Reality vanishes in a puff of logic

This post is part of a series where I hope to share some of what I’ve learned about a woefully overlooked connection between rationality and mysticism.

Many people have a deep intuition that there’s something unspeakably magical about life and existence, but struggle to fit it into a rationalist framework. Deep down, we “know” that this intuition can be nothing more than rogue neurotransmitters, presumably serving some mindless evolutionary purpose.

In my experience, there is more to the story. And it turns out that rationality, if followed meticulously to its logical conclusion, can help offer a glimpse into the experiential source of that intuition.

Your entire life unfolds entirely within your mind. Yet it is also obvious that there is an objectively reality outside of mind that is responsible for this.

But what happens when you dig very skeptically into the basis of that knowledge? It is not hard to see that you have no way of knowing whether such a hypothesis is ultimately true in any sense. But it gets worse: you find that you cannot even assign it a meaningful probability without blind faith in assumptions that cannot themselves be independently confirmed.

As Sean Carroll eloquently points out:

There is no way to distinguish between the scenarios by collecting new data.

What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities.

What does “straightforwardly realistic” mean? It means that we should pick a mental model of reality that straightforwardly matches our experience of it:

Experience --> Model

Yet it should also be obvious that causation also operates in the other direction. Your model of reality shapes your experience:

Model --> Experience

Just how heavily the causation runs in this direction is less obvious than it might first seem. Considerable meditation practice is generally helpful in seeing its full depth.

This creates a feedback loop of sorts. The mystical hypothesis might simply be expressed like this: the construct you experience as “reality” is the product of this feedback loop run amok, and the whole game is to discover what precedes it.

Make no mistake: it is, quite literally, the trickiest of all games. To give a small taste of just how tricky, reflect on how utterly real nighttime dreams feel while you’re having them. The dream maintains the illusion by denying you access to the very tools you would need to see through it.

Yet, as any lucid dreamer knows, there are mechanisms that can help puncture the illusion. They work by forcing you to inquire more precisely into the nature of the dream than you normally would.

Something very similar is going on “out here.” And rationality can either be used as a tool to intensify the feedback loop or to penetrate to its origin. Most of us are extremely well-versed in the former. I want to share my own experiences in the latter.

The lynchpin seems to be this: despite a deep intellectual understanding that I cannot be certain about the nature of reality, a very deep aspect of my mind is utterly certain anyway. This unreasonable certainty manifests itself in the following (common) line of reasoning:

Sure, maybe [radically skeptical hypothesis] is true, but rationally speaking, it shouldn’t affect my behavior; therefore, nothing is to be gained by taking it absolutely seriously.

Where examples of [radically skeptical hypothesis] might include things like:

The universe popped into being just now, with memories and evidence of the past being conveniently inserted.
Solipsism
Boltzmann Brain; Descartes’ Demon; etc.

So what if any of those are true? If those hypotheses are constructed well enough—so that there would be no way to differentiate them from my default metaphysics—then by definition they cannot provide utility. They don’t pay rent!

But there’s a way to make them pay rent: they can be used to help penetrate the irrational certainty. Under certain conditions (generally when the mind is very calm), it becomes possible to sincerely challenge one’s deepest assumption.

Why would this be useful? Because that certainty lies at the event horizon of the feedback loop that is spinning “reality” into existence. When you penetrate it, what you normally think of as “reality” vanishes in a puff of logic, and is replaced by something infinitely more wondrous.

(I hesitate to say much more about “it.” Firstly because it’s probably already sounding pretty religious—which is ironic, since, as I’ve said, one way “in” is to be more skeptical than you ever have dared before. Secondly, because people like Rumi have done an infinitely better job than I ever could. And finally, because I’m only a relative novice myself and have no business guiding others.)

One question immediately rears its obvious head: why would you believe that this “something infinitely wondrous” is not itself just the illusion of a (very real) physical brain?

The closest I can come is to offer an analogy. When you become lucid in a nighttime dream, how can you be sure that your supposed “waking self” is not just an illusion generated by some squishy stuff inside your dream-skull? The answer is that if you become lucid enough, you can gain precise insight into how and why your illusory dream-brain is being spun into apparent existence by a fiendishly clever trick, and how it therefore cannot be responsible for generating illusions of its own.

I realize that this may be deeply unsatisfying, and I’m sorry that I can’t do better. I’m not trying to convince you of what’s written here, but for those who have the suspicion that there’s something to it, I figure it’s worth sharing my own experience.

This topic is interesting enough on its own, but it’s also of practical concern. One of the insights that can be communicated “in here” goes something like this:

This world is infinitely more alive and precious and sacred than our rational minds can accept, because we’ve chosen to wholeheartedly swallow a metaphysics that denies those words even the possibility of meaning. Even if you bravely assert that you get to choose your own meaning, a deep part of you “knows” that this, too, is reducible to the flow of neurotransmitters, which are themselves reducible to fundamentally lifeless matter—the only “real” reality there is. Is it any surprise that we’re killing a world that we’ve so painstakingly “proven” is intrinsically dead?

But this “proof” is a fiendishly clever illusion. There is a meaningful sense in which the world is marvelously, deliciously alive, and rationality can help one get closer to seeing it.