Alienation and "Unassailable Experience"
What if all ontology is fundamentally about relationship and/or its absence?
(This essay continues a series that begins here.)
A few months back I started writing this series of posts by making the case that AI is unlikely to ever be sentient, because it seems unlikely that the mechanics of computing can ever generate an individualized awareness, or an “I.” This idea was expanded to make the case that it’s unlikely that matter can generate individualized “I”s as an emergent property, and then to make the case that true emergence may not exist, but instead that every possible attribute of reality is preexistent in whatever the ground of being is.
Along the way, it was noted (originally by Google Gemini) that ontologies could be grouped into five categories:
“The Stuff” — e.g., materialism and physicalism
“The Pattern” — e.g., simulation theory and the idea that the substrate of existence is math
“The Process” — e.g., relational, process theologies
“The Mind” — e.g., analytic idealism, Abrahamic theism, the Sat-Chit-Ananda of Vedanta
“The Unknown” — e.g., incomprehensible order, agnosticism, Parabrahman
And it was noted that many of these ontologies have a “first cause” problem, because they don’t really articulate a pure ontological “first cause” which, plausibly, must be substantially simple and also without limit. A little bit of time was spent here, and more succinctly here, entertaining the possibility that the universe may be incomprehensible, noting Kant’s and Gödel’s theories about the limitations of reason. But it was argued that this limitation of reason needn’t totally subvert our most fundamental intuitions about reality. Even if you accept Kant’s and Gödel’s qualifications of reason (which is reasonable to do), I think all this does is force us to hold logic a little loosely; it certainly doesn’t demand that we categorically abandon what logic suggests.
It’s just really hard to get around the idea that there has to be an uncaused cause and, therefore, to get around the suggestion that the “first cause” filter sets aside many ontologies as incomplete.
Of course, this “first cause” challenge doesn’t deter many people from adhering to ontological arguments that don’t make it through the filter. Partly, I imagine, this is because the first cause argument is a little technical, and that’s going to deflect a lot of people from even thinking about it. But also, it seems pretty clear that logic isn’t the primary heuristic by which people decide their worldviews anyway. What’s interesting to me is that it seems like there may be one other standout factor that is highly determinative of one’s ontological worldview — and that’s alienation.
In another previous post, it was noted that the physicalist worldview suggests that humans are highly alienated in the universe, and that the implication is so fundamental that a bittersweetness saturates the work of even the most compassionate apologists of physicalism. But I think it’s worth noticing that every ontology carries with it a certain characteristic alienation “temperature,” and that these temperatures might be ranged on a continuum:
“The Stuff” — Maximally alienating. Nothing in the universe gives a hoot about human experience, except other humans, sometimes, and maybe your dog. Also, at some point, all of those hoot-givers will utterly cease — and so will you.
“The Pattern” — Somewhat more comforting, but still pretty alienating. Do you like the aesthetics of form? Cool. ‘Cause that’s what’s at the bottom. Do you love the aesthetics of form? Good for you. They don’t love you back.
“The Process” — Less alienating. The universe could be a web of interbeing. Maybe God suffers?1 Here, the alienation perhaps lies mostly in the dynamism: Where’s it all headed? Does God even know?
“The Mind” — As deism or analytic idealism, this ontological category is potentially somewhat alienating. But in its fullest extension, it has the potentially to be least alienating of all. In the fullest implications of “mind,” everything exists, and resolves to, an ultimate cradle of infinitely conscious, even lovingly relational Being.
“The Unknown” — Ranging from very alienating to something transcendent of alienation altogether. When I ran some ideas through Gemini to prep this post, Gemini pointed out that this category allows for “ecstatic alienation” — which I associate with the God-fearing reaction of some Biblical personages, or the overwhelm of Arjuna glimpsing Krishna’s true form, or Jung’s conclusion that the universe is governed by something like the raw divinity, Abraxas.
What strikes me now is how significant this “alienation temperature” appears to be in determining your ontology. I’m left with the impression that, for most people, the most deeply held beliefs about the nature of the universe may actually be mediated, above all, by the question of how much alienation from the ground of reality we have to accept in the course of an incarnate human life.
Clearly, your worldview entails a certain amount of alienation from the ground and obliges you to accept it. If you believe that the universe is entirely explainable in terms of physics, you are obliged to accept the associated alienating implications, and if you believe that God is pure creativity, then you are obliged to accept the associated alienating implications of that. (Potentially much, much less alienation than with physicalism, but also, I would argue, a nonzero amount of alienation.)
But I wonder how much one’s worldview is actually determined by the amount of alienation one is willing to accept. If you believe in a deeply relational God, for instance, then it seems to me you’re likely to reject physicalism simply on the basis that its implications are so alienating. And if you accept a physicalist worldview or, say, a deist worldview (that a higher power created the universe but is not necessarily particularly involved otherwise), then it’s interesting to explore the extent to which one is led to that ontology directly from the perception that certain kinds of alienation are unavoidable.
In other words, how often is the experience of, or tolerance for alienation — or its positive opposite, relatedness — actually the basis for our ontology altogether?
It’s easy to suppose that we are always trying to keep our level of alienation to a minimum. But this wouldn’t necessarily result in everyone having the most relational worldview possible. Depending on how you see the world, you could argue for a more alienating ontology as a way to minimize your alienation. For instance:
I think that a certain amount of alienation from the ground of reality is inevitable. So I accept this, because if I resist that inevitable amount of alienation, then I am fighting reality, which will leave me even more alienated — from reality.
Or:
I think that God holds people to a standard that I can’t possibly meet. If I believe in God, I’ll have to accept that I am hopelessly alienated from God. So I accept an ontology that minimizes God, because in that way I have the experience that I am less alienated.
Both of these are examples of alienation-minimizing strategies that still involve a lot of alienation — based in certain ideas about the nature of the cosmos.
If our ontological beliefs are mediated by the amount of alienation from the ground we are willing to, or feel obliged to tolerate, we could shift the discussion about the existence or nonexistence of God, or what God is like, first, to questions like these:
Are we right about how much alienation is inevitable in the universe?
How do I know that the alienation I feel from the ground of reality is inevitable?
Or, how do I know that a particular feeling of cosmic connection, against alienation, is real?
In other words, instead of asking what is objectively real by trying to study objective reality, itself, we’re asking what’s objectively real by studying what could be objectively real about subjective experience.
To a Western mindset, this might seem a little fishy. As I’ve already noted in several preceding posts, since the Enlightenment, Western thinking has been trying to more or less escape or counteract subjectivity, not to refine it.
But by now, this shows up to many, many people, very clearly, as nothing more than neglect. There’s pretty widespread consensus that — whatever you want to call it — rationalism, objectivism, “scientism;” the prioritizing of outer, measurable fact over the register of anything actually vital, conscious, or sensate has constricted our capacity to inhabit whole domains of reality. Paul Kingsnorth might call it the triumph of “The Machine.” Ken Wilber or Bernardo Kastrup might say that empiricism has attempted to condense the qualities of human experience into mere quantities, which cannot contain their full range of meaning (Kastrup in just these terms). Charles Eisenstein talks about the “story of separation and scarcity” that grew in tandem with a mechanized approach to all of life.
As we were mechanizing and “empiricizing” the world, we were already constricting the spaces in which we agreed that we “validly” existed. But then, we also determined that the so-called objective lens we were trying to apply was actually effectively impossible, because of the limits of reason, and I think it’s clear that we were then left in even more existential discomfort. Out of faith in reason, we’d given less and less attention to our inner lives, and then reason failed, too. We were left lost, in a heat-dying universe, having little permission to feel, with no way to really know anything.
So in the end, it doesn’t seem at all less valid to study subjectivity than to take what’s typically been called the objective approach. At the very least, at this point, in the face of a metacrisis, there is perhaps nowhere more promising to go but back into ourselves and our relationships. But it also makes sense in terms of, for instance, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem2: If we allow that within any logical system, there can be statements that are obviously true without being provable, then to explore our subjective experience in search for truth is just to inquire about those very kinds of apprehensions about reality which can be self-evidently true, but which lie outside the structure of formal logic.
So how do we substantively go within? What strikes me most is not any question about the validity of studying inner experience, but more how ill-equipped the Western canon has progressively become at dealing with this sort of inquiry. In the East, there are a few standout subjective inquiry techniques: There is the Vedic practice of neti, neti — “not this, not this” — i.e., disidentifying from one phenomenon after another, until one arrives at a pure, immutable awareness. There is Ramana Maharshi’s related method of asking “Who am I?” which is not an abstracted, theoretical propositional inquiry, but a directing of attention at attention itself until, again, one arrives at a dis-identified pure awareness.
Perhaps the closest counterpart to these inquiries in the West begins with Edmund Husserl, who proposed that you could study “first person” consciousness through a process of “phenomenological reduction” (very similar to the neti, neti process of Vedanta), and that you could particularly study the active, apprehending, “intentional” part of consciousness through a process that he called “eidetic reduction” (again, a neti, neti-style reduction).
Ultimately, though, it seems worth noting that the end result of these inquiries is really different from the end result that we expect from logical, outer inquiry. It seems clear to me that the endpoint of inner inquiry is not a logically transmissible proof, necessarily, but rather “unassailable experience,” a lived experience so self-evident that it stands against any form of counter-argument.
So, as we said, if ontology is really primarily related to managing alienation, then the most important ontological question is: How do I know that the alienation or relatedness that I feel is real?
And the answer that we can expect is something like this:
The way to prove that the experience you are having is real is to have an experience that is so self-evident that it cannot be shaken by any form of argumentation.
Of course, this might seem like a very dangerous thing to say. I’ll bet, particularly these days, that anyone reading this can easily point to situations where they have observed people holding views that could not be shaken by any form of argumentation and had the feeling that those views probably should have been able to have been shaken by some form of argumentation.
I asked Gemini to stress-test this idea of ontology based in “unassailable experience,” and Gemini eventually applied four tests, which seem to me to be extremely valuable. (The summaries of the concepts are my words.)
The “Madman” Test (Gemini’s term): The unassailable experience should be demonstrably conducive to a more adaptive, functional, healthy mode of being and relating.
The “Bio-hack” Test (Gemini’s term): The unassailable experience should be translatable to uninflected awareness — i.e., it should ultimately be consistent with an awareness unaffected by extraordinary circumstances, like drugs or trauma.3
The “Triangulation” Test (my term): The unassailable experience should be verifiable by others, or conducive to consensus, however nascent or emerging that consensus is.
The “Explanatory Power” Test (Gemini’s term): The unassailable experience should be able to reasonably account for all aspects of reality and, in particular, should comprise the reasonable ways any other ontology accounts for reality — i.e., where it differs from the “Stuff,” or the “Process” ontologies, for instance, it should reasonably harmonize with everything reasonable about these.
In sum, a solid “unassailable experience” should be conducive to the (ultimate) well-being of the experiencer (with things like the parable of the king and poisoned well notwithstanding); it should be able to be integrated into the basic awareness that is the starting point for naturalist inquiry (no matter how it may, necessarily, stretch that basic awareness); it should be conducive to consensus; and it should have a way of comprising, if transcending, the reasonable parts of other belief systems.
The next question, then, is: What happens when we apply these tests to various ontologies. Does anything stand out?
This is tantalizing. But for now, it seems like it’s worth taking a minute to come up for air.
Shabbat shalom. :)
(This series continues here.)
I like this idea, and believe it.
The incompleteness theorem basically goes like this: Suppose in a logical system, S, it’s possible to articulate the following statement, G, “This statement is unprovable by S.” If Statement G is false then it is provable by System S, but if it’s provable then S is inconsistent, because S has proven something that is false. And if S is consistent, then G is true, and unprovable — which means that S is incomplete, because it can express a proposition that it cannot prove. So system S, and any system of sufficient complexity, must either be incomplete or inconsistent.
To be clear, the “unassailable experience” could originate from an altered state of consciousness, like an NDE, or a DMT experience, or an experience induced by yogic breathing techniques, but it should be integrate-able into ordinary consciousness, and not just be a peripheral “glitch” of the brain. There has been no small attempt to write off psychedelic experiences and, especially, NDEs as just this sort of glitch, but as has been noted in other posts, these counter-arguments are not particularly well-argued, because the transcendent experiences often appear to be hyper-aware experiences related to brain quiescence, not just biological misfirings.