technical knowledge. As Anglo-European civilization advanced in technological capacity, it became the dominant world power, exporting its values and economic model through colonialism and imperialism.

Copernicus challenged the geocentric model of the universe, which was endorsed by the Church. This may, in retrospect, have been the key moment in the shift towards materialism, just as the publication of photographs of the Earth from space were a key moment in the creation of the green movement and the “Gaia hypothesis” centuries  later. Newton's laws of motion and universal law of gravitation provided a mechanical framework for understanding the physical world, without requiring a divine cause.

Darwinian evolution provided a secular explanation for the origin of life and the diversity of species. These scientific advances eroded the explanatory and authoritative power of the Bible, making room for a purely naturalistic and even mechanistic understanding of the world.

Industrialization and the rise of capitalism furthered the shift towards materialism. As Anglo-European society became increasingly secular, the elites prioritized material prosperity and technological advancement over anything spiritual, transcendent, or ineffable. Modern thinkers rejected religious belief, mysticism, the supernatural and the occult as irrational and unprovable.

When Friedrich Nietzsche declared "God is dead" at the end of the 19th Century, he forced his readers to reckon with the consequences of the increasingly disenchanted, scientific worldview. The 20th century saw the rise of existentialism, postmodernism, and other philosophies that emphasized individual experience over universal truths, further marginalizing the role of religion. Even today, the media and academic establishment of the contemporary West overwhelmingly supports the materialist paradigm, reflected in the much-acclaimed writings of avowed atheists such as Sam Harris (The End of Faith), Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained).

At the same time, as historians such as John Gray have shown, the philosophy of liberalism, or secular humanism, absorbed elements from Christian theology, such as the belief that human society inevitably progressed toward a future utopian state. Christian salvationism continues in the worldview of many modern technologists and engineers, via “transhumanism” and the idea of the “Singularity.” Here, the prospect of Revelation and a transmutation or “ascension” of the human species is linked to technological progress, which can liberate us from constraints such as aging or the natural limits placed on our cognitive and physical capacities.

The phenomenology of our experience forms a feedback loop with our technology, in other words: the tools that we make, in turn transform us.

Instead of an eternal soul, Transhumanists seek an immortal ego, freed from the organic constraints of the body. Our hyper-focus on consumption and technology, however, is not free from consequence. The phenomenology of our experience forms a feedback loop with our technology, in other words: the tools that we make, in turn transform us. Our sense of self and cognitive processes are altered and changed as we become more dependent on our exterior projections. This was the case, even, with written language. With contemporary social media, this has reached a new threshold, where programmed algorithms alter our worldview and cognition, causing both neurological and societal effects.

Social media functions as an “outrage machine,” inciting intense reactivity that intensifies polarization and exacerbates the polycrisis. Over-reliance on technological prostheses–such as GPS or AI–can cause long-term changes in our cognitive capacities that ultimately get etched into the hardware of the brain. Today, an increasingly invasive form of “cognitive Capitalism” reshapes individual and collective consciousness, with little input from civil society.

The triumph of scientific materialism compelled a hyper-focus on everything that can be quantified, experimentally verified, and substantiated by the scientific method. The qualitative aspects of being and experience were dismissed as irrelevant to the march of social, technological, and economic progress. The prospect that consciousness—or any aspect of what was traditionally known as the soul or the spirit—could exist separate from the body or after death was dismissed by the secular and scientific elite, along with any access to transcendence. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, for instance, wrote that we simply had to accept that we lived transient, meaningless lives in a “universe in ruins.”

Groups like The Society for Psychical Research—founded in the 19th Century, made up of leading scientists and intellectuals of that time—or the Institute of Noetic Sciences today – seek to bring scientific rigor to the study of psychic and paranormal topics. But as materialism gained traction, such earnest efforts were generally ridiculed, ignored, or repressed.

The rise of materialism cleared away centuries of superstition, leading to a hyper-focus on left-brain rationality and evidence-based science. Anything that could not be proven, any experiment that could not produce reliable and repeatable results, was dismissed. In the inherently nihilistic universe of materialism, the individual seeks to maximize their own comfort and potential for genetic success by amassing resources for themselves. The drive to accumulate wealth staves off the existential terror of inhabiting a world without meaning or transcendence. Mass consumerism and culturally suppressed death anxiety are organic outgrowths of such a worldview. Materialist death anxiety impels the transhumanist to make the personal ego immortal, via genetic engineering or by uploading individual consciousness into a digital matrix.

We forgot that reductive materialism—the idea that the foundational elements of reality are physical or material in entirety—is only a hypothesis, an idea or a story we concocted about the world. If materialism was the most compelling story and the most likely scientific hypothesis back in the late 19th and early 20th Century, this is no longer the case today: Reductive materialism or physicalism is, today, as obsolete as Christian ideas of a paternal God with a long white beard were a few centuries ago.

The attainment of the integral structure—allowing for the integration of scientific, psychic, and sacred approaches to the nature of reality in a new synthesis—could only happen through a totalizing crisis, forcing a “mutational break” into the new structure of consciousness.

At the edge of postmodern history, we can explore other perspectives on the evolution of human consciousness. The rational, reductive mindset of the engineer or technocrat—what the Austrian philosopher Jean Gebser called the “mental-rational” consciousness structure—may not represent the end point. For Gebser, the mental-rational structure was an inevitable development that required a temporary loss of connection with the visionary, intuitive, and a-rational aspects of consciousness, traditionally associated with the feminine. Writing in the 1950s, Gebser believed we were rapidly evolving toward another consciousness structure, which he called the “integral” or “aperspectival,” where we would rediscover our underlying connection with the Cosmos in a new holism, allowing us to reintegrate psychic and sacred dimensions of reality with rational, scientific understanding.

As the constituent element of reality, consciousness, as it moves through different structures, opens different possibilities within reality itself. Hence, for aboriginal or indigenous societies, “magic” may indeed function, while it will not be accessible for those within the mental-rational consciousness structure. For Gebser, the attainment of the integral structure—allowing for the integration of scientific, psychic, and sacred approaches to the nature of reality in a new synthesis—could only happen through a totalizing crisis, forcing a “mutational break” into the new structure of consciousness.

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