The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality [1st ed.] 9783030490072, 9783030490089

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The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality Eugene Subbotsky

The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality

Eugene Subbotsky

The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality

Eugene Subbotsky Psychology Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-49007-2    ISBN 978-3-030-49008-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Mohd Zulfikree Mohd Sabki / EyeEm / gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

When I am writing this book, an infectious disease called Coronavirus 19 is raging around the world. Many major cities have introduced quarantine regulations in a bid to prevent the spread of the disease. Hundreds of millions of people are being locked in their homes without permission to go outdoors, save in exceptional cases and for a brief time. Temporarily taken away from their routine duties, torn away from their habitual links with the outside world, many people are looking inside their own minds with more than usual attention. What are they seeing? This book presents a version of answering that question. In Part 1 of the book (Chaps. 1–7) we will introduce the main concept—the Bubble Universe (Bubbleverse). We will show that the initial (primordial) Bubbleverse is the very foundation of our existence as a real living person, who sleeps at night, wakes up in the morning, goes to work, sometimes argues with his or her loved ones, enjoys good food and music and may have health issues and money problems. In other words, the primordial Bubbleverse is our individual and personal mind, which encompasses all that exists, including both our subjective experience (needs, thoughts and feelings) and objective reality (matter). The primordial Bubbleverse is the ground on which we firmly stand. On this ground, we grew beautiful trees: religion, science, art and morality. We will call these trees Commonverses: scientific, religious and sociocultural ones. When we grew these trees, our primordial Bubbleverse v

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became more complex, turning into the ‘Garden of Eden’—the mature Bubbleverse. We will describe this ‘Garden of Eden’ in some details: its fabric, functions and structure. While we were tending the Commonverses, something happened to us: we developed the acute interest towards cognizing our Bubbleverse. Unable to restrain our curiosity, we entered into the areas of the Bubbleverse that earlier had been forbidden to enter, from the depths of the subconscious to the high peaks of absolute truths. In Part 2 of the book (Chaps. 8–10) we will see, how science and art competed for being our guides towards cognizing and understanding the Bubbleverse, and how science finally won the competition. We will also see that as a result of its victory, the tree of science grew immensely and began to overshadow the whole Bubbleverse. Wandering in the dense crown of knowledge, we began losing the view of the ground below, forgetting that the tree of the scientific Commonverse has its roots in the soil of the primordial Bubbleverse. Armed with the methods of natural sciences, we created the ‘cognitive machines’ of knowledge and invested these machines with the power of consciousness. Not surprisingly, the machines began getting out of our control, trying to fill the whole Bubbleverse and replace our authentic Self with themselves. This ‘Great Replacement’ created the danger of us losing our personal identity and free will and viewing ourselves as puppets of our own creations. Part 3 of the book is given to attempts to understand how this dangerous situation came to be. In Chap. 11, we will descend down the trunk of the tree of science and examine, how the initially innocent ‘concessions’ to science by taking all the ‘mentality’ from physical objects gradually brought us to the situation when the human mind and Self became to be viewed as products of the blind inanimate force: evolution by natural selection. We will then show that the method of natural sciences and one of its products—the theory of evolution—have our subjective experience as one of their integral parts and therefore cannot explain this experience without plunging into the vicious circle. In Chap. 12, we will see that a similar replacement of our primordial Bubbleverse with higher powers (gods) was attempted by religion. In Chap. 13, we will investigate how our personal universe gradually ‘crystallised’ from the initially religious Commonverse, and how it manages to repulse the never stopping

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attempts of religion, science and politics to engulf our individual subjective Self and dissolve the Bubbleverse in religious, scientific and sociocultural concepts. In Chap. 14, we will disavow the popular view that life and mind may have originated from inanimate matter and show that both of these concepts arise from the reality of the primary Bubbleverse— the mind of a living individual person. In the conclusive Part 4 of the book, Chaps. 15 and 16, we will analyse how, through faith, we are able to make sense of our private universe. We will see that in a real Bubbleverse we live in a complex subjective reality, with happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, good and bad luck. We will show that it is up to the presence or absence of our own effort and good will to make our Bubbleverse a heaven or allow it to plunge into a hell. Finally, in Chap. 17 we will discuss the mysteries of our private universe, which we cannot, and probably will never be able to, solve. And the greatest wonder of all is that, despite all odds, we are able to survive and even enjoy life on the pillow of mysteries. The Ancient Greek aphorism ‘know thyself ’, inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, is known to almost everyone, but did we often follow it? Immersed in the flow of the everyday life, many of us didn’t have much time left for looking inside ourselves, and some didn’t really care. Indeed, the external world is so much clearer and more interesting than the depths of our souls, and even if we peeped in those depths, god knows what we might find hidden in there. Besides, comparatively, we live in a gentle time. For three quarters of a century there have been no major wars, endemics were taken under control, and famine, on a mass scale, is no longer a threat. In industrial cultures, an average person enjoys a long and comfortable life. So why bother and make one’s life more complicated by digging inside ‘thyself ’? Yet, at the level of the individual, something doesn’t feel right. Stranded in the vastness of cosmos, dwarfed by the astronomical and geological timescales and lost in the flows of information, a modern person, in terms of his or her significance in the universe, has somehow shrunk to the size of an ant. Indeed, while the size of the population grows, a person, in theory if not in the streets, is becoming less and less visible, gradually dissolving in the subhuman (genes, neurons and molecular nanomachines) or

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superhuman (artificial intelligence, information, the internet of things) impersonal entities. For millennia before the emergence of modern science, and for hundreds of years after, people have been suffering various hardships—hunger, pandemics and wars—but at least they viewed themselves as individuals with their own unique Selves, capable of sensing and thinking, praying to gods and acting on their free will. Psychology—a young discipline, dealing with the individual human mind, separated from philosophy and started to make its steps towards creating a nonreligious description of human conscious and subconscious processes. And suddenly in the middle of the twentieth century the ‘naïve’ belief in the human Self as a source of action and decision making began to crumble. Ironically, this seems to have happened not as a result of a pandemic or an invasion of aliens, but because of the success of science. Due to the progress of natural sciences, humanity has managed to lessen the threat of the traditional evils—hunger and mass diseases—and invention of weapons of mass destruction made global wars much less probable. But the progress of science, which made our lives so much longer and more comfortable, was made at a cost. Inspired by outstanding achievements of molecular biology, neuroscience and cybernetics, many thinkers began to believe that traditional ‘folk theories’ of the human mind became obsolete. There is no consciousness—only electrical circuits in the brain, there is no Self—only the competing ‘modules’ in the depths of a neural network. The sensations of colours, sounds, tastes and others, the feeling of free will and responsibility for our actions, the whole ‘phenomenalistic garden’ of the mind are nothing but pleasant illusions, ‘sweet dreams’, destined to be replaced by the modern conceptual models of how the mind works: evolution of complex dissipative systems, replication of genes, quantum computing and flows of information. As a result of this replacement, the value of psychology as a rational discipline studying human consciousness was put under question. In the popular view, all that remains to be of unquestionable practical value today is psychotherapy, which is a modified and secularised form of the ancient practices of magical healing and priest counselling, and the ‘history of psychology’—classification and storage of the ‘folk\false beliefs’ about the mind. Surprisingly though, these folk\false beliefs proved to be

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quite robust and resist all the efforts to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘reduce’ them to the workings of Nano-neuro-bio-quantum machines. Simply put, despite all our knowledge about genes, neurons and information circuits, all of us (and scientists are no exception) are still locked into the shells of our individual Selves. We experience pain and pleasure, suffer from illnesses, make free choices, enjoy good wine and food and do all the things that people used to do since the dawn of humanity to feel alive: we love our children, suffer from solitude and fear death. To summarise, we live in two different ‘perspectives of life’: the perspective of the individual, personal mind and the perspective of impersonal forces that govern the ‘big universe’ described in science. The perspective of the individual mind is like a soap bubble with our Self being in its centre, whereas the big universe is a ‘digital space’ in which a person is reduced to the role of a tiny cog in the enormous wheel. This book is about the universe, viewed from the former perspective—the perspective of the individual mind. * * * Natural sciences study objects, such as elementary particles, atoms, ­molecules and organisms, in a way that necessarily excludes human consciousness. The fundamental principle of natural sciences— ­ objectivity—demands that an observer can not influence the results of an observation. As a result of scientific exploration, there appears the world of scientific concepts, theories, schemes, blueprints and formulas. This world allows one to explain and predict a certain kind of phenomena— the phenomena which are believed to be independent of our Self (or consciousness) and which we call ‘natural phenomena’. The point that natural sciences exclude a conscious observer from the results of scientific exploration is important, because as a result of this exclusion scientific knowledge is devoid of mental phenomena. Thus, the work of biological machines within a living cell such as DNA and ribosomes is known down to the atomic level and is unimaginably complex and sophisticated, yet we cannot fit such entities as need, sensation, intention, perception or understanding in the workings of those machines.

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The theory of the development of life forms through natural selection, allegedly challenged the last bastion of ‘creationism’ and explained the complexity of biological structures and species without intervention of an intelligent designer. Seen against this background, psychology looks like a discipline very different from natural sciences, because the subject matter of psychology in its ‘core’ is the entity which has no admission into the space of scientific exploration. This subject matter is psyche. The term psyche originates from the Greek word ψυχή (psyche) meaning ‘life’ in the sense of ‘breath’, with the conjunct meanings such as ‘spirit’, ‘soul’, ‘ghost’ and more recently ‘Self ’ or ‘conscious personality’. In modern philosophy and psychology, the umbrella term for all of these notions is ‘mind’. Psychology is a rational discipline that explores the structure and functions of the mind, including the role the mind plays in controlling behaviour, the functioning of social groups and scientific exploration. The implication is that psychology has its own view on many concepts of science, such as space, time, object and causality (physics), life (biology) and thinking (neuroscience). It is impossible for a psychologist to study psychological phenomena objectively to the same degree as scientists who study non-­ living and living entities, because in psychology an observer (e.g., an experimenter) cannot completely separate the object under observation from the processes happening in the observer’s mind. Even when the observer takes ‘a third-person point of view’ when observing human or animal behaviour, the observer nevertheless has to project his or her mental processes into the behaviour being observed (see Chap. 11 for more on that). It is therefore not surprising that in many subfields of psychology the level of prediction achieved in natural sciences cannot be reached. Unlike science, psychology may deal with concepts that are strictly forbidden in science, such as magic and mysticism. Anthropological and psychological studies have shown that our everyday thinking and feelings are often based on concepts of magical causation (sympathetic and contagion magic), and ‘intentionality’ is an inseparable part of many psychological phenomena. It is this ‘intentionality’ that contains the elements of teleology, magical causation (sympathy, contagion and emergence from nothing) and agency within itself.

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Unlike psychology, natural sciences created the picture of a universe which is independent from a conscious observer. In this universe a human person has no privileged status. Instead, humans seem to be a ‘freak of natural evolution’, stranded on an infinitesimally small speck of matter in the boundless ocean of cold and indifferent space. Many scientists, and some philosophers too, believe that psyche is nothing but a side effect of the complex biological machine of the brain. Not surprisingly, many psychologists disagree. This book aims to draw a picture of the universe from a psychological perspective, with a conscious observer being in the centre of it. Let me call this universe a Bubble universe, or a Bubbleverse for short. The Bubbleverse, in which the Copernican revolution never happened, faithfully revolves around its centre—the human Self. In the Bubbleverse science is still important, but certain points that science makes need to be corrected and aspirations of scientists to produce a ‘theory of everything’ are ungrounded. Let us see, whether the Bubbleverse’s perspective can alter certain beliefs that we adopted from natural sciences, and change our perspectives on some hotly debated problems, such as the relations between body and mind, psychology and natural sciences, the understanding of life, consciousness and many other. In the Bubbleverse, the first ‘rule of thumb’ to follow is to remember that scientific theories do not appear by themselves. We will keep in mind that all we know about the atoms, stars, life and the human brain has been created by us, with our conscious minds. In this creation, two of our mental abilities are most important: subjective experience (seeing things, hearing things and having all other possible sensations in which the things are directly presented to our minds) and creative thinking, which is capable of analysis (dividing a whole into separate parts) and synthesis (putting the parts back together in a variety of combinations, with the aim of creating new wholes). But our mind also includes needs, which can influence our knowledge. In other words, each of us has assumptions, expectations and vested interests, which can put their mark on theories we create. For example, a scientist may develop a theory in which he or she begins to strongly believe. But scientists are human beings, who make their careers, fight for money to fund their research and strive to maintain prestige among their fellow scientists. As a result, the scientist may

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develop the need to stick to the theory even when the new facts show that the theory may not be true. This tendency of scientific theories to be biased by our needs and beliefs is called ‘ideology’ (as used in this book, the term ‘ideology’ has no political connotations). There can be various versions of ideology in human reasoning. The most typical one is scientific ideology—the belief that the whole universe can be described in terms of science. Similarly, religious ideology makes god a universal explanatory concept. Apart from these universal kinds of ideology there are multiple more specific reductionist ideologies, such as computer ideology that explains the universe in terms of units of information, evolutionary ideology that interprets all the existing species, institutes and behaviours as a product of the ‘survival of the fittest’ and neuro ideology that interprets consciousness as a product of processes in the neural networks of the brain. In fact, it is impossible for a person to be completely free from some kind of ideology. What is possible however is to consciously adopt a certain ideology and take it as an unavoidable by-­ product of reasoning. In this book, we adopt the Bubbleverse ideology— the assumption that our Self is the centre and the host of the single individual universe. The Bubbleverse ideology is not the same as solipsism—a philosophical theory that only one’s own mind really exists. Solipsism asserts that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds are nothing but images on the screen of our consciousness. In contrast, the Bubbleverse ideology holds that the objects and people outside our mind really exist while we are alive and conscious of them, but their existence must be discovered and sanctioned by our Self, and the death of the Self has a consequence that the Bubbleverse ends as well. To summarise, the purpose of this book is to create an alternative to scientific ideology, according to which our individual mind can be explained as a product of scientific knowledge: chemical reactions, natural selection, the workings of genes and neural processes in the brain or as a product of culture. The hidden flaw of scientific ideology is the omission of the fact that the scientific picture of the universe1 is constructed,  From now on, the terms ‘scientific, religious and sociocultural picture of the universe’ and ‘scientific, religious and sociocultural universe’ will be used interchangeably. 1

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both historically and in the individual development, with the help of the individual subjective experience, which thus inevitably becomes a foundational basis of the scientific picture of the universe. Unlike animals, who live within the shell of their natural environment and perceptual experience, people go beyond it and construct their own thinking by creating symbolic structures—numbers, languages, concepts and scientific theories, which will be referred to as rational constructions (RCs). Theories of the origins and evolution of life, molecular structure and workings of the genes, neural processes in the brain and cultural norms are among these RCs. Having created RCs—this artificial ‘scaffolding’ of their ‘raw’ subjective experience—people managed to make outstanding advances in their cultural development and acquired an unprecedented power over the elements. However, people didn’t stop at that and aspired for more: they now want to use RCs to explain their subjective experience. However, the subjective experience, being at the foundation for the creation of RCs, itself cannot be cognized through RCs without putting an explorer in a vicious circle. As a result, whenever a scientist is trying to generalise the explanatory function of RCs to cover subjective experience itself, he or she falls into a logical trap: the creation (RCs) is used to explain the creator (subjective experience). Following the above theoretical tenets, the book aims to make the following points: 1. Subjective experience is a foundation of our private psychological universe (the Bubbleverse); therefore, subjective experience cannot be causally deduced from scientific concepts; 2. The Bubbleverse cannot be inferred from the universe described by physical sciences. Just the opposite: we build the scientific picture of the universe on the basis of our Bubbleverse; 3. In the course of his or her individual development, a person does not shake off the Bubbleverse, but rather expands it by building the ­scientific, sociocultural and religious pictures of the universe inside his or her Bubbleverse; 4. The distinction between the Bubbleverse and the scientific picture of the universe goes across many domains of the Bubbleverse:

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(a) In the domain of origins of laws of nature and society, in the Bubbleverse the person’s own subconscious mind participates in creation and maintaining these laws, while in the scientific universe these laws emerge independently of a person in the course of cosmic evolution and historical development; (b) In the domain of the role of a person in the universe, in the Bubbleverse a person is the centre; the Bubbleverse hinges on the person’s existence and disappears with the person’s death. In contrast, in the scientific universe a person’s existence is a fleeting moment in the ocean of space and time; (c) In the domain of fabric of the universe, the Bubbleverse is a feast of sensual experiences—colours, sounds, tastes, feelings and emotions, while the scientific universe is predominantly built of rational constructions and abstract notions; (d) In the domain of social behaviour, in the Bubbleverse behaviour is determined by our private needs, whereas in the scientific, sociocultural and religious universes it is controlled by genes, and moral and social norms (developed by society or given by god); (e) In the domain of understanding the Self, in the Bubbleverse our Self is a Central Agent of the mind, and a holder of freedom of action and personal responsibility. In contrast, in the scientific universe the Self is an illusion, whereas the mind is viewed as a useful machine working via a set of separate modules; (f ) In the domain of understanding life, in the Bubbleverse the defining feature of a living entity is subjective experience—the ability of a living organism to sense its own states; in contrast, in the scientific universe life is a result of the evolution of insensitive complex molecules; (g) In the domain of origins of knowledge, in the Bubbleverse the Self gets all new ideas from the subconsciousness via intuition, whereas in the scientific universe the new ideas are predominantly ­constructed from already available RCs through logical inferences and causal reasoning; (h) In the domain of understanding the truth, in the Bubbleverse the truth is a personal and individual experience, whereas in the scientific universe the truth is one for all. In the Bubbleverse miracles

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can occur, not only in dreams but in reality, whereas in the scientific universe miracles are viewed as false beliefs; (i) In the domain of experiencing death, in the Bubbleverse death is viewed as the most significant event in the person’s life, as it is the end of the Bubbleverse. In the scientific universe, death of an individual is a natural event and a passing case, which affects the universe little if at all.

The Bubbleverse has many more interesting features that will be explored in this book. Welcome to the Bubbleverse. Lancaster, UK

Eugene Subbotsky

Contents

Part I The Bubbleverse   1 1 Introduction  3 1.1 Giants in a Deadlock   3 1.2 A Person in the Psychological Multiverse   5 1.3 Turning the Tables   6 1.4 Making a Break   8 1.5 Science and Us   9 1.6 Changing Perspectives  10 1.7 A Brief Glossary  13 References 14 2 What and Why of the Bubbleverse 17 2.1 What is the Bubbleverse?  17 2.2 Do We Need the Bubbleverse? Fighting the Doubts  20 2.3 Why Think in Terms of the Bubbleverse: Advantages  22 2.4 Bigverse versus Bubbleverse  30 References 36 3 Grounding the Bubbleverse 39 3.1 The Impossibility of the World Without Us  39 3.2 Evidence for the Bubbleverse: Physics  43 xvii

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3.3 Empirical Evidence—Parapsychology  50 3.4 Living in the Bubbleverse: Conclusion  60 References 62 4 The Fabric of the Bubbleverse 65 4.1 A Magical Gap  65 4.2 The Layer Cake: Components and Hierarchy  67 4.3 Qualia and Sensations: Where is the ‘Redness’ Really?  71 4.4 The Shining Bubbleverse: Phenomena  77 4.5 Rational Constructions: The Phenomena ‘Sun-dried’  78 4.6 Anchoring in the Social World: Beliefs  80 4.7 Taming the Chaos: Conclusion  81 References 82 5 The Diversity of the Phenomenal World 83 5.1 Waking Up into the Bubbleverse  83 5.2 Comparisons, Measurement and Extraction of Meanings 86 5.3 The Relationships of Phenomena Between Themselves  89 5.4 The Relations of Phenomena to Our Self  92 5.5 The Relations of Phenomena to Rational Constructions  93 5.6 The Relations of Phenomena to the Idea of Truth  95 5.7 The Relations of Phenomena to Themselves  97 5.8 Fight Within the Mind: Perception Against Knowledge 100 5.9 So, What’s Next? The Conclusion 109 References110 6 Self in Multiple Universes113 6.1 The Magical Projector: Self in the Bubbleverse 113 6.2 The Elusive Observer: Self in the Commonverse 118 6.3 Central Agent Versus Pandemonium: Do We Really Need the Self? 119 6.4 Catching the Invisible Self 123 6.5 Conclusion: Why Do We Need the Self? 135 References136

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7 Structure of the Bubbleverse139 7.1 A Place Where Monsters Live 139 7.2 Laws of Nature: Building the Commonverse 140 7.3 Perceiving and Imagining Things: Two Types of Reality 144 7.4 The Body of the Bubbleverse 150 7.5 Nowhere to Run: Conclusion 153 References154 Part II  Cognizing the Bubbleverse 157 8 The Black Hole of the Bubbleverse159 8.1 Subconscious in the Bubbleverse 159 8.2 Plunging into the Depths 170 8.3 Dreaming the Subconscious 175 8.4 Communication with the Subconscious: Conclusion 178 References179 9 Truth in the Bubbleverse181 9.1 What is My House Really Like? The Question of Truth 181 9.2 Shrinking Buildings and Impossible Bricks: Existence in the Core Bubbleverse 182 9.3 Mermaids and Parallel Universes: Truth and Existence in the Commonverse 183 9.4 Illusions that Work: Conclusion 191 References193 10 Exploring the Bubbleverse195 10.1 Order from Chaos: The Dawn of Cognition 195 10.2 The Blind Spot of Cognition 198 10.3 The Revolt of Machines 200 10.4 Neuroscience: The Unaccomplished Dream 203 10.5 Sculpting Phenomena: The Artist as an Explorer 207 10.6 Art Versus Science: The Silent Dispute 209 10.7 The Great Replacement: Conclusion 211 References213

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Part III  Expanding the Bubbleverse 217 11 The Great Replacement in Perspective: The Hi-story of Science219 11.1 History and Hi-story 219 11.2 Observing the Divine: The Emergence of Science 221 11.3 Folk Psychology as a Cradle of Science 223 11.4 Scientific Explanation as Subdued Animism 227 11.5 Evolution as Implicit Design 230 11.6 Evolution through the Prism of the Bubbleverse 235 11.7 Nature as a Narcissistic Mirror 239 11.8 Jumping from the Train: Conclusion 244 References246 12 The Hi-story of Religion251 12.1 The Hoop of Life 251 12.2 The Invention of Gods 252 12.3 Gods and the Supernatural in the Bubbleverse 258 12.4 Dreaming of the Gods: Conclusion 263 References265 13 The Hi-story of the Bubbleverse267 13.1 Arising from a Myth: The Early Bubbleverse 267 13.2 The Philosophical Bubbleverse 269 13.3 Bowing to the God: The Biblical Bubbleverse 270 13.4 Personalising the Bubbleverse: Christianity 271 13.5 Throwing God Off the Pedestal: The Raise of Science 271 13.6 Omega Point: Dreaming of the Future 274 13.7 The Little Bang: The Hi-story of Child Development 275 13.8 Getting Away from Leviathan: Conclusion 280 References282 14 The Hi-story of Life285 14.1 Life Through the Prism of the Bubbleverse 285 14.2 Life in the Commonverse 289

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14.3 Types of Mentality 297 14.4 The Miracle of Life: Conclusion 301 References303 Part IV  Experiencing the Bubbleverse 307 15 Transcending the Bubbleverse309 15.1 Other People 309 15.2 Faith in the Bubbleverse 312 15.3 Transcending 316 15.4 The Rise of Morality 319 15.5 The Meaning of Life: Conclusion 323 References324 16 Properties of the Bubbleverse327 16.1 Evil as a Shadow of Good 327 16.2 Death in the Bubbleverse 330 16.3 Unhappiness in the Bubbleverse 333 16.4 Luck in the Bubbleverse 334 16.5 The Unpredictable Bubbleverse: Conclusion 339 References340 17 The Cosmic Train: A Summary of Sorts341 The Mysteries of the Bubbleverse: Epilogue349 Index355

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5

Decline of the paranormal effect with time of testing in Study 1, Experiment 1 (Subbotsky & Ryan, 2009) 53 Decline of the paranormal effect with time of testing in Study 1, Experiment 2 (Subbotsky & Ryan, 2009) 54 Decline of the paranormal effect with time of testing in Study 2 (Subbotsky, 2013) 57 The texture of the Bubbleverse 70 Number of answers (out of 32) localising sensations in a subject and not in the objects as a function of age and type of sensation 75 The relationships between my Self, other Self, beliefs and gods 81 The relationships between the Self, internal and external worlds, animated and inanimate phenomena 84 The relationships between my Self, other Self, perceived object and the thing-in-itself 85 The relationships between the thing-in-itself, phenomena and rational construction 87 Visual displays used to test the practical effectiveness of knowledge (PEK) versus phenomena in Experiments 1, 2 and 3 103 Quasi-scientific explanation of the change of liquid’s colour in Experiment 3 [15] 107

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.1

The Self 0-mind (B1), Meaning-responsive Self (B2) and Executive Self (B3) The 3.5-year-old child’s performance on drawing a pattern with (row c) and without (rows a, b and d) self-generated loud speech The 5-year-old child’s performance on drawing a pattern with (row c) and without (rows a, b and d) self-generated loud speech Percentage of children who passed LHG test, as a function of age (years) Field-independence test with confusing social pointing: the child (left), the experimenter (front) and the child’s partner (right) (Subbotsky, 1993) Percent of children who passed the LHG confusing social pointing test, as a function of age (years) and the level of Self ’s activity: involved (action test) versus uninvolved (verbal test) Percent of children who passed the LHG confusing social pointing test, as a function of age (years) and partner (adult versus peer) Testing for the transcending Self. The child is being instructed on the task (1); the child is left alone and discovers that doing the task without cheating is impossible (2); the child moves the balls with his hands (3); the child tells the instructor that he had moved the balls with the scoop and not with his hands (4) Structure of the Bubbleverse Relationships between an object (distant stimulus—1), retinal projection (proximal stimulus—2) and brain in classical theories of perception Relationships between thing-in-itself (1), retinal projection (2), phenomenal subjective image that we see (3) and RC (4) in the Bubbleverse The relations between conscious mind, subconscious mind and potential knowledge entities (PKEN) in the Bubbleverse Percent of dreams as a function of Condition (magical suggestion versus no-suggestion) and Type of dream (target, scary and ordinary)

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6

Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4

125 127 128 129 130

131 131

133 151 161 164 167 177

  List of Figures 

Fig. 9.1

The scheme of the relations of existentialisation for presenting phenomena in the Commonverse Fig. 9.2 The scheme of the relations of existentialisation for RCs in the Commonverse Fig. 11.1 Necker Cube Fig. 12.1 Percent of participants who prohibited the experimenter’s symbolic action aimed at affecting their future lives, as a function of the outcome desirability (desirable versus undesirable) and context (magic loaded versus magic free)

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184 186 236

262

List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 5.4 Table 6.1 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 9.1 Table 13.1 Table 14.1 Table 16.1 Table 17.1

The relation of phenomena to the Self, as a function of authorship and controllability 93 The relation of phenomena to RCs, as a function of knowledge resistance and commensurability 95 The relations of phenomena to the idea of truth, as a function of truthfulness and possibility 97 The relations of phenomena to themselves, as a function of transparency and presentation 99 Types of Self 135 The laws of extraordinary reality versus the laws of ordinary reality147 Domains of reality versus sections of the conscious part of the Bubbleverse 152 Structure of the Bubbleverse, as a function of Level of the Self ’s activity and Domain of reality 153 Existential statuses of entities in the Bubbleverse 190 Hi-storical types of the Bubbleverse, as a function of centration and polarisation 275 Types of mentality, types of subjective experience and types of behaviour of living entities 301 Types of participatory death in the Bubbleverse, as a function of orientation and value 333 The distinctions between the core Bubbleverse and the Commonverses across domains 345 xxvii

Part I The Bubbleverse

1 Introduction

1.1 Giants in a Deadlock Since ancient times, thinkers were trying to answer fundamental questions about our universe and the role a person has in it: “Why is the universe the way it is? How did it emerge? What is life? What is the origin of consciousness? Do gods exist? Are conscious observers a necessary part of the universe, or are they a side effect of its development? What happens to our souls when we die?” The answers to these questions varied, but the common ground that united the answers was the assumption that the universe we live in is one and the same for all of us. The concept universe comes from Latin universum—meaning literally ‘the whole turned into one’ (from unus—‘one’), so it was logical to assume that, although the answers varied, all of them referred to the same thing. Myths and religions gave a number of answers to the aforementioned questions, and in the last centuries science joined the club. Not all of the answers that science gave are proven, many of them (e.g., on origins of the universe, origins of life, origins of consciousness and morality) are inaccessible for the empirical check, yet the answers had to fit the general tenet of scientific world outlook. As a result, the © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_1

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answers that science gave often are in direct contradiction to our intuitive understanding and look more like the ‘party line’, the ideological slogans of the ‘religion of science’ rather than the truth about reality. The mainstream scientific theory of the origins of the universe, known as the ‘Big Bang theory’, closely resembles an act of a creation, yet some scientists emphatically deny the existence of god. The emergence of life, let alone consciousness in the course of evolution of dead matter looks like an instance of magic, but science denounces magic as a false belief and rejects the idea that supernatural events exist. Intuitively every person believes that inside his or her mind there is a central agent called ‘Self ’; we know that we possess freedom of action and are individually responsible for our conscious deeds; in contrast, science cannot accept that our decisions are made without causal determination, and some scientists and philosophers deny the existence of the Self. Every one of us can see colours, hear sounds and experience sensations of taste; nevertheless, from the scientific point of view all these subjective experiences are nothing but epiphenomena which accompany physical processes: electromagnetic and air waves and molecular compositions of substances that we eat. These and other controversial views on the most important theoretical issues have been intensely debated for centuries, yet the common solutions seem to be as far away from us now as they were in the times of Descartes and Galileo. So, what is going wrong? Why is it the case that the most brilliant minds, with all their efforts to find common ground, have been unable not only to come to agreed solutions, but even to reconcile their views? Might it not be that the discussions on the issues contain a fundamental epistemological flaw which brought the discussants into a deadlock? In this book, I will make an attempt to show that such a flaw does indeed exist, and this flaw is the fundamental assumption that a human person lives in only one universe.

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1.2 A Person in the Psychological Multiverse Some cosmologists put forward the hypothesis that the Big Bang might not be a unique event. Instead, as our universe is expanding, Big Bangs happen here and there, giving birth to other independent universes, which the cosmologists called bubbles. As these bubbles are driven apart, other bubbles sprout out of them. We live in one of these bubbles [1]. In psychology, this mind-bending hypothesis finds its analogy in the fact of the psychological ‘bubble universes’—individual human minds. When a child is born, a new little individual universe, which we call the Bubbleverse, appears in this world, with the unique sensations, feelings and dreams. At the moment, there are about 7.5 billion of such bubbleverses in the world, whereas, according to estimates by Population Reference Bureau (PRB), for the last 50,000 years, more than 108 billion members of our species have walked the Earth [2]. Importantly, most of all these people strongly believed that their private bubbleverses are parts of a much larger universe—the Commonverse. While the Bubbleverse is the universe we are born into, the Commonverse we build inside the Bubbleverse. Perhaps, there was a time when a human person, like an animal, lived only in his or her Bubbleverse. For such a person, the world was limited by the person’s perceptual environment. An early human individual was encapsulated in the eggshell of his or her immediate perceptions and feelings, unable to pierce this barrier with the sparkle of creative imagination. But then, and rather suddenly, people discovered the idea of the invisible world of spirits, invented paintings, sculptures and other symbols to communicate with this invisible world, and the magnificent work of constructing the Commonverse began. With the emergence of abstract languages people created mythology, and mythology laid the foundation for religious Commonverse. Later the language of mathematics and philosophy allowed people to create what would subsequently become a scientific Commonverse. This symbolic artificial Commonverses, consisting of religious beliefs and scientific theories, made it possible to drastically change the initial Bubbleverse, by adding to it what we call culture: buildings, machines, bridges, social

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customs and cultural traditions. As a result, the initial primordial Bubbleverse divided within itself: part of it remained as a private ‘core Bubbleverse’, which contains our sensations, dreams, feelings and desires, but other parts transformed into the religious, scientific and sociocultural Commonverses. And today we have no choice but to live in the psychological multiverse—our personal Bubbleverse containing enormous artificial ‘scaffoldings’ inside—the Commonverses. Apart from these Commonverses within my own Bubbleverse, there are innumerable other bubbleverses each belonging to other people and any creature which is sentient (see Chap. 13 for more on that). In this book we assume that the structure of the primordial Bubbleverse (both historically and in a new-born baby) is complex and disorderly. Speaking metaphorically, being born is like landing on a new planet: you see some familiar features, like rivers and mountains, but don’t really know whether you can drink the water or what kind of creatures might be inhabiting it. Not surprisingly, people invented Commonverses in order to make this chaotic Bubbleverse simpler and more comprehensible. But danger was lurking underneath—the danger of going too far down the line of simplification, up to writing the Bubbleverse off altogether and along with the Bubbleverse giving up the person’s Self and mind.

1.3 Turning the Tables Like the character of the famous Greek myth, a sculptor named Pygmalion, who fell in love with his own creation—the statue he named Galatea—we fell in love with the Commonverses. First, the religious Commonverse became a subject of our devotion, for its remarkable ability of explaining everything in the world and giving us the hope for eternal life. Next, the scientific Commonverse took the stage. The scientific Commonverse is devoid of colours and tastes, it is nothing but a mental construction of enormous proportions, but for us it possesses a magical charm, because it allows us to understand, predict and control the chaotic phenomenal world of the Bubbleverse, diminishes the ever-present

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danger of famine and diseases and gives us the endless supply of useful toys in the form of cars and electronic gadgets. But the Greek myth had a twist: the goddess of love, Aphrodite, took pity on Pygmalion and brought the statue to life. It appears that today this twist is coming true as well. Not only did we fall in love with the Commonverses, but we began to believe that the Commonverses—our own creation—have a life of their own. We are missing the fact that the Bubbleverse is our primary universe, an end in itself, while the Commonverses are only tools we made for our convenience. Instead, we began to worship the Commonverses and view ourselves as their creation. Having turned the tables, we started to see our Bubbleverse as a complex machine, to believe that our bodies are vehicles for carrying our genes, our Self is an illusion that accompanies the workings of the brain and our personality is a puppet of the interplay between hereditary and environmental influences. Charmed by this ‘Copernican revolution’, we began to disregard the fact that the scientific Commonverse is a result of selection, in which the ‘imperfections’ of raw phenomena of the Bubbleverse are eliminated and only the objects’ pure essences left. As a result, from all the diverse reality of the Bubbleverse, only selected entities were let through the net into the scientific Commonverse, with the rest being left out. And the entities we left out are not only ancient myths, ghost stories and magical incantations of shamans; the phenomena such as life, consciousness, free will, art and the Book of Genesis too were among the rejected. And because it is impossible for us to completely shake the Bubbleverse off and transfer ourselves into the reality constructed by science, the tension on the Bubbleverse/scientific Commonverse borders continues to mount. Whereas activities such as art, morality and religion can be discounted as completely unscientific, it is not so easy for science to ignore disciplines that rely on empirical methods. Psychology, economics and other social sciences accumulate phenomena which do not meet the strict demand of replicability, but still allow to predict human behaviour. Parapsychology knocks on the door of the scientific Commonverse with the effects that undermine the very foundation of scientific method—the requirement that the results of observation were independent of the observer’s mind. Some philosophers argue that certain phenomena, such

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as life and consciousness, though inexplicable in terms of science, could occasionally happen in the physical universe. Finally, physicists and cosmologists themselves stumble upon phenomena that closely resemble miracles, such as ‘quantum entanglement’, the ‘fine tuning’ of the fundamental cosmological constants and the ‘Big Bang’.

1.4 Making a Break Perhaps the time has come to think again of ‘who the boss is’ in the life of a person. Let us remind ourselves that every human individual lives in his or her Bubbleverse, which contains the scientific Commonverse inside but still is full of mysteries and unexplainable phenomena. I don’t know why me, exactly that person with exactly that body, this colour of eyes and these birthmarks, was called into life. I don’t know why I am given consciousness and freedom of choice, and what is my destiny in this life. I don’t know whether I live or die tomorrow and what happens after I die. We are not even sure of whether the world will remain after we are gone, or it will cease to exist. In these, and many other issues we have to rely on hope, guessing and faith, rather than knowledge. The most important things in our lives: our psychological and physical wellbeing, the life and health of our loved ones, the destiny of our homeland, humanity and the magnificent planet we live on—all of them are squeezed into our personal Bubbleverse. With most of these things the scientific Commonverse has no final say, and we are still in the hands of the ancient ‘fatum’, or destiny. What we value the most—beauty, kindness and dignity—are concepts alien to the scientific Commonverse. But why do we need this reminder? Saying that there are things science can’t account for, not due to temporary limitations of scientific knowledge, but in principle—does it add anything to our life? [3].

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1.5 Science and Us Since the dawn of science, humanity has been increasingly taking the person-decentred view of the world. Finally, modern science made a person almost completely invisible. Science made our life safer and more comfortable but took away the meaning of life. There is no god, no eternal life, and the humanity is lost in the boundless and silent cosmos. Even here, on Earth, a person is just a complex combination of atoms, genes and electrical circuits in the brain. Making the individual disappear may be necessary for scientific methodology, but make no mistake—the scientific picture of the universe is only an abstraction, a model. It is wrong to identify this abstraction with a real human individual. A real person is a holder of an emergent quality—the need for a meaning of life. The attempts to discover that meaning in religion and myth some scientists view as an illusion, and a harmful illusion at that. And what might that meaning be, from the scientists’ point of view? The best science can offer is to declare that a person’s ultimate destiny is to cognize the universe. But what for? To make our life even safer and more comfortable? But these improvements in life, however desirable, will not save a person from illnesses and death. Coincidentally, when I am writing these lines, most countries of the world are shut for travel, to prevent the spread of the new virus Covid19. Perhaps, the joy of cognition is the end in itself, the ultimate goal of human life, like art can exist for the sake of art. But if the pleasure of scientific discovery is the ultimate goal of life, this pleasure is increasingly undermined by science itself. Science converted a person from a favourite creature of God into a machine—yes, a complex biological one, yet still a machine, and a mortal machine at that. The immortal soul was thrown into a wastebasket, and consciousness declared to be a product of the brain. The human-machine is becoming increasingly knowledgeable about the universe, and about its own origins and mechanics; the human-machine creates other complex machines—the AI—which is believed to eventually surpass humans in knowledge and perhaps replace humanity in the universe. The universe itself is doomed: in 7.5 billion years, the Sun will become a red giant and engulf the earth, and in a still longer time the universe will freeze

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completely or come to its end in some other way [4,5]. If this perspective is a meaning of human life, then it is a really gloomy meaning. It appears that science strictly follows the prophecy of the wise king of Israel: “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief ” (Ecclesiastes 1:18). But what if diminishing a human role in the universe was a wrong way to go? What if a human person is not an emergent property of the universe, but is the centre of the universe? What if the Copernican revolution, which took our blue planet out from the centre of the universe, happened only in the scientific Commonverse, but not in the person’s private universe? Without aspiring to be ‘the ultimate and only truth’, this idea is certainly worth investigation. And in some sense, this idea is true. As a physical body, a person may be a microscopic ‘monad’ in the great play of the big universe, but he or she is certainly king in his or her private psychological universe. Perhaps, looking at the universe from this ‘person-centred’ point of view might help us to discover some truths about the person and the universe which remain hidden in the scientific grand scheme of things?

1.6 Changing Perspectives In the ancient world, two perspectives on the universe were fighting for dominance. One of them belonged to philosophers like Pythagoras and Plato, who viewed spiritual entities as primary elements in the universe, whereas physical entities were viewed as secondary. For Plato physical objects were shadows of ideas on the screen of the mind, and Pythagoras believed physical things to be combinations of numbers. The second perspective was proposed by materialistically oriented thinkers, such as Democritus and Leucippus, who maintained that the universe and people consisted of spiritless entities, which they called atoms. It turned out that in the modern world the second, materialistic orientation took the upper hand. As a result, the notion of the soul was abandoned, and the mind came to be viewed as derivative of biological (neural networks in the brain) and physical (molecules, atoms and elementary particles) matter.

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The victory of the materialistic picture of the world had two consequences. On one hand, this victory gave rise to modern science and technology, and resulted in the outstanding technical advances of modern civilisation. On the other hand, it put the role of the mind in cognition under question. Being a side effect of material processes, the mind dropped out of the scope of scientific enquiry. It became a problem to understand how something non-physical and spiritual could have emerged from physical processes, either in the course of evolution of inanimate entities such as genes, or in the course of the work of the brain. At the same time, nobody can deny that mental processes, such as observation and thinking, are involved in every act of cognition. As a result, in the perspective of natural sciences mental processes came to be treated as epiphenomena—something that appears to exist but has no say in the real world. This controversial view on the role of the mind had repercussions for physical sciences, creating puzzles such as a direct action of observation on behaviour of quantum objects (see Chap. 3 for more on that). But a branch of knowledge that suffered most from the domination of the materialistic viewpoint was psychology. Despite psychology having gained some respect for its practical applications in branches like engineering, occupational counselling and psychotherapy, the position of psychology among other sciences remains unclear [6]. As long as consciousness and the mind are viewed as derivative of physical processes, psychology can’t be acknowledged to be a proper science. Indeed, the ‘laws of psychology’ are not even close to the laws of physics and chemistry in terms of stability and universality [7]. The primary subject matter of psychology—the mind and consciousness—has an uncertain ontological status and needs to constantly be protected from accusations of being something illusory. Finally, the human soul—something that intuitively is sensed by every human person as the very core of personality—is ousted from psychological research and given away to religion and literary fiction. Of course, these aforementioned problems don’t mean that the materialistic perspective is all wrong. Moreover, materialism has many obvious virtues—simplicity, consistency and comprehensibility; its only weakness is that it has little to say about life, consciousness and the mind. The

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simplicity of materialistic ideology may be one of the reasons why Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection was such a success in the modern world, even though Darwin himself did not aspire to explain the origins of life or consciousness, and was not an atheist. The Neo-Darwinism of today much advanced Darwin’s theory, adding to this theory materialistic understanding of the sources of variation (genetic mutations) and conservation of useful changes in subsequent generations through transmission of genes. But uncovering complex molecular mechanisms of heredity did not solve the problem of our understanding of origins of life and consciousness. The question of how dead matter somehow acquires agency, intentionality and ultimately reflective consciousness remains a mystery. But what if the perspective is changed? What if the mind is taken as the basis of the universe, with physical entities—molecules, atoms and quantum objects—being, at least partially, a product of the mind? Not an intentional, purposeful product, like a car is a product of the automobile factory, but a product, nevertheless? What if the brain, body and the rest of the material world are not the creators of the mind, but inherently include representations, in creation of which the mind had a crucial role? This change of perspective does not imply that the scientific view on the universe is undermined or diminished in value. What this change implies though is that the scientific materialistic perspective becomes a part of a new broader perspective. Accordingly, the aim of this book is an attempt to alter the perspective and see how the role of consciousness in the modern world might have changed if the spiritual perspective on the universe were a winner in the battle for the world outlook. This is not to say that Plato was right and the individual mind is determined by the outworldly ideas; rather, the new perspective gives the ‘right of primacy’ to the individual mind itself. And so, we create the Bubbleverse—a universe revolving around an individual, with the Self being in its centre. In the Bubbleverse, the individual mind, with its sensations, perceptions and feelings, cannot be reduced to physical constructs: atoms, genes and electrical circuits in neurons. Just the opposite, in the Bubbleverse physical constructs are products of human subjective experience projected by our mind into the things-in-themselves (see Chaps. 3 and 5 for more on that). In this

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anthropo-self-centred universe cognitive constructs such as gods, numbers, information, genes, generative grammars and virtual realities do exist, but their roles are sanctioned by our Self. Like some of our habits, which we are unable to control, the external physical reality is made by our Self, yet it is ‘externally real’. In other words, in the Bubbleverse individual psychology, rather than being a foam on the surface of the ocean of scientific knowledge, rules the waves, and the Sun keeps revolving around the Earth. Let us see what this means for our understanding of the universe and our role in it.

1.7 A Brief Glossary Bigverse—the umbrella term for commonverses. Bubbleverse—a person’s private universe, containing the whole world, both internal world of the mind and external world of the cosmos. Core Bubbleverse (in the everyday language this concept is partially covered by the term ‘private life’)—an irreducible remainder that a person retains from the primordial Bubbleverse when the person creates the commonverses. The core Bubbleverse constantly reminds the person that the commonverses are only an artificial scaffolding built inside and on the base of the primordial Bubbleverse. On this ground the concepts of the core Bubbleverse and the primordial Bubbleverse will be used as interchangeable. Existentialisation—making a decision of whether an object is real or unreal, via comparing the object’s phenomenon, image and RC between themselves. Hi-story—a narrative aimed at extending any concept within the Bubbleverse in the past or the future. Partially coincides with regular history, but without the belief in that historical events had really happened without us being a witness. Image—a phenomenon’s mental representation, held in the imagination. Phenomenon—an object or a process as it is presented to us by our sensations and feelings, without being mediated by scientific concepts and logical thinking.

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Primordial Bubbleverse—the Bubbleverse of animals, early humans and a new-born baby, that exists before the creation of commonverses. Rational Construction (RC)—an essence of a group of similar phenomena, converted by logical thinking into scientific concepts and theories and presented to us in the form of words, numbers, formulas and geometrical figures. This concept is related to notions such as a schema or a cognitive template. Religious Commonverse—the picture of the universe created within the Bubbleverse through beliefs in gods, for the purpose of transcending the Bubbleverse and comprehending natural and social phenomena. Science generated object—a bunch of related phenomena processed by scientific exploration, supplied with an RC and written down into the whole context of available knowledge. Scientific Commonverse—the picture of the universe created within the Bubbleverse through rational and logical thinking, for the purpose of comprehending natural phenomena of the Bubbleverse. Sociocultural Commonverse—the Commonverse, created through rational and logical thinking for the purpose of comprehending social and cultural phenomena of the Bubbleverse.

References 1. Borde, A., Guth, A. H., & Vilenkin, A. (2003). Inflationary space-times are incomplete in past directions. Physical Review Letters, 90, 151301. 2. Kaneda, T., & Haub, C. (2018). How many people have ever lived on earth? Retrieved from https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/ 3. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/dawkbody.html 4. Wang, Y., Kratochvil, J.  M., Linde, A., & Shmakova, M. (2004). Current observational constraints on cosmic doomsday. Journal of Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics, 12, 006. 5. Adams, F. C., & Laughlin, G. (1997). A dying universe: The long-term fate and evolution of astrophysical objects. Reviews of Modern Physics, 69, 337–372.

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6. Jogalekar, A. (2013). Is psychology a “real” science? Does it really matter? Scientific American. Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ the-curious-wavefunction/is-psychology-a-e2809creale2809d-science-doesit-really-matter/ 7. Lehrer, J. (2010). The Truth Wears Off. The New Yorker, 52–57. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wears-off

2 What and Why of the Bubbleverse

2.1 What is the Bubbleverse? The Bubbleverse is a universe with a centre in the individual person. Our person is the sun in the ‘solar system’ of the Bubbleverse. Alternatives to the Bubbleverse are the universes in which a human person is derivative of a more fundamental subject or an impersonal substance. In the Judeo-­ Christian tradition this subject is God, for German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) it was the Absolute Spirit (Geist, sometimes also translated as ‘mind’) [1], for British biologist Richard Dawkins this fundamental substance is a bearer of hereditary information—a complex organic molecule called gene [2], and for Russian philosopher Georgy Schedrovitsky (1929–1994) it is impersonal ‘thinking as such’ [3]. These alternative universes consider a human person to be a vehicle for, or a product of, a greater entity. In contrast, in the Bubbleverse these super individual entities are not granted an independent existence; rather, they are contained within the Bubbleverse, and are created by subconscious or conscious effort of our Self. The Bubbleverse hypothesis doesn’t say that there is no external world outside my Self. It also doesn’t say that the external world is a product of © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_2

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my Self. As Immanuel Kant argued, from just thinking of my own existence it follows with necessity that there is something outside of my Self to compare my Self with. If I say, ‘I exist’ I have to assume that there is a thing which is ‘not I’, and so something must exist beyond my Self. All the Bubbleverse hypothesis contends is that the universe exists for as long as my Self exists. In other words, the Bubbleverse appears with my Self and disappears when my Self disappears. It is possible of course, and even natural for my Self to imagine the universe before my Self and after my Self. But these ‘before’ and ‘after’ universes are the products of my thinking and imagination, and not the phenomenon as the present Bubbleverse is. Finally, in the Bubbleverse personal death means the end of the world as a whole, including the science-shaped reality with all its galaxies, black holes and ‘laws of nature’. Even if a person gives his or her life voluntarily for a good cause, the result will be the dive into Nothing. From the Bubbleverse’s perspective, the whole world is born and gone with a particular person, only to be reborn with another person as a new and unique one. The mystery of birth, death and rebirth of the individually tailored universes is one of many supernatural and mysterious events that abound in the Bubbleverse, and we need to have the courage to acknowledge this. In the scientific universe—the Commonverse—the Copernican revolution in cosmology made humankind realise that Earth is not the centre of the universe; rather, humankind is stranded on a tiny speck of matter formed from cosmic dust and lost in empty space among the trillions of other stars and galaxies. Not so in the Bubbleverse. In the Bubbleverse, the Copernican revolution in cosmology did not change the fact that all the cosmos revolves around our person. It doesn’t mean that the Bubbleverse is a solitary universe; to the contrary, the Bubbleverse includes representations of all bubbleverses of other people, animals and other sentient entities. However, the Bubbleverse doesn’t have direct access to other bubbleverses, which are represented in the Bubbleverse by the other living entities’ bodies and behaviours. Our Self is connected with other bubbleverses through observation, actions and languages. When scientists create theories of the physical structure of the universe, this doesn’t mean that they go beyond their Bubbleverses as there can be no external point of view in the Bubbleverse. As a result, the

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physical universe and even the physical multiverses of various kinds [4] are necessarily contained inside the Bubbleverse of a scientist who created them. When a scientist believes that human thinking is a result of quantum processes going on inside the brain [5], the scientist overlooks the fact that the theories of brain structure and quantum particles had been created by that same thinking these theories are trying to explain. As far as it concerns the belief in the multiverse, the belief doesn’t change the fact that the other worlds are contained in the scientist’s actual Bubbleverse, similar to a Russian nesting doll. In other words, in the Bubbleverse we cannot avoid the idea of our mind being a single frame of reference and a final judge of all the physical transformations. When physicists talk about parallel universes, they imply that the observer (the mind) is entangled with the observed physical reality in a single system and changes together with this system in the process of observation. This means that at any act of observation (i.e., the collapse of the wavefunction)1 the universe splits into as many possibilities as there are available, each becoming a separate individual universe, with the observer’s person multiplying correspondingly. In the Bubbleverse such a split is impossible by definition, since all the multiple universes that emerge are still being observed— directly or not—by the same single mind—my mind. In other words, from the assumption that at the moment of measurement the physical universe splits into many universes it doesn’t follow that at the same moment the observer’s Bubbleverse undergoes the same splitting. The hypothesis of the multiple universes (or the Many-worlds interpretation) [6] is hinged on the tacit presupposition that the mind (or Self ) is a product of physical matter; as we will see further in this book, in the Bubbleverse this presupposition doesn’t hold. The Bubbleverse is a cognitive black hole. In theory, there is no escape from the Bubbleverse.

 The idea that a quantum object, such as a photon or an electrone, cannot be defined as a particle or a wave before it is observed by a person. 1

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2.2 D  o We Need the Bubbleverse? Fighting the Doubts “How could other people”—you might ask—“be nothing but images within my Bubbleverse? These people talk to me, they might reward or punish me, they are independent of my intentions or desires, I can’t manipulate them as if they were puppets. And I see the people so clearly”. This is true, yet when in our dreams we see other people talking to us, we have no doubts in retrospect that these people were images within our mind. Of course, these images may be not as clear and distinct as those we see in our waking state of mind, but this is not a convincing argument to prove that the ‘daytime people’ are any different from the people I see in my dreams. After all, in our daily life we can see the same things more or less clearly depending on circumstances. In a mist, objects—a tree in our garden, a car on the road—can be seen vaguely, yet we don’t think they are less real than the same objects we see in clear weather. “But how can you prove that the Bubbleverse is my universe, that I belong here. Might it not be a creation of some other entity—an alien for example—with me being put in this universe by chance?”—you might ask. Well, as the saying goes, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”. The fact that you can live in this world and even understand its laws is the proof that you are a part of your Bubbleverse. This could not be the case if the Bubbleverse was created by an alien, unless the alien made the universe specially for you. But since this alien is also a part of your Bubbleverse, we go around in circles. “OK, but if my Bubbleverse exists for me alone, why am I unable to control so many things within it?”—your next question might be. First of all, you are able to control your body and a lot of things within your Bubbleverse with the help of your body. Next, you can understand science, and using science, people have managed to solve problems that have been hunting them for millennia: for most people there is no more a threat of starvation, the average person’s life span increased for dozens of years, we can go to the Moon and swim on the bottom of the ocean. But this control can never be complete, because the Bubbleverse is a lot larger and more complex than it’s fraction a person can grasp with his or her conscious Self. Most of my Bubbleverse is in the

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subconscious and reveals itself to me only occasionally and in small fractions. My Bubbleverse is like an unknown planet to me and I am a sailor in the never-ending pursuit of new lands. I can never know what is there, over the horizon. Even in my personal life I can never calculate all the consequences of my own actions. I may buy a wrong car and lose money, marry a wrong person and turn my life into a mess and make other decisions I would later regret having made. In other words, my Bubbleverse is like a huge Noah’s Ark which I can never completely apprehend, and yet I am in charge of it. And the best proof of me being in charge is that my end means the end of this ark as well. Finally, do we really need to assume that with a person’s end, all the world disappears? Why not accept that my life is just a soap bubble in an enormous room of the universe, which existed before me and will continue after I die? The assumption that my Bubbleverse does not survive me is not a theoretical claim, it rests on the empirical fact that I could never see for myself the world before I became conscious and capable of asking questions, and cannot possibly have the proof that the world will continue after I am gone. Of course, nobody can stop a person from believing in the single and only universe, which began 14 billions of years ago and will end long after the person’s death, like most people, including scientists and philosophers, believe (see Chap. 15 for more on that). But believing in the universe before or after me is a belief, and not knowledge, because even if I imagine the world after me this image will exist only as long as I am imagining it. It is possible to have faith in the existence of my universe before or after me, but impossible to logically infer such an existence, because inferring this would mean acknowledging that an object of thinking (the world without me) can exist without a thinker. This book is about exploring the consequences of breaking with this faith. Likewise, everyone is free to believe in the afterlife, like most ancients believed, like billions of people believe today. Psychologists who studied near-death experiences reported that after such experiences many non-­ religious people start believing in life after death [7–9]. But even if our personal Self survived physical death, it would not break away with the Bubbleverse. If our personal Bubbleverse dissolves in the Great One, like the Greek philosopher Plotinus (204/5–270 AD) believed [10] or reaches nirvana, like Buddha taught [11], we lose our individual Self, and these

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are simply other ways for the Bubbleverse to end. Alternatively, if our Self after death remained as an individual soul, it would still be locked within a new (this time only spiritual) Bubbleverse. Either way, there can be no Bubbleverse without our Self. The doubts will continue throughout this book, but for the moment let us think of advantages of thinking in terms of the Bubbleverse over thinking in terms of the scientific Commonverse.

2.3 W  hy Think in Terms of the Bubbleverse: Advantages The most evident advantage is resolving the problem of the source of truth in our knowledge. Indeed, in the scientific Commonverse, we certainly can have true knowledge, but we don’t know how we have this knowledge. Indeed, we know that statements ‘if A > B and B > C, then A > C’ or ‘2 + 2 = 4’ are true, but how can we know that? We cannot possibly infer these truths from simply comparing perceived things with each other, because in that case we had to have made an infinite number of comparisons. How can we understand ‘the language of truth’ about the external world when we have no clues to that language? Scientists were able to decipher the hieroglyphic language of the ancient Egypt because they had two identical texts—the famous Rosetta stone, written in two languages— Egyptian and Greek, and the scientists could understand Greek. But what is the parallel of ‘Greek’ for deciphering the ‘hieroglyphs of cosmos’? Similarly, in the scientific Commonverse, we create concepts by cross comparing real perceived objects and subtracting differences while retaining common features. Thus, a shape of a pebble on a beach, an apple or a fish’s eye may give rise to the idea of a circle as an abstract figure, but this can only happen if our Self is able to ‘recognise’ that these particular objects, the pebble, the apple and fish’s eye, are similar in this particular way—being round shaped. Indeed, the objects in questions have many other features in common—they have smell, weight, texture and colour— but the feature that our thinking selects and ‘subtracts’ from the objects is only this one—the ‘roundshapeness’. But how could we have recognised the roundshapeness in objects which in all other respects are so

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different from each other if we had not already had the idea of roundshapeness? In the scientific Commonverse, we don’t have answers to these questions. For example, some scientists, like Jean Piaget, talk about how cognitive schemas develop based on the child’s interactions with the environment, yet what the scientists miss is that in order to interact with the environment the schemas already must be there; without the already available schemas interacting with the external world is like jumping into the water without being able to swim. In the Bubbleverse, however, we appreciate that. As long as  the external world is generated by our Bubbleverse, with our mind (both conscious and subconscious) being an inseparable part of our Bubbleverse, we must already know the ‘language of nature’, which is contained in our subconscious. Thus, the idea of roundshapeness is inherently contained in our subconscious, whereas the scientific concept of a circle we build by projecting this idea on perceived objects (see Chaps. 3 and 4 for more on this). In other words, for scientific concepts to become possible, the innate ideas supplied by our Bubbleverse—the ideas of qualia, numbers, logical laws, basic geometrical shapes and others—are a necessary precondition. It is on the basis of the ideas supplied by the subconscious part of the Bubbleverse that the concepts of sciences rest. As will be explained later in this book (see Chaps. 8 and 9), because the basic ideas emerge from our subconscious, it is easy for us to overlook their emergence and take for granted the illusion that the abstract concepts, such as roundshapeness or a number, are contained in the perceived things themselves. As a result of this ‘epistemological mistake’ the mathematical concepts and logical thinking of the scientific Commonverse come to be viewed as the primary reality, which we learn from experience. It appears that the scientific concepts and the laws of logical thinking would exist even if there were no people in the universe, or even if planets, galaxies and the universe as such didn’t exist. Destroy the whole universe, yet 2 + 2 would still be 4, and the laws of logic and mathematics would still be there. In reality though, all of scientific thinking begins in the Bubbleverse, and only on the basis of intuitively gained ideas can we go into the realm of the scientific Commonverse. Without our Bubbleverse, not only there would be

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no planets and stars, but there would be no scientific concepts, the laws of logic wouldn’t exist and there would be no science as we know it. In philosophy, the aforementioned problem is known as the ‘paradox of knowledge’. In Plato’s dialogue ‘Meno’ [12] Socrates points out to his opponent Meno that in order to inquire into anything you have to already know the properties of what you are looking for, otherwise you cannot recognize the thing you are looking for even if you come across it. As a way out of this paradox, Socrates puts forward the theory of ‘anamnesis’—knowledge as recollection. He assumes that the human soul is immortal and goes through a series of reincarnations. This means that when the soul transmigrates in a new body, it already contains knowledge about the world; however, because of the trauma of birth the soul forgets its knowledge. It therefore turns out that what we usually view as learning is in reality remembering of what is already known. Socrates illustrated his theory by putting questions about a geometrical theorem to an uneducated slave boy. In the beginning it looks as though the boy doesn’t know the theorem, but gradually, by answering Socrates’ questions, the boy comes to the correct answer. This demonstrates, Socrates says, that the boy knew the theorem but was unable to remember it without the leading questions. Today the idea of transmigration of souls retreated into the religious Commonverse, yet modern psychology takes the subconscious mind seriously and there is some experimental evidence confirming that knowledge can come from subconsciousness by passing the process of learning. Research has shown that new-born babies and young infants possess cognitive skills that they could not possibly acquire through experience [13–15] (see Chap. 3 for more on that). In the scientific Commonverse, the subconscious structures are often named schemas or evolutionarily evolved intuitive concepts, yet these terms are tacitly based on admitting the Bubbleverse as a foundation for scientific concepts. This evidence shows that ‘thinking in terms of the Bubbleverse’ makes not only theoretical but empirical sense as well. One more advantage is that thinking in terms of the Bubbleverse helps us to expose psychological roots of scientific theories. In my readings of natural scientists and philosophers I often wondered why many of them are so reluctant to admit psychology into their concepts and theories.

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Perhaps, the reason for their avoidance of psychology (or what they often call ‘psychologism’) is the fact that both scientists and philosophers aim at reasoning ‘Sub specie aeternitatis’, trying to discover what is universally and eternally true. For example, in physics, all bodies accelerate in a gravitational field at the same rate relative to the centre of Earth. This means that, neglecting friction such as air resistance, all bodies dropped from the same height will fall on the ground at the same time, regardless of the masses or compositions of the bodies. In philosophy, the statement “I am thinking therefore I exist” is universally true regardless of the individual characteristics of the person who makes this statement. In contrast, psychology often deals with realities that exist only ‘here and now’. We see a cloud high above our heads, which looks like a swan; in a few minutes the swan turns into a camel, then it becomes shapeless and finally completely dissolves in the blue vastness of the sky—this is how many typical psychological mechanisms work. In psychology, like in nature, regularities do exist, but they are far from being as stable and ‘eternal’ as the laws of physics or principles of logic and philosophy. I can feel empathy towards my relatives but be indifferent towards equal sufferings of strangers. Adults and children, men and women, people of different cultures can react differently to the same situations. And yet, there is not a physicist or a philosopher who can avoid psychological phenomena in his or her private life or scientific work, for the simple reason that every one of us lives in his or her private Bubbleverse. That is why, from time to time, natural scientists and philosophers have to turn their gaze to the Bubbleverse. But the way they describe the Bubbleverse is different from the way psychology does. For science and philosophy, the Bubbleverse is like a cadaver for anatomy students—a body from which all life and blood were drained to make it ready for dissection and analysis. As a result, instead of a human person we see a living automaton, a bio-psychological machine, with such properties as unconditioned and conditioned reflexes and biologically based temperamental characteristics. For psychology the Bubbleverse is alive. Like any living entity, the Bubbleverse can only be observed and analysed in dynamics, which creates limits and boundaries to the cognition. Cross the boundaries, and the observed subjects—subjective experience, creative thinking, free will, moral values, agency and the

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Self—disappear, turning the Bubbleverse into a ‘psychological cadaver’. For biology, this cadaver consists of organic molecules and their combinations. For philosophy the cadaver includes the transpersonal ‘transcendental Self ’ and other abstract notions. Yes, the cadaver is not completely dead: the electrical shock can make its hands and legs twist, reinforcement can change its behaviour and the ‘conceptual Frankenstein’ erected by philosophical analysis is capable of making the ‘transcendental judgements’. But these remaining pieces of psyche can only give a poor and distorted image of the real thing. The biological and philosophical ‘person’ is just a body or an abstract notion, and as such it cannot have the Bubbleverse. The price of pursuit of the absolute truth is that in philosophy the Bubbleverse is viewed as an intellectual exercise, a philosophical game in ‘solipsism’ (the assumption that the only thing that really exists is our perceptions and other mental phenomena), whereas in biology the Bubbleverse is treated as a bunch of illusions that emerge as side effects of processes in neural and physical matter. In the perspective taken in this book, however, the process of building both scientific and philosophical views is rooted in psychology of the author. Psychologically, we all find ourselves locked in the ‘museum’ of our private Bubbleverse, with all the ‘paintings of the world’, big and small, hanging on its walls. Since every scientist and philosopher is also an individual human being, he or she has to  obey the rules of this museum: a theory is born in the mind of an individual person and has to undergo transformations to be converted into scientific concepts. Here the ways of natural scientists and philosophers split. Usually, scientists, deliberately or not, ignore the fact that the theory emerged in their private minds and present the theory as if it had existed objectively in the outside world, while the scientists simply discovered the theory like we discover an unusual shell on the ocean beach. As a result, the psychological roots of scientific thinking stay invisible. Scientists who don’t believe in god entertain the dream of reaching what a philosopher Thomas Nagel called ‘the view from nowhere’ [16], whereas deistically inclined scientists hope to decipher ‘the mind of God’ [17]. For scientists, pretending to be able to look ‘from nowhere’ seems like a good deal, since it creates the impression of objectivity of scientific discoveries.

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Unlike scientists, philosophers are more conscious regarding the psychological roots of their thinking. A Greek philosopher Protagoras (490– c. 420 BC) believed that: “Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not” [18]. A Russian philosopher Lev Shestov argued that, unlike objective truths of science, in philosophy “Even the so-called self-evident truths—those that are meant to be equal with mathematical axioms—have a character of the witnesses’ testimony” [19, p.289]. Shestov is joined by a modern British philosopher Julian Baggini, who writes: “Honest and sincere reasoners should accept that though they strive for objectivity, how we reason is in part determined by our personalities” [20, p.241]. Proponents of the theory-ladenness of scientific facts, such as Karl Popper [21], Thomas Kuhn [22] and Paul Feyerabend [23], argue that scientific facts are partially determined by the scientists’ theoretical tenets. More recently, Thomas Nagel directly contrasted the two standpoints: the objective point of view that transcends our personal interests and experiences and our personal perspectives ‘from the inside’, that cannot always be objectified [16]. Nevertheless, philosophers too want to reach absolute truth: “Philosophy cannot take refuge in reduced ambitions. It is after eternal and nonlocal truth, even though we know that is not what we are going to get” [ibid, p.10]. With rare exceptions [24–27], in philosophy the subjective perspective is considered as a necessary yet annoying obstacle for reaching the eternal truth. As a result, philosophers strive to clean the ‘true judgement’ from the garbage of ‘psychological ingredients’. For a philosopher of science, the claim that a person is the centre of his or her mental world and that the person’s ‘true knowledge’ is embedded in the person’s mental processes is unacceptable. Thus, Karl Popper believed that through the process he called ‘falsification’ science progresses towards absolute and impersonal truth [28]. Paul Feyerabend suggested that the mind itself can be reduced to physical matter [29]. An Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes “Philosophical I is not a human being, not a human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather a metaphysical subject, a limit of the world and not its part” [30, p.103]. But aspiring to reach the objective truth by shaking the Bubbleverse off is like a person hoping to get out of the water completely dry.

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Not surprisingly, ignoring the Bubbleverse pays back by creating ‘fundamental incomprehensibilities’, such as the impossibility to find a link between mind and brain, or accommodate free will and individual responsibility in the world of physical cause-effect continuum. More importantly, some phenomena such as the emergence of subjective experience in the course of evolution of dead matter are hard to explain without taking into consideration the individual mind of a human observer. In philosophy, disregarding the psychological origins of human knowledge have created the perennial problems, such as explaining ‘qualia’ or the ‘permanence of the individual Self ’. The non-stop confrontation between scientific and religious views on the existence of god and miracles, evolution of the universe, the origins of humans and other fundamental problems too have roots in the fact of ignorance of the role of psychology in generating knowledge. To summarise, for philosophers a subject is a transpersonal, immortal transcendental subject, and not an individual human being. The transcendental subject is an abstract notion, not a person, and as such it doesn’t have the Bubbleverse. The point of the Bubbleverse approach is that it replaces the transcendental subject with a living human individual, who has to go to work, has joys and sorrows, health issues, money problems and, at some point, unfortunately has to die. Such a replacement has a fundamental consequence—it creates the whole new concept—the Bubbleverse. Having made this replacement, all we have to do is to draw consequences from it, as accurately as possible. As we will see, the consequences turn out to be quite dramatic: they change our perspectives on psychology, science, religion, consciousness, morality and many other aspects of life and universe. Disregarding the Bubbleverse creates problems in psychology too; cognitive psychologists are undecided on how consciousness should be defined and what role it plays in our comprehension of the world. In developmental psychology, the science-oriented perspective on cognitive development resulted in denying the value of the unique structure of the child’s mind. Some researchers argue that children are ‘scienceblind’: this means that children’s early representations of the world could be an obstacle to learning science concepts later in life [31, 32]. From this perspective, four-year-olds’ anthropocentric belief in that all things in nature

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exist in order to serve people’s need (e.g., “a zebra is for a zoo, for us to look at”, “a rain is for growing crops, to make food for people”) provides a fertile soil for these children’s later belief in creationism (the belief that animals and people were created by god) and resistance to the scientific theory of evolution through natural selection. The ‘scienceblindness’ perspective considers the scientific views to be ‘really true’, whereas the children’s views are treated as immature and distorted views, which are destined to be transformed into scientific views or dropped altogether and replaced by scientific knowledge. The Bubbleverse’s perspective holds a different view: from this perspective, the children’s beliefs are as true in the children’s Bubbleverse as scientific beliefs are in the educated adults’ scientific Commonverse. For a little child, anthropocentric and egocentric views of natural processes not only make the child’s universe psychologically comfortable, but they also are consistent with the whole image of the child’s primordial Bubbleverse, which by definition has the person as its centre. In fact, research shows that if scientific truths are thrown onto the children prematurely, they ‘don’t stick’ and are rejected by the children’s Bubbleverse [33, 34]. However, such rejection of scientific knowledge can be viewed as an obstacle only if the children’s minds are attributed with the aim of reaching the scientific knowledge. In the Bubbleverse, children of a certain age range don’t hold such an aim; instead, their beliefs in animism, artificialism and anthropocentrism fit their primordial Bubbleverse better than do scientific beliefs. In this context, preschool children can be considered blind to scientific beliefs on the same logical ground as scientific beliefs can be considered blind to the children’s early beliefs. It doesn’t mean of course that teaching children science is pointless or unnecessary, but to be effective this teaching has to be coordinated with the changes in the child’s whole Bubbleverse, which include physiological maturation, changes in the child’s social position, interaction with peers and adults, and the social image of a child of a certain culture, gender and age (see Chaps. 10 and 12 for more on that). In contrast to the science-oriented perspective, in the Bubbleverse subjective experience is in the centre of cognition. This implies that consciousness, being the foundation for explaining everything in the objective part of the Bubbleverse, cannot itself be reduced to more simple entities and thus causally explained. In this perspective, our personal world is not

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just a soil that contains ‘gems’ of the absolute truths; rather, it is our unique and private universe—the Bubbleverse—which carries inside itself artificially created Commonverses of science and religion. As this book aspires to show, the Bubbleverse’s perspective sheds new and unexpected light on most of the incomprehensible problems mentioned in the previous paragraph. Finally, thinking in terms of the Bubbleverse sheds new light on the dispute between religion and science. For philosophers who are after objective truths, miracles are only imaginary flukes of our personal viewpoint, but in the Bubbleverse they may be real. In the Bubbleverse, the pursuit of eternal truths gives way to the realisation that truth can be strictly local and personal. As one of the founders of modern psychology William James (1842–1910) argued, religious experiences may be as true and valuable as the experiences obtained in scientific research [35]. It doesn’t matter whether human experiences are stimulated by efforts of a logical mind, by intuitions of a religious faith, or via intake of chemical substances; all authentic experiences have the ‘noetic quality’, all of them are insights into the depths of truth, and none of them has a privileged position over the others.

2.4 Bigverse versus Bubbleverse According to Merriam-Webster dictionary [36], early medieval scholars sometimes viewed a human mind as a microcosm—a miniature copy of the world. Today, treating the individual mind as a ‘microcosm’ or a reflection of cosmos in the human head has become a habit. Of course, there would be nothing wrong in presenting a person’s mind as a model of cosmos if such a presentation were taken as a useful abstraction. However, if this presentation is taken for truth, then it has important consequences in sciences, politics and economics. Specifically, a human individual begins to be viewed as a small cog in the grand wheel of physical universe, or as an ant in the anthill of society. It is only one step from this view to the idea that an individual mind is a product of heredity and environment, and the individual’s input in politics and economics is a drop in the sea. In the political domain, this view on the mind feeds

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theories that reduce an individual’s behaviour to societal structures such as classes or nationalities. In social sciences, the cosmos/microcosm hierarchy lays a foundation for behaviourism, which denies individual freedom and responsibility and reduces human behaviour to conditioning by external stimuli [37]. In neurosciences, this hierarchical perspective made it possible to interpret human subjective experience as a product of neural processes in the brain. In the Bubbleverse, the hierarchy is reversed: the cosmos or the Bigverse becomes a product and a part of the Bubbleverse, though not in a spatial sense. My Bubbleverse incorporates religious and scientific Commonverses, as well as Bubbleverses of other living beings. The fact that an individual plays a role in economics and politics (bringing the so-called subjective contribution into the play of universal laws) is being appreciated by many theories, particularly in the domain of social sciences. Even in physics certain phenomena are considered to be linked to a human observer. But the Bubbleverse perspective goes a lot further than that: this perspective asserts that these very laws, including the laws of nature, are sanctioned by our Self. This means that in the Bubbleverse our living consciousness is a precondition for the very existence of the laws of nature and society, and cannot be explained by these laws. Speaking metaphorically, laws of nature and society are like a stable habit that we develop but cannot give up or change; although the habit is sanctioned by our mind, it becomes nevertheless an objective reality, unable to be altered either by ourselves or by other people. Indeed, sometimes a person wants to quit smoking or drinking, but neither the person himself or herself nor the multiple therapists and rehabs are able to destroy or change the habit. In other words, while in the Bigverse society trumps an individual, in the Bubbleverse society is a material for the individual’s endeavours. Whereas in politics and economics the Bigverse perspective feeds totalitarian theories of relations between individual and society, the Bubbleverse perspective promotes liberalism. In philosophy, the Bigverse reduces the  individual mind and Self to universal laws of nature and material structures (evolution, genes, neural processes in the brain, cultural norms and traditions), whereas the Bubbleverse views an individual mind as a lawmaker and a co-creator of external reality.

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“But does this mean that I, a human person, define the laws of physics and society?”—a reader might ask. No, it doesn’t. It only means that something bigger than my conscious Self is working within the Bubbleverse. This something is my subconscious. In the Bubbleverse, my conscious Self is only a tip of an iceberg. It is from my subconscious that I receive what Plato and Descartes called the innate ideas [38], and Immanuel Kant called the a-priori forms of perception and reason—the structures that give rise to my understanding of a stable object, space, time and physical causality [39]. Something that is ‘innate’ is effectively present from birth, and while it may not reveal itself then, it is more than likely to present itself later in life. While philosophers of the past had to infer the reality of the a-priori knowledge only theoretically, in the twentieth century psychological research has shown that young infants and even new-born babies possess cognitive skills that they could not possibly acquire through learning. The common assumption is that these cognitive skills are innate and transmitted through genes. But this interpretation involves a logical circle, because the concept of genes itself is a result of a long history of studies in which our minds, in the form of the innate ideas of physical space, time and causality (plus more recent knowledge of molecular biology), have already played a crucial role. We have to assume that there is a secret depository inside our Bubbleverse that contains the innate ideas and supplies our conscious Self with the precious guidance when our Self needs directions. Some theorists, of which Freud and Jung are most famous, called this depository the subconscious. To summarise, with all the differences between religious and scientific Commonverses they share a common feature: they view the individual human mind as a part of a bigger whole—the Big Universe, or the Bigverse. It doesn’t matter that in the religious Commonverse the Bigverse is created by God, and in the scientific Commonverse it appeared by itself. What is important is that the Bigverse theorists believe that something they developed using their own individual minds—the conception of the Bigverse—is completely independent of their minds. Galaxies and stars, atoms and molecules, animals and plants—all that looks to them as having nothing to do with their minds, as the ‘stuff’ that existed eons before they appeared in this world, armed with telescopes and microscopes, and will be there long after they will end to exist. From such

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reversal of the ‘cause and effect’ succession just one step remains to acknowledging that our Bubbleverse is a product of the Bigverse, and the fabric of our mind—subjective experience—is determined by the fabric of the molecules and electrical circuits in neurons. In reality though, as we will see from subsequent chapters, the Bigverse consists of rational constructions—scientific concepts and theories and from science-generated objects. For the Bigverse this vase is not a wonderful piece of ceramic, colours green and yellow, with the unique pattern and pictures on its body and a little crack on its neck; rather, it is like any other vase of the same class, called Chinese ceramic. For science, this cat is not your much-loved pet with unique features and habits, but a case of the species of felines. One might say that the Bigverse consists of simple things and rules—those that contain the essences of things and ignore all the particularities and individual features. That is why the Bigverse is, or at least is supposed to be, identical for all people. The vase has a body shape, a price and a function which is the same for every person in the world. In the Bigverse, this vase can be replaced with a picture, a scheme or a description in words, and it remains in the form of this scheme or the description even if all the real vases in the world cease to exist. In the Bubbleverse the situation is different. What comes first here is what I see, hear, taste, smell and feel—in other words, my sensations and perceptions of things, my unique subjective experience, on the basis of which general concepts are yet to be built. In the Bubbleverse this vase is my individual subjective experience of this vase—with its unique shades of colours, its imperfections, its unique pattern of cracks which appeared on its glimmering skin from the old age, with its round edge chipped on one side, and all the other individual features and particularities that only this object has, plus a unique piece of my family’s history. For me this cat is ‘the cat’—with a unique décor of its hair, its habit to sit on the right handle of my sofa, its sore eyes, its own history of life and dozens of other things that I see and know about this particular animal. Even the way I am seeing this particular vase or this particular cat is unique only for me; nobody can see the object exactly in the way I am seeing it, and no one else can ‘peek into my mind’ and see the image of this object that fleetingly emerged in my perception. In other words, the world of the

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Bubbleverse is centred on perceptual phenomena and it is complex, since it contains all the individual specific features of objects. Because the Bigverse, by definition, is built on the base of the Bubbleverse and is a part of it, there is no an absolute border between the two. While enjoying the view of the vase, we at the same time know the concept of the vase, its price, can weight it and create the vase’s rational description. The borderline between the Bubbleverse and the Bigverse exists not in space but in our mind. In order to cross this border, we don’t have to go through a border control and show our passport—all we need to do is to shift our point of view. Figuratively speaking, in the Bigverse life is stiffened and stripped to the bones, to reveal the skeleton of essential features, whereas in the Bubbleverse life flourishes in its primaeval richness and diversity. Atoms, molecules, electromagnetic waves and gravitational fields don’t have colours and smells, they don’t feel heavy of light, hard or soft: all they possess is physical structures, such as mass, valency and frequency. Contrary to the popular view, the physical Bigverse does not generate phenomenalistic diversity of the world; just the opposite, it is through the reduction of this phenomenalistic diversity that the abstract concepts of the Bigverse are being created (see Chaps. 3 and 4 for more on that). In the Bubbleverse, not only a separate object cannot fit into the ‘procrustean bed’ of scientific concepts, but scientific laws and theories as well are unable to capture the divergent and controversial nature of reality. In dreams, we can ignore the law of gravity by flying in the air without support, we can breathe under water, go through solid walls and do other things prohibited by scientific laws. While in the Bigverse we live in everyday reality only, in the Bubbleverse the everyday reality coexists with magical reality of dreams and the imagination. Being constructed from invisible concepts, the Bigverse seems incredibly stable. Indeed, most of us believe that an animal species can get extinct, but the concept of the species would remain in paleontological records. Many ancient cultures no longer exist, but their traces in history stay in human memory. In contrast, our Bubbleverse is fragile. The fact that our Bubbleverse is our private home doesn’t mean it is a cuddly toy for us to play with as we wish. Indeed, it can explode at every moment. Sometimes people destroy their Bubbleverses deliberately, by committing

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suicide, and sometimes the Bubbleverse ends due to its own mutations: a person can become a victim of a crime, a fatal accident or a natural disaster. If we are lucky and work hard to prolong our Bubbleverse, we can last to an old age, but the end will come anyway. And what will happen to the Bigverse then? It is natural of course for us to think that when our Bubbleverse dies the Bigverse remains. But there is a problem with thinking like that. As long as our Bubbleverse was there, it contained the Bigverse within itself. Our Self was the observer, a researcher and even, partially, a creator of the Bigverse, but who will do the job after our Bubbleverse ends? Perhaps, other people’s Bubbleverses will do it? But no, because other people were a part of our own Bubbleverse too and they cease to exist with the end of it. In the Bubbleverse, only other people die, but I continue: all we need to do is to appreciate this commonly known fact. Sadly, it appears that with the end of our Bubbleverse the Bigverse ends as well. When we think of the Bigverse existing after our death, we unintendedly deceive ourselves, because imagining the Bigverse after our life requires a subject who is imagining it, and this subject will no longer be available. We, with our Bubbleverse, are attached to the Bigverse like a body to a head: cut the body off and the head dies. The only consolation for our mortal Self is to have faith in that the end our earthly body is not the end of the Bubbleverse (see Chap. 15 for more on this). But this is a belief and not a proven fact or a logical inference. And even if this belief comes true, the place where our surviving Self will live after death will be another Bubbleverse, with the same difficult questions to answer. All this makes it a good idea to look at the Bubbleverse more closely. Perhaps, appreciating the role of our private universe in producing scientific and philosophical knowledge might help us put the aforementioned questions in a new perspective. And the key step in determining the role of the Bubbleverse in generating knowledge is having a closer look at our subjective experience.

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21. Popper, K. (1972). Objective knowledge. London: Clarendon Press. 22. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 23. Feyerabend, P. (1993). Against method. London: Verso. 24. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality. New York: The Free Press. 25. Griffin, D. R. (Ed.). (1988). The reenchantment of science: Postmodern proposals. New York: SUNY Press. 26. Laszlo, E. (2006). Science and the reenchantment of the Cosmos: The rise of the integral vision of reality (Kindle ed.). Rochester: Inner Traditions. 27. Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous. Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage Books. 28. Thornton, S. (2018). Karl Popper. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#ProbKnowVeri 29. Feyerabend, P. (1963). Materialism and the mind-body problem. Review of Metaphysics, 17, 49–66. 30. Wittgenstein, L. (2018). Logico-Philosophskii Tractat. Moscow: Act. 31. Bloom, P., & Weisberg, D. S. (2007). Childhood origins of adult resistance to science. Science, 316, 996–997. 32. Shtulman, A. (2017). Scienceblind: Why our intuitive theories about the world are so often wrong. (Kindle ed.). New York: Basic Books. 33. Subbotsky, E. (2000). Phenomenalistic perception and rational understanding in the mind of an individual: A fight for dominance. In K. S. Rosengren, C.  N. Johnson, & P.  L. Harris (Eds.), Imagining the impossible. Magical Scientific and religious thinking in children (pp.  35–74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 34. Subbotsky, E. (2004). Magical thinking in judgments of causation: Can anomalous phenomena affect ontological causal beliefs in children and adults? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 22, 123–152. 35. James, W. (2009). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 36. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/microcosm 37. Skinner, B.  F. (1948). Superstition in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168–172. 38. Schmaltz, T.  M. (2002). Radical Cartesianism: The French reception of Descartes. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 39. Kant, I. (2018). Kritika Chistogo Razuma. Moscow: Act.

3 Grounding the Bubbleverse

3.1 T  he Impossibility of the World Without Us The relationship between subject and object can be likened to the relationship between a figure and its background. Usually these relations are not equivalent: we see the figure against the background, and not the other way around; when watching a bird flying in the sky, we see a bird against the sky, and not the sky against the bird. Sometimes, however, the background\figure relations become competitive; thus, in the ‘Rubin figure’ we see either two faces staring at each other or a vase between them [1]. Moreover, an object can be its own background, like the ‘Necker’s Cube’, which we see either from the top face or the bottom face, depending on which face we concentrate attention on [ibid]. But in all possible relations between figure and its background the shift of attention is incomplete. So, when we see the Rubin figure as two profiles, we are implicitly aware that it can also become a vase, and the same effect is the case with the Necker’s cube. If such a subconscious ‘side view’ did not exist, we wouldn’t be able to swap the figure for the background.

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The same incomplete shift of attention occurs between subject and object. I can look at any object directly (which we usually do), but I can also look at it from one side, as if through the eyes of another person. Using imagination, I can look from one side at my own body and even at my own thoughts, with some kind of a ‘view from the orbit’. But at the same time, looking at objects and at myself ‘from the orbit’, I still remain myself and never cease to be the same subject as I was prior to my imaginary exit from my body; I have the same name, consciousness and memory of myself. In other words, independently of whether I look at the world directly or indirectly ‘from the orbit’, I am tied up to the object of my attention by an unbreakable link. This inability to completely detach myself from an object illustrates the fact that subject and object, like figure and background, are inherently linked with each other: it is impossible that background (read ‘subject’) disappears, and figure (read ‘object’) remains, and vice versa. That is why with the disappearance of the subject, the subject’s world of objects disappears as well. Why then do we believe that with our end the world will continue to exist? There are two reasons for such a belief: external and internal ones. The external one is that our teachers and handbooks, against common logic, convince us of this. But let us assume that, following Descartes, we reject the opinions of the handbooks and teachers as unproved, and remain, so to speak, tête-à-tête with the outside world. Will the unbreakable link between subject and object become obvious to us? No, it will not. Having closed our eyes and imagining ourselves non-existent, we would still believe in the idea that the world keeps rolling forward without us. We would still cling to the common belief that there is an external, objective, real world that will continue after our demise. For millennia, philosophers argued that for the stars and planets to be, there must be someone to observe them. The very concept of something to exist is indispensably linked to this something being perceived of reflected in the mind of a subject (see Chap. 9 for more on that). And still, for some people this idea, which appears self-evident, is hard to understand. In order to make this line of reasoning a bit clearer, we need to dwell on it in more detail

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Perhaps, a reader had a chance of being under general anaesthetics, or at least had a memory of sleeping without dreams. What do you remember about the world when you were in the state of unconsciousness? Did you even know that you or the world around you existed? Obviously, you don’t remember anything, and did not know that you existed, because be it otherwise, you would not be in the state of unconsciousness. And now think that an apple you have in your hands, the room you are in and the whole world of inanimate things, including the physical universe, are in the state of permanent unconsciousness. They don’t know that they exist. The only reason to say that they exist is that you are aware of them. Now suppose, you reached the deep old age and die. What happens to the world around you? The world loses its last ‘straw’ that kept it on surface of existence—your awareness of that world. The only inference we can make from the aforementioned premises is that the world stopped existing. “Well—you might say—but this is only true about the inanimate things, but what about other people, who keep being conscious when I die?” Unfortunately, other people will follow the rest of the world into nothingness, because in your Bubbleverse other people are conscious only because you acknowledge them being conscious (see Chap. 5 for more on that). When you are unconscious or cease to exist, you stop endowing other people with consciousness, and without consciousness they are nothing but physical bodies, just like galaxies and stars. But why is it so hard to accept that the world cannot survive the disappearance of our Self? Why do we cling to the idea that the world survives us so strongly? Let’s call this idea the ‘illusion of the world’s permanence’. There is a powerful psychological reason for this illusion to arise. It arises because one of the fundamental structures of the phenomenal world is the belief in ‘object permanence’ (see Chap. 5 for more on that). Indeed, the belief in object permanence and identity is innate, like the ideas of space and time. As Immanuel Kant famously argued, subjective space and time are not facts we derive from experience, but forms of perception inherent to our mind. The reason is clear: if there were no space and time, there would be no experience. We get experience from perceiving the surrounding world, and any perception occurs in space and time. But the same can be said about the permanence of an object: if

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objects (e.g., an apple on the table, the taste of a lemon or a toothache) did not last for at least a moment, they wouldn’t exist for us. It is not by chance that the ability to perceive objects as permanent is registered even in young infants [2]. In one experiment, a toy car goes down a track and disappears behind an opaque screen. In one scenario (a ‘possible event’), before the screen was lowered, a toy mouse was placed behind the tracks but was hidden by the screen as the car rolled by. In another scenario (an ‘impossible event’), the toy mouse was placed right on the tracks but was secretly removed after the screen was lowered so that the car seemed to go through the mouse. In the ‘impossible scenario’, even infants as young as a 3.5-months were surprised [3]. This means that the babies were aware that objects that had been obscured from their view (the car and the obstacle on its path) did not disappeared from the world but continued to exist behind the screen, even if the infants couldn’t see them. In other words, from early age we believe that ‘out of sight’ does not mean ‘out of the world’. By analogy, our intuition tells us that the whole world, like the toy car that disappeared behind the screen, will continue to exist if we disappear from the world. By so doing, our intuition incorrectly identifies disappearance of our mind with disappearance of a certain object from view. It is this intuitive substitution that creates the ‘illusion of the world’s permanence’. Yes, an object can disappear from the field of our perception and reappear there again; this is so because the object, being invisible, still remains in our mind as a thought about this object. In other words, our mind serves as a ‘background’ and a ‘storage facility’ for images of objects that disappear from view. But if we die, then our mind disappears entirely, and with the disappearance of the mind (read ‘the background), the figure (read ‘the world’) disappears as well, taking all the objects with it into the oblivion. To summarise, the opposition between the Self and the world is at the same time the inseparable unity between the world and the Self. Whereas in the scientific Commonverse the illusion is maintained that the world of inanimate objects exists independently of the human subject, in the Bubbleverse the Self and the world are inseparable ‘Siamese-twins’. Because the Bubbleverse is a foundation on which the scientific Commonverse is built, evidence should exist that beneath the cover of

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scientific facts and theories there is a deeper layer of reality—the Bubbleverse. Like human flesh can be seen through the holes in clothes, through the gaps in the fabric of the scientific Commonverse, fragments of the Bubbleverse should shine. Let us see whether such fragments were indeed observed.

3.2 Evidence for the Bubbleverse: Physics Scientists have long been puzzled with the fact that the structure of the physical universe, instead of being arbitrary, is just right for us to emerge and live in it. They call this unique combination of factors ‘anthropic coincidences’ [4]. For example, if the universe were 10 times younger or older as its present age, there would not have been planets and elements necessary for our bodies to exist. If the four fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, gravitational, strong and weak nuclear) were not so fine-tuned with each other as they are now, it would be impossible for the commonly found matter (such as water) to form and for the living organisms to emerge. The existence of the ‘fine tuning’ of fundamental physical constants in the universe, which is necessary for the emergence of life and a conscious observer, gave rise to a range of tentative explanations, from the ‘intelligent designer’ hypothesis (religious Commonverse) to the ‘many worlds’ and ‘multiverse’ assumptions (scientific Commonverse). Viewed from the Bubbleverse perspective, such assumptions are redundant. Indeed, the ‘fine tuning’ looks puzzling only in the light of the ‘succession assumption’—the presupposition that these coincidences were created or evolved prior to the emergence of life and conscious observers, and thus had to be ‘adjusted’ in the light of the anticipation of the emergence of humans. In the Bubbleverse, the ‘succession assumption’ is invalid, since the Bubbleverse inherently contains the conscious observer. The fact that the existing physical universe is so nicely tuned to the observer is an evidence that the universe we live in is the Bubbleverse: the unique private universe individually tailored to our Self. Indeed, be it otherwise, our Self wouldn’t be here, just as our body wouldn’t be able to function if its internal organs weren’t so nicely tuned to each other.

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But if our Self is embedded in the Bubbleverse, then from the perspective of the Bubbleverse our Self must be able to mentally affect inanimate matter. Of course, from the Commonverse’s perspective this conclusion is impossible, since the fundamental principle of the physical universe is that inanimate objects—atoms, molecules, chemical substances and other physical bodies—cannot be changed by mental effort alone, and our everyday experience seems to support this principle. Indeed, we cannot move a pencil by just thinking about it. This creates the impression that the mind and inanimate matter have nothing in common. However, that is where the Bubbleverse comes into the game. In the Commonverses, mind and matter are separated as two different substances: one (mind) exists beyond space and the other (matter) exists in space. That is why a physicist cannot accept the idea that the mind can directly affect a physical body. In the Bubbleverse however, mind and matter are linked as two sides of the same coin—the Bubbleverse. Like opposites such as up and down, left and right, north and south, mind and matter are not the same, yet they don’t exist one without the other (see Chap. 6 for more on that). Changes in the mind are accompanied by changes in the brain, and the opposite is true as well, but the link between the two is not a causal one. Typically, our Self is unable to directly affect inanimate matter outside of our own body. Nevertheless, some facts in physics and psychology support the idea that under certain conditions the gap between mind and matter can be bridged. The most obvious of these facts is the effect of our thinking on EEG of the brain, and on voluntary movements of our body. However, because our body and brain are composed from living matter, the ‘mind over body/brain’ effects are not exactly the effects of the mind on inanimate matter. More persuasively the mind/matter unity is seen in the effect of an observer on observed inanimate objects. But before we discuss these effects, we need to define the concepts of ‘observer’ and ‘observation’. In the Bubbleverse, the observer is my mind (Self ) plus ‘observational devices’—brain and sense organs and their artificial extensions such as a microscope or a telescope. If we exclude the imagined ‘posthumous Bubbleverse’, in the Bubbleverse of a living person mind doesn’t exist without the brain, and the brain cannot normally function without the

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mind. And what is observation? Let us accept that observation is an interaction between a subject and an object as a thing-in-itself that results in a subjective image.1 This means that any subjective phenomenon—a sensation of light or a perception of an apple lying on the table—is a joint result of two inputs: from a subject and from an object as a thing-in-­ itself. It follows from this that in the Bubbleverse there can be no such thing as a phenomenon independent from an observer. Why then does it appear that our observation alone has no effect on physical objects? Indeed, to really affect a physical object we need to do something with it, rather than just observe it. For example, in order to change liquid water into ice or gas we need to freeze or heat it, in order to change properties of plants or animals we need to manipulate with their genes, but we can’t do the aforementioned changes by observation alone. Of course, in some way observation alone affects an object too. To see an apple, we need to illuminate it, to hear a musical instrument we need to play it, to taste a cake we need to take part of it in our mouth. But in the macroworld (i.e., the world of big objects, as opposed to the world of atoms and molecules) observation doesn’t change the essence of the object of observation: the apple stays the same whether it is in light or in darkness, the musical instrument has the same parts and properties independent of whether it is being played or not, and the cake retains its chemical properties even if part of it disappeared in our mouth. This happens because at the macro level our observation deals not with an object as a whole, but with the object’s insignificantly small fraction. Every macro object is a complex comprised of billions of other objects  The term ‘thing-in-itself ’ belongs to Immanuel Kant, to designate something that is beyond sensual cognition and of which we cannot obtain any knowledge [5]. In this book, this term is used to refer to that part of the Bubbleverse that is opposed to our Self and independent of our Self ’s conscious effort. However, in contrast to Kantian original use of this term, in this book the thing-­ in-­itself can be partially cognised, via merging with the qualia projected by our Self into the outer world and producing a phenomenal image. The rationale of using the Kantian term instead of creating a new one is that the Kantian term is established in philosophy and psychology and modification of its meaning would create less confusion than creating a similar new term (e.g., ‘a thing as it really is’, or ‘a thing independent of our conscious Self ’). Because the resulting phenomenal image is a thing-in-itself converted into subjective reality, the original thing-in-itself remains beyond cognition in the special domain of the ‘potential knowledge entities’ (PKEN) (see Chap. 8 for more on this notion), and in this sense it overlaps with the Kantian meaning of the thing-in-­ itself as something that puts limits to our cognition. 1

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arranged in a unique way. When we observe a macro object, we only change a tiny fraction of this complex, thus leaving the main structure intact. One can say that a subjective input in the resulting phenomenon is too small to fundamentally affect the contribution which comes from the thing-in-itself. Speaking metaphorically, macro objects are too heavy for our ant-size observational effort to speed up or slow down their motion. However, at the quantum level objects become so sensitive that observation alone can fundamentally affect them. At this level, the subjective input of the act of observation into the resulting phenomenon becomes big enough to affect an object as a whole. A simple sensation of colour testifies to that. When we see green or red colour, we convert electromagnetic waves of certain frequency into subjective experiences. Because sensation and perception are not simply reflections of things-in-themselves but also active projection of qualia of our mind (such as the ideas of greenness or redness) into things-in-themselves (see Chaps. 3 and 8 for more on that), we may say that we see green or red colour because we made the colour green or red. In one of the famous paradoxes by the Greek philosopher Zeno, as soon as you begin thinking about a flying arrow, the arrow has to freeze in mid-air, because in order to move from Point A to Point B it has to first cover half of the distance between A and B, but in order to cover half the AB distance, it has to first cover a quarter and so on ad infinitum; as a result, the arrow will never leave Point A [6]. When physicists observed atoms of lattice gas under nearly absolute zero temperature, they discovered that atoms behave similarly to Zeno’s arrow [7]. According to the famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle, position and velocity of a quantum particle are related and cannot be simultaneously measured precisely. It follows from this principle that under extreme cold velocity is almost zero, so there is a lot of flexibility in position: when being observed, the atoms are as likely to be in one place as in the other. This momentous ‘jumping’ behaviour of atoms is called ‘tunnelling’. The researchers claim that they were able to suppress quantum tunnelling merely by observing the atoms. Under normal conditions a light microscope can’t see individual atoms, but when the researchers illuminated the atoms with a separate imaging laser they began to fluoresce, and the microscope captured the flashes of

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light. When the imaging laser was on, the tunnelling reduced dramatically, but with the imaging laser back off, the atoms tunnelled freely. It appears that atoms, unlike an apple in the macroworld, reacted to the sheer fact of being observed by losing their essential property—tunnelling. Similar to the Zeno’s arrow, the atoms froze in space when, and because, they were being observed. The effect of observation on physical objects was also registered in the famous ‘double slit experiment’. In the classical version of this experiment, a laser emits, one at a time, particles of light—photons—which then go through a plate with two parallel identical slits in it: Slit A and Slit B. On the detector screen behind the plate, the light beam leaves a trace. The detectors placed at the slits’ entrances show that each individual photon enters only one of the slits and not both as would be expected from a wave, producing a single spot on the screen. Thus far each photon behaves as a single particle of matter. As the number of spots accumulates, they build bright and dark bands on the screen, which is a result of interference—a phenomenon that is a property of waves, but not of particles. This proves that a photon can be both a particle—an entity that has a certain position in space—and a wave that hasn’t. This phenomenon is called wave—particle duality [8]. Other elementary units of matter behave in a similar way [9–11]. Till this point the observer registers the result without affecting it. Now, in a modified version of this experiment (the so-called quantum eraser experiment [12, 13]) a special prism splits every photon emitted by the laser into two entangled photons2 of a lower frequency, which then are focused into two separate beams of light; for convenience, let us name these beams the upper and the lower ones. Entangled particles are those which are connected to each other in a way that if anything happens to one of them, then the other would change in a predictable way at any distance and in no time. Next, one of the beams—the lower one—goes through the double slit plate, and the detector screen at the other side registers the expected interference pattern. At this stage, a new element is introduced to the  The entangled particles are particles that are connected without being linked by any physical medium. 2

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experiment: a special device is placed in front of each slit, which ‘marks’ the photons by producing clockwise circular polarisation of the photons that went through Slit A and anticlockwise circular polarisation of photons that went through Slit B. As such, polarisation alone doesn’t change the fundamental nature of photons, but framed in the context of the double slit experiment polarisation allows an observer to know which path each individual photon of the lower beam took. After this, the interference pattern on the detector screen disappears, meaning that the polarised photons stopped being waves and became particles. Finally, another device gives the photons of the upper beam that did not go through the double slit plate a diagonal polarisation. By entanglement, the upper beam gives diagonal polarisation to its pair—the lower beam. This erases the effect of circular polarisation of the lower beam, which now becomes a mix of clockwise- and anticlockwise-polarised photons. The photons of the lower beam are no longer marked, and the observer can no longer determine through which slit each individual photon passed. As a result, the interference pattern on the detector screen reappears. The conclusion is clear: when the observer knew which path in space had been taken by each photon, the photons behaved as particles, and when the observer didn’t know ‘which path’ had been taken, the same photons behaved as waves. It looks as though the observer’s knowledge about the quantum object’s path ‘condenses’ it into a distinct object—a particle—whereas when the knowledge about ‘which path’ is absent, the quantum object ‘dissolves’ in space as a wave. At first glance, this effect of the observation on the observed is not a direct effect of human mind on matter. The way a quantum object behaves depends on our choice of measuring devices and experimental procedure and not on our knowledge. However, it isn’t the case. And the reason of why it isn’t the case is hidden in the meaning of knowing. What does it really mean ‘to know’? In the macroworld, when we know something, we can control it, and if we don’t know, we can’t. For example, if a detective knows where the wanted criminal is, the detective can catch the criminal, but if he doesn’t know, the criminal will stay free. However, when the detective suddenly obtains information about the criminal’s whereabout and catches the criminal, the criminal as such is not supposed to turn into a fundamentally different person (e.g., by turning

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from a man into a woman). Not so in the quantum world. When in the quantum eraser experiment, we mark the photons by using clockwise or anti-clockwise circular polarisation, we are in the shoes of the detective who found the criminal’s whereabouts. However, unlike in the macroworld, in this experiment the ‘criminals/photons’ fundamentally change and turn from waves into particles. Now the detective story takes another twist: without physically touching the criminals/photons we lose knowledge of their whereabouts, through linear polarisation of their entangled twins in the upper beam of light. Because entanglement is correlational and not a causal effect, and because this effect occurs without any transmission of information between the entangled particles [14, 15], we cannot say that we physically affected the ‘criminals/photons’, we only lost the knowledge of their whereabouts. And here we go—the ‘criminals/photons’ changed again and recovered their wave-like properties. That is why we have the right to say that in this experiment our mind, through a special measurement device, changed fundamental properties of inanimate matter, and did this not in a causal way. One might ask what all of this has to do with consciousness. Indeed, photons are being registered not directly by our consciousness, but by devices. After all, our knowledge about which path this or that photon went is only potential, as the observer cannot see the individual photons. It is the detector screen which the observer actually is seeing, and which tells the observer whether photons are marked or not marked. But this question is relevant only in the scientific Commonverse. In the Bubbleverse, our consciousness can’t directly register not only photons, but any object at all. In order to be able to see or hear something we need special devices: the retinas in our eyes or eardrums in our ears. Such things as ‘redness’ or ‘loudness’ do not exist in the physical Commonverse; what exists in the Commonverse are electromagnetic waves of certain lengths and frequencies and the amplitude of a sound wave’s vibration, plus our knowledge about how perceptual organs and brain react to light and sound waves. It is only in the Bubbleverse that our perceptual organs (eyes, mouth, ears) and brain miraculously turn these physical structures into subjective experiences—colours, sounds and knowledge. Devices that allow us to ‘see’ photons and electrons are our ‘artificial eyes’ that

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convert some invisible reality—photons—into the reality that is accessible to our perception—traces on a detector screen and subsequently into knowledge of whether the traces are left by particles or waves. This makes the whole observing device an extension of the observer’s mind, brought out into the external world; the detector screen is literally a continuation of the retina of our eyes and thus a part of our consciousness. We have therefore the right to conclude that the effect of knowledge about the quantum objects’ whereabouts on the object’s essential properties (e.g., to be a wave or a particle) was a direct non-causal effect of our mind on inanimate matter. This means that the mind changed something in the physical world without applying any of the known physical forces (i.e., electromagnetism, gravity or weak and strong nuclear forces).

3.3 Empirical Evidence—Parapsychology Parapsychological phenomena have been under investigation for over a hundred years. One such phenomenon is extrasensory perception (ESP)—reading other people’s thoughts at a distance or foreseeing the future. In a typical test for ESP a person (an inductor) picks a card with some picture on it out of the shuffled pack and, looking at the picture, tries to pass the image to another person (a receptionist) who is located in another building. The timing of the information transfer and reception is synchronised in advance. The receptionist tries to guess the image he or she is being transmitted. If the number of correctly guessed shapes is higher than the one expected by chance alone, then the result is interpreted as confirming that the information transfer took place. Years of research showed that the effect is small but statistically significant [16]. Another effect studied by parapsychologists is psychokinesis (PK)—the ability of a person to affect physical processes by an effort of mind alone; this effect too was supported in rigorous experimental studies [17, 18]. To summarise, studies of parapsychological effects showed that mind over matter effects, which the Bubbleverse perspective implies, are not just science fiction; such events do exist. Nevertheless, most scientists are not persuaded by these results. There are two reasons for this mistrust. The theoretical reason is that in the scientific Commonverse mind and

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matter are separate substances and cannot directly affect each other, and the empirical reason is that parapsychological effects cannot be replicated with 100% certainty. For example, a stone thrown in liquid water will always sink, but the person’s ability to show ESP or PK effects can vary in different experiments, even when the experimental methods stay the same. This violates the fundamental principle of the scientific Commonverse—a complete replicability of effects. In the core Bubbleverse, these reasons are invalid (see Chap. 7 for more on the core Bubbleverse). Theoretically, mind and matter are parts of the same whole—the Bubbleverse—and therefore can interact, though in a non-causal way. In terms of replicability, in the core Bubbleverse most conscious phenomena are unique and unreplicable on the full scale. Indeed, recurrent subjective phenomena such as love, hope and belief do exist, but they are unique and never happen twice in exactly the same way. Dreams fall in the same department. Not a single night dream, recurring dreams including, ever looks exactly like any other dream, yet we see dreams all the time. Mind over matter phenomena studied by parapsychology are manifestations of our subconscious and beyond our voluntary control. Their full-scale replication is not guaranteed, yet they can be real. The fact that paranormal effects of the mind are manifestations of the subconscious explains why these effects are ‘case specific’ and ‘subject specific’: unlike effects in physical sciences and traditional psychological effects, which are supposed to always be statistically significant in the same experimental conditions, the effects in parapsychology can be or not be statistically significant, even when the same experimental conditions are carefully maintained. The effects are also unstable: They may show up in the beginning of an experiment and fade away in the end; the same person can be able show these effects and eventually lose the ability. In fact, the lack of universality and replicability in paranormal effects suggests that these effects are not embedded in the cause-effect continuum of scientific Commonverse. In other words, paranormal effects are free from causal determination. To an extent, all mental phenomena are specific and unreplicable, but the degree of specificity and unreplicability varies. Our mental skills and habits are highly automatised, their replicability is high, and the results are relatively stable during the time of experimentation. For example, the

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number of recollected digits (out of 10) briefly shown on a computer screen varies from person to person, but if we repeat the experiment day after day, the average number people remember in each day of testing will be about seven [19]. In contrast, more complex psychological effects, which involve perception, thinking and emotions, are less stable and not always replicable [20–22]. The difference between ‘normal’ and paranormal effects in this regard is of a degree and not of kind. The decline of paranormal effects with time of testing was first reported in 1930s by American parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine, who found that in some of his participants their abilities to correctly guess other peoples’ thoughts were fading until they disappeared completely [23]. The decline of the paranormal effects with time of testing, inexplicable in terms of a simple regression to the mean, was also observed in both studies which I conducted. My first experiment on ESP (in collaboration with Adrian Ryan) [24] was based on the method developed by the American physicist and parapsychologist Edwin May. A participant is told that approximately in 15 minutes he or she will be shown a photographic picture of a certain landscape or a city, named ‘the target’. The pool of around 300 pictures is stored in the computer available in the room. The participant’s goal is to visualise and draw one of these pictures. After the sketch is made, the experimenter switches the computer on, and the computer randomly selects five pictures out of the pool. Next, looking at the participant’s sketch, the experimenter ranks the five chosen pictures on the scale of similarity to the participant’s picture, with the least similar being given the lowest rank. The computer then is put to work again and randomly picks a picture out of the five earlier chosen pictures. The chosen picture is considered to be the target, which the participant was trying to see by making his or her sketch. The experiment ends with the experimenter showing the target picture to the participant. The assumption was that if the target picture chosen by the computer out of five pictures is the one that the experimenter had ranked the highest, then the experimental trial is a ‘hit’, meaning that the participant correctly guessed the picture ‘from the future’. If the participant could indeed see the image from the future, then the target picture would

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coincide with the experimenter’s highest ranked picture significantly more frequently than in 20% of all trials. The study included two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants indeed exhibited ESP. Interestingly, their sketches were not always a mirror copy of the target picture; sometimes similarity was in meaning rather than resemblance. For example, one participant drew a road, a windmill on the hill and mountains on the horizon, and the target picture proved to be almost exactly the same. Another participant pictured a strange human figure wearing a helmet and said it was an alien. None of the five pictures chosen by the computer even remotely resembled the figure of the alien. However, I noticed than one picture showed a wheat field with crop circles: concentric circles and ellipses, as if printed on the field by a gigantic stamp. I remembered that crop circles are sometimes viewed as made by aliens and gave this picture the highest rank; this picture turned to be indeed the target picture. In Experiment 2 the overall ESP effect was not statistically significant. However, in both experiments the initially high ESP effects declined to the end of the testing (see Figs. 3.1 and 3.2).

Fig. 3.1  Decline of the paranormal effect with time of testing in Study 1, Experiment 1 (Subbotsky & Ryan, 2009)

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Fig. 3.2  Decline of the paranormal effect with time of testing in Study 1, Experiment 2 (Subbotsky & Ryan, 2009)

The second study was based on the method proposed by the American psychologist Daryl Bem [25]. The gist of the method is as follows. Participants were individually presented on a computer screen a succession of 48 words, which named one of four types of objects: food, clothes, professions and animals. Participants had been instructed to visualise every word that they saw. After all the words had been presented, participants unexpectedly were given a memory test, which asked them to recall as many of the words as they could. So far, this method was a standard psychological test on memory. But then the computer randomly selected 24 words out of the earlier presented 48 words, and the participants were given a practice exercise—the opportunity to practice with these words and so better remember them by classifying the words into the four aforementioned categories (i.e., food, clothes, animals and professions). If this practice exercise had been given prior to the memory test, we would not be surprised to find out that the participants recalled the words from the

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subgroup that they had seen twice (S2) better than from the subgroup of the remaining words, which they had only seen once (S1). However, because in this experiment the practice exercise was given after the memory test, the participants were expected to remember an approximately equal number of words from both subgroups. Paradoxically, even though the participants repeatedly saw the words from S2 after they had recalled them, these words were still remembered significantly better than the words from S1. Understandably, in the control session of this experiment, in which participants were not given the practice exercise, yet the computer still randomly selected the 24 words out of 48, there was no a difference in recall between the two subgroups of words. It appears that the memory stabilising effect of repetition worked ‘backwards in time’. I was one of dozens of scientists who conducted the replications. Most replications failed, but there were also successful ones [26]. In my replication [27] I repeated the experiment three times, with two groups of participants (experimental and control) in each trial. In three out of six groups of participants I found significant differences between numbers of words remembered from S2 and the S1. The probability of this happening by chance alone was 0.002, which was significantly lower than the criterion 0.05 for the ‘no effect’ assumption accepted in science. This means that my results could not be explained by mere chance. The difference between Bem’s results and the results of my replication was that in two out of three trials that produced differences in recollection, the words from S1 were recalled significantly better than the words from the S2. This goes against Bem’s hypothesis that the memory facilitation through practice works backwards, ‘from the future to the past’. It looks more likely that my results in this experiment, like in the previously described experiment, were caused by the experimenter’s expectancy effect—the direct effect of the experimenter’s expectation on the data of the experiment. This conclusion, however, warrants some explanation. The standard ‘observer effect’ is well known. This effect means that an experimenter can unintentionally influence results of an experiment by giving the participants suggestive signals through voice intonations, facial expressions or by skewing the experimental data in the direction of the experimenter’s expectation. Fortunately, this experiment was safeguarded

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against the standard observer effect, because I was isolated from participants by an opaque screen, and the participants received all the instructions directly from the computer. The results were registered and statistically worked out by the computer; the calculating programme was locked, which excluded the possibility of tampering with the data. The only way for the experimenter to affect the results was if the experimenter’s mind was employing its ability of PK or ESP. Because I already knew the results of Bem’s original experiment, my expectations regarding results of my experiment were biased by this knowledge. Independently of my conscious intentions, my subconscious might have affected the programme of random numbers that the computer contained, so instead of randomly choosing the words out of the pool, the computer loaded the words that participant had recollected into S2 more frequently than into S1, or vice versa. Another possibility was ESP—participants’ minds could have detected my expectation of them remembering S1 and S2 words with different efficiency, anticipated which words would be placed in each category and better remembered words from one of these categories. In a published paper I called the results of my experiments the ‘non-­ standard observer effect’, which essentially was the case of direct ‘mind over matter’ phenomenon. However, we need to realise that any ‘explanation’ of the direct mind over matter effect is doomed to be a speculation, since in the Bubbleverse there is no a direct logical or a causal link between mind and matter, while the very concept of an explanation is based on physical and logical causality (see Chap. 11 for more on that). Like in the previous study, in this study a significant decline of the ‘mind over matter’ phenomenon by the end of the experiment was observed (see Fig.  3.3). The decline effect escapes simple explanations, such as regression to the mean, since its initial starting point is the effects that are significant, statistically solid and unlikely to be random deviations. In both of the aforementioned studies impermanence of paranormal effects was also evident: only in half of the experiments were these effects statistically significant. However, from the Bubbleverse perspective both impermanence and decline of paranormal effects are to be expected: if the person’s mind could directly affect inanimate matter in a causal way and with the same regularity as physical objects affect each other, then the

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Fig. 3.3  Decline of the paranormal effect with time of testing in Study 2 (Subbotsky, 2013)

difference between subject and object would diminish and disappear, thus shutting the Bubbleverse down altogether. The question arises of why paranormal effects exist at all. Indeed, wouldn’t the world be a better and more consistent place without such mindboggling phenomena like mind over matter effects in physics and psychology? Again, the structure of the Bubbleverse is the answer. If the subject versus object split were absolute and the subject could never directly affect the observed processes, then the subject and object would be completely independent and could exist separately from each other. For the scientific Commonverse this complete mind/matter division would be an ideal condition for research, since in this condition the demand of the observer not meddling into observed phenomena would be met to the extreme. But if it were the case, then the mind/matter interaction would become a problem. As Rene Descartes famously argued, because mind is a non-­extended entity and the body is an extended entity, interaction

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between the two entities is incomprehensible [28]. Nevertheless, a simple voluntary movement is an obvious proof that the mind (e.g., our intention to lift a hand) can affect the body (e.g., us actually lifting the hand). This means that mind and matter are connected. Typically, our Self connects to inanimate matter through our body, but the unity between mind and body opens the theoretical possibility that in special circumstances mind can affect inanimate matter skipping the body. The direct mind/ matter effects in physics and psychology are exactly such effects that occur when special circumstances are artificially created. To reiterate, like entanglement phenomena in physics, paranormal effects in psychology are free from physical causality; there is no known causal mechanism that connects an act of consciousness with the changes in physical processes. Paranormal effects can only be registered as empirical facts of correlation between mental efforts and certain physical events in our core Bubbleverse. And even in the core Bubbleverse not every physical event can be directly affected by our Self. I cannot move a heavy stone by a sheer effort of will. With the exception of our own bodies, we are unable to tear physical bodies and processes off the cause-effect continuum of the Commonverse. But there is one more exception—random processes. By definition, a single random event cannot be predicted with 100% certainty, only a probability of it happening can be assessed in numbers [29]. The inherent unpredictability makes a random event free from the cause-effect continuum of the Commonverse. Liberated from causal determination, a random event belongs in the core Bubbleverse. At the same time, random processes are also a part of the Commonverse, as their probabilities can be estimated by mathematical means. If a stone is solidly embedded in the Commonverse, and a night dream is exclusively a part of the core Bubbleverse, a random event is a marginal entity that exists in both parts of the Bubbleverse. As a separate event, a chance event is a part of the core Bubbleverse, but as a part of a long string of such events, the random event becomes a part of the scientific Commonverse. This creates a unique opportunity to study non-causal effects of the Bubbleverse by applying the same criteria usually applied to physical objects in the scientific Commonverse.

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Paranormal effects are distortions brought into random processes by the direct effort of the Self. For example, a participant is asked to make an effort of will in order to affect an outcome of chance processes, such as the work of a random number generator based on unpredictability of radioactive decay or electronic noise; as a result, one of the equally probable binary events (e.g., a flash of red light) starts to occur more frequently, then the other (e.g., a flash of green light) [30]. These distortions of random physical processes caused by an effort of will are what researchers call psychokinetic effects. Since random events are not thoroughly embedded into the fabric of cause-effect continuum of the Commonverse, they can be responsive to the effort of the mind. In a sense, every paranormal effect is like a dream or a piece of art: it is strictly individual and non-recurrent. Producing the paranormal effect also requires spending psychological energy and is therefore subject to fatigue. This may explain the decline of paranormal effects with the time of testing: when conditions are created for our Self to distort random processes, our Self has a tendency to quickly run out of psychological energy, and this produces the decline effect. Because of their impermanence, small magnitude and tendency towards declining with time, paranormal effects do not threaten the orderly structure of the scientific Commonverse, which is mostly independent of the direct efforts of the mind. Nevertheless, these effects are important as they reveal the fundamental unity between mind and matter in the core Bubbleverse. Like in chemistry a tiny proportion of an indicator substance is needed to show the presence or absence of a threshold concentration of a chemical species, paranormal effects are indicators of the link between mind and matter that exists at a fundamental level in the core Bubbleverse. This could explain why studying these effects, despite their small magnitude, evokes great interest among scientists, as well as hot discussions on validity of these effects [31]. Much in these discussions is missing the point, because of the assumption that paranormal phenomena are supposed to be as stable and replicable as phenomena in physics. As argued in this chapter, they are not, neither can these effects compete with physical effects on the scales of strength and practical importance. What these effects indicate is that underneath the scientific Commonverse there is a primordial reality, where mind and matter are parts of the same whole— the primordial Bubbleverse.

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3.4 Living in the Bubbleverse: Conclusion In the scientific Commonverse, a person is dwarfed by the grandiosity of the cosmos. The innumerable galaxies, the endless expanse of space, the vastness of time, the incomprehensible complexity of sub-atomic matter can squash the person’s imagination. The Bubbleverse consists of the same galaxies, the same infinite ocean of space and the same endless river of time, but they no longer crush the imagination, because in the Bubbleverse cosmos cannot exist without us. In the scientific Commonverse a person is nothing but an infinitesimally small speck on the gigantic painting of nature. As Blaise Pascal famously noted, a drop of water is enough to wash the person away, with the universe hardly even noticing this. In my Bubbleverse though I am a host and a centre; a drop of water can still wash me away, but my Bubbleverse will follow. In the scientific Commonverse, all happens for a reason and miracles are banned. In the Bubbleverse, miracles flourish. For starters, my very entrance into being as a particular person can’t be causally explained. Every object—my thoughts, my movements, even the physical cosmos—is a creation of my conscious or subconscious Bubbleverse and a miracle too. The final miracle will be the end of my Bubbleverse, which pulls all the cosmos back into Nothing. “All this sounds fine”—a reader might say—“but if all the universe will cease to exist with the end of your mind, why are you writing this book in the first place? Writing books only makes sense if you hope that they will make your mark on eternity, that people after you will read them. If everything ends with your Bubbleverse, then any long-term project becomes pointless”. Fortunately, this is not the case, and writing books still makes sense in the Bubbleverse. Even if leaving my mark on eternity is an illusion, this illusion attracts me. Besides, later in this book we will see that in the Bubbleverse the distinction between illusions and reality doesn’t stand. This beautiful blue sky over my head, this splash of the ocean wave on the sandy beach, this taste of a delicious cake in my mouth and all my sensations and feelings are personal and non-shareable, but they are important to me, because they are what I am. In the Bubbleverse I enjoy life, with all its pleasures and hardships, I want to live, I want to

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live forever, and although I know that these subjective experiences will come to an end, I nevertheless would not give up these experiences for the world. And so is with the long-term projects. This is not to say that living in the Bubbleverse is all fun. Yes, the consciousness of being a centre of the world can be enjoyable, but it also brings with it a great psychological burden. Just to feel that you are alone not simply for a moment but for all the span of your life, not only in a room, but in the universe—this awareness can be depressing. In the Bubbleverse, our beliefs in gods and in science are our own inventions and there is no one to tell us what to think or do. The absolute freedom of action makes us feel as if we are weightless and floating in space. The difficulty of living in the Bubbleverse is rooted in the fact that we are torn apart between different sections of the Bubbleverse. In our minds, most of us prefer to stay in the Commonverses, but with part of our mind we have to remain in the primordial core Bubbleverse. Usually, we become aware of our core Bubbleverse in our dreams and fantasies, or in the so-called altered states of mind. We can reach the core Bubbleverse through psychological meditation or through philosophical reasoning. And of course, our private life, with all its loves and hates, pleasures and pains, choices and problems, is a part of the core Bubbleverse. But the Commonverses always remain for us the ‘holy land’. There, in the universe for all, we find a desired relief from the hardships of everyday life. There we are back on solid ground made of cause-­ effects ‘bricks’, with scientists to teach us, and gods to take care of us. The burden of absolute freedom is replaced by laws, rules and spatiotemporal limitations. Some philosophers might call this a prison, but this is a comfortable prison. And of course, there is science that makes our life longer and less painful and promises us to give the answers to all hard problems, if not now, then in the future. Writing books and engaging in other long-­ term projects is no longer a useful illusion, but a chance to leave the trace in the world that will outlive us. The wonderful Commonverse—we would like to stay in it for as long as we can, and perhaps forever. But no, it is impossible to completely escape our sovereign realm—the core Bubbleverse. With some part of our mind and body we are always there. Through fantasies and virtual reality, we enjoy its magic and miracles: we listen to music, watch art, meditate, do sport. Our love and

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hatred, our joys and sorrows are in the core Bubbleverse. To escape the hardships of the core Bubbleverse or enjoy its luxuries, people go to concerts, museums and cinema, and sometimes get drunk or take substances (not recommended). So, let us have a closer look at the Bubbleverse.

References 1. Retrieved from https://www.artofplay.com/blogs/articles/fun-with-ambiguous-images 2. Bower, T.  G. R. (1971). The object in the world of an infant. Scientific American, 225(4), 30–38. 3. Baillargeon, R., & DeVos, J. (1991). Object permanence in young infants: Further evidence. Child Development, 62, 1227–1246. 4. Stenger, V. J. (2007). The anthropic principle. In T. Flynn (Ed.), The new Encyclopedia of unbelief (pp. 65–70). New York: Prometheus Books. 5. Kant, I. (2018). Kritika Chistogo Razuma. Moscow: Act. 6. Huggett, N. (2018). Zeno’s Paradoxes. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-zeno/#Dic 7. Patil, Y. S., Chakram, S., & Vengalattore, M. (2015). Measurement-induced localization of an ultracold lattice gas. Physical Review Letters, 115, 140402. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283639073_ Measurement-Induced_Localization_of_an_Ultracold_Lattice_Gas. 8. Rueckner, W., & Peidle, J. (2013). Young’s double-slit experiment with single photons and quantum eraser. American Journal of Physics, 81, 951. Retrieved from https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/files/sciencedemonstrations/files/single_photon_paper.pdf. 9. Donati, O., Missiroli, G. F., & Pozzi, G. (1973). An experiment on electron interference. American Journal of Physics, 41, 639–644. 10. Frabboni, S., et al. (2012). The Young-Feynman two-slits experiment with single electrons: Build-up of the interference pattern and arrival-time distribution using a fast-readout pixel detector. Ultramicroscopy, 116, 73–76. 11. Nairz, O., Brezger, B., Arndt, M., & Zeilinger, A. (2001). Diffraction of complex molecules by structures made of light. Physical Review Letters, 87, 160401. Retrieved from https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/ PhysRevLett.87.160401.

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12. Aharonov, Y., & Zubairy, M. S. (2005). Time and the quantum: Erasing the past and impacting the future. Science, 307, 875–879. 13. Yoon-Ho, K., Yu, R., Kulik, S.  P., Shih, Y.  H., & Scully, M. (2000). A delayed choice quantum eraser. Physical Review Letters, 84, 1–5. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9903047.pdf. 14. Yin, J., et al. (2013). Bounding the speed of ‘spooky’ action at a distance. Physical Review Letters, 110, 260407. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/ pdf/1303.0614.pdf 15. Matson, J. (2012). Quantum teleportation achieved over record distances. Nature News. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/news/quantumteleportation-achieved-over-record-distances-1.11163 16. Bem, D. J., & Honorton, C. (1994). Does Psi exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 4–18. 17. Dunne, B. J., Nelson, R. D., & Jahn, R. G. (1988). Operator-related anomalies in a random mechanical cascade. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2, 155–179. 18. Nelson, R. D., Bradish, G. J., Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (1994). A linear pendulum experiment: Effects of operator intention on damping rate. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 4, 471–489. 19. Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97. 20. Schooler, J. W., & Engstler-Schooler, T. (1990). Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: Some things are better left unsaid. Cognitive Psychology, 22, 36–71. 21. Schooler, J. (2011). Unpublished results hide the decline effect. Nature, 470, 437. 22. Lehrer J. (2010). The truth wears off. The New Yorker, 52–57. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wears-off 23. Rhine, J. B. (1934). Extra-sensory perception. Boston, MA: Bruce Humphries. 24. Subbotsky, E., & Ryan, A. (2014). Motivation and belief in the paranormal in a remote viewing task. The Open Behavioral Science Journal, 8, 1–7. Retrieved from https://benthamopen.com/contents/pdf/TOBSJ/ TOBSJ-8-1.pdf. 25. Bem, D. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 100, 207–225.

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26. Retrieved from https://www.dailygrail.com/2014/01/is-precognition-realpositive-replications-of-daryl-bems-controversial-findings/ 27. Subbotsky, E. (2013). Sensing the future: Reversed causality or a non-­ standard observer effect? The Open Psychology Journal, 6, 81–93. Retrieved from https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/subbotsk/Sensing%20the%20 future%281%29.pdf. 28. Hart, W. D. (1996). Dualism. In S. Guttenplan (Ed.), A companion to the philosophy of mind (pp. 265–267). Oxford: Blackwell. 29. Eagle, A. (2018). Chance versus randomness. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chancerandomness/ 30. Radin, D., & Nelson, R. (2000). Meta—analysis of mind—matter interaction experiments: 1959 to 2000. Retrieved from www.spiritualscientific. com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Review_of_Mind-Matter_Interaction_ Articles_19592000_RNG_Articles.12960830.pdf 31. de Beauregard, O.  C., Mattuck, R.  D., Josephson, B.  D., & Walker, E.  H. (1980). Parapsychology: An exchange. The New  York Review of Books. Retrieved from www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/06/26/parapsychology-an-exchange/

4 The Fabric of the Bubbleverse

4.1 A Magical Gap Imagine that, sitting in the library and fully immersed in reading a fascinating book on biology, you suddenly felt hungry. Having descended to the cafeteria and bought a couple of sandwiches, you decided to postpone reading for another time and switch to other, more urgent problems. You recall that you need to prepare for tomorrow’s lecture, pick up the child from school, wash clothes and do other small but necessary chores. Closer to the evening, you suddenly feel that you are tired. Having sent the child to bed and spent some time reading a novel, you now decided that the day is over and it’s time for yourself to get some sleep. But even in the dream your worries and desires do not leave you alone: you are being chased by a monster, see your friends, make scientific discoveries. In other words, you always want something or are worried about things. And when you think that at last you don’t need anything and have it all, you discover that you developed a new need—the need for a stimulating distraction from comfortable but boring existence. To be in need, to worry, to want and to strive for something are innate properties of a person. A person is an ‘equation with the sign of © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_4

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inequality’: we are never equal to themselves, we always feel some incompleteness and lack of something. This means that we exist simultaneously in the present and in the future. In the present we feel the tension, the need, the desire, and in the future, we see ourselves the happy owners of all the desired objects and states. Unfortunately, a future like that happens only once—at the moment of our departure from this world. Being alive, we are always in a state of discomfort, going beyond ourselves—we are like a splintering atom that can never finish the splinting. This state of having a split inside, the feeling of inequality with itself is a property of all living things. Any inanimate object—a stone, water, a piece of dead tree—is always calm and strives to nothing. A flying meteor is indifferent to its condition. It is never hungry or bored; it will never try to avoid collision with another celestial body which will destroy it. Only the living thing, even at the unicellular level, has the ability to aspire to something: to eat, to avoid danger, to survive and produce an offspring. Like a splintering atom releases energy, so the cracking of a living thing into ‘itself at present’ and ‘itself in the future’ produces something new— something that we call psyche. Psychology has many names to refer to this new reality: sensations, needs, desires, strives and feelings. Anything that gets caught into this magical ‘gap’ between ‘I now’ and ‘me in the future’ is painted in the colours of this new spiritual reality. Let us say that an object that splits within itself into ‘now’ and ‘in the future’ becomes a subject, and a resulting gap becomes a new reality—the subjective reality. We can also say that subjective reality is a mirror in which a living entity can see its own states. The definitive property of subjective reality, as well as life itself, is this ability of flipping on itself (see Chap. 13 for more on that). In the billions of years that have passed since the beginning of life on earth living things became more complex. A monocellular eukaryotic organism upgraded itself to a conscious person. Every person who tries to look at his or her consciousness ‘from inside’ feels like the climber on top of a tall mountain: the person will see a varied and colourful world—the Bubbleverse. Originally, this world seems a chaotic jumble of mountain peaks, precipices and valleys. However, on closer inspection we will see that the world of the individual mind has order and logic of its own. In this and subsequent chapters we will try to understand this hidden order.

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4.2 T  he Layer Cake: Components and Hierarchy So, let’s begin. The first thing we notice is that things are red or green, heavy or light, round or square. These subjective properties of things are a result of the work of innate properties of our mind called qualia. Qualia are ‘mental tools’ that help us create objects’ properties. Manipulating objects, we can change their properties. For example, genetic engineers can turn a red tomato into a black one, and little apples into large apples. By changing the frequency of electromagnetic emission, we can change colour of the light source from red to green. However, we cannot manipulate qualia in just the same way, because qualia are different from properties. Qualia are given once and forever. Using a colour filter, we can change colour of milk from white to green, but not the ‘whiteness’ into ‘greenness’. You can mould a triangle made of flexible wire into a circle, but it is impossible to transform the idea of ‘triangleness’ into the idea of ‘circleness’: all you can do is to mentally switch from the former to the latter. So, we discovered that although qualia themselves are purely mental, unchangeable and invisible, they obtain a more tangible form when projected by our perception into external objects. When this happens, qualia become phenomena. The most basic phenomena are sensations. As noted above, sensations are not the same as qualia: qualia are innate mental abilities, whereas sensations have a cause. For example, we can think about redness without actually seeing anything red, but to have a sensation of red colour we need to have a red object in front of us. When sensations join together, they build up into more complex phenomena—perceptions of objects. A perceived apple has taste, form, colour and smell, a perceived melody is made of a bunch of different sounds, internal perceptions are experienced as pain or pleasure in a particular part of the body. Moreover, if qualia are just given to us, in creating phenomena our mind plays an active part. Psychology of sensations and perceptions gives many examples of such participation [1]. The same food may seem tasty or tasteless depending on our mood, a lousy job becomes easier to do if we are promised a good pay, and clouds floating

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in the sky may resemble people, animals and other familiar objects. Phenomena form a second layer of tissue of the Bubbleverse. Note that although our mind actively participates in the creation of phenomena, that participation is involuntary and performed without conscious effort on our part. To summarise, phenomena emerge as a result of our mind imposing qualia onto things-in-themselves. Unlike qualia, phenomena constantly change. Green tomatoes become red when they ripen; under reduced visual acuity square objects blur and look oval or round. The plane in which we fly seems huge, but the same plane that we see flying in the sky may seem the size of an ant. So, what is the plane really like—big or small? If you take in one hand a heavy stone and in another hand a matchbox you can feel the difference in weights. Now replace those objects with two identical tennis balls. This time, the weight of the balls too seems different: for the hand that had carried a heavy stone a tennis ball seems lighter than for the hand that had carried the matchbox. The waiting time for public transport at the bus stop in the cold December day passes slowly, and the time during interesting movie flies on wings. And such a mess with subjective images happens all the time: the objects of perception change colour, shape, weight, taste and smell. It is right here that we call in our ability of thinking. Thinking is a part of subjective experience, but a special one. If our perception is mostly subconscious and automatic, our thinking isn’t. When we think we split into two persons: the one who is doing the thinking and the other one who is watching the thinker. This ability of seeing things from the outside (called reflection) opens a new wonderful opportunity—to compare things between themselves. Thus, looking at a plane flying in the sky, we can compare it with the same plane which is resting in front of us at the airport; now the question of whether the aircraft ‘in reality’ is big or small becomes clearer. We don’t need thinking to see that the plane resting in front of us is bigger than the plane flying in the sky but smaller than the plane we see while sitting inside the plane. But to decide which of these three images of the plane is the plane’s ‘true image’, we need to resort to a special way of comparison—measurement. We select some object (e.g., a bamboo stick the length of an arm) as a measure and put it to the plane in a regular way as many times as is needed to cover the whole length of

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the plane. Having found out that the stick laid along the plane a certain number of times, we take this number for the real size of the plane. Now it remains to convince other people to take the same stick for a measure. So, we created what can be called the simplest rational design, or rational construction (RC) of the airplane’s length. Such RCs can be built for all the other features of the aircraft—its width, internal structure, engine and everything else. Currently, science has created RCs for almost all the things and processes in the world: inanimate objects, animals, people, space and time, the laws of nature and society. These RCs we call knowledge. Note that at this point we are leaving the ground of the primordial Bubbleverse and stepping into the scientific Commonverse, which still is a part of the Bubbleverse. Of course, in modern science, comparing the observed objects and processes with each other and developing their RCs is a much more complicated procedure than the example we outlined; these procedures may involve hordes of academic institutions, complex experiments and mathematical calculations, but the principle remains the same. So, now we have identified three layers in the fabric of our Bubbleverse: the one that was given to us without participation of our mind (qualia), the one in which our mind takes part involuntarily (phenomena—perceptions and mental representations of objects and processes) and the one that we create by consciously comparing the observed objects with each other through measurement (RCs). The first and second layers belong only to us, as other people cannot see qualia or phenomena that we harbour in our mind. The third—knowledge or RCs—belongs to us and other people. Qualia and phenomena we call subjective (only for us) experience, while knowledge is objective experience, that is, it belongs not only to us (subjects) but also to other people, who are objects for us, but which we endow with properties to be the same subjects as us (see Chap. 15 for more on that). Finally, entering into relationships with other people (animated objects), we discover that such relationships are subject to certain rules. These rules are laws of morality and society, traditions and social customs. We call these rules collective beliefs. Collective beliefs do not have physical bodies and are not presented as phenomena but exist in our imagination. However, not being physical bodies, collective beliefs are nevertheless

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quite real, and in some ways even more real, than scientific concepts and theories. Thus, by breaking the law we might make the Bubbleverse an unpleasant place to be in. Altogether, the texture of our Bubbleverse begins to look like a layer cake, centred around our reflecting Self (Fig. 4.1). And now let’s have a look at every layer of the fabric of the Bubbleverse in more detail, leaving our Self suspended for a special chapter (see Chap. 6).

The Great Nothing Beliefs

Rational constructions (knowledge) Phenomena Qualia

The Bubbleverse

Self

Fig. 4.1  The texture of the Bubbleverse

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4.3 Q  ualia and Sensations: Where is the ‘Redness’ Really? One Sunday morning, your partner and you were roaming TV programmes and stumbled upon a lecture on physiology of sensations. A lecturer, a famous scientist, started with explaining the workings of our vision. He showed a picture of the eye, spoke of the pupil and the lenses, the multi-layered structure of the retina that lies at the bottom of the eye and in its entirety comprises ten distinct layers. The outer layer contains neural cells that are directly sensitive to light—rods and cones. Rods function mainly in dim light and provide black-and-white vision while cones are responsible for the perception of colour. The lecturer then explained how the eye actually works. The light striking the retina initiates a cascade of chemical and electrical events that ultimately trigger nerve impulses that are sent to various visual centres of the brain through the fibres of the optic nerve. Neural signals coming from the nerve then undergo processing by other neurons, and ultimately reach the visual cortex—a special area in the brain that is responsible for vision. Finally, we learned that we can only see a small portion of electromagnetic radiation, which we call visible light. Each colour has a different wavelength. Violet has the shortest wavelength, at around 380 nanometres, whereas red has the longest wavelength, at around 700 nanometres. Next, the lecturer talks about our hearing, which evolution designed no less beautifully and imaginatively than it designed vision. The ear consists of three main sections: the outer ear, the middle ear and the inner ear. The inner ear is situated in the structure called bony labyrinth. Sound that travels through the outer ear impacts on the eardrum and causes it to vibrate. Vibrations are transmitted into the inner ear through a fluid called endolymph. The fluid eventually transmits the vibrations to the cochlea—a spiral-shaped structure. Finally, hair cells, situated within the cochlea, convert mechanical vibrations into electrical stimuli that are eventually transmitted to the brain. “We can only admire the magnificent inventiveness of nature—the speaker noted—which created the way of converting mechanical energy into electromagnetic energy hundreds of millions of years before we invented the electric generator”. Like in the

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area of vision, humans can only hear sound waves with the frequency between about 20 Hz and 20 kHz. Sound above 20 kHz is ultrasound; it can be detected by bats, whales and dolphins, which use this sound for echolocation. Sound waves below 20 Hz are known as infrasound; whales, elephants and other animals communicate through infrasound. In the end of the lecture the noticeably tired speaker turned to our sense of taste. Taste, or gustatory perception, is the sensation produced when chemical compounds of a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with taste receptor cells located on taste buds in our mouth, mostly on the tongue. Taste, along with smell (olfaction) and trigeminal nerve stimulation (registering texture, pain, and temperature), determines flavours of food. The tongue is covered with thousands of small bumps called papillae. Within each papilla are hundreds of taste buds. Each taste bud contains 50–100 taste receptor cells. Neural signals from taste buds go to the gustatory cortex which is responsible for the perception of taste. Later the same day, you and your partner popped into a local Italian restaurant for a quick lunch. At lunch, you discussed the latest news while enjoying a delicious pizza, washed down with a pint of really nice pale lager. Having finished the lunch, you decided to go for a stroll on the riverbank. When passing by a museum of fine arts, you saw that a new exhibition of the famous artist Chaim Soutine was on display. You never saw his paintings and decided to have a look. Drifting slowly through the exhibition, you were wondering what kind of aesthetic pleasure one might get from the multiple paintings of open carcasses of beef. Your partner, who is more sophisticated in arts than you, explained “Perhaps, this is a way for an artist to say to the viewer that what we see around us is only a surface of things, with a very complex and not so beautiful fillings being hidden from view… but the colours are really impressive”. Indeed, you have never seen before that there can be so many shades of red. When you left the museum, it was already getting dark and a good time to hurry to the local philharmonic where you and your partner had booked tickets for a concert of classic music. They were playing Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ violin concert. Vivaldi’s music was your favourite, and this evening the performance was particularly enjoyable. When the day was over and you were getting asleep in your bed, the events of the day went through your mind again. Suddenly, and with

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some surprise, you realised that not a single time since the morning’s lecture did you or your partner recall the lecture’s content, nor you felt the need of recalling the content. The diverse sensual impressions you enjoyed in the restaurant, the museum and in the philharmonic were completely self-sufficient and needed no knowledge of how they arise in your brain. In fact, remembering the knowledge you had learned from the lecture might have actually spoilt the fun. And here we are faced with a problem. Indeed, the knowledge of the mechanisms of our sensations have nothing to do with sensations themselves. It is as if the knowledge exists in a separate compartment of our mind, while in the real life we exhaustively rely on our feelings. It is only when something goes wrong with our senses that we have to open the compartment of knowledge and start thinking about the repair work. In other words, the world in our Bubbleverse is presented to us in two separate ways: in the form of subjective experiences, which is inherent to the core Bubbleverse, and in the form of knowledge of the physical and neural mechanisms of these subjective experiences, which is constructed by the scientific Commonverse. As we learned from the previous section of this chapter, sensations and perceptions result from our Self projecting its inherent tools—qualia—into the objects-in-themselves, located outside or inside our body. The projection works like a torch: we don’t really see the light of a torch; we see the objects that reflect this light back into our eyes (see Chap. 8 for more on that). By the same token, we don’t sense qualia; instead, we see red tomatoes, hear musical melodies and feel the sweet taste of sugar. In other words, we sense the effects of our qualia when they ‘fuse’ with the objects-in-themselves. However, when physical scientists explain how the objects ‘really are’, they present the objects as totally independent of our senses, whereas our senses are presented as passive side effects of neural processes that emerge in the brain, similar to the waves on the surface of a pool in which a stone has just been thrown. This view implies that sensations have no ‘active say’ in shaping perceptions of physical objects. This arises the question of what sensations ‘really’ are: are they part of the objects that we perceive, as our ‘projection’ intuition tells us, or do they emerge in the brain as side effects of neural processes, as the scientific teaching insists? The real aim of school education is to install the

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scientific view—the belief that physical reality is totally independent from subjective experiences; as for subjective experiences, they emerge in our brains and sense organs as side effects of neural processes caused by physical objects. This aim is not stated directly in school curriculum but is present in this curriculum indirectly. All you need to do to see that this is so is to open handbooks on physics of light, sound, weight and molecular structure of objects for beginners. But does school education in Western countries really achieve that aim? To investigate the issue, a study was conducted [2]. The aim was to examine what six- and nine-year-old children and adults think about sensations: do they believe that sensations shape the objects out there, as the core Bubbleverse intuition tells us, or do they think that sensations appear in the head and sense organs as the physical science teaches? A set of questions about eight kinds of sensations was asked. For instance, in regard to colour participants were shown a red pencil lying on the table, and asked “What colour is the pencil? And this ‘redness’ of the pencil, where do you think it is: in the pencil or in your mind? (a version: in the pencil or in your eyes?)”. It was assumed that locating ‘redness’ in the pencil and not in the mind (eyes) would stand for the belief that the sensation of colour is a legitimate part of physical objects, and not just a passive side effect of neural processes in the brain. And vice versa: if a person says that redness is in the mind and not in the pencil, the person is already ‘corrupted’ by the scientific Commonverse and believes the redness to be merely a side effect. Similar methods were used for the sensation of sound (the ring of a bell was displayed), smell (a piece of soft tissue dipped in perfume was used), taste (a chocolate crumble was given to taste), consistency (hard and soft objects were given to be handled), weight (heavy and light objects were compared) and warmth (participants were asked to approach their hands to a burning cigarette lighter). The only exception was the sensation of pain; understandably, in this case the demonstration was only imaginary (participants were asked to imagine that they are being given vaccination by a syringe). In each case participants were asked whether the sensations (loudness, smell, sweetness, hardness, heaviness, warmth and pain) were in their minds (sense organs) or in the external objects. The results (Fig. 4.2) indicated that most participants considered sensations to be imminent properties of external objects, and not mere side

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28 26 24 22 six

20

nine

18

adult

16 14 12 10 8 colour

sound

smell

taste

consistensy

weight

warmth

pain

Type of sensation

Fig. 4.2  Number of answers (out of 32) localising sensations in a subject and not in the objects as a function of age and type of sensation

effects of neural processes that objects produced in their minds. Adults (university graduates and undergraduates) rejected the scientific view on sensations almost as frequently as did the six- and nine-year olds. The only exceptions were the sensations of pain, and, to a lesser extent, sound. Only six-year-olds thought that pain was in the needle, whereas almost all nine-year-olds and adults found pain to be the property of the mind. It appears that school education fails to install in most people the opinion that sensations are nothing but side effects of physical processes in the sense organs and the brain and have nothing to do with objects ‘as they really are’. In other words, the intuitive belief in that sensations are ‘in the world’ and not in the mind resists the efforts of the scientific Commonverse to prove otherwise. Despite the determination of scientific education to ‘push’ sensations out of the real physical world and reduce them to the status of side effects, most people view sensations as part of the external objects. Through this, the core Bubbleverse holds its ground, resisting the attempts of the scientific Commonverse to devalue or destroy it.

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Indeed, in the perspective of the Bubbleverse, qualia—redness or yellowness, hardness or softness—are innate ‘tools of the mind’ that obtain a tangible form of subjective experiences—sensations and perceptions— when our Self interacts with external objects. In contrast, the ideas about physics and physiology of perception are developed on the basis of these subjective experiences. With the emergence of the scientific Commonverse, the objective way of description took the upper hand and pushed subjective experiences into the domain of illusions. However, in the everyday life, which unfolds in the core Bubbleverse, the belief in reality of subjective experiences holds sway. This belief resists scientific description not only because it was in the beginning, but also because in the everyday life describing the world in terms of subjective experiences is a lot more convenient and economical than describing the world in terms of scientific concepts. Just imagine if in conversation with other people, instead of calling red objects red, you would have to call them “objects reflecting electromagnetic waves of 780 nanometres wavelengths”, and instead of saying “a delicious cake” you would have to describe the chemical composition of the cake’s substance? Indeed, using the objective way of description would make communication inconvenient if not entirely impossible. And of course, we wouldn’t be happy to swap the ‘illusion’ of pleasure when eating delicious food for the mechanical intake of energy efficient but tasteless matter or replace satisfying sexual activities with artificial insemination. Only pain caused by the injection most participants localised in the mind. Why? Perhaps, unlike ‘distant’ sensations of colour or sound, pain emerges inside our body via a direct contact with the physical source (the needle), and unlike taste and smell, pain remains with us after the source of pain (the needle) is taken away. Only six-year-­ olds, who were completely untouched by science education and still lived entirely in the primordial Bubbleverse, localised pain in the needle. It doesn’t mean to say that knowledge of physical and physiological mechanisms which correlate with sensations is useless. First, knowledge of physical properties of colour and sound allows us to understand that other species can see and hear what we cannot. Second, knowledge of physics and physiology of perception can help to correct our senses when they start faltering, by creating senses assisting devices. Finally, the knowledge is a key factor in medicine. It is because we know which receptors

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correlate with that kind of pain that we can do local anaesthetics and other useful manipulations with our sensations. But make no mistake: sensations are not the side effect of the processes in the brain. Sensations are linked to the physical processes in the sense organs and the brain, but their role is far greater than simply reflecting physical reality. Instead, sensations, together with objects-in-themselves, shape and ‘mould’ phenomenal objects that we call physical reality, and for most children and adults the view of sensations as an imminent part of reality remains more convincing than the reductionist view of science.

4.4 The Shining Bubbleverse: Phenomena In the window of a rented apartment on a tropical island I see a stone wall that separates the building from the ocean. The wall is completely engulfed by ivies and vines with glorious scarlet and purple flowers hanging from the stems. From time to time, colourful butterflies of generous proportions visit the flowers, only to be spooked away by the long wings of huge palm trees moved by the ocean breeze. In the arc of the wall I can see the blue water of the Atlantic Ocean, periodically covered by the white foam of curling waves. Through the open window, the sound of the ocean feels like a monotonous but powerful breathing of an enormous beast. Cradled by the colours and sounds of the phenomenalistic spectacle of nature, I have to make an effort to maintain concentration on my writings about phenomena. According to Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, a phenomenon (Greek: φαινόμενον, which means to show, shine, appear, to be manifest or manifest itself) is “an observable fact or event” [3]. In modern philosophy the term was introduced by German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who opposed phenomena to noumena. Unlike a phenomenon, a noumenon (another term for a thing-in-itself ) cannot be observed. Simply put, phenomena are things around us that we feel with our sense organs and learn from everyday experience. The phenomena can have colours and shapes, they smell and taste, they are heavy or light, big or small, loud or silent, smooth or rough. They can be chaotic like a sound of traffic or beautifully organised like a Mozart’s symphony. They are also

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connected between themselves and with our person. Phenomena are given to us ‘for free’. A five-year-old child doesn’t have to learn science to understand that if she lets an egg go it will fall on the ground and break, and if she disturbs an angry dog the dog might bite her. She also knows that if she says the word ‘ice cream’ the ice cream will not magically appear in front of her; instead, she has to ask her parents for money and go to the ice-cream van. Usually, only part of our Bubbleverse is presented in the form of phenomena. We cannot see flowers in ultraviolet light and feel the ultrasounds that bats use for orientation in space. In every domain of the world only a section is accessible to our senses, but science can help. For example, scientists reported obtaining sequence information from single DNA molecules by using fluorescence microscopy [4]. On the other end of the scale, improving Hubble’s telescope photo resolution with new imaging techniques made it possible to detect dozens of earlier invisible galaxies lurking in the deepest and darkest outstrips of the universe [5]. These and other technical advances enormously expanded the number of perceived phenomena. Like qualia, phenomena are primordial features of the Bubbleverse. Unlike qualia, they are not innate but rather are constructed by a joint contribution of our Self and things-in-themselves. Phenomena are the main ‘filling’ of the Bubbleverse and deserve a special chapter (see Chap. 5).

4.5 R  ational Constructions: The Phenomena ‘Sun-dried’ Essentially, RCs have three functions. First, when we create a general concept, such as an apple or a chair, we remove all the multiple features of individual apples or chairs and retain only the essential features. As a result, RCs called ‘an apple’ or ‘a chair’ don’t have colour, weight or smell, they didn’t grow on this particular tree or were produced at this particular factory. The resulting ‘apple’ or ‘chair’ is supposed to be identical for all

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people. In a sense, RC’s are like ‘sun-dried tomatoes’: the smell and taste are accentuated but most flesh and juices are gone. Creating RCs is also important for fixing phenomena in time. Indeed, a phenomenon exists in the present time only for a fraction of a second, after which it disappears into the past. For instance, when you see a familiar person and say ‘Hi’ to him or her, the person only hears your voice a fraction of a second after, when the image of yourself in the person’s mind is already in the past. Likewise, when the person responds with his or her ‘Hi’, you hear the ‘Hi’ some little time later, after the person who elicited the sound became a history. So, in reality we deal not with phenomena in the present, but with our immediate memories about these phenomena. In order to fix a phenomenon in time, we create its RC in the form of the image of this particular person, accompanied with a certain symbolic representation of this image. For example, the familiar person is represented by the image of a beaded man with particular physical and psychological features and the name ‘John’. In science, instead of RCs for individual objects, more general RCs are created for typical objects; these kinds of RCs we know as geometrical figures or scientific concepts and theories. For instance, a facet of a crystal can have distinctive shapes with three or four angles, which we fix in the form of their RCs named as ‘a triangle’ and ‘a square’. The triangle and the square drawn on paper are still being perceived as phenomena which keep escaping into the past, but as RCs they are beyond time: a real apple can be eaten and a real chair can be broken, but not the RC-apple and the RC-chair. Let me call this function of RC essentialising. Second, RC stabilises phenomena. Indeed, real perceptual objects are constantly changing. Depending on our position in space this tea cup may show or doesn’t show a handle, colours may vary depending on illumination and saturation, and tastes of the same food or wine may depend on my mood or habituation. Converting a phenomenon into RC makes it stable: I can look at the tea cup from any position, but its RC will always be with the handle, the wine may taste differently now and then but the sort and vintage of the wine written on the label will be the same. This is the stabilising function. Finally, with the help of RC we explain phenomena, by reducing the live perceived objects to their structural components. As discussed above,

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science replaces sensations with physical and neural processes in sense organs and the brain, and the same thing science does to phenomena. For example, when we see an apple, we, according to science, process the apple’s projection on the bottom of our eye, when we taste food we react to the food’s chemical composition and so on. The reduction depends on the nature of a phenomenon. Thus, a piece of food is reduced to its chemical components, a piece of metal—to their molecular composition, and weather—to fluctuations of temperature, wind and humidity. This explanatory function is important as it allows us to manipulate (e.g. cooking or making metal alloys) and predict (e.g. forecasting weather) phenomena.

4.6 Anchoring in the Social World: Beliefs Whereas most of the core Bubbleverse is presented to our Self in the form of sensations and phenomena, which we sense, perceive and feel, social world is given to us in the form of norms in which we believe and to which we conform. Beginning with norms of toilet training and finishing with norms of moral conduct, social norms anchor our Self to society. These norms can vary cross-culturally and even across individuals. For instance, the norm of respecting other people’s property can be recognised by some individuals and rejected by others (e.g., criminals), the norm of sharing one’s property with others (altruism) can be accepted by you but viewed as unnecessary by others. Most social norms are culture-specific social customs based on traditions, but some (e.g., moral norms, juridical codes and myths about the origins of the world) are based on beliefs and make the backbone of interindividual relationships within and between cultural groups. In order to stabilise such fundamental social norms, people anchor these norms within the imagined universal holders—spirits and gods. Thus, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, God gave the moral rules to people in the form of the Ten Commandments, and similar divine origins of social rules of behaviour are proclaimed by other religions (see Fig. 4.3).

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The Great Nothing

Gods

Other person’s Bubbleverse

My Self

Beliefs

Other Self

My Bubbleverse

Fig. 4.3  The relationships between my Self, other Self, beliefs and gods

4.7 Taming the Chaos: Conclusion We find our Bubbleverse not as a grandiose supra-individual entity waiting for us to discover it, but as a soap bubble floating in Nothingness, with a hoard of soap bubbles inside it. Each bubble is an individual micro-Bubbleverse of an individual living being. The bubbleverses do not overlap with each other, but they are able to reflect surrounding objects and each other. For me in my Bubbleverse, external objects are represented in the form of sensations, perceptions, rational constructions and beliefs that unite me with other living beings.

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As a result, the development of the human mind can be presented as ordering the chaos of an individual Bubbleverse. In the course of this development, a person learns to distinguish inanimate objects from living things, people from animals and gradually coordinate his or her perceptions and actions with perceptions and actions of other people. The highest degree of such coordination is what we call today the Bigverse, which includes the entire totality of our ideas about the universe—scientific knowledge about the nature and humankind, ideas about the past and the future, myths and religions. Nevertheless, the Bigverse is built on the base of phenomena for the purpose of handling phenomena, and as such it remains a part of the Bubbleverse. It is now a good time to have a more thorough look at phenomena—the main ‘bricks’ of which the Bubbleverse is constructed.

References 1. Gregory, R. (1970). The intelligent eye. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2. Subbotsky, E. (1997). Understanding the distinction between sensations and physical properties of objects. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 20, 321–347. 3. Retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/religion/philosophy/concepts/phenomenon 4. Braslavsky, I., Hebert, B., Kartalov, E., & Quake, S.  R. (2003). Sequence information can be obtained from single DNA molecules. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 7, 3960–3964. 5. Mosher, D. (2017). Astronomers just found more than 70 ‘invisible’ galaxies lurking in the deepest, darkest patch of the night sky. National Geographic. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/hubble-ultra-deep-fieldgalaxy-count-2017-11

5 The Diversity of the Phenomenal World

5.1 Waking Up into the Bubbleverse One lovely morning we wake up and, to our horror, notice that we forgot who we are. We also forgot all what we have learned about the world and have to start afresh. At the same time, we are in full possession of our ability to think and speak and have to give names to things that we see around. So, what do we have? Along with the feeling that we have our Self in place, we are clearly aware of some reality that is opposing our Self; usually, we call this reality ‘the world’. The world is divided into two distinct, though related, parts: the internal reality (our feelings, thoughts, memories) and the external reality of objects ‘out there’. We also observe that external objects belong to two categories: some can move in an unpredictable way and others cannot. We might be wrong about what objects we include in each of these two categories, yet the difference between the categories is intuitively clear. From this observation, we make our first assumption: animated phenomena contain something in themselves that is similar to our Self and inanimate phenomena don’t. At this stage of our analysis the world can be presented as in Fig. 5.1. © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_5

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Inanimate

Animated

External world

Internal world

Self

The Bubbleverse

Fig. 5.1  The relationships between the Self, internal and external worlds, animated and inanimate phenomena

From the observation of other people’s verbal and non-verbal behaviour, we infer that other people perceive external phenomena too, and perceive them similarly, but not identically to the way we perceive the same phenomena. We then have to conclude that phenomena are not the products of my imagination but have to have some foundation behind them, which makes the phenomena accessible not to me only, but to other minds as well. Of course, we don’t recall at the moment that, centuries ago, Immanuel Kant called this hypothetical foundation ‘things-­ in-­themselves’. Our world now becomes as in Fig. 5.2. According to Kant, we cannot know anything about things-in-­ themselves; unlike Kant, we accept that we can have an educated guess about these enigmatic entities. One way of guessing about things-in-­ themselves is to assume them to be stable and unchangeable, whereas

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The Great Nothing

Thing-initself

My Self

Object perceived

Other Self

Other person’s Bubbleverse

My Bubbleverse

Fig. 5.2  The relationships between my Self, other Self, perceived object and the thing-in-itself

phenomena that we see are unstable. Because our Bubbleverse encompasses all that exists, things-in-themselves are still within our Bubbleverse, but in a special section—in the domain of potential knowledge entities (PKEN) (see Chap. 8 for more on that). By definition, things-in-­ themselves are independent of our mind. Speaking metaphorically, things in themselves make the ‘dark’ part of the Bubbleverse, which is not illuminated by the projector of our conscious Self. Most things-in-­themselves are present in our mind in a feeble form of the image of the ‘unknown’ or perhaps, even ‘unknowable’ part of the Bubbleverse (see Table 9.1); when thing-in-itself become known, they take shape of perceived objects (i.e., phenomena), which can eventually be converted into scientific concepts.

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Things-in-themselves and those phenomena which are not controlled by our mind (see below) belong to what we call ‘external reality’ in the Bubbleverse, as opposed to ‘internal reality’ of our conscious thoughts and feelings. When I see a building from a distance, I can cover the building with my hand, but when I approach the building it becomes a lot bigger. Similarly, when I am close to the building and another person is far away, I and the other person see the building to be of different visual sizes. The problem can therefore be put as follows: how can I describe the building in such a way that in this description the building would stay the same independent of my distance from the building and of the points of view of different observers? Perhaps, such a description can be taken for a tangible substitute of an elusive thing-in-itself.

5.2 Comparisons, Measurement and Extraction of Meanings As described in the previous chapter, in order to tame the unstable phenomena, I apply the procedure of comparison, by applying a certain object about which I and other people agree to use it as a measure, for example, a bar of wood of a certain size. By putting this bar to the building in a standard way, I count the number of times this bar fits to the foundation and the height of the building and then designate the buildings sizes as, say, 20 by 50 bars. By doing this, I created the simplest symbolic substitute of the building as the thing-in-itself, which in this book is referred to as ‘Rational Construction’ (from Latin ratio—reason, understand). Rational Construction (RC) makes the ever-changing world of perceived things stable: whatever distance I have between myself and the building, and however different the other person’s view of the building might be, the building’s RC remains the same—20 × 50. To summarise, the RC is a phenomenon’s ‘doppelgänger’ and has important functions (see Chap. 4). Modern science generated RCs for nearly every object and process of the external and internal worlds: galaxies and black holes, stars and planets, mountains and rivers, plants and

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animals, our bodies, perceptual organs and brains. Science created doubles not only to objects that we perceive, but also to our subjective faculties involved in perception: subjective space became physical space, subjective time was converted into physical time and subjective causality was upgraded to physical causality. As a result, our world acquired a doubled structure: the world that we perceive (phenomenal world) and the world that we know (the world of RCs) (see Fig. 5.3). The difference between phenomenal world and RCs world is that the former we can feel (e.g., we can see and eat the apple), whereas the latter we can understand (e.g., we can see and understand the word ‘apple’ and the picture of an apple, but we cannot eat it). Another The Great Nothing

Thingin-itself

The Bubbleverse Perception Pheno mena Comparisons, Measurements & Experiments

Rational Construction Mind

Fig. 5.3  The relationships between the thing-in-itself, phenomena and rational construction

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way to put it is to say that the phenomenal world consists of qualia and raw phenomena as they were before being measured and counterposed to their RCs. The world as we know it—the scientific Commonverse—consists of science-generated objects—the phenomena, which have been compared, measured, investigated and conceptually written into the general context of the existing knowledge. For example, the raw phenomena are lightning and seeing a piece of amber attracting small objects after you rub the amber, and the science-generated counterpart of these phenomena is electricity: the complex of artificial electric phenomena (from electric bulb to electric engine) plus all the knowledge we have about electricity (see Chap. 11 for more on that). The simple division of the Bubbleverse into perceived versus known world is complicated by the fact that our Self also has a third ability—to imagine things. Every object that we perceive can also be imagined by our mind as a mental copy of the perceived object. This mental copy has different properties from the perceived one: it is a lot more susceptible to the direct effort of our Self than the perceived object. For example, when I am seeing a black Poodle running on the street, I can close my eyes and keep imagining the dog, but in my mind I can easily change the colour or the breed of the dog, thus converting the black Poodle into a white Bulldog, but when I open my eyes the black Poodle is back. There are also other properties that distinguish imagined phenomena from perceived ones, but we have to postpone discussing this division till Chap. 7. For now, though, let us agree that the phenomena we are discussing in this chapter are perceived, and not imagined, phenomena. Well, it took us the whole morning and a significant effort to tame the phenomena, but now we are sufficiently equipped in order to begin the description of these ‘bricks’ of the Bubbleverse in more detail.

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5.3 T  he Relationships of Phenomena Between Themselves The simplest phenomena are sensations. Internal sensations, such as pain, pleasure, anxiety, fear, hope and love, are our private experiences caused by our body and mind. External sensations, such as colours and shapes (visual), sounds (auditory), smells (olfactory), tastes (gustatory), sensation of heaviness or lightness (weight), smoothness or roughness (tactile), are caused by external objects. The more complex phenomena are our perceptions of objects. Internal perceptions include thoughts, memories and subconscious processes. Most of our subconscious processes are not accessible to our Self directly but could be detected indirectly. For instance, sometimes we struggle to recall a name of a certain object or a person, whose name is well familiar to us. Another way we know about subconscious processes is through our night dreams, the meaning of which often escapes our understanding. External perceptions include our body and things outside our body, as well as symbols and signs of communication. In the external world the most salient distinction is between animated and inanimate phenomena. Inanimate objects are those whose behaviour is predictable, and which are fully open to our examination, whereas animated objects behave in an unpredictable manner and have some kind of mentality. Having established the main classes of phenomenal experience (internal/external and animated/inanimate), we can now look at how these phenomena could be related between themselves. The first thing that we notice is that, with all the difference between phenomena, all of them possess certain general properties, with the first general property being identity. According to this property, two phenomena are independent from each other, unless a chain of physical causes continuously connects them. Accordingly, each phenomenon conserves its identity and is not influenced by other phenomena in the Bubbleverse for as long as it exists in our mind. Linked to identity is the property of permanence. This property requires that a phenomenon maintains its identity throughout a certain period and cannot instantly change into another phenomenon. Thus, a person cannot turn into a cat and vice versa.

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One more general property is locality. A phenomenon occupies a certain place in the Bubbleverse, and no other phenomena can take this place. In other words, phenomena possess a certain amount of solidity; there is a borderline between a phenomenon and other phenomena, which prevents the phenomena from merging with each other. When coming in touch with each other, phenomena repel each other like two similar poles of a magnet. The simplest example of this property is the fact that a solid object (e.g., a bullet) cannot permeate another solid object (e.g., a human body) without causing destruction in the body. Finally, the last general property is inclusion. According to this property, the phenomenon can’t emerge from nothing and vanish without a trace. Every phenomenon is included in some preceding phenomena, emerges from its predecessors and, having lived for a certain amount of time, turns into some other phenomena. Thus, a person’s body is born, lives and dies, being converted into molecules from which it had arisen. Derivative of the aforementioned general properties are our concepts of subjective space and time. Thus, the concept of subjective space is derivative of the properties of identity and locality: indeed, without such properties phenomena would collapse into a mathematical point and cease to exist; henceforth phenomenal space is perceived as expanse of separate phenomena coexisting next to each other. The phenomenon of the field, like a magnetic field, though invisible itself, is nevertheless accessible to perception through visible phenomena; for example, when we are trying to bring two similar magnetic poles close together the magnetic field makes the space between the poles tangible. Finally, empty space is perceived as an invisible object that exerts no resistance to other phenomena that go through it. Likewise, the general properties of permanence and inclusion constitute our conception of phenomenal time; phenomenal (subjective) time is the intuitive sensation of our Self ’s lasting identity against the background of changing conditions. Implicit in our perception of Self is the feeling of incompleteness and intentionality, usually known as the feeling of a need (see the previous chapter). This feeling of intentionality, which is crucial for the concept of subjective time, sets up the concept of an arrow of time—the understanding that the feelings we are experiencing now are different from those we experienced before. Simultaneously, we

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realise that in the flow of changing states of our Self there is something stable and permanent, which is our Self itself (see Chap. 6 for more on that). Also, we notice that our sensation is conditional on circumstances. Thus, waiting for a bus to come in cold weather feels longer than when the weather is nice; involvement in interesting activity makes time run faster. The comparison between phenomena within modalities (e.g., visual phenomena with other visual phenomena) opens the opportunity of measurement and, as a consequence, generation of RCs for objects of external and internal realities. RCs for external objects are all the concepts and theories of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, physiology, medicine and other sciences that study objects of the external phenomenal world, including functioning of our bodies, perceptual organs and brain. RCs for internal objects are concepts and theories of psychology and other social sciences regarding the structure of the mind and mental processes. External sensations can be compared with internal sensations. Thus, according to Fechner’s law perceived loudness/brightness is proportional to logarithm of the actual intensity of physical stimuli measured with a non-human instrument [1]. The conflation of inanimate phenomena between modalities (e.g., visual phenomena with auditory phenomena) creates the effect of synaesthesia: a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory modality leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory modality [2]. A form of synaesthesia is the association of sounds with colours. For some people, sounds such as doors opening or people talking can trigger seeing colours. Someone with auditory-tactile synaesthesia may experience hearing a specific word like the feeling of touch in one specific part of the body. For example, Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria reported his studies of Shereshevsky—a person with multiple synaesthesia. When Shereshevsky heard a musical tone playing he would immediately see a colour, touch would trigger a taste sensation and so on for each of the senses. For example, Shereshevsky reported: “One time I went to buy some ice cream … I walked over to the vendor and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. ‘Fruit ice cream,’ she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black

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cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn’t bring myself to buy any ice cream after she had answered in that way …” [3, p.82]. Comparing between animated phenomena gives a scale of the complexity of animation. The scale goes from monocellular organisms, plants and insects, whose behaviour is most predictable, all the way up to the most complex organisms, such as animals and humans [4] (see Chap. 14 for more on that).

5.4 The Relations of Phenomena to Our Self With regard to the human subject, phenomenalistic reality can be divided in two classes of phenomena: those that can be controlled by the intentional effort of our Self (controlled phenomena) and those that cannot (uncontrolled phenomena). For instance, in the domain of external phenomena, we can control muscles of our body. At the same time, most objects and processes other than our body are beyond reach of our conscious effort. Similarly, in the domain of internal phenomena, such as fantasy and daydreams, we can manipulate with our attention and images by our conscious effort (e.g., moving our ‘mental eye’ from one object to another, or imagining a person who passed away), whereas other internal phenomena (e.g., pain in our body or monsters that chase us in night dreams) appear and persist against our will. When our capacity to maintain the controlled/uncontrolled division is immature or disturbed, we experience animation of inanimate objects (animistic thinking in children, hallucinations in mental patients) and the incapacity to control our impulses and images (impulsive behaviour in young children, acting in the state of affect or mental illness in adults). Another way to classify phenomena with regard to our Self is to distinguish between those phenomena which are produced by the Self (Self-­ created phenomena) and those that are not (Self-related phenomena). For instance, images in our night dream are phenomena created by our Self. In contrast, as argued in the previous chapter, sensations and perceptions of objects are only partially related to our Self, because they are a combination of the projection of qualia by our Self into properties of things-in-­ themselves. Unlike the previous distinction (controlled versus

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uncontrolled phenomenal objects), this distinction draws the borderline on the basis of ‘authorship’, rather than ‘controllability’. Thus, although we acknowledge our Self to be the author of our night dreams, some characters and events in the dreams are beyond our voluntary control. This distinction is fundamental for maintaining the division between the concepts of mind (Self-created phenomena) and matter (Self-related phenomena). Crossing the ‘controllability’ and ‘authorship’ dimensions is given in Table 5.1.

5.5 T  he Relations of Phenomena to Rational Constructions A different line of classifying phenomena is the way they relate to their RCs. Whereas rational constructions exist (or can be created) for all possible types of phenomena, the phenomena relate to their RCs not in a unified manner. Specifically, some phenomena stay closer to their rational constructions then do others. This was first noted by the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who divided phenomena (which he called ‘qualities’) into primary (size, shape, number, movement) and secondary (colour, sound, smell, taste) [5]. Locke viewed primary Table 5.1  The relation of phenomena to the Self, as a function of authorship and controllability Controllability Authorship

controlled

Uncontrolled

Self-created phenomena (mind)

Images of art and fantasy; pretend play; conscious thoughts; voluntary actions Muscles of our body

Hallucinations; night dreams; compulsive ideas and images

Self-related phenomena (matter)

Perceptual images of objects; feelings of hunger and thirst; pain and unconscious functions of our body; forbidden wishes and impulses; involuntary actions (sneezing, coughing)

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phenomena as belonging to things themselves, “whether they are perceived or not” [ibid, p.50], while secondary qualities are mind bound and depend on primary qualities. Indeed, the object’s geometric shape (for instance, a cube) and its perceived shape (for instance, a dissected pyramid) belong to the same class of objects. The object’s measured size and its perceived size are closely related too, as soon as both are measured by the same units (e.g., inches or meters). In contrast, sensations of the object’s consistency (hardness or softness), taste or smell have nothing to do with their rational scientific explanations (see the previous chapter). Similarly, all sorts of ‘wave theories’ that explain sensations of colour, light and sound are incommensurable with the sensations they are supposed to explain. On this basis, a distinction can be made between commensurable phenomena (those which exist in the same dimension with their rational constructions) and incommensurable phenomena (those which are qualitatively different from their rational constructions). The second dimension that distinguishes different kinds of phenomena in their relation to their RCs is the phenomena’s stability or power. On this dimension phenomena can be classified as knowledge resistant and knowledge sensitive ones. This dimension is based on the fact that in the Bubbleverse phenomena and their RCs exist within the scope of one mind and can influence each other. As was said in the introduction, in the scientific Commonverse RCs are evaluated as ‘really existing’, whereas phenomena are viewed as derivative from RCs. For instance, a physicist would interpret our sensation of green colour as an effect whereas the concept ‘electromagnetic waves of wavelength 560-520 nm’ as a cause of this effect. In contrast, in the Bubbleverse phenomena are primary reality and RCs are derivative from phenomena. From this perspective, the concept of electromagnetic waves took its origins in the phenomena (e.g., observation of waves on a water surface) and only later, through inductive and deductive reasoning, became the explanatory RC for magnetic and electric phenomena. Nevertheless, as soon as RCs are created, they begin to influence phenomena, but the degree of such influence varies. Some phenomena are quite fragile and responsive to their RCs that can devaluate them, others appear to be very hard to ‘dissolve’ by their RCs. For instance, as children go through the channel of scientific education,

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preschool children’s phenomenalistic perception of natural events (e.g., animistic and artificialist perceptions of natural phenomena) gradually disappears from children’s explanations, being undermined by scientific concepts [6]. Similarly, our sensations of taste or smell of food and wine can change depending on our knowledge of the source or price of these phenomena. In contrast, other sensations, such as shape, colour and temperature, some perceptual illusions and ‘collective false beliefs’ (e.g., that the Sun rotates around the Earth) are notoriously persistent and don’t go away with the acquisition of knowledge about their ‘falsity’. Let us call the first type knowledge-sensitive phenomena and the second type knowledge-­resistant phenomena (see Table 5.2 for a summary).

5.6 T  he Relations of Phenomena to the Idea of Truth One more way of classifying phenomena is relating them to the idea of truth. Within the Bubbleverse perspective, the judgement of truth is determined by correspondence between phenomena and their RCs. If a phenomenon matches its RC, then this phenomenon can be classified as a true one (see Chap. 9 for more on this). Thus, RC for a wheel is a circle, and any wheel that looks like a circle can be classified as a true one; if, Table 5.2  The relation of phenomena to RCs, as a function of knowledge resistance and commensurability Knowledge resistance

Commensurability Commensurable

Incommensurable

Knowledge resistant

Perceptions of shape and size of objects; some perceptual illusions, such as Mueller-Layer illusion, and the rotation of the Sun around the Earth Some illusory perceptions of temporal and spatial reality; subjective perception of time intervals; Piaget’s phenomena; phenomenalistic causality

Sensations of colour, sound, weight, tactile and temperature sensations

Knowledge sensitive

Sensations of taste and smell

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however, a wheel looks like a triangle, the phenomenon is false. Perceptual illusions are false phenomena, because they don’t match their RCs. For instance, in the Müller-Lyer illusion two parallel lines look unequal in lengths, whereas their measured lengths (i.e., their RC) are the same. Likewise, if two different phenomena relate to each other in the same way as do their RCs, then this relation can be defined as true; and vice versa, if the phenomena relate to each other differently from how their RCs relate to each other, then this relation should be defined as false. For example, staying close to a building I see my hand covering only a small portion of the building, which corresponds to the ratio between known (measured) sizes of the two objects. However, viewing the building from a large distance, I can cover the whole building with my hand, and this contradicts the known ratio between the measured sizes of the hand and the building. This allows us to define the first type of relations (the building is larger than my hand) as true and the second (the building is smaller than my hand) as false. Another aspect of this line of classification is the distinction between possible and impossible phenomena. Some phenomena are viewed as impossible within the phenomenalistic reality not because they do not correspond to their RCs (in fact, they don’t have any RCs at all), but because these phenomena can only exist in the imagination. For example, magical appearance of physical objects from thin air can exist in virtual reality (e.g., movies) or night dreams, but not in perceived physical reality. Usually, these phenomena are qualified as non-existing. Some phenomena that do exist but violate the laws of physics are also classified as impossible. Thus, an individual random event, by definition, cannot be predicted with certainty; this means that a random event is not fully determined by physical causality and can be classified as impossible. Similar phenomena are the phenomenon of quantum entanglement in physics or a living cell in biology. The crossing between the dimensions of truthfulness and possibility is given in Table 5.3.

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Table 5.3  The relations of phenomena to the idea of truth, as a function of truthfulness and possibility Possibility Truthfulness

Possible

Impossible

True (phenomena Perceptual objects at a certain Random events; quantum entanglement; a living orientation (a circle looking conform to cell like a circle) and positions (a their general hand looking smaller than a properties and building); phenomena with RCs) appropriate form or colour (a car looking like a car, white milk, green grass) Self over matter magic: Perceptual objects at certain False objects emerging from orientations (a circle looking (phenomena nothing or disappearing like an ellipse) and positions that violate without a trace; complex (a hand looking larger than their general objects instantly turning a building); perceptual properties and illusions (e.g., the Müller-Lyer into other complex RCs) objects; inanimate objects illusion); phenomena with instantly coming to life distorted form or colour (i.e., a car looking like a watch, blue milk, red grass)

5.7 T  he Relations of Phenomena to Themselves Further, a separate dimension of phenomena is their relation to themselves. Some phenomena have the ability to present themselves to our Self. Phenomena of this kind we usually call ‘matter’ or ‘real things’. Alternative to presenting phenomena are phenomena that represent other phenomena, RCs or things-in-themselves: symbols and signs, including spoken and written languages, digital codes, numbers, theories, schemes, pictures and mathematical equations. For example, an apple in front of us is a ‘real thing’ which we can eat, and a picture or a photograph of the apple is a representation. A book about dolphins represents real dolphins, but the book itself can be represented in the form of a summary, which is a ‘representation of a representation’. Some of these representing phenomena, such as proper names, schemas and blueprints of individual objects and processes, represent individual phenomena—this particular person,

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this particular river or this particular building. Other representing phenomena represent RCs (general concepts) via words, schemes or descriptions. For example, the RC of a feline family can be represented by the spoken or written word ‘cats’. A separate class of phenomena along this dimension are simulating phenomena. For example, simulating phenomena are fictional stories and virtual reality (e.g., movies or computer simulations), which do not represent real events but simulate them. To prevent the viewer from taking created event for real ones, authors of movies and books specially mention that the events portrayed in the presentation have been made up and do not represent real events. Another dimension of relating phenomena to themselves is transparency. Phenomena are transparent if what they present, represent or simulate is within our perception capacity. In contrast, phenomena that present, represent or simulate entities beyond our perception range will be called non-transparent phenomena. For example, some physical concepts represent perceived phenomena, such as a solid body or water, whereas other concepts represent objects which we are unable to perceive, such as ultrasound, atoms and quantum objects. Non-transparent representations require interpretation. For example, in the ‘double-slit experiment’ (see Chap. 3) the way photons collapse is represented by the pattern on the detector screen: if the pattern displays interference fringes, the photons are interpreted to be waves, and if it doesn’t, the photons are interpreted to be particles. In this regard, (animated) living organisms fall in non-transparent category, as they represent psyche—the inner spiritual dimension beyond perception of other organisms. In regard of this, bodies and behaviours of animated entities are signs, representing their own subjective reality. At that, some living organisms, such as plants and monocellular organisms, are presenting themselves (e.g., reveal their properties to our perception) to a significantly larger extent than other organisms, such as complex animals and people, whose behaviour is more complex and unpredictable. Take, for example, a tree. When we see an old wound on the trunk of a tree (a trace of a branch that had been cut off, or a bare patch on the trunk where a piece of bark was removed) and the bulge of new bark grown at the borders of the wound, we understand that the tree feels the

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wound and tries to heal it, just like a person who covers a wound on his or her skin with a piece of blister plaster. Even if we know the mechanism of this ‘self-healing’ down to a molecular level, the healing still means that the tree has some kind of sensitivity within itself, but this inner spiritual dimension is at its most basic level, so that the tree looks more like an inanimate object rather than an animated agent. And still, there is clearly some degree of animation and agency in the tree, because an inanimate physical object (a stone or piece of dead wood), when damaged, won’t be healing itself, unless it is a robot programmed by people to do some kind of ‘self-repairing’. The crossing between the scales of presentation and transparency are given in Table 5.4. Apart from the above types of classification, phenomena can be classified in many other ways. But what does such classification give us in practice? Let us see how classifying phenomena into knowledge sensitive and knowledge resisting can help us understand the psychological mechanism of addiction.

Table 5.4  The relations of phenomena to themselves, as a function of transparency and presentation Presentation Transparency

Presenting

Transparent (don’t require interpretation)

Virtual reality: Phenomena accessible Graphic images, movies, blueprints, to the naked eye animations schemes, and other and computer analogous sensations: simulations symbolic images, phenomenalistic photos macro world, known as matter Theatrical Phenomena accessible Characters, performance; mathematical via sophisticated symbols, digitally fiction imaging techniques coded meanings, literature; or through abstract art signs and texts; observation devices: living organisms distant galaxies, representing living cells, agency molecules, atoms (traces of matter)

Non-transparent (require interpretation)

Representing

Simulating

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5.8 F ight Within the Mind: Perception Against Knowledge According to media, around 13% of adult population worldwide are now clinically obese, with another 39% being overweight [7]. More than 60% of British people aged 20 and over are overweight [8]. Around 11 million more obese adults are expected in the UK by 2030, which would grossly increase cases of diabetes mellitus, heart disease, stroke and cancer [9]. A British survey found that only about 10% of obese people (three times more women than men) are conscious that they are overweight [10]. In the light of the aforementioned classification of phenomena, obesity is a result of the fight between two components in the mind—knowledge and phenomena, with the knowledge being information of the risks obesity entails to human health and the phenomenon being the pleasure of eating. The knowledge is being widely propagated in media in order to help people to beat the tendency to overuse the pleasure. Unfortunately, the knowledge is losing the fight. It means that in the domain of eating the practical efficacy of knowledge (PEK) is negative. In the domain of smoking the situation is better. From 2010 to 2015, smoking has decreased across all ages in the UK, with the largest effect observed among those aged 18–24 years. In 2015, of all adults in the UK 17.2% smoked, against 20.1% of adults who smoked in 2010. This is likely to be the result of antismoking campaign that links smoking to lung cancer and a bunch of other health problems, thus resulting in a positive PEK [11]. Other cases of the fight between knowledge and pleasure are addictions to alcohol, drugs and certain kinds of crime. In different domains the ‘resistance to temptation’ that allegedly results from knowledge varies widely. But what does it depend on? How can we help increase the PEK in its fight with bad habits? We know that in the domain of physical processes knowledge plays a crucial role in creating civilisation. Without knowledge about the resistance of solid substances it is impossible to build a bridge or a skyscraper, knowledge of chemical combustion makes engines in our cars work, knowledge of the structure of atoms helps to build nuclear power stations

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and knowledge of the work of our bodies allows pharmacists to cure illnesses and surgeons to transplant organs. But is knowledge equally effective in the domain of the mind? Can knowing how things work really affect our addictions? Although there has been a long tradition of studying the psychology of people’s tackling their health problems within the ‘health beliefs model’ (HBM) framework [12], this framework mainly centred on the role of people’s beliefs and perceptions of cues leading to actions of improving one’s health, rather than on the knowledge about what causes the problems. Whereas elements of knowledge were certainly incorporated into the HBM theory, they were nevertheless mixed up with many other factors. Indeed, the examples of improved ‘resistance to temptation’ do not really prove that the improvements were achieved due to the knowledge. Take, for instance, smoking. People might indeed have quit smoking because they had learned that smoking can kill, but they could also quit because of other reasons. In the recent decades, the number of places where a person can smoke shrank to a few restricted areas only; smoking became a habit which is socially frowned upon, and smokers, instead of proudly matching themselves to movie heroes with a butt of Marlboro sticking from their mouths, today feel rather like bullied teenagers and have problems with finding a job or a sexual partner. The pictures of exposed and ruined lungs on a pack of cigarettes might elicit the feeling of repulsion and contribute to the person’s decision to quit smoking through the subconscious mechanism of disgust [13]. Finally, other factors (a drop in income, health deterioration or unavailability of good tobacco) can also play a certain role in the final decision to quit. So, the question is, can knowledge really beat phenomena? The importance of this question is rooted in the context of the aforementioned classification of phenomena as knowledge-sensitive versus knowledge-­resistant ones. In order to answer the question, an experiment was conducted [14, 15]. Recall that knowledge is representing phenomena in the form of RCs: measurements, numbers and theories. In contrast, perception of the same phenomena is experiencing these phenomena as they are presented directly to our mind; it is not mediated by scientific methods and theories. For example, we perceive a hot object as if the object contained heat inside itself, while knowledge tells us that what the object contains is not

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heat but molecules in motion. By the phenomenon’s power we understand the subjective strength of perception. For instance, if some object feels warm and another feels hot, we say that in the former the phenomenon of heat is less powerful than in the latter. Above we introduced the concept of practical efficiency of knowledge (PEK) as the ability of knowledge to affect our verbal or non-verbal (actual) behaviour. For example, when we don’t know the rational picture of a certain process (e.g., that smoking can cause lung cancer), the PEK is zero. When we learn that smoking can cause lung cancer and the knowledge is at odds with how we perceive this process (i.e., smoking is pleasurable), thus creating a cognitive dissonance, we can appropriate the knowledge in three ways. One way is to deny the knowledge and keep smoking, in which case PEK remains zero. The second way is to accept the knowledge verbally (i.e., be able to understand the knowledge and reproduce it in words) but stick to perception in practice and keep smoking. Since in this case knowledge changes only one of the two components of behaviour (the verbal one), PEK can be estimated as 0.5. Finally, one can quit smoking altogether, in which case knowledge changes both behavioural components (verbal and actual), and PEK can be estimated as 1. Understandably, the practical efficiency of perception (PEP) would be an inverted version of PEK.  When PEK is zero, PEP is one and vice versa. We know that in preschool children perception is mostly free from scientific knowledge (see Introduction), which makes preschoolers an appropriate kind of participants for our experiment. The idea of the experiment was simple: we took phenomena that varied in power and of which children had no prior knowledge (PEK = 0). We then introduced the knowledge to the children and estimated whether the knowledge affected the children’s verbal (PEK= 0.5) and actual (PEK = 1) behaviour. In Experiment 1 we used the ‘number non-conservation illusion’. To produce the illusion, the array consisting of two parallel rows of chocolates was used. Each row includes the same number of items, but in one row gaps between the items are longer than in the other. Previous studies have shown that four- to seven-year-olds believe that the longer row contains a larger number of items [16]. It was also established in research that

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these illusions depend on context and the way questions are asked [17], which suggests that in terms of power these phenomena are weak. In the experiment four-, five- and six-year-old children were displayed two rows of six identical chocolate bars, with one row being twice as long than the other (Fig. 5.4, Ex1). The children were asked whether the rows had the same numbers of bars, or one had more bars than the other. As expected, most children pointed to the longer row and said it contained more chocolate bars. The children were then asked to count the chocolates in both rows and see that there were equal numbers in both rows. Next, the children were repeatedly asked the question about the numbers of items in each row and acknowledged that the numbers were equal. As a result, the display began to exist for a child in two competing forms: one based on perception (more bars of chocolates in the long row) and the other on knowledge (both rows contain the same number of chocolate bars). But which of these two versions of the display will the children rely on in a practical situation? To examine that, the children were promised that

Fig. 5.4  Visual displays used to test the practical effectiveness of knowledge (PEK) versus phenomena in Experiments 1, 2 and 3

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chocolate bars from one of the rows would be given to them as a New Year present. They were then asked to pick up the row they wanted to be their present. It was expected that if children relied on their perception (more bars of chocolates in the longer row), then most of them would pick up the longer row. If, however, they were guided by their knowledge (both rows have the same number of bars), then they would pick up any of the rows at a chance level. After the children made their choices, they were asked again whether there were equal numbers of sweets in both rows, or one of the rows had more than the other. This was done in order to find our whether the knowledge acquired through counting took over the perception in children’s verbal judgments. Results indicated that in the practical situation, the children used their knowledge and not their perception of the array. When asked the question repeatedly, the children retained their knowledge as well and said that the numbers were equal in both rows. The results therefore support the assumption that knowledge can directly affect perception: knowledge that there are the same numbers of chocolate bars in any of the two rows replaced perception in both verbal judgement and practical actions (PEK = 1) But what would happen if a phenomenon with stronger phenomenalistic power was used? To examine this, in Experiment 2 the Müller-Lyer illusion was employed. Unlike ‘number non-conservation’ phenomenon used in Experiment 1, which is specific to childhood, the Müller-Lyer illusion covers the whole life span and is much less context dependent [18]. Children were shown an array with two identical rulers, each 40 cm long, fastened parallel to one another on a piece of plywood. The background consisted of right angles made from two similar 25  cm rulers nailed to the plywood. The long rulers were fastened so that each end was at the top of the right angle. In one case the ends of the angles diverted upwards and downwards from the ruler (dovetail), and in the other they converged towards the centre (arrow-tip) (Fig. 5.4, Ex2). The children were first asked whether both rulers were of the same lengths, or one was longer and the other one shorter. As expected, all children said that the dovetailed ruler was longer. The children were then

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encouraged to remove the rulers from the background, place them side by side and see that they were of equal lengths. After this, the rulers were returned on the background as the children watched. By this manipulation, the perception of the rulers when attached to the background as unequal in lengths was contrasted with the knowledge that the rulers are in fact equal. To examine which of the two competing images of the display would prevail in a practical situation the experimenter suggested that if the child could reach a pretty postage stamp with his or her hands without getting off the chair, then he or she could keep the stamp as a reward. The stamp was placed on the floor far enough away so that, even with the child’s hand outstretched, there was still a gap roughly equal to the length of the ruler. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the child was offered to use one of the rulers as a tool. It was expected that if the children relied on their perception of the ruler’s lengths, they would pick up the ruler that looks longer more often than at a chance level. If however they sought guidance from their knowledge they would pick both rulers at a chance level. Results indicated that almost all of the children used the dovetailed ruler in order to reach the stamp. When asked a question of why they chose this particular ruler, none of the children was able to give a sensible explanation. To the repeated question of whether rulers were or weren’t equal in lengths, most children answered that the rules were equal. Altogether, the children displayed the dissociation between words and actions: in their verbal judgements the children used their knowledge, while in a practical situation they relied on their perception of the array. This result indicates that when the power of perception is great, knowledge tends to be only partially effective (PEK = 0.5). Finally, Experiment 3 tested how the complexity of knowledge affects its competition with perception. Indeed, in the previous two experiments knowledge was a simple counting or comparison. In the real life though obtaining knowledge requires some learning of science. From experience we know that the more complex the knowledge is, the harder it is to understand and retain in memory. Will the complex knowledge be able to compete with perception? To examine the effect of the increased

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knowledge complexity on the knowledge/perception competition, in Experiment 3 knowledge about causal relations was used. Three small transparent beakers were placed before the child (Fig. 5.4, Ex3). All of the beakers contained something that looked like colourless liquid. In reality one of the beakers contained base solution (NaOH), the second contained acid solution and the third contained phenolphthalein (an acid-base indicator). Alongside the beakers there were two small bottomless cylinders made of card. One of the cylinders was red and other was white. The children were asked the following question: “What colour is the liquid in the beakers?” “What colour would the liquid be if I pour the liquid from this beaker into this one (phenolphthalein into base)?” After the child gave the expected answer that the ‘water’ would remain ‘clear’, red cylinder was descended on the beaker with the base, covering the beaker completely from the child’s view, and phenolphthalein was added into the beaker. The cylinder was removed, and the child saw that the clear liquid turned bright red. More questions were then asked, “What colour would the water be if I pour this clear liquid (the acid solution) into this red liquid?” After the children answered that the ‘water’ would become ‘pink’, the experimenter then placed the white cylinder over the beaker with the red liquid and poured the acid solution into it. On removing the cylinder, the child could see that the liquid became clear. Finally, the children are asked the key questions: “Why did the water become red? Why did it become clear again?” The purpose of these manipulations was to find out whether the children exhibit phenomenalistic perception of two causally unrelated phenomena as causally connected. In the everyday life we often make phenomenalistic connections when we don’t understand RCs of certain causal phenomena. For instance, if somebody suggested that you might have a car accident and you had a minor car accident the next day, you may have the feeling that these two events are causally connected—the phenomenalistic connection made on the basis of temporal succession (‘after this, therefore because of this’). Another phenomenalistic connection is by physical resemblance: if two essentially distinct objects resemble each other in shape or colour, we may perceive the objects as having similar essential properties. Thus, experiments have shown that people are less inclined to eat the piece of chocolate fudge shaped in the form of dog

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faeces than the one shaped in the form of a muffin [13]. In this experiment the display implied phenomenalistic perception of causality based on both of the above mechanisms: temporal succession (after a cylinder is put over the beaker, the liquid’s colour changed) and physical resemblance (white cylinder—the liquid becomes transparent, red cylinder— the liquid becomes red). Results indicated that almost all of the children named the cylinder to be the cause of the colour change, while ignoring the fact of the other liquid being added to the original cylinder’s content. This proved that the children indeed exhibited phenomenalistic perception. The children were then given a quasi-scientific (though somewhat anthropomorphic) explanation of the phenomenon. They were shown a

Fig. 5.5  Quasi-scientific explanation of the change of liquid’s colour in Experiment 3 [15]

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picture like in Fig. 5.5 and told a story that presented a colour change in the beakers as a result of ‘love-hate’ relationships between small white invisible balls swimming around in the beakers. When the balls swim free (the upper row of the picture), they are happy and white. When the balls with the hooks accidentally catch the balls with the hoops, they can’t separate and became angry and red (the middle row). When the balls with the little hammers make the balls free again, the balls calm down and become white again (the lower row). The children were asked to repeat the explanation. As a result, like in the preceding experiments, each child was confronted with two competing versions of the same event (changing the liquid’s colour): a phenomenalistic perception version (the change occurs because of the cylinders) and a rational understanding version that stayed for knowledge of chemical processes (the ‘water’ changed its colour because of the interaction of invisible little balls). In the practical phase of the experiment, each child was given the original set of beakers and asked to try and “make the water in these beakers red and then white again”. If they succeeded, the children were promised a nice postage stamp as a reward. It was expected that if in the practical situation children used their phenomenalistic perception of the causal relations, they would use cylinders to produce the effects. If, however, they used rational understanding, they would not use the cylinders. In the third phase of the experiment the children were asked again to explain why, as a result of their actions, the liquid became red and then white. The results showed that in the practical situation almost all of the children used the cylinders in order to produce the desirable effect. In the final phase, despite the cylinders not having been mentioned in the explanation, most four- and five-year-olds and about a half of six-year-olds insisted that the cylinders, in fact, had been the cause of the effects. This indicates that in this experiment the complexity of the quasi-scientific explanation made the explanation ineffective for most children. Not only was the knowledge not used in the practical situation, but it was replaced by the phenomenalistic perception in children’s verbal explanations as well. This makes the effectiveness of the knowledge low (PEK = 0.1) Altogether, the results indicated that the ‘fight within the mind’ heavily depends on both competitors: power of phenomena and complexity

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of knowledge. This may suggest explanations for the different effects of the anti-obesity and anti-smoking campaigns. Obesity results from satisfaction of our basic need for nourishment, whereas smoking is a luxury; thus, phenomenalistic power of the pleasure of eating should be greater than the pleasure derived from smoking. Even if we assume that rational explanations of the harm of both habits are equal in complexity (which is yet to be examined), obesity is a lot harder to beat with knowledge than is smoking. Perhaps, for a health psychologist this result might look like reinventing the wheel. Nevertheless, the empirically acquired data about different effects of fighting smoking and obesity do not necessarily prove that the causes of this difference may, at least partially, be conditioned by the interplay between the strengths of knowledge and phenomena. After all, before Archimedes formulated his famous principle, people used to observe that when they plunge into water their bodies became less heavy, but this doesn’t make the formulation of the Archimedes’ principle ‘the invention of the wheel’.

5.9 So, What’s Next? The Conclusion When we woke up, we were initially overwhelmed by the diversity of phenomenal composition of the Bubbleverse. The picture of the phenomenalistic filling looked breathtakingly complex and, at first sight, chaotic. Like molecules involved in Brownian motion, phenomena collided with each other, attracted or repelled each other, clung together or climbed one another in a most unpredictable manner. Gradually though, we have managed to find the ‘Ariadne’s thread’ in this labyrinth, by detecting general properties of phenomena and breaking the phenomena into classes. We also tamed the chaotic and unstable nature of phenomena by putting the ‘rib cage’ of RCs into them. We discussed that in the Bubbleverse a constant fight goes on between phenomena and knowledge for taking control over our behaviour, with mixed results. We understood that, with all the diversity of phenomena and RCs, they are parts of the same Bubbleverse and are somehow interconnected, but we don’t know yet how. What is the glue that turns the

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phenomenal threads of the Bubbleverse into the solid fabric? In other words, what is the structure of the Bubbleverse? But before addressing the issue of structure, we need to take a look at one more key player in the ‘phenomenalistic game’—the viewer of the game—our Self.

References 1. Fechner, G. T. (1966). Elements of psychophysics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 2. Cytowic, R.  E. (2002). Synaesthesia: A union of the senses (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 3. Luria, A.  R. (1987). The mind of a mnemonist: A little book about a vast memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 4. Larson, E. J. (2004). A growing sense of progress. Evolution: The remarkable history of a Scientific Theory. New York: Modern Library. 5. Locke, J. (1998). An essay concerning human understanding. New  York: Penguin Classics. 6. Piaget, J. (2007). The child’s conception of the world. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 7. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesityand-overweight 8. Boseley, S. (2016). The chicken shop mile and how Britain got fat. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/ jan/28/chicken-shop-mile-britain-fat-cheap-food-obesity 9. Wang, Y.  C., McPherson, K., Marsh, T., Gortmaker, S.  L., & Brown, M. (2011). Health and economic burden of the projected obesity trends in the USA and the UK. The Lancet, 378, 815–825. 10. Johnson, F., Beeken, F., Croker, H., & Wardle, J. (2014). Do weight perceptions among obese adults in Great Britain match clinical definitions? Analysis of cross-sectional surveys from 2007 and 2012. BMJ Open, 4, 11. Retrieved from https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/4/11/e005561.full?sid= ef1e9018-cd8a-4c5e-8ed9-f52b04290546. 11. Windsor-Shellard, B. (2017). Adult smoking habits in the UK: 2015. Retrieved from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/ healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/bulletins/adultsmokinghabit singreatbritain/2015

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12. Rosenstock, I. (1974). Historical origins of the health belief model. Health Education & Behavior, 4, 328–335. 13. Rozin, P., Millman, L., & Nemeroff, C. (1986). Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 703–712. 14. Subbotsky, E. (1990). Phenomenal and rational perception of some object relations by pre-schoolers. Soviet Psychology, 28, 5–24. 15. Subbotsky, E. (1993). Foundations of the mind. Children’s understanding of reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 16. Piaget, J. (1965). The child’s conception of number. New  York: W.  Norton Company & Inc.. 17. Light, P. (1986). Context, conservation and conversation. In M. P. M. Richards & P. Light (Eds.), Children of social worlds: Development in social context (pp. 170–190). Cambridge: Polity Press. 18. Berry, J. W. (1968). Ecology, perceptual development and the Müller-Lyer illusion. British Journal of Psychology, 59, 205–210.

6 Self in Multiple Universes

6.1 T  he Magical Projector: Self in the Bubbleverse Waking up in the morning, we have no doubt that we are the same person who yesterday fell asleep. But are we really? After all, several hours have passed since the evening, and a significant part of this time (excluding the remembered dreams) we were unconscious. And in dreams we often see ourselves in the body of another person. Our ‘sleeping double’ can not only look differently from us but can also have habits and desires that we don’t have (e.g., he or she smokes, and we don’t). So, why are we sure that we are the same person as we were yesterday? “I can’t say—you might answer. I just know—that’s all”. Now look at your photo taken 10–20 years ago. You can easily recognise yourself in the photograph, but the answer to the question of whether this person is you no longer seems so obvious. Your face changed (wrinkles appeared), habits are different (you quit smoking), knowledge expanded (you read new books, lived and worked in another country) and your life plans altered (you decided to marry or divorce your spouse). “No, it is still I”—you would say. And you are right. At every moment of © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_6

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our life we are accompanied by an invisible companion—our Self. We are changing, but our Self remains the same. Look around you: there is a street in front of you, cars are running on the street, houses are visible on the other side of the street and people are moving along the sidewalk— and in each of these images the same invisible satellite is invisibly present—your Self. “This is I who is seeing the street, the cars, the houses and the people”—you would say. But where are you really? Your Self is like an invisible stamp of your personality, which is imprinted in every image you perceive, in every memory and every thought. Moreover, in most cases of your conscious life, you do not even notice its presence at all. Remember—before you began to read this book, you have been doing something else—typing on a computer, cooking breakfast, talking with your partner—and didn’t think about your Self at all. But where was your Self then? It turns out that our Self is like a ghost—it is always with us, but we can neither see nor touch it. It’s hard to even think about it—it’s like trying, without using a mirror, to see the back of your head. No matter how much we try to imagine our Self, it always escapes our imagination. And yet it is our Self that shapes the body of the phenomenal Bubbleverse out of things-in-themselves, like a sculptor shapes a statue out of a piece of marble. As argued in the previous chapters, in the Bubbleverse our Self is a holder of magical tools—the invisible qualia. Merging qualia with things-in-themselves, our Self produces sensations and helps sensations to build up phenomena-objects, thus creating what we call subjective space, time and causality. Further, our Self applies its magnificent ability of comparison and creates RCs, thus laying down a foundation for the Commonverse. Not only does our Self participate in moulding external independent reality, it also works on shaping our physical and mental body. Like a crystal, our Self has multiple facets. Our spatial Self is associated with the borders of our physical body—the feeling that our Self is located somewhere within the body or very near it. Temporal Self provides the feeling of uninterrupted personal identity. Agential Self makes us feel responsible for our actions, and social Self allows us to distinguish our Self from other Selves. Normally these Selves are integrated in one, but that is not guaranteed.

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Psychiatrists described so-called dissociative identity disorder (also known as the multiple personality disorder) when a person displays two or more Selves, each with its own name, habits, memories and temperament. The number of Selves can vary from a few up to a lot more [1]. An iconic literary example of multiple personality disorder is a fictional character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel ‘Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ [2]. Usually, when the patient is in the shoes of one of his or her alter ego, he or she doesn’t remember anything about the other ones. To complicate the problem, clinical psychologists provided ample evidence that our Self does not necessarily sit within the limits of our body. People with the anomaly in their brains can lose the feeling of their Self-­ body identity and perceive parts of their bodies as not belonging to their Selves. Even odder is the case when a person has the perception of his or her body doubled and cannot decide to which of the two bodies his or her unique Self belongs. Scientists developed a device through which a person can experience virtual reality presenting a mannequin’s body as their own body. Surprisingly, after two minutes training the participants indeed began to have the feeling that the mannequin’s body and their own body is one; for example, when a mannequin’s abdomen was touched by a rod, the participants felt that their own body was touched in the same place. When the participants observed a knife ‘cutting’ the mannequin’s abdomen they displayed reactions usually associated with anxiety to a significantly larger extent than when they observed the mannequin touched by a neutral object [3]. Experiments with macaque monkeys showed that their perception of their body schema changed when they were given the opportunity to use a rake to retrieve food rewards, with the tool being incorporated in the body-schema. More important, the training with the rake performance caused a significant increase in the brain’s grey matter—the effect known as neurogenesis [4], and there are studies suggesting that the same effect can happen in humans as well [5]. Psychosomatic effects like that are useful for therapeutic purposes, such as reduction of phantom pain in amputated limbs via intensive training in mental imagery [6, 7], but they also have a tremendous theoretical significance. These effects support the foundational assumption that mind and body are not separated by an impregnable border but are too

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poles of the same entity—the Bubbleverse. It is important to grasp this particular type of relations: the unity of two different entities—Self and the body. Indeed, if you cut a magnet bar in half, you will end up with two magnets with their poles restored. We cannot cut between Self and body physically, but they can move one from the other and back in the mental plane while staying entangled at the same time. When we are watching a horror movie and the character is in danger, we feel scared as if our Self were in the character’s body. When we experience the emotion of compassion to a person in pain, our Self expands to include the person’s body and mind, without losing the link with our own body. Together with the aforementioned clinical cases these effects demonstrate how unbreakable and at the same time flexible the link between Self and body really is. Not only can our Self reach outside our body, but the body too can go out of control of our Self while maintaining the contact with the Self at the same time. We can clearly distinguish between involuntary actions (e.g., coughing or sneezing) and action that we do purposefully. However, not all purposeful actions are accompanied with the feeling of agency. When driving a car, our Self is concentrated on the situation on the road, while our body is doing many purposeful actions at the same time: monitoring a steering wheel, changing gears, pressing on the brakes, and most of these voluntary actions are being done subconsciously. Even more convincingly the dissociation between purposeful actions and actions under the control of our Self is manifested when purposeful actions run against the person’s conscious will. Thus, a patient with the ‘anarchic hand’ syndrome [8] reports that one of his or her hands is doing actions than the person doesn’t want to be done, as if the ‘disobedient hand’ were acting on its own. Nevertheless, unlike truly automatic actions, such as shaky hands in some degenerative neurological conditions, the actions of the anarchic hand are not at all involuntary and have a purpose. Thus, a person with lesions in the particular parts of the frontal lobe who is sitting at a dinner table suddenly realises that “her left hand took some leftover fish-bones and put them into her mouth….A little later, while she was begging it not to embarrass her any more, her mischievous hand grabbed the ice-cream that her brother was licking. Her right hand immediately intervened to put things in place and as a result of the fighting the dessert

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dropped on the floor. She apologised profusely for this behaviour that she attributed to her hand’s disobedience” [9]. Stranger still are cases of patients with bilateral lesions in the so-called supplementary motor area located in the medial surface of frontal lobes. These patients show episodes of the phenomenon called ‘utilisation behaviour’. For instance, a patient who sees an apple and a knife placed next to him begins to automatically consume the apple while having no idea of why he is doing it or who the apple belongs to. These patients start doing purposeful actions with objects available in their perceptual field without awareness that their behaviour is inappropriate. One more example of a body’s purposeful behaviour out of control of the Self is a rare disorder called parasomnia. Like a sleepwalker, a parasomniac can be doing a manual work, driving a car or even committing a crime, without being conscious of this. When they get awake, parasomniacs have no memories whatsoever of the actions done during their ‘zombie’ condition. This shows that our body can act independently of our Self, while still remaining linked to the Self in some mysterious way [10]. These examples only highlight the greatest miracle of all—the fact that our body responds to our Self. Unlike independent phenomena of the Bubbleverse, which our Self only illuminates with its magical mental projector but cannot directly control, our body responds to our thoughts and desires. The body therefore is an extended Self, which under normal conditions acts on independent phenomena. All artefacts in the Bubbleverse—the cities, the computers, the spaceships and all of the material culture—are product of our bodies controlled by our Selves. To summarise, in the Bubbleverse the Self is not a phenomenon along with other phenomena; rather, the Self is a magical projector and a creator of both the artificial objects and rational constructions. And how does the Self look from the perspective of the scientific Commonverse? Is it possible to catch the Self in the net of scientific concepts? All what we learned about the Commonverse so far suggests that there might be a problem with that.

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6.2 T  he Elusive Observer: Self in the Commonverse The first problem we run into is that of creating RC for our Self. Remember that in the Bubbleverse Self is a non-physical entity, and a non-physical entity is a lot harder to measure and assess in numbers than a physical entity. We know that in the scientific Commonverse there is no such thing as a non-physical entity: even RCs take a physical shape of written or spoken words, geometrical figures drawn on paper and numbers embedded in computer programmes. It means that if we decide to talk about Self it must be treated as a phenomenon made of atoms and molecules, and this requires it to be included in the cause-effect continuum. For example, Self can be presented as an observer of a certain phenomenalistic spectacle, such as an apple sitting on the table. In order for the apple to reach the observer, the light reflected by the apple must produce a projective image on the retina of our eyes that is then converted into neural impulses going into the visual cortex of our brain. Now, if our Self is nothing but these neural processes, then the story ends there. In this case the Self is a physical phenomenon no different from any other physical phenomenon, for instance, the processes in the computer. Now suppose that our Self is not just these physical processes, but something outside these processes. In this case the Self is observing the processes in the brain, and thus needs to have the eyes and brain of its own. But then, Self 2 is needed to observe the processes in the Self 1’s brain, and so on ad infinitum. As a result, we have to assume that there should exist an infinite number of ‘little Selves’ watching each other, and we are stuck in the so-called homunculus paradox [11]. Just like the famous baron Munchausen managed to pull himself out of a mire by his own hair [12], in order to break away from this paradox we have to do the impossible: make the effect to be its own cause. Reflecting on these problems, some thinkers come to the conclusion that Self is an illusion, a myth about myself created by my consciousness. In reality, there is no a Central Agent in the mind; instead, there is a system of subsystems—‘modules of consciousness’—working simultaneously. Each module performs its own role in the workings of consciousness,

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with the whole bunch of the modules creating pandemonium. The term ‘pandemonium architecture’ was coined by a mathematician Oliver Selfridge in the late 1950s as a model for understanding of how we perceive and recognise objects [13, 14]. The pandemonium is composed of different groups of ‘demons’ working independently to process the visual stimulus. Each demon is assigned a specific role in recognition, and the demons work in parallel. Applied to consciousness as a whole, this model produces theories of a similar kind, portraying our mind as a system of relatively independent interpretive processes, similar to a computer processor [15]. Thus, philosophers Dennet and Kinsbourne proposed a version of the ‘pandemonium mind’ theory, which they called the ‘Multiple Drafts Model’ [16]. The theory portrays consciousness as a system of ‘editors’, receiving multiple sensory inputs from a given event and interpreting these inputs in a variety of ways, thus creating multiple drafts of the event. Only those drafts reach consciousness which manage to outstrip their competitors. A model like that has no need in the ‘central observer’, or the Self who decides which of these drafts is better than the others. The conscious Self thus becomes an abstraction, something like a ‘centre of gravity’ of a doughnut. Even if this abstraction is useful, it is secondary and derivative from physical processes. And remember that in the scientific Commonverse even an abstract concept is a result of physical processes in the brain. Altogether, in the scientific Commonverse there is no place for the ‘magical projector’—our Self. So, what is right: is our Self a Central Agent of the mind (the Bubbleverse) or is it just a useful illusion (the scientific Commonverse)? In order to answer this question, an experiment was designed.

6.3 C  entral Agent Versus Pandemonium: Do We Really Need the Self? The experiment’s aim was to find out whether the ‘pandemonium mind model’ (PMM) can or cannot exhaustively explain facts of how the mind works at decision making. The understanding was that if it can, then the

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concept of the Self is redundant, and if it cannot, then the explanation requires the concept of a ‘central judge’—our Self [17]. In order to test PMM we used the way we remember a temporal order of events. The PMM predicts that if two or more competing processes are simultaneously occurring in our mind, then the outcome would depend on the subconscious competition between these processes and the ‘survival of the fittest’. If the competition is won by the strongest of the processes, then the PMM can exhaustively explain the decision-making result. If, however, the final result is won by the weakest process, then the result can only be explained by the intrusion of the Central Agent, who, due to some ‘higher reasons’, helps the weakest process outstrip the strongest ones. The best candidate for the Central Agent is our Self. A wooden box 15 × 11 × 11 cm was constructed in such a way that a metal plate would separate from one of the inside walls and sink to the bottom as soon as the lid is closed. The special construction of the lid and a system of magnets built into the side and bottom of the box ensured that the box could be manipulated without the metal plate being revealed. In addition, two identical postage stamps and a scrap of white paper 2 × 3 cm were employed as stimuli: one of the stamps was hidden between the plate and the wall of the box, another was lying on the table next to the box, together with the scrap of paper. After a brief introductory session, in which a participant was given the opportunity to see that the box was empty, the experimenter asked the participant to fetch a toy truck that had been placed in the far corner of the experimental room. The aim of this manipulation was to create a rupture in the participant’s stream of consciousness which could be subsequently used by the participant in order to explain the unexpected disappearance of a physical object (e.g. by thinking that the box was tampered with at the moment when the participant went to get the truck and was not watching the table). On return, the participant was asked to put the objects (the stamp and the piece of paper, which thus far have been lying on the table next to the box) in the empty box and close the lid. In about 5 seconds, the participant was instructed to remove everything from the box and to put it on the table. On opening the box, in the control condition (no challenge) the participant would find the same objects, and in the experimental

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condition (challenge) he or she would find ‘the same’ postage stamp (in reality the other one that had been hidden between the metal plate and the wall of the box) but not the scrap of paper. Among other questions that followed, participants were asked to recall the succession of the events: whether they first brought the toy truck and then put the objects into the box, or whether they put the objects into the box and then fetched the toy truck. The control condition, in which participants did not observe the event that could challenge their belief in object permanence, was designed to establish if participants’ working memory for the order of the two events was good (the correct order is recollected with frequency significantly above chance) or poor (the correct order is recollected with a chance frequency). Developmental studies established that even young babies believe that a physical object cannot suddenly disappear [18, 19], and in adults this intuitive belief is only strengthened [20]. When the participants see an event that violates their belief in object permanence, a competition begins in the  participants’ working memory between the right (R) order of events (fetching the toy preceded closing the box with the objects in it) and the wrong (W) order (placing the objects in the box preceded fetching the toy). Just like PMM requires, W and R became the two alternative ‘drafts’ of the same event—the event that preceded the phenomenon of the ‘magical’ disappearance of a physical object. The results showed that in the experimental condition a significant majority of participants recollected the W. This result cannot be explained by the participants’ poor working memory, because in the control condition (no violation of object permanence) the majority of participants recollected the R. The only viable explanation of the participants’ behaviour in the experimental condition was that the W had an upper hand over the R, because the W is compatible with the belief in object permanence (e.g., when the participant was fetching the toy, the experimenter removed the piece of paper from the box), whereas the R is not. Recollecting the W fits the PMM, since according to the PMM the competition between the ‘multiple drafts’ is supposed to be won by the strongest draft. The outcome of the competition between the alternative ‘drafts’ was reached subconsciously, whereas the participant’s conscious Self (in case it does exist) simply created a plausible story to justify the decision: when the

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participant was fetching the toy, the experimenter snatched the piece of paper from the box. The story is wrong, and the role of conscious Self is not that of a decision maker (Central Agent) but that of a commentator of the decision made at the subconscious level. Thus far, the experiment supports the PMM. And now let us increase the time period between the key events (bringing the toy truck and closing the objects in the box) from 5 seconds to 30 seconds. To do this the experimenter, after taking the toy truck from the participant, keeps writing in the protocol for 30 seconds before asking the participant to place objects into the box. Results indicated that the errors in reporting temporal order of events in this condition dropped down to the level that had been earlier observed in the control condition. In other words, the R had overpowered the W. But why? Because in the 30-second time delay a lot of things happened in the participants’ minds. They might be asking themselves what the experimenter is writing, or what they would do with the reward they were going to get after the experiment, or simply wonder with their Self elsewhere. And all these conscious subjective events get in between the key events, thus strengthening the participant’s memory on the R. As a result, the competition between the W and the R is won by the R, even if the R was incompatible with the ‘impossible’ phenomenon the participants had observed. The belief in object permanence is still there, but now it is confronted with the logical thinking: “Look, he couldn’t possibly tamper with the box when I was fetching the truck, because I had fetched the truck some time ago but placed the things in the box right now”. It appears that conscious Self is not only the maker of plausible narratives but can affect the competition between W and R: our conscious Self strengthens the R against the W, even though it has to accept that something impossible had happened. One could object by saying that increasing the time interval between the key events alone have increased the plausibility of the R. But remember that the competing drafts are about the order of key events, and not about the time that elapsed between them. For the R and the W order the time between the key events is irrelevant. It is the interpretation of the time interval that is key for making the decision, because it was not a simple choice between two different but otherwise equally probable options, but an executive decision: to accept or reject the R when

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accepting it contradicts the fundamental belief in object permanence. And when there is executive decision making, there must be the executor— the Self. However, for the conscious Self to be able to intervene in the decision making, it requires a certain time, and when the time is too short, the ‘drafts’ compete without the sanction of the Self. It appears that in this experiment the magical projector of our Self was invisibly present, though whether it was or wasn’t engaged in making the decision was conditioned by time. Altogether, the results of the experiment suggest that, when remembering the order of events, the mind can indeed work as a ‘pandemonium’, but only within certain short time intervals between these events. When the intervals between the events exceed a certain threshold, a Central Agent—our Self—comes into the play.

6.4 Catching the Invisible Self So, psychological experiments suggest that Self is not a fiction but a real Central Agent that makes executive decisions. However, to engage into the work of the mind, the Self needs two conditions: (1) the problem cannot be solved by a simple competition of motives and (2) there is a certain time for conscious decision making. Suppose, you are a skilled runner and are running down a mountain filled with medium-sized stones. If, in the process, you put your foot in the wrong place you can get hurt. But since you are in the hands of inertia, you don’t have the time to think about where to put your foot. And—lo and behold—your legs themselves find the right position and you quickly run down without getting a single scratch. In some ways, such a run resembles the movements of a monkey in the trees: the monkey does not have time to think about which branch to grab. But suppose there was a deep crack on your descent that you cannot jump over. At this point you pause, and your Self begins its work of finding a workaround. As we agreed, in the Bubbleverse the Self is not a phenomenon we can observe directly; yet, it reveals itself indirectly in behaviour. By comparing one’s own behaviour in different situations and the behaviour of

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different people, it is possible to try and create an RC for the Self. If this attempt is successful, it might show that a three-year-old child, a five-­ year-­old preschooler, a teenager and an adult have very different Selves. So, let’s try to look at the Self from the ‘view from an orbit’. For this, we have to start from the very beginning—with the emergence of Self. It is hard to be sure, but let’s assume, along with Jean Piaget, that in the beginning a new-born baby does not distinguish itself from the surrounding world [21]. Let us skip the first few months of neurological development, during which a baby cannot yet control its movements and mainly relies on innate reflexes, and begin with the age when the infant’s actions start to be undeniably intentional (Piaget called this substage in cognitive development, which begins approximately at the age of 4 months, Secondary Circular Reaction). Despite at this age the infants’ actions are intentional, this initial intentionality is governed by the direct interaction between inner and outer world and exists mainly in the form of reactions to external stimuli. It looks as though things attract the infants’ actions like a magnet attracts metallic objects: when the baby’s mouth touches a bottle with milk, she takes the bottle in her mouth and begins to suck, and when an object passes through the infants visual field, the infant follows the object with her gaze; somewhat later, when the baby is able to grasp things, she manipulates with objects that her little hands are able to reach. At this initial stage the baby is unable to react to spoken words. For instance, the baby is in her mother’s hands and looking at the magnificent Barbie-doll placed on the sofa’s left corner. In the right corner of the sofa a teddy-bear is placed, looking much less attractive and colourful than the Barbie-doll. “Where is the teddy-bear?”—the mother asks, but the baby ignores the mother’s request and keeps looking at the doll. This means that the baby’s mind is able to project qualia into the presenting phenomena like the Barbie-doll, but is transparent to the representing phenomena, in this case—to spoken words. Let us call this kind of mind Self 0 mind (see Fig. 6.1, Bubbleverse 1). The first type of behaviour that can be interpreted as governed by the Self appears at the second level of intentionality, when the baby starts reacting to the adults’ requests that direct the baby’s look at a certain object among those available in the perceptual field. For example, to the mother’s request where the teddy-bear is the baby turns her head from

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Word heard Barbie-doll

Teddy-bear

Bubbleverse 1

Self 0

Word heard Barbie-doll

Teddy-bear

Bubbleverse 2

Meaning responsive Self

Word generated Barbie-doll

Teddy-bear

Bubbleverse 3

Executive Self

Fig. 6.1  The Self 0-mind (B1), Meaning-responsive Self (B2) and Executive Self (B3)

the Barbie-doll in search of the named object and fixes her gaze on the teddy-bear; somewhat later the intentional look is accompanied with a pointing gesture. Here we observe the first signs of the Self: the baby reacted to the magic of the spoken word, which inhibits the impulsive reaction (e.g., to keep looking at the Barbie-doll) and directs the baby’s gaze to the designated object (e.g., the teddy bear). For the first time the

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baby’s body (muscles of her neck and visual system) is controlled not by the magnetic pull of the attractive display, but by the spoken word. This reaction to a word, which in physical terms is nothing but a pattern of vibrating molecules of the air, is not caused by any of the four physical forces (i.e., gravitation, electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear), but by something that has no physical embodiment—the semantical meaning. When a baby starts reacting to the meaning of the word, the baby’s inner world changes. Through spoken words, the baby’s Bubbleverse starts ‘talking’ to the baby not only through presenting phenomena, but also through representing ones. Indeed, a meaning of the word is beyond perception: the word ‘sky’ for a person who doesn’t know the language is only a vibration in the air. So, when the baby begins to adequately react to words that she hears, something new is added to the innate qualia. This novel element is the ability to project meanings into the word and convert the word into specific body reactions (e.g., looking at the teddy bear). Before that, the baby’s mind was only able to project meaning into presenting phenomena (sensations and perceptions) but was ‘transparent’ to phenomena that have meanings—the ability to represent other phenomena. Now the baby is able to project meanings into patterns of the vibrating air that she hears and turn these patterns into purposeful actions. Let us call this kind of mind meaning-responsive Self (Fig. 6.1, Bubbleverse 2). The third stage in the development of Self is when the child begins to be able to generate meanings within her own mind. At this stage, the child can generate words and turn these words into actions. In the aforementioned example, the child who is currently looking at the Barbie-doll might say to herself ‘teddy-bear’ and then turn her gaze in the search for the teddy-bear (see Fig. 5.1, Bubbleverse 3). With this ability in her pocket, the child becomes independent from the perceptual field of non-­ social objects, which allows us to call this Self executive Self. The emergence of the executive Self (which in the psychoanalytic perspective is named ‘Ego’) can be illustrated with the study in which a version of Luria’s pattern-making task was employed [22]. A 3.5-year-old girl is presented with a simple pattern of geometrical figures (e.g., a string of circles, as in Fig. 6.2, row a). The child is then given a pencil and a task

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Fig. 6.2  The 3.5-year-old child’s performance on drawing a pattern with (row c) and without (rows a, b and d) self-generated loud speech

to continue making the pattern, which she does well. Next, the child is asked to continue a circle/cross pattern. Drawing a cross, which is just two straight lines, is a simpler task in terms of sensory-motor coordination then drawing a circle, what makes the cross have more phenomenalistic power than has the circle (see Chap. 4). The girl is unable to overcome the pressure of the phenomenon and ignores the instruction by switching to drawing a string of crosses (Fig. 6.2, row b). In order to test whether the girl can react to self-generated word output, she was encouraged first to say out loud what she was going to do (i.e., “I am going to draw a circle” or “I am going to draw a cross”) and only after that execute the action. With the help of self-generated words, the girl is able to cope with the cross/circle pattern (Fig. 6.2, row c), but switches back to drawing a string of crosses as soon as the self-generated loud speech was no longer allowed (Fig. 5.2, row d). In this example, executive Self could only operate when the child was speaking out loud, but not with the help of the child’s inner speech. A more advanced level of executive Self performance is shown in Fig.  6.3. In this figure, a five-year-old child can perform a cross/circle pattern without the loud self-generated speech (row a), meaning that the

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Fig. 6.3  The 5-year-old child’s performance on drawing a pattern with (row c) and without (rows a, b and d) self-generated loud speech

child’s Self was operating on the basis of self-generated inner speech. However, the inner speech was unable to support the child’s executive performance when a more complicated asymmetrical programme was given, and the child slipped down to performing a symmetrical programme (rows b and d). It is only when the child was allowed to generate words out loud that she could cope with the asymmetrical programme (row c). Another test on the availability of executive Self was Luria’s hand game (LHG). In this game, in the pre-test condition, a participant and an experimenter had a set of two identical toys (i.e., a small flag and a wooden doll) [23]. Whenever the experimenter lifted his doll the child was asked to lift his or her flag and vice versa. Children were considered to pass the test if they imitated less than 20% of the partner’s actions.

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Unlike the previously discussed test with drawing geometrical figures, this task did not require complex motor coordination. The results showed that on this task three- to five-year-old children were able to show field-­ independence even without speaking out loud. It means that the children were able to rely on their inner speech in order to distance themselves from the pressure of the phenomenal field (Fig. 6.4) Children who successfully passed the LHG test were then  offered a complicated version of this task. This version involved confusing social pointing. The child was told that a partner (the child’s peer or an adult) would be joining the performance and that the partner did not know how to perform the task. In reality, unbeknownst to the child, the partner was asked to randomly make right or wrong responses (Fig. 6.5). In this situation, if the partner’s action was incorrect, then the implicit confusion inherent in LHG was made stronger by the partner’s explicitly confusing pointing. This confusion placed an increased load on the child’s executive Self. The children were asked either to perform LHG together with a confederate (action test) or to verbally assess the confederate’s actions (verbal test). This was a test on whether the executive Self acts 120 100 80 60 40

2-2.5 2.6-2.11 3-3.5 3.6-5

20 0 Fig. 6.4  Percentage of children who passed LHG test, as a function of age (years)

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Fig. 6.5  Field-independence test with confusing social pointing: the child (left), the experimenter (front) and the child’s partner (right) (Subbotsky, 1993)

differently at involved (action) and uninvolved (verbal assessment) levels (see Table 7.3). The results indicated that the children’s performance on the task was indeed dependent on the level of their Selves’ activity: a significant number of three- to six-year-old children were able to correctly assess the partner’s wrong actions, yet they imitated those actions when they were asked to perform the test (see Fig. 6.6). The confusing social pointing severely impeded performance: if in the simple version of the test 95% of threeto four-years-old children passed the test, in the complicated version the successive performance with an adult partner dropped down to 30%. Interestingly, when the phenomenalistic power of the confusing social pointing had been decreased (the partner who gave confusing signals was the child’s peer), the performance significantly improved (Fig. 6.7).

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2.7 to 3

3 to 4 Action test

4 to 5

5 to 6

Verbal test

Fig. 6.6  Percent of children who passed the LHG confusing social pointing test, as a function of age (years) and the level of Self’s activity: involved (action test) versus uninvolved (verbal test)

120 100 80 60 40 20 0

2.7 to 3

3 to 4

4 to 5 Adult

5 to 6

Age, years

Peer

Fig. 6.7  Percent of children who passed the LHG confusing social pointing test, as a function of age (years) and partner (adult versus peer)

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The next level of the development of Self comes when children become able to reflect upon their own Self—their thoughts and feelings. At the same time, the children can become aware that other people may have similar thoughts and feelings. In one of the studies children were presented with a box of the candy ‘Smarties’ that had pictures of Smarties on it and asked what they thought was inside [24]. After they answered, ‘Smarties’, the box was opened to reveal a pencil instead of Smarties. The box was then closed, and the children were asked what a friend, who remained outside the experimental room and could not therefore know what really was in the box, would think was in the box. Typically, three-­year-­olds said, ‘a pencil’, while older children correctly stated ‘Smarties’. Summarising extensive research on false belief tasks in a meta-analysis, scientists concluded that children’s performance on these tasks improves dramatically from ages three to five years [25]. This threshold in improvement is highly robust and doesn’t get down even when various manipulations managed to simplify the task. When children become able to reflect upon their own mind, the executive Self becomes also the reflective Self. Finally, the highest level of the development of Self is achieved when children become able to respect other Selves as equal to their own Selves. This means that children stop viewing other people as perceptual displays on the screen of their Bubbleverse and are able to transcend the boundaries of their Bubbleverse into the social Commonverse. With this the executive Self is added to with the transcending Self. In order to test for the presence of the transcending Self in children, a test was designed that put the child before a choice of whether to anonymously deceive an experimenter for personal profit or unselfishly keep to the rules of decency (to keep one’s promises) and honesty (not to tell lie) [23]. In the warm up session, children were taught to perform a manual task—to transfer three ping-pong balls from a bucket into a jar using a special L-shaped shovel, without touching the balls with their hands. The correct performance on this task required some training, but it was quite

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manageable even for three-year-olds, as long as the bottom of the L-shaped shovel was slightly concave. In the experimental condition though the concave shovel was surreptitiously replaced by an identical but slightly convex shovel, which made a successful performance on the task without cheating impossible. In order to make the children free from the suspicion that the adult would snoop on them if they cheated, they were first showed the performance of another child who cheated on this task and was ‘believed’ by the experimenter and rewarded ‘for performing the task correctly’ (as in Fig. 6.8).

Fig. 6.8  Testing for the transcending Self. The child is being instructed on the task (1); the child is left alone and discovers that doing the task without cheating is impossible (2); the child moves the balls with his hands (3); the child tells the instructor that he had moved the balls with the scoop and not with his hands (4)

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When the children discovered that the manual task could not be done without using their hands, they faced a choice: to stop working on the task and thus loose the opportunity to get the reward, or follow the example of the child who had successfully lied to the experimenter and win the reward through cheating. It was assumed that refusing the reward for keeping the promise given to the experimenter would indicate the presence of the transcending Self: viewing another person (i.e., the experimenter) not as a display on the child’s own Bubbleverse, but as a person in the social Commonverse whose interests should be respected notwithstanding the child’s own interests. Results showed that on average around 20% of three- to seven-year-­ old children displayed the transcending Self: they acknowledged the impossibility to accomplish the task while being fully aware that this would deprive them from a desired prize. Interestingly, while most normally developing children and adults are supposed to have executive Self, the number of people able to exhibit the transcending Self behaviour doesn’t seem to grow with age. For example, when in a psychological study adults were given an opportunity to anonymously choose whether to show generosity towards a companion, which they had preached in the preliminary interviews, or behave selfishly, only about 20% of people chose to act morally [26]. In contrast, some people are capable of the transcending Self behaviour to the highest degree; they would rather die than hurt others by following their selfish needs. The individual differences in the ability to transcend one’s selfish Self become especially evident in extreme circumstances such as starvation, when all hopes to be rewarded for doing well vanish. Russian writer and scientist Dmitry Likhachov, who survived the Leningrad blockade by German Army in 1941–1944, writes “Starvation is incompatible with any reality, with anything we know of life where food is available… I believe that the real life is starvation; any other life is a mirage. During starvation people showed who they really were, their souls were stripped naked, freed of all the trumpery: Some proved to be wonderful, unparalleled heroes, and the others—villains, dirt bags, murderers, cannibals…everything was genuine” [27, p.369]. Altogether, the development of Self is summarised in Table 6.1.

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Table 6.1  Types of Self Type of Self

Properties of behaviour

Self 0

Behaviour is governed by the power of presenting phenomena, not responsive to verbal requests Behaviour is responsive to verbal requests

Meaning-­responsive Self Executive Self Reflective Self Transcending Self

Behaviour is governed by self-generated speech Behaviour is governed by understanding of the minds of others Behaviour is governed by moral laws without external enforcement or surveillance

6.5 Conclusion: Why Do We Need the Self? Having Self has two important advantages over having pandemonium of parallel processes instead of the Self. First, by making decisions single-­ mindedly, my Self takes full responsibility for these decisions on itself. If I see a person on the street who is being assaulted by a criminal, I cannot reload the responsibility on my competing brain processes; it is in my own hands only whether to intervene or not in this situation. Second, being a single Self, a person measures other people’s feelings and behaviours against his or her own. I can clearly see when other person’s reactions to a certain situation (e.g., when there is a threat or a seduction) are similar or dissimilar to those of my own in the same situation. In other words, I assess the other people’s behaviour critically. To summarise, personal responsibility and critical thinking are the inherent properties of the Self. There can be situations, however, when the invisible membrane of my Self dissolves and I begin to feel the unmediated unity with the Bubbleverse.1 Usually, this happens in a crowd [28]. In a crowd, I may lose control over the borders of my I.  Although this possibility might look like involving a logical contradiction (the whole crowd is still within my Bubbleverse), it does not. What happens in this situation is that my Self loses the protective membrane that separates my feelings from feelings and behaviours of other people. By losing the protective membrane  Dissolving one’s Self shouldn’t be confused with transcending one’s Bubbleverse through faith (see Chap. 15). Unlike transcending, dissolving one’s Self occurs entirely within one’s Bubbleverse. 1

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I lose control over my own feelings and behaviours and become a part of the whole. My critical thinking and individual responsibility are deactivated, and my emotional reactions go out of my control. The ‘crowd behaviour’ is not the only situation of the dissolved Self. The same may happen in situations of a strong emotional appeal, such as listening to powerful music or watching a particularly talented movie. Describing situations of the dissolved Self, we often use the expression ‘tears streamed from my eyes’. In this case my core Bubbleverse expands, to include those of other people, thus dissolving the borders between my Self and the social Commonverse. An artificial way of relaxing the borders of the Self is via using psychedelic substances (see Chap. 8 for more on that). But independently of whether our Self is relaxed or in the state of full alert, in the Bubbleverse we can never fully escape our Self without shutting the Bubbleverse down  at the same time. By definition, in the Bubbleverse, the subject versus object division is the ‘Little Bang’, in which the Bubbleverse is born, and the subject is our Self (see Chap. 13 for more on that).

References 1. Lynn, S. J., et al. (2012). Dissociative disorders. In M. Hersen & D. C. Beidel (Eds.), Adult psychopathology and diagnosis (pp. 497–538). New York: John Wiley & Sons. 2. Stevenson, R. L. (2017). The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. London: Chump Change. 3. Petkova, V., & Ehrsson, H. H. (2008). If I were you: Perceptual illusion of body swapping. PLOS ONE. Retrieved from https://journals.plos.org/ plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003832 4. Quallo, M. M., Price, C. J., Ueno, K., Asamizuya, T., Cheng, K., Lemon, R. N., & Iriki, A. (2009). Grey and white matter changes associated with tool-use learning in macaque monkeys. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences U S A, 27, 18379–18384. 5. Peeters, R., et  al. (2009). The representation of tool use in humans and monkeys: Common and uniquely human features. Journal of Neuroscience, 29, 11523–11539.

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6. Levenson, J.  L. (2006). Essentials of psychosomatic medicine. New  York: American Psychiatric Press Inc.. 7. MacIver, K., Lloyd, D. M., Kelly, S., Roberts, N., & Nurmikko, T. (2008). Phantom limbpain, cortical reorganization and the therapeutic effect of mental imagery. Brain, 131, 2181–2191. 8. Banks, G., Short, P., Martinez, J., Latchaw, R., Ratcliff, G., & Boller, F. (1989). The alien hand syndrome. Clinical and postmortem findings. Archives of Neurology, 46, 456–459. 9. Sergio, D.  S. (2005). The anarchic hand. The Psychologist, 18, 606–609. Retrieved from https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-18/edition-10/ anarchic-hand. 10. Rock, A. (2009). The mind at night. The new science of how and why we dream. New York: Basic Books. 11. Gregory, R. L. (1987). The Oxford companion to the mind. New York: Oxford University Press. 12. Morgan, E. (2005). Tales from Baron Munchausen. Edinburg: Mariscat Press. 13. Lindsay, P.  H., & Norman, D.  A. (1977). Human information processing (2nd ed.). New York: Academic Press. 14. Anderson, J.A, & Rosenfeld, E. (1988). Neurocomputing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 15. Carruthers, P. (2011). The opacity of mind: An integrative theory of self-­ knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 16. Dennett, D.  C., & Kinsbourne, M. (1992). Time and the observer: The where and when of consciousness in the brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 183–247. 17. Subbotsky, E. (1996). Explaining impossible phenomena: Object permanence beliefs and memory failures in adults. Memory, 1996(4), 199–233. 18. Bower, T. G. R. (1974). Development in infancy. San Francisco: Freeman. 19. Baillargeon, R., & DeVos, J. (1991). Object permanence in young infants: Further evidence. Child Development, 62, 1227–1246. 20. Michotte, A. (1950). A propos de la permanence phenomenale: Faits et theories [Concerning phenomenal permanence: Facts and theories]. Acta Psychologica, 7, 293–322. 21. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 22. Luria, A.  R., & Subbotski, E.  V. (1978). Zur frühen Ontogenese der Steuernden Funktion Der Sprache. In G. Steiner (Ed.), Die Psychologie des 20 Jahrhunderts (pp. 1033–1048). München: Kindler.

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23. Subbotsky, E. (1993). The birth of personality. The development of independent and moral behaviour in preschool children. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Weatsheaf. 24. Perner, J., Leekam, S. R., & Wimmer, H. (1987). Three-year-olds’ difficulty with false belief: The case for a conceptual deficit. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 5, 125–137. 25. Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory-­ of-­Mind. Child Development, 3, 655–684. 26. Batson, C.  D., & Thompson, E.  R. (2001). Why don’t moral people act morally? Motivational considerations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10(2), 54–57. 27. Likhachev, D. (2013). Mysli o zhizni. Pis'ma o dobrom. Moscow: Kolibri. 28. Toch, H. (1988). Psychology of crowds revisited. Contemporary Psychology, 33, 954.

7 Structure of the Bubbleverse

7.1 A Place Where Monsters Live When my older son was four years old, he invented an imaginary creature he named ‘Bamselia’. He drew it as an octopus looking creature with multiple tentacles, which has magical properties and comes at night. Each night my son had trouble falling asleep: he was expecting Bamselia to appear and swallow him. My wife and I had to sit near him for a long time until he finally calmed down and fell asleep. He rejected all the rational reasons that I used to persuade him that the creature was only in his mind: when I closed the doors and windows my son would say that the creature can go through solid walls, and when I promised to kill the monster with a kitchen knife, the boy replied that the creature is magical and the knife would simply go through it without causing it any harm. However, one night I noticed that the boy rolled the edge of the blanket into a shape of sausage and told that Bamselia would not come while he was holding the ‘sausage’ in his hands, because it is afraid of the ‘sausage’. And indeed, the boy seemed to begin to sleep peacefully while keeping the ‘sausage’ in his hands. The only problem was that each time he was about to fall asleep, his palm relaxed, and the ‘sausage’ unrolled, causing © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_7

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the boy to wake up and repeat the procedure again and again. But for me this was now just a technical problem. I took a small wooden Lego cylinder and gave it to my son to hold, suggesting that the cylinder had the same protecting effect as the ‘sausage’ made of the blanket. The boy believed and began to get asleep quietly with the cylinder in his hands. After a few weeks he didn’t need the cylinder and the fear of the imaginary monster faded away. This example demonstrates that my son and myself were living in different personal universes. In my son’s Bubbleverse, magical creatures were as real as any everyday object, but unlike everyday objects they possessed magical powers. In my adult Bubbleverse magical phenomena exist too, but they are far from being as strong and influential as in the Bubbleverse of my son. The dominant part of an adult Bubbleverse in industrial cultures today is the scientific Commonverse which excludes the conscious belief in magic. Nevertheless, the magical Bubbleverse of a preschool child is hidden in my subconscious. Psychological experiments show that in their verbal accounts most educated adults report that they don’t believe in magic, yet subconsciously they still harbour this belief [1]. To summarise, the structure of the Bubbleverse can best be described as a hierarchy of universes. Like a Russian nesting doll, the Bubbleverse contains religious and scientific Commonverses inside. In the young child, the fabric of the Bubbleverse is a mixture of the primordial phenomena described in the previous chapters. As the Bubbleverse matures, there appear internal divisions between domains, the most important of which is the division between ordinary and extraordinary realities.

7.2 L aws of Nature: Building the Commonverse As argued in the previous chapters, the primordial phenomena share general features: identity, permanence, locality and inclusion. From the age of a few months, babies show their intuitive understanding that a solid object can’t go through another solid object [2], an object can’t disappear into thin air or appear from nothing [3], and an inanimate object can’t

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move by itself but can be moved by other objects or a human hand [4, 5]. In the beginning, these primordial properties don’t have a firm grasp on phenomenalistic reality of a child, where causal events are mixed with magical ones [6]. Even children as old as six years, when they see an event that looks like an instance of magic, can easily revert to magical beliefs [7], and when it goes about their own lives, rational adults too allow magic to enter the everyday reality [8]. When we build the scientific Commonverse, we use the primordial phenomena for manufacturing their RCs. Laws of nature are canonical RCs. With all the variety of laws of nature, they are united by a strict principle of causality, which evolves from the general property of phenomena—inclusion. The causality principle states that all phenomena and processes of nature are interrelated in such a way that for every phenomenon it is possible to identify other phenomena that precede the phenomenon in time and contain all of the phenomenon’s components. Thus, the scientific picture of the world can be represented as a continuous fabric, consisting of cause-effect links. This ‘fabric of nature’ is very similar to normal fabric. A weaver is spinning the wool into a continuous thread, and a weaving loom connects the filament at right corner to each other, at the same time twisting them so tightly that no holes or tears remain. This fabric of nature, consisting of continuous cause-effect filaments, we call ‘cause-effect continuum’ (CEC). Of course, CEC is not an exact copy of a real fabric. In CEC, many causes can result in a single effect, and vice versa, one cause may produce a bunch of effects. Only one principle needs to be observed: there can be no gaps between the links. Like a women’s nylon stocking falls apart if a single thread is broken, the CEC disintegrates if any of the cause-effect links breaks. As the French philosopher and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) famously argued, if someone (the Demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe, the universe’s past and future values for any given time can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics. This means that the future and the past of the CEC are set for all times, and the only reason we don’t know the future is the limited nature of our present knowledge. “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future”—Laplace wrote [9, p.4].

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The belief in the Laplace’s Demon is a backbone of the scientific Commonverse. In the Commonverse we view the laws of nature as objective and unbreakable regularities that are wired into the basis of the cosmos and exist independently of the human mind. But what exactly are these laws in the perspective of the Bubbleverse? Without the mind, the Bubbleverse wouldn’t have space and time, and no causality is possible either. In this light, the laws of nature too are the entities that are established by the work of our subconscious Bubbleverse. In the altered states of the mind, such as dreams, hallucinations and psychedelic journeys, the laws of nature don’t stand: physical objects can magically turn into other objects, gravitation doesn’t work, time can go backwards, things emerge from nothing and disappear into thin air, animals can behave like humans and plants can turn into people. It appears that in the Bubbleverse the stability of the laws of nature hinges upon the work of the mind. At first glance, this conclusion looks strange. Indeed, how can laws of nature depend on our mind? The laws are stable and do not depend on our thinking or action. For instance, in vacuum objects will fall on Earth with the same acceleration independently whether we want this or not. Water will boil at 100 degrees Celsius even if we want it to boil at 90 degrees. But let us have a closer look. The laws of nature exist in physical space and time of the scientific Commonverse, and physical space and time are RCs of subjective space and time, which are created by us. As we saw in the previous chapters, in the primordial Bubbleverse space is not a phenomenon along other phenomena, space is a relation between phenomena, and this relation is inherently unstable: When I am far away from a skyscraper, I can cover it with my hand, but as I approach the skyscraper grows in size. Despite our perception has the innate ability towards size and shape constancy, this ability doesn’t work on large distances (see Chap. 8 for more on that). In order to make the relations stable, we measure space by applying one thing to another. Some of the things we select for standard measures. Applying measures to phenomena, we designate the results in numbers, and now—surprise, surprise,— the skyscraper stops changing its size: from whatever distance we look at the skyscraper, it will always be the same size, say 300 × 50 × 40 m. Similarly, the primordial time in the Bubbleverse is not an objective concept as well. Time is not a phenomenon we can point out to and say,

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“that is time”. We measure time by the effort we call ‘patience’ while being engaged in various activities. The effort can vary on the kind of activity: it can be hard (e.g., when we are hungry and waiting for a dish to be delivered by a waiter in a restaurant or are waiting for a bus to come in the cold whether), and it can be or easy (e.g., when we are watching an interesting movie). While having a long transatlantic flight we can speed up the ‘patience time’ by reading an interesting novel, or the time can slow down if we suddenly develop a toothache. In order to stop the time changing we compare two processes with each other. For example, a 1 min interval is the effort we make to see the long hand of the clock to move a certain section on the clock’s dial at a certain speed. From now on the processes stop being elastic and become hard. For example, when we say “it took 5 minutes for the kettle to boil the water” what we in reality say is that the boiling process took our 1 minute effort when watching the clock multiplied by 5. Now, consider causality. In the primordial Bubbleverse phenomena don’t have causes, all they have is the property of inclusion. Like the subjective space and time, subjective causality is tricky and unstable. A baby hits a hanging toy and mum appears, so the baby begins to ‘think’ that mum appeared because he or she had hit the toy. American psychologist B.F. Skinner observed pigeons developing ‘causal behaviours’, including circling, head swinging and pecking; because the birds received food after they made a certain movement, they began ‘expecting’ that the food was caused by this movement [10]. As a result, in the primordial Bubbleverse anything can become a cause of anything, and the most typical causal links are the links by contagion (one phenomenon shares position in space with another) and similarity (one phenomenon shares form, smell or taste with another). In the Bubbleverse, phenomena can even appear from nothing, and disappear without a trace. The division between animated and inanimate phenomena is blurred as well: ancients believed that objects we presently consider inanimate (e.g., rivers, mountains and tools) had souls, and children’s early intuitions regarding animate/inanimate distinction have to go a long way to mature [11]. In order to tame the property of inclusion, scientists took a certain phenomenon as a measure and began to look at every other link between phenomena by comparing it with the ‘standard cause’. An instance of such a standard cause

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can be a mechanical push: one billiard ball hits another and launches the second ball into motion. This standard cause contains the essential requirements for any causal connection: a cause must precede its effect in physical time, and a cause must transfer its content to the effect via certain medium in physical space called ‘a force’. Currently, there are only four such forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear. As a result, there appeared the scientific Commonverse with its CEC, in which all the fabric is woven of cause-effect links and any direct effect of mind over matter is impossible. To summarise, the scientific Commonverse, with its space and time, causality and laws of nature is a construction by our Self, made of the basis of primordial phenomena of the Bubbleverse. Our Self has achieved what it wanted: in order to make unstable and chaotic primordial Bubbleverse more stable and controllable, the Self ‘sun dried’ primordial phenomenalistic reality, converting the primordial phenomena into science-­generated objects and creating a stable and predictable reality— the reality of the scientific Commonverse (see Chap. 4 for more on that). As mentioned in the Introduction, along with the scientific Commonverse, there exist also religious and sociocultural Commonverses. As we will discuss later in this book, religious Commonverse preceded scientific Commonverse; despite many properties that distinguish the former from the latter, they share the same feature: the belief in the universality of laws of nature (see Chaps. 10, 11 and 12 for more on that). The socio-cultural Commonverse stands apart from the other two as it is structured not by the laws of nature, but by values: social customs, cultural traditions, juridical and moral laws.

7.3 P  erceiving and Imagining Things: Two Types of Reality When we develop the Commonverses, the Bubbleverse undergoes drastic changes. The primordial unity between the Self and the phenomenal world splits into perceived and imagined phenomena. We can see an apple lying on the table in front of us, but we can also imagine the apple when

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we close our eyes. Long after pain in out stomach is gone, we can still recover the pain in our imagination. The perceived phenomenal world is the one we described in Chap. 5 of this book. In this world, phenomena are structured by their general properties, inherently given to our Self: qualia, identity, permanence, locality and inclusion. In contrast, the imagined phenomenal world is the world in which perceived phenomena are given in the form of their fluid and flexible copies—mental images. The imagined phenomenal world can also include mental images that have no analogies in the perceived phenomenal world: mermaids, dragons and other products or creative work of our Self. Unlike in the perceived phenomenal world, in which our Self is confronted with the world of independent reality of matter, in the imagined phenomenal world the Self remains intimately linked with the matter and has the power of directly affecting things ‘out there’. As a result of the perceived versus imagined phenomena split, the primordial reality diverges into two kinds of reality: ordinary and extraordinary realities. By realities in the Bubbleverse we will understand anything that is or can be an element of our conscious Self (see Chap. 9 on more of that). Ordinary reality takes its origin in the perceived phenomenal world, which is further shaped by the scientific Commonverse. There appears a totally new kind of phenomena—representing phenomena (see Table 4.4). RCs and values don’t exist in a vacuum; in order to be processed by our mind, they have to be represented in written and spoken words, numbers, formulas, schemes, graphs and other codes. Primitive tools develop into complex machines, computers and electronic gadgets. Cave paintings of early people develop into virtual realities: movies, cartoons and computer games. Tribal customs develop into sophisticated religions, juridical and moral codes. Technical advances allowed to develop representing phenomena (e.g., written texts) into simulating ones (e.g., movies and virtual reality of computer modelling). Instead of representing the phenomenal Bubbleverse, virtual reality simulates it, having created the miniature copy of the Bubbleverse. Like primordial phenomena of the original Bubbleverse, virtual reality relies on vision and hearing; it doesn’t require the coding/decoding processes which are necessary for reading. As a result, most children today prefer interaction with gadgets to reading;

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according to a recent survey, children aged 0–8 years spend three times more time engaged with screen media than they spend with books [12]. Nevertheless, a substantial part of the original primordial Bubbleverse remains untouched by their RCs. Most primary phenomena are knowledge resistant: the building being measured still changes its visual size when we approach it, the sun still revolves around the Earth and most sensations didn’t change by our knowledge of their origins or underlying physical mechanisms (see Chap. 5 and Table 4.2). In the ordinary reality, a person is a puppet of the ‘laws of nature’ and the ‘laws of society’. He or she is supposed to follow his or her ‘temperament’ and conform to demands of social customs, laws and moral rules. A person is not a master of the universe, has no freedom of action and is condemned to dance to the music of cosmos. Even the person’s thinking is not free but has to serve the unbreakable laws of formal logic. In contrast, extraordinary reality, which is mostly subconscious, revolves around a person who is free to follow his or her most cherished and wild desires and inclinations. Extraordinary reality sprouts out of the world of imagined phenomena. In a sense, living in extraordinary reality is like seeing a ‘lucid dream’. In extraordinary reality thinking conforms not to the laws of logic but to the laws of magic: we think through free associations and have a luxury of letting our thoughts wonder. Like artists, we can ‘draw’ our lives in a way we feel desirable and enjoyable. In extraordinary reality, we can ignore demands of logic and morality, be a ‘criminal’ without consequences or a ‘saint’ without sacrifices. In extraordinary reality, laws of nature are powerless, and miracles hold sway. The differences between the laws of ordinary and extraordinary realities are summarised in Table 7.1. However, the borderline between ordinary and extraordinary realities is rather fragile. Sometimes extraordinary reality makes its way through the border into the ordinary one. Most often such intervention happens in social sciences. Unlike in physical sciences, in which RCs are fixed by measurements and mathematical calculations, in social sciences RCs are often influenced by creator’s personal interests. For instance, according to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, some theories in economics, which pretend to reflect the objective mechanisms of capitalist economics, in reality reflect their authors’ economical and class interests (e.g., they justify

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Table 7.1  The laws of extraordinary reality versus the laws of ordinary reality

Laws and phenomena of extraordinary reality

Laws of ordinary reality which oppose the laws and phenomena of extraordinary reality

The law of sympathy (two Identity (two objects or events are objects that resemble independent one one another are from the other, connected and share unless they are common fate) continuously linked by one of the four physical forces) Identity The law of contagion (two objects that once were in contact maintain their link forever)

Phenomena allowed by the laws of extraordinary reality and prohibited by the laws of ordinary reality Affecting a person’s photograph will affect the person, immediately and at an indefinite distance

Affecting a person’s bunch of hair will affect the person, immediately and at an indefinite distance A person’s qualities pass to another person via personal things Identity A tribe and its totem (e.g., The phenomenon of an animal) share the participation (two same invisible essence or objects, which are soul entirely different one A person’s fate is from the other, don’t connected to a certain resemble one another planet and have never been in Sacrificial bread and wine contact can still share a transubstantiate into the common essence or body and blood of Christ soul) Random events appear Inclusion (a The phenomenon of from nothing phenomenon cannot emergence/vanishing Creative ideas appear from (things can emerge from emerge from nothing nothing or vanish nothing and vanish into Ghosts and apparitions without a trace) nothing) emerge and vanish A person turns into an Permanence (one The phenomenon of animal, and vice versa complex object transmutation (complex cannot instantly turn Two distinct entities merge entities instantly turn into another complex into one: Mermaids, into other complex centaurs and dragons object) entities; different entities can merge into monsters) (continued)

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Table 7.1 (continued)

Laws and phenomena of extraordinary reality The phenomenon of direct Self over matter/ mind (the effort of will or desire can directly change physical objects and processes, and pass information to other minds)

Laws of ordinary reality which oppose the laws and phenomena of extraordinary reality Inclusion and permanence

Phenomena allowed by the laws of extraordinary reality and prohibited by the laws of ordinary reality Prayer changes physical matter; A person affects physical processes or passes information to another person, without connecting to the processes or the other person via a physical medium

the right of exploitation of workers and social inequality) [13]. A similar intervention can happen in psychology, in the form of rationalisation— the way of reasoning in which obscene or socially inacceptable behaviours or feelings are justified and explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner to make them consciously tolerable. Sigmund Freud brought multiple examples of this kind of intervention [14]. Today, the phenomenon of the extraordinary reality mixing with ordinary reality gave rise to the whole trend in philosophy—the ‘postmodernist’ deconstruction, or demystification of social and cultural concepts and theories, by reducing them to their roots in the theorist’s personal interests [15]. Another pathway for the extraordinary reality to enter ordinary reality is language. While physical sciences operate with inanimate objects, the language of scientific theories is often animistic: it portrays inanimate objects as if they had intentions and purposeful goals. When we say, ‘the avalanche fell’ or ‘a flower faded’, we speak of a causal event that is isolated in time, and thus the animistic structure of language is not visible to us that clearly. In contrast, when we speak of complex functions in a living cell, the animism of our language becomes quite obvious. When we read that the RNA ‘carries’, the ribosomes ‘read’ and molecules ‘bring’ something [16], we might forget that these verbs relate to inanimate molecules and not animated subjects with consciousness. Taking the active

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verbs in inverted commas doesn’t change the fact that using such verbs is a better way to describe the reality of processes in a living cell than using a passive voice. This is because, unlike a falling avalanche, the action of an RNA molecule is not an isolated causal event, but a link in a long chain of events, and thus the purposeful nature of this link becomes particularly salient. One might think that this impression arises due to the inappropriate use of language and can be corrected by just changing the active voice into a passive one. However, if we say, for instance, that ‘something makes RNA carry information’ instead of saying ‘RNA carries information’, we simply relegate the active voice from the RNA to the ‘something’; next, we have to explain what caused that ‘something’ to ‘make the RNA carry information’, and so on until the end. And what will be the end? What is the final cause that makes the whole chain of the biosynthesis in a cell going? You might be surprised, but if you are a biological scientist the ‘causa finalis’ is you. It is your own mind that ‘injects’ processes happening in a cell with ‘causal energy’. That is where Kantian theory comes into the play. Kant writes “Therefore, experience itself, that is empirical knowledge of phenomena, is only possible because we submit the sequence of events … to the law of causality…” [17, p.231]. In other words, when a microbiologist repeatedly observes the sequence of two events, such as the movement of the RNA molecule and some amino acids linking together, he or she projects the ‘cause-effect’ qualia into this sequence of events, and the ‘pact’ of a scientist with nature is made: the natural event now looks similar to the one when a conscious subject makes things on purpose. According to the ‘third law’ of the science-fiction writer A.C. Clark, today’s magic is tomorrow’s advanced technology [18]. This law implies that a miraculous event is either an unknown scientific event or a perceptual illusion. In the context of the Bubbleverse, this ‘law’ is correct only within the scientific Commonverse. Within the core Bubbleverse supernatural events can be illusory (e.g., dreams) or real (e.g., voluntary movements, or paranormal psychic effects). The fact that reality of such supernatural effects is denied by science is understandable and expected, since the very foundation of science is built on denial of supernatural events in favour of physical causality (see Chap. 11). But the Bubbleverse

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incorporates the scientific Commonverse and is wider than scientific Commonverse; therefore, there is nothing unusual in the fact that the core Bubbleverse may contain supernatural effects that are prohibited in the scientific Commonverse. In fact, scientific Commonverse partially overlaps with the core Bubbleverse in such effects as quantum entanglement or quantum Zeno effect (see Chap. 3). In the perspective of the Bubbleverse, life and consciousness cannot be explained by science in principle, and therefore, they too are instances of the supernatural (see Chap. 14). To summarise, the domain of ordinary reality includes phenomena organised by their general properties—identity, permanence, locality and inclusion. Ordinary reality also includes RCs. As a result, the phenomena stick to each other in a rather regular manner: in the room where I am writing this text, things are orderly arranged, they fit in functions and colours, and the events are linked to each other by cause-effect sequences. However, along with ordinary reality, the Bubbleverse also comprises events that are impossible in the scientific Commonverse: dreams, fairy tales, fantasy and phenomenal supernatural events. Events like this shape the domain of extraordinary reality: an array of phenomena that violates general properties of the primordial phenomena.

7.4 The Body of the Bubbleverse After the split between perceived and imagined phenomena, the primordial Bubbleverse splits as well. The mature Bubbleverse consists now of the following sections: the core Bubbleverse, which is the remainder of the primordial Bubbleverse, and the ‘built’ sections of the Bubbleverse—the scientific, religious and sociocultural Commonverses, as in Fig. 7.1. The core Bubbleverse contains our Self, primordial phenomena untouched by scientific knowledge, and the subconscious part of the Bubbleverse. We will delay the discussion of the subconscious part of the Bubbleverse till later (see Chap. 8). In terms of the type of reality, the core Bubbleverse is primarily filled with extraordinary reality, in the form of dreams, feelings and magical thinking, but it also includes primordial phenomena, untuched by scientific

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Bubbleverse Scientific Buffer zone

Self

Commonverses

Sociocultural

Core Bubbleverse

Religious

Fig. 7.1  Structure of the Bubbleverse

knowledge. In contrast, the Commonverses are primarily stuffed with ordinary reality, which includes logical thinking, science-generated objects and representing phenomena, such as signs, numbers, scientific models and theories. The virtual reality—movies and computer simulations—is also a part of the Commonverses, as long as it doesn’t violate properties of physical space, time and causality. Still, even in the scientific Commonverse there are elements of extraordinary reality. In virtual reality, magical events can violate physical causality, and phenomena such as quantum entanglement and psi-effects add to extraordinary reality. The sociocultural and religious Commonverses are even more tolerant towards extraordinary reality than the scientific Commonverse and include conventional religious magic (e.g., the eucharist ceremony) and magical thinking in art. As a result, the structure of the Bubbleverse can be presented as in Table 7.2. Nevertheless, the borderline between the core Bubbleverse and the Commonverses is not set in stone. There is a buffer zone between the core Bubbleverse and the scientific, sociocultural and religious Commonverses (see Fig. 7.1). For example, a person can create a piece of ordinary reality

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Table 7.2 Domains of reality  versus sections of the conscious part of the Bubbleverse Domains of reality

Sections of the conscious part of the Bubbleverse

Ordinary reality

Primordial phenomena (sensations Rational constructions, science generated and perceptual objects objects, representing untouched by scientific phenomena and knowledge) simulating phenomena Magical thinking, dreams and Quantum entanglement, feelings psi-effects, magical events in movies and computer games, religious magic, magical thinking in art

Extraordinary reality

Core Bubbleverse

Commonverses

(e.g., a new scientific theory, a religious concept or a piece of art), but before the person makes his or her creation public it remains within the buffer zone between the person’s core Bubbleverse and a commonverse. Sometimes, when the person decides to destroy his or her new creation, the creation never enters a commonverse. Crossed with the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary realities is the distinction between two different levels of our Self ’s activity. On the involved level our Self functions when it deals with objects of vital value (like passing an important examination or having a major surgery). This means that the wellbeing of our Self in the Bubbleverse and even its very existence may depend on the results of this activity. On this level actions of our Self are usually irreversible, and we are aware of high responsibility and strong motivation for success. In contrast, on the uninvolved level our Self deals with objects that are not directly linked to our basic needs. Although our emotional experiences of acting on this level can be rather strong (for instance, when reading an exciting novel or watching a movie), the results of these actions can never be of vital value, and in most cases they are reversible. In the everyday context, when we act on the uninvolved level, we usually say that “It’s just words”, meaning that what we say does not necessarily entail serious consequences and can easily be discounted or forgiven. This is not the case when we act at the involved level, when we realise that what we did cannot be taken back.

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Table 7.3  Structure of the Bubbleverse, as a function of Level of the Self’s activity and Domain of reality Domain of reality Level of the Self’s activity

Ordinary

Extraordinary

Involved

Action

Uninvolved

Planning Joking Guessing Verbal assessment

Hallucination Night dreams Fantasy Art

As a result, we can handle the same problem (or object) in different ways depending on the level of our Self ’s activity. For instance, when we are planning our holiday, we can afford looking at the most remote and expensive places and hotels, but we are a lot more selective when we actually book the flight. The crossing between domains of realities and levels of the Self ’s activity is presented in Table 7.3. When we are in a commonverse, we mostly deal with representing phenomena: words, formulas, plans and schemes. In contrast, in the core Bubbleverse we have to deal with presenting phenomena, such as perceptions, feelings and needs. This implies that in a commonverse we mostly act at the uninvolved level, whereas most action in our core Bubbleverse are made on the involved level of our Self. For example, inventing and testing nuclear weapon has been done in the scientific Commonverse, but the decision to apply the weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made in the core Bubbleverse and was based on the primordial phenomenon of fear of the U.S. Army’s colossal causualties of war had the weapon not been applied.

7.5 Nowhere to Run: Conclusion In the Commonverse, scientific and religious alike, the world seems a relatively simple construction—some kind of a gigantic mechanism, in which separate parts are rationally joined together by the laws of nature or the ‘intelligent designer’. This apparent simplicity and predictability of the Commonverse is one of the reasons of its attractiveness. In contrast, the core Bubbleverse can be chaotic and hard to organise. The everyday

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life tells us that the world is not as predictable as we would like it to be, and a ‘sword of chance’ is constantly hanging over our head. And we think we are lucky when we manage to escape the vicissitudes of the core Bubbleverse and dive under the umbrella of science or religion. But is the scientific Commonverse that predictable really? In his essay The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the author Douglas Adams wrote that if ever anyone discovered exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly be replaced by something even more inexplicable. It is also possible—he added—that this has already happened. Extending this line of thought I would say that this is happening all the time. The more phenomena science explains, the more inexplicable phenomena it creates. In cosmology, scientists established that the speed of light is around 300,000 kilometres per second, but why this speed has exactly that value nobody knows. Equally unexplainable are the meaning and destiny of the existence of a person and the humankind. There are hypotheses, but none seems very convincing. In other words, we will never be able to answer some fundamental questions of being; all we are left with is to guess or believe. This brings some philosophers to think that the fragment of the known world floats on a pillow of miracles. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, human knowledge cannot hope to find an absolute truth not because knowledge has its intrinsic limits but because there is no absolute truth. Instead of finding an absolute truth, every historical epoch invents its unique way of looking at various phenomena. Foucault called this unique way ‘a discourse’. In this context nothing, even science, has access to the truth, and escaping into the scientific Commonverse is nothing more than getting ourselves stuck in another kind of ‘practical myth’. So, let’s try and sketch the limits to which we could still cognize our Bubbleverse.

References 1. Subbotsky, E. (2005). The permanence of mental objects: Testing magical thinking on perceived and imaginary realities. Developmental Psychology, 41, 301–318.

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2. Baillargeon, R. (1987). Object permanence in 3 1/2- and 4 1/2-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 23, 655–644. 3. Bower, T.  G. R. (1971). The object in the world of an infant. Scientific American, 225(4), 30–38. 4. Saxe, R., & Carey, S. (2006). The perception of causality in infancy. Acta Psichologica, 123, 144–165. 5. Leslie, A. (1987). Do six-month-old infants perceive causality? Cognition, 25, 265–288. 6. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 7. Subbotsky, E. (2004). Magical thinking in judgments of causation: Can anomalous phenomena affect ontological causal beliefs in children and adults? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 22, 123–152. 8. Subbotsky, E. (2011). The ghost in the machine: Why and how the belief in magic survives in the rational mind. Human Development, 54, 126–143. 9. Laplace, P. S. (1951). A philosophical essay on probabilities. New York: Dover Publications. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_ demon. 10. Skinner, B.  F. (1948). Superstition in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38, 168–172. 11. Wright, K., Poulin-Dubois, D., & Kelley, E. (2015). The animate-inanimate distinction in preschool children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 33, 73–91. 12. Retrieved from https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/zero-to-eightchildrens-media-use-in-america-2013 13. Engels, F. (1968). Letter to Franz Mehring. In Marx and Engels Correspondence. London: International Publishers. 14. Freud, S. (2010). The psychopathology of everyday life. South Carolina: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. 15. Haustov, D.  C. (2018). Lektsii Po Philosophii Postmoderna. Moscow: RIPOL Classic. 16. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/science/RNA 17. Kant, I. (2018). Kritika Chistogo Razuma. Moscow: Act. 18. Clarke, A. C. (1973). Profiles of the future: An inquiry into the limits of the possible. New York: Popular Library.

Part II Cognizing the Bubbleverse

8 The Black Hole of the Bubbleverse

8.1 Subconscious in the Bubbleverse There is a realm in our mental activity which is inaccessible to our rational mind. In this book, we call this realm the subconscious. Subconscious actions are actions generated by our mind but not certified by our Self. Unlike conscious perception and thinking, subconscious perception and thinking can only be detected indirectly, through effects they generate. Some of such effects were first described by an English poet and psychologist Frederic Myers (1843–1901) under the name of subliminal consciousness [1]. So, how do we know that we have the subconscious? For example, when we are trying to remember the name of a person or an object with which we are well familiar but are struggling to recall at the moment, we are certain that these names are stored in the domain of the subconscious. The proof of such confidence is that after some time and without any efforts on our part, these names emerge in our memory. When a hypnotist suggests to a person immersed in a hypnotic state that the person, after regaining a waking state of mind, should make a certain (often meaningless) action, the person indeed makes the action, which he or she © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_8

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usually ‘justifies’ by inventing a plausible reason. This means that the person makes the action consciously, but ‘takes the command’ to perform the action from his or her subconscious. In psychoanalysis, the subconscious is assumed to contain ‘complexes’—the results of traumatic experiences of early childhood, although this interpretation of the subconscious is arguable. More convincing manifestations of the subconscious part of the Bubbleverse come from our dreams or creative ideas, which sometimes unexpectedly visit our conscious Self. Clinical cases described in Chap. 6, such as the anarchic hand syndrome or parasomnia, demonstrate that our mind can control our actions without our Self being aware of that. Not all events in the Bubbleverse, of which our conscious Self is unaware, belong to the realm of subconscious. There is a large area in the Bubbleverse that belongs to external reality, which could become a part of our conscious mind but for some reasons has not yet done so. Let us call this area potential knowledge entities (PKEN). Whereas most of subconscious events are the work of the inner world of our mind, the PKEN contains objects and events of the outer world. The main function of PKEN is containing things-in-themselves, which are objects and events that exist in the ‘dark’ part of the Bubbleverse without our knowledge, and which we learn about through exploration and discoveries, like geographical discoveries in the past and astronomical discoveries of today. On a smaller scale, PKEN also contains current events that we learn about from the media, with some of those events happening to us personally. For example, when on a holiday in Spain a thief had taken my wallet in a shop, I was unaware of this and learned about the event only when attempted to pay in another shop, and later when I watched the event taken on the CCTV camera installed in the first shop. Nevertheless, the domains of the subconscious and PKEN are connected, since in order to reach our conscious Self the PKEN (e.g., things-in themselves) have to cross the domain of the subconscious. Indeed, in addition to the unobservable actions of our mind (e.g., subconscious inferences), the subconscious includes psychological processes that are inaccessible to our conscious control and observed only by the tracks they leave in the ‘cloud camera’ of conscious perception. A conscious

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perceptual image is, therefore, only a ‘tip of an iceberg’, which crowns the bulk of subconscious work our mind has to do in order to convert the things-in-themselves, supplied by PKEN, into perceptual images. Let’s take visual perception for an example. Most psychological theories of visual perception assume that the light coming from an external object (e.g., of an apple lying on the table) elicits a pattern of electrical impulses on the bottom of the eye, on which our brain then works by making a variety of subconscious inferences [2] (see Fig. 8.1). It is clear that the phenomenal image of the apple cannot be a direct result of the retinal image, because the latter is inverted relative to the former by 180 degrees, and the ratio of the retinal projection’s size to the actual size of the phenomenal image is not invariant. So, if we move the apple located at a distance of 1 meter from our eyes forward to a distance twice as large as before, the projection on the retina will be halved in size, but the visible image will remain almost the same—the so-called phenomenon of size constancy [3]. If we partially open the door and its projection on the retina changes from a rectangle into a trapezoid, we will

Brain’s unconscious inferences

1

2 Eye

Scientific Commonverse Fig. 8.1  Relationships between an object (distant stimulus—1), retinal projection (proximal stimulus—2) and brain in classical theories of perception

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still see the door as a rectangle (constancy of form). Perceptual illusions too demonstrate the relative independence of the visible image from the projection on the retina. Thus, in the classical Müller-Layer illusion, the segments that give the same projection on the retina of the eye are perceived as different in lengths [4]. On top of these difficulties, the assumption of the direct ‘retinal projection—phenomenal image’ link is undermined by the homunculus problem [5]. As argued in Chap. 6, according to the homunculus argument, if we see an image by ‘observing’ our retinal projection, there must be another ‘little person’ within our brain to observe the projection, which brings us into a vicious circle. Because of these problems, psychologists had to conclude that subjective phenomenon must be a combined effect of our perceptual organs (i.e., a retinal projection) and subconscious inferences of the mind, which transform the retinal projection into a phenomenal image. “But if the retinal projection is such an unreliable source of information about the perceived object, why is it needed at all?—the reader might ask—Why can’t things-in-themselves turn into visual images by just working on our mind directly?” Because the Bubbleverse is designed in a way that things-in-themselves cannot directly reach our mind, they need the ‘body’—eyes, ears, brain and the whole organism. Without the organs of perception, the brain and the body, we simply could not connect to our subconscious Bubbleverse, which means we could not ‘make it exist’. We need organs of perception and the brain not only to receive signals from the outer objects, but also to project qualia into the world out there: to create this majestic ‘beam of subjective light’ outwards, which merges with a thing-in-itself in order to turn into a subjective phenomenal image. We can feel this ‘projective’ ability of our mind when engaged in the process of writing with a ballpoint pen. When we are writing with the pen, our point of kinaesthetic sensation is on the end of the ballpoint pen, despite the fact that we don’t touch the end of the pen with our hand. This means that our kinaesthetic sensation is ‘sliding’ down from our hand along the body of the pen to its very end. In the same vein our vision and hearing work, by projecting subjective images from our mind and brain forward into the outer space. It is important to keep in mind that the subjective image is not a product of sensory organs and brain processes, just as the music that comes

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from the audio recorder is not a product of transistors and platinum circuits. Like the music, which is a creation of a composer, the content of subjective experiences comes from our subconscious Bubbleverse that transfers things-in-themselves from PKEN into the projector of consciousness. But without the ‘transistors’ of the eyes, ears and the brain, we will not hear the ‘music of the subconscious’. Our brains and sense organs ‘translate’ the ‘music of the Bubbleverse’—things-in-themselves—into phenomena, like a piano translates the creative inspiration of a composer into sounds. “Hold on”—the reader might say, “the photons of light and sound waves that come into our eyes and ears are reflected from real physical objects, and not from mythical things-in-themselves”. This is true if we understand what a real physical object is. As we established in the previous chapters, a physical object (e.g., a Chinese vase) is a joint result of three elements: (1) qualia, projected by our mind on (2) the thing-initself, blending with which they produce the phenomenon, and (3) the RC of the resulting phenomenon. Light, which the vase reflects, is also a physical object, and comprises the same three elements. When we are seeing the vase, we are oblivious of the neural impulses in the eye and the brain; instead, what we are seeing is an image projected into space by our mind. The work of visual perception can be easier to understand if we say that we have two eyes joint together: a physical eye and a mental eye. While the physical eye is a receptive device, the mental eye is a producer. The physical eye receives the physical light, which science presents as electromagnetic waves of a certain length, reflected by the molecular structure of the vase. The physical light creates neural impulses in the receptors of the eye, which are then transmitted to the neurons of our visual cortex via the visual nerve, and disappear into the ‘black whole’ of the subconscious. At this point the mental eye comes into the game, by extracting from this ‘black whole’ a beam of ‘subjective light’ which throws the image of the beautiful vase into the space out there (see Fig. 8.2). The mental eye works like a projector. A projector creates images on the screen, and so does the mental eye. How the neural impulses in the brain are converted into the subjective beam of light is a fundamental mystery which cannot be explained in terms of physical causality. At this

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Mental eye: The Gap Subjective beam: generates phenomena

Brain

C O R T E X

Visual nerve 2

3

1

4

Physical eye Physical beam(photons): Generates retinal projections Self (conscious mind) Subconscious mind

Potential Knowledge Entities Bubbleverse

Fig. 8.2  Relationships between thing-in-itself (1), retinal projection (2), phenomenal subjective image that we see (3) and RC (4) in the Bubbleverse

point there is an unsurmountable gap between the core Bubbleverse, which contains the phenomenal image of the vase, and the scientific Commonverse, which contains the RC of the vase, light and processes in the physical eye and brain. When we obscure the vase with a non-­ transparent screen, our ‘subjective beam’ keeps working for a short time, by creating the mental image of the vase behind the opaque screen. But this residual image soon fades and disappears. Without the physical eye, our mental eye is powerless or deficient. “But if our mental eye works like a projector, does this mean that we create images by the sheer power of our mind?”—you might ask. No, it does not. There are things out there, and these things are independent of

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our mind. These things are called things-in-themselves. Remember, that for a projector to be able to produce the big image on a screen, the projector needs two things: (1) a torch producing the beam of light and (2) a small image on a transparency slide. Similarly, our mind works like a torch that throws the subjective light to ‘illuminate’ things-in-themselves in the Bubbleverse. If we look at a physical beam of light in darkness from one side, and if there were no objects on the beam’s way able to reflect the photons, we wouldn’t see the beam. In the subconscious part of the mind things-in-themselves are such ‘objects’ that the ‘subjective beam’ of our mind ‘illuminates’ to produce ‘positive’ subjective images at the output. These subjective images, or phenomena, are like ‘positives’ in photography, whereas things-in-themselves serve as ‘negatives’. To summarise, phenomena are things-in-themselves transformed by our mind; phenomena emerge when the projector of our mind ‘illuminates’ the things-in-themselves, supplied by PKEN, with its subjective beam, with the help of the physical eyes and the brain. These things out there—apples, vases, mountains, beams of light, stars and galaxies—we call physical matter. But the same beam of subjective light can be directed onto our brain and sense organs. They too are the product of the ‘magical tandem’ of things-in-themselves and the workings of consciousness. After all, what are the eye’s retina and neurons of the brain if not phenomena for our mind to observe and study? Having done this kind of observation we transform the phenomena of our sense organs and the brain into neurological concepts and theories. Phenomenal objects that we see, and our brains that help us see these objects—all of them are phenomena of our consciousness, which means that they are not in cause-effect relationships one with another but correlate with each other. It is a habit of our Self to ‘inject’ causality into the process of perception, by directly connecting visual images with retinal projections via a cause-effect link. In reality though the observation that our image of an apple is accompanied by a certain pattern on the retina is a coincidence, and not a cause-and-­ effect link. Indeed, from the fact that A is larger than B and B is larger than C, it follows with necessity that A is larger than C.  A triangle cannot have more than three corners. But a change in the projection of an apple on

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the retina of the eye may or may not be accompanied by the same changes in the visible apple. This gap between physical (retinal projection and neural impulses) and mental (phenomenal images) processes is immersed in the subconscious. As a result, all we can study is correlations between two kinds of phenomena: (1) subjective images and (2) physical processes of perception. These correlations can be quite complex and unpredictable. For example, if a person wears the goggles that reverse the retinal image on the bottom of the eyes (i.e., make the retinal image oriented the way we see the phenomenal image), then a person will see the phenomenal world turned upside down; surprisingly, after a few days of wearing the goggles normal vision restores [6]. The same happens if the glasses reverse the visible world in depth: people see unfamiliar objects turned inside out, but a mask of a human face remains convex despite the goggles’ distorting effect [7]. What makes things even more complicated is that although phenomenal images are more stable than retinal projections, they too are subject to change. A visible image of car will not change significantly in size if we increase the distance to the car from 5 to 10 meters, but the car will seem the size of a bug at a distance of 1000 meters. All this instability of the phenomenal world, which we observe in empirical studies, is a result of the subconscious underbelly of perception. As far as it concerns potential knowledge entities (PKEN), they exist for me only when I become aware of them, and this means that they have to be perceived in some way. For example, when I read or hear about an earthquake in the other part of the globe, I have to imagine the event in order to be able to understand it. Even the most abstract thing, like a mathematical formula, has to be shaped in some kind of image in order to become a part of my conscious Self. This means that PKEN have to get through the domain of subconscious in order to ‘emerge’ in my mind as perceived objects or explicit knowledge (as in Figs. 8.2 and 8.3). Before that, the domain of PKEN exists in my mind as a thought about the dark and unknown part of the Bubbleverse—the area beyond the ‘event horizon’ that lacks phenomenalistic filling (see Table 9.1). After the PKEN had been converted into perceived and conceptual objects of clear consciousness, they could return into the subconscious part of the mind as memories. Although most phenomena and concepts cannot be constantly held with the limited area of my conscious Self (and sometimes all

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A piece of art

Conscious mind

Free action or logical thought The representation zone

Subconscious Thinking

Eureca Direct pathway

Language, laws of nature, logic and morality

Subconsciuos mind

Imagination and dreams

Potential Knowledge Entities

The Bubbleverse

Fig. 8.3  The relations between conscious mind, subconscious mind and potential knowledge entities (PKEN) in the Bubbleverse

of them temporarily disappear from the Self, when I sleep without dreams or am in the state of general anaesthetics), they can never completely return into the domain of PKEN and become proper things-in-themselves again; instead, they are stored in my subconscious as objects that I am unaware at the moment but can easily recover when I need it. For example, when I see a person or an object for the first time, I perceive and cognize them, but when I see them repeatedly, I recognise them. In other world, in the Bubbleverse everything my Self generates or recollects as perceived phenomena, imaginary structures or RCs, emerges from the ‘subterranean’ domain of the subconscious.

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The same relates to any conscious thought or action. Any thought, independently of whether it is initiated by perception or by other thought, appears in our minds at the beginning as a subconscious intention, and only gradually takes the form of a conscious goal.1 The criterion which distinguishes a subconscious thought from a conscious goal is that, unlike the subconscious thought, the conscious goal can be expressed in representing phenomena—words, numbers, schemas or other RCs. In other words, intuitive ideas are images or hints created in the subconscious, whereas scientific knowledge is a result of standard procedures accepted in the scientific community, such as measurement, comparison, logical inferences, analysis, synthesis, generalisation and some others. Speaking metaphorically, intuitive ideas can be compared with a seed thrown into a dense and unstable chemical solution, whereas scientific knowledge is a crystal that grows on the seed. Let us designate the zone in which such transformation of a subconscious thought into a conscious goal takes place as the zone of representation. Much of our actions in everyday life are carried out automatically and do not require representation. Representation occurs only then when the problem cannot be resolved on the subconscious level. For example, being in a harmonious relationship with another person we rarely reflect upon the relationships, because coordination between our interests and those of the other person occurs automatically. Only when the harmony is broken, contradictions arise, and the relationship becomes a problem. The problem is formulated in speech, discussed, and if a solution cannot be found, the relationship breaks off. On a simpler level, when we are driving a car, we don’t think about how we change gears, unless we move to another country and have to change the right-hand drive vehicle for the left-hand drive one. But what does the conversion of a subconscious action into a conscious action change? When I convert a subconscious action into a conscious one, I place the action in the wider context of my Bubbleverse, by coordinating the action with a large number of objects, as well as with the laws of nature, morality and logic. In another context, Sigmund Freud  This might explain the results of the famous Libet’s experiments, which demonstrated that decisions show up in brain activity prior to their being accessible to the conscious mind [8]. 1

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called this process of coordination ‘censorship’. As a result of the ‘subconscious into conscious’ conversion, I can go beyond the action in the making and discover the possibility of alternative actions. Having alternative options for the action, I can change the action: I can stop it or swap for another action. In the aforementioned examples, I can find alternative ways to coordinate my actions with my partner or take an automatic instead of the left-hand drive car. It is this possibility of a change that we call ‘freedom of choice’. Such freedom can vary within a wide range: from minimal (stopping the action) to considerable (choosing from several options). For example, in the domain of logical thinking you may create a large number of possible worlds by just varying some initial parameters, yet the range of options is limited by the necessity to conform to the laws of logic. The maximal freedom of choice is achieved in the imagination. In the imagination, the subconscious finds a direct pathway into the conscious, thus bypassing the laws of nature, logic and morality. Such a short circuit is closest to what we call the act of creativity. Because in the creative act the subconscious filters into consciousness bypassing the ‘zone of representation’, we experience the act of creation as a ‘sparkle of thought’, a sudden flash in the mind—the ‘Eureka’ (Fig. 8.3). Entering our conscious mind, the ‘Eureka products’ can be presented as a piece of art; alternatively, merging with logical thinking within consciousness, some of the imaginary constellations can be accepted as the new theories about the world, while others are thrown into the wastebasket for the ‘mental junk’. Summing up, one can say that the subconscious in the Bubbleverse is the source of our phenomenal world, both internal (sensations from body organs, memories, creative insights, emotional states) and external (sensations and perceptions of external objects). As for the consciousness, it includes the abilities of our Self—volitional actions, reflection and logical thinking. The subconscious and the conscious are not divorced from each other but are in constant interaction. The work of the subconscious ‘surfaces’ in the domain of clear consciousness, and conscious actions supply the subconscious with memories to store and new material for creative processing. For example, the pages that you have just read will go into your subconscious and may later reappear in your conscious thinking in the form of new ideas and images.

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By definition, the subconscious escapes our conscious effort to perceive it. However, in some conditions a person can approach his or her own subconscious at a close distance.

8.2 Plunging into the Depths Sometimes the subconscious reveals itself to a person through mystical experiences. Analysing such experiences, William James maintained that they are intuitive and inexpressible in words [9]. Such experiences may occur under the influence of psychedelic drugs, but they can also happen without the help of pharmacological substances at special moments of a person’s life, usually when the person is alone in the natural environment. Such states come suddenly and are described as the feeling of the ‘dissolved Self ’, the unity of a person with trees, grasses, birds, insects and everything else. It seems to people in such a state of the mind that they achieved the understanding of the ultimate meaning of life, and that their consciousness expanded to the size of the world; objects lose their boundaries, as if dissolving in each other. The logical constraints into which our conscious Self encases the perceived world also disappear: the oppositions between animate and inanimate, subject and object, conscious and subconscious relax to the degree of almost non-existence. Often these states are accompanied by the intense sense of delight, and the incredible pleasure of being. William James noted that, compared with the normal state of mind, the mystical states intensify the feeling of novelty and mysteriousness of the world. It is this intimacy and communion with the mystery of the world that makes the mystical state of mind so attractive. In the mystical state of mind, a person briefly opens the curtain, which hides from us the riddle of the world. This experience is fascinating, but it doesn’t last. On return to their conscious Selves, people disconnect with their subconscious and the world regains its clear forms. In the normal state of mind, a person is condemned to make a constant ‘effort of perception’ that turns things-in-themselves into subjective images. As a result, the world becomes ‘solid’ and independent of our Self.

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The reports of people who undertook the ‘psychedelic journeys’ by taking substances such as LSD or psilocybin mushrooms are similar to those described by William James. The ‘travellers’ reported having the feeling of the ‘dissolved Self ’, as if they were one with the surrounding things and with the whole universe. The objects’ shapes began to fluctuate as if the objects were alive. The senses lost their modality and it was unclear whether the person was seeing, hearing or tasting the new world. Sometimes a person reported seeing the grandiose spectacle of the beginning of the physical world, the forming of celestial bodies, the emergence of life and the whole process of evolution. The sense of reality of subjective experiences in such states approaches, and sometimes exceeds the sense of reality that people have in the normal waking state of mind. Curiously, although the psychedelic experiences had been induced by chemicals, on return to the normal state of mind many of the ‘psychedelic travellers’ began questioning their materialistic persuasions. They were now inclined to see the brain as a receiver of the divine reality that was not generated by their brains but existed elsewhere. By taking psychedelic drugs, a person tunes the receiver to the appropriate wave, which without such tuning would simply pass through our brain unnoticed. So, what exactly is this life changing experience that the ‘psychedelic travellers’ talk about? Most of them acknowledge that they became more loving, more open to new experiences and less fearful of death, but these characteristics are too general and hard to prove. Perhaps, what the psychedelic experience really does is better expressed not in terms of personality characteristics, but in terms of the world overview. The psychedelic experience opens the person’s eyes to his or her core Bubbleverse: from the scientific Commonverse, in which RCs have an upper hand, the psychedelic experience brings the person into the core Bubbleverse, where subjective experience holds sway. So, how does this ‘expansion of consciousness’ affect our understanding of the Bubbleverse? The mystical experiences certainly make a person realise that the Bubbleverse is incommensurably more complex and enigmatic than our ‘normal’ experiences make us think. The domain of the Bubbleverse that is covered by our conscious knowledge seems to be only a small fraction of the Bubbleverse, most part of which is immersed in the area of unknown and, probably, unknowable. The way different people

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cope with this realisation depends on the purpose of the expansion. In people who simply seek new experiences, this experience may be followed by a spiritual uplifting and the feeling of the unlimited potentiality of being, while in others the expansion might bring the opposite effect, similar to blinding and disorientation. But if a person is looking for the deeper understanding of the Bubbleverse, the psychedelic experience may indeed help. In particular, the psychedelic experience undermines the ‘scientism’—the belief in that the scientific Commonverse is the only existing universe. The mystical experiences make a person realise that the scientific view of the universe is an artificial creation, which hinges on the belief that RCs occupy the highest position on the ‘scale of existence’. The psychedelic ‘journeys’, like our night dreams, only more powerfully, reinstate the simple truth that raw subjective experience is the primordial ‘building matter’ of the Bubbleverse, and this building matter is rooted in our subconscious. But does this mean that liberating ourselves from the captivity of scientism undermine our belief in science? Not in the least. We need science to cope with the magnificent yet chaotic subconscious Bubbleverse and establish our Self in it. What we don’t need though is exaggerating the scientific worldview and reducing our subjective experiences to scientific staples. Whereas science helps our Self to cope with the chaos of the phenomenal Bubbleverse, the mystical experiences help our Self to keep at bay the ‘crusaders of rationality’ with their ambitions to convert the ‘Jerusalem of our Self ’ into the stronghold of science. Since the Bubbleverse as a whole is a system of fine balances (between organic and inorganic matter, living and non-living entities, need and satisfaction, life and death, good and evil and so on), a balance must also exist between the known and the unknown. The Bubbleverse is our private universe, but it is not prearranged to make us happy. It is yourself who may or may not make your Bubbleverse suitable for living, and this is true also in regard to the balance between the known and the mysterious: too much of the mysterious could make existence unbearable. Perhaps, that is why having a psychedelic experience is reported not to be addictive. Tribes of traditional people, who used to have psychedelic experiences for millennia, would have got extinct if they had been doing this too often.

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One more observation reported by the ‘psychedelic travellers’ concerns the fabric of the subconscious Bubbleverse. The ‘travellers’ generally reported a partial loss of the Self. This partial loss depends on the quantity of psychedelic substance taken. According to a scientific writer Michael Pollan, who described his psychedelic journeys in a recent book, when the quantity of consumed psychedelic substance was relatively small (i.e., around 100 micrograms of LSD), the feeling of the Self was only partially submerged; he saw his relatives and friends in an unusual light, but could still feel his Self being in his own body [10]. However, when the quantity was greater (i.e., around 400 micrograms of LSD), the complete dissolving of the Self was taking place, with the body no longer felt; the feeling described was as if the Self was “dispersed over the scene” [ibid, p.264], as though the agency became a paint that covered the whole universe. This observation suggests that fundamentally the fabric of the subconscious Bubbleverse consists of the sensual but non-agential reality. When the Bubbleverse matures, this primordial reality splits into two parts: the active part, which eventually condences into the entity we experience as our Self, and the passive part, which coagulates into objects, such as our body and the bodies of other things, animated and inanimate. The adult person in the waking state of mind becomes a Self that reflects upon the objects and, ultimately, upon himself or herself. The psychedelic intrusion into the brain puts the process in the reverse gear: a person feels that he or she (if this expression is still relevant to the situation) turns into the primordial sensual reality of the Bubbleverse, loses the agency while still keeping sensations, but the sensations are not personalised and are felt as being universal or ‘cosmic’. It is important to keep in mind that psychedelic accounts of the ‘primordial Bubbleverse’ are nothing but interpretations. As William James wisely pointed out, the mystical experience is ineffable: too great to be expressed or described in words. When we try to describe the subconscious experience that filtered into our conscious Self via the direct pathway, we inevitably have to convert the experience into the concepts and RCs of our conscious Bubbleverse. As a result, the primordial experience loses its authenticity, which opens the doors to misinterpreting or overinterpreting this experience.

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One of such misinterpretations is the frequently reported complete loss of the Self. In reality the fact that people who experienced the psychedelic states remember them means that some kind of reflection remains even in the deepest of these states. Without such residual reflection we wouldn’t expect any recollection of psychedelic experiences at all. By definition, having reflection means having the Self. Perhaps, what feels as the disappearance of the Self in deep psychedelic states in reality is widening the ‘projector of the Self ’, which expands to illuminate ‘all that there is’, rather than being focused onto selected patches of the Bubbleverse. This assumption takes credit in the fact that in the deep psychedelic state reality is described as a non-differentiated flow of images, as a gigantic super object that replaces the distinctive phenomenalistic diversity of the conscious Bubbleverse. Another misinterpretation is presenting psychedelic experience as ‘opening the doors of perception’. This metaphor, which often wrongly alludes to Aldous Huxley’s famous essay [11], implies an effort that needs to be made to widen the limited and narrow channel, through which the potentially unlimited content of the subconscious storms into the conscious mind. In reality, it is conscious perception that requires our Self to do the effort of focusing on a certain fragment of the Bubbleverse. The effect of psychedelic substances does exactly the opposite: it relaxes the aforementioned projective effort. In his book, Michael Pollan illustrates this point by his observations of the display of a rotating mask of a human face, which he played on his laptop while being under the influence of psilocybin containing mushrooms. Just as this happens in experiments with participants in the normal state of mind [12], in the concave phase of the rotation the mask ‘popped back out’ and looked like a mask of a normal human face. This means that the projective capacity of the Self was still in operation. When Pollan took in an additional portion of the mushroom and repeated the experiment, he reported that the concave mask “dissolved into a grey jelly and slid down the screen of my laptop” [10, p. 267]. This could be interpreted as a result of the loss of the Self ’s projective capacity. In other words, the mind immersed in the deep psychedelic state is not an invigorated mind, but the incapacitated mind. It is therefore an exaggeration to say that “consciousness survives the disappearance of the self ” [ibid, p.305]; rather, what remains in the deep

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psychedelic state is not consciousness but sheer sensitivity, which lacks the most essential properties of normal human consciousness: agency, the projective capacity and the ability of analytical comparison and symbolic creative synthesis. If what is left is to be called consciousness, then it is a low-level consciousness on the brink of the subconsciousness. Some researchers call this state of mind ‘primary state of consciousness’, which is rich in entropy and magical thinking [13]. Neurological fMRI and MEG research have shown that being in a psychedelic state is accompanied by a decrease in the activity of core structures of the default mode network (DMN) in the brain, which is connected with self-reflection and metacognition [14]. To summarise, the ‘psychedelic relaxation’ of the subject-object division in the Bubbleverse is a double-edged sword. On one hand, relinquishing the critical Self and widening the direct pathway from subconscious into the conscious part of the Bubbleverse (see Fig.  8.3) may bring the mind into the state of disorder, produce disorientation and hallucinations. On the other hand, the descent into the subconscious can shake the rigid structures of our conscious thinking and perception and allow the person see the Bubbleverse by the ‘baby’s eye’. On return to the reflective conscious state, the person’s memories of these refreshed experiences may help the person see the world ‘out of the box’ and bring creative changes in his or her habits, views and thinking.

8.3 Dreaming the Subconscious As follows from Table 7.3, you don’t have to have mystical experiences in order to meet your extraordinary reality. Typically, extraordinary reality naturally filters into our conscious Self through the direct pathway (Fig. 8.3) and takes the form of art, imagination and dreams. Sometimes in our night dreams we have glimpses of reality which are similar to mystical experiences. Thus, in one of my own dreams I had an experience of flying over the surface of the ground covered with pebbles. The pebbles were of different shapes and colours, each with its own specific features: imperfections, chippings and cracks, and there were tens of thousands of them. Nevertheless, I perceived each of these pebbles simultaneously as if each

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was in the centre of my attention. At the same time, I was acutely aware that I was dreaming and wondered how it was possible to see so many small objects at once with such extraordinary clarity. In my other dreams, I saw gardens with trees and vines shining as if they were just created by god, landscapes of unimaginable beauty and multi-storey buildings with thousands of distinctive features, and I heard music that was coming as if from heaven itself. In most cases, the meaning of subconscious images of our dreams is a mystery. Sometimes, however, it is possible to predict the way our subconscious beliefs show up themselves in the dreams. To check this possibility out, in a psychological study educated adults were offered a magic spell that aimed at helping them to see their chosen night dreams [15]. Some of the participants declined the offer, while the majority accepted. The context of the study was framed by the observation that in the Western Christian cultures magic is aligned with dark forces yet contains a degree of fatal attraction. This ambiguous attitude towards magic is exposed in some masterpieces of fiction, such as Goethe’s ‘Faust’ and Thomas Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus’. As a result, people’s attitudes towards magic are mixed: they are curious towards magic and eager to experiment with it, yet they have the fear that involvement with magic may harbour hidden dangers. In the light of the day, when the scientific Commonverse is active, people do not usually show any fear of magic, which they view as something purely imaginary. Yet earlier studies have shown that subconsciously most educated adults still hold the belief in magic [16], and this subconscious belief may produce anxiety in participants who accepted the offer. The anxiety may filter into the participants’ dreams in the form of frightening images. The results indeed showed that participants who had accepted the offer of magical help reported seeing frightening dreams significantly more often than those who rejected the offer (see Fig. 8.4). The Commonverses’ narratives for dreams vary [17]. The earliest narratives interpreted dreams as messages of gods. More recently, Sigmund Freud produced the psychodynamic account of dreams; according to this account, dreams are a reflection of subconscious feelings that built up in early childhood. In the middle of the twentieth century, there appeared a neurological account of dreams, according to which dreams are produced by activities of special parts of the brain. In this account “the brain uses

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100 90 Magical suggestion

80

No suggestion

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Target

Scary

Ordinary

Fig. 8.4  Percent of dreams as a function of Condition (magical suggestion versus no-suggestion) and Type of dream (target, scary and ordinary)

sleep to optimize its generative model of the world during wakefulness. This is akin to post hoc model selection, in which redundant parameters are removed to minimize model complexity and provide a more parsimonious internal model” [18]. Simply put, seeing dreams is a way of accessing the basic level of consciousness, in which logical biases and perceptual limitations of the waking mind are lifted and the brain (read ‘consciousness’) can solve certain tasks more creatively and economically. With all the differences between these narratives all of them are post hoc. They explain the events in the dreams after the events were observed and remembered. Even if some of the accounts, such as the psychodynamic and neurological ones, allow us to make testable predictions regarding the content of the dreams, they are unable to explain the subjective fabric of dream events, which cannot be causally derived from neural processes (see Chap. 4 for more on the ‘mind/brain gap’). Thus, neurologists excel at correlations between dream events and brain events. For example, they observed that during certain stages of sleep those areas of the brain are deactivated that are normally associated with logical thinking and critical feedback. On this ground, some scientists assumed

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that deactivation of these areas is the cause of the fact that in dreams certain laws of logic can be violated. However, this ‘explanation’ is circular: because the definitive feature of dreams is that they contain violations of logical laws, on the ground of the same correlations one can as well conclude that seeing dreams deactivate the parts of the brain responsible for logical thinking. In contrast to the above accounts, the Bubbleverse perspective interprets dreams and the accompanying brain activities as two poles of the same substance—the Bubbleverse, thus eliminating the necessity of finding the causal connection. As a result, the dream-brain link is a probabilistic judgement. Dreams are not “an image of the world entirely within our own brains that is unfettered by sensory feedback”, as the authors of the aforementioned paper maintain. Dreams are manifestation of the subconscious, correlated with the brain processes.

8.4 C  ommunication with the Subconscious: Conclusion No matter how rational a person may be, in his or her Bubbleverse the person is a swimmer on the surface of a vast ocean, who feels the presence of the formidable force underneath. This invisible force is the subconscious. Nevertheless, the person has an irresistible (and hopeless) urge to take this power under control, or at least to influence it and communicate with it. In the religious Commonverse, the method of such communication is prayer. Some experts in Palaeolithic art believe that drawings on walls of the caves were a way for the people to magically communicate with spirits of animals and deceased ancestors. In modern religions, the method of such communication is a petitionary prayer. Simultaneously with the institutionalised magic of prayer, there is also the ‘everyday magic’ [19]. Astrology, fortune telling and everyday magic are widely represented in modern media space. Superstitions is another way to pacify our subconscious fears [20]. When knocking on wood or crossing our fingers, we know that these magical actions will not save us from a possible accident.

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Still, these actions are not meaningless [21]. By creating an illusion of control over the subconscious, prayer and everyday magic help us cope with anxiety that trickles from the ‘chaos below’, and thus give us an opportunity to live and act in the Bubbleverse more effectively. And now it is time to leave the shaky ground of the subconscious and return to the conscious part of the Bubbleverse, in which our attempts to cognize reality stumble over the fundamental problem—the problem of truth.

References 1. Myers, F. (1892). The subliminal consciousness. Retrieved from http:// www.bbk.ac.uk/deviance/unconscious1/TheUnconsciousPsychicalResearch/ Myers1/index.htm 2. Von Helmholtz, H. (1925). Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik. Leipzig: Voss. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/handbuchderphysi00helm/ page/80. 3. Gillam, B. (2000). Perceptual constancy. In A. E. Kazdin (Ed.), Encyclopedia of psychology (pp.  89–93). New  York: American Psychological Association and Oxford University Press. 4. Donaldson, D., & Macpherson F. (2017). Müller-Lyer Illusion. In Macpherson, F. (Ed.), The Illusions Index. Retrieved from https://www.illusionsindex.org/ir/mueller-lyer. 5. Gregory, R. L. (1987). The Oxford companion to the mind. New York: Oxford University Press. 6. Stratton, G. M. (1896). Preliminary experiment on vision without inversion of retinal image. Psychological Review, 3, 611–617. 7. Gregory, R. (1970). The intelligent eye. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 8. Libet, B. (1999). Do we have free will? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, 47–57. 9. James, W. (2009). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature. South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 10. Pollan, M. (2018). How to change your mind. The new science of psychedelics. New York: Penguin Books. 11. Huxley, A. (1954). The doors of perception. London: Chatto & Windus. Retrieved from https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoors OfPerception.pdf.

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12. Hill, H., & Johnston, A. (2007). The hollow-face illusion: Object-specific knowledge, general assumptions or properties of the stimulus? Perception, 36, 199–233. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/19f5/635c40 2d81d011a0937b91550e7f23441305. 13. Carhart-Harris, R., et al. (2014). The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs. Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020/full 14. Palhano-Fontes, F., et  al. (2015). The psychedelic state induced by ayahuasca modulates the activity and connectivity of the default mode network. PLOS ONE, e0118143. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0118143 15. Subbotsky, E. (2009). Can magical intervention affect subjective experiences? Adults’ reactions to magical suggestion. British Journal of Psychology, 100, 517–537. 16. Subbotsky, E. (2005). The permanence of mental objects: Testing magical thinking on perceived and imaginary realities. Developmental Psychology, 41, 301–318. 17. Rock, A. (2009). The mind at night. The new science of how and why we dream. New York: Basic Books. 18. Hobson, J. A., & Friston, K. J. (2012). Waking and dreaming consciousness: Neurobiological and functional considerations. Progress in Neurobiology, 1, 82–98. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC3389346/. 19. Pronin, E., Wegner, D. M., McCarthy, K., & Rodriges, S. (2006). Everyday magical powers: The role of apparent mental causation in the overestimation of personal influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 218–231. 20. Vyse, S.  A. (2000). Believing in magic: The psychology of superstition. New York: Oxford University Press. 21. Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 311–328.

9 Truth in the Bubbleverse

9.1 W  hat is My House Really Like? The Question of Truth Whatever angle I look at my house from, I always see only a part of it, with the other parts hidden behind. When I go inside, I don’t see the house at all, only the room I am in. Yet, I can imagine the invisible parts of the house because I know how my house ‘really looks’. So, my house is given to me in three embodiments: the way I am seeing it at the moment (phenomenon), the way I imagine it (image) and the way I know it (knowledge or RC). The question is, which of these three embodiments is my house ‘really and truly’: one of them, all three of them or neither? As Rene Descartes noted, the only absolute truth is the realisation that I am in doubt about something, even if that something is my own existence. But what about a toothache? Can the pain in the tooth be an illusion? The pain cannot, but the source of the pain can. One day I had a toothache, but the doctor convinced me that it is necessary to treat another tooth, not the one which I believed was in pain, as the pain spreads along the nerves. And even more convincing example about the

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wrong source of pain is the so-called phantom limb pain: people who lose a limb sometimes feel pain in the limb which isn’t there. So, what is truth and what is false? It looks easy to prove that the statement “sparrows are red” is wrong, or that the impossible Penrose triangle [1] is a 2D illusion, but these questionable statements and images nevertheless exist, at least in my imagination. I feel that I have already confused the reader; my only excuse is that I confused myself too. But let’s try and unravel the mystery.

9.2 S  hrinking Buildings and Impossible Bricks: Existence in the Core Bubbleverse As we established, in the Bubbleverse a thing exists only if it is presented to my reflecting mind (see Chap. 3 for more on that). Even the subconscious exists because it reveals itself to my conscious mind in the form of phenomena: dreams, forgotten and then recovered  names and others. But things can be presented to me in a number of ways. Some are right in front of me (e.g., the Moon in the sky) and others I can only think about (e.g. a planet that is yet undiscovered). Some are ordinary (e.g., a regular brick), and others are strange (e.g., a brick that lets my hand pass through it as if it’s made of air). Let us begin with the primordial Bubbleverse, as if we were just born. What we have is our mind (subject) and something opposed to it (object). As we established in Chap. 5, our mind is equipped with some innate tools: qualia, which include geometrical forms, colours, numbers and the general properties of phenomena—identity, permanence, locality and inclusion. By projecting these tools on things-in-themselves, we create phenomenal objects. But things-in-themselves are peculiar entities: they might, but don’t have to, fit the qualia. When we see a brick and can take it in our hand, we consider the brick as real, but if the brick lets my hand pass through it as if it’s made from smoke, I say the brick is an illusion. As developmental experiments showed, even 3.5-month-old infants are surprised when they see a display when a solid object, obscured by an opaque screen, allows another solid object to go through it unhindered

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[2]. An object like that exists, but it exists in a peculiar way: it fits some of its general properties (e.g., identity) but doesn’t fit another (e.g., permanence). Let us say that the brick we can take in our hand has full or strong existence, and the second, ‘disabled’ brick has incomplete existence. We might also call the first kind of phenomena ‘true’ and the second kind ‘false’, but that’s a matter of preference (see Table 5.3). Because in the primordial Bubbleverse we only have presenting phenomena and don't have representing ones (see Table 5.4), the question of truth seems to be exhausted. In other words, in the core Bubbleverse, the division between truth and falsity is determined by a match between raw phenomena and their general properties: when a phenomenon matches its general properties (e.g., a solid brick) it has a strong existential status and is considered as a true brick, and when a phenomenon doesn’t match some of its general properties (e.g., a brick made of smoke), it has an incomplete existential status and is considered as a false brick. The problem with the primordial Bubbleverse is that due to the inherent instability of raw phenomena it is often hard to decide whether the phenomenon is strong or weak. A cube of ice looks solid, but it can melt and turn into water, thus violating its property of permanence. The same is true about the building, which looks huge when close to us but small at a distance. Two clouds in the sky look like separate objects but can merge into one, thus violating their property of identity. Decisions about the phenomenon’s existential status become a lot easier when we move into the Commonverse.

9.3 M  ermaids and Parallel Universes: Truth and Existence in the Commonverse As mentioned above, in the Commonverse any presenting object appears in three forms: as a perceived phenomenon, a mental image and an RC. RC is no longer the object itself but an idea of this object sitting within the representing phenomenon: a scheme, a blueprint, a spoken or written word. Deciding on the existential status of the object, which later

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Presenting phenomenon

2

1

Mental image of the presenting phenomenon

3

4

5

RC of the presenting phenomenon

6

My reflecting Self Fig. 9.1  The scheme of the relations of existentialisation for presenting phenomena in the Commonverse

in this book will be called existentialisation, is therefore establishing the relationships between these three components, as in Fig. 9.1. In order to establish the object’s existential status, I need to compare (match) the components with each other (Step 1: Relations 1, 2 and 3). If the result of this comparison indicates that they match (they represent one and the same object or event of the external reality), then this object or event should probably be given the status of strong existence. Step 1 alone is, however, insufficient for deciding whether the object really exists or not; after all, even if the three components seem to be matching one another, their mutual coordination may be a result of an illusion. Indeed, how do I know whether I am doing the comparison in reality or sleep and see doing this comparison in my night dream? In order to overcome this doubt I also have to compare all the three components with my reflecting Self (Step 2: Relations 4, 5 and 6). Because I have no doubts that my reflecting Self certainly exists, I can now certify that the match between

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the three components is not an illusion, but reality. In everyday language, we simply say that the object or the event ‘really exists’. For example, we perceive this tomato (can see, touch and eat it), can imagine it and think of the concept ‘tomato’ as an edible vegetable of a certain taste, spherical shape and red colour (Step 1). Having related all the three forms of matching representations to our Self (Step 2), we experience the feeling that the object really exists. But suppose that a certain object ‘lost’ one of its components. For example, a T-Rex can be imagined (e.g., shown in movies or as a sculpture) and conceptualised (based on fossil remains and knowledge of the theory of evolution), but it cannot be perceived as a living animal. In this case, we are talking about the incomplete existential status of the object. Even less complete will be the existence of an object, which is presented only in one of the three above forms. For example, an impossible triangle, which is made of 3D bars, can be drawn (i.e., represented in the form of imagination), but cannot be seen in the form of a phenomenon (i.e., a real 3D triangle). Moreover, it is impossible to build a consistent RC of such a triangle, since any triangle is a 2D figure by definition. We assume that such an object has a weak existential status. All perceptual illusions, including stage tricks, have similar debilitated existential statuses. Therefore, when we say that an object is an illusion, we do not claim that this object does not exist; instead, we emphasise that this object’s existential status is weaker than that of ‘real’ objects. Well, now in the Commonverse it becomes so much easier to decide on the objects’ existence than it was in the core Bubbleverse: the ice cube may melt and the building may zoom in and out, but they remain the water and the building. It is now that the distinction between truth and falsity begins to make real sense. As mentioned in Chap. 5, presenting phenomena which correspond to their RCs (e.g., a round shaped wheel) are classified as true ones, and those that don’t match their RCs (e.g., a triangular shaped wheel) are classified as false. But entities for which the truth/falsity division is most important are RCs themselves. Recall that, whereas presenting phenomena are partially rooted in things-in-themselves, RCs , which exist in our mind in the form of representing phenomena (see Table 5.4), are constructed entirely by us (see Chap. 5). In the Commonverse we still  need to decide whether our

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1 3

Experimental check of the RC

4

5

RC of the presenting phenomenon

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My reflecting Self Fig. 9.2  The scheme of the relations of existentialisation for RCs in the Commonverse

RC—a statement or a scientific theory—has strong or weak existential status, but the components we use for making the existential judgement are different. As we see in Fig. 9.2, two of the components—the presenting phenomenon and the RC of the presenting phenomenon—are the same, however, instead of a mental image we have the experimental check. Unlike in presenting objects, in which a phenomenon and a mental image are fundamentally different (e.g., you can kill your hunger by eating the phenomenal loaf of bread but not the bread’s mental image), in regard to RCs these differences are not essential (you cannot get full by eating a ‘conceptual loaf of bread’, whether it is drawn on paper or is being thought about inside your mind). What is essential, however, is whether my RC is supported or not supported by scientific experiments. When I need to decide whether the RC is true or false, I compare the RC with experimental evidence and see whether they match (the RC is true) or not (the RC is false) (Step 1: Relations 1, 2 and 3). Next, I need to certify the achieved results by comparing them with my Self (Step 2: Relations 4, 5 and 6).

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For example, if the presenting phenomenon is my observation that a feather and a metal ball thrown from the same height fall on the ground at different times, I might develop a theory (RC of the presenting phenomenon) that the objects fall at different times because gravitation pulls the heavy object harder than the light one (Step 1). This theory is false, because the differences in gravitational pull for different objects are nullified by the differences in the objects’ masses and inertia, which makes different objects gain velocity at the same rate [3]. The empirical fact that the feather hit the ground later than the metal ball happened because the air resistance for the feather was stronger than for the ball. The falsity of the original RC of the  observed presenting phenomenon (different objects falling on the ground with different accelerations) becomes evident when I repeat the ‘feather and the metal ball’ experiment in a volume from which the air is removed. As a result, we classify RCs (statements, theories and other kinds of RCs) into true or false ones, and the criterion for classification is correspondence between RCs and their experimental check, via varying the conditions of the presenting phenomenon (see Chapter 10 for more on that). Simply put, if we change the conditions and the presenting phenomenon stays, then the RC is true and has a strong existential status. If, however, altering the conditions changes the presenting phenomenon, then the RC is false and has a weak existential status. So, let us try and rank some entities in the Bubbleverse, on the scale of existence. The highest rank on this scale is occupied by entities for which their images, phenomena and RC coincide. The first entity of this type is our reflecting Self and our subjective experience. As Rene Descartes persuasively argued, doubting the reflecting Self contains a logical contradiction. As for the rest of subjective experience (thinking, perceiving, feeling things), it’s content may be true or wrong, but the fact of having subjective experience is beyond doubt, because doubting subjective experience contains a logical contradiction  as well. Innate ideas, such as qualia, mathematical and logical laws, subjective space and time have the same highest existential status. Let us call these objects absolute objects. Because these objects are given to our mind directly and don’t require any proof, the way we operate with this kind of objects is certainty.

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On a lower existential level there are science-generated objects, both animated and inanimate. By science-generated objects we understand objects that were taken from the Bubbleverse’s pool of raw phenomena by scientific exploration and placed into the general scientific context through turning these phenomena into RCs. Perhaps, a science-generated object is the closest we can get to a thing-in-itself. Unlike raw phenomena, which are fully immersed in the core Bubbleverse, science-generated objects are ‘double-headed creatures’: their phenomenal parts remain in the core Bubbleverse, but their RCs are rooted in the Commonverse. Empirically established RCs, such as theories and laws of physics and biology, belong to this class of entities too. The atomic theory in physics and Charles Darwin’s theory of the origin of species are examples of such RCs. The existential status of objects of this category can be classified as high. However, as Immanuel Kant noted over two centuries ago, any empirical law cannot be proven for all possible cases, therefore all empirical laws are only hypothetical. Indeed, the concept of an atom existed since antiquity, but the atom’s RC has changed considerably and the ways of seeing individual atoms optically were only recently invented [4]; Charles Darwin’s theory has been verified in the modern synthetic theory of evolution, yet there is an ongoing debate on inheritance of acquired characteristics [5]. Unlike the absolute objects, entities of this category never achieve the level of self-evidence and are subject to disputes and amendments. The way we operate with these entities is knowledge: we study molecular composition of genes, investigate the structure of atoms and use this knowledge to create genetically modified plants,  nuclear bombs and power stations. This class of entities can therefore be classified as having strong existential status, and the entities are referred to as strong objects. Entities whose phenomena or RCs are absent or don’t match each other represent the class of objects, whose existential status is incomplete. Such entities would include people who passed away, extinct species of animals, historic events of the past, fantastical objects that can be created in the future. Unique events such as the emergence of physical universe or the emergence of life belong here as well. These events happened only once; we cannot compare between various instances of the emergence of life or the universe and create their RCs. Visual and other illusions belong to this class of entities too. Thus, phenomena like the inequality of line

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lengths in the Müller-Lyer illusion or the Sun rotating around the Earth are viewed as false because measurements and scientific theories contradict these phenomena. The way we operate with these incomplete objects are perceiving, assuming and hypothesising. Finally, weak existential status describes the entities that I can only imagine but cannot have as phenomena. Because these entities do not exist in perceptual form, they cannot be compared one with another and their RCs cannot be made. Gods, ghosts, fantastical creatures (mermaids, unicorns and centaurs) belong to this class of weak objects. We can have such creatures in our imagination, draw them on paper or embody them in virtual reality of a computer game, but we cannot perceive them ‘in the flesh’. Representing phenomena such as lies and false beliefs come under this umbrella as well. All the potential phenomena contained in the domain of potential knowledge entities can be added to this category: undiscovered planets and galaxies, alternative universes and all those wonderful partners and friends we dream about but will never see in reality. The way we operate with weak objects is believing. Since existence of these entities cannot be certified by perception, we are free to believe or not to believe in the entities’ reality. Thus, people who believe in gods, ghosts or sasquatch behave as if these entities were indeed real, whereas non-believers treat these entities as a product of fantasy. Later in this book, we will discuss how the belief in such entities can upgrade these entities’ existential status. The hierarchy of existential statuses of entities in the Bubbleverse is summarised in Table 9.1. Although a healthy individual is usually unaware of the process of existentialisation, this process is vital for maintaining a normal condition of the Bubbleverse. This process is basic, and it takes place even when the normal functioning of the brain is disturbed. For example, patients whose brain cortex was open and stimulated by a weak electric current exhibited two simultaneously running streams of consciousness—one authentic but artificially evoked by the electric stimulation and another driven by output from the environment; however, the patients were fully aware which of the streams was real and which was apparent [6]. The importance of existentialisation becomes evident when this process is disturbed. A typical case of the disturbed existentialisation is madness. Although it is not unusual for a healthy person to conjure strange

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Table 9.1  Existential statuses of entities in the Bubbleverse Entity’s existential status High: innate ideas

Examples of entities

Absolute entities: reflecting Self, subjective experience, qualia, subjective space and time, logical and mathematical laws Strong entities: science generated Strong: image, objects (e.g., atoms, brain, phenomenon, and RC electricity); empirically match each other established scientific laws and theories (e.g., atomic theory, Darwin’s theory of evolution) Incomplete entities: visual and Incomplete: image, other illusions; art; unique phenomenon or RC is entities; people who passed absent, or one of the away; extinct species of animals; components doesn’t historic narratives; futuristic match the others objects; scientific hypotheses; quantum entanglement; quantum Zeno effect Weak entities: Gods, ghosts, Weak: only image is fantastical creatures; magical available, with no events; deliberate or indeliberate matching deception; potential knowledge phenomenon and RC entities (e.g., undiscovered galaxies; alternative universes); hallucinations; false beliefs

Way of operating Certainty

Knowing

Perceiving, assuming and hypothesising

Believing

ideas and frightening images, the person usually has no difficulty in keeping these ideas and images under control by interpreting them as unreal. In madness, however, the partitions between the real and the unreal become blurred and ontologically weak entities (e.g., hallucinations and false beliefs) upgrade to ontologically strong ones. Another way of upgrading ontologically weak entities is faith. For a believer in magic or religion, gods and spirits are real, despite the fact that one cannot actually see them (see Chap. 15 for more on that).

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9.4 Illusions that Work: Conclusion “But what is the point of renaming false statements and perceptual illusions into objects with a weak existential status?—the reader might ask— Why not keep calling them lies and illusions instead?” The reason is that in everyday speech such concepts as ‘illusions’, ‘lies’ and ‘false statements’ usually mean something morally negative and useless in life. And vice versa, such concepts as ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ are associated with something good and useful. In everyday life, though, being true and being useful is not the same thing. Thus, false perception of sizes (e.g., distant objects looking smaller than they really are) opens the opportunity to use small objects (e.g., a sun shade) for protecting us from big ones (e.g., the sun); watching ‘unreal’ events in movies can facilitate creativity [7], thinking [8] and memorising [9]. There are many weak objects in the Bubbleverse that play important roles in our life. Sometimes weak objects are more important to us than strong ones. For example, if your parents have already left this world, they may still be more important to you than strangers living nearby. In the Bubbleverse, illusions can have more practical value than true knowledge. Thus, in a recent study participants (university undergraduates) were given a golf putter and told that a professional golfer had owned it [10]. The results indicated that these participants not only were more successful at putting the ball into the golf hole than the participants who had been told that their putter had just been purchased in a store, but they also perceived the size of the golf hole to be larger. This showed that the belief that their tool earlier belonged to a person who used this tool successfully, which was objectively incorrect, in reality made these participants’ performance better than that of the participants who had been told the truth. In certain domains of human relations, creating collective false beliefs may be more useful than telling people the real state of things. In his book about the financial crash of the 1929, American economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that during the crisis American President Hoover deliberately practiced meetings that had no practical significance. He invited to the White House various VIPs (e.g., governors of the states,

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manufacturers, trade union leaders, businessmen and politicians) who discussed issues of no significant value. Nevertheless, in the eyes of general public the impression was building up that some important activity was going on, because the importance of persons involved in these meetings was associated with the meetings themselves. Creating this erroneous but optimistic impression helped stabilise the public mood better than doing nothing or telling the public that the taxpayers’ money is being spent on useless debates [11]. Needless to say, that most believers in god have never seen their god, yet they are prepared to sacrifice to the god their time, property and sometimes even their lives. In the core Bubbleverse, it doesn’t make sense to consciously cheat to themselves, but in the sociocultural Commonverse we often pretend and ‘edit’ the information we give to people. We enter the sociocultural Commonverse each time when we speak in public. Recently I watched the popular live talk BBC television programme. The interviewer—a distinguished British journalist—was asking ‘hard’ political questions to a high-rank executive of a major international organisation. Faces of both men gave up their feeling of strain and caution. The interviewer repeatedly asked questions that required ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers, while the interviewee was doing all he could to avoid direct answers, displaying masterpieces of intellectual flexibility. As soon as the interview ended and the programme went off the records, the faces of both men suddenly relaxed, giving away the masks they had been wearing ‘for the public’. It was obvious that what the senior executive thought privately and what he had presented publicly were two different stories. Without false stories created for the public consumption, social institutions such as politics, diplomacy, politeness and etiquette would collapse. And recall how often you have to not tell your close ones what you really think or feel, in order not to disturb the peace in the family. Unfortunately, making illusions that work is a double-edged sword. Cheating to the enemy at war actions may save your soldiers’ lives, but it can also take lives of the enemy’s soldiers. Misinformation in politics and media is deliberately used in order to extract political, social and financial benefits [12]. A particularly sophisticated and disguised way of misinforming is filtering online information [13], which results in the creation of ‘echo chambers’ [14] and ‘filter bubbles’ [15]. Encircled within their

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own ‘information bubble’, a person falls an  easy prey to manipulation with his or her choices by media giants. Altogether, both true and false knowledge can be scored on the scale of existence. And now let us see how, through existentialisation, we explore our Bubbleverse, and how this exploration gradually brought us to the controversial phenomenon of replacing our authentic Self with its own products: science-generated objects.

References 1. Donaldson, J., & Macpherson, F. (2017). Impossible triangle. In Macpherson, F. (Ed.), The Illusions Index. Retrieved from https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/impossible-triangle 2. Baillargeon, R. (1987). Object permanence in 3 1/2- and 4 1/2-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology, 23, 655–644. 3. Cook, A. H., Faller, J. E., & Nordtvedt, K. L. (2019). Gravity. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 4. Hu, Z., & Kimble, H. J. (1994). Observation of a single atom in a magneto-­ optical trap. Optics Letters, 22, 1888–1890. Retrieved from https://www. osapublishing.org/ol/abstract.cfm?uri=ol-19-22-1888. 5. Sheldrake, R. (2015). Darwinian inheritance and the evolution of evolutionary theory. Retrieved from http://opensciences.org/blogs/open-sciencesblog/darwinian-inheritance-and-the-evolution-of-evolutionary-theory 6. Penfield, W. (1975). The mystery of the mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 7. Subbotsky, E., Hysted, C., & Jones, N. (2009). Watching films with magical content facilitates creativity in children. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 111, 261–277. 8. Subbotsky, E., & Slater, E. (2011). Children’s discrimination of fantastic vs realistic visual displays after watching a film with magical content. Psychological Reports, 112, 603–609. 9. Subbotsky, E., & Matthews, J. (2011). Magical thinking and memory: Distinctiveness effect for TV advertisements with magical content. Psychological Reports, 109, 1–11. 10. Lee, C., Linkenauger, S.  A., Bakdash, J.  Z., Joy-Gaba, J.  A., & Profitt, D.  R. (2011). Putting like a pro: The role of positive contagion in golf

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­ erformance and perception. PLoS one, 6. Retrieved from https://journals. p plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0026016 11. Galbraith, J. K. (2009). The Great Crash 1929. New York: Penguin. 12. Kakutani, M. (2018). The death of truth. New York: Penguin Random House. 13. Del Vicario, M., et  al. (2016). The spreading of misinformation online. PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 3, 554–559. 14. Panke, S., & Stephens, J. (2018). Beyond the echo chamber: Pedagogical tools for civic engagement discourse and reflection. Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 21(1), 248–263. 15. Pariser, E. (2011). Beware online “filter bubbles”. TED: Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved from www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_ filter_bubbles.

10 Exploring the Bubbleverse

10.1 O  rder from Chaos: The Dawn of Cognition We are born in a chaotic and unpredictable place. The primordial Bubbleverse provided us with some tools of perception—the qualia—but it didn’t tell us what to do with perceived reality. To become the Self, we need to detach our mind from the phenomenal field, and the way to do this is decentration. By definition, our Self is the centre of the Bubbleverse, and all the phenomena that we observe in the Bubbleverse we observe from this privileged point. Let us call this privileged point of view ‘authentic view’, or simply AV. Clearly, what we see from AV is limited: for example, you are looking at a statue in a museum that is facing you, but the statue’s back side is hidden from AV. Let us call everything that we can see from AV the ‘Self-horizon’. We can’t go beyond the Self-horizon: wherever we go, we carry the Self-horizon with us. What we can do however is to change the position of things within our Self-horizon, for example, by circling the statue to view its back side, or to make changes in the observed phenomenal world, for example, to turn the statue 180 degrees. By doing © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_10

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these manipulations we learn something by broadening the Self-horizon, but we learn it without leaving the AV. Now, suppose we are looking not at a statue, but at a framed painting on the museum’s wall. In this situation, if we need to see the painting’s back side, we cannot go around it and are not allowed to take the painting off in order to turn it around. But we can still ‘see’ the painting’s back side by imagining it. This time, however, we have to partially leave the AV and adopt the ‘shifted view’. The shifted view has two important differences from the AV. First, when we adopt the shifted view, our Self is no longer fully in the centre of the Bubbleverse, because it delegates part of itself to the shifted view. By imagining ourselves behind the painting, we are still looking at its front, meaning that our shifted view takes its legitimacy from our AV. Because the AV, as any subjective experience, is indivisible in space, by adopting the shifted view we do not ‘divide’ our Self in two parts; rather we extend our Self-horizon to include the back side of the painting into it, as if making the perceptual image ‘a hologram’. From our experience, we know that having the AV is effortless, while adopting the shifted view is difficult and acquires an effort. Developmentally, children become able to adopt the shifted view at the age of about nine months (see Fig. 6.1). Jean Piaget describes his observation of a seven-month-old baby who is lost when a bottle of milk is presented to him upside down in such a way that the nipple is hidden from view, but can adjust the bottle in the right way as soon a fraction of the nipple becomes visible [1]. It is not until the age of nine months that the child begins to understand that objects can have hidden sides, thus being able not only to perceive, but also to imagine objects. Imagining the hidden parts of objects, which Piaget called the simplest form of representation, is also the simplest form of the shifted view. Later, at the age of about two years children learn to anticipate future events. For example, if a ball rolls under a sofa, the children don’t start looking for the ball everywhere in the room; instead, they can infer the trajectory of the ball, which enables them to look for the ball at the other end of the trajectory behind the sofa. But this ability means that the children can trace the ball’s trajectory in their imagination from a point of view different from their own, as if they were looking at the ball ‘from above’. This magnificent ability—to look at things ‘from a displaced position’, or to be able to

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take a shifted view—is what, after Piaget, scientists call ‘decentration’. If the AV is given to us, the shifted view we acquire through experience. Now, if we move from the domain of perception into the domain of cognition, we will see the same structure, but with a difference. Whereas in perception we adopt the shifted view by mentally moving our body, in cognition we shift our view by ‘playing’ with external phenomena. Some phenomena within the Self-horizon we grasp without shifting our AV. For instance, if I see a stationary billiard ball beginning to move after it was hit by another ball, I don’t have to have it explained to me what caused the stationary ball into movement. In other cases, though, the cause-­ effect links are not so clear, and in order to identify the cause we have to shift the AV by manipulating phenomena. This is what we call experimentation: a manipulation of phenomena by systematically changing some of them while keeping the others constant. For example, the English physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) wanted to explore the effects of the magnetic force on light passing through various substances. He systematically varied the substances, without any success, until he happened to test a piece of ‘heavy’ glass that contained lead. In this condition, the magnetic force affected the beam of light, by rotating the polarisation of light proportionally to the strength of the force. By systematically varying the conditions, Faraday was changing his ‘points of view’, until he found the one from which he saw something important: the link between light and magnetism. Learning through experimentation can be difficult and time consuming, but once it is done, learning becomes more effective if instead of phenomena we take their rational constructions (RCs). Knowing that, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) converted the results of Faraday’s experiments into mathematical equations. By reinterpreting Maxwell’s equations, Albert Einstein created his relativity theory, which changed our understanding of physical space and time. Note that by converting the phenomena into RCs, we are leaving the AV and go beyond the Self-horizon into the scientific Commonverse. In the scientific Commonverse, almost all in the universe can be presented from the shifted view. Almost, but not all.

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10.2 The Blind Spot of Cognition There is a ‘blind spot’ within the scientific Commonverse, and this spot is subjective experience. Scientists can causally explain everything but their own subjective experience, because to causally explain something means to divide and connect phenomena in physical time and space, and subjective experience of the mind doesn’t exist in physical space. In the domain of subjective experience, logic stands for causality, but logical thinking itself is a part of subjective experience. In a sense, the relationship between subjective experience and the laws of nature is the same as the relationship between our optic nerve and visual perception in psychology, or a subset and a set in logic. We see things because our optic nerve works, but we don’t see the optic nerve itself, except indirectly (the blind spot). Similarly, in mathematics, the A = {1, 2} is a subset of the set B = {1, 2, 3}. At the same time, B cannot be a subset of itself, as it is not contained inside itself but coincides with itself [2]. What it means for subjective experience in relation to the physical universe is that in the Bubbleverse the subjective experience incorporates the laws of nature, which thus become a ‘subset of the mind’, but the laws of nature cannot explain the subjective experience itself. For example, in physics a maximal speed allowed for any physical object is the speed of light, yet in our imagination we can move to the edge of the observable universe in almost an instant. As we argued earlier, there is no a direct link between the external reality (i.e., things-in-themselves) and the conscious mind. In order to get the feedback from the realm of potential knowledge entities (PKEN), the things-in-themselves have to cross the area of the subconscious (see Fig. 8.3). Because scientists discover the laws of nature by looking at phenomena from inside their minds, the discovered laws first emerge in the depths of the subconscious and only later are projected on perceived reality. In point of fact, some scientists explicitly acknowledged that they had come to new ideas in their core Bubbleverse first, and only later had extended these ideas to the physical Commonverse. A classic example is German chemist August Kekule, who confessed that the idea of the ring structure of a benzene molecule crossed his mind right after he had dozed

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off on a chair and had a daydream of a serpent seizing its own tail (an ancient symbol known as the Ouroboros) [3]. To illustrate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, James Clerk Maxwell used the image of a demon who violated that law by sorting out fast molecules from slow ones and thus decreasing entropy in a closed physical system [4]. Einstein mentioned that the idea of special relativity theory entered his mind for the first time at the moment when he was imagining himself sitting on the end of a beam of light [5]. These revelations support the suggestion that a scientific discovery occurs not as language-based inductive generalisation of known facts, but as a ‘sparkle’ of thinking within the scientist’s mind. New insights reveal themselves unexpectedly, through magical participation, which links together totally different images (e.g., a structure of a molecule and a snake biting its tail, a fantastical creature and physical processes in thermodynamics) in a way that escapes rational explanation. It is only after a discovery is extracted from the scientist’s subconscious that that the scientist might wish to ‘put things in order’ and present the discovery as a logical inference from the existing laws of nature (see Fig. 8.3). In reality, as Einstein wrote, “There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them” [6]. In other words, creative thinking, which comes from the subconscious depths of the Bubbleverse, supplies rational thinking with new ‘theories in the making’, whereas rational thinking forwards the creative insights further into the Commonverse and provides empirical support and critical assessment for these insights. It might look as though it would be reasonable for a natural scientist to simply acknowledge the intuitive foundation of knowledge. The inability of natural sciences to causally explain subjective experience is well compensated by their ability to causally explain the physical universe. By a strange irony of things, for most natural scientists this acknowledgement proved to be notoriously hard to make. Instead, by backdating, the scientists are trying to eliminate the subjective experience of the mind from the picture and present creative thinking as a rational process carried out by physical processes in the brain. Such devotion to rationalism and materialism might be nothing but unjustifiably elevated ambition, had it not created ‘a revolution’ in the scientists’ view on the origins of

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consciousness. As a result of this revolution, the products of subjective experience (e.g., a combined effort of perception, imagination, creative thinking and logical inference)—the science-generated objects—became to be viewed as the causes of the subjective experience itself, thus plunging the cognitive science into the vicious circle. Let us consider this revolution in more detail.

10.3 The Revolt of Machines The machines’ rebellion is a popular topic in science fiction movies. Machines subdue human population to use it as a source of energy [7], take complete control over the character’s body [8] and swallow the whole person’s mind [9]. While the dystopian future we see in films still seems a distant and remote possibility, in reality it is already happening, if, instead of technical machines we take the ‘cognitive machines’—science generated objects1 (see Chap. 9 for more on that). Among the gigantic pool of science generated objects today, there are three that took the lead in dethroning the mind from its pedestal: electricity, brain and information. Let us see how these key rebels came to be. In about 600 BC the Greeks observed that rubbing fossilised tree resin, or amber, with animal fur made the resin attract dried grass. In around 1600 AD an English physicist William Gilbert used the Latin word ‘electricus’ to describe the phenomenon. In 1752 an American polymath and politician Benjamin Franklin conducted his experiment with the kite, key and storm, which proved that lightning and tiny electric sparks were the same thing [10]. Subsequent experiments with this phenomenon by Alessandro Volta, Luigi Galvani, Andre-Marie Ampere, George Ohm, Michael Faraday and many other brilliant scientists produced the science generated object known to us as electricity. So, when you switch the lights in your flat on and read a heavy volume on the physics of electricity, remember that all of this began from a humble effect of rubbing a piece of amber.  Recall that by science generated objects we call a bunch of related phenomena, which are united by a common RC and embedded into the whole context of scientific knowledge of the present time. 1

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And now let’s take the brain. Ancients differed regarding functions of the brain. The Greek scientist Hippocrates believed the brain to be a seat of intelligence, whereas the Greek philosopher Aristotle viewed the brain to be a cooling mechanism for blood. Much later, the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) suggested that the pineal gland in the brain was a place where the mind (soul) is linked to the body. In 1780, Luigi Galvani discovered that touching the muscles of dead frogs’ legs by an electrical spark made the leg twitch. At the end of the nineteenth century the Spanish anatomist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, using sophisticated microscope technique, saw in the microscope a unit of chick’s cerebellum matter looking like a squid with multiple tentacles, which he assumed to be the functional unit of the brain [11]. These units, called neurons, were connected with each other through a network of junctures, which the British physiologist Charles Sherrington named synapses. More recent discoveries in neuroscience have shown that our thoughts and actions correlate with activation of certain areas in the brain [12]. This chain of discoveries, which unfolded over approximately two millennia, brought about a new science generated object: the brain. This was how a lump of greyish matter in the skull became a seat of the mind. One more Cinderella story was the invention of the ‘bit’ of information. The story began with a common observation that things in the phenomenal world are structured as opposites: full and empty, high and low, up and down and on and off. The encoding of data by discrete bits (a bit is a state having only one of two values, e.g., a hole or no hole in a strip of paper, a charged or a flat battery, a switcher on or off, etc.) was invented by textile workers Basile Bouchon and Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1732), who used a perforated paper to partly automate textile production. Computer manufacturers like IBM adopted that idea. In all those systems the card or tape carried an array of hole positions; each position could be either punched through or not, thus carrying one bit of information. The byte is a larger unit that consists of eight bits. The byte can be used to encode a single character of text or a number in a computer, in a binary code. For instance, a character A can be coded as 00000001, B as 00000011, number 1 as 10000000, number 2 as 10000001, and so on. Using a larger number of bytes one can code nearly everything: letters, numbers, colours, shapes, sounds and musical notes. Coupled with

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electricity and technical devices, such as chips made of semiconductors, digital code can create technical miracles—all those beautiful pictures and sounds on our TV and computer screens that imitate the phenomenological splendours of real life with ever-increasing perfection. The raw phenomenon of perforated paper turned into a science generated object known to us as information. The production of science generated objects was a great achievement of human genius, but it harboured a potential problem. People ran into this problem when they reversed the existential statuses of the absolute objects (i.e., the subjective experience and the qualia) and the existentially strong objects, to which the science generated objects belong (see Table 8.1) and began to view strong objects as entities which causally determine subjective reality of the mind. Indeed, today many neuroscientists and philosophers believe that the brain is a biological computer consisting of billions of ‘chips’—neurons— that conduct electrical impulses. The neural impulses transmit information from the outside world and around the brain, which we take for subjective phenomena and thinking. This makes subjective experience an epiphenomenon—a shadow thrown by neural processes on the inner screen of the mind [13–15]. Even if subjective experience is viewed as the ‘emergent property’ of the brain processes, it is treated as a side effect that has no say in decision making. Thus, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, “emergent properties necessarily come from the interactions of the parts of the larger system. As an example, a memory that is stored in the human brain is an emergent property because it cannot be understood as a property of a single neuron or even many neurons considered one at a time. Rather, it is a collective property of a large number of neurons acting together” [16]. But stating that a certain ability (e.g., memory as a form of subjective experience) cannot be understood as a direct property of individual objects that underlie that ability (neurons) is a tacit acknowledgement that the link between the former (memory) and the latter (neurons) is not causal, but only correlational. Indeed, a car wouldn’t go without all the parts of its engine working properly, but we don’t call the car’s ‘ability’ to go the emergent property of its engine’s parts. Rather, the car goes because its ‘ability’ to go is causally determined by the parts of its engine, and if the car loses mobility, the cause of this loss can be

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traced down to a malfunction of a certain concrete part of the engine, or a combination of parts. In contrast, subjective experience (e.g., memory) too requires the brain’s neurons to be in working order, but we cannot infer subjective experience from malfunctioning of a single neuron or a particular combination of neurons. It is also known that people with a damaged brain could recover some of their psychological abilities through training—the phenomenon known as neuroplasticity [17]. While it is possible to build a self-repairing technical system by inserting in this system complex algorithms, we certainly wouldn’t think that this system could repair its faulty parts by purposefully training itself. Going still further, some scientists view digital information wired into a genetic code written on the DNA molecule to be a foundational basis for life. As Richard Dawkins famously put it, “We are survival machines— robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes” [18, p.29]. The foundational function of information has been expanded as far as to explain the physical universe: in the theory of digital ontology the universe is conceived as the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer programme [19]. The revolt of machines brought about the situation wherein the subjective experience of the mind, which created the science generated objects, came to be viewed as these objects’ product, and a human person has fallen from being God’s favourite creation to evolutionary evolved ‘hardware’ for carrying information embedded in genes. The rebellion of machines culminated in neuroscience. But can neuroscience really explain the mind?

10.4 Neuroscience: The Unaccomplished Dream Neuroscience explores correlations between two kinds of phenomena: subjective (e.g., your perceived or imagined phenomenon of a tree) and objective (e.g., a certain group of neurons firing in your brain). As the Nobel Prize winning physiologist Eric Kandel put it, “The last frontier of the biological sciences—their ultimate challenge—is to understand the biological basis of consciousness and the mental processes by which we perceive,

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act, learn, and remember” [20, p.5]. Following this line of thinking, Francis Crick, one of the scientists who discovered the structure of DNA, writes, “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” [21, p.3]. Simply put, neuroscience’s ultimate aim is to reduce the phenomenal diversity of subjective experience to predictable and controllable patterns of neurological activity in the brain. If the aim were reached, we would be able to reconstruct a subjective narrative (e.g., a person’s sitting in his or her back garden) by switching certain neurons on and off. Because the subjective narrative to be reconstructed is already available in the mind of the neuroscientist, viewed from the Bubbleverse perspective this manipulation is a forced simulation of the neuroscientist’s mind in the patient’s mind. The normal way of doing this is simply to ask a patient to imagine himself or herself sitting in his or her back garden. For neuroscientists, though, it is not enough; they want to be able to control the patient’s mind not by asking but by force, through manipulating the patients’ brains. A person who suggested that this may be possible was the Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. Back in the 1950s Penfield was looking for a way to ease the seizures of patients suffering from particularly severe cases of epilepsy. He used to open the patient’s skull so as to be able to access the temporal lobe of the brain and stimulate the cortex by low-­ voltage electric current [22]. Penfield registered a new phenomenon, which he named ‘double-consciousness’. The patients, who were under local anaesthesia but fully conscious, reported having two parallel but separate currents of subjective experience. One of the currents was artificially induced by the electric stimulation but seemed to the patient completely real, and the other was elicited by the stimuli coming from the current environment in the operating theatre. The patients could unmistakably tell the artificially induced subjective experience from the real one. For example, Penfield recorded an occasion in which “a young South African patient lying on the operating table exclaimed, when he realized what was happening, that it was astonishing to him to realize that he was laughing with his cousins on a farm in South Africa, while he was also

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fully conscious of being in the operating room in Montreal” [23, p.55]. Using results of his pioneering studies, Penfield developed the cortical ‘homunculus map’, which showed cortical localisation of motor and sensory zones connected to the actions of limbs and other organs. It is obvious however that double consciousness is only a midpoint towards forced simulation, since in the former electrical stimulation of cortex can only elicit a certain unpredictable conscious content, whereas in the latter this content is supposed to be the exact copy of the content that had been appointed by the scientist in advance. The problem of forced simulation is complicated by the fact that the results of the brain stimulation can only be assessed by the patient’s own conscious account, since there is no a direct way to find out what kind of subjective experience emerges from firing this particular neuron patterns. The way out of this difficulty would be if the scientist purposefully stimulated certain neurons in his or her own brain with a goal of eliciting certain conscious narratives that he or she set in advance (e.g., to see a dream about a squirrel eating a walnut). In order to realise the complexity of the ultimate goal of neuroscience—to find a direct link between a bunch of firing neurons in the brain and subjective experience in the mind—it might be useful to compare this goal with converting information stored in an analogue form into a digital form [24]. The original conscious narrative of a scientist (read: a painting of a gothic cathedral as an analogue form of representing the real gothic cathedral) is put in one to one correspondence with a bunch of firing neurons in the scientist’s brain (read: a digital image of the gothic cathedral on a computer screen). Like digital technology, the ‘neuro technology’ (if ever developed) might increase our capacity to store and retrieve the conscious narratives, thus opening the opportunity of treatment certain dysfunctional states of the mind. Like analogue/digital correspondence, mind\brain correspondence is supposed to be causal, rather than correlational. This means that by triggering that particular bunch of neurons in his or her brain, the neuroscientist would be able to play the aforementioned narrative in his or her mind. However, a strict correspondence between subjective images and neuronal patterns is impossible to achieve in the foreseeable future, if at all. One reason that prevents achieving such correspondence is complexity of

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a neural process, when “a range of activity is constantly being carried out by thousands of molecules within a single neuron, which in turn is acting in concert with a network of tens of thousands of related neurons, all of which figure into a total cast of 100 billion neurons within a single human brain…” [25, p.  176].2 Another reason is that establishing correspondences between conscious images and electrical activity in the brain is fundamentally different from converting analogue information into a digital form. When image sensors convert light into digits, two physical phenomena—light and the image sensor—are interacting, thus resulting in another physical phenomenon—a string of electric impulses that code digital information [27]. Similarly, when the DNA molecule determines the structure of proteins from which our body is built, two science generated phenomena—the DNA and the proteins—are connected by a causal link. However, when a scientist wants to create a planned image in his or her mind by firing certain neurons in his or her brain, the subjective image (and the electrical circuits in the brain correlated with this image) already exist prior to putting the neurons to work, which makes the whole task of firing the neurons redundant. As is usual with mind-brain coordination, we are locked in a vicious circle: the effect (a subjective image) precedes its cause (the firing neurons). To conclude, the neuroscientists’ ultimate goal is an unaccomplished dream, since, as argued above, the fabric of subjective experience is irreducible to electrical circuits in the brain [28]. It doesn’t mean that on its way to this unattainable goal neuroscience cannot produce useful pieces of knowledge, for example, about flexible correlations between subjective phenomena and activities of certain parts of the brain. But these achievements, however useful and interesting, are bound to be only side effects of neuroscience’s search for its Holy Grail—biologically explained subjective experience. But along with the attempt to reduce the ‘software’ of the Bubbleverse— subjective experience—to its ‘hardware’ (brain processes, genes and other physical entities) there have been attempts to explore subjective experience directly via various phenomenological methods. The most known  A recent study gives an estimate of the number of neurons in the human brain as 86 billion [26], which is still too high for neuroscientists to take a complete account for. 2

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and ancient of these methods is art. Let us see whether art can give us insights into subjective experience of the mind, which are inaccessible through science.

10.5 S  culpting Phenomena: The Artist as an Explorer When we are looking at Leonardo’s ‘La Gioconda’, listening to music by J. S. Bach or watching a movie by Andrey Tarkovsky, we realise that it is pointless to try to verbally express ‘what it is all about’. Like a mystical experience, art is inaccessible to logical understanding. We understand that we are being in touch with the very heart of our private universe that can be experienced but not expressed in words. Art brings us beyond phenomena and into the world of things-in-themselves, into the depths of PKEN and our subconscious. But how does it do this? One way of doing this is by experimenting with the general properties of phenomena (see Chap. 5 for more on these properties). The experimentation can be traced back to the dawn of visual arts. Palaeolithic cave paintings, along with magnificent realistic images, contain objects that violate the phenomena’s identity by combining features of people and animals. This tendency to violate the raw phenomena’s general properties can be observed throughout history, from Egyptian to Modern Art. Whereas Academism and other versions of realistic art stuck closely to the laws of raw phenomenology, they too were not insensitive to the twists of fantasy. Thus, in paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569) the combinations of ordinary objects with monstrous freaks were not unusual [29, 30]. However, these concessions of classical art to the depths of the subconscious are exceptional; they support rather than reject the basic properties of raw phenomena, such as identity and permanence. The tendency towards complying with general properties of raw phenomena was shaken in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the emergence of new trends in visual arts.

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The message these new trends brought was that all phenomena in the Bubbleverse are linked by some deep level unity. This message is evident in impressionism, cubism, optical art and other trends. The Rouen Cathedral’s series by Oscar-Claude Monet portrays a gothic cathedral dissolving in the morning air [31], in Pablo Picasso’s painting ‘Portrait of Ambroise Vollard’ a person’s face is emerging from the elements of the environment as if called into existence by a magical spell [32], and graphic works by Mauritz Escher, such as ‘Sky and Water’, show gradual transformation of one object into another [33]. By removing the object\environment and object\object boundaries, the artists challenge the phenomena’s identity. The phenomena’s permanence and independence were also shaken by these new trends: when looking at many objects of modern art, it is hard not to have the impression that the artists presented the phenomenal world as it appears to a person in the state of deep psychedelic trance. Following impressionism, artists began to explore visual phenomena by distorting visual space (e.g., the ‘full face and profile’ portraits by Picasso [34]), spilling paint on canvas (e.g., Jackson Pollock’s abstract impressionism [35]), and ‘deconstructing’ space by creating the never existing combinations of lines and shapes (e.g., Vassily Kandinsky’s abstract art [36]). By suspending the intrinsic properties of phenomena in the core Bubbleverse, visual arts open the door into the depths of ‘possible Bubbleverses’, trying to imagine how these possible worlds might look. Looking into the textured darkness of Kazimir Malevich’s ‘Black Square’, we get the feeling of opening Pandora’s box, from which everything, possible and impossible, might emerge. And here they come out— the magical universes of Giorgio de Chirico, Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali. The visual field flows, objects transform one into another and living and non-living entities merge in one. We have the impression of witnessing the time of creation, with the creator still undecided of what he or she really wants to create. The reality melts, solidifies and melts again. The objects part with their RCs and go into a free flight. In the modern world, art most closely approached its Latin semantic root ‘Artem’, which comes from the combination of ‘Ar’ (fit together, join) and suffix ‘tem’, meaning ‘skill, craft’. In visual arts, any artificially made combination of phenomena with a title can be declared a piece of

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art, despite not all of these combinations get acknowledged as art in the sociocultural Commonverse. This resulted in dozens of art trends appearing in the twentieth century alone, each emphasizing a certain aspect of phenomenology and having a varying degree of ideological load. Thus, art povera protested against the rational and intellectually loaded manner of conceptual art by employing most ordinary objects and even pieces of garbage for their installations, art of underground revolted against dominant political and ideological censorship in aesthetics, and art brut emphasised the creative potential of marginalised groups of people, such as mental patients, the disabled and the homeless [37]. A similar relaxation of intrinsic properties of raw phenomena can be seen in literature. The great realistic literature of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, represented by Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), rested on the assumption of the existence of ‘absolute truth’ and ‘objective view’ of events. In the beginning of the twentieth century this assumption began to crumble; instead of bringing reality to a single point of view, writers switched to report their ‘stream of consciousness’. In the novels by Marcel Proust (1871–1922), James Joyce (1882–1941) and Franz Kafka (1883–1924), just like in visual arts, the mixture of realistic and fantastical events led to the dissolution of boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary realities. Finally, postmodernist writers declared the ‘relativity’ of truth, thus replacing the objective description by subjectively biased narratives [38]. The reality lost its ‘backbone’—the invisible but objective truth—and turned into the ‘literary invertebrate’ in the form of a discourse. Following the experiments in visual arts, modern writers opened the door into the subconscious. But what can artists tell us about the Bubbleverse that scientists cannot?

10.6 Art Versus Science: The Silent Dispute As Aldous Huxley observed, poets are rarely inspired by science [39], but when they are, they produce masterpieces, such as Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Lamark” [40].

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Still, it was not poetry but visual arts that accepted the challenge of science, by presenting an alternative way of comprehending the Bubbleverse [41]. Unlike science, art is sensitive to the fact that natural phenomena to an extent are human creations (see Chap. 4 for more on that). Art replaces the colourless carcass of scientific Commonverse with the colourful spectacle of sensual images. To the revolutionary idea of the unity of space and time, which in science was symbolically represented by the equation (Δs)2 = (Δct)2 − (Δx)2 [42], art responded with Salvador Dali’s masterpiece ‘The Persistence of Memory’ [43]. The connection of art with our subconscious via a direct pathway (Fig. 8.3) may result in discoveries that precede discoveries in science. For instance, Einstein’s 1915 idea of gravitation affecting the curvature of space-time [44] finds a ‘pre-view’ parallel in Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting ‘The Scream’ [45]. In the painting, the emotion of despair emanating from the crying person curves the lines of the surrounding space, thus converting the person’s feeling into ‘gravitational mass’ that distorts physical space in the person’s private universe. In its silent dispute with science, art asserts the idea of primacy of subjective experience over science generated reality. In minimalist art, objects are stripped of their colours and textures [46]. Bare cubes, squares and other shapes carry a hidden message that, torn off their phenomenal counterparts, RCs become pointless; it is the sensual phenomena that invest their RCs with meaning. Another way to deliver this message is designing phenomenal objects whose RCs cannot be built. The impossible objects were first constructed by a Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd (1915–2002) [47], and later widely used in graphic works by a Dutch artist Mauritz Escher (1898–1972) [48]. The fact that our mind can synthesise objects that don’t exist in the field of raw phenomena and are beyond reach of our rational ability manifests the creative power of the subconscious. Finally, one more way of demonstrating the projective power of the Self was discovered in the art of pointillism—a technique of the impressionist art that uses the ability of the eye to fuse colour spots into a fuller range of tones [49]: looking at magnificent paintings by Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Paul Signac (1863–1935), instead of the dots we see a palette of fresh and bright colours.

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Still, it is not art but science, that plays a decisive role in the Bubbleverse of today. This brought us to a controversial point in our exploration of the Bubbleverse, which we will be calling the Great Replacement.

10.7 The Great Replacement: Conclusion One day, at the dawn of humanity, a person took a piece of ochre (a natural clay pigment of yellow or brown colour) and drew a figure of a bison on a wall of a cave. The person was the first artist. Another person took a piece of clay and made a bowl that could keep water, oil and grain. The person was the first scientist. Both the picture and the bowl were imitations of something people observed in nature around them—living animals and bowl-type objects, such as an ostrich egg or a coconut shell. These people saw themselves not as creators of something new, but as imitators of what existed in the world since the dawn of time. And the world had been made by gods. In the biblical story of genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, plants, animals and people [50]. The people saw their plight in admiring the works of the gods, learn from them and emulate them [51]. But the people proved to be really good learners. With time, a bowl became a gracious vase, decorated with pictures of plants, animals and humans—the joint work of a pottery maker and an artist we enjoy seeing in museums today. People also started to make things they didn’t see in nature. Thus, in the first or second century BC someone created the first analogue computer known as Antikythera mechanism, which was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes. Made of bronze, the mechanism resembled a complex mechanical clock, with multiple cog wheels and other parts, with inscriptions on them. It is not until the fourteenth century AD that people were again able to create something of that complexity [52]. People also began to domesticate plants and animals and then cultivate them by selecting the most desired seeds and animals to produce better breeds. In the time of Renaissance (fourteenth to seventeenth century AD), impressed with their own achievements, people in Europe began to perceive themselves not as imitators only, but as creators: creation began to be viewed as a

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property of man, and not a gift of gods. Thus, a modern idea of creativity emerged. At this point, the paths of art and science diverged. Artists view the role of a creator as presenting and exploring the fabric of the phenomenal world. In contrast, scientists ventured beyond phenomena and into construction of artificial objects. Going from victory to victory, science achieved an unprecedented success in improving people’s life and representing phenomena in abstract symbols. Having fallen in love with its greatest creation—the ‘machine of Nature’—natural sciences delegated creativity to non-human reality: atoms, genes and the laws of natural selection. Physicists and biologists now made Nature a creator of all living species, including humanity itself. Today, while art and psychology view creativity as a property intrinsic to living entities, in natural sciences creativity migrated into the inanimate world. The evolution by natural selection, with the help of inanimate entities, such as DNA, mutations and environmental demands, is credited with creative potential, thus making a person’s body and mind a product of evolution of inanimate matter. As a result, in the scientific Commonverse the creative ability ‘changed hands’ once again: having accepted the creative ability from gods, natural scientists delegated this ability to the science generated object—evolution (see Chap. 11 for more on that), thus viewing themselves as a product of their own creation. In the scientific Commonverse, there appeared the phenomenon of Great Replacement: cognitive machines replaced ancient gods in their function of creating and determining the human mind. While in practical ways of life the Great Replacement did not preclude science from being a provider of goods for people, in our theoretical understanding of the Bubbleverse this replacement became a supplier of multiple paradoxes and fundamental incomprehensibilities. One of these paradoxes is a popular view on psychology as a poor science, or not science at all [53–55]. In the next chapter, we will see how the seeds of the Great Replacement were embedded in the emergence of natural sciences and how the Bubbleverse perspective changes our view on the relations between science and psychology. We will show that, far from being a poor copy of physical sciences, the psychological method of comprehending phenomena makes a foundation for the method of physical sciences to emerge.

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15. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Sweet dreams. Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 16. David, G. (2015). Complexity and emergent properties. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/science/ systems-biology#ref1218077 17. Ganguly, K., & Poo, M.  M. (2013). Activity-dependent neural plasticity from bench to bedside. Neuron., 80(3), 729–741. 18. Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press. 19. Schmidhuber, J. (2010). Computable universes & algorithmic theory of everything. Algorithms. Retrieved from http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ computeruniverse.html 20. Kandel, E.  R. (2012). Principles of Neural Science (5th ed.). New  York: McGraw-Hill Education. 21. Crick, F. (1994). The astonishing hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul. London: Simon & Schuster. 22. Penfield, W. (1961). Activation of the record of human experience. Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 29, 77–84. Retrieved from https:// w w w. n c b i . n l m . n i h . g o v / p m c / a r t i c l e s / P M C 2 4 1 4 1 0 8 / p d f / annrcse00375-0003.pdf. 23. Penfield, W. (1975). The mystery of the mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 24. Woodford, C. (2019). Analog and digital. Retrieved from https://www. explainthatstuff.com/analog-and-digital.html 25. Rock, A. (2009). The mind at night. The new science of how and why we dream. New York: Basic Books. 26. Azevedo, F. A., et al. (2009). Equal numbers of neuronal and nonneuronal cells make the human brain an isometrically scaled-up primate brain. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 513, 532–541. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19226510. 27. Nice, K., Wilson, T. V., & Gurevich. G. (2006). How digital camera works. Retrieved from https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cameras-photography/digital/digital-camera.htm 28. Burton, R. A. (2014). Skeptic’s guide to the mind. London: St. Martins Press. 29. Gibson, W.  S. (1985). Hieronymus Bosch (world of art). London: Thames & Hudson. 30. Gibson, W. S. (1977). Bruegel (world of art). London: Thames and Hudson. 31. Retrieved from http://www.theartwolf.com/monet_cathedral.htm

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32. Retrieved from https://www.pablopicasso.org/portrait-of-ambroisevollard.jsp 33. Retrieved from https://www.mcescher.com/gallery/switzerland-belgium/ sky-and-water-i/ 34. Retrieved from https://terraingallery.org/art-criticism/picassos-doramaar-seated/ 35. Friedman, B. H. (1995). Jackson Pollock: Energy made visible. New York: Da Capo Press. 36. Lindsay, K., & Vergo, P. (1994). Kandinsky: Complete writings on art. New York: Da Capo Press. 37. Mosin, I.  I. (2017). Vse o Stiliach I Techeniyakh v Sovremennom Iscusstve. Sanct-Peterburg: CECEO. 38. Kakutani, M. (2018). The death of truth. New York: Penguin Random House. 39. Huxley, A. (2006). Brave new world revisited. New York: Harper Perennial. 40. Retrieved from http://masterrussian.net/f25/осип-мандельштамнекоторые-стихи-с-переводом-на-английский-11938 41. Quito, A. (2018). An eye-opening exhibition shows how scientific breakthroughs shaped modern art. Retrieved from https://qz.com/ quartzy/1476253/dimensionism-defined-how-science-shaped-modern-art/ 42. Curtis, W. D., & Miller, F. R. (1985). Differential manifolds and theoretical physics. New York: Academic Press. 43. Retrieved from https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018 44. Wambsganss, J. (1998). Gravitational Lensing in Astronomy. Living Reviews in Relativity, 1, 12. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.12942/lrr-1998-12. 45. Retrieved from https://www.edvardmunch.org/the-scream.jsp 46. Rose, B. (1965). ABC art. Art in America, 53, 57–69. 47. Retrieved from https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/impossible-triangle 48. Ernst, B. (1978). The Magic Mirror of M.  C. Escher. Cologne, Germany: Taschen. 49. Ruhrberg, K. (1998). Seurat and the neo-impressionists. In Art of the 20th Century, Vol. 2. Koln: Benedikt-Taschen-Verlag. 50. Retrieved from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1 &version=ESV 51. Tatarkiewicz, W. (1980). A history of six ideas: An essay in aesthetics. New York: Springer. 52. Jones, A. (2017). A portable cosmos: Revealing the antikythera mechanism, scientific wonder of the ancient world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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53. Berezow, A.  B. (2012). Why psychology isn’t science. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2012-jul-13-laol-blowback-pscyhology-science-20120713-story.html 54. Jogalekar, A. (2013). Is psychology a real science? Does it really matter? Scientific American. Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ the-curious-wavefunction/is-psychology-a-e2809creale2809d-science-doesit-really-matter/ 55. Henriques, G. (2016). The “Is Psychology a Science” debate. Psychology Today. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theoryknowledge/201601/the-is-psychology-science-debate

Part III Expanding the Bubbleverse

11 The Great Replacement in Perspective: The Hi-story of Science

11.1 History and Hi-story In order to unravel the problem of this chapter—to see how the seeds of the Great Replacement were sowed in the body of the emerging science, we need to introduce a new concept: the hi-story. We defined Bubbleverse as a universe of a person’s lifetime. In actuality, it’s even shorter, because the early part of our lifetime, somewhat before three years, we don’t remember. This might suggest that there is no history in the Bubbleverse before we became aware of being in this word. But this is not the case. And the reason this is not the case is hidden in the fabric of the Bubbleverse. As we saw in Chap. 5, the ‘bricks’ of Bubbleverse—phenomena—have fundamental properties, such as identity and inclusion. This means that all phenomena exist in subjective space and time, and are also linked one to another by subjective causality, meaning that every entity in the Bubbleverse evolved from another entity. From this it inevitably follows that for the private universe to make sense, we need to extend every phenomenon in the past. Such an extension we call hi-story. In fact, the Bubbleverse did most of this job for us already, providing us with written history. As we grow, we learn that our grandparents had © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_11

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parents of their own, who had lived but are no longer in our Bubbleverse. Later, we learn about history of our country, the humankind, our planet and our universe. Soon some of us become aware of a controversy: in the Commonverse’s history they tell us that all of the events before us existed ‘really and truly’, and in the Bubbleverse this makes no sense. Indeed, by definition, in the Bubbleverse there is no object (e.g., a historical event) without a subject (e.g., us observing that event) (see Chap. 3 for more about that). This means that for any historical event to exist, it has to be reflected in my mind. How then could that be that the events before my birth existed without me being there? But there is a way out of this controversy: to assume that history is not an account of the ‘subjectless objects’ but an imaginary story, or a narrative, which extends events we observe now into the imaginary time ‘before us’. A corollary of this assumption is that our Self too needs to be extended in the past. By embarking on this magical time travel journey, we become observers of all the events that the historical narrative describes: we were present at the Big Bang that brought the physical universe into being, we observed the formation of planets and galaxies out of the primordial cosmic dust, we saw the emergence of life on Earth, roamed primaeval tropical forests with dinosaurs and watched an early man sitting at the fire and cutting flesh off an animal carcass with stone tools. In this magnificent daydream we watched the military victories of Alexander the Great, Cesar and Napoleon, were flying over the Battle of Hastings and the Battle of Stalingrad and were present at the discoveries of genes and x-rays. In other words, we converted history into hi-story: the story that extends the Bubbleverse in the past. This is a never-ending story, which is being created and changed all the time. All that is required from a hi-story is that it fits our need to explain the presently observed phenomena in a most logical, comprehensive and uncontradictory way. And one more feature distinguishes the hi-story from history: in the hi-­ story we don’t have to be particularly chronological, because what matters in the hi-story is meaning rather than order. In the next few chapters we will see that converting history into hi-story is cognitively productive, because it helps us free the history from the garbage of biases and vested interests, which accumulated for millennia and thus obscures the fact that we live in the personal Bubbleverse. Doing this will also help us to

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throw a fresh view on some important problems, such as the relations between the methods of psychology and those of physical sciences, the origins of life, the evolution of consciousness and others. It is important to draw a distinction between a hi-story and a speculation. According to Oxford English Dictionary, speculation is “the activity of guessing possible answers to a question without having enough information to be certain”. For instance, ‘theories’ of aliens, living among us disguised as humans, or those about unidentified flying objects or Yeti are indeed highly speculative. In this context, any hi-story is not a speculation; rather it is a selective interpretation of the facts of history. In the Bubbleverse, a person who studies history, has no choice but to select some facts as true and reject other facts as false, and by doing this a person ‘re-creates’ these facts as the facts of his or her hi-story. In this chapter, we are going to create a hi-story for science in its relation to psychology.

11.2 O  bserving the Divine: The Emergence of Science For ancient philosophers cognizing meant getting in touch with gods. Philosophy was a mother of science, but it had origins too: it grew out of myths. In myths, a human being is involved in the play of magical forces, embodied in the form of various deities. In Greek mythology there were agricultural deities, chthonic deities (those that lived in the underworld), deities that dealt with health by healing or bringing illness to people, sky deities (responsible for winds, stars and planets), water deities and others [1]. These deities felt and behaved like people: they were jealous, unfaithful, greedy and prone to swings in the mood. Breaking away from myths, ancient philosophers began to view the gods as forces of nature. Whereas Thales of Miletus (624/623–548/545 BC)—the father of Greek philosophy—was the first to distinguish natural forces from the forces of gods [2], his followers Anaximander (610–546 BC) and Anaximenes (585–528 BC) transformed the gods in a unified divine force. Following this lead, Anaxagoras (c. 510–c. 428 BC) introduced the concept of an ordering force he called Nous (Cosmic Mind) [3].

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Having demystified the mythological gods, ancient philosophers transformed the chaotic and unpredictable world of mythology into what they called cosmos (Ancient Greek: κόσμος)—the world containing the divine order within itself. This was an analogue of what today we call the universe. And what we today call cognition for the ancients was literally ‘observing the works of gods’. For the Greeks, cognizing meant creating a theory—the term that originated from conflating Theos (e.g., god), with horan (e.g., ‘to see’). In other words, creating a theory literally meant seeing the divine in things. But how did the philosophers manage to observe the divine? They did this via distilling from a pool of phenomena something which is unchangeable, universal and cleaned from all the unnecessary features. For example, one of the oldest known theoretical statements was “Any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object” [4]. An author of this statement, the Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), literally managed to ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’. The statement is true independently of whether the object immersed in a fluid is a stone, a feather or our own body, and whether the fluid is water, oil or mercury. The ability to extract the divine in things turned ancient philosophy into natural philosophy. It was almost science, but not quite yet. What was absent in natural philosophy but present in modern science was quantitative measurement and experiments, which are based on these measurements. Adding a measure—a standard phenomenon that can be applied to any other phenomenon—and then assessing the results in numbers made distilling the truth, hidden in the fabric of phenomena, a lot easier. With measurement, it became possible to systematically vary conditions under which presenting phenomena are observed, while assessing the effects of the variations on these phenomena, and thus the experiment was born. Through measurement and experiments, we transformed the Bubbleverse of raw phenomena into Commonverse of rational constructions (RCs). By losing colours, tastes, odours and other sensual features on the way, the unstable but so habitual and close to our heart phenomena were ­converted into numbers, words and geometrical figures, thus creating the dead and abstract world—the world of science. While empirical

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sciences deal with science generated objects that are still partly in the core Bubbleverse, mathematics operates with absolute objects represented through written, spoken or imagined symbols and formulas. On the surface, it looks as though our Self literally ‘catches out’ the scientific concepts and theories from the external world, where these concepts and theories hide expecting to be caught. In reality though creating RCs is not an extraction of something given in advance; instead, it is a creative process. Thus, we create RC of a tree not only by deleting non-­ essential properties of various trees (e.g., their dimensions, colour and shape of the leaves, etc.) but also by including in the RC all the knowledge about plants: molecular structure of a plant cell, its miraculous ability to feed on sunlight, the functions of roots and leaves, the way of breading and a lot more. As a result, a raw primordial phenomenon of a tree becomes a science generated object—the phenomenon processed by the analytical and synthetic work of our conscious Self. Having acquired the ability to reprocess raw phenomena into science generated objects, ‘natural philosophy’ became modern science. There was only one object that science found impossible to reprocess via objective measurements, and this object was the creator of science—the human subjective experience.

11.3 Folk Psychology as a Cradle of Science Psychology is a rational discipline about psyche, which stands for the modern concept of the mind. One of fundamental differences between psychology and natural sciences is in the method of observation. Natural scientists can observe their subject matter ‘from the outside’; they can do this observation directly or indirectly, through observing devices. Indeed, physicists observe a quantum object by traces the object leaves on detector screens, biologists and neuroscientists observe bacteria or neurons through a microscope. Unlike physicist and biologists, psychologists cannot observe their subject matter—the mind—on a detector screen or see sensations and thoughts through a microscope. Nevertheless, psychologists too have a ‘screen’ for observing mental events, and this screen is their own minds. Each time we consciously observe something (e.g., a

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tree in the garden), we also have the awareness of what we are observing; similarly, each time a certain thought runs through our mind we can ‘pin this thought down’ and place it into the storage house of our memory. Psychologists call this kind of observation ‘self-reflection’ or ‘introspection’. Of course, self-reflection doesn’t happen to us all the time, most of the time we see and think without being aware of this, but when we want to learn about our mind, most of us are able to put themselves into the ‘self-reflecting mode’. Through self-reflection, we can observe our mental states, give them names (such as feelings, needs, emotions, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, memory, imagination and others) and explore how these states interact one with another. Apart from self-observation, psychologists can also observe other things—people, animals, plants and objects. On first glance, in this regard psychologists are in the same position as natural scientists. However, this similarity is misleading. Take for example the knee-jerk reflex. For a physiologist, observation of the knee-jerk reflex is sufficient to understand the causes of this particular movement, by linking it to the nerves and muscles of the body. For a psychologist, however, this movement says nothing about what the owner of the knee feels ‘inside his or her mind’, and whether he or she feels anything at all. In other words, whereas a physiologist can explain the particular movement by linking it to other observable phenomena, a psychologist has to interpret the movement. In the dictionary, to interpret means “to decide what the intended meaning of something is” [5]. In its turn, “The meaning of something is what it expresses or represents” [6]. Finally, representing means “to be a sign or symbol of something” [7]. Altogether, for a psychologist observed behaviour is not an effect of other observable events, but a symbol that represents something unobservable, and this something is the mind. Of course, natural scientists too have to do guessing and building ‘mental models’ of physical processes, but for natural scientists this guessing and hypotheses building is an intermediate stage to discovering causal mechanisms, whereas for a psychologist interpreting people’s behaviour in terms of mental states this behaviour represents is getting to the ‘final destination’—the symbolic representation of subjective experience.

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But how can a psychologist find out what exactly this particular behaviour represents? For example, we see a running person falling on the ground and letting out a shriek. The only way we can interpret the meaning of the shriek is to compare it with a similar behaviour of our own. We observe that when we fall and let a shriek, we experience pain. Based on this, and some other external clues, we conclude that the person who has just let out the shriek is experiencing pain. In other words, when we interpret our own behaviour the sequence is ‘from the internal to the external’: our internal sensation of pain is followed by our seeing us on the ground and hearing ourselves letting a shriek. In contrast, when we interpret another person’s behaviour, the sequence goes the opposite way: from seeing the person falling on the ground and hearing a shriek we conclude that the person is experiencing pain. So, independent of whether we detect our own feelings via self-reflection, or observe other people’s behaviour, we have our own mind for an assessor. And now we come to the important distinction between explaining and interpreting. Explaining does not necessarily mean that what is being explained has some kind of mind, or subjective experience. When scientists explain a natural phenomenon, they link the phenomenon to other phenomena through known physical forces (i.e., electromagnetic, gravitation or nuclear forces). In contrast, when psychologists interpret a phenomenon, they invest the phenomenon with meaning, and this necessarily implies the phenomenon being a result of a mental action. Thus, in order to interpret the Egyptian language, linguists had to find out the meaning of signs and symbols in the ancient Egyptian text, comparing this text to a matching text written in Greek language [8]; similarly, interpreting a string of ones and zeroes in a computer programme involves decoding the meaning that a conscious person—the programmer—had put in this string of digits when creating it. Being locked in their primordial Bubbleverse, early people had no choice but to interpret things when they were trying to understand them. In other words, the people relied on what in modern terms is called commonsense, or folk, psychology. When a stone falls on the ground, there is a sound that can be taken for a shriek of pain. As a result, the people viewed the whole world as full of mental entities—souls or spirits. With time this animistic view of the world changed, and the area of animated

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objects shrank to include only gods, people and animals. There appeared a vast area of entities that are devoid of mental content—the entities we now call ‘inanimate’. When inanimate things are put together (e.g., as a cause and its effect or as a volume and its content) we have an explanation. This means that explanation is the ‘amended interpretation’—the interpretation of objects from which the ‘breath of life’ was removed. Interpreting is based on association and projection: we invest an observed phenomenon with feelings similar to our own. Explaining is based on causation: scientists view the observed phenomenon as a receptor of the content infused by other phenomena, which they call the causes. In the domain of thinking, the analogue of causation is deductive inference. When the scientific Commonverse emerged, scientists and philosophers began to specialise in explaining inanimate objects, whereas psychology become a discipline on interpreting human and animal behaviour. We can therefore conclude as follows: 1. initially we can understand things only through interpreting; 2. interpreting is an association of observed phenomena with the feelings of our own and projection of these feelings into the observed phenomena; and 3. explaining is a transformed interpretation, in which objects whose mental content is empty are linked together through causation. The process of transforming interpretation into a scientific explanation will be called dementalisation. Viewed in the hi-storical perspective, in people’s coping with phenomena folk psychology preceded causal reasoning: early humans intuitively interpreted surrounding objects, rather than explained them (animism). With the onset of monotheistic religions, the world was interpreted as God’s creation. Dementalisation that emerged with the onset of scientific Commonverse (see Chap. 14 for more on that) changed our views on the origins of the world and living things. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection partially dementalised the creationists’ view on origins of species: according to Darwin, only the first living things were created, whereas all subsequent species evolved through natural causes. Similarly, modern cosmologists view the evolution of the universe as a natural process launched by the enigmatic ‘initial singularity’, yet they are struggling to dementalise the initial singularity itself, as it makes no sense looking for the causes of the event which produced causality in the first place.

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11.4 Scientific Explanation as Subdued Animism The hi-story of science replicates itself in modern theories. Although a natural scientist would hardly acknowledge this, psychologically in natural sciences explanation begins with interpretation, as if the entities to be explained have mental abilities, wanted something, needed something and pursued their goals intentionally; it is when the plausible hypothesis is in place, the process goes into reverse and undergoes dementalisation. In the course of dementalisation, the interacting entities are being converted from active into passive ones and the intentional terms are replaced with cause-effect continuities. For example, here is the way the origins of breathing are explained in a scientific journal [9]. The author begins with pointing out that the first organisms living on earth extracted the energy by moving electrons from one type of molecules (donors) to another (acceptors). During the move, the electron gives part of its energy away to the cell which can then use the energy for its own purposes. Next, some bacteria developed a new way of getting energy by using sun light. This process, called photosynthesis, involves turning carbon dioxide into usable sugars by splitting a water molecule. Now a special molecule called chlorophyll, which uses water as a source, becomes the electron donor. When the water molecule is split, it produces free oxygen, which is highly poisonous for cells. This means that from the ‘point of view’ of every other organism the newly evolved photosynthetic blobs were spewing toxic gas into the atmosphere. These organisms with anoxic (non-oxygen-using) breathing therefore developed the need to somehow neutralise the oxygen. In order to accomplish this, organisms developed breathing. In essence, breathing is turning oxygen into water. Apart from detoxicating oxygen, the proto bacteria that managed to use the oxygen gained a major energy boost. Some of these oxygen-using bacteria were swallowed up by larger cells which then used them as specialised intracellular breathing compartments. These bacteria became mitochondria, and the cells with mitochondria gradually became eukaryotic cells—the kind of cells that all plants, animals and people are made from.

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No doubt this description is close to the way the original hypothesis was made, with the proto-cells, and even molecular processes described in terms of needs and intentions, similar to intentions and needs of our own. Whereas in regard to a living cell such terms as ‘point of view’ and ‘developed a need’ are partially relevant (see Chap. 14 for more on that), using active verbs in regard to molecules is interpreting, rather than explaining, the processes. Of course, authors didn’t mean exactly that an electron ‘gives’, chlorophyll ‘uses’ and water molecule ‘produces’; the scientists used active verbs to simply make the description simple and understandable. When the exact scientific description of these processes is made, anthropomorphic expressions disappear from view and processes are explained in the ‘mentality free’ cause-effect terms. Nevertheless, explanation can never completely clean itself of mentalistic properties. For example, the process of making proteins in a living cell are completely deterministic, yet the terminology which is still employed in describing this process bears traces of interpretation: the DNA molecule is described as holding information, some RNA molecules are called messenger RNA, the process of copying DNA into messenger RNA is called transcription, and the RNA producing proteins is called translation. While the process is deterministic, the terms ‘information’, ‘messenger’, ‘transcription’, ‘translation’ and others have strong mentalistic connotations. There are problems in modern molecular biology that simply cannot be understood without using psychological terms. One of these problems is the problem of how neurons—the nerve cells with long tentacles called axons—recognise the right dendrites of other neurons to which they have to connect. Studying the neuronal connections in a fly called Drosophila, scientists discovered that a special molecule called Dscam is employed to accomplish this. This is how the results of the study are summarised: “We conclude that Dscam … provides each neuron with a unique identity by which it can distinguish its own processes from those of other neurons, and that this self-recognition is essential for wiring the Drosophila brain” [10]. The same is true regarding a scientific description of evolution of life. In spite of Darwinian dementalisation of evolution, the way natural selection is discussed and presented still bears mentalistic terms. For instance, a recent article on evolution says that evolution can “implement and preserve” certain properties in living creatures [11]. Other

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mentalistic terms frequently used to describe evolution are evolution acts, chooses, prefers, conserves and eliminates. An important element of evolution—spontaneous mutations—are changes in the genotype that can be caused by cosmic radiation or chemical substances. Objectively these changes are unrelated to the demands the environment puts to organisms. Like chemical compounds in the liquid that either facilitate or inhibit the grown of a crystal, genetic mutations cannot be assessed in terms of values. However, because in the Bubbleverse spontaneous mutations and the environmental demands coexist in the mind of a theorist, the theorist often describes them as ‘harmful’ or ‘beneficial’ to the organisms [12], as though the mutations were generated by an intelligent agent in advance, with the intention to do bad or good to this particular living entity. This suggests that dementalised theory of evolution initially branched off the creationist’s view and still exhibits traces of this view in the terminology it employs. By breaking off with the creationism, the theory of evolution made the first step towards the Great Replacement. In the beginning, this step was relatively modest and partial; it didn’t aspire to explain the origins of life and human consciousness. According to Darwin, the original set of species (or one of them) was created, and then the species developed naturally, by means of conservation of the accumulative changes through natural selection of most adapted individuals [13]. But even that part of evolution that Darwin’s theory dementalised contained elements of psychological interpretation. Indeed, evolution includes living organisms, changing environmental conditions, mechanisms of replication, spontaneous mutations, struggle for survival between individuals, survival of the fittest organisms and other components. Whereas each of the components of evolution, except for life, can be rationally explained, the fact that these components fit together into a harmonious whole is puzzling. Is the complex called ‘evolution’ a chance coincidence of various factors, similar to the ‘fine-tuned universe’ in cosmology [14], or can it be interpreted as a product of intelligent design? And if it can, who is the designer?

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11.5 Evolution as Implicit Design As the Kantian famous maxim asserts “reason can see only that what it creates according to its own plan” [15, p.7]. If this maxim is true, then nothing can illustrate it better than the theory of evolution. According to the theory of evolution, complex organs, such as an eye, a wing or a sonar, developed naturally, without an intelligent designer. However, in Darwin’s time the intelligent designer of species was God, understood in a somewhat anthropomorphic way [16]. In fact though, a concept of intelligent design does not necessarily have to be linked to an individual. An example of super-individual intelligent behaviour is swarm intelligence. Clustering behaviour in ants and nest-building behaviour in wasps and termites are well beyond the cognitive capabilities of a single ant, wasp or termite. For instance, termites build nests whose dimensions are gigantic when compared to a single individual. It is highly unlikely that the plan of the whole nest, with its intricated internal structure, is available in the head of a single termite, and there is no a central agent in the termite society who could possibly be a holder of such a plan. This means that the plan of the nest must exist in the system itself—in the coordinated behaviour of a large number of individuals [17]. Like in Darwin’s theory, in the Bubbleverse there is no a magical engineer beyond the Bubbleverse who manufactures an eye, an ear or a wing in the developing species; however, it doesn’t mean that there is not a pre-existing design, according to which these adaptations emerged in the course of evolution. The difference between the creationistic and the evolutionistic perspectives is that in the evolutionistic perspective the designer is not an individual (God) but the system organisms\environment. This means that environment is not a passive ‘dead’ matter to which the living organisms adapt via natural selection; instead, the environment ‘provides input’ into the development of the system, by putting challenges to living entities that make the entities change and adapt. In other words, in the evolutionistic perspective, species are still ‘programmed in advance’, but the ‘programmer’ sits not outside the developing ‘organism/ environment’ system, but inside this system. The future state of this

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system exists as an ‘Implicit Design’ (IMD), which at the moment exists as a potentiality, but can emerge in the future as actually existing new organs and species. Unlike the individually tailored design, the super-­ individual IMD has an open-ended output: it determines the end products to have similar general structures but allows for a wide range of variations in more specific details. Thus, the presence of light on Earth implies that photosensitivity and corresponding organs can emerge in living organisms and eventually develop into the eye in humans and higher animals; the presence of air and sound waves implies the emergence of hearing and echolocation, the presence of gravity and the magnetic field contains the possibility of the emergence of organs sensitive to gravity and magnetic field. However, there is a wide range of variations in specific anatomy and functioning of similar organs in various species, and even species as such can be viewed as variations of a certain original living entity: the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) [18]. On other planets where environmental conditions may be different, the IMD should be different as well. Simply put, the organisms/environment is a system capable of self-organisation and increasing complexity. In the Bubbleverse’s perspective, evolution in not blind; rather, it includes an element of the spiritual in the form of IMD, and the holder of the IMD is not an individual, and not a god (because gods too are our inventions within the Bubbleverse) but the Bubbleverse, which has my Self as its centre. In contrast to really spontaneous processes, such as Brownian motion, evolution is intellectually comprehensible and relatively predictable, although it is not always easy for a person to predict the particular concrete implementations of IMD. Indeed, as argued above, in the Bubbleverse the fine tuning of the fundamental cosmological constants is not a precondition, but a necessary ingredient of the existence of conscious observers. There is no need to postulate the existence of an infinite number of universes in order to justify the existence of our own. Rather it is the existence of a conscious observer that makes the fine tuning necessary. Similarly, the existence of my Self in the Bubbleverse makes it necessary that all the components of evolution, animated (living entities) and inanimate (mutations, heredity and environmental challenges) are fine tuned into the unique ensemble of evolution. It is not that my Self intentionally created evolution, but the

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evolution is there because my Self is here. And this logical necessity creates a link between my Self and evolution akin to the entanglement between two quantum objects in physics (see Chap. 3 for more on that). All I need to do is to discover the evolution and conceptually describe it. But the necessary link between my Self (and my mind) and evolution inevitably ‘blows’ into the evolution the element of intentionality and design, because the sheer fact of my existence makes it necessary for evolution to be able to produce in me and other species such complex organs as an eye, an ear or a hand. In other worlds, it is my own existence that ‘programmes’ the evolution with the IMD. The presence of IMD is most clearly represented in the phenomenon of artificial reproduction (simulation) of IMD by humans. For example, aircrafts simulate the flight of birds, radar simulates echolocation in bats by using radio waves instead of sound waves, a photographic camera is a simulation of an eye, and a tape recorder is a simulation of auditory memory. Both the original achievements of evolution (the wing, the eye, auditory memory and echolocation), and their simulations by humans are different ways of realising the IMD available in the Bubbleverse from its very beginning. Often simulations (such as the camera and the tape recorder) reproduce IMDs already known to people, but sometimes simulations are created before people discover the naturally available prototypes. For example, the first radar was tested in the UK in 1937 [19], whereas American scientists Griffin and Pierce first described echolocation in bats in 1938 [20]. According to Griffin, when they first reported their discovery at a conference in 1940, some scientists were quite surprised and showed disbelief that a natural device of such complexity might really exist [21]. Similarly, sonar in sea mammals was discovered in 1950th [22]—long after the first active sonar devices were tested in Britain and the United States (1918) [23]. Finally, quite often similar IMDs are discovered in nature and created in laboratories independently one from the other. For example, the methods of encoding digital information in modern digital technology were previously implemented by evolution in the form of encoding information in genes, by saving hereditary information in DNA or copying this information using RNA and translating it into the structure of a polypeptide (protein). The discovery of DNA—the carrier of genetic

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information—dates back to 1860, when a Swiss chemist Johann Friedrich Miescher extracted the substance he called ‘nucleus’ and which later was named DNA; understanding the structure and functions of DNA culminated in the creation of the ‘double helix model’ of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 [24]. At the same time, computation in mathematics dates back to ancient times [25] and gradually evolved into the first electronic general-purpose computer (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer—ENIAC), announced to the public in 1946 [26]. The presence of IMD is also evident in the fact of convergent evolution, during which similar adaptations arise independently in different species, living on different continents. For example, a long tongue for taking nectar from flowers was developed by the Australian honey possums, butterflies, some moths and hummingbirds. The North American kangaroo rat, Australian hopping mouse and North African jerboa have a small rounded body shape with large hind legs and long thin tails and a characteristic bipedal hop, which are adaptations for hot desert environments. Echolocation in bats, dolphins and whales has already been mentioned, and there are many other examples of such convergence [27]. Thus, it can be said that evolution carries out many pre-determined designs, which, however, are not determined with mathematical precision and allow a range of variations of the final product. To reiterate, the difference between the IMD and the Intelligent Design is that the IMD is not contained in the head of a certain subject (e.g., god), but exists in the structure of my Bubbleverse, which is a unity of living beings, their environment, and our Self. It is not surprising, therefore, that natural scientists often describe evolution in animistic terms, such as ‘evolution creates’, ‘evolution perfects’ or ‘evolution adapts’. In this instance, animistic terminology goes beyond simple ‘metaphorical animism’ and indicates the presence of a spiritual principle in evolution. There is a difference between saying that ‘evolution creates new kinds of living things’ and saying that ‘this TV is misbehaving’. The expression ‘this TV behaves badly’ is a metaphor and can be transcoded into the passive voice (e.g., ‘such and such parts of the TV are faulty’), but this does not apply to evolution, which indeed creates new living beings according to IMDs available within the organism/environment

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system. The presence of the creative force in evolution was not left unnoticed among evolutionary scientists. Thus, according to the theory of nomogenesis by a Russian biologist L. S.Berg, evolution unfolds not as a selection of useful mutations in a small number of individuals, but as a result of the directional and almost simultaneous change of a large number of individuals of a certain species, as if a certain conscious designer coordinated this collective mutation in order to prevent dissipation of the individual mutations among the ‘non-­ mutated’ majority [28]. If such ‘collective mutation’ happened just once (e.g., as a result of some outburst of solar activity), it would be compatible with the natural selection theory, but when it happens systematically all the time, it puts the ‘blindness’ of evolution under doubt. As for the natural selection, it plays not a progressive but rather a conservative role in evolution, by protecting the ‘normal’ features in a population. Indeed, in nature a spontaneous emergence of a useful genetic mutation in a small number of individuals would not change ‘the norm’, as it would be diminished and eventually wiped out by the subsequent mixture with individuals that don’t have the useful genotypical feature. The breeding/ survival advantage that this mutation gives would become less salient in each subsequent generation until it completely dissipates and disappears in population. In order for the norm to change in a certain direction, the change must appear in a large number of individuals simultaneously. Berg brings about many examples of this kind of directed evolution, in particular, the emergence of the so called ‘anticipatory’ phenotypical features in individuals, which don’t have any adaptational value at the moment but acquire such a value in this or a descendant species in a distant future. For example, the invertebrate soft bodied animal ascidia in its embryonic development shows some features characteristic to vertebrates, which later disappear. Even in a mature animal there are some features, such as endostyle, which may be homologous with the thyroid gland of vertebrates, despite its differing function [29]. Usually, these anticipatory features were interpreted as if ascidia were a degraded form of vertebrates, which is unlikely. It is therefore logical to assume that the temporary vertebrate features of embryonic stage ascidia are the anticipatory forms of the vertebrate species that will appear in the future. But how can

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evolution ‘know’ what kind of features will be called by the environment in the future? Such anticipatory ‘knowledge’ has to be assumed, because the feature in question is present not occasionally and not in a few individuals of this species, but systematically and on a mass scale. Berg leaves the question open: explaining the origins of the purposefulness is not a task for evolutionary teaching, but a metaphysical issue. In the Bubbleverse’s perspective however, this question makes perfect sense, and the answer is: evolution ‘knows’ the future of the species because this ‘knowledge’ exists in the form of the IMD, laid down in the organism/ environment system. To summarise, the ‘entanglement’ between theory of evolution by natural selection and our Self made it impossible to completely shake off the idea of a creative force lurking behind the evolution, and where there is the creative force, there must be the mind. Let us have a look at how the mentality and intentionality tacitly ‘slipped’ into the theory of evolution.

11.6 E  volution through the Prism of the Bubbleverse Some phenomena in the Bubbleverse escape explanation, both within the core Bubbleverse, and within the scientific Commonverse. Thus, there is an ongoing debate regarding systems of the so called ‘irreducible complexity’, when a number of fitting parts of the system had to emerge simultaneously in order to make the system workable [30]. The religious Commonverse explains the origins of these systems via the hypothesis of Intelligent Design [31], whereas the scientific Commonverse explains these systems as a product of the accumulation of evolutionary precursors of these systems. For example, the proponents of the Intelligent Design argue that for the bacteria’s flagellum (a string-like appendage that protrudes from the cell body of certain bacteria and is used for locomotion and sensation) to be functional around 40 proteins it consists of must fit together at the same time, which is very unlikely to happen by chance, whereas their opponents argue that most of homologous related proteins are found to function in other, simpler biochemical systems [32].

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With all the differences, both the advocates and the opponents of the Intelligent Design argument share the same point: the acknowledgement that a certain creative force must be working in the universe in order to produce systems of a decent complexity. The proponents of Intelligent Design view the source of this creative force in the ‘mind of the designer’, whereas the opponents see the source in the chance mutations, which, in combination with other components of evolution, make the flagellum’s precursors drop their initial functions and begin functioning as the flagellum. From the Bubbleverse’ perspective, independently of whether we later attribute this creative force to the mind of God, or to evolution itself, initially we learn about this force from observing our own mind. Even God saw the goodness of the world he had created after, and not before, he created it, because there was no ‘before’. In humans, creation too is a single moment event, the ‘Eureka’. It is only when the creative idea is already there, that we begin thinking about it. It is impossible to break the creative idea into steps or pieces like a jigsaw puzzle; the creative idea comes as a ‘click’, momentarily and unpredictably. The elusive nature of creativity can be illustrated by our perception of the so called ‘ambiguous figures’, such as the Necker Cube (Fig. 11.1): in the same picture we see either a top or a bottom of the cube, but not both, and the shift of the mind from one perspective to the other happens in no time. A similar shift occurs between the moment when we are pondering on a certain

Fig. 11.1  Necker Cube

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difficult task and the moment when we suddenly see the solution. The important point is that in the Bubbleverse we ponder on the unexplainable origins of our creative ability and then project this mysterious ‘creative force’ into the mind of God (religious Commonverse) or evolution of species (the scientific Commonverse). Likewise, in order to theorise about the evolution of species, scientists needed first to observe the species and observe the evolution in their own Bubbleverse. That is exactly what Charles Darwin did, by his observations over the diversity of species during his voyage on the Beagle, and over breeding a great variety of animals within a single species (e.g., dogs) by artificial selection. By putting together the creativity of the human mind (named ‘variability’), the human desire to reproduce and leave heritable traits to future generations (heredity), the human tendency to survive and compete with others for resources (struggle for survival) and the human ability to lay down requirements for breeding new subspecies of animals (demands of the environment), Darwin had all the necessary components for his theory; all he had to do was to replace the human selector by the demands of environment, and the theory was there. Presenting Darwin’s theory, Richard Dawkins simulated these components on his computer: by introducing the ‘variability’ (via a chance variation) in the sequence of 28 letters of the English alphabet, and a ‘selector’ comparing the results with the outcome set in advance, he managed to make the computer generate the desired meaningful phrase (‘methinks it is like a weasel’) in a relatively short time [33]. And of course, it was a considerably shorter time than the time it would take a monkey hitting the keys of a typewriter in random order to achieve this result. Yes, there was no the ‘divine designer’ in Darwin’s theory of evolution of species, but the theory carries all the birthmarks of its original designer—a human person. The modern version of the theory—the synthetic theory of evolution—expanded on Darwin’s original theory, by adding to it discoveries from microbiology, genetics, palaeontology and other sciences, but the principle remains the same: the modified theory of evolution reflects the authentic experiences of our Self. “I see why God was removed from the theory, but why did Darwin expel the human designer too?”—one might ask. He had to do this in order to make his theory ‘objective’ and a true RC. Remember that RCs

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are created with the aim of distancing the phenomena from a subject and making them ontologically independent from a person (see Chaps. 3 and 4 for more on that). But, as argued in the previous section, the removal of an individual designer did not remove the design, because the variability, the drive of living organisms for survival and reproduction, and the selector in the form of environmental demands altogether contained the IMD within themselves. In other words, the theory of evolution converted the Intelligent Design into the Implicit Design, thus distancing the process of evolution from an individual subject. Yet both the Intelligent Design and the IMD theories harbour in their depths the real designer of the theory of evolution—the human Self—by projecting the Self ’s creative force either into the mind of God, or into the process of evolution. The religious Commonverse does not aim to dementalise evolution; all it does is attribute the creative ability of our Self to God. In contrast, in the scientific Commonverse, an attempt is made to present evolution of species as a mentality free process, which in reality only makes the link between the property of Self (creativity) and the mental element in the concept of evolution (the IMD) hidden. It seems that the real reason for the hot ‘creationism versus evolutionism’ dispute is not belief or disbelief in God. Indeed, some prominent believers in God, such Theillard de Chardin [34] and John Polkinghorne [35], endorse the theory of evolution. For them, instead of creating species individually, God created evolution by natural selection. As mentioned above, Darwin himself believed that species evolved but life had been created. Perhaps, ‘hard evolutionists’ are so intolerant towards overt creationism because overt creationism exposes what hard evolutionists are most eager to hide—the undeletable ‘birthmark’ of the Self on the otherwise spotless body of the synthetic theory of evolution, in the form of the Implicit Design hopelessly contaminated with human subjectivity. To summarise, Charles Darwin’s modest attempt to replace the mind as a creating force in the Bubbleverse by the ‘cognitive machine’ of evolution by natural selection yielded only partial success: God was left as a creator of life, and the element of mentality was embedded in the very process of evolution, in the form of the IMD. In other words, not only the human mind was a creator of the theory of evolution, but the work of

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the mind, in the form of the Implicit Design, is embedded into the evolutionary process as such. This brings us to a conclusion that takes us beyond the mainstream understanding of the relations between the human mind and evolution of species: if the human mind is embedded in the process of evolution as its integral component (the IMD), then the mind can not be viewed as a causal product of evolution. Nevertheless, in the subsequent 160 years natural sciences boldly progressed towards the Great Replacement, increasingly seeing the human mind as a derivative from natural objects and processes. The more scientists explore the nature and see their own reflections in it, the stronger the belief becomes that these reflections are the predecessors and evolutionary origins of the mind.

11.7 Nature as a Narcissistic Mirror A character of the famous Greek myth named Narcissus was a hunter known for his beauty. Being aware of this, Narcissus became so proud of himself that he disdained those who loved him, causing some to commit suicide to prove their devotion to him. To punish Narcissus for his cruel behaviour the goddess of revenge Nemesis lured Narcissus to a pool where he leaned upon the water and saw himself in the bloom of his physical charm. Narcissus did not know it was merely his own reflection and fell deeply in love with it. When he eventually realised that his love could not be reciprocated, the passion burning inside him turned him into a flower [36]. This moving legend often comes to my mind when I think of the fire burning inside us when we look in the depths of the universe. Those who found refuge in the religious Commonverse are proud to view themselves made ‘in the image of God’, and thus be superior to other things in the universe. Believers in the scientific Commonverse took the opposite course of thinking: seeing themselves reflected in the mirror of nature, they reversed the ‘cause-effect arrow’ and declared themselves to be evolutionary descendants of the cosmic laws and animal species. In cosmology, this reversal took form interpreting the ‘fine tuning’ of fundamental

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cosmological constants as the cause of the emergence of intelligent observers [37]. In psychology, this reversal is evident when scientists’ evolutionarily deduct the emergence of the human mind from the mind of animals behaving similarly to humans. Not surprisingly, apes were the first and the best candidates for being taken for our evolutionary ancestors. When we see the behaviour of chimps in their natural environment, we are amazed by the similarity of their behaviour to that of our own. They can communicate, use tools, go to war and even hunt almost like us. Understandably, scientists decided that this similarity exists because humans and chimps evolved from a common ancestor. But that was only the beginning. As the methods of observation progressed, the Narcissistic mirror of Nature increased in depth, reflecting human abilities in the ever mounting number of subhuman species. Indeed, rats were shown to be able to ‘reason causally’ [38] and fishes proved capable of making logical inferences from premises [39]. Mice [40] and hens [41] demonstrated some ability for empathy. Of course, these humanlike abilities in animals are not exactly as good as similar abilities in humans. For example, mice showed empathic distress only in regard to conspecifics that they had been familiarised with in advance, and hens demonstrated it towards their own chicks. Even biological scientists who strongly believe in the power of evolution acknowledge that there is a large distance between animal abilities and quintessentially human ones, such as philosophy, art, religion and science. But this distance doesn’t confuse some believers in evolution, who have no doubt that, sooner or later, the remaining ‘psychological fortress’ of human consciousness will be taken by scientific explanation. The scientists are persuaded that the differences between the animal mind and the human mind is of degree, and not of kind [42]. Of course, for evolutionary scientists, the reflection of human abilities in the realms of physics and biology has a rational explanation. Thus, the ‘fine tuning’ of universal cosmological constants is a ‘fluke’ that happened in one of an infinite number of alternative universes, while the humanlike abilities of animals simply prove that humans are nothing but a branch of the animal kingdom. However, from the perspective of the Bubbleverse, the reflection of a person in Nature looks different. From

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this perspective, the ‘fine tuning’ of cosmological constants follows with necessity from the fact that a scientist, who discovered this enigmatic correspondence, looks at the world from inside of his or her Bubbleverse. For example, for life to appear in the universe, the universe has to be more or less in a ‘golden age’, neither too young nor too old; otherwise, there wouldn’t have been sufficient time to build up appreciable levels of elements that are necessary for living organisms. Similarly, for the universe to exist for billions of years the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to the strength of gravity for a pair of protons must be approximately 1036 [13]. But what are these fundamental constants? They are RCs produced by scientists through apprehending phenomena that are already available in the Bubbleverse. This means that these RCs, if they are created by following certain standardised rules and procedures, necessarily have to be in harmony with conscious observers, simply because they reflect parts of the existing and functioning whole—the Bubbleverse— which by definition is centred around the conscious observer. By the same token, if we describe the structure and functions of various parts of a human body, such as a heart, a liver and the lungs (read—universal physical constants), we might be wondering why these different organs fit so nicely together only if we forget that scientists discovered these organs as parts of the already existing whole—the living body (read—the existing Bubbleverse). In other words, the anthropic principle only looks like a problem if we assume that the universe has been around for billions of years before and without human observers, which from the Bubbleverse’s perspective is nonsense (see Chap. 3 for more on that). In reality, when cosmologists operate with the universal constants, they are bound to see themselves reflected in the mirror of cosmos. A similar shift in perspective happens in regard to the humanlike animal’s psychological skills. The more we explore animal behaviour, the more we see ourselves reflected in it. First, we learned about causal way of thinking in humans, and then we found a similar behaviour in rats and fishes. We discovered altruism in people, and then found it in dogs and chimps. And this process is far from being completed. Like Narcissus, we don’t realise that the image we see and fall in love with is our own. Like Narcissus, we interpret humanlike animal skills as something

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independent of our own Selves, and ‘turn the tables’ to interpret our Selves evolving from the animal kingdom. “But are you trying to say that evolutionary theory is useless?”—a reader might ask. Not at all, but it depends. From the Bubbleverse’s perspective, evolutionary theory works well for understanding certain phenomena in the animal kingdom. Moreover, this theory is a unique and useful way for us to cognize ourselves. Like we need a mirror to shave our face, we need evolutionary theory to better understand our mind. In order to create a hi-story for a certain feature of our mind, we look into the evolutionary ladder to find out whether this feature is specific to our Self or is a common feature with animals. For example, when we observe our dog sleeping and trying to ‘catch a fly’ with its mouth, we conclude that seeing dreams is a general feature of dogs and humans in Bubbleverse, and when we observe that the dog can’t speak English we infer that spoken language is an exclusive property of humans. Usually we say that the former feature is ‘evolutionarily hardwired’ and the latter is not. This difference allows us to create quite different hi-stories for dreams and for spoken language. But there is a danger of overextending the ‘evolutionary thinking’ and turning it from a useful mechanism of self-cognition into an explanatory monster. When we observe that animal behaviour is determined by instincts and reflexes, we might conclude that we too are no more than ‘biological machines’ and our feeling of free will is an illusion. There are only two ways out of this logical trap. One way, embedded in the scientific Commonverse, is to discover ‘free will’ in animals and then have an ‘evolutionary justification’ to admit that we too may have free will; this way of thinking is based on the supposition that human abilities are an evolutionary extension and ‘improvement’ of similar abilities in animals. Another way is to realise that not all of the abilities of our Self can be reflected in the mirror of nature, like we cannot see our thoughts in a real physical mirror. Such subjective phenomena as free will, the sense of beauty, the belief in gods, the feeling of moral duty and some others are typically human, and it is pointless to look for them in the mirror of evolution. “Well, all right but does the Bubbleverse theory add anything new to our understanding of why not all human abilities can be found in

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animals?”—you might ask. Yes, it does. In the scientific Commonverse, scientists explain the absence of certain human mental abilities in animals by the failure of evolution to produce the proper neurological and anatomical basis for such abilities. More specifically, dogs and chimps cannot speak English because their evolutionary development didn’t sophisticate their bodies enough to match the human brain and the human vocal tract [43]. From the Bubbleverse’s perspective, the explanation is different. We don’t find certain human abilities in the animal kingdom because the resolution capacity of the Narcissistic mirror of Nature is not powerful enough to reflect these human abilities. From this perspective, animals can’t speak English because they don’t need speaking English, and we humans do. In other words, from the Commonverse perspectives (both religious and scientific) the relations between humans and animals are asymmetrical (god or evolution first created animals, then humans), with humans having some ‘higher level’ abilities that animals don’t have. In contrast, in the Bubbleverse these relations are symmetrical: if chimps could reflect upon these relations, they would consider their ability of jumping in trees as a higher level skill that humans don’t have. At the same time, the human abilities analogous to those of the chimps (e.g., using tools or signal communication) might make the ‘chimps-scientists’ think that their advanced tree-jumping abilities evolutionarily developed from the ability of humans to climb trees. As one can see, from the ‘grand perspective’ of the Bubbleverse it doesn’t follow that similar abilities in animals and humans are causally connected, or that the human mind evolutionarily originated from the animal mind. It is not until we developed the scientific Commonverse within the Bubbleverse and discovered that the theory of evolution works well at comprehending the phenomena in the animal kingdom that we wrongly began to place human mind in the same causal sequence of evolution. But from the fact that evolution explains phenomena in the subhuman domain we cannot infer, without falling into a vicious circle, that foundational component of evolution—the human mind—is a link in the causal chain of evolution. In the Bubbleverse, the similarities between human and animal psychological abilities are analogies, rather than indicators of a cause-effect link. Perhaps, looking at these similarities from the perspective of the Bubbleverse can explain why anthropologists still

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did not find the missing link between us and apes [44], and psychologists didn’t even try to teach chimpanzees to write books and compose symphonies. Of course, those who strongly believe in science will never stop looking for causal links between animal and human minds, thus more and more falling in love with their own image reflected in the Narcissistic mirror of Nature. But there is a price for this passion: whereas Narcissus turned into a flower, many scientists today, at least in theory, turn their minds into machines made of molecules and electrical circuits. Indeed, in physical sciences the distinction between human intelligence and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming less and less visible. Clearly, anthropomorphising AI goes way beyond the common anthropomorphic nature of human languages. For example, when we say “the water is running” or “the cloud is moving” we do not really believe that the water or the cloud are animated entities. However, when scientists and philosophers speak about AI, some of them indeed hope that the ‘intelligent machines’ will be capable of setting goals for themselves, if not today than in the future, and consciously achieve those goals [45, 46]. The humanisation of AI gave rise to popular discussions on the limits of its development, and these limits disappear over the horizon. In science fiction books and movies robots frequently outperformed humans in their ability to consciously think and act. Of course, today such leaps of imagination still look like instances of magic. But many scientists strongly believe in A. C. Clark’s ‘law’, according to which todays magic is a technology of the future. The Great Replacement phenomenon is on the offensive.

11.8 Jumping from the Train: Conclusion As science intercepted the magic wand of truth from ancient gods, it began to move away from raw phenomena of the primordial Bubbleverse with increasing velocity. The impression appeared that the new reality of RCs has nothing to do with the subjective experience of the theorists. Science generated objects, such as atoms and neurons, while still holding ground on the phenomenological Bubbleverse, mutated into ‘pure

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concepts’—quarks, strings and other universes. This allowed scientists to create ‘mathematical worlds’ which are impossible to check by experiments. As a result, there appeared theories like the many-worlds theory of the physical universe, which ran so far away from observable reality that they became indistinguishable from magical worlds of the imagination [47, chapter 5]. But it is impossible to run away from your own mind. In 1632 Galileo Galilei described transformations, which can compare two inertial frames—systems that move in a straight line with constant speed relative to each other (e.g., a train that is passing a railway platform with constant velocity, and the platform itself ). The principle of relativity, which Galilei introduced, says that the laws of physics are identical in inertial frames so that one cannot conduct any physical experiment capable of indicating if the body is immobile or in motion [48]. Albert Einstein applied Galileo’s principle to the laws of optics and electrodynamics and drew the conclusion that the absolute reference frame doesn’t exist [49]. This conclusion may be true in the physical Commonverse, but in the Bubbleverse it doesn’t stand. Indeed, independent of whether I am staying on the railway platform and thinking about the train that is passing by or sitting in the moving train and thinking about the platform, I am having both of these frames of reference in my head. It turns out that the statement on the equivalence of the laws of nature in inertial frames only makes sense if I tacitly allow for the existence of my own ‘personal’ frame of reference, from which I can compare the two inertial frames and make the inference about the impossibility to distinguish between them by any physical experiment. Staying firm on his or her personal reference frame (i.e., the Bubbleverse), an observer can mentally observe the passing train and the platform ‘from the cosmic perspective’, jump from the train onto the platform and conclude that the laws of nature in both are identical. What the observers can’t do, however, is to jump out of their own minds and ponder laws of nature at the same time. In the Bubbleverse, subjective experience is the absolute frame of reference, which is always with us. The problem is, in the scientific Commonverse physicists tend to ignore the fact that all possible frames of reference are based on the psychological one. Disregarding this fundamental fact inevitably brings one to

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mysteries and paradoxes in cognition, some of which are being discussed in this book. Ironically, many people who believe in gods too fall the victims of the Great Replacement. Instead of seeing gods as their own creation within their Bubbleverses, believers view gods as creators of both the universe and themselves. Hopefully, describing the hi-story of religion will help to demonstrate that our representations and beliefs in supernatural beings are also rooted in the human individual psychology, which initially was the only filling of the primordial Bubbleverse. Perhaps, taking modern religion in the Bubbleverse’s perspective might also explain the paradox of why many people who don’t believe in god nevertheless believe in the supernatural. Instead of presenting the religious and scientific world overviews as alternatives to each other, or complimentary to one another (the two mainstream views), the Bubbleverse perspective suggests that science and religion are ‘allies’ in their opposition to common magic, which is available in the core Bubbleverse. The Bubbleverse perspective also asserts that the fight that religion and science lead with magic is destined to end in the loss.

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26. Goldstine, H. H., & Goldstine, A. (1996). The electronic numerical integrator and computer (ENIAC). Journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 1, 10–16. 27. Sanderson, M. J., & Hufford, L. (Eds.). (1996). Homoplasy. The recurrence of similarity in evolution. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. 28. Berg, L. S. (1969). Nomogenesis or evolution determined by law. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 29. Barnes, R. D. (1982). Invertebrate Zoology. Philadelphia, PA: Holt-Saunders International. 30. Behe, M. J. (1996). Darwin’s Black Box. New York: The Free Press. 31. Dembski, W. A. (1999). Intelligent design: The bridge between science & theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. 32. Scott, E.  C., & Matzke, N.  J. (2007). Biological design in science classrooms. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, USA, 104, 8669–8676. 33. Dawkins, R. (2006). The blind watchmaker. New York: Penguin Books. 34. de Chardin, T.  P. (2008). The phenomenon of man. New  York: Harper Perennial. 35. Polkinghorne, J. (1996). So finely tuned a universe of atoms, stars, quanta & God. Retrieved from http://personal.stthomas.edu/plgavrilyuk/ PLGAVRILYUK/101/Readings/Polkinghorne.pdf 36. Gantz, T. (1993). Early Greek myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 37. Barrow, J., & Tipler, F. (1986). The anthropic cosmological principle. New York: Oxford University Press. 38. Blaisdell, A. P., Sawa, K., Leising, K. J., & Waldmann, M. R. (2006). Causal reasoning in rats. Science, 311, 1020–1022. 39. Grosenic, L., Clement, T. S., & Fernald, R. D. (2007). Fish can infer social rank by observation alone. Nature, 445, 429–432. 40. Langford, D.  J., et  al. (2006). Social modulation of pain as evidence for empathy in mice. Science, 312, 1967–1970. 41. Edgar, J. L., Lowe, J. C., Paul, E. S., & Nicol, C. J. (2011). Avian maternal response to chick distress. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278, 3129–3134. 42. Markov, A. (2011). Evolutsia Cheloveka. Vol. 2. Obeziany, neirony I dusha. Moscow: Astrel, Corpus. 43. Lieberman, P. (2018). Why human speech is special. The Scientist. Retrieved from https://www.the-scientist.com/features/ why-human-speech-is-special%2D%2D64351

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44. Barras, C. (2017). We have still not found the missing link between us and apes. BBC: Earth. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/earth/ story/20170517-we-have-still-not-found-the-missing-linkbetween-us-and-apes. 45. Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The conscious mind. In search of a foundational theory. New York: Oxford University Press. 46. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Sweet dreams: Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 47. Subbotsky, E. (2018). Science and magic in the modern world. Psychological perspectives on living with the supernatural. London and New York: Routledge. 48. McComb, W. D. (1999). Dynamics and relativity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 49. Ferraro, R. (2007). Einstein’s Space-Time: An introduction to special and general relativity. New York: Springer Verlag.

12 The Hi-story of Religion

12.1 The Hoop of Life I am looking at the reproduction of Giorgio de Chirico’s painting ‘Mystery and melancholy’ hanging on a wall in my flat. The square of an ancient city lit by the invisible sun, the dark blue, almost violet sky. Two buildings with multiple arcs disappear in the perspective. A girl with her hair fluttering in the air is running and rolling a hoop. Who is this girl? What time does she live in? Probably ancient Roman. She is running the hoop oblivious to the past, not bothered with the future, fully immersed in the sparkling joy of the present moment of her young life. But the ominous shadow of a person is already showing up from behind one of the buildings ahead. Probably, it’s the shadow of death. The time will come when the shadow will cover the girl, the girl will drop her hoop, become old and die. A mixture of feelings is running through my mind: the acute nostalgia of the sparkling happiness of being alive, the horror of inevitably approaching death and above all—the absence of meaning of it all. Why am I running the square of my life, why am I rolling my hoop? All the usual consolations of the rational world—children, homeland and © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_12

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humanity—don’t really work. Because when I die, there will be no more children, homeland and humanity, there will be Nothing. So, what is the point? To go through all the hardships and sufferings of life, to accumulate experience and fortune, to achieve wisdom and knowledge at a high cost—only in order to part with all of this? What a waste! The greatest challenge the Bubbleverse gives to a person is not that it is chaotic and full of pain, but that it ends. Being conscious of your own death while still enjoying the feast of life for most of us is devastatingly painful, since it undermines our fundamental desires—to be and to have meaning. And it appears to me that feelings like that were the beginning of any religion. When and how people began to have these feelings is covered by the mist of time. But when they began, the sparkle of hope flashed before their minds—the idea of an afterlife.

12.2 The Invention of Gods A small herd of elephants is moving on the arid African plain. Suddenly one of them, and then the others too, stop and surround a big white object. This object is the skull of their long-dead matriarch. The vultures and the hot sun dried up and exposed the remains, but the elephants carefully examine and sniff them. What are they thinking about? Perhaps the older ones recall the image and smell of the matriarch, whom they knew well and who helped them find food and water more than once. Maybe the younger ones vaguely catch the similarity of the skull with the heads of the living relatives that surround the youngsters. We don’t know. But we know that animals do not bury their relatives, and do not put food into the graves, assuming that the dead relative may need them in the afterlife. Man is the only animal, as far as we know, that has developed faith in life after death. This faith was the first form of religion. How and when does such faith arise? Scientists see the development of cognitive abilities in humans, such as attributing the active principle to natural phenomena, as the basis for the emergence of religion. Some anthropologists argue that attribution of agency to objects is evolutionarily hardwired [1]. When we see branches of a tree moving or hear an unexpected sound, we

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immediately attend to it, thus ‘assuming’ that the sound may have been produced by a living, and possibly dangerous, agent. We inherited this danger escaping reaction from our animal ancestors. However, there is a fundamental difference between danger escaping behaviours based on detecting movements and sounds in the environment and the animistic beliefs in that behind these movements and sounds some invisible agents are pulling the strings. Danger escaping behaviours are either hardwired in animal brains by evolution (and then they are called instincts) or learned through experience (conditioned reflexes), but they are not based on beliefs. The belief in gods requires imagination—the ability to extend the Bubbleverse beyond perception. The idea or an image of an invisible spirit exists only in our mind and has no a physical embodiment in the perceptual world. Despite the recent discoveries of advanced anticipatory and tool-use abilities in some species of animals, there is no solid evidence that animals are capable of generating the alternative invisible Bubbleverse. It is possible that the idea of the invisible spirit originated from early people reflecting upon their dreams. The British anthropologist Edward Tylor argued that in dreams, people of ‘traditional cultures’ could occasionally experience themselves leaving their bodies and traveling while they were asleep. From this the people concluded that an ‘invisible double’ lives in their bodies, which could temporarily leave those bodies. According to Tylor, the people mistakenly took their dreams for reality, and this error of judgement gave rise to the belief in the invisible world of spirits [2]. Although dreams could certainly help the ancients to produce the idea of the ‘invisible double’, they were unlikely to make the people believe in this idea; for the belief, a more powerful force was needed. Indeed, cognitive abilities themselves are intellectual tools, just like an axe or a knife. They must be put into action by some kind of experience stronger than sheer curiosity: hunger, sex or fear. It seems to me (and many others before me) that at the core of faith in the invisible spiritual world lies the emotional shock people experienced when they discovered the fact of inevitability of personal death. Roman philosopher Lucretius (95–55 BC) [3], anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski [4], physicist Albert Einstein [5] are just a few famous scientists who shared this view. British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote, “It is not rational arguments,

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but emotions, that cause belief in a future life. The most important of these emotions is fear of death” [6]. Animals often witness the death of their conspecifics from disease or old age, but this sight leaves them mostly indifferent. Presumably, an animal does not see its own fate in the death of a congener. Only a person is able to see the death of another person as a threat to his or her own existence. The kinsman, with whom we hunted together and sat by the fire, and who was yesterday full of life, today becomes a lifeless body. When I refuse to accept this fact, the urge appears inside my Self to believe that ​​an ‘invisible double’ that I had seen in my dreams would continue to exist after my death. To summarise, cognitive development allowed the ancients to imagine things beyond their immediate perceptual environment. One of these things was the ‘invisible double’, that occasionally appeared in people’s dreams and imagination. At a certain stage in their cognitive development, the people began to reflect upon the fact that every one of them was destined to die. This discovery triggered emotional shock, which gave rise to the belief that the person’s ‘invisible double’, or spirit, doesn’t die with the death of the person’s body but lives on in an invisible reality. These disembodied Selves of the ancestors become the first gods of the Bubbleverse. Gradually, the attribution of immortal spirits to external entities expands, to include animals, plants and other objects of the surrounding world. As a result, the whole world begins to be perceived as alive and full of spirits. With time, the powers and responsibilities of the gods grew. From the spirits of deceased tribesmen who watched over behaviour of the living, the gods became rulers of the elements, and eventually condensed in a single ‘demiurge’—a creator and keeper of the universe. The omnipotent and omniscient God monopolised the spiritual power, sharing part of it with humans and forcing the rest of the world to obey the strict and never changing ‘laws of nature’. And what happened to the spirits of the dead? Well, with the upgrading of spirits of dead ancestral leaders to the status of permanent gods, the spirits of common people became the god’s subordinates. In Egypt, people’s souls had to go through a series of trials, supervised by Osiris and other gods, to enter the Kingdom of the Dead [7]. In Ancient Greece, souls of the dead with the help of gods such as Thanatos and Hermes,

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went into the Underworld that Greeks called Hades [8], whereas in Scandinavian mythology souls of the warriors who died in battles proceeded into Valhalla, where they feasted under the leadership of the supreme god Odin [9]. In Christianity, purgatory awaits the souls, who then proceed into inferno or paradise, depending on their services to God during their earthly lives [10]. Finally, in Hinduism, souls are locked into the almost endless circle of reincarnations [11]. Destined to stay in eternity and deprived from its original status of a candidate into a family of gods, the soul became something that a living person has but doesn’t really know what it is and how to deal with it. Leading a ghostly existence somewhere in a limbo between this world and the world of the afterlife, the soul could not be accepted in the scientific Commonverse [12], and even in the core Bubbleverse psychology has no means of connecting to the soul. In ancient Greek thought the soul was partially mixed with psyche [13, 14], but gradually the soul and psyche separated. Today, psychology studies psyche, which is available through subjective experience and connected to physical phenomena of sense organs and the brain, whereas the soul became a subject for the domain of values, art, morality and religion. The soul is a matter of faith and not of knowledge. Occasionally, we can feel the reality of our soul when we experience the pangs of conscience, inspirations of altruism or revelations of mystical experiences, but the real place for the soul remains in its ancestral home—the religious Commonverse. The question arises: why didn’t faith in God fade away in the course of history, as did many of the emerging faiths, for example, the belief of the ancients in mythical giants or people with dog’s heads? Why didn’t faith give in to the unstoppable pressure of science? As Tambiah persuasively argued, it happened because faith in god performs multiple functions— explaining the incomprehensible, caring for people’s needs, consoling us in despair and, most importantly, giving us the sense of meaning [15]. The explanatory power of faith in gods is overwhelming. A prehistoric hunter did not catch up with the deer—this happened because his pregnant wife broke the taboo by eating a prohibited food, which angered the spirits of the ancestors. The fundamental constants in the universe are nicely tuned for life to be able to appear—it is because God made them so. Evolution, working blindly, creates such perfect ‘devices’ as the human eye and the brain—it means that evolution is wisely designed by God.

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Our beloved person untimely died; our fortune went down the drain because of a financial crash; I am born in poverty; my health is poor—all this can be tolerated if viewed as a test sent by god. And above all—with god I can part with the fear of death, hoping for eternal life. Simply put, the religious Commonverse brings structure and meaning in my chaotic Bubbleverse and makes my existence tolerable and sometimes enjoyable. Still, the development of critical thinking makes modern people look for evidence of the existence of God. Although these searches are internally contradictory (if there is evidence, there is no need for faith), they are not meaningless. One way to prove the existence of God is to infer God’s existence from the existence of miracles. As we argued earlier in this book, the scientific Commonverse rejects miracles, but they can exist in the core Bubbleverse [16]. By definition, gods can do miracles. And the question arises: if miracles exist in the core Bubbleverse, do they make the existence of the greatest miracle of all—God—more likely? In order to examine whether witnessing the existence of a magical and miraculous event increases our tendency to accept the existence of god, a study was conducted [17]. In Experiment 1 of this study, British undergraduate and graduate students were asked questions that roughly followed the famous ontological proof of the existence of god [18]. According to this proof, the sheer acknowledging that god is perfect and almighty implicitly contains the proof that god exists in the world, and not only in the imagination of the people who are reasoning about god’s almightiness, since god’s non-existence is logically incompatible with god’s almightiness. The participants were interviewed individually in an empty room, in which an empty chair was available. They were asked a series of questions about whether they were able to imagine an Almighty Wizard that had all the possible powers in the world, and whether this Wizard could leave the participants’ minds and sit down onto the chair. All of the 17 participants acknowledged that they can imagine the Almighty Wizard, but only one agreed that the Wizard could come out of his imagination and sit down on the chair, with the rest emphatically denying this. When the participants were pointed out that acknowledging that the Wizard is almighty and still unable to get out of their heads contained a logical contradiction, most participants said that they didn’t see a logical contradiction.

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In order to find out what psychological reason was behind the participants’ resistance to acknowledge the Wizard’s reality, three more experiments were run, with an independent group of participants in each. Each experiment had a prompt session and a test session. In the prompt session, participants were given hints that were supposed to eliminate various psychological causes of the participants’ unwillingness to acknowledge the logical contradiction in their judgements. It was explained to the first group that it was not themselves who were supposed to be a creative cause behind the Almighty Wizard’s leaving their minds; contrary to that, it was in fact the Almighty Wizard who might have ‘settled down’ in their minds in the form of their thinking (speaking) about him. To the second group it was made clear that the Almighty Wizard could be invisible and not necessarily human. This was done to prevent the anthropomorphising of the Wizard’s image and make it easier for participants to acknowledge the Wizard’s reality. Finally, a third group of participants was demonstrated a phenomenon that looked like an instance of real magic: the participant was asked to imagine an object (a postage stamp) which immediately ‘magically’ appeared in an empty wooden box. This was done to strengthen the possibility that supernatural events can happen in real life. The results showed that in the test session the first and the second groups of participants continued to deny that their resistance to allowing the imagined Almighty Wizard to come out into the real world contained a logical contradiction. However, almost all participants in the third group acknowledged the presence of the logical contradiction, which can be interpreted as an indirect acknowledgement of the validity of the ontological argument. Moreover, around a half of these participants openly acknowledged that the Almighty Wizard is in fact real. The results of this study suggest that being a witness of an apparently miraculous event may indeed facilitate people’s willingness to believe in the reality of an Almighty Being.

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12.3 Gods and the Supernatural in the Bubbleverse When Napoleon pointed out to the French mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace (1749–1827) that there was no mention of God in his book, Laplace answered that he did not need this hypothesis [19]. On the other hand, the French philosopher and enlightener Voltaire (1694–1778), who was critical of the official Catholic church, nevertheless believed that “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him” [20]. Like Laplace and Voltaire, many rational adults today deny or question the existence of God and the supernatural. Following the seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, modern people identify god with the laws of nature. But if some people deny the existence of gods, does this mean they also deny the existence of the supernatural? Looking from the Bubbleverse perspective, the answer is likely to be ‘No’. Indeed, in the religious Commonverse people feel confident in their lives, and this confidence gets support from the belief that God takes care of the person. When people move from the religious Commonverse into the scientific Commonverse, they have to give up the protection of gods and come under the protection of science; they believe that if they follow the laws of nature and society, and lead a healthy lifestyle, they will have a long and happy life, and even if they get sick, medical science will come to their aid. But, along with living in the scientific Commonverse, people also live in the core Bubbleverse, and when the people get into the core Bubbleverse, the optimism fades. The people realise that they don’t know what awaits them around the corner. They know that they and their loved ones can get a terminal illness, have a fatal accident or fell a victim of crime. And suddenly, to their own surprise, people discover that they actually believe in the supernatural. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) argued that there are rational reasons for a person to live as though God actually exists. Indeed, if a person lives as though God existed (e.g., the person goes to the church and doesn’t breach the laws of morality) while in reality God doesn’t exist, the person doesn’t have much to lose. However, if God does exist the person’s gains will be much greater (e.g., eternity in Heaven).

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On the other hand, if the person lives an unrighteous life and God does exist, the person’s losses will be enormous (e.g., eternity in Hell) [21]. Most everyday superstitions are based on this ‘Pascal’s wager’. It doesn’t take us much effort to cross ourselves, knock on wood, don’t pass under the ladder or cross our fingers when embarking on a dangerous journey or beginning a risky enterprise, even though we ‘really’ don’t believe in god or the bad prophecy; the gain from these magical actions, should they really work, would be a lot greater than the effort invested in performing the action. Psychologists call this mechanism the ‘illusion of control’. Psychological experiments have confirmed that people feel more confident and act more effectively if they believe that they are in control over the situation than if they think that they are not. When a group of participants was allowed to choose their lottery tickets while another group received lottery tickets chosen for them by someone else, participants of the first group assessed their chances higher and were inclined to swap their tickets for different ones to a lesser extent than participants of the second group [22]. In another experiment, participants were instructed to watch a basketball player throwing a ball into the basket. Those participants who had been trying to ‘help’ the player to score by visualising successful throws did indeed think that the player’s successes were achieved partly due to their imaginary ‘help’ [23]. One can assume on this ground that a petitionary prayer and other ritualistic pleas to gods play a similar role: they create in people the illusion of control over those situations of their lives, which in fact are out of their control. In the ancient times, ordinary people didn’t distinguish their Bubbleverse from their religious Commonverse (see Chap. 13 for more on that). They believed in spirits and gods and were eager to look into their future by addressing oracles and fortune-tellers. In ancient Rome, no serious actions (like going to a war or laying a foundation for a major building) were undertaken without speaking with fortune-tellers and studying the omens. Even the decision to convert to Christianity was taken by the emperor Constantine because of the omen he had seen before a battle. The onset of monotheistic religions, such as Judaism and Christianity, put an end to the animistic universe of pagan religions. Although the

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Bible doesn’t deny the existence of magic, it considers common magic to be the revelation of dark forces: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18). In the recent few centuries, science joined religion in its millennia long fight with magic. Yet, despite joint efforts of science and religion to eradicate magic fortune telling is still a popular profession. The belief in God should have kept people from coming to fortune-­ tellers, and logical reasoning should have told people that if something were written into their fates then it would happen to them independent of whether they know or don’t know their fates. Contrary to both faith and logic, many rational people are still attracted to astrology and magic, and the question is why. The Commonverse/core Bubbleverse split, which happened in last few centuries, might suggest an answer. This split also means that the fight of monotheistic religion and science with the people’s belief in magic is hopeless. Indeed, when people reason logically, they sit in the scientific Commonverse in which gods and supernatural events are banned. But in the everyday life a person is plunged in his or her core Bubbleverse, which hasn’t changed that much from the time of antiquity. Indeed, ancients and modern traditional peoples believed “that by drawing the figure of a person in sand, ashes, or clay, or by considering any object as his body, and then pricking it with a sharp stick or doing it any other injury, they inflict a corresponding injury on the person represented” [24, p.1]. When psychologists encouraged modern educated participants to throw darts at pictures of good or bad characters, they discovered that participants were less accurate at throwing darts at pictures of the faces of people they like. In spite of the participants’ clear realisation that hitting a person’s photo with a dart cannot possibly hurt this person (the scientific Commonverse’s perspective), subconsciously the participants followed the magical law of similarity and tried not to damage the photo of a nice person (the core Bubbleverse’s perspective) [25]. In order to further explore the effect of the Commonverse/core Bubbleverse split on people’s superstitious behaviour, a study was conducted [26]. In one experiment (magic loaded context), university graduates and staff members were interviewed on whether they believed that a magic spell, if put on them, would change something in their future lives. The theoretical part of the interview was set into the scientific Commonverse

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context: it was conducted in a university office by a professional psychologist. In the practical part of the interview, the participants were asked whether they would allow the experimenter to put this magic spell on their future lives. They were told that the two spells were taken from an old book on magic: a good spell, which promised to make the participants’ future lives good and problem free, and a bad spell that could make their lives hard and full of problems. In this condition participants were brought from the level of verbal reasoning (uninvolved level of Self activity) to the level of real actions (involved level of Self activity) (see Table 7.3). By bringing up associations with magic and shifting the participants’ behaviour from the level of theoretical judgements to the level of actions that may have repercussions to participants lives, the experimenter moved the participants from the scientific Commonverse’s context into the context of the core Bubbleverse. In the new context, the participants understood that it was not their opinions about magic that was at stake, but their real lives. The results showed that in the theoretical part of the interview almost all participants denied that either of the spells could affect their future lives. However, when asked to allow or prohibit the real spell in the practical part of the interview, participants acted as if they really believed in the spell’s magical power: about half of participants allowed the good spell to be cast on their lives, but almost all participants prohibited the bad spell and commented that the bad spell might actually affect their future lives. Another experiment has demonstrated that the  participants’ belief in that the experimenter’s symbolic actions can directly affect their lives worked even when this symbolic action was free from direct association with magic. In this experiment (magic free context) participants received the same instruction, but this time the magic spell wasn’t mentioned; instead, the participants were told that if the experimenter increased or decreased the number of ones on a computer screen (e.g., changed 1111 into 11111111 or into 11), then the number of difficult problems in the participants’ future life would increase or decrease proportionally. The results indicated that although in the theoretical part of the interview almost all the participants denied that changing the number of digits on the screen would affect their lives in any way, in the practical part of the interview they behaved like the participants in the first experiment: most

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of them allowed to decrease the number of ones on the computer screen but prohibited to increase the number (Fig. 12.1). The results of these experiments show that when modern educated adults are in the context of the scientific Commonverse, they deny their belief in magic and the supernatural; in contrast, when they are in the context of their core Bubbleverses, they believe that magical and other symbolic actions can affect their lives. This is why modern people want to know their fates: by doing magical actions or praying to god people hope to get control over their future. With their rational minds, people understand that their attempts to change fate are illusory, and yet this illusion has a soothing psychotherapeutic effect. This split in the mind of people is often targeted in art. For example, in his poem ‘The Song of Wise Oleg’ Alexander Pushkin tells a story of Russian Prince Oleg, to whom a fortune-teller prophesised that Oleg would take death from his favourite stallion. While doubting 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Desirable Magic loaded

Undesirable Magic loaded

Desirable Magic free

Undesirable Magic free

Fig. 12.1  Percent of participants who prohibited the experimenter’s symbolic action aimed at affecting their future lives, as a function of the outcome desirability (desirable versus undesirable) and context (magic loaded versus magic free)

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the prophecy’s validity, Oleg nevertheless replaced his favourite war horse with another one. After many years of successful fighting in battles, Oleg enquired about the fate of his favourite horse and was told that the stallion has long been dead. Having damned the false prophecy Oleg decided to visit the horse’s grave, but when he put his foot on the horse’s skull, a poisonous snake crawled out of the skull and gave Oleg a deadly bite. Oleg’s attempt to cheat fate failed—and yet this attempt was not meaningless. If Oleg had not changed his horse, he might have been anxious about the stallion bringing him death, which may have diminished his courage in battles and even cost him his life. Changing the horse increased Oleg’s confidence and supported his military spirit. It didn’t matter that in the end the prophecy came true. What matters is that the illusion of having cheated the fate gave Oleg a very real advantage: courage and self-­ confidence in fighting. For believers in god, their prayers may provide a feeling of control. Most believers in the scientific Commonverse overtly denounce the supernatural, yet subconsciously harbour the belief in magic. By crossing our fingers or knocking on wood we make ourselves calm, as if pacifying the evil forces and soliciting help of our guardian angels. Consciously we know that these actions are nothing but superstition, yet these magical actions help. It is no coincidence that people of most dangerous professions (pilots, construction workers and sportsmen) are also the most superstitious ones [27]. Where the results are unpredictable and stakes are great, the scientific Commonverse is abandoned, and a person retreats to his or her core Bubbleverse for the magical aid. Being shy to acknowledge their tacit belief in God, modern people returned to ancient animism.

12.4 Dreaming of the Gods: Conclusion Once I had a dream. On the rocky path up a huge mountain, people were walking under the scorching sun, carrying wooden platforms on their shoulders and heads. On these platforms gods of different nations were sitting. In the front, a dark Indian in a loincloth was walking, his arms supporting a perfectly round two-storied platform that rested on top of

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his head. A four-armed Indra was sitting on top of the platform, with all of his body covered with eyes. Nearby, the multi-armed Shiva was dancing, and the four-armed Vishnu with blue skin was sitting with his legs dangling from the platform. Between them, the four-faced Brahma mounted a white swan. Below the gods of the first magnitude there were younger gods: the elephant-like Ganesh, the three-legged one-eyed Kubera and the beast-like god of death, Yama. Under the weight of the platform, the Indian was reeling and sweating. Behind the Indian, at some distance, three ancient Egyptians were moving slowly, holding a huge wooden ship with three decks. The nose of the ship was supported by a peasant, barefoot and in a short skirt; a priest with a shaven head and wearing a white tunic followed in the middle and the stonemason with muscular callused hands was holding the rear of the ship. The upper deck was taken by the green-skinned deity with a pharaoh’s beard Osiris, who was holding some incomprehensible objects in his hands. The middle deck was occupied by the manager of the afterlife Anubis—a person with a head of a jackal. Aside Anubis the god of wisdom Thoth with the head of an ibis was sitting, and the bottom deck displayed a completely animal-like goddess of justice Ammit, with a crocodile head, the body of a leopard and the back of a hippopotamus. And who is there, lagging in the distance, small, almost naked, with feathers on his head and a humpy nose? Yes, it looks like a Mayan Indian, with some kind of wicker basket on his head, rather large in size. Peeping from the basket were multi-coloured, stone-like gods. An old man with a big nose and a lizard in his hand was the creator deity Itzamna. A winged serpent with a human head, Kukulkan, the lord of fire, protruded nearby, and the bloodthirsty god of death Ah-Puch, a monstrous skeleton in a richly decorated helmet, was standing above them. From time to time, smaller gods peeped out of the basket: the sun god Kinich Ahau, the rain god Chaac and the fertility goddess Ix Chel. Far away, behind the Mayan Indian, other peoples followed carrying their gods, but they were hard to see. Suddenly, the Mayan Indian bent and collapsed, unable to bear the weight of his burden. The basket rolled down the slope, and the Maya gods, left without support, hung for a moment above the ground. Their bodies thinned, became transparent

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and gradually dissolved in the air. And the thought flashed in my mind: if gods are immaterial, why is it so hard for people to carry them? I woke up, without getting an answer. In the next chapter, we will try to re-create the hi-story of the Bubbleverse, with the aim to compare the modern Bubbleverse with its historical predecessors and use this comparison to better understand the structure of the modern Bubbleverse. Like any new concept, the Bubbleverse will be a lot better understood when it is taken not as an isolated notion, but as a notion that has long roots in human history.

References 1. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The human instincts that fashion gods, spirits and ancestors. New York: Basic Books. 2. Tylor, E. (1920). Primitive culture. New York: J. P. Putnam’s Sons. 3. Retrieved from https://iperceptive.com/authors/lucretius_quotes.html 4. Malinowski, B. (1972). The role of magic and religion. In W. A. Lessa & E. Z. Vogt (Eds.), Reader in comparative religion: An anthropological approach. New York: Harper & Row. 5. Einstein, A. (1995). Ideas and opinions. New York: Crown Publications. 6. Retrieved from https://afterall.net/quotes/bertrand-russell-on-the-fear-of-death/ 7. Castellano, N. (2019). The book of the dead was Egyptians’ inside guide to the underworld. National Geographic. Retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/01-02/egypt-book-of-the-dead/ 8. Mirto, M. S., & Osborne, A. M. (2012). Death in the Greek World: From Homer to the classical age. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. 9. Orchard, A. (1997). Dictionary of norse myth and legend. London: Cassel. 10. Dante, A. (2013). The divine comedy: Inferno, purgatory, paradise. New York: Interactive Media. 11. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/reincarnation 12. Musolino, J. (2015). The Soul Fallacy: What science shows we gain from letting go of our soul beliefs. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. 13. Aristotle. (1957). On the soul. Parva naturalia. On breath. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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14. Jones, D., Wirth, J. M., & Schwartz, M. (Eds.). (2009). The gift of logos. Essays in continental philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 15. Tambiah, S. J. (1990). Magic, science, religion, and the scope of rationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 16. Subbotsky, E. (2013). Sensing the future: Reversed causality or a non-­ standard observer effect? The Open Psychology Journal, 6, 81–93. 17. Subbotsky, E. (1996). The child as a Cartesian thinker. Children’s reasonings about metaphysical aspects of reality. New York and London: Psychology Press. 18. Oppy, G. (1996). Ontological arguments and belief in god. New  York: Cambridge University Press. 19. Retrieved from https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/ Pierre-Simon_Laplace 20. Retrieved from https://www.whitman.edu/VSA/trois.imposteurs.html 21. Connor, J. A. (2006). Pascal’s Wager: The man who played dice with god. San Francisco: Harper. 22. Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 311–328. 23. Pronin, E., Wegner, D. M., McCarthy, K., & Rodriges, S. (2006). Everyday magical powers: The role of apparent mental causation in the overestimation of personal influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 218–231. 24. Frazer, J. G. (1923). The golden bough. A study in magic and religion. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd.. Retrieved from https://www.sacred-exts.com/pag/ frazer/gb00302.htm. 25. Rozin, P., Millman, L., & Nemeroff, C. (1986). Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 703–712. 26. Subbotsky, E. (2007). Children’s and adult’s reaction to magical and ordinary suggestion: Are suggestibility and magical thinking psychologically close relatives? British Journal of Psychology, 98, 547–574. 27. Vyse, S.  A. (2000). Believing in magic: The psychology of superstition. New York: Oxford University Press.

13 The Hi-story of the Bubbleverse

13.1 Arising from a Myth: The Early Bubbleverse Although any living entity, even a bacterium and an ant, by definition lives in its own ‘subjective egg’ that we are calling in this book a Bubbleverse, not every entity is conscious of this. Perhaps, even people were not conscious of their Bubbleverse till the time of the Renaissance. Since human reflective consciousness emerged simultaneously with the discovery of the idea of gods [see 1, chapter 3], the Bubbleverse first appeared dressed in the cloak of the religious Commonverse, and only later emancipated itself from this dress. But for keeping the subject of the current chapter ‘on track’, I am going to use the term ‘Bubbleverse’ throughout this chapter. There are good reasons to assume that in early humans an individual did not oppose his or her own Self to those of other people and to natural objects: rather, he or she felt a unity with the social group and the environment. The growing individuation and differentiation of the Self from those of others (people, animals and plants) must have been a long and complex process. © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_13

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The beginning of such opposition between an individual and the world can be seen in cave paintings, made by early people tens of thousands years ago [2]. In many prehistoric cave paintings, along with the magnificent images of people and animals, hand stencils were found, made by placing a hand on the wall and blowing pigment at it. This resulted in a characteristic image of an area of solid pigment with the uncoloured shape of the hand in the centre, which sometimes is decorated with lines or dashes. This opposition of a human individual’s identifier—a hand— and other living entities can be interpreted as a growing awareness by the painter of his or her distinction from the surrounding world and the living creatures in it. For ancients, their Bubbleverse was full of gods. In the mythological Bubbleverse gods and spirits have anthropomorphic feelings and behaviours, and a person has a direct, personal link with gods. For example, in the Homer’s poem ‘Iliad’ gods and minor deities fight among themselves and participate in human warfare; they often team up with humans to counter other gods. Ancient Greeks and Romans addressed their deities through prayers in order to learn their fate or to ask for assistance in everyday affairs. In modern traditional peoples, a person can address spirits via a shaman or a witch, with the aim of healing a sick person or inflicting harm to an enemy [3]. Another characteristic feature of this early mythological Bubbleverse is ‘animism’—the absence of a fundamental gap between a person and things of nature. A spring, a mountain and a tree had little spirits inside, which could be communicated with and could respond to a human plea by agreeing or refusing to collaborate. A person did not see himself or herself superior to a wild boar, an eagle or a tree. To summarise, the early mythological Bubbleverse was decentred, in the sense that there was no supreme centre for psyche in this Bubbleverse. It was also horizontal, meaning that a person could communicate with the spirits ‘on equal terms’, and non-polarised, in the sense that there was no opposition between a person’s Self and the rest of the Bubbleverse.

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13.2 The Philosophical Bubbleverse The early Greek philosophers kept animism but transformed the mythological non-polarised Bubbleverse into a more organised and unified picture of the ‘living world’ which they called cosmos. In cosmos, psyche is distributed in the universe under the name ‘logos’—a Greek word meaning ‘ground’, ‘opinion’, ‘expectation’, ‘word’, ‘speech’, ‘reason’, ‘proportion’ and ‘discourse’ [4]. Logos, or reason, was a spinal cord of cosmos. Thus, according to the philosophy of Stoics, which emerged in the third century BC, the universe is a material, reasoning substance, known as God or Nature, which has two sides—the active and the passive ones. The passive substance is matter, and the active is Logos—an intelligent aether or primordial fire, which acts on the passive matter. The universe is constructed in a harmonic way and is a kind of ‘animated machine’. A human person is a little part of this machine—a microcosm—able to cognize it and reflect upon it [5]. The philosophical Bubbleverse is therefore still decentred, and psyche is more or less evenly distributed across it. Like the early mythological Bubbleverse, the philosophical Bubbleverse is also horizontal, as a person opposes cosmos without being subordinated to it. However, this new Bubbleverse becomes polarised or split in two poles: Cosmos (Nature) and the microcosm (a person). The polarisation was a double edged sword. On one hand, it distinguished a person from the world and made it possible for a person to critically reflect upon Nature. On the other hand, the person is now faced with Cosmos, which, although still animated, is nevertheless independent from and indifferent to the person. This created a psychological gap between the person and Cosmos, by alienating Cosmos from an individual human being. As the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius writes, “Thou hast existed as a part. Thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee; but rather thou shalt be received back into its seminal principle by transmutation” [6, p.14]. What this is likely to mean is that a person is a product of the cosmic dust and the dust he or she will turn into after death, only to reappear later in some other form, as an animal, a tree or a different person.

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Allegedly, this alienation of the person’s Self from the rest of the Bubbleverse created in people the feeling of strain and dissatisfaction.

13.3 Bowing to the God: The Biblical Bubbleverse Another way of transforming the mythological Bubbleverse was attempted by monotheistic religions, such as Judaism. In Judaism, mythological deities were replaced with one almighty God. God acquired a monopoly on the active element—agency, thus pulling agency off a large part of the Bubbleverse. As a result, there appeared a realm of what we call ‘inanimate matter’. Some special individuals chosen by God could still do magic, by ‘blowing life’ into inanimate things, just like Aaron turned his rod into a snake (Exodus 7:10), but for the majority doing such feats were strictly prohibited: “You shall not permit a sorceress to live” (Exodus 22:18). God of the Bible still had many anthropomorphic features and had a personal relation with an individual. God was jealous, prone to fits of anger and had other typically human emotions, such as demanding fidelity from people. Although God created a person in their own image, this does not mean that God possesses human-like features; rather the statement is a metaphorical way to say that God treated a human being with special respect and supplied the person with the ability of reason. Still, God of the Bible was alienated from a person. A person may pray to God, but god was a Spirit, not a corporeal being and was a predominantly abstract concept. In this monotheistic Bubbleverse, God is a rewarding and punishing agent, but not a benevolent and caring father who can suffer like a person and be forgiving to a person’s sins. In other words, the Biblical Bubbleverse is centred (with the centre in God) and vertically polarised. The polarisation was top-down: God-creator made the world, people and the laws of Nature; all a person could do was to observe the glorious order of Nature, just like ancient Greek philosophers observed the magnificent machine of Cosmos.

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13.4 Personalising the Bubbleverse: Christianity Christianity made a step towards overcoming the gap between a person and his or her Bubbleverse. It divided God into three manifestations: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. As a result, Logos of the ancient philosophers turned into a human being—Jesus Christ the Son of God. God of the New Testament is no longer just an invisible Spirit, but also a person in flesh and blood, who is kind to an individual person and keeps the person in the centre of their attention. A person can now communicate with god directly through the Son of God, or through addressing other humans (The Virgin Mary and saints). As a result, compared to the mythological, the philosophical and the Biblical Bubbleverses, the Christian Bubbleverse becomes a much more desirable and comfortable place to be in. At the same time, in the medieval mentality Nature was a cosmic backwater, as it was only the creation of God. Indeed, who would bother meddling with the creation if the Creator is known? People grew crops and made things, but there was no science. In monasteries, learned people discussed the properties of God; as for the laws of nature, medieval monks mostly followed the writings by Aristotle, Plato and other ancient scholars. The Christian Bubbleverse is therefore centred and horizontally polarised.

13.5 T  hrowing God Off the Pedestal: The Raise of Science Suddenly, in the time of Renaissance, an individual human being was placed in the centre of the world, replacing God. The innumerable Madonnas and saints on Renaissance paintings become portraits of real people, a person’s mind becomes a microcosm reflecting the God’s created cosmos and reflecting it right. Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Rafael made a human body speak for the inner world of the mind, thus resurrecting the ideals of the art of antiquity. In the time that directly followed

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the Renaissance the interest in the person’s inner world grew even stronger. Portraits by Rembrandt, Goya and Velasquez with unprecedented mastery display the human inner microcosm, which emanates from eyes and features of the characters. The science of the modern age (which emerged approximately in the middle of the fifteenth century AD) reanimated the philosophical universe of the ancients, but with a twist. It made the horizontal relations between a person and the physical universe (Cosmos of the ancients) vertically polarised. Yet, in contrast to the Biblical Bubbleverse, in the humanistic Bubbleverse a scientist and philosopher, rather than God, brings order into cosmos. Putting a human being in the place of God had five important consequences. First, it made a person free. A person was no longer under divine surveillance and was left to determine his or her actions; as a consequence, the person was fully responsible for his or her behaviour. Second, a person replacing God made the gap between a person and a thing of nature even greater than it was in the Biblical and Christian Bubbleverses. A thing of nature begins to be viewed in a completely mechanistic way, as a toy in the endless fabric of the cause-effect continuum. Even animals were portrayed by some philosophers, such as the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), as complex machines. This gap between a person and a natural thing gave rise to the antagonism between ethics and science. For ethics, a person is able to act with freedom and responsibility, whereas scientists, such the French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751), included a person into the cause-­ effect continuum of Nature. Third, removing God from the picture of the Bubbleverse alienated a person from the physical universe to the extreme. Without God, a person is left stranded on a small planet in the boundless ocean of the cold and indifferent universe. The fourth consequence was particularly important: a person discovered the core Bubbleverse (see Fig. 7.1). Prior to that time, a person thought that he or she was a product of some kind. In the philosophical Bubbleverse, a person was a creature made from the cosmic dust: atoms. In the religious Commonverse (Biblical and Christian versions) God created and supervised the person. But when René Descartes dared to put under question the existence of the whole world, he put a human subject

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in the centre of the universe. Following Descartes, the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) denied the existence of material substance and contended that familiar objects, other people including, are nothing but ideas in the mind of a thinker. Paradoxically though, both Descartes and Berkeley did not articulate the idea of the Bubbleverse and kept insisting that the world and a person were God’s creation. For them, putting a person in the centre of universe was only a theoretical assumption and not an ontological claim. It was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who brought the radical doubt to its logical end. He declared that the ideas of space, time and causality are innate to the human mind. Without a human observer and his or her ability to actively ‘join together’ the flow of natural events, the natural world is a ‘thing-in-­ itself ’—something we can know nothing about except that it exists. According to Kant, the existence of God is not a self-evident truth but has to be rationally proven, and the proof of God’s existence is the existence of morality. However, the sheer fact that a person has to obtain a proof of the existence of God from his or her own reason was a radical step away from viewing the universe as God’s creation. Finally, the fifth consequence of replacing God with a human person was the emergence of the scientific Commonverse. Cosmos of the ancients and God’s Nature of the Biblical and Christian Commonverses were now transformed into the Nature of science: the impregnable continuum of cause-effect links. In this newly built cosmos, the philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632–1677) identified god with Nature. A single ‘rupture’ in the cause-effect continuum would break the whole building. This glorious building was the scientific Commonverse, in which modern sciences could now arise. Ever since Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) formulated the heliocentric model of the universe, and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) started dropping things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the idea of the world as a colossal machine has been taking over the minds of people. After a few centuries of liberation, the core Bubbleverse of the individual person began to be sucked into the gargantuan mechanism of the scientific Commonverse. Like in the time of antiquity, the individual viewpoint became a poor and temporary reflection of the grandiose spectacle of the physical universe. The core Bubbleverse, which had only recently emerged

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from inside the religious Commonverse, was now in great danger of being engulfed by the mighty scientific Commonverse. But the core Bubbleverse survived. Philosophers and psychologists of the nineteenth century resisted aspirations of science to replace the Bubbleverse with the science-generated reality. In philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) proclaimed that the world of external reality was a product of the blind and insatiable metaphysical will, while Lev Shestov (1866–1938) maintained that the most essential issues of life and death are rooted in the individual mind, and not in the science-generated reality. In economics, Karl Marx (1818–1883) discovered that a rational scientific picture of society is constantly distorted by the vested interests of individuals of which they are unaware—the phenomenon he called ideology. In psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) elaborated his theory of the unconscious1 as that part of the individual mind that determines our rationally made choices. In the twentieth century, the presence of the core Bubbleverse was further elaborated by existentialism. Not only was the importance of the core Bubbleverse reinstated, but its structure was extended as well: the subconscious domain of the mind was added to Descartes’ conscious Self, reflecting upon external phenomena. The Bubbleverse finally found its present structure, with the core Bubbleverse in the centre, and the Commonverses in the periphery (see Fig. 7.1).

13.6 Omega Point: Dreaming of the Future Some philosophers and scientists predict that in the distant future the Bubbleverse will spiral towards a final point of divine unification. A palaeontologist and Roman Catholic priest Theilhard de Chardin theorised that, as evolution of Homo sapience continues, the noosphere (i.e., the intelligent layer of cosmos) will gain total dominance over the biosphere and concentrate into a metaphysical being—the Omega Point [7]. From the Bubbleverse’s perspective, the Omega Point is the universe with a centre but without a periphery and polarisation between god and man. The view was supported by theoretical physicist Frank Tipler, who  In this book, the Freudian term ‘unconscious’ is covered by the term ‘subconscious’.

1

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Table 13.1  Hi-storical types of the Bubbleverse, as a function of centration and polarisation Polarisation Centration

Not polarised

Polarised vertically

Polarised horizontally

Centred

Omega Point (futuristic) Mythological (ancients)

Biblical (BC) Humanistic (modern)

Christian (medieval) Philosophical (antiquity)

Not centred

maintained that the Omega Point universe is required by the laws of quantum physics [8]. To summarise, the hi-story of the Bubbleverse can be presented as in Table 13.1.

13.7 T  he Little Bang: The Hi-story of Child Development Scientists are not born scientists. While some theorists call human infants ‘little scientists’ [9, 10], in reality there is a large distance between the infants’ ‘knowledge’ and that of real scientists. Some behaviours of young infants (e.g., the ability to react to violation of object permanence and physical causality or simple statistical patterns) may indeed suggest that the infants have precocious knowledge of science, but this is not the case. What the infants react to is violation of general properties of phenomena (e.g., identity and inclusion, see Chap. 5) and not violation of scientific laws. Yes, infants can explore and learn from their exploration, but so can animals. Intuitively, 18-month-old children can react to relatively complex statistical patterns (e.g., distinguish between representative and unrepresentative samples of objects) [11], but this doesn’t make them mathematicians. In reality abstract concepts of science (RCs) differ from the intuitive ‘knowledge’ of young babies not in degree but in kind [12]. Speaking in the Bubbleverse’s terms, it is the ability to convert presenting phenomena into representing ones (symbols, signs, schemas and formulas) and thus squeeze one’s intuitive revelations through the zone of representation from the domain of subconscious into the domain of

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conscious and logical reasoning (see Fig. 8.3) that real scientists do. When a person goes through the conveyer of school education, his or her primeval vision of the world is challenged by the vision manufactured by science. Let us have a brief look at how the child responds to this challenge. In the beginning, there is Nothing. The Nothing has a miraculous ability to explode and give birth to something, which we refer to as the Bubbleverse. By analogy with the Big Bang that created the scientific universe, let us call the explosion of Nothing that launched the private Bubbleverse the Little Bang. As the theory goes, the Big Bang creates space and time and also matter in the form of the primal radiation [13]. In a very small time, there appeared lumps of matter (the primary isotopes), which later gave rise to elementary particles of matter and eventually to stars and galaxies that keep expanding. In contrast, the Little Bang creates a split between what we call mind and matter. In the beginning, mind and matter are the same, but as the primordial Bubbleverse expands, mind and matter become increasingly separated. In child psychology, the process of this separation was described by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget [14]. Initially, the child doesn’t distinguish itself from the outer world, taking the external world as an extension of its own activity. For example, when a three-month-old baby does some action (e.g., moving her legs violently) that produces a certain interesting effect (e.g., swinging of a cloth doll attached to a bed), the baby starts replicating the movement expecting the effect to happen again. When an older baby tries to widen a slit in a match box with her finger, with the intention to get a gold chain from the box but doesn’t succeed, she starts opening and closing her mouth as if expecting to solve her problem in this way. In their early preschool age, children demonstrate animistic and artificialist thinking, as if believing that everything in the world is purposefully made in order to satisfy their needs. The child’s early world doesn’t extend back into the past or forward into the future; instead, the child lives in the beautiful present. Gradually however, the child discovers that the world has its own reality and resists the child’s actions upon it. Through this resistance, the world forces the child to adjust (accommodate) its action to fit the requirements of the world. In course of this adjustment, the child learns that objects

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occupy space, don’t disappear when they go out of sight and are linked together through a series of cause-effect relationships. As the child grows older, he or she learns scientific concepts about physical matter and about his or her mind. With this knowledge, mind and matter become to be viewed as entities with very different qualities. Mind is active, it can feel, perceive, think and memorise, whereas matter is passive and devoid of the aforementioned abilities. At the same time, the initial unity between mind and matter, which has its root in the primordial Bubbleverse, keeps manifesting itself in the fact that the child has a body. For the child, his or her body increasingly become an enigma: on one hand, the body consists of matter—molecules and biological tissues; on the other hand, it can be moved and controlled by the child’s mind. The unity between mind and body, which for a baby was natural, begins to be viewed by the school age child as a problem, albeit only if the child is asked about it [15]. As the child becomes an adult and a scientist or a philosopher, the body-mind problem becomes a matter for scientific debates and philosophical contemplation. When the knowledge about matter expands, to include living matter (unicellular organisms, plants and animals), there appears another problem: to fit the mind into the living bodies in the course of biological evolution. For a preschool child, there was no such problem, as the child perceived matter in the form of ‘big chunks’—objects, and all the objects—rivers and clouds, grass and trees—contained some kind of mind or souls within themselves. But the time comes when the child learns that matter consists of atoms, quantum objects and fields that have no souls of their own. The ‘big chunks/objects’ become lumps of invisible and inanimate elements. At the same time, some of these lumps, including the child himself or herself, carry minds within themselves. When a grown child becomes a philosopher, he or she usually forgets that there was a time when mind and matter were the same, and even when observation over children remind the philosopher about the children’s early belief in the mind-matter unity, the philosopher explains this belief by immature and primitive mentality of a little child, as a confusion between two substances which ‘in reality’ are totally different. The philosopher uses his or her knowledge to extend the universe back into the past, up

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till the Big Bang, and ahead into the unknown future. But the coordination of mind and matter remains an unresolved problem. Having made a number of unsuccessful attempts to weave the mind and matter together, some thinkers may decide to resolve the problem by refusing subjective experience an independent existential status, considering mental processes to be a side effect of brain functioning [16, 17]. Other thinkers, directly or indirectly, might begin to consider the ‘childish’ view of things more seriously [18–21]. What if the early ‘panpsychism’ of a little child was not such a bad idea after all? What if matter indeed has some kind of a ‘spiritual dimension’ to it? What if the two contrasting realms of the Big universe—the realm of the mind and the realm of matter—were the same at a certain ‘singularity point’? If that was indeed the case, this might, albeit partially, explain the miracles of the voluntary control that our mind has over our body or the wonderful coordination between the workings of the brain cells and our mental experiences. This might also shed some light on how the ‘dead matter’ eventually became a living one, having acquired some kind of mental agency, which eventually became our consciousness. Of course, some problems would still remain. At what point of evolution did the clump of molecules, which contained the ‘sleeping mentality’ inside, become a living cell, capable of agency and activity? Do living cells within a single organism communicate with each other using some kind of mentality or can this communication be exhaustively explained in terms of physical causality? How exactly is our mental experience coordinated with the brain functioning? When the philosopher begins asking these questions, he or she becomes reflecting upon the Bubbleverse. In addition to the fundamental problem of the relation between mind and matter, reflecting upon the Bubbleverse raises other, more specific theoretical issues. We learn from science about the structure of matter, but what is the structure of subjective experience? How do we cope with the diversity and unstable nature of subjective images? How do we distinguish between what really exists and what is only an illusion and between true and false thoughts and subjective images? How do we define our Self, and is our Self a single subjective entity or a bunch of subjective processes running in parallel?

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Along with raising theoretical problems, the Bubbleverse perspective has repercussions for education. If the scientific Commonverse is not the ‘ultimate truth’ of the world but an auxiliary scaffolding built within the individual Bubbleverse to better cope with the diversity of phenomena, than the children’s conception of the world is no longer ‘a stage’ in the development towards a certain end point set by the scientific view of the world; rather, the children’s beliefs about the world should be viewed as a unique way of coping with the unique reality. This means that cognitive development is not a dismantling of imperfect and immature beliefs about the world and replacement of these beliefs by the beliefs of science, which represents the world ‘as it really is’ (the ‘scientific predestination perspective’); rather, development is building the scientific Commonverse up and over the child’s initial primordial Bubbleverse (the ‘scaffolding perspective’). The scaffolding perspective on psychological development has two implications. First, in the course of development, the children’s early beliefs are expected not to disappear, but coexist with the adults’ beliefs in some form. Indeed, as the child’s Bubbleverse matures and produces the scientific Commonverse within itself, the growing child (and later an adult) incorporates the scientific beliefs. But this incorporation is neither a transformation nor a replacement of the child’s early beliefs. Rather, the scientific beliefs are added to the child’s early beliefs, and the latter are conserved ‘at the bottom’ of the adults’ minds. Harbouring the early childish beliefs by the adults’ mind is revealed in such phenomena as anthropocentrism and animism of scientific language. Indeed, scientific texts are full of expressions, when inanimate objects are treated as animated subjects that can set goals and act purposefully (e.g., ‘DNA conserves’, ‘RNA carries’ and ‘evolution perfects’) (see Chap. 11 for more on that). Another indication of the child’s egocentric beliefs in the adults’ Bubbleverse is the adults’ social and moral egocentrism in human relations [22] and anthropocentrism in cosmological theories, such as the ‘anthropic principle’ [23]. Finally, in certain conditions rational adults exhibit magical beliefs, which, according to the scientific predestination perspective, are supposed to have disappeared in educated adults [24, 25]. Second, the children’s early beliefs are productive, rather than destructive. These early beliefs do not delay or inhibit cognitive development by

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making the children insensitive to scientific views as some theorists suggest [26, 27]; instead, these beliefs shape the children’s Bubbleverse both externally (the children’s social and physical environment) and internally (the children’s mental world). Externally, children’s early belief in magic created the ground for literary masterpieces, such as fairy tales by Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, and the vast industry of toys and electronic games for children. Internally, children’s early beliefs in magic and animism help them make the surrounding world understandable and psychologically comfortable. In addition, scholars argue that fairy tales help children understand their inner conflicts and resolve these conflicts in a symbolic plane, enrich the children’s knowledge of life and help them cope with the fears of the horrible [28]. Moreover, psychological studies revealed that children’s belief in magic can be used to promote intellectual creativity and advance cognitive functioning in children [29, 30, 31]. To summarise, in the Bubbleverse, the Little Bang that launches the course of child development, like the Big Bang that creates the physical universe, opens problems and perspectives that cry for attention of both theorists and practitioners.

13.8 Getting Away from Leviathan: Conclusion In the modern age, the image of the sociocultural Commonverse engulfing the individual’s Bubbleverse was embodied in Leviathan—the model of society created by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), in which individuals delegate their freedom to a sovereign in exchange for protection. According to Hobbes, the sovereign has all the civil, military and judicial powers. Even the words of an individual are under control of the sovereign. The opposing image today is the concept of liberalism—a mental orientation that emerged among Western philosophers and economists in the Age of Enlightenment. The ideology of liberalism proclaims the rights of a human individual to be equal with those of the society and protects freedom of speech, press and religion.

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Under liberalism, the separation of the core Bubbleverse from the sociocultural Commonverse reaches its highest peak, culminating in the form of abstract art and postmodernist philosophy [32]. The invention of printing played a principal role in this extraction of the core Bubbleverse from the sociocultural Commonverse, by locking a person into the world of a book and simultaneously separating this world from the world of others. In the early 1960s, the Canadian philosopher M. McLuhan predicted that soon the individualistic print culture would be replaced with electronic media culture [33]. This fundamental change will turn the world into the global village, in which people move from individualism and fragmentation back to collective identity. Evidently, reality proved this prediction wrong. Despite our ecstatic surfing of the internet in search of the lost unity with ‘the tribe’, the core Bubbleverse did not disappear. There is a big difference between a person sitting at a fire among his or her tribesmen and listening to a tribal myth and a teenager surfing the internet on his or her private computer or a gadget. To an extent, the electronic media made the core Bubbleverse even more isolated from the sociocultural Commonverse, since a gadget replaces our personal communication with other people with the communication mediated by the screen. Increasingly often, we see a young man and his girlfriend sitting next to each other in public transport and not talking or looking at each other; instead, they are immersed into their iPhones. More and more often our children, instead of reading books or playing with friends, escape into virtual worlds of their computer games. In the era of gadgets, the private psychological universe of the mind, at a new level, remains our ‘personal kingdom’, in which our Self is a ‘constitutional monarch’ with a limited power. But Leviathan is a resilient animal. With the emergence of science, it spread its tentacles beyond the sociocultural Commonverse, and into the scientific Commonverse, where the materialistic view of the universe became an absolute monarch (see Chaps. 1 and 11 for more on that). As a result, the human mind—the creator of materialism—had to bow to atoms, molecules and electrical circuits. And nowhere more this adoration became evident than in the domain of the origins of life. Unlike the reflective consciousness, which is predominantly linked to humans, life is also embedded into the bodies of more simple entities, such as bacteria

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and other monocellular organisms. On this ground, it can easily be concluded that life emerged as a result of the evolution of inanimate matter: atoms, molecules and energy. At the same time, life and mind are deeply connected. In the Bubbleverse, only living entities have mind, and all living entities have some kind of mind. If life emerged as a fluke of the evolution of inanimate matter, then the mind could too. And is it a coincidence that both life and the mind stubbornly resist all the efforts of chemistry and biology to exhaustively explain them? As long as the Bubbleverse asserts primacy of the mind over inanimate matter, it is crucial that the concept of life is considered in the context of the Bubbleverse.

References 1. Subbotsky, E. (2018). Science and magic in the modern world. Psychological perspectives on living with the supernatural. London and New York: Routledge. 2. Whitley, D.  S. (2009). Cave paintings and the human spirit: The origin of creativity and belief. New York: Prometheus. 3. Frazer, J. G. (1923). The golden bough. A study in magic and religion. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd.. 4. Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. (1999). 5. Sellars, J. (2006). Stoicism. California: University of California Press. 6. Retrieved from https://www.bartleby.com/2/3/4.html 7. de Chardin, T.  P. (2008). The phenomenon of man. New  York: Harper Perennial. 8. Tipler, F. J. (1994). The physics of immortality: Modern cosmology, God, and the resurrection of the dead. New York: Anchor Books. 9. Holub, D., & Roode, D. (2018). This little scientist: A discovery primer. New York: Little Simon. 10. Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A.  N., & Kuhl, P. (2001). The scientist in the crib. New York: Harper Collins. 11. Gopnik, A. (2009). Amazing Babies. Retrieved from https://www.edge.org/ conversation/alison_gopnik-amazing-babies 12. Subbotsky, E. (1996). Vygotsky’s distinction between lower and higher mental functions and recent studies on infant cognitive development. Journal of Russian and European Psychology, 34(2), 61–66.

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13. Kragh, H. (1996). Cosmology and controversy. The historical development of two theories of the universe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 14. Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.. 15. Subbotsky, E. (1996). The child as a Cartesian thinker. Children’s reasonings about metaphysical aspects of reality. New York and London: Psychology Press. 16. Churchland, P. (2013). Touching a nerve: The self as brain. New  York: W. W. Norton & Company. 17. Dennett, D. C. (2006). Sweet dreams. Philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 18. Griffin, D. R. (Ed.). (1988). The reenchantment of science: Postmodern proposals. New York: SUNY Press. 19. Laszlo, E. (2006). Science and the reenchantment of the Cosmos: The rise of the integral vision of reality. (Kindle ed.). Rochester: Inner Traditions. 20. Abram, D. (1997). The spell of the sensuous. Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York: Vintage Books. 21. Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press. 22. Batson, C.  D., & Thompson, E.  R. (2001). Why don’t moral people act morally? Motivational considerations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10(2), 54–57. 23. Barrow, J., & Tipler, F. (1986). The anthropic cosmological principle. New York: Oxford University Press. 24. Subbotsky, E. (2005). The permanence of mental objects: Testing magical thinking on perceived and imaginary realities. Developmental Psychology, 41, 301–318. 25. Subbotsky, E. (2007). Children’s and adult’s reaction to magical and ordinary suggestion: Are suggestibility and magical thinking psychologically close relatives? British Journal of Psychology, 98, 547–574. 26. Bloom, P., & Weisberg, D. S. (2007). Childhood origins of adult resistance to science. Science, 316, 996–997. 27. Shtulman, A. (2017). Scienceblind: Why our intuitive theories about the world are so often wrong. (Kindle ed.). New York: Basic Books. 28. Bettelheim, B. (1977). The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairy tales. New York: Vintage Books.

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29. Subbotsky, E., Hysted, C., & Jones, N. (2009). Watching films with magical content facilitates creativity in children. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 111, 261–277. 30. Subbotsky, E., & Matthews, J. (2011). Magical thinking and memory: Distinctiveness effect for TV advertisements with magical content. Psychological Reports, 109, 1–11. 31. Subbotsky, E., & Slater, E. (2011). Children’s discrimination of fantastic vs realistic visual displays after watching a film with magical content. Psychological Reports, 112, 603–609. 32. Jameson, F. (1992). Postmodernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism. North Carolina: Duke University Press. 33. McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

14 The Hi-story of Life

14.1 L ife Through the Prism of the Bubbleverse In the beginning there was Nothing. And then there appeared I. Or you if that matters. Well, not in no time and not overnight but let us skip the history. So, there appeared I, and I am alive. I know that I am alive because I can feel something. But to feel something there has to be the ‘something’—entity outside my Self. And so, we have a familiar split between subject (My Self ) and object (something that I am feeling) (see Chap. 3 for more on that). It follows from this that life is a crack in the Nothing—the split of the Nothing into subject and object. By definition, a living entity is inseparable from its environment, and the living entity plus its environment is another representation of what we earlier called the Bubbleverse. This means that life is not just a property of a subject, but the property of the whole Bubbleverse. It would then be a mistake to attribute life to a separate ‘blob’ in the Bubbleverse, such as a living cell or a person, without taking account of the blob’s surroundings. Now let’s become a little more specific. For me to feel means to be aware of my feelings. If I am not aware of my feelings and needs, I don’t © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_14

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feel. But to be aware of my feelings means that my feelings are reflected in my own Self, however tautological this phrase might look. Whereas a physical mirror is reflecting light coming from outside, I can reflect ‘my own light’—the light of subjectivity that I am generating. I am seeing an apple and I am aware of seeing the apple, I feel hungry and I am aware of that too. While awareness is mostly associated with the human mind, sentience isn’t. In the Cambridge dictionary, sentience is defined as “the quality of being able to experience feelings”. In other words, sentience is the ability to ‘sense one’s own states’, or to be ‘flipped on itself ’. And now we can make a definition of a living entity: a living entity is the entity which is flipped on itself. This property of being flipped on itself has many names: psyche, subjective experience, feelings, sensitivity, consciousness, mind and others. These terms are not identical, each of them has its own shade of the meaning, but all of them share one essential component— sentience. In this book, sentience will be treated as the simplest form of subjective experience. Natural or artificial systems with a negative feedback loop (e.g., the predator-prey balance or a thermostat) can simulate actions of a living entity (e.g., as if they ‘sense’ the changes in their surroundings and ‘want’ to maintain a stable condition near a certain setpoint), but in reality such ‘behaviour’ is programmed by nature or people and only superficially resembles the behaviour of a sentient organism. Only a living entity, starting from a single cell organism, can behave on the basis of the inner reflection of its own condition—the reflection that we call subjective experience. In the Bubbleverse’s perspective, the ability to feel one’s own states, or sentience, is the definitive feature of life. While this definition of life might seem outlandish to some readers, by the end of this chapter, I hope to make it more compelling. Now let’s make one more step forward. To feel is also to act. When I am seeing an apple, I am projecting qualia in the outer world of things-­ in-­themselves (see Chap. 7), when I feel hungry or thirsty I am thinking of food and water by representing them in my mind or, in a more advanced stage of the acting, simply eat and drink. These actions we call behaviours. Some of these behaviours are hard to see from the outside; for example, another person can detect the fact that I am seeing the world only by applying some special devices, such as goggles that turn my visual field upside down. When I put the goggles on, I begin to stumble upon

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things, and that is an indicator that I am seeing the things in a wrong way. To detect that I am thinking of food, the person has to ask me and hear my answers. But other behaviours are evident to everyone: when I start eating or switch my TV on, the person knows that I feel hunger of boredom. Purposeful behaviour is therefore the objective indicator that an entity is alive. Of course, there is a problem of how to distinguish purposeful behaviour from non-purposeful one, but this is a technical problem (see Section 14.3 for more on this distinction). Another, though secondary, objective indicator of a living entity is a membrane. Membrane separates the entity from the environment and protects the inner content from external influences. However, this separation only concerns the body, but not the agency. The agency component of the living entity—the entities’ subjective experience—transcends the body and includes the surrounding space. Because of this, the entity can now treat the environment selectively, distinguishing in the environment those objects that can be consumed from those that need to be avoided. There appears what can be called the ‘subjective field’, which encompasses the whole Bubbleverse, with the organism’s body being in the centre. The body becomes an open system that consumes energy from the environment and excretes the waste, but it can only do this because the environment is not separated from the entity entirely but is present in the system and for the system in the form of the organism’s subjective experience. With development, the organism’s subjective experience evolves in what we call consciousness, and the centre of subjective experience becomes what we call the Self. Note that, according to the classification of elements in the Bubbleverse (see Table 9.1), subjective experience is existentially an absolute entity, meaning that the concept of life cannot be reduced to more basic concepts or placed in the cause-effect continuum of nature. Like qualia, life is an authentic property of my Self; this means that we cannot create life by producing a living entity from non-living entities, for the same reason that we cannot produce ‘roundness’ and ‘redness’ from other, more basic elements. All we can do regarding phenomena in the Bubbleverse is to attribute life to some of them on the basis of objective indicators, such as purposeful behavior and a membrane: for example, molecules, rivers, mountains and galaxies don’t belong to the ‘club’ of the living, but animals, plants and bacteria do.

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Indeed, in order to distinguish a living entity from a non-living one, it is not enough to say that a living entity has needs and a non-living one hasn’t. A river, in order to flow, ‘needs’ a slope; a snow, not to melt into water, ‘needs’ a sub-zero temperature, a tornado ‘needs’ an influx of energy from the atmosphere to keep going, but neither the river, nor the snow and the tornado would do anything to obtain what they ‘need’. In reality the non-living entities don’t have any needs; it is our Self that ascribes needs to non-living entities, to be able to interpret their behaviour by analogy with itself (see Chap. 11 for more on that). In order for the entity to begin doing something, the need has to be reflected in the entity’s supernatural ‘mirror of psyche’, and it is this reflection that creates a living entity. With the emergence of a living entity, there emerges what we call environment. Because without life, without psyche there is no point in talking about environment. The very concept of environment, which includes space, time and physical causality, only makes sense in relation to a living entity that makes this environment a source of food or danger, as something good or bad for itself. We can speak of the ‘environment before life’ only because we are already invisibly present there, in the past before life. In other words, when in the scientific Commonverse we create the hi-story of life, we spin the time-­ machine backwards and slip into the hypothetical ‘RNA world’ [1,2] and further down to the Big Bang. To summarise, not only does life stand separate and opposite to the cause-effect continuum of nature, but life is the creator of this continuum. This means that in the Bubbleverse’s perspective all we know as the history of the universe before life is an artificial scaffolding, which we consciously create in order to make sense of the concept of life in the spatial-temporal and cause-effect continuum of the Bubbleverse. In reality though it is logically impossible to inscribe life into the cause-effect continuum. Nevertheless, attempts of building such a scaffolding have been made. Let us have a look at some of them.

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14.2 Life in the Commonverse In the scientific Commonverse, the definition of life is necessarily reductive. Thus, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger defined a living organism as an open organic system that has an ability to resist the 2nd law of thermodynamics by feeding itself with negative entropy [3], and the biologist Richard Dawkins sees life in a self-replicating molecule capable of carrying information [4]. Still others add to the above features the ability of a living entity to extract energy from the environment [5]. Finally, some biologists maintain that even the most complex self-reproducing molecules don’t make a living system until they are organised into a whole—a living cell [6]. We don’t know whether the primordial self-replicating systems like RNA molecule were alive or just open ‘dissipative systems’, similar to a whirlpool or a hurricane, but most natural scientists agree that life emerges as a result of evolution of non-animate matter. None of the scientific definitions of life goes as far as to include mental properties, such as sentience, irritability or agency. Some authors apply the term ‘active work’ to describe the functions of separate parts of a living cell, such as RNA or proteins [7]. However, using anthropomorphic language doesn’t imply that complex chemical reactions include intentional processes based on mental representation (see Chap. 11). As a result, scientific definitions of life do not draw the borderline between non-living chemical processes and processes in a living entity. In reality though, even if a living organism is unable to move, its metabolism is fundamentally different from chemical reactions. A direct chemical reaction means that two different substances, like hydrogen and oxygen, come into direct contact with each another. First, energy must be supplied to break the covalent bonds that hold H2 and O2 molecules together; a covalent (or molecular) bond in chemistry is a chemical link between two atoms in which the electron pairs are shared between them. The resulting hydrogen cations and oxygen anions are then free to react with each other, which they do because of their electronegativity differences. When a molecule of water is formed, a covalent bond makes an atom of the oxygen and two atoms of hydrogen into a water molecule

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(H2O). Each of the covalent bonds contains two electrons, one from a hydrogen atom and one from the oxygen atom, and both atoms share the electrons. When the chemical bond emerges to make water, additional energy is released, which propagates the reaction. As follows from this description, a chemical reaction is called ‘reaction’ in the metaphorical sense, due to the unavoidably anthropomorphic nature of language (see Chap. 11) but in reality the ‘reaction’ happens completely within the cause-effect continuum of physical matter and does not require terms such as ‘sensing’ and ‘acting’. The same can be said about complex processes happening within a living cell. Thus, protein synthesis is made by complex molecular machines called ribosomes. The ribosome is largely made up of another organic molecule—ribonucleic acid (RNA), as well as dozens of proteins [8]. The reaction of protein synthesis (called translation) is very complex and is usually described in active verbs; thus, in the aforementioned article, the ribosome ‘decodes’, ‘utilises’ and ‘recognises’. Again, these active terms are nothing but anthropomorphic heuristics for making a description of chemical reactions more linguistically accessible. In reality, like chemical ‘reaction’ in the inorganic world, the workings of the ribosome are completely contained within the cause-effect continuum of the interplay of a complex system of atomic and molecular forces [9]. However, none of these forces separately and even all of them together make the system a living organism capable of some kind of intentional activity. It is not until such systems acquired another property—the membrane—that they can become a living organism—a cell. It has been suggested that the first living cells were hypothetical cellular organisms with self-replicating RNA but without DNA [10]. The first proto membranes (coacervates) may have been simply bubbles made of lipids (fats) in the liquid substances. The first living cells may have originated as symbiotic coexistence of the membrane and the self-replicating RNA [5]. The importance of developing the membrane in transformation from a non-­ living into a living entity becomes clear when we remember that any chemical reaction is a direct interlinkage of atomic and molecular forces that happens when the substances (reagents) come into close contact. In this process, there is no division into a subject (the active whole) and an object (the passive part). Instead, different parts of interacting molecules

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come into coordination according to their atomic compositions. In contrast, a reaction of a living cell with the matter outside the cell is not a direct intercourse but is mediated by the protective layer—membrane. Cell membrane surrounds every living cell and holds its content inside. On the surface of membranes, there are antigens and proteins that protect the cell. Membranes can be permeable or semi-permeable which allows the flow of nutrients, fluids, wastes (cell metabolism by-products) and chemical messengers to be transported into and out of the cell. Thus, having a membrane creates an opposition between a subject (inside the membrane) and an object (outside the membrane). To summarise, the components of the living cell could have emerged as two separate entities coexisting in close proximity with each other. The first entity was a passive dissipative system open to the influx of energy and able to use this energy to support itself and replicate. The second was the cell’s membrane, emerged as result of links between molecules of fats or proteins; we can observe this happening when a drop of oil doesn’t dissolve in water but forms a thin layer on the water surface. In certain conditions, some of which exist in warm hydrothermal vents at the ocean bottom, the primitive membranes joined in symbiotic relations with self-­ replicating RNA that initially clung to the inorganic surfaces available within the vent’s labyrinth. As a result, there appeared a primitive ‘proto-­ cell’. The membrane in this proto cell, made from fatty acids, gradually changed its structure and became working as a ‘semi-conductor’, thus accumulating energy from ions that were flowing through the cell and using this energy for building up the cell’s body. It is at this level of chemical complexity that another revolution may have occurred, and the cell became ‘flipped upon itself ’: there appeared the first form of subjective experience (sentience) as a sense of need in energy supplying substances. The most important indicator of the emergence of subjective experience is the process of cell signalling [11]. It is clear that the concept of signalling is no longer within the classical cause-effect continuum, as it involves sensation and active response. Thus, a non-living self-regulating device, such as a thermostat, doesn’t need a membrane. The device’s components, such as relays, automatically change with the deviation of temperature from a certain point set by humans in advance; it’s functions can be exhaustively described in passive cause-effect terms, such as metal

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expansion due to temperature, electrical currents and relay contacts. In contrast, the living organism feels the deviation as an experience of pain, fear or need. Indeed, having a membrane makes the relationships between a stimulus (e.g., a chemical substance or a beam of light) and the cell mediated; as a result, the stimulus acquires a new quality—‘meaning for the cell’—which can only be understood in non-physical terms, such as ‘useful’, ‘harmful’ or ‘neutral’ for the cell’s survival and replication. So, even if a living cell doesn’t have the ability of active movement, it still reflects the ‘out of membrane’ substances in this new and non-physical form of communication—subjective experience. One more fundamental change happened when these proto-cells somehow developed special Nano-machines able to actively ‘pump-­ through’ the ions and absorb energy from the environment. They no longer needed the constant flow of the energy rich matter through their membranes but became able to actively absorb the matter and extract the energy. This made it possible for the living cell to leave the supporting surfaces and go into an active pursuit of food. However, the physical components of mobility were not enough to make the ‘mobile cells’ competitive. For becoming self-sufficient active agents, the cells needed subjective experience. Without emergence of the ‘sense of need’, detaching off the energy supplying thermal springs and going for a free swim in the ocean would be counter effective, as the chances of blindly bumping into the energy rich substance in the expanse of water are slim. On the other hand, the acquisition of the ‘sense of need’ made the cell sensitive to the gradient of energy rich sources and grossly increase the cells’ chances of finding the source of food. According to some biochemists, the source of energy is the motion of protons through the cell, and this energy is enough to provide for the cell’s metabolism and motion in the environment [5]. However, at this level living cells (most of which being bacterial prokaryotic cells) possess a very basic level of subjectivity. In order for this level to become more advanced a cell must evolve into a eukaryotic complex cell, and this conversion occurred through endosymbiosis (coexistence) of some prokaryotic cells [12]. As a result, there appeared a set of complex morphological and functional changes, such as special fabrics of energy (mitochondria), a cellular core and sexual reproduction. The cellular membrane changed

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too and became flexible enough to allow a predatory cell to engulf other cells in the process of phagocytosis. All these changes may have lifted subjective experience to a much higher level, providing the eukaryotic cell, on top of the feeling of need, with some kind of ‘perception’ based on sensitivity to chemicals and light and the feeling of feedback during motion. It is proposed that the earliest living organisms on earth were similar to sponges or corals—multicellular colonies consisting of single-celled organisms capable of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is a chemical process that uses sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into sugars that a cell can use as sources of energy. Other organisms get their energy directly from chemical reactions; these organisms are called chemoautotrophs. Today, the closest to the earliest life forms are Stromatolites—structures formed by cyanobacteria or single-celled algae. Cyanobacteria use water, carbon dioxide and sunlight to create their food and expel oxygen as a by-­ product. The oldest known stromatolites have been dated between 3710 million years and 3695 million years old [13]. The emergence of elementary subjective experience in simple unicellular organisms becomes more evident when the organisms acquire mobility. Thus, studies showed that bacteria cells named Escherichia coli or Salmonella typhimurium can sense chemicals in their environment and respond by moving towards some and away from others, using their flagella—long, whip-like structures working like a fish’s tail [14]. In a more recent study, the choanoflagellates—a group of free-living unicellular and colonial organisms considered to be the closest living relatives of animals—were observed swimming towards the oxygen concentration in the water [15]. Similarly, in a single-celled pond organism Synechocystis scientists discovered the ability to detect light ray direction and move towards the light. The bacteria do this by acting like a lens in a human eye: incoming rays are focused by the organism’s spherical surface in a spot on the far side of the cell. The organism then moves towards the light by shuffling along in the opposite direction to that bright spot [16]. Interestingly, scientists recently discovered a bacterium which for millions of years has been isolated in water collected at 2.8 km depth in a South African gold mine. This bacterium had genes for various receptors and systems for signals transmission, which in microbes stand for neural

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system and makes them capable of sensing nutrients in its environment. The bacteria also had flagella that permit motility along chemical gradients of minerals dissolved in the water. This suggests that this type of bacteria, which was completely independent from the environment on the surface of earth, was able of sensation and active movements—the external manifestations of embryonic subjective experience [17]. Another element of subjective experience that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) [18] necessarily needed was some kind of the sense of unity or wholeness, otherwise it would easily disintegrate. Indeed, if the first living organism can distinguish substances that can be used as a source of energy, than it must also be able to sense substances that can be harmful to its body, and this necessarily implies the distinction of the body and all the parts (organelles) inside the body from the environment outside the body. The sense of the body wholeness would be necessary for the cell in order not to digest its own organelles and protect itself from harmful entities. Thus, according to an article in Science Daily, “When cells are confronted with an invading virus or bacteria or exposed to an irritating chemical, they protect themselves by going off their DNA recipe and inserting the wrong amino acid into new proteins to defend them against damage” [19]. The cell’s membrane therefore is not simply a ‘bubble made of the film of fats’, but a sensitive border that makes the internal content (a whole) able to sense itself as a whole, as something different from the outer environment, either useful (food) or harmful (enemy). Even more complex behaviour is displayed by some primitive organisms in extreme conditions, such as hunger. For example, bacteria Bacillus subtilis that lives in soil can grow flagella and actively move in the environment, gathering in swarms. When nutrients became scarce, about half of cells of B. subtilis enter the pathway to become spores that can exist for a very long period of time without food. But before they do this, they elicit a special toxic substance that kills their siblings and feed on these dead cells. Amazingly, the killers also produce ‘the antidote’ substance that protects them from their own killing toxin, whereas the other half of the community blocks their production of the antidote and make themselves available to the killer-bacilli [20]. Of course, this ‘quasi-altruistic’ behaviour of the victims is far from being an analogue of conscious

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altruism in humans, but it certainly involves a degree of subjective experience, in terms of sensing the harmful toxins and blocking the production of the antidote instead of automatically producing it. If the bacteria-­ victims had any sense of the body, this sense had to be suppressed to allow the destructive substances to kill the body. The sense of the body, along with the sense of need, may be the first manifestations of subjective experience that emerged in the Bubbleverse. Perhaps, it is in this context that we can interpret the concluding passage of Darwin’s ground-breaking book: “There is a grandeur in the view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved” [21, p.360]. The emergence of subjective experience is really ‘a breathing into’—a supernatural event which slips through the fingers of the cause-effect continuum. With this magical breathing, a living sentient entity comes into existence, together with all the rest of the Bubbleverse that we call Nature. It is hard to imagine what the world is like for a bat [22]. Even more difficult is to visualise what the world looks like for an amebae or a cyanobacterium. All we can say with a certain degree of certainty is that for a bat or a bacterium the world nevertheless ‘looks’ something, whereas for an atom, a gene or a crystal it doesn’t. Of course, there is a long distance between this embryonic form of bacterial subjective experience and human conscious subjective experience. Bacteria ‘flips upon itself ’ and becomes able to feel its needs and wholeness, resulting in ‘qualia’ such as taste and pain, but it cannot reflect upon these subjective experiences in the way a person can reflect upon his or her feeling of hunger or sense of the body. Still, the embryonic bacterial subjective experience and reflective human consciousness share a fundamental common feature: the division between subject and object and sentience, which distinguishes the former from the latter. With this division, the primordial Bubbleverse comes into being for the first time. But if we acknowledge that a free-living single cellular eukaryotic organism, such as an amoeba, has some kind of simple subjective experience in the form of sentience, irritability and sensation, then what

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happens to the cell when it acquires the ability to join with other cells in a multicellular organism? Does the cell stop having sentience and delegate all its psychological content completely to the central nervous system of its host, or does it retain some kind of mentality? Taken in the Bubbleverse perspective, the correct answer is the latter, rather than the former. Indeed, the Bubbleverse perspective asserts that any living entity, however small, is an autonomous Bubbleverse of its own, meaning that it is split into subject and object. If the cell of a multicellular organism completely lost its psychological, mental dimension, it would have to stop being a Bubbleverse and thus also stop being alive. Yet, in biology any cell in a body, be it situated in a liver, a kidney or in the brain, is considered a living cell. But if the cell retains some kind of subjectivity, being at the same time a part of a bigger whole, it has to use that subjective experience for performing its main functions: nourishment, excretion, defence and multiplication. As an example, let’s take a neuron. Hence the interesting question: which entity is more complex—the brain or a neuron? At first glance, this is the brain, since it consists of billions of neurons. But on the other hand, a neuron is a living entity, a micro Bubbleverse, and the brain isn’t. The brain is an organ that does not have its own internal agency independent of the whole subject, whereas the neuron is a living cell, and an element of agency must be present in it. Evolutionarily, the brain developed not as an independent unit, but as a part of the living organism, and a part cannot fully substitute the whole (see ‘The brain in the vat’ mental experiment [23]). It looks as though the brain is a huge hostel with billions of rooms in which guest neurons reside. In reality a neuron is a fully functional cell with all the necessary elements of a cell, it is being fed and protected by the surrounding cells— astrocytes. A human brain contains around 100 billion neurons, each connected to around 1000 other neurons. Because neurons are so connected, most of them are indispensable and cannot multiply. But neuron chemical metabolism, though very complex, in principle is similar to the metabolism of other cells, with glucose being the favourite neurons’ ‘food’ [24–26]. Neurons are distant descendants of eukaryotic unicellular organisms which have a membrane-bound nucleus and later joined with other cells to form a multicellular community.

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On this ground, there all reasons to attribute some sort of agency to a neuron; a neuron «needs» to be fed and to be occupied with a certain kind of function, and if this function is artificially disturbed, the neuron can switch to another function. As a philosopher Daniel Dennett put in his interview: “Maybe a lot of the neurons in our brains are not just capable but, if you like, motivated to be more adventurous, more exploratory or risky in the way they comport themselves, in the way they live their lives. They’re struggling amongst themselves with each other for influence, just for staying alive, and there’s competition going on between individual neurons” [27]. There is one important consequence of acknowledging the presence of agency and mentality at the level of a single neuron: it makes it easier to explain the otherwise unexplainable and non-causal link between our thinking and the processes in the brain. Thus, when our Self consciously commands our body to make a voluntary movement, might it not be that this mental command is being felt at the level of a single neuron? Indeed, if a neuron is not just a complex combination of molecules, but has a spiritual dimension, then it can be sensitive not only to chemical signals coming from the bodily environment, but to mental messages coming from the Self. Coming back to the main theme of this chapter, we can conclude that in the perspective of the Bubbleverse, living organisms could not evolve from non-living ones, because the non-living entities (the objects in the form of  environment) can only emerge simultaneously with the living ones (the subjects). However, once the ‘magical breathing into’ occurred, it launched the process of evolution. In the course of evolution subjective reality passed through various stages to become human consciousness.

14.3 Types of Mentality So, according to some theories, at the ‘great split’ between object and subject, when the Bubbleverse emerges from Nothing, the living organism was likely to be fixed to a certain place (e.g., a thin partition within a labyrinth of the ocean vent) and supplied with food source by the natural flow of the food containing material; the organism’s subjective experience

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was a simple sensation of internal needs, similar to our feeling of hunger. This simplest type of subjective experience had a causal power—to make the organism start accepting and digesting food (Type 1—simple agentic mentality). The external sensation—like the sense of the gradient of the source of energy (gradient of light or a chemical substance) could only appear when the organism separated from the permanent place and became able to move in the surrounding medium (Type 2—complex agentic mentality). The closest living relatives of these primordial organisms are choanoflagellates—a group of free-living unicellular colonial eukaryotes [28]. Choanoflagellates have an ovoid or spherical cell body that is 3–10 microns in diameter with a single flagellum surrounded by a collar. By moving their flagella, the organisms can propel themselves through the water and trap bacteria and other organic material against the collar of microvilli, where these foodstuffs are engulfed and digested. These primitive creatures are prone to colonial behaviour, what could gradually lead to forming multicellular mutants—animals. The animals’ complex bodies could lead to a more complex mentality than what we attribute to a single cellular bacterium. At this stage organisms could develop the simplest type of intelligence, such as the ability to find the shortest way to the source of food. To examine this, in one study researchers used the plasmodium of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum; it is a large amoeba-­ like cell consisting of a dendritic network of tube-like structures (pseudopodia). Scientists divided the piece of plasmodium into small chunks and placed it into a labyrinth, with two blocks of food located in the two ends of the maze. After some time, the chunks joined into a single organism which, after some searching done with the help of pseudopodia, was able to form a thick tube covering the shortest way between two points in the labyrinth [29]. It is flexibility—the entity’s ability to vary its way towards the attractor—that is the objective indicator of purposeful behaviour. Indeed, a piece of iron moves towards a magnet pole or towards the Earth’s centre of gravity, but it is unable to vary and adjust its ‘behavour’ in order to reach the attractor in the shortest and fastest way. Multicellular organisms with Type 3 subjective experience (simple non-­ reflective mentality) display the flexible behaviour even to greater extent then organisms with Type 2 mentality, by being able to discover indirect

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ways of reaching the attractor. Thus, the Russian psychologist Alexei Leontiev described and experiment with a water flea (Daphnia), which is attracted towards light. When it is placed in a glass tube that lies horizontally under the water with one end open towards the source of light, the fleas began at once to move along the horizontal limb in the direction of the source of light. On emerging from the tube, they then swam freely to the illuminated wall of the tank. One might think that their behaviour is strictly controlled by the effect of light. However, when the tube was rotated by 180 degrees from the direction of the source of light, the fleas moved in the direction away from the source of light and, on reaching the open water, turned around and proceeded towards the source of light. This demonstrated that the organisms were able to sensibly adapt to the environment, rather than to blindly move towards the source of attraction [30]. A limitation of this kind of mentality is its global nature. Although at this stage animals develop specialised sense organs, they are unable to perceive an object separately from its environment and cannot distinguish between a source of food and an object that is an obstacle on the way to the source. Thus, in another experiment described by Leontiev, American catfish were taught to swim towards the source of food by finding a way around the obstacle that prevented them from reaching the food directly. When the obstacle was removed, the fish kept swimming towards the source of food by the same curved route as if the obstacle was still there, and only gradually learned to go towards the source of food in a straight line. This shows that in the beginning the animals perceive the source of food and the obstacle as a single complex but are able to eventually adapt when the obstacle disappears. Swarm intelligence—a coordinated behaviour of a group of animals and insects that lacks a centrally coordinated control, belongs to this type of mentality too. Thus, individual ants do not exhibit complex behaviours, yet a colony of ants is able to solve complex tasks such as constructing nests, taking care of their young, building bridges and searching for food [31]. However, the ability of creatures at this stage of mentality to differentiate between objects within the environment is scarce. This changes with the onset of complex non-reflective mentality (Type 4), when animals develop the first forms of mental representation. Experiments revealed that when mammals, such as dogs and monkeys,

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had been shown an attractive item of food, which then was hidden from view by a screen, they could easily find the way around the screen and would keep searching for the original item if behind the screen they had found another and less attractive item. This shows that the animals can keep the first item in their short-term memory. Also, unlike the catfish, when the obstacle towards the food is removed, animals can proceed towards the food in a shortest way as if the obstacle had never been there. At the highest end of this level, more complex forms of intelligence could emerge, such as the ability to problem-solving in apes. The German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler conducted experiments that demonstrated the problem-solving ability in chimps. For example, in one experiment a bait is placed outside the cage in which the animal is housed, at a certain distance from it. Next to the cage but beyond the animal’s reach is a long stick. Another, shorter stick is put inside the cage that can reach the long one but not the bait. Most animals found no difficulty in taking the short stick and putting the long one towards themselves and then reaching the bait. The new feature of this intellectual activity is in the capacity to solve two-phase tasks [32]. This type of mentality is the one best described in the literature. This stage also crowns the mental abilities that can be found in the animal kingdom. As argued in Chap. 11, in spite of the analogies found between human and animal behaviour, in the perspective of the Bubbleverse there is no a necessary causal link between animal and human mentality. The fundamental property of human mentality is the reflective ability—the ability of our Self ‘to think about its own existence’—the ability to say “I am thinking, therefore I exist”. Hi-storically, this ability was rooted in the invention of invisible supernatural reality of spirits [33]. As a result, subjective experience became structured, by dividing the reality into two domains: ordinary reality and extraordinary reality (see Table 7.1). This kind of subjective experience we call consciousness. Consciousness had a special function—existentialisation: deciding whether elements of subjective experience belong to ordinary or extraordinary reality and making a decision about the existential statuses of these elements. Human mentality can therefore be called reflective mentality. The initial substage of this kind of mentality—Type 5 simple reflective mentality—existed in humans before they developed symbolic language and abstract thinking.

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Table 14.1  Types of mentality, types of subjective experience and types of behaviour of living entities Type of mentality

Type of subjective experience

Simple agentic mentality Complex agentic mentality Simple non-­ reflective mentality Complex non-reflective mentality Simple reflective mentality

Sensation of internal needs Sensation of external stimuli

Complex reflective mentality

Representing reality in symbolic form

Differential sensation of food and neutral objects Keeping the image of a source of food in short-term memory Reflecting upon own thinking and existence

Type of behaviour Can accept and digest food which naturally flows by Can purposefully move in the environment towards the source of food by the shortest way Are able to find an indirect way towards food by overcoming obstacles Can find food obscured by a screen; can solve two-phase tasks Can distinguish between ordinary and superordinary phenomena; can rank phenomena on their existential statuses Can do measurements and create RCs

Eventually  though, consciousness evolved into symbolic consciousness, with the development of symbolic function and abstract language. This opened the possibility of inventing comparisons and measurements and, as an extension of these abilities—mathematics and sciences, thus bringing the Bubbleverse into its mature shape (see Chaps. 2–9 of this book). These developments shaped the highest known Type  6 complex reflective mentality. The types of mentality are summarised in Table 14.1.

14.4 The Miracle of Life: Conclusion The British biologist Richard Dawkins defined a miracle as a very unlikely event which does not violate the laws of nature (e.g., a marble statue waving its hand at us) [34]. Clearly, this understanding of a miracle does not take us beyond the continuum of nature. In contrast, in the Bubbleverse a miracle is defined as a violation of laws of nature, an impossible

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phenomenon, rather than an improbable one (see Table 5.3). For example, a miracle would be if the marble statue could develop a feeling of sympathy towards us and waved its hand at us as a greeting. In the scientific Commonverse there is no place for subjective experience. A scientist who explores Nature uses his or her own mind as an instrument that reduces complex phenomena to simpler ones. This approach works well as long as it concerns explaining inanimate objects (e.g., complex molecular structures within a living cell) via other, and simpler, inanimate objects. Still, biologists view living organisms as some kind of biological machines, with no mental reality involved. According to biochemist Nick Lane, life emerged on the ocean floor; the right chemical and temperature conditions. Resulted in the formation of large molecular structures, such as the fascinating turbinelike protein, Adenosine triphoshate synthase, the head part of which is made to rotate, capturing energy in usable chemical form. In the course of natural selection, these complex molecules evolve into a living organism—a system that is capable of copying itself. For instance, a virus doesn’t have metabolism of its own but takes energy from the body of its host. Structurally, a virus is nothing but a complex combination of molecules. However, viewed through the biological criteria of life, a virus can be called a living organism, because when it finds itself within a cell of a host, it replicates. From the biochemist’s view, there is no a sharp divide between living and non-living organisms; rather, there is a gradual transition between the two [5]. For a psychologist however, the divide between a living and a non-­ living entity is fundamental. Psychologically, the constituent part of a living entity is the presence of subjective reality—the ability to sense (or reflect upon) their own needs. It is on the basis of reflecting on our subjective reality that we create the idea of inanimate objects. Some of such objects, like a meteorite, look ‘entirely dead’, whereas others, such as a growing crystal or a moving cyclone, in some ways remind a living entity, but in other ways are fundamentally different from it. Let’s take a cyclone as an example. Speaking metaphorically, we can apply the concept of a need to a tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclones’ heat engine is fuelled by warm ocean waters and requires special atmospheric conditions. It is therefore possible to say that the cyclone ‘needs’ these conditions, and when these

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conditions disappear, the cyclone fades and ‘dies.’ However, the cyclone is not aware that it needs something, and therefore does not look for the source of resources that are needed for its continuation. Being not alive, the cyclone cannot really die. That is why, when applied to the emergence of life, which contains subjective reality, reductionism gets into a vicious circle: explaining subjective reality through the products of subjective reality. Of course, it is tempting to ‘project’ the evolution of living organisms by natural selection into the domain of inanimate matter. By creating metaphorical images of evolution of crystals [35] or organic chemical substances [36] it is possible to create a more or less plausible hi-story of evolution of matter before life. But the point at which this ‘pre-life’ speculative hi-­ story ends and life begins will remain a mystery. Unlike some Neo-Darwinists, Charles Darwin understood that.

References 1. Cech, T.  R. (2012). The RNA worlds in context. Cold Spring Harbour Perspectives in Biology, 4, a006742. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm. nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3385955/. 2. Neveu, M., Kim, H. J., & Benner, S. A. (2013). The “strong” RNA world hypothesis: Fifty years old. Astrobiology, 13, 391–403. 3. Schrödinger, E. (2012). What is Life? With mind and matter and autobiographical sketches. New York: Cambridge University Press. 4. Retrieved from https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/ dawk-body.html 5. Lane, N. (2016). The vital question: Why is life the way it is? London: Profile Books. 6. Es’kov, K. U. (2014). Udivitel’naja Paleontologiya. Moscow: Enas. 7. Markov, A. (2011). Rozhdeniye Slozhnosti. Evolutsionnaya Biologiya Segodnia. Moscow: Astrel, Corpus. 8. Savir, Y., & Tlusty, T. (2013). The ribosome as an optimal decoder: A lesson in molecular recognition. Cell, 153, 471–479. Retrieved from https://www. cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(13)00389-9. 9. Trobro, S., & Åqvist, J. (2005). Mechanism of peptide bond synthesis on the ribosome. PNAS, 102, 12395–12400. Retrieved from https://www. pnas.org/content/102/35/12395.

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10. Joyce, G.  F. (2002). The antiquity of RNA-based evolution. Nature, 418, 214–221. 11. Eungdamrong, N. J., & Iyengar, R. (2004). Modelling cell signalling networks. Biology of the Cell, 96, 355–362. 12. Koonin, E. V. (2011). The logic of chance: The nature and origin of biological evolution. New York: FT Press. 13. Nutman, A. P., Bennett, V. C., Friend, C. R. L., Van Kranendonk, M. J., & Chivas, A.  R. (2016). Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures. Nature, 537, 535–538. 14. Blair, D.  F. (1995). How bacteria sense and swim. Annual Review of Microbiology, 49, 489–522. 15. Goldstein, R. (2016). How single-celled organisms navigate to oxygen. Retrieved from https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/how-single-celledorganisms-navigate-to-oxygen 16. Webb, J. (2016). Bacteria ‘see’ like tiny eyeballs. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35502310 17. Chivian, D., et al. (2008). Environmental genomics reveals a single species ecosystem deep within the Earth. Science, 322, 275–278. 18. Theobald, D. L. (2010). A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry. Nature, 465, 219–222. 19. University of Chicago Medical Center. (2009). Cells defend themselves from viruses, bacteria with armour of protein errors. ScienceDaily. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091125134701.htm 20. Craig, D., Ellermeier, C. D., Hobbs, E. C., Gonzalez-Pastor, J. E., & Losick, R. (2005). A three-protein signalling pathway governing immunity to a bacterial cannibalism toxin. Cell, 124, 549–559. 21. Darwin, C. (2008). On the origin of species. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 22. Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450. 23. Heylighen, F. (2012). A brain in a vat cannot break out: why the singularity must be extended, embedded and embodied. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19, 126–142. 24. Peters, A., Schweider, U.,...& Felm, H.L. (2004). The selfish brain: Competition for energy resources. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 28, 143–180. 25. Bolanos, J. P., Almeida, A., & Moncada, S. (2010). Glycolysis: A bioenergetic or a survival pathway? Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 35, 145–149.

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26. Samikhina, I. (2016). Prozhorliviy mozg. Retrieved from https://biomolecula.ru/articles/prozhorlivyi-mozg 27. Dennett, D. (2020). The normal well-tempered mind. Retrieved from https://www.bodyintelligence.com/bi-blog/daniel-dennett-the-normalwell-tempered-mind 28. King, N., et al. (2008). The genome of the choanoflagellate Monosiga brevicollis and the origin of metazoans. Nature, 451, 783–788. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2562698/. 29. Yamada, H., Toth, A., & Nakagaki, T. (2000). Intelligence: Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism. Nature, 407, 470. Retrieved from https://www. researchgate.net/publication/238823756_Intelligence_MazeSolving_by_an_Amoeboid_Organism. 30. Leontiev, A.  N. (1981). An outline of the evolution of the psyche. In A. N. Leontiev (Ed.), Problems of the development of the mind (pp. 156–326). (Trans. M. Kopylova). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Retrieved from https:// www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1981/evolution.htm 31. Maeterlinck, M. (1927). The life of the white ant. London, UK: George Allen & Unwin. 32. Köhler, W. (1925). The mentality of apes. London and New  York: Kegan Trench & Harcourt. 33. Subbotsky, E. (2018). Science and magic in the modern world. Psychological perspectives on living with the supernatural. London and New York: Routledge. 34. Dawkins, R. (2006). The blind watchmaker. New York: Penguin Books. 35. Cairns-Smith, A. G. (1996). Evolving the mind: On the nature of matter and the origins of consciousness. New York: Cambridge University Press. 36. Dose, K. (1988). Prebiotic evolution and the origin of life: Chemical and biochemical aspects. In J. Jeanteur, Y. Kuchino, W. E. G. Muller, & P. L. Paine (Eds.), Progress in molecular and subcellular biology (Vol. 10, pp. 97–112). Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer.

Part IV Experiencing the Bubbleverse

15 Transcending the Bubbleverse

15.1 Other People Staying on the escalator, I am ascending the deepest station of Moscow underground ‘Park Kul’tury’. On the opposite side of the escalator hundreds of people’s faces go by in the opposite direction: men, women, children, young and old, beautiful and ugly, a mixture of colours, races and nationalities. The faces are so many, and they move so fast that at some point I stop seeing the individual features; instead, the faces merge into a multicoloured strip moving beside me. And still, I am acutely aware that each person is a part of my Bubbleverse, which means—a part of my Self. Catching from the crowd a face or two, I look at their eyes. This old man has sad eyes, perhaps he is in pain. Behind the man a young woman is looking at her partner with her eyes full of happiness and devotion. Each of these people is sitting in the centre of his or her private universe, which he or she carries without thinking about it. Their Bubbleverses are inaccessible to me, and I am trying to imagine what they might look like. Some of the people resemble me physically, others are different, but still they are people and not aliens. In a sense, other people are replicas of my © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_15

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Self, and their private universes should be very much like mine, with the core Bubbleverse in the centre and a set of Commonverses on the periphery. But what kind of Bubbleverses do non-human animals have? Or aliens, if they exist? All I know for sure is that their Bubbleverses are split into subject and object, the active mental and passive physical components. But what physical shape the subject can take is hard to imagine. Would they be looking like reptilians, intelligent octopuses or dolphins? Or perhaps, intelligent beings in these imagined Bubbleverses are based not on matter at all. Everything is possible. Suddenly I am hearing a voice inside my head: “But if other people are just manifestations of your Self, why there should be other people at all, and not just you?” The reason is simple: through others, I cognize my own Self. It is only when my Self takes the shape of other selves that it becomes an object for itself. Without becoming others my Self can’t see itself, just like without a mirror I don’t see my face. Of course, the others are not exactly like my authentic Self: their pains are not directly my pains, and their pleasures don’t necessarily give pleasures to me. If others die, I live. In my Bubbleverse, others are like branches of a tree: some of them might dry out and die, but the tree (read: my authentic Self ) can be alive and well. And because other people are revelations of my Self, I am responsible for all of them—for good and bad, saints and sinners, talented and mediocre, men and women, adults and children. Looking into the faces of others, I look in the mirror image of my Self, and cooperating or competing with others, I cooperate or compete with my Self. “But couldn’t this bring you to extreme immoralism?—the voice keeps asking.—If other people are manifestations of your own Self, they are not as important to you as your authentic Self and can be sacrificed”. While I am pondering this question, two maxims are crossing my mind. One is attributed to King Louis XV of France “Après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”) [1, p.43]. Another belongs to Immanuel Kant: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” [2, p.30]. Simply put, the first maxim proclaims indifference to others, whereas the second encourages me to do good to others even if for doing this I have to sacrifice my own selfish interests. When we are in the religious Commonverse, we follow the second maxim because God says so, and in the

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sociocultural Commonverse we follow this maxim because the society makes us obey the moral rules and punishes us for disobedience. But in the core Bubbleverse there is no surveillance, either social or divine, and we are free to follow any of the two maxims. On first glance, my belief that other people are parts of my Self should make me go for the Kantian one; after all, doing good to others, though indirectly, is doing good to my Self, even if doing this involves a certain price. Indeed, in everyday life we often have to accept small inconveniences to obtain desired benefits: we pay dearer for a shorter flight and are happy to interrupt our morning sleep to see a beautiful sunrise. That is why it looks as though in the core Bubbleverse unselfish behaviour still makes sense. Unfortunately, the coin has a flipside. If other people are nothing but part of my Bubbleverse, I might as well decide not to do good to others on the same ground of choosing not doing good to myself. And even if I choose doing good to others, it is not because I really respect them, but because I am concerned about my own wellbeing, or/and am enforced to help others in order to reduce my own empathic distress. In other words, I would be treating other people as a good master treats his or her valuable property; clearly, my motivation is in reality selfish, and this makes my following the Kantian maxim only superficially moral. Probably, even King Louis XV of France was wise enough to take care of his people when doing this fit his personal interests. Following the moral imperative in the Bubbleverse would be unselfish only if I acknowledged that other people’s personal universes are not just parts of my personal world but are independent of my Bubbleverse. Suppose I acknowledged other people’s equality with my Self; then sacrificing my private interests to the wellbeing of other people would mean that I break the Bubbleverse and go beyond into a bigger world, which my private universe is only a part of. By so doing, I obtain something really important—the meaning of my life. Because it is only if my life (read my Bubbleverse) is a part of something bigger than itself that it has meaning at all (see Chap. 12 for more on that). “Hold on—I am hearing the voice—you defined Bubbleverse as something which cannot be broken. Whatever you think or do is always within your Bubbleverse, and not beyond. You cannot break away the Bubble”.

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Indeed, this is what logic says, which until this point I have been trying to strictly follow. But there is something beyond logic, and this is faith. Although the religious Commonverse makes a strong claim to have a monopoly on faith, in the Bubbleverse this is not the case. As we saw in Chap. 12, in the religious Commonverse people invent gods, which are still no more than representations in the people’s Bubbleverses. But there is a crucial difference between thinking about gods and believing in the gods. Whereas thinking about gods, and even praying to the gods keep our Self within the impenetrable Bubble of our private universe, faith can bring us beyond. This means that to have faith in something you don’t have to be a religious person. One can claim being a religious person without having faith in gods; and vice versa, one can have faith and not be a religious person. Let us see how faith can do the impossible—bring our Self beyond the Bubbleverse.

15.2 Faith in the Bubbleverse The early Christian author Tertullian (160–225 AD) captured the essence of faith when he wrote, “It is certain, because impossible” [3]. Without mentioning the Bubbleverse, Tertullian understood that the belief in god is a kind of intellectual suicide. Faith is the negation of both logic and empirical evidence. You don’t need faith to believe in the fact that you need air to survive; in case you are in doubt of that just try and hold your breath. It is not necessary for us to believe in that 2 × 2 = 4, or if A > B and B > C, then A > C—this mathematical and logical truths are self-­ evident. Somehow, I am happy to accept empirical facts and the laws of logic without an emotional protest. But when the same logic tells me that with my death the universe will cease to exist (see Chap. 3 for more on that), I just don’t want to buy it. Why? Because the fabric of the Bubbleverse is based on causality, and when everything has a cause or a reason, why should the Bubbleverse be an exception? If my Bubbleverse has a cause, then my life has a meaning, because to have a meaning is being related to something greater than my Bubbleverse. But looking for the origins of my Bubbleverse is just that—attributing my life to

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something greater than it is in itself. Conversely, accepting the fact that apart from my Bubbleverse only Nothing exists and my life cannot be attributed to anything bigger than itself makes my life meaningless. The meaningless nature of life becomes even more evident when you think about people who died in the holocaust, air crash, traffic accident, from serial killers or wild animals. Did they deserve to die like that? That is the moment when faith comes into play. Faith denies what logic convinces me of. Logic says that there is nothing outside the Bubbleverse— but faith says that there is. In the scientific Commonverse, I believe in the infinity of cosmos and in the fact that the Universe existed for eons before me and will exist after me. In the Religious Commonverse I believe in an eternal and almighty god, and in my immortal soul. In other words, by the act of faith I flip the relations between the Bubbleverse and the Bigverse and accept that my Bubbleverse is not a primary reality, but a part of a bigger whole. In this denial of the primacy of the Bubbleverse, a priest and a scientist are not different one from the other: both of them have faith in that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” [John 1:1]. It doesn’t matter what ‘the Word’ really was: God or whatever modern cosmologists think it was. What matters is that the belief in the Word preceding the Bubbleverse is not a proven fact or a logical necessity, but an effort of faith. We believe that it is not our Self that created the concept of God and the physical Commonverse, but the other way around. For a person who is not aware of his or her Bubbleverse, faith doesn’t confront logic. Most believers in God have no doubts about God’s existence, and a believer in science is convinced that his or her faith in the primacy of the Bigverse goes along with logic. But for the one who can see the ontological primacy of the Bubbleverse, the struggle between faith and logic becomes a permanent effort and turns into a mode of life. There have been a number of attempts to logically prove the existence of God, but none was unanimously accepted. The ontological argument proposed by Anselm of Canterbury in 1078 is one of the most known; yet, as the psychological study has shown [4], this argument is powerless when applied to both children and educated adults, unless it is supported by evidence suggesting the reality of the supernatural (see Chap. 12 for more on that). It appears that a person who attempts to logically infer the

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existence of someone outside the Bubbleverse resembles a rational chicken that is trying to break out of its shell into the outside world, but all that the chicken can do with the assistance of logical thinking is to inflate the size of the shell. The only way of getting out of the shell is faith: believing that someone else’s Bubbleverse is exactly like my Bubbleverse while knowing at the same time that this very belief is a part of my Bubbleverse. Indeed, if I acknowledge that other person’s Bubbleverse is not simply a subsection of my Bubbleverse, but is equal to my Bubbleverse on the scale of existence, then the other person’s Bubbleverse must necessarily be a reality external to my Bubbleverse; be it otherwise, the other person’s Bubbleverse would be a subclass of a larger class (e.g., my Bubbleverse), and therefore, subordinate to my Bubbleverse on the scale of existence. But what does it really mean—to have faith in something beyond your Bubbleverse, while realising at the same time that this ‘something’ is only a part of your mind? It is certainly not enough for me to simply say, “I believe in the existence of God” or “I believe that the physical universe existed for 14 billions of years”, when at the same time I realise that God and the physical universe are only parts of my own Bubbleverse. Saying words is cheap, and what is said can easily be unsaid. In order to persuade myself that I believe in something outside of my Bubbleverse I need to do something to assert my faith—something that disturbs my Bubbleverse and deprives me from something valuable. From the historical records and mythological narratives I know that ancients sacrificed their life stock, people and sometimes their own lives to their faiths in gods. Similarly, I can transcend my Bubbleverse only if I commit a certain act of sacrificing—for example, make an anonymous donation for a cause of my faith. It is only through the acts of sacrificing, which are irreversible and disturbing for my Ego, that I can transcend the shell my Bubbleverse, while in theory still remaining locked in its logically impenetrable prison. But a word of warning: transcending the Bubbleverse should be free from spatial associations. Just like one cannot think of going beyond the physical universe in terms of space, because space emerged together with the physical universe in the enigmatic point of singularity (known as the Big Bang), so one should not think about going beyond the Bubbleverse as though he or she is leaving a movie theatre to step outside in the street.

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Rather, transcending your Bubbleverse should be understood as overcoming our Self ’s encapsulation in one’s own subjective eggshell, by endowing something or someone with an existential status that is equal to the status of my own Self; as argued in the next section, this can only be done through action that involves a certain amount of risk, deprivation of one’s needs and the feeling of pain. Only through the unselfish and risky sacrifice can one upgrade an image (of a god, an engineering construction, a scientific discovery or a moral action) from the status of a mental entity to the status of a ‘real thing’, independent of whether this real thing is a material object (e.g., a gothic cathedral) or a spiritual entity (e.g., a god, a wonderful piece of art or a great scientific discovery). In a similar vein, we should not hope that transcending the Bubbleverse is creating material or spiritual objects that will survive our Bubbleverse in time. All that our Self can achieve in terms of transcending itself can only exist here and now and will end with the end of our Bubbleverse. Still, transcending our personal universe can fill us with the feeling of unity with something outside of the capsule of the Bubbleverse. And this also means that our attempts to transcend the Bubbleverse relatively rarely end in success; unlike our pragmatic activities, which are pre-calculated and routinely achieve their goals, our attempts to break the Bubbleverse often end up in failures, and only those of us who have the courage and persistence enough to keep on trying might finally get to the destination. “And what is the reward?”—you might ask. Again, the reward should not be associated with material pleasures. The reward can only be spiritual: the acute feeling of rubbing against something impossible, something beyond one’s Bubbleverse. Imagine that an asteroid appeared in the Solar System on its way to the collision with Earth. Your mathematical calculations reveal with certainty that the humanity has only a few months or years to live. The asteroid can be diverted by a rocket, but the rocket cannot be fully remotely controlled and needs a ‘kamikaze’—a pilot who will have to die in order to save the humanity. Would you agree to be the kamikaze for the sheer feeling of the greatness of your heroic action? Or would you rather enjoy life for the time remaining for your Bubbleverse to exist? The answer depends on whether you really believe that there is something greater than your private universe.

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15.3 Transcending As indicated above, there is no way we can transcend our Bubbleverse by using our perception and thinking. Indeed, whatever we see or think automatically becomes a part of our Bubbleverse. Even if we imagine that there is something outside our personal universe, it will still be an image within the Bubbleverse. But there is still a way to escape the seemingly unescapable trap of the Bubbleverse, and this way is faith. So, what is faith? Faith is something that we create while having no causal means of creating it. Faith has no rational grounds; it comes from within our Self as a response to some powerful need. For instance, at some point of human evolution early people imagined that a dead person doesn’t really die but lives on after death, leaving his or her dead body behind. This imagined entity was the first concept of a spirit—the entity that inhabits the invisible reality of the afterlife. The spirits were the first gods. But the image of a god was still completely within the people’s Bubbleverses, until … until they started doing something, which in utilitarian terms was meaningless: making sacrifices. Indeed, suppose you are an early human, a hunter-gatherer, and you were lucky to kill a deer. Now, instead of feeding yourself and your family, you burn a part of the deer, because you believe that the spirit feeds on the smoke of sacrificed animals. From the perspective of your core Bubbleverse doing this is illogical and meaningless. Indeed, your luck at hunting may suddenly change and without the deer you or some of your family might starve to death. Of course, when doing your sacrifice, you are hoping that somehow the spirit will pay back, by giving you luck at hunting or finding fruits and roots. But this is only a hope, whereas the threat of starvation is hard reality. Even a more radical example of sacrifice for one’s faith we read in the Hebrew Bible. In this story, God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaak, in order to test Abraham’s faith, and it was only at the last moment before Abraham was about to cut Isaak’s throat that a messenger from God interrupted him. Sure, sacrificing one’s son is incommensurably more painful than giving up the animal’s carcass, yet the magnitude of suffering is a measure of one’s faith,

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and a measure of the endowing the object of one’s faith with the highest existential status. The question is, where do you get the strength from to be able to make your sacrifice? You cannot get your strength inside the Bubbleverse, because in your Bubbleverse the sacrifice runs against your natural instincts. The answer seems clear: you get the strength from the outside your Bubbleverse, which means from Nothing. And that is how it works today too. Instead (or along with) your faith in gods, you may start believing that other people are not just complex displays on the screen of your Bubbleverse but are private universes of their own; these private universes are independent of your Bubbleverse and many of them will survive you. How can you prove that, contrary to logic, you really believe this? Again, by doing something illogical. And here is an example. Suppose that a colleague of yours who lives in a foreign country and who briefly visited your university for a conference left with you some books that you promised to give to the library for the public use. Having inspected the books and finding them to be of no particular interest to yourself, you fulfilled your promise and donated the books to the library. By so doing, you followed the moral rule of decency (to keep one’s promises). The important feature of this action is that following the moral rule (your moral interest) also matches your private interest (not to keep the books that you do not need in your flat), and this match makes your action causally determined within your Bubbleverse. Next, suppose that, after examining the books, you found them very interesting and important for your own work—the books that you would like to have permanently on your desk. In this case, your private interest (to keep the books) runs against your moral interest (to fulfill your promise to your colleague). Even now, if you give the books to the library, you would still be in doubt of what made you do so—your belief in the value of your promise or your hidden private interest. Indeed, you might think that your colleague may enquire whether you did what you had promised and would be angry with you if you didn’t. Finally, suppose that you received sad news that your colleague had tragically died in a car accident. Now you know for sure that you can keep the books that you found so useful for yourself without anyone ever knowing about the promise that you had given. In other words, you are

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faced with a free choice of either part with the books or keep them. This means that for donating the books to the library, you exhausted the resources available within your core Bubbleverse (i.e., the desire to get rid of uninteresting books or the fear of being punished for keeping the interesting ones) and have to borrow the strength from beyond. But the number of options is limited. If you are a religious person, you observe God’s command of not lying, and if you are not—you have to get the strength from Nothing. Both God (if you are a believer) and Nothing are beyond your Bubbleverse. To summarise, it is only through voluntarily denying your private interests for the sake of your faith that you transcend your Bubbleverse and go beyond the ‘event horizon’. Note that it has to be a voluntary action, and not an action that you are forced to do by some extraneous causes within your Bubbleverse, be this cause other people or some of your selfish needs. And of course, not all people are capable of doing this. Remember how hard it is to keep our promises when keeping them is no longer profitable to us, or to donate some of our wealth to other people anonymously, without expecting our generosity being appreciated. Not surprisingly, most people spend all their lives in the confinement of their core Bubbleverses. But not all. On 17 October 2018, in Crimean city of Kerch a student of Kerch Polytechnic College opened fire at his teachers and fellow students with an automatic rifle, killing 18 people and wounding more than 40. According to the eyewitnesses of the attack, four of the students could have run away but chose to distract the gunner by throwing stones at him and helping other people to escape through the windows. All four heroes paid with their lives [5]. Of course, one can transcend the Bubbleverse in a less tragic way. All that is important is that it is impossible to transcend the Bubbleverse theoretically, only sacrificing can do that, and sacrifices are hard to make. But having faith and doing sacrifices brings meaning to your life and makes your Bubbleverse more complex and advanced. Today, every truly moral action that we do is an act of transcendence, the act of breaking outside the eggshell of our Bubbleverse. On a grander scale, the energy to build the Commonverses was taken from people’s faiths. Hi-storically, it was the belief in gods that made early people invent art, symbolic thinking and ultimately science [6]. The

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Stone Circle in England, the giant Moai statues of Easter island and the magnificent gothic cathedrals of Europe are concentrations of human energy that could have been spent on more practical goals. These unique items are the visual embodiments of the human ability to transcend, to believe in something that cannot be logically inferred from the knowledge available in the Bubbleverse. The voyages by Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan were driven by their faith rather than solid knowledge. Today, any science endeavour which is based not on certainty but hinges on the risk and belief is a transcendence too. To summarise, transcendence is a free action, generated by your faith and not by your private needs. But make no mistake: the free action should not be confounded with the free choice. In our daily life, we are constantly faced with a choice of what to order in a restaurant or what kind of movie to see. We call them free choices, but in reality they are conditioned by our needs and preferences: we choose a spicy dish because we like spicy food and go for a romantic movie rather than for a horror because we hate horrors. Our free choices still keep us within our Bubbleverse. A free choice is reversible. For instance, when thinking which kind of a restaurant you would like to go out tonight, you decided to go for the Italian one but by the time to really go to the restaurant you might have changed your mind one or two times. Not so with the free action. Free action exists only when it is being done. You can have an intention to sacrifice to gods or to commit an action of honor, but your intention becomes a free action only when you actually made it.

15.4 The Rise of Morality When a child is born, he or she is necessarily centred upon his or her private interests, simply because there are no other kinds of interests in the primordial Bubbleverse. Sometime at the age of around two or three years the child discovers that other people’s interests may be different from those of his or her own. Toilet training and other social demands are the first manifestations of the fundamental change of perspective within the child’s Bubbleverse—the approaching sociocultural Commonverse.

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Somewhat later, with the onset of language, the child discovers the first branch of the Commonverse in social domain. Typically, due to the early sensitivity to their first language, children absorb this early outgrowth of the Commonverse without much effort. At the age of around three years children come across the existence of moral and social norms, which make another branch of the sociocultural Commonverse. This time, however, adapting themselves to the new requirements doesn’t come easy. In order to protect their private interests from the demands of the Commonverse, children invent cheating, and the split between the sociocultural Commonverse and the core Bubbleverse begins. So, sometime between two and three years, the child becomes an individual with a ‘split mind’. Whatever the child does, or thinks, or experiences at the moment, is now being recorded on the ‘portable tape recorder’ of his or her verbal (narrative) memory. Through this taping, an original copy of the child’s behaviour is created. Of course, this copy is far from being perfect. When telling about past events, the child may forget or misinterpret something; nevertheless, if you ask a three-year-old child to tell what he or she has been doing for the last few hours, the child would come up with more or less plausible story. Let me call this original story ‘the first tape’ or simply the tape (T). In the child’s Bubbleverse, the function of the T is the same as that of verbal memory. Apart from storing, keeping and retrieving information, the T maintains the unity and consistency of the ‘stream of consciousness’ as it flows from the past to the future. With the onset of the sociocultural Commonverse, however, a class of situations emerges when producing the T becomes insufficient for coping with the Bubbleverse. In these situations, the child anticipates that if he or she would have to expose the T to other people, the people won’t be happy. Typically, such situations emerge when the child’s private interests come in conflict with interests of other people, and the child is aware of this. In our analysis of these conflicting situations we can skip trivial cases when the child is simply too small to be able to control his or her actions. For example, if a two-year-old child has a strong temptation to take a bite from a cake that was prepared for a party of guests and left on the table unattended, the child would hardly be able to restrain his or her impulse,

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and most adults are aware of that. If, however, the child is already capable of keeping his or her impulses under control, the child still has a chance of doing what he or she wants and getting away with this. But for that to be possible, the child has to create a story for the ‘outer use’—a T-duplicate (e.g., that it was a dog who took a bite out of the cake). With the creation of the T-duplicates, the child’s mental space becomes doubled or double-layered. In the first layer, the T, the events are stored as they had occurred. As this process is compulsory and involuntary, it cannot be edited on purpose, even if the child does not want some events to remain in his or her memory. With the T-duplicate things are different. The child can create and edit the events, adjusting the T-story to the requirements of the Commonverse. In the process of editing, the child replaces some events written on the T with different events or changes some of their elements and their succession. To be able to create the T-duplicate and thus enter the Commonverse, the child has to acquire two major capacities. First, the child has to discover that his or her mind is private, and the T cannot be read by other people directly from his or her mind (understanding the privacy of the individual mind). If the child has any doubts about this, then the creation of the T-duplicate has no point. Second, the child has to be able to view the situation through the eyes of other people, or to have some kind of ‘theory of mind’. As was shown in many studies, the capacity to understand that other people can have ‘false beliefs’ (i.e., look for a cake in the fridge without knowing that the cake had been eaten by someone else) cannot be found in most children younger than four years [7]. It is approximately at this age that children also become capable of deliberate lying [8]. Having mastered these capacities, children are now able to create a narrative in which the picture of past events is arranged in the way the children would like others to believe the events had occurred. As a result, the child interprets the meaning of what other people do on the basis of his or her T-duplicates, and this meaning can be different from (even opposite to) the meaning that these people’s  actions have in the child’s core Bubbleverse. For instance, if the child said that the dog had taken a bite on the cake and the adults punished the dog, the child is aware that

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the dog was punished not for spoiling the cake but for what the child had presented to adults in the form of the T-duplicate. At that point, the child’s Bubbleverse splits in two parts: the one that exists for private use (the core Bubbleverse) and the other that is tuned to the social environment (the sociocultural Commonverse). The first exists in the form of the child’s private interests and T-memories, and the second takes shape of social demands and the T-duplicates created by the child to meet these demands. The simple T-mind becomes the T-doubled-­ T-mind (the TDT-mind) [9]. The acquisition of the TDT-mind is crucial for the child’s moral development. Typically, moral development ends with the ability of the person to conform to moral and social requirements of the Commonverse. Let us call this kind of adaptive moral behaviour pragmatic morality. The essential feature of pragmatic morality is that a person follows moral rules not because the person wants to, but because the person has to. In other words, pragmatic moral behaviour is enforced by the Commonverse, in the form of external or internal surveillance. When such enforcement is not available, the person ignores the moral rules and follows his or her private interests. For example, researchers reported that people are prone to moral hypocrisy: they appear to themselves to be moral without actually being so [10]. When adults were given an opportunity to anonymously violate a rule of fairness in order to achieve a private benefit, 70% consciously took this opportunity [11]. The existence of pragmatic morality clearly demonstrates that the sociocultural Commonverse became a part of the person’s Bubbleverse, by creating an artificial private interest—to conform to moral rules in order to avoid punishment for disobedience or be rewarded for conformity. This artificial private interest is parasitic on the person’s innate private interests available in his or her Bubbleverse from birth—the tendency to avoid suffering and maximise pleasure. There is, however, a possibility for a person to break away from his or her Bubbleverse, by conforming to moral norms selflessly, on the ground of the person’s accepting the virtue of morality. When a person does this, the external or internal surveillance is no longer necessary. By selflessly doing good to other people, at the expense of the person’s private interests, the person creates reality beyond his or her Bubbleverse, in the form of other people’s Bubbleverses.

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Traditionally, this realm, external to my Bubbleverse, is meant when we talk about God or Plato’s ideas. It is impossible to describe this realm in theoretical terms: as soon as we start describing the realm it immediately becomes a part of the Bubbleverse. However, it is possible to bring this realm into existence by committing the acts of sacrifice for the faith. Selfless moral action is one of those acts.

15.5 The Meaning of Life: Conclusion Ancients and people of the Middle Ages saw the meaning of life in their faith in gods. Their Bubbleverse and their religious Commonverse were the same. They were unable to rule the elements but able to explain the elements and their own existence through the will of gods. Today the faith in gods is fading, and many of us find the meaning of life by believing in the scientific Commonverse. Indeed, knowledge and science gave us the power to predict and control much of the physical world. But despite the successes of science, the modern world becomes increasingly mysterious. Quantum physics and molecular biology made us realise the complexity of the material world. Psychology and philosophy confront us with the enigmas, such as the relationship between consciousness and the brain, free will and moral choice. Cosmology discovered the vastness of the universe, the puzzling ‘fine tuning’ of the fundamental cosmological constants, and the dark matter that escapes all the efforts to detect it. In the hi-storical future, the world is likely to become even more incomprehensible. And this is not surprising. The more the Bubbleverse ‘swells up’, the larger the area of the ​​ bubble gets, and the more inexplicable its filling becomes. The number of inexplicable phenomena is mounting, which makes believers in science increasingly conscious about the fact that, unknowingly, they are living in the Bubbleverse. But the inevitable end of the Bubbleverse will always bring with it the nagging question ‘What for?’ This painful question triggers a worrying thought: perhaps, the ancients were right, and the meaning of life is to believe in the powers beyond the Bubbleverse? But what kind of powers could that be? With God and science being parts of the Bubbleverse, these traditional objects of devotion are no longer trusted.

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Because beyond the Bubbleverse there is only the great Nothing, shall we try and fill the Nothing with greater reality through faith? This external greater reality we might call the Absolute Intelligence. And what kind of sacrifice could we offer to our new idol? A possible option is giving up hope for eternity, both of the physical universe and our personal Self. It’s a hard sacrifice, but not impossible. In exchange, one can find the meaning of life in transcending one’s Bubbleverse: through selfless actions in intellectual and social domains (e.g., increasing one’s knowledge, bringing up children, creating wonderful things, doing good to others and fighting the evil) one can break through the shell of the Bubbleverse towards the greater reality and make one’s Bubbleverse more intellectually and emotionally meaningful  and engaging. Until it all ends. But not all hope is lost. There will be other innumerable Bubbleverses, and perhaps, one of them will be exactly like this one. Only, I will not know about it. Perhaps, it is better that way. Because if I was happy in this Bubbleverse, I wouldn’t like to repeat everything once again; even more so if I was unhappy.

References 1. The Routledge Dictionary of Cultural References in Modern French. 2. Kant, I. (1993). Grounding for the metaphysics of morals. (Trans. Ellington, J. W) (3rd ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett. 3. Retrieved from http://www.tertullian.org/quotes.htm 4. Subbotsky, E. (1996). The child as a Cartesian thinker. Children’s reasonings about metaphysical aspects of reality. New York and London: Psychology Press. 5. Roth, A. (2018). Crimea college attack: Student carries out mass shooting in Kerch. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2018/oct/17/crimea-college-rocked-by-deadly-bomb-blast-kerch 6. Subbotsky, E. (2018). Science and magic in the modern world. Psychological perspectives on living with the Supernatural. London and New  York: Routledge. 7. Perner, J. (1992). Grasping the concept of representation: Its impact on 4-year-olds’ theory of mind and beyond. Human Development, 35, 146–155.

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8. Sodian, B., Taylor, C., Harris, P. L., & Perner, J. (1991). Early deception and the child’s theory of mind: False traits and genuine markers. Child Development, 62, 468–483. 9. Subbotsky, E. (2012). Development of moral foundations of action: The role of the narrative function of language. In D.  A. Leontiev (Ed.), Motivation, consciousness and self-regulation (pp. 209–242). New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc. 10. Bersoff, D. H. (1999). Explaining unethical behavior among people motivated to act prosocially. Journal of Moral Education, 28(4), 414–428. 11. Batson, C.  D., & Thompson, E.  R. (2001). Why don’t moral people act morally? Motivational considerations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 54–57.

16 Properties of the Bubbleverse

16.1 Evil as a Shadow of Good Since in the Bubbleverse the belief in the loving and benevolent god is a mental construction within the artificial religious Commonverse, there is no problem of explaining how the evil can coexist with the good. For an animal, good is what supports the animal’s life and procreation, evil is what resists or impedes them. For a human person, selfish good is joined by moral good, represented by Kantian categorical imperative: act in a way such that your actions could be a model for the rest of the humanity. The imperative extends selfish good to the size of a ‘good for all’, thus implying the new type of behaviour—altruism, when a person is able to sacrifice his or her personal good for the sake of others (see Chap. 15 for more on that). Accordingly, selfish evil finds a societal prototype in the ‘common evil’—phenomena such as wars and totalitarian regimes. The goal for our Self in the Bubbleverse is therefore not a complete eradication of evil, but a fight for the dominance of good over evil. As long as this dominance is maintained, the Bubbleverse is in the state of stable existence and development. If the evil takes over the good, the Bubbleverse ‘collapses on itself ’. In the core Bubbleverse death of the Self © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9_16

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is a maximal evil. The implication of this is that in the core Bubbleverse self-sacrifice has a limit: a person can sacrifice some of his or her selfish interests for the good of others, but not his or her life, because sacrificing life in the core Bubbleverse means the end of the Bubbleverse. In the core Bubbleverse, we could give money for charities and protect a woman on the street if she is being attacked by a ruffian, even if we risk getting a couple of punches themselves, because by doing this we make our Bubbleverse a better and safer place to live. But if a terrorist started killing people in a public place with an automatic gun and there is a zero chance that we can disarm or neutralise the terrorist, the only option left for us is to run for safety. One can heroically sacrifice his or her life in the religious Commonverse for earning the eternal life, or in the sociocultural Commonverse for the grateful memory of humankind, but doing this in the core Bubbleverse would mean shutting the Bubbleverse altogether. The inevitability of evil in the Bubbleverse follows from the fact that evil grows out of good. When we have a bunch of options, we don’t sometimes choose good and other times evil; instead, we always choose the option we think is best for us. The problem is that what is good for us may not be good for others, and this is how evil emerges from the good. The freedom of action allows a person to commit acts of unselfish sacrificing to the good of others; unfortunately, the same freedom creates the possibility to hurt and kill other people. The freedom of thinking and public expression of opinion is a cornerstone of democracy, but it also allows things such as public denial of mass repressions under Stalin’s rule and the Holocaust. Obeying to the laws of your country is good, but if the laws approve genocide, like it was in Nazi Germany, the obedience becomes evil. Faith in god can make a person a saint, but it can also produce a fanatical killer or a suicidal terrorist. That is why in the Bubbleverse there will always be saints and sinners, the carriers of good and the bearers of evil. Because in the core Bubbleverse other people are indirect manifestations of our Selves, by doing evil things to others we bring the evil things on our Selves. Criminals, when caught, are punished for what they had done, but at the moment of committing their crimes their actions were looking good to them. The selfish good could turn into the evil for the same Self. In order to neutralise the tendency of good turning into the

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evil, the categorical moral imperative was introduced. Simply put, the moral imperative is a default strategy protecting people from bringing harm to themselves. A partial case of good turning into the evil is that in the core Bubbleverse we often act on the base of insufficient information and are prone to false beliefs. When people of the Easter island were creating their giant statues—Moai, they believed they were doing good to themselves; little did they realise that cutting the lash palm growth that was needed for transporting the Moai to the shore would bring deforestation and, as a consequence, the demise of the feeding basis of the people—fishing in the ocean. Global warming, which is being recognised as the greatest danger of our times, results from our natural desire to be warm and have cars. The evil brought to us by natural causes like earthquakes and tornados can partially be explained by our false beliefs and insufficient information about these causes; by predicting these natural events, we could be able to avoid or minimise the harm they bring to us. Finally, technical disasters, such as car accidents and plane crashes, are caused by either a human factor (which again is a result of the people making wrong or selfish decisions which the people view as good for themselves), or a technical failure, which typically results from wrong decisions made by the engineers or technical staff. Pandemics, such as the Black Death in medieval Europe, were brought to Europe by fleas living on the rats that infested the merchant ships bringing wealth to Europe. During the French revolution of the eighteenth century and Russian revolution of the twentieth century, the people who started and chaired the revolutions (Girondists and Jacobines in France and leading Bolsheviks in Russia) were subsequently executed by the same revolutionary forces they had helped to unleash. In all of these cases what initially people thought to be good (e.g., bringing goods from Asia to Europe or unleashing the revolutionary terror) turned out to be evil for the same people. In order to counteract the natural evils, we need science, and for countering moral evils, we create laws and religions. But neither science nor religion is immune to evil. Science helps us eradicate certain kinds of diseases and avoid natural evils, but it also managed to produce nuclear contamination at Chernobyl and is partially responsible for the greenhouse effect. Today, the price for scientific progress is approaching the

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value of its benefits: overpopulation, exhaustion of ocean resources, deforestation, mass extinction of species on the planet, contamination of the air, waters and near-earth space with pesticides, microplastics, space debris and other industrial wastes—this is an incomplete list of evils that began as benefits of scientific progress: achievements of medical care, industrial revolution, mass production of popular goods, sanitation, improvement of tools for crops growing, fishing, oil extraction and satellite navigation. And the scientific progress is unstoppable, intervening into the very heart of human existence—reproduction of human species. Will science ever be able to remedy the evils it unleashed? Hardly so, because science is a tool and not a person. The only force that can stop scientific progress from turning into the devastation of the Bubbleverse is the entity that created science—the human Self. As for religion, it improves people’s morals and diminishes the fear of death, but it is a cause of religious wars and fuels the fundamentalists’ terrorism, which, in spite all the efforts to eradicate it, grows in power. While being artificially manufactured parts of the Bubbleverse, the scientific and religious Commonverses do not escape the general law of the Bubbleverse, according to which good has a tendency to degrade into evil. Of course, not every action which is good automatically turns into evil (e.g., there is nothing wrong in eating an apple or kissing your child), but every evil act begins as the good of some kind, because a person (organisation and society) initially views this action as good. And the most painful manifestation of this law is also the simplest: life has to end in death.

16.2 Death in the Bubbleverse When a person is in the state of sleep without dreams, under general anaesthetics, or in the state of clinical death, the person is still alive and his or her subconscious mind is functional. But what happens when a person dies and the Bubbleverse shuts down, we cannot possibly know. To exist is to be conscious of your own existence, even if the awareness comes in the retrospect. Nothing is the end of consciousness: a person can enter it but this is a one-way journey.

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In the scientific Commonverse, death is a fleeting moment. A person dies, but the humanity and the universe live on and often don’t even notice the fact that the person is no longer there. More than that, in the scientific Commonverse death is welcome: the ‘black hand with a hook’ is a necessary component of evolution that destroys unfit organisms in order to clean the way for the fitter ones. In the core Bubbleverse, death is a tragedy. With death, the Self and the whole world of innumerable creatures—animated and inanimate— come to their ends. This fundamental fact changes the perspective of life. When Plato suggested that philosophy is nothing other than the preparation for death [1], he unwittingly meant the Bubbleverse. As a result, we face a choice between the two paths of reasoning. One path leads to the ultimate end and leaves us no hope. Everything we do in the Bubbleverse we do ‘here and now’, and there will be no another chance. Another path, which Plato himself was inclined to take, leads to the belief in reincarnation. Perhaps, our Self existed before, and will re-emerge in the future, in some other Bubbleverse. Perhaps, we don’t learn our knowledge but remember the knowledge we had obtained in our previous incarnations. Ultimately, this path leads us to faith. So, how does a person die in the Bubbleverse? A person may die a forced death in an accident, be a victim of a crime, be killed in a war or die from natural causes, and in that case he or she has no choice. But what if a person has a choice of whether to save his or her life or put an end to it? Let us call this kind of death a participatory death. Here, the choice depends on the person’s beliefs. A believer in god might choose death in order to be rewarded in the afterlife. This is the death of a Christian martyr who was tortured to death by Roman emperors or the death of an Islamic suicidal terrorist today. People who don’t believe in the afterlife but believe in eternal Commonverse might sacrifice their lives for the sake of the earthly values, such as ideology, country or family. This is the case of a heroic death of an atheist. Both a martyr and a hero give up their personal Bubbleverses for a reward, either personal (the martyr) or impersonal (the hero). In a more extreme case, a person is aware that his or her death will stay unrewarded or will be rewarded negatively. In the ‘Ascendance’ movie by the Russian filmmaker Larisa Shapit’ko [2], a character called Sotnikov is

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a guerrilla fighter in the Soviet territory occupied by Germans during the 2nd World War. He is wounded and captured by the enemy. The police interrogator demands that Sotnikov betrays his comrades, but Sotnikov refuses. He is tortured and told that, unless he agrees to collaborate, he will be executed, and the interrogation will be documented as if he had indeed agreed to collaborate. So, Sotnikov, after he dies, will be a traitor in the eyes of his countrymen. Still, he chooses death, for the only thought of saving his conscience. In the secular cultural context of the late 1970th Soviet Union conscience was the sheer idea of honesty and decency. It means that during his or her life a person can develop a central value or idea, which becomes the spiritual backbone of the person’s Bubbleverse. As a result, when the person is confronted with a choice of dying or giving up the central value, the person prefers to go for the first option. In contrast to a martyr who dies for the afterlife and a hero who dies for his or her country, Sotnikov can be called a superhero who died solely for the idea. Altogether, the three types of death show the growing depersonalisation and internalisation of the death motive: the martyr dies for the external personal cause, the hero for the external impersonal one and the superhero for the internal impersonal one. Nevertheless, all these types of death are based on transcendence: by believing in a central value (God, nation of idea), a person makes his or her Bubbleverse a part of a bigger whole, thus rendering death meaningful. In all these cases, we deal with the transcended Bubbleverse. In contrast, in the non-transcended Bubbleverse, a person is not ready to end his or her life for any value. Still, the person may wish to end his or her life voluntarily when, due to the illness or other circumstances the Bubbleverse becomes unbearable. In this case, the motive for ending the Bubbleverse would be personal (ending the sufferings) and internal (because gods and society do not approve suicide). Altogether, the reasons for ending the Bubbleverse can be summarised as in Table 16.1 Paradoxically, even a martyr and a hero may become a toy in the play of most cynical forces, such as a political power or a controversial religious cult. The founder of Peoples Temple Jim Jones made hundreds of his followers commit suicide at their agricultural commune in a remote part of the South American nation of Guyana. Brainwashed by their

16  Properties of the Bubbleverse  Table 16.1  Types of participatory death in the Bubbleverse, as a function of orientation and value

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Value Orientation Personal

Impersonal

External Internal

Hero Superhero

Martyr Suicidal person

leader, many of Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison, while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. This raises the question of why my Bubbleverse, which by definition is centred around my Self, may suddenly become so poignant as to make me think of a suicide?

16.3 Unhappiness in the Bubbleverse There can be times when the world seems hostile to our Self, up to the point of being life threatening. How do these situations square with the idea that the very existence of the Bubbleverse hinges on my Self? Is it possible to assume that my Bubbleverse may become my own enemy? Like a fresh fruit can with time start to rot, can the happy Bubbleverse suddenly go sour? This assumption is not as arbitrary as it looks. The inevitability of unhappiness simply follows from the availability of happiness. If a person was always happy, he or she would be unable to feel this as happiness. In fact, it has been pointed out in philosophy and psychology that our Self can have mutually contradictive tendencies—both towards life and towards death. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer presented our world as the ongoing action of metaphysical ‘Will’, which drives us towards pleasure but brings us even more suffering. Drawing on these contradictive tendencies of our psyche, and on his observations over patients who had a tendency of willingly re-enacting sufferings they had experienced in the past, Sigmund Freud speculated that a human person harbours two alternative drives: the drive towards life (Eros) and the drive towards death (Thanatos), “whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death” [3 , p. 311].

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It is also clear that in the Bubbleverse happiness and unhappiness are distributed in unequal measures; however bad my situation in the Bubbleverse  might be, there will always be a person or another living entity whose situation is even more miserable. But does this mean that I should take responsibility for the unhappiness of all other people in the world and give all my life to overcoming that unhappiness? From the perspective of the Bubbleverse, it doesn’t look that I should. Giving all my fortune to caring about others means dissolving my creative potential in the entropy of the Bubbleverse, and, ultimately, making the Bubbleverse less complex and attractive, possibly even prematurely bringing my Bubbleverse to its end. It looks as though my duty in the Bubbleverse is to first attend to my own share of unhappiness and only after that share part of my happiness with others. To keep the Bubbleverse in a healthy condition, unlimited altruism is as unacceptable as unlimited selfishness. Perhaps, a moderate degree of unhappiness is not necessarily a bad thing? In fact, doesn’t our Self need encounters with problems and hardships to be stimulated towards greater achievements? Like Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger. Of course, only if doesn’t kill me. May be, it is the lucky combination of happiness and unhappiness that in the end keeps us alive and well, albeit not forever. But what if the combination of happiness and unhappiness in my Bubbleverse turns unlucky? How come that in their own Bubbleverses people die of accidents, crimes and diseases? Why and in what circumstances can a cherished private universe become my greatest enemy?

16.4 Luck in the Bubbleverse One early morning, when driving to the university in my car, I speeded up just a little and my car caught the black ice on a steep slope. Having broken through a wooden fence, my car ended up in somebody’s back garden. Just for a fleeting moment, when I felt that the car is completely out of my control, I had a brief ‘out of body’ experience, as if I wasn’t sitting in my car but flying over it and seeing the car moving into the garden

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from the ‘drone’s view’. Fortunately, there was no one in the garden, but the accident did cost me some money and a lot of stress. Another time I had an incident of a different kind. I was walking in the big yard inside the square shaped block of buildings in one of which I lived at that time. My 2.5-year-old son was walking next to me. While peacefully strolling between a heavy iron fence and a raw of buildings and looking away from the buildings, I heard a car engine starting. Suddenly I saw my son looking intensely at something happening behind my back. At that very moment the contractor’s van, which till this moment has been peacefully parked on the trottoir next to the raw of buildings, hit the iron fence behind me and my son with a force, dislodging the section of the heavy fence completely from its nest. It turned out that the drunk contractor lost control of the car, which moved 120 degrees and hit the fence missing my son and me by a distance of about ten centimetres. Had the car spun at just a slightly lesser angle, my son’s and my lives could have had a tragic turn. These events made me think. Indeed, in the Bubbleverse we act consciously, but not in empty space. Just the opposite actually: every action is squeezed into a pocket of background events, like a hand in a glove. Usually, we discount these background events on chance and hardly even notice them. It is when the background events get us in the guts, they become to be felt more significant; sometimes they even might be seen in the mystical light as mischievous jokes of little demons or a helping hand of our guardian angels. Let us call these events the ‘Background of Luck’ (BoL). When we set a goal for a certain action, we assume that BoL can be good or bad, benevolent or malevolent to us. For instance, when we think of buying a car, we know on the back of our mind that we might have a car accident in the future but hope that we won’t. In other words, we count on the possibility that the benevolent BoL will outweigh the malevolent BoL and, having bought the car, we will drive happily ever after. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. The obstacles may emerge completely unexpectedly as if ‘from nowhere’, but in reality, they come from the BoL. So, what is the BoL, psychologically speaking? It consists of a series of events that we cannot possibly foresee when we are planning and doing our conscious action. Viewed from the Commonverse’s standpoint, each

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of these events has a cause or a reason. For example, in the car accident that happened to me, the accompanying malevolent events were my decision to drive to work instead of cycling as I usually did, and the black ice on the patch of the road which I considered to be perfectly safe. But these events were only a fraction in the chain, because I was also speeding, and I was speeding because I was getting late to my lecture, and I was getting late because I had overslept, and I overslept because at the previous night I had been watching an interesting programme on TV which made me go to bed late, and I was watching this programme because … the list of the ‘ands’ can go on. In other words, despite the fact that each particular event in the BoL can be ascribed a cause, the combination of these events, both mental and physical ones, seems to be entirely unpredictable. My bad luck resulted from the fact that this time the malevolent BoL overpowered the benevolent one. As for the incident my little son and I had in the yard of the building block, it too was dressed in the dense fabric of BoL events. My son and I were ‘in the wrong place in the wrong time’ of course. But also, the van driver was drunk, the van steering system broke, I was looking away from the van and didn’t see it misbehaving, and so on. Fortunately, the devilish combination of malevolent BoL events was undermined by the benevolent one: the van was spinning just a little too fast to hit my son and me. It is a good time to make some inferences. In the Bubbleverse, every conscious action is dressed in the thick fabric of BoL events. Speaking metaphorically, we are not walking on a wide road towards our goals; rather, we are burrowing tunnels through the rocky mountain of the BoL. In the everyday life we simply call this mountain ‘luck’—good or bad. Mostly, we just ignore the BoL, hoping for the best. In more responsible and meaningful actions, we assess the risks consciously in advance, and don’t go for the action if the malevolent BoL overweighs. Such assessment can even be institutionalised and put in the form of laws and prohibitions, such as the ban on drunk driving. But we can never perfectly calculate the balance and are always under the ‘hanging sword’ of the BoL. Usually, positive and negative balances intermingle throughout our life, but sometimes the bad balance of the BoL can completely shut our Bubbleverse, like it happens for a person who dies in a plane accident. Our Commonverse thinking can be of help only to an extent. The

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rational assessment of risks is always incomplete, and even the safest plan can go wrong. Sometimes a phenomenon happens that can be called a persistent malevolence effect. The effect means that you know the truth and have the means to prove it to others, but the persistent malevolent coincidences make it impossible to prove the point. Again, I can bring an example from my own experience. It began with my decision to buy an expensive car in Moscow, while my gut feelings were telling me that I shouldn’t: in Moscow driving is dangerous, traffic jams are constant, parking space is hard to find and keeping a car is costly. I didn’t listen to the caution of my guts and bought the car. Clearly, very soon I began to feel that I had made a mistake: my job demanded that I stay away from Moscow for most of the year, and the car was parked in the cold weather under the thick blanket of snow in a parking lot near the block of flats I lived in when I visited Moscow. Soon, the parking space was taken by the local contractors and I had to squeeze the car in the street where it was constantly in danger of being hit by passing vehicles. So, after two years and ten months I decided to sell the car. Little did I know that in Russia selling a car within the period of three years of possession means you have to pay 13% tax from the income you make on selling it. When I learned about the law, the car had already been sold. Fortunately, I did not have to pay the tax because I sold the car cheap and suffered a financial loss. In order to prove this to the tax office I enclosed two documents: the purchase agreement and the car handling statement, from which with a 100% certainty it followed that the price I had paid for buying the car was a lot higher than the price I sold it for. However, the tax office demanded the payment slips, on the obviously absurd reason that somebody (e.g. my grandma) could have paid for my car, and the only documents that definitely prove my expenses could be the payment slips. Unfortunately, I have already disposed of the payment slips. When I tried to request the copies of the slips, I found that the firm I bought the car from went out of business two years ago, by merging with another firm, and the other firm too disappeared a month ago without a trace. The tax office demanded to pay the amount from the full price of selling and fined me for a tax fraud of deliberately decreasing the sum under taxation. My appellation to the superordinate tax body was

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declined, so I had to sue the local tax office. During the court meeting, I almost managed to persuade the judge that it was I, and not someone else, who had paid for the car, when the judge suddenly found that the price shown in the trading agreement I had submitted to the court was different from the one in my lawsuit application. I was unable to explain the discrepancy and immediately realised that I was going to lose the case, which indeed happened. It is only after the session that I remembered that I had two different trading agreements: one for a less expensive model of this car, and another one for a dearer one. By coincidence, I supplied the court with a wrong trading agreement. In the end, I had to pay a sum equivalent to 1200 pounds, instead of just ten pounds fine for the late deliverance of tax declaration. Of course, I could keep fighting by appealing to the higher court, but my chances of proving my case were increasingly slim. Still, on reflection I think that the price I paid for the persistent malevolence was small. It is worth mentioning in this regard the character of the Book of Job in the Bible [4]. Beset by Satan, Job—a good and prosperous family man—suffers horrendous disasters that take away all that he holds dear, including his children, his health and his property. He struggles to understand his situation and begins a search for the answers to his difficulties, which in the context of the Bubbleverse theory are a result of persistent malevolence. Luckily for Job, in the Bible God listened to his prayers and restored him to an even better condition than he had been before his disasters struck. Unfortunately, millions of Russian people who, like Job, were unjustly deprived of their property and imprisoned during Stalin’s repressions happened to be less lucky. They were rehabilitated many years after they had perished in the prisoner camps. Is it possible that the BoL changes with time? For example, in the process of a career growth we can put to themselves increasingly ambitious goals, until we reach what in psychology is called, the peak of competence. Psychological studies have shown that a person doesn’t need to be highly intelligent in order to be creative and successful at his or her career [5]. Rather, a person has to reach a certain level of his or her IQ, after which further growth of intelligence loses correlation with creativity. In a similar vein, a person who puts increasingly hard and ambitious goals can move the BoL from the positive towards the negative side. Not only the

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goals become objectively harder to achieve, but the malevolent BoL may become stronger, due to the envy of colleagues, hostility of competitors and the lack of necessary skills. It is also possible that such a shift of the BoL may happen as we age. Failing health and fading appearance my change the way other people feel towards us, and our own mental abilities may deteriorate, thus giving more space to malevolent BoL events. The only thing we know for sure is that the very fact that we are still alive is a result of a positive balance of our BoL. We can only hope that this balance doesn’t change too soon.

16.5 The Unpredictable Bubbleverse: Conclusion The splitting of the primordial Bubble into the active and passive parts, the conscious Self and the outer world doesn’t come for free. Our Self has to constantly battle the counterforces that push the Bubbleverse back to the initial Nothingness. Subjectively, we experience these forces as evil, unhappiness and bad luck. Despite the fact that a living system has the ability to resist the 2nd law of thermodynamics, the resistance is only temporary and, due to the wearing of the living system’s compounds, the body of the system eventually fails. Not surprisingly, this perspective doesn’t look attractive to most of us. Psychologically, it is only natural that we begin thinking of the possibility to postpone death. Scientific medicine can help, but only to a point. In their desperation, some people put their hope in cryonics [6]. The religious Commonverse comes to an aid by promising us afterlife, but it requires faith in gods. In the Bubbleverse, a person without faith is like a mole burrowing its way through the solid mass of the background events. The problem is, what to invest the faith in? Today, the traditional gods lost their attraction for many, and a modern person is in the state of looking for the new idols. Will the person ever see the light?

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References 1. Plato. (1972). Phaedo. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 2. Kehr, D. (2008). New DVDs: Larisa Shepit’ko. Retrieved from https://www. nytimes.com/2008/08/19/movies/homevideo/19dvds.html 3. Freud, S. (1987). On metapsychology—The theory of psychoanalysis: ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, ‘Ego and the Id’ and other works. New York: Gardners Books. 4. Retrieved from https://ebible.org/kjv/Job.htm 5. Andreasen, N. (2014). Secrets of the creative brain. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/07/secrets-of-thecreative-brain/372299/ 6. Steinbeck, R. L. (2002). Mainstream science is frosty over keeping the dead on ice. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from https://www.chicagotribune.com/ news/ct-xpm-2002-09-29-0209290429-story.html

17 The Cosmic Train: A Summary of Sorts

Usually we think of the universe as if it were a cosmic train which we can enter or leave at a stop of our choice, with the train travelling independently with or without us. In the Bubbleverse, it is different. In the Bubbleverse, a person is the train. The Bubbleverse train appears and disappears only when you get on and off. But otherwise, the analogy with the train stands. In the Bubbleverse, like in the ‘standard universe’, you are a passenger and not the driver of the train, and you can wander within the train from one of its couches to another, discovering various features and objects that look new to you. You can also make the train stop by pressing the alarm button: in the Bubbleverse train, such an unplanned stop happens each time when we lose conscious state of mind, during sleep without dreams or being under general anaesthetics. Like in the standard train, in the Bubbleverse train there are other passengers, restaurants, toilets, medical centres, libraries, research laboratories, schools, universities and other luxuries of life. To reiterate, there is only one difference between the standard train and the Bubbleverse train, but this is a major difference: in the Bubbleverse train you realise that when you leave the train, the train will be no more.

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How much can this awareness affect your life? Pretty much actually. First, you realise that, as long as the Bubbleverse train exists in space and time, you need to extend the train’s existence in the past and in the future. You understand, of course, that there was no the past and there will be no the future. Logical thinking tells you that it is useless to make things and write books for someone else to use them after your departure. All the same, being in time demands that you construct the past and the future, in order to make your travel in the train psychologically meaningful. Indeed, having seen a dream in which we fly in the air like a bird, we are not happy with just accepting this dream for a fact but want to somehow interpret it. Similarly, in the Bubbleverse train you are not happy to simply accept that some passengers are your mother and father, others become your husbands and wives, still others you take for your children. You want more. You want to create the whole history of the train. By examining the train with all its details (the analogy for scientific enquiry in the scientific Commonverse), you might think of the factory on which the train had been built as of an automatic conveyer system (read: the theory of evolution in the scientific Commonverse), or as a workshop of a master that makes trains (read: the god-creator in the  religious Commonverse). At the same time, unlike the passenger of the standard cosmic train, you realise that in the Bubbleverse train the past and the future are nothing but the creations of your mind made on the basis of what you observe in the train here and now. “Does it mean that in the Bubbleverse train every person has to be a qualified historian, and perhaps, also a specialist in all of the existing sciences?”—a reader might ask. Of course, it doesn’t. Saying that in the Bubbleverse train hi-storical knowledge is a creation of my mind doesn’t mean that I build the hi-story of my Bubbleverse train on my own; most of it I find ready made for me. In the library, which is available in the cosmic train, the person finds the existing knowledge coded in books; all he or she needs to do is to accept some of this knowledge as a plausible narrative, while rejecting the other as false or misleading. By the fact of accepting or rejecting the existing knowledge I re-create this knowledge for myself. Indeed, every piece of knowledge and history had been discovered or recorded for the first time by somebody. As we saw earlier in this book, a discovery cannot be made without the ability of the human

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mind to observe and causally connect things. When we accept this discovery for truth we again, for the second time, ‘make’ the discovery or re-create what the original discoverer had discovered (see Chap. 12 for more on that). The same selection of the ready-made stories as suitable or unsuitable the person has to make while going through the channel of education. The Bubbleverse train provides a person with scientific knowledge, religious beliefs, moral laws and all that the person needs to know about the train. As we appropriate this knowledge, the Bubbleverse train divides into two parts. There appear three new couches—each for every kind of a commonverse—the scientific, sociocultural and religious ones. The remaining coaches now contain the core Bubbleverse—the residue of the original primordial Bubbleverse. The commonverses put the phenomena of the Bubbleverse train in spaciotemporal perspective, presenting things as a series of scientific discoveries and religious revelations of our ancestors. With the train divided, we can now see the same objects differently depending on which perspective we take: the perspective of the core Bubbleverse or the perspective of a commonverse. In the core Bubbleverse the difference between your Self and physical reality (and the difference between your mind and your brain) is not the difference between two independent things, (e.g., the difference between this table and the planet Mars); rather, it is the difference between two mutually dependent opposites which exist and disappear together, like top and bottom, figure and background, day and night. When you live, your body (your brain) is a pipeline that connects your Self to the rest of the train; you can control the speed of the train via your body (your brain), and the train speaks back to you through your body (your brain), sending messages in the form of subjective experiences: internal feelings (e.g., thirst or hunger), social feelings (e.g. love or remorse) and perceptual images (e.g., a perception of a flower meadow). When you die, your Self (mind) and your body (brain) cease to exist simultaneously, together with other people and the physical universe. In contrast, in the scientific Commonverse the universe existed billions of years before you and stays on after your death. Not only in terms of time, but also in terms of causality the scientific Commonverse takes over your Self, by making your Self (mind) a product of your body (brain).

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Further, in the core Bubbleverse you know that other people are manifestations of your own Self. Like any object in the Bubbleverse train, another person has to be different from your Self, otherwise you wouldn’t notice the person’s existence. But being different from your Self, other people are nevertheless parts of your mind. In the sociocultural Commonverse other people are independent agents who lived before you and will keep roaming the earth long after you are gone. They have minds of their own and you are supposed to respect their needs like if they were needs of your own. The sociocultural and scientific Commonverses view the historical knowledge as the record of what really happened in the past; in contrast, as a passenger of the core Bubbleverse you accept that the past events existing without you is a fictional hi-story—your own creation, made on the base of the presently observable facts and history books available to you in the Bubbleverse’s library. In the religious Commonverse, the ‘centre of gravity’ is shifted from the Bubbleverse train to God. God is not a creation of people’s minds (core Bubbleverse), but people and the Bubbleverse train are creations of God. The world doesn’t disappear with the person’s death (core Bubbleverse), but the person’s soul transmigrates into higher realms, leaving the physical world and the person’s lifeless body behind. Unlike scientific Commonverse, which portrays the origins of life and species as a result of laws of nature, the religious Commonverse depicts the dawning of life as a product of intelligent design. A summary of some of these perspectives is presented in Table 17.1. Having compared these perspectives, the passenger of the Bubbleverse train has a choice: to stay in the core Bubbleverse’s part of the train or to move to the couch where a commonverse reins. Most people today prefer the couch with the scientific and sociocultural Commonverses, some settle in couch carrying the religious Commonverse, but no one can completely break away with his or her core Bubbleverse. In their private lives, most people desert their scientific and religious Commonverses and follow the rules of the core Bubbleverse. It is important to realise which part of the Bubbleverse train we in are at the moment, and not to confuse the core Bubbleverse with any of the commonverses and the different commonverses between themselves. Such understanding will save us a lot of nerves and protect us from the

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Table 17.1  The distinctions between the core Bubbleverse and the Commonverses across domains Commonverses Domain

Core Bubbleverse

Scientific and Sociocultural

Emerge in the course Created and of cosmic evolution maintained by or established by the person’s society in the subconscious course of history Bubbleverse The role of a Person is a centre Person is a part of humanity, which is and a holder of person in stranded on a small the universe the universe, which disappears planet in the with the person’s boundless ocean of space and time death Representing Subjective Reflecting Self, phenomena reality qualia, (characters and primordial numbers), RCs presenting (concepts and phenomena theories), science (feelings and generated objects perceptions), (e.g., atom or products of neuron), art, social fantasy customs and moral (mermaids) laws Is controlled by Social Is determined by moral, social and behavior person’s private cultural norms motives developed by society Good and Are determined by Are determined by social interests bad personal interests Origins of natural and social laws

Religious Are given by God

Person is a creation of God

Like in the core Bubbleverse and other Commonverses, plus religion generated objects (gods, ghosts and spirits)

Is controlled by moral and social norms given by God Are determined by God (continued)

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Table 17.1 (continued) Commonverses Scientific and Sociocultural

Domain

Core Bubbleverse

Religious

Self

Is a holder of Is a Central Agent Is causally freedom of action determined by of the mind, free and personal motives and stable from causal responsibility, psychological determination given by God properties revealed and through behaviours indescribable in conceptual terms

Self and external In the scientific Self and external world are related Commonverse, world are locked through harmony external world is into inseparable pre-established by independent of unity. Self Self. Self comes and God. With death of cannot exist the body, part of goes, but external without external the Self (soul) can world stays for world and vice exist forever billions of years. In versa independently of the sociocultural external world Commonverse (philosophy) reflecting Self is independent of the physical world Life is created by Origins of life Life is the inherent Life emerged from God non-living matter property of the (environment) as a Bubbleverse, result of evolution which emerges in accord with simultaneously natural laws with non-­living matter (environment) Purposeful and is Blind, unfolds via Evolution Purposeful, directed by God chance mutations contains implicit and struggle of design of species animals for survival within itself Relations between Self (subject) and external world (object)

(continued)

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Table 17.1 (continued) Commonverses Domain

Core Bubbleverse

Scientific and Sociocultural

Is a result of Is a result of observations over processing presenting things-in-­ phenomena, themselves by experiments and the subconscious logical inferences part of the from already Bubbleverse available knowledge Truth Is determined by a Is determined by a match between match between phenomena and raw phenomena and their general their RCs properties Structure of A combination of Ordinary reality plus events violating the universe ordinary and laws of nature superordinary (quantum realities (e.g., entanglement, everyday magic) psi-effects) New knowledge

Relation to death

Religious Like in other Commonverses, plus revelations from God

Like in other Commonverses plus revelations from god (mystical experiences) Like in the core Bubbleverse and other Commonverses, plus religious magic (e.g., eucharist ceremony) Death is a Death is the most Death is a natural event and a passing supernatural event significant of the soul leaving experience in the case on the the body, with the background of the person’s life and subsequent lasting physical the end of the afterlife universe Bubbleverse

nagging doubts caused by fundamental incomprehensibilities, such as indecisions of whether we have or don’t have free will, whether miracles are reality or sheer fantasy or whether our mind is or is not produced by the processes in our brain. This understanding will make us more tolerable towards the differences between science and religion, evolutionism and creationism; it will give us immunity against the extremities of both science (scientism) and religion (religious fundamentalism). We will also understand why evil can be so attractive and art so ugly. Knowledge about

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the fabric and structure of the Bubbleverse will help us be more conscious about how to cope with our addictions and about what to do in order to transcend our private universe. This knowledge will make us aware that the continuation of the universe beyond the Bubbleverse is not the law of nature or a gift of gods, but hinges on our faith and requires an effort. With every action of good will, however small, with every effort of unselfish sacrifice to others or a good cause, we make the idea of the universe beyond our Bubbleverse more real. The choice is up to us.



The Mysteries of the Bubbleverse: Epilogue

The first and most important enigma of the Bubbleverse is why it exists at all. The problem “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” has been chasing philosophers from ancient times but still remains a mystery. Among the answers there is one according to which this question does not make logical sense, because the question of origin can only arise about anything within an already existing universe, but not about the universe itself. This answer looks just right for the Bubbleverse. The Bubbleverse exists, I find myself in it, and all the “why” questions can be asked only inside my cosmic bubble. However, the Bubbleverse has other and more sensible riddles. One of them is the question of the fabric of the Bubbleverse: why is the Bubbleverse given to me in the form of physical space and time? Indeed, qualia, numbers, geometric shapes and abstract symbols exist beyond physical space and time, which means you can imagine a subject who deals only with such spaceless and timeless entities. The possibility of such intelligence is not a fantasy but reality. In essence, modern artificial intelligence (AI) is like that. AI does not need perceptions in the form of subjective images, it operates with numbers and symbols that exist beyond physical space and time. Yes, AI is not alive and lacks the main feature of © The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9

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human intelligence—the ability to generate emotions and needs. Besides, the AI’s hardware is made of matter and exists in physical space. But why can’t we imagine an intelligence that is not based on physical matter? Such intelligence is fully alive and exists outside physical space and time. True, in my Bubbleverse, this bodiless living entity is impossible, since the very concept of a living entity is inherently linked with physical space and time, but in the spaceless and timeless Bubbleverse such intelligence might exist. The second mystery of the Bubbleverse is its scale: why build a colossal structure of size and complexity of the universe for the meagre time of an individual human life? Of course, in a dream world, new universes can arise and disappear in an even shorter time, but then it is a dream, and my Bubbleverse is a solid reality. Or perhaps my Bubbleverse is nothing more than a life-long dream. Perhaps, for the Bubbleverse, the time of its existence does not matter at all, and only the fact of existence is important. Indeed, a soap bubble exists only for a few seconds, and a planet— for billions of years, but in one way the soap bubble and the planet are equal: unlike a winged horse or a mermaid, which are only flukes of my imagination, both the planet and the soap bubble existed in flesh. On the grand scale of existence, a prince and a beggar are the same: when they live, they exist, and after death they don’t. Perhaps, it is because the time of existence doesn’t matter the Bubbleverse can end suddenly and unexpectedly, like it happens with a person who dies in a plane crash or is killed by a lightning. The third mystery of the Bubbleverse is its psychological structure. Most of the Bubbleverse consists of illusions. The hardness of a stone cliff, the fluidity of water, the redness of the poppy flower—all of them are perceptual illusions. Neutrinos pass through the rock and our entire planet without hindrance, the water in a frozen state turns into a solid body, and behind the redness of the poppy flower stand electromagnetic waves. Ancient Egypt left us the pyramids, and Ancient Rome the ruins of the Colosseum, but in the Bubbleverse these structures exist for the sole purpose of creating in me the illusion of the history of mankind— the illusion which will perish with my disappearance. Other people, who seem so different from me in all sorts of ways, are in reality just manifestations of my subconsciousSelf. They exist as long as I observe them or

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351

think about them. My hope that my deeds will remain in the memory of the descendants after me, the gigantic dimensions of the universe and the inviolability of the laws of nature are illusions as well. Without me as an observer, there are no laws of nature, volcanos don’t erupt, and water doesn’t freeze at zero Celsius. It is a human mind that brings the laws of nature into existence. All that is not an illusion is the existence of the Bubbleverse, and the fact of its emergence and disappearance at the time of my coming to life and departure from it. This raises the question: what is the whole cosmic spectacle for? If the fact of existence is all what matters in the Bubbleverse, wouldn’t it be easier to build my existence in the form of a flashing and dimming lamp? But to expand to the size of the universe with all its glory and complexity and then suddenly burst with the person who dies young because of the earthquake or a tsunami— what a waste of energy and elaboration! The fourth mystery is the mind-body interaction. According to the Bubbleverse perspective, our body contains over 30 trillion living cells in it, each of which is a miniature Bubbleverse of its own (see Chap. 12 for more on that). Whereas the biochemical processes of cell-cell communication, such as exocytosis (the cell taking its trash out), endocytosis (bringing goods into the cell), phagocytosis (eating), pinocytosis (drinking) and others are known, the way our Self communicates with the subjective parts of the cells remains a mystery. When we communicate with other people and animals, we use language, but what ‘language’ does our Self use to communicate with the cells of its own body? How do neurons of our brain ‘understand’ the command when our Self ‘asks’ our body to lift a hand? How do the neurons and other cells ‘detect’ our feelings and thoughts to be able to produce the placebo effect? The fifth riddle is of ethical nature and will be called ‘the dilemma of the anonymous majority’. The riddle can be put as follows: why are there so many other people in my Bubbleverse? Indeed, for other people to perform their main function—a reflection of my Self, I only need a few hundreds, perhaps, a few thousand people, with whom I am in direct or indirect contact. They are my relatives and friends, my acquaintances and characters of the movies I watched and books I read, but what about the other 7 billion something people on Earth? Let us call these 7 billion people the anonymous majority (AM). Once I know about the AM

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existence, I have to decide how I should treat it. It looks as though I have only two options. I can acknowledge each person of the AM as an independent bubbleverse equal to my own Bubbleverse. As we know from Chap. 15, such an acknowledgement means transcending my Bubbleverse, which involves sacrificing all my fortune, time and creative resources to helping the AM to survive. If I am not a king or a billionaire, I would soon exhaust all my resources in charitable activities, without the AM even feeling the difference, and even a billionaire’s resources are limited. Ultimately, going this road would completely dissolve my Self in the entropy of the Bubbleverse, which would be the end of the Bubbleverse. The second option is not to do the transcendence and treat the AM as a group of other people inferior to my Self. Perhaps, I even come to the conclusion that the AM are parasites that multiply with the increasing pace and soon will destroy my cultural habitat and the planet’s resources, which eventually be the end of the planet’s ecosystem and the end of my Bubbleverse. Treating the AM like that would mean dividing other people into two groups, the good one (the people I find useful to my Bubbleverse) and the bad one (the AM), and doing what I can to support the former and diminish the latter. As I am unable to eradicate the AM, I can only hope for a disaster (e.g., the Great Flood, an epidemic, a nuclear war or a falling of a big meteorite) that would diminish and destroy the AM, with my Self and the ‘good ones’ being saved in some kind of Noah’s Ark. Obviously, this outcome is unlikely; the more likely outcome is that my Bubbleverse too can perish in that disaster. Trying to find a middle way between these two options (e.g., treating only some people from the AM as friends of my Bubbleverse) will not solve the riddle, as soon as the rest of the AM would still be a challenge to my ethical feelings. Finally, including animals into the AM would make the AM dilemma even more challenging and unsolvable. Some of these and other mysteries could be resolved in a click by just admitting that the whole idea of the Bubbleverse is wrong and returning to the standard Commonverse’s view that a person is perishable, but the universe exists forever. Unfortunately, this easy solution comes at a price: you have to admit that your universe can exist without a subject—your Self—and this is logically impossible. Even if you imagine your universe being without you, it will only exist for as long as you are imagining it.

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353

“Yes—one might say,—assuming that my universe is really my Bubbleverse rather than a real universe”. The core of this sceptical statement is hidden in the word ‘real’. Whether we like it or not, but the universe that has the highest (absolute) existential status is our subjective personal universe—the Bubbleverse. Putting one’s Bubbleverse below the ‘real universe’ on the scale of existence is self-defeating as it tacitly means doubting one’s own existence. The existence of the physical universe of science or religion has a strong existential status, yet this status is not absolute. With the extinction of our conscious mind, the Bubbleverse will cease to exist, because on the grand scheme of things the Bubbleverse and the mind are the same. As for the physical universe of science and the religious Commonverse  , with all their impressive glory, we cannot be that sure: there is no way to check whether these magnificent creations of human genius remain after the candle of our mind stops burning. * * * In the beginning, there was Nothing. Somewhere in the depths of Nothing, a tiny invisible blob was born—the bubble universe. In the beginning, it was just a tiny spot of ‘something’—the seed of which we can’t say anything except that this was a speck of ‘existence’. But even at its very origin, this speck contained a division within itself: the embryonic distinction between light and darkness, between what would later become subject and object, consciousness and matter. As the newly born bubble began its slow motion upwards, the divisions inside it grew. There appeared two opposite but interconnected worlds: the world of consciousness, with the centre in the Self, and the world of external reality, which contained matter and society. The Self was becoming conscious of itself, discovering subjective time and space, as well as dividing itself into domains of sensation, perception, thinking, volition, imagination, needs and emotions. The opposite part—matter and society—differentiated as well. It separated into the world of living and non-living entities, and further into inanimatematter, plants, animals and people. As our Self developed, it learned what is appropriate to be learned—developing knowledge about the internal and external

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worlds: psychology and science. Simultaneously, our Self was engaging into various relationships with other selves, recognising itself as a part of family, race, gender, ethnic, religious and other groups of people. Our Self became a person, with all what being a person involves: beliefs, knowledge, profession and plans for life, with love and hatred, joy and sufferings. Extending the Bubbleverse in time and space, our Self invented multiple hi-stories, from the Big Bang and the theory of evolution to the stories of their civilisation, country and family. As time flew, the bubble became more and more unstable. The membrane was wearing up, becoming thinner and less strong. The moment unavoidably came when the bubble finally exploded. Or perhaps, it slowly shrank as a rubber balloon punctured by a needle. Maybe, it simply extinguished like a light bubble or a fire in the woods. In all the possible ways of dying, the Bubbleverse ceases to exist. And the whole universe shuts down with it. There is no more the majestic light of consciousness, the oceans of beliefs, the tornados of emotional outbursts. The society with its multiple peoples and languages is no more either. The cosmos, with all its galaxies and black holes, plunged back into the void of Nothing, taking with it all the achievements of scientific knowledge I had learned, all the magnificent experiences and memories I had had, all the gods I had believed in. Darkness. The miraculous journey of the bubble through the great Nothing has come to an end. The Nothing has finally won…. But look… down there the invisible seeds of new bubbles emerge in the Nothing; like the sparkles of champagne in a crystal glass, they begin their journey upwards, to the light of being…. Perhaps, one of these bubbles will be like me…. Maybe, it will be me.

Index1

A

Absolute objects, 187, 188, 202, 223 Absolute reference frame, 245 Absolute Spirit, 17 Absolute truth, 154 Abstract languages, 5 Academic institutions, 69 Adams, Douglas, 154 Addictions, 99–101, 348 Afterlife, 21, 252, 255, 264, 316, 331, 332, 339 Agency, x, 12, 25, 99, 116, 173, 175, 252, 270, 278, 287, 289 See also Free will; Intentionality Agential Self, 114 Age of Enlightenment, 280 AI, see Artificial intelligence Alexander the Great, 220 Aliens, viii, 8, 20, 53, 221, 309

Almighty Wizard, 256, 257 Altered states of mind, 61, 142 Altruism, 80, 241, 255, 295, 327 Amber, 88, 200 See also Electricity Amebae, 295 Ampere, Andre-Marie, 200 Anaesthetics, 77, 330, 341 Analogue, see Digital Analogue/digital correspondence, 205 Analysis, xi, 25, 83, 132, 168, 320 See also Thinking Anamnesis theory of, 24 Anarchic hand disorder, 116, 160 Anaxagoras, 221

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Subbotsky, The Bubble Universe: Psychological Perspectives on Reality, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49008-9

355

356 Index

Anaximander, 221 Anaximenes, 221 Ancient cultures, 34 Ancient Rome, 350 Ancient world, 10 Anderson, Hans Christian, 280 Animal behaviour, x, 226, 241, 242 Animated, 69, 83, 89, 92, 98, 143, 148, 173, 188, 225, 244, 269, 279, 331 agent, 99 phenomena, 83 Animism, 29, 148, 226–229, 233, 263, 268, 269, 279, 280 Animistic, 92, 225, 233, 253, 276 Animistic structure of language, 148 Ant, 30, 46, 68, 230, 267 Anthropic coincidences, 43 See also Anthropic principle; Fine tuning Anthropic principle, 241 Anthropocentric/anthropocentrism, 28, 29, 279 Anthropocentrism in cosmological theories, 279 Anthropological studies, x Anthropomorphic/ anthropomorphisation/ anthropomorphism, 107, 228, 244, 268, 270, 289, 290 Antikythera mechanism, 211 Antiquity, 188, 260, 271, 273 Antismoking campaign, 100 Aphrodite, 7 See also Greek myth A-priori forms of perception and reason, 32

Archimedes, 222 Ariadne’s thread, 109 Aristotle, 201 Arrow of time, 90 Art, 7, 9, 59, 61, 169, 175, 178, 207, 208, 210, 212, 240, 255, 262, 271, 281, 318, 347 Art brut, 209 Artificial intelligence, viii, 9, 244, 349 See also Computer; Information Artificialism, 29 Artificial selection, 237 Artist, 207–209 Art povera, 209 Art versus science, 209–211 Ascidia, 234 Atoms, ix, xi, 9, 10, 12, 44, 46, 66, 98, 100, 118, 141, 188, 244, 272, 277, 281, 289, 295, 339 See also Quantum objects ATP synthase, 302 See also Life Authentic view (AV), 195 Automaton, 25 Axons, 228 B

Babies, 24, 32, 42, 121, 140, 275 Bach, J. S., 207 Background of Luck, 335 Bacteria, 223, 227, 235, 267, 281, 287, 293, 294, 298 Baggini, Julian, 27 Bat, 295 Battle of Hastings, 220

 Index 

Battle of Stalingrad, 220 Beam of subjective light, 162, 165 Behaviourism, 31 Belief, viii, xii, 13, 19, 21, 28, 35, 40, 41, 51, 74–76, 80–81, 121–123, 140, 142, 144, 172, 176, 191, 238, 242, 253–255, 258, 261–263, 277, 279, 280, 311–313, 317, 318, 327, 331 See also Faith Bem, Daryl, 54–56 Berg, L. S., 234, 235 Berkeley, George, 273 Biases, xi, 177 Biblical Bubbleverse, 270 Big Bang, 4, 5, 8, 136, 220, 276, 278, 280, 354 Big Bang theory, 4 Big universe, 10 See also Bigverse Bigverse, 13, 30–35, 82, 313 Biological machines, ix, xi See also Living cell Biology, x, 26, 65, 91, 96, 149, 188, 240, 282 See also Life Biosynthesis, 149 Bit, see Information Black holes, 18, 19, 86, 159–179, 354 See also Cognitive, of the Bubbleverse Blind spot, 198–200 Body and brain, 44 Bony labyrinth, 71 Book of Genesis, 7 Book of Job, 338

357

Bosch, Hieronymus, 207 Bouchon, Basile, 201 Bowing to the God, 270 Brain, see Body and Brain; Mind Brothers Grimm, 280 Brownian motion, 109, 231 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, 207 Bubble universes, 5, 353 See also Bubbleverse Bubbleverse, xi–xv, 1, 5–8, 12–14, 17–35, 39–62, 45n1, 65–86, 88–90, 94, 95, 109, 113–119, 123, 124, 126, 132, 134–136, 139–154, 157, 159–179, 181–193, 195–212, 217, 219, 221, 222, 225, 230–233, 235–240, 242, 244, 245, 252–256, 258–263, 267–282, 285–287, 295, 297, 301, 307, 309–324, 327–339, 341–344, 349–354 perspective, xi, 29, 30, 231, 241, 242, 260, 274, 286 primordial, 6, 29 Buddha, 21 Byte, 201 See also Information C

Cadaver, 25 biological, 25 psychological, 26 Cajal, Santiago Ramon, 201 Cancer, 100, 102 Capitalist economics, 146

358 Index

Carroll, Lewis, 204 Categorical imperative, 327 Catholic church, 258 Causal connection, 144, 178 Causal effect, 49, 239 Causality, x, 32, 56, 58, 87, 96, 107, 114, 141–144, 149, 151, 163, 165, 219, 226, 273, 275, 278, 288, 312, 343 Causal reasoning, xiv Cause-effect continuum (CEC), 28, 51, 58, 59, 118, 141, 144, 272, 273, 287, 288, 290, 291, 295 CEC, see Cause-effect continuum Celestial body, 66 See also Meteor Cell signalling, 291 Celsius, 142, 351 Censorship, 169, 209 Central Agent, xiv, 4, 118–123, 230 See also Self Central processor, 120 Cerebellum, 201 Cesar, 220 Channel of education, 343 Chaos, 81–82, 172, 179, 195–197 Cheating, 133, 134, 320 Chemical reactions, xii, 289, 290, 293 See also Life Chemical substances, 30, 44, 229, 303 Child development, 276, 280 Child’s mind, 28 Choanoflagellates, 298 Christian Bubbleverse, 271 Christianity, 255, 259, 271 Cinderella story, 201

Cinema, 62 Circular polarization anticlockwise, 48, 49 clockwise, 48, 49 Civilisation, 11, 100, 354 Clark, A. C., 149, 244 Clinical death, 330 Cognising, 157 Cognitive development, 28, 254, 279 Cognitive psychologists, 28 Cognitive skills, 24, 32 See also Babies; Infants Collective beliefs, 69 See also Social customs Collective identity, 281 Cognitive, of the Bubbleverse, 19, 28, 238 Columbus, Christofer, 319 Commensurable phenomena, 94 Commonverse, 5, 6 scientific/sociocultural/religious, 8, 10, 14, 18, 22–24, 29, 32, 42–44, 49–51, 57–61, 73–76, 88, 94, 114, 117–119, 132, 134, 136, 140–145, 149–151, 153, 154, 164, 171, 172, 178, 183–190, 192, 197–199, 210, 212, 220, 222, 226, 235, 237–239, 245, 255, 256, 258–263, 267, 272–274, 279–281, 288–297, 302, 310, 311, 313, 319–323, 327, 328, 331, 335, 336, 339, 342–344, 352 Communication, 178–179 Complex agentic mentality, 298

 Index 

Complex chemical reactions, 289 Complexes, 160 Complex non-reflective mentality, 299 Complex reflective mentality, 301 Computer, xii, 52–56, 98, 114, 118, 119, 145, 151, 189, 201, 202, 205, 211, 225, 233, 237, 261, 281 Conceptual art, 209 Conceptual models, viii See also Rational constructions (RC) Concerts, 62 Conditioning, 31 Confusing social pointing, 129, 130 Conscious Bubbleverse, 173, 174 Conscious minds, xi Consciousness, ix, xii, 3, 4, 7–9, 11, 12, 28, 29, 40, 49, 58, 61, 66, 118, 120, 148, 150, 159, 165, 169–171, 174, 177, 189, 199, 200, 203–206, 209, 267, 278, 286, 287, 300, 301, 320, 323, 330, 353, 354 origins of, 3 See also Mind Conscious observers, ix, 3, 43, 241 Constantine, 259 See also Christianity Contagion magic, x See also Magical thinking Controlled phenomena, 92 Convergent evolution, 233 Copernican revolution, xi, 7, 10, 18 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 273 Core Bubbleverse, 6, 149, 150, 153, 154, 171, 183, 188, 223, 235, 260, 261, 273, 274,

359

281, 318, 320, 322, 327, 343, 344 See also Bubbleverse, primordial Correlational effect, see Causal effect Correlations, 166, 177, 203, 206 Cortical localisation, 205 Cosmic, 18, 173, 220, 229, 239, 245, 269, 271, 272, 341–349, 351 Cosmic spectacle, 351 Cosmic train, 341–348 Cosmological constants fundamental, 8, 240, 241, 323 Cosmos, vii, 9, 13, 18, 22, 30, 31, 60, 142, 146, 222, 241, 269, 271–274, 313, 354 Counselling, 11 Creationism, x, 29, 347 See also Evolutionism Creative thinking, xi, 25, 199 See also Subconscious Creativity, 169, 191, 212, 236–238, 280, 338 Crick, Francis, 204, 233 Crime, 100, 117, 258, 331 Crowd behaviour, 136 Cryonics, 339 Cubism, 208 Culture, xii, 5, 117, 281 See also Sociocultural Bubbleverse Cyanobacteria, 293, 295 Cybernetics, viii See also Computer; Information D

Dali, Salvador, 208, 210 Darwin, 12, 188, 226, 229, 230, 237, 238, 295, 303

360 Index

Darwin’s theory, 12, 188, 226, 230, 237 Da Vinci, 271 Dawkins, Richard, 17, 203, 237, 289, 301 The dawn of cognition, 195–197 de Balzac, Honore, 209 de Chirico, Giorgio, 208, 251 de La Mettrie, Julien Offray, 272 de Sharden, Teillard, 238 Death, ix, xii, xiv, xv, 9, 18, 21, 35, 171, 172, 251–254, 256, 262, 264, 269, 274, 312, 316, 327, 329–333, 339, 343, 344, 350 See also Death in the Bubbleverse Decentration, 195, 197 Decline effect, 56, 59 Deconstruction philosophy of, 148 See also Postmodernism Deep psychedelic state, 174 Default mode network, 175 Deities, 221, 268, 270 Dementalisation, 226–228 Democritus, 10 Demon, 119, 199 Dennet, Daniel, 297 KInsbourne, Marcel, 119 Descartes, Rene, 4, 32, 40, 57, 181, 201, 272–274 Desires, 6, 20, 65, 66, 113, 117, 146 Destiny, 8, 9, 154 Detector screen, 47–49, 98, 223 Development historical, xiv individual, xiii

Developmental psychology, 28 Digital, ix, 97, 202, 203, 205, 206, 232 Digital code, 202 Digital ontology theory of, 203 Digital space, ix See also Information; Simulation Direct chemical reaction, 289 Discourse, 154, 209, 269 Disgust mechanism of, 101 Dissipative systems, viii, 289 See also Life; Living entity; Need Dissociative identity, 115 disorder (see Multiple personality) Dissolved Self, 136 DNA, ix, 78, 203, 206, 212, 228, 232, 279, 290, 294 See also Life Dominance of good over evil, 327 Doors of perception, 174 Doppelgänger, 86 Double helix, 233 Double slit experiment, 47 Dream-brain link, 178 Dreaming of the future, 274–275 Dreaming of the gods, 263–265 Dreams, viii, xv, 5, 6, 20, 34, 51, 61, 89, 92, 93, 96, 113, 142, 149, 150, 160, 172, 175–178, 182, 242, 253, 254, 330, 341 See also Subconscious Dreiser, Theodore, 209 Drosophila, 228 Drugs, 100, 171

 Index  E

Ear, 49, 71, 162, 163, 230, 232 See also Hearing; Perception Eardrum, 49 of an ear, 71 Earth, 5, 9, 13, 18, 25, 95, 142, 146, 189, 220, 231, 315 Easter island, 319 Ecclesiastes, 10 Echo chambers, 192 Echolocation, 72, 231, 232 Economics, 7, 30, 31, 146, 274 EEG, 44 Effort of faith, 313 Egocentric views, 29, 279 Egypt, 22, 254, 350 Einstein, Albert, 197, 199, 210, 245 Electrical stimulation of cortex, 205 Electricity, 88, 200, 202 Electromagnetic emission, 67 Electromagnetic waves, 46, 49, 76, 163, 350 Electrons, 49, 227, 290 Elementary particles, ix, 10, 276 See also Quantum objects Elements, x, xiii, 10, 43, 151, 163, 208, 241, 254, 277, 287, 300, 321, 323 Emergence from nothing, x See also Chance events Emergent property, 10 Emergent quality, 9 Empirical methods, 7 Endosymbiosis, 292 ENIAC, 233 See also Computer Entangled particles, 49

361

Entangled photons, 47 Entanglement, 48, 49, 58 Entities, ix, 7, 10–12, 17, 18, 29, 58, 98, 116, 142, 172, 182, 187–190, 202, 208, 225, 227, 230, 244, 268, 277, 281, 287, 288, 291, 294, 297, 349, 353 spiritless, 10 spiritual, 315 Entropy, 175, 199, 289 Environment, xiii, 5, 7, 30, 170, 189, 204, 208, 229–231, 233, 235, 237, 253, 254, 267, 280, 285, 287–289, 292–294, 297, 299, 302, 322 Environmental influences, 7 Epilepsy, 204 Epiphenomena, 11 Epiphenomenon, 202 Epistemological flaw, 4 Epistemological mistake, 23 Eradication of evil, 327 Eros, 333 Escher, Mauritz, 208, 210 ESP, see Extrasensory perception Essences of objects, 7, 33 See also Rational constructions (RCs) Essentializing, 79 Eternal life, 9, 256, 328 Eternal truth, 27 See also Absolute truth Eukaryotic cells, 227 Eukaryotic organism, 66 Everyday magic, 178

362 Index

Everyday thinking, x Evils, viii, 327–330 See also Unhappiness Evolution, viii, xi, xiii, xiv, 4, 11, 28, 29, 31, 71, 171, 185, 188, 212, 226, 228, 230–240, 242, 253, 255, 274, 277–279, 282, 289, 297–301, 303, 316, 331, 342, 354 cosmic, xiv by natural selection, vi, 212, 226, 235, 238 (see also Darwin; Neo-Darwinists) Evolutionary scientists, 234, 240 Evolutionism, 238, 347 Evolutionistic perspective, 230 Executive Self, 126, 129, 132 Existence, 182–183 Existence of god, 4, 28, 256, 258, 273, 313, 314 Existentialisation/existentialization, 13, 184, 189, 300 See also Truth Existential status absolute, 353 strong, 183, 184, 186–188, 353 incomplete, 183, 185, 188 weak, 183–189, 191, 278 Experimenter, observer, x Experimenter’s expectancy effect, 55 Experiments, 51, 53, 56, 69, 105, 106, 108, 123, 140, 174, 182, 186, 197, 200, 209, 222, 245, 257, 259, 300 Explaining behavior, 225 Explanatory function of RC, xiii, 80

Explorer, xiii, 207–209 External world, xii, 13, 17, 22, 23, 50, 89, 223, 276 Extraordinary reality, 146 Extrasensory perception, 50 F

Fabric of the Bubbleverse, 65–82, 140, 219, 312, 349 Faith/faith, 8, 21, 30, 35, 190, 252, 253, 255, 256, 312–319, 322, 323, 328, 331, 339, 348 Falcon, Jean-Baptiste, 201 False beliefs, viii, xv, 4, 95, 132, 189–191, 321, 329 See also Illusions False phenomena, 96 Famine, 7 Faraday, Michael, 197, 200 Fatum, 8 See also Destiny Fechner’s law, 91 Feelings, x, xiv, 5, 6, 12, 13, 60, 66, 73, 83, 90, 132, 135, 148, 153, 176, 224–226, 251, 252, 268, 285, 343 Feyerabend, Paul, 27 Figure and its background, 39 Filter bubbles, 192 Fine tuning, 8, 43, 239, 240, 323 Flagellum, 235, 298 Flipping on itself, 66, 286 See also Subjective reality Fluorescence microscopy, 78 fMRI, 175 Folk theories, viii See also Mind; Reductionism

 Index 

Formulas, ix, 14, 145, 153, 223 See also Rational constructions (RCs) Foucault, Michel, 154 Foundational basis of the universe, xiii Four fundamental interactions, 43 Frame of reference, 19, 245 Frankenstein, 26 Franklin, Benjamin, 200 Free action, 319 Free choices, ix, 318, 319 See also Free will; Moral responsibility Freedom of action, xiv, 4, 61, 146, 328 See also Free will Freedom of choice, 8, 169 See also Free will Free will, viii, 7, 25, 28, 204, 242, 323, 347 See also Free choice Freud, Sigmund, 148, 168, 176, 274, 333 Fundamental incomprehensibilities, 212, 347 Fundamental physical constants, 43 Fundamental structures, 41 G

Galatea, 6 See also Greek myth; Pygmalion Galbraith, John Kenneth, 191 Galileo, 4, 245, 273 Galvani, Luigi, 200, 201 Gap between mind and matter, 44 General properties of phenomena, 89, 90, 109, 145, 150, 182, 183, 207, 275

363

Generative grammars, 13 Genes, vii, viii, xii, 7, 9, 11, 12, 31, 32, 45, 188, 203, 220, 232, 293 Genetic engineers, 67 Genetic mutations, 12 Genetics, 237 Geometrical figures, 14, 79, 118, 126, 129, 222 Geometrical theorem, 24 Ghost, x, 7, 114 See also Spirit Gilbert, William, 200 Global warming, 329 God, viii, xii, xiv, 3, 4, 9, 13, 14, 17, 26, 28, 29, 32, 61, 80, 176, 189, 190, 192, 203, 211, 212, 221, 222, 226, 230, 233, 236, 237, 239, 242, 244, 253–256, 258–260, 262–264, 267–274, 310, 312–314, 316–319, 323, 327, 328, 331, 332, 338, 342, 344, 348, 354 See also Almighty Wizard; Ghost; Spirit Gods and the supernatural, 258–263 Good, ix shadow of, 18, 26, 35, 67, 72, 82, 101, 121, 172, 191, 211, 229, 240, 260, 261, 267, 288, 310, 311, 322, 324, 327–330, 335, 336, 338, 348 Goya, 272 Gravitation, 126, 187, 210, 225 Gravity, 34, 119, 231, 241, 295, 344 Great One, 21 Great replacement, 211–212

364 Index

Greek myth, 3, 6, 221, 239 Greeks, 200, 222, 255, 268 Gustatory cortex, 72 Gustatory perception, 72 H

Hallucinations, 92, 142, 175, 190 Hearing, xi, 71, 91, 145, 162, 171, 225, 231, 310, 311 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 17 Hereditary, 7, 17, 30, 232 Heredity, 12, 237 See also Inheritance of acquired characteristics Hieroglyphs, 22 Hinduism, 255 Hippocrates, 201 History, 13, 32–34, 207, 219, 230, 255, 285, 342, 344, 350 Hi-story, 13, 219–246, 251–265, 267–282, 285–303, 342, 344 See also History History and hi-story, 219–221 History of psychology, viii Hobbes, Thomas, 280 Holocaust, 328 Hologram, 196 Homer, 268 Homo Sapience, 274 Homunculus argument, 162 Homunculus map, 205 Hoop of life, 251–252 Hubble's telescope, 78 Human brain, xi, 206 Human consciousness, viii, ix, 175, 240, 295, 297 See also Subjective experience

Humanistic Bubbleverse, 272 Humanity, viii, 8, 9, 211, 212, 252, 315, 327, 331 Humanlike abilities in animals, 240 Human-machine, 9 Human mind, vi, viii, 5, 30, 32, 48, 82, 142, 212, 237–240, 243, 244, 273, 281, 286, 330, 351 subjective experience (see Sensations; Perceptions; Qualia; Rational constructions) Human reasoning, xii Hunger, viii, 287, 294, 295, 298, 343 Huxley, Aldous, 174, 209 I

IBM, see Information Identity, 41, 89, 90, 114, 115, 140, 145, 150, 182, 183, 204, 207, 208, 219, 228, 275, 281 See also General properties Ideology, xii, 12, 274, 280, 331 computer/evolutionary/neuro, xii religious, xii scientific, xii See also Biases Illusions, viii, xiv, 4, 7, 9, 23, 26, 41, 42, 60, 61, 75, 76, 94, 96, 103, 104, 118, 119, 149, 162, 179, 181, 182, 185, 188, 189, 191, 192, 242, 259, 262, 263, 278, 350 of control, 259 of the mind, viii perceptual, 191–193

 Index 

Imagination, 5, 13, 18, 34, 40, 60, 69, 84, 96, 114, 145, 150, 169, 175, 182, 185, 189, 196, 198, 224, 244, 245, 254, 256, 350, 353 See also Art; Dreams Imagined phenomenal world, 145 See also Perceived phenomenal world IMD, see Implicit Design Impersonal entities, viii Impersonal forces, ix Implicit Design, 230–235, 238 Impossible event, 42 Impossible phenomena, 96 Impossible triangle, 185 Impressionism, 208 Inanimate/inanimate, 11, 42, 44, 49, 50, 56, 58, 66, 69, 82, 83, 89, 91, 92, 99, 140, 143, 148, 170, 173, 188, 212, 226, 270, 277, 279, 282, 302, 303, 331, 353 matter, 44, 49, 50, 56, 58, 212, 270, 282, 303, 353 objects, 42, 44, 69, 82, 92, 148, 226, 279, 302 phenomena, 83 Inclusion, 90, 140, 141, 143, 145, 150, 182, 219, 275 See also General properties Incommensurable phenomena, 94 Incompleteness, 66, 90 Incomplete objects, 189 Incomprehensibilities fundamental, 28 Increasing complexity, 231 Individual, vii, ix, xii–xv, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 19, 21, 25, 26, 28,

365

30–33, 46–49, 59, 66, 78, 79, 81, 82, 96, 97, 134, 136, 188, 189, 230, 231, 238, 267–271, 273, 274, 279, 280, 299, 309, 320, 321, 350 Individual human mind, viii Individual Selves, ix Industrial cultures, vii Inertial frames of reference, 245 Infants, 24, 32, 42, 124, 182, 275 Information, vii, viii, xii, 13, 17, 48–50, 78, 100, 149, 162, 192, 200–203, 205, 206, 221, 228, 232, 289, 329 See also Brain; Electricity Infrasound, 72 Inheritance of acquired characteristics, 188 Initial singularity, 226 Innate ideas, 23, 32, 187 See also Subconscious Inner speech, 127–129 Instances of the supernatural, 150 Intellectual tools, 253 Intelligence, 201, 244, 298, 300, 338, 349 Intelligent design, 229, 344 Intelligent designer, x, 43, 153 See also Evolution Intention, ix, 58, 168, 229, 276, 319 See also Subjective experience Intentional activity, 290 Intentionality, x, 12, 90, 124 See also Psyche Interference pattern, 47 Internet of things, viii Interpreting behavior, 225

366 Index

Intuition, xiv, 42, 73, 74, 199 See also Subconscious Invention of gods, 252–257 Invisible galaxies, 78 Involved level of Self ’s activity, 152, 153, 261 Irreducible complexity, 235 See also Intelligent design Israel, 10

191, 199, 206, 223, 235, 252, 255, 275, 277, 280, 319, 323, 324, 331, 342–344, 348, 353, 354 See also Mind; Rational constructions (RCs) Knowledge-resistant phenomena, 95 Knowledge-sensitive phenomena, 95 Kohler, Wolfgang, 300 Kuhn, Thomas, 27

J

James, William, 30, 170, 171, 173 Jesus Christ, 271 Jones, Jim, 332 Joyce, James, 209 Judaism, 270 Judeo-Christian tradition, 17, 80 K

Kafka, Franz, 209 Kandel, Eric, 203 Kandinsky, Vassily, 208 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 32, 41, 45n1, 77, 84, 149, 188, 273, 310 Kekule, August, 198 King, 10 Kingdom of the Dead, 254 Knee-jerk reflex, 224 Knowing/know, 48, 101, 317 Knowledge, ix rational constructions (RCs), xi, xii, xiv, 8–11, 13, 21, 22, 24, 27–29, 32, 35, 45n1, 48–50, 56, 69, 73, 76, 82, 88, 94, 95, 99–109, 113, 141, 146, 149, 154, 160, 168, 171, 181, 185, 188,

L

Ladder of evolution, 242 Lane, Nick, 302 Language of truth, 22 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 141, 142, 258 Laser, 46, 47 Last Universal Common Ancestor, 294 Laws of physics, 11 of psychology, 11 of science, viii, x, 28, 91, 212, 221, 223–226, 354 of morality, xiv, 11, 18, 20, 23–25, 31, 32, 34, 61, 69, 96, 141, 142, 144, 146, 153, 168, 169, 178, 187, 188, 198, 199, 207, 245, 254, 258, 270, 271, 275, 301, 312, 329, 336, 343, 344, 351 of nature, 18, 31, 69, 140–144, 146, 153, 168, 169, 198, 199, 234, 245, 254, 258, 270, 271, 301, 344, 351 of society, 146 of the Bubbleverse, 330

 Index 

Leonardo, 207 Leontiev, Alexei, 299 Leucippus, 10 Leviathan, 280–282 Liberalism, 31, 280 Life/life, vii, x, xi, xiii–xv, 3, 6–9, 11, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28, 32–35, 43, 60, 61, 66, 73, 76, 104–106, 113, 134, 150, 154, 168, 170–172, 178, 188, 191, 202, 203, 212, 220, 226, 228, 229, 238, 241, 251, 252, 254, 255, 257–261, 263, 270, 274, 280, 281, 285–303, 311–315, 318, 319, 323, 327, 328, 330–333, 336, 341, 342, 344, 350, 351, 354 eternal, 6 origins of, 3 Life after death, 21, 252 See also Afterlife Likhachov, Dmitry, 134 Literary fiction, 11 The Little Bang, 275–280 Living cell, ix, 96, 148, 149, 228, 278, 285, 289–292, 302 Living entity, xiv, 25, 66, 229, 231, 267, 285–290, 302, 350 See also Life Living organism, xiv, 289, 290, 294, 297, 302 See also Life Living thing, 66 Locality, 90, 140, 145, 150, 182 See also General properties Locke, John, 93 Logical inferences, xiv, 35, 168, 199, 240

367

Logical trap, xiii, 242 See also Vicious circle Logos, 269, 271 Louis XV of France, 310, 311 LSD, 171, 173 LUCA, see Last Universal Common Ancestor Luck, 334–339 Luria, Alexander, 91, 126, 128 Luria’s hand game (LHG), 128, 129 M

Machines, ix, 5, 9, 145, 200, 203, 212, 242, 244, 272, 290, 292, 302 nano, ix Macroworld, 45, 47, 48 Madness, 189 Magellan, Ferdinand, 319 Magic, x, 4, 61, 125, 140, 141, 146, 149, 176, 178, 190, 244, 257, 260–263, 270, 280 See also Magical thinking Magical causation, x See also Sympathetic magic Magical forces, 221 Magical healing, viii See also Psychotherapy Magical incantations, 7 Magical law of similarity, 260 Magical participation, 199 Magical powers, 140 Magical projector, 113–117, 119, 123 Magical thinking, 150, 151, 175 Magnetic field, 90, 231 Magnetic force, 197 Magnetism, 197

368 Index

Magritte, Rene, 208 Malevich, Kazimir, 208 Mandelstam, Osip, 209 Many-worlds interpretation, 19, 43 Marcus Aurelius, 269 Marx, Karl, 146, 274 Mass diseases, viii Materialism, 11, 199, 281 See also Materialistic perspective; Materialistic viewpoint Materialistic orientation, 10 See also Materialism Materialistic perspective, 11, 12 Materialistic viewpoint, 11 Materialism, 11, 199, 281 Mathematics, 5, 23, 198, 223, 233, 301 Matter, 4, 10–12, 18, 19, 26–28, 30, 32, 43, 44, 47–51, 56–60, 76, 93, 97, 144, 145, 165, 172, 178, 183, 201, 212, 220, 223, 230, 255, 263, 269, 270, 276–278, 282, 285, 289–292, 303, 310, 313, 323, 350, 351, 353 Maxwell, James Clerk, 197 May, Edwin, 52 McLuhan, M., 281 Meaning of life, 9, 170, 323–324 Meaning-responsive Self, 126 Meanings, x, 86–88, 126 Measurement, 19, 49, 68, 69, 86–88, 91, 168, 222 See also Rational constructions (RCs) Measuring devices, 48 Media culture, 281 Medicine, 76, 91, 339 Meditation, 61

Membrane, 135, 287, 290–292, 294, 354 See also Living cell Meno, 24 Mental abilities, xi, 67, 227, 339 See also Subjective experience Mental activity, 7 See also Consciousness; Mind; Subjective experience Mental constructions, xiv See also Rational construction (RCs); Scientific concepts Mental copy, 88 Mental eye, 92, 163, 164 Mental images, 145 Mental processes, x, 11, 27, 91, 203, 278 See also Subjective experience Mental representations, 69 Mental tools, 67 Mermaids, 183–190, 350 Messenger RNA, 228 Metabolism, 289, 291, 292, 302 Metacognition, 175 Metaphysical subject, 27 Meteor, 66 Michelangelo, 271 Microbiology, 237 Microcosm, 30, 269, 271 See also Cosmos Microscope, 44, 46, 201, 223 Miescher, Johann Friedrich, 233 Mind subjective experience, viii–xii, xiv, 4–7, 10–13, 17, 19, 20, 23, 24, 26–28, 30–34, 41, 42, 44–46, 48–51, 56–61, 66, 67, 69, 72–76, 79, 82, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 100–109,

 Index 

115, 116, 118–120, 123, 124, 126, 132, 139, 142, 144, 145, 149, 159–165, 169–171, 173–175, 177, 186, 195, 198–207, 210, 212, 223–225, 235–240, 242, 245, 251, 253, 262, 265, 271, 273, 274, 276–279, 281, 282, 286, 302, 310, 314, 319–322, 330, 335, 341–344, 347, 351 Mind over matter phenomena, 51 Miracle of life, 301–303 Miracles, xiv, 7, 28, 30, 60, 61, 146, 154, 202, 256, 278, 347 See also Supernatural Mirror, 53, 66, 114, 241, 242, 244, 286, 288, 310 Mitochondria, 227, 292 Moai, 319 Model, 9, 30, 119, 177, 233, 273, 280, 327, 338 scientific, 9 Modern art, 208 Modern science, viii, ix, 9, 11, 69, 222, 223 See also Sciences Modules, viii, xiv, 118 See also Brain Molecular biology, 32, 228, 323 See also Anthropomorphism; Evolution; Natural sciences Molecules, ix, xiv, 10, 12, 26, 33, 44, 78, 102, 109, 118, 126, 148, 199, 203, 204, 206, 212, 227, 228, 244, 277, 278, 281, 287, 289–291, 302 See also Life

369

Monad, 10 Monet, Oscar-Claude, 208 Monsters, 92, 139–140, 188 Moon, 20, 182 Moral action, 318, 323 Moral and social norms, xiv, 320 Moral behaviour, 322 Moral conduct, 80 Moral egocentrism in human relations, 279 Morality, 3, 7, 28, 69, 146, 168, 255, 258, 273, 319–323 Moral imperative, 311, 329 Moral responsibility, 327 Moral values, 25 Mozart, 77 Müller-Lyer illusion, 96, 104, 189 Multiple Drafts Model, 119 Multiple personality disorder, 115 Multiverse, 19, 43 Munch, Edvard, 210 Munchausen, 118 Museums, 62, 211 Music, 61, 72, 136, 146, 162, 176, 207 Mutations, 35, 229, 234, 236 Myers, Frederic, 159 Mystery, 12, 18, 163, 170, 176, 182, 303, 349, 350 Mystical experiences, 170–172, 175, 255 Mysticism, x See also Mystical experience Myth, 6, 7, 9, 118, 154, 239, 267–268, 281 Mythological Bubbleverse, 269 Mythology, 5, 221, 222, 255 Myths, 3, 7, 82, 221

370 Index N

Nagel, Thomas, 26, 27 Nano-machines, vii, 292 Napoleon, 220, 258 Narcissistic mirror, 239–244 Narcissus, 239, 241, 244 Narratives, 122, 176, 177, 205, 209, 314 Natural phenomena, ix Natural philosophy, 222 Natural sciences, viii–xi, 11, 199, 223, 226, 227 See also Psychology; Sciences Natural scientists, 24–26, 224, 233, 289 Natural selection, xii, 12, 29, 226, 228–230, 234, 235, 238, 302, 303 See also Darwin; Evolution Near-death experiences, 21 Necker Cube, 39, 236 Needs, xi, xiv, 32, 66, 118, 123, 134, 152, 153, 165, 174, 220, 224, 228, 255, 276, 285, 288, 298, 302, 315, 318, 319, 342–344, 350, 353 private/moral, xiv See also Subjective experience Neo-Darwinism, 12 See also Darwin; Evolution Neo-Darwinists, 303 Nerve impulses, 71 Neural cells, 71 Neural circuits, see Brain Neural mechanisms, 73 Neural networks, viii, xii, 10 See also Brain Neural networks of the brain, xii

Neural processes in the brain, xii, 31 Neurogenesis, 115 Neurological accounts of dreams, 116, 165, 176, 177, 204 Neurons, vii, 9, 12, 33, 71, 163, 165, 201–206, 223, 228, 244, 281 See also Brain Neuroscience, viii, x, 31, 201, 203–207 See also Brain; Neurons New Testament, 271 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 334 Nirvana, 21 Noah’s Arc, 21 Noetic, 30 Nomogenesis theory of, 234 Noncausal effect, 50 Non-living and living entities, x See also Inanimate Non-transparent phenomena, 98 Nonverbal behaviour, 84 See also Verbal behaviour Nothing, 18, 252, 276, 285, 297, 313, 318, 353, 354 Nothingness, 60, 81, 330, 339 Noumena, 77 See also Phenomena Nous, 221 Number non-conservation illusion, 102 O

Obesity, 100, 109 Object, see Causality; Space; Time

 Index 

Objective truth, 27, 209 See also Absolute truth; Eternal truth Objective way of description, 76 Objectivity, ix, 26, 27 See also Observer Object permanence, 41, 121–123, 275 Objects-in-themselves, 73 Observation, ix, x, 7, 11, 18, 19, 44–48, 83, 84, 165, 173, 176, 196, 201, 223, 224, 277 See also Observer Observational devices, 44 Observer, ix–xi, 7, 19, 28, 35, 43, 44, 47–49, 55, 57, 118–119, 241, 245, 273, 351 Odin, 255 Ohm, George, 200 Omega Point, 274–275 Ontological proof, 256 See also Existence of god Ontological status, 11 Opposites, 44 Optical art, 208 Optic nerve, 71, 198 Ordinary reality, 146 Organisms, ix, 43, 92, 98, 227, 229–231, 238, 241, 277, 282, 290, 293, 294, 297, 298, 302, 303, 331 See also Life Origin of species, 12, 188 See also Evolution Origins of the universe, 3 Osiris, 254, 264

371

Other people, 6, 18, 20, 35, 50, 69, 76, 80, 82, 84, 86, 132, 135, 225, 267, 273, 309–311, 317–322, 328, 339, 343, 344 Ouroboros, 199 P

Palaeolithic art, 178 Palaeolithic cave paintings, 207 Palaeontology, 237 Paleontological records, 34 Pandemonium architecture, 119 Pandemonium mind model (PMM), 119–122 Pandora’s box, 208 Paradox of knowledge, 24 Parallel universes, 19, 183–190 Paranormal effects, 51, 56–59 Parapsychological, 50, 51 Parapsychology, 7, 50–59 See also Psychology Parasomnia disorder, 117, 160 Participatory death, 331 Pascal, Blaise, 60, 258, 259 Pattern-making task, 126 PEK, see Practical efficacy of knowledge Penfield, Wilder, 204, 205 Penrose triangle, 182 Perceived phenomenal world, 145 Perception of taste, 72 Perceptions, 5, 12, 26, 33, 67, 69, 73, 81, 82, 89, 92, 95, 126, 153, 169, 224 Perceptual organs, 49, 87, 91, 162 See also Brain

372 Index

Permanence, 28, 41, 42, 89, 90, 140, 145, 150, 182, 183, 207, 208 See also General properties Persistent malevolence effect, 337 Person, vii average, vii, ix, xi–xv, 3–6, 8–11, 13, 17–21, 25–30, 32, 33, 35, 40, 49–52, 56, 60, 65, 66, 74, 78, 79, 82, 86, 89–92, 97, 99, 101, 113, 115, 116, 126, 134, 135, 146, 154, 159, 160, 162, 166, 168, 170–173, 178, 189–191, 193, 200, 203, 204, 208, 210–212, 219, 221, 225, 231, 237, 238, 240, 251, 252, 254–256, 258–260, 263, 264, 268–273, 276, 281, 285–287, 295, 309, 313, 316, 318, 322, 327, 328, 330–333, 336, 338, 339, 341–344, 350–352, 354 Personality, x, 7, 11, 114, 115, 171 Perspectives of life, ix Phagocytosis, 293 Phantom limb phenomenon, 182 Phenomena, ix, x, 7, 14, 25, 26, 28, 34, 50, 51, 57, 59, 67–69, 77–80, 83–86, 88–103, 106, 108, 109, 114, 117, 124, 126, 140–146, 149, 150, 153, 154, 165–168, 182, 183, 185, 187–189, 195, 197, 198, 202, 203, 206–210, 212, 219, 220,

222–226, 235, 238, 241, 242, 244, 252, 255, 274, 275, 279, 287, 302, 327, 343 cultural, 14 natural, ix, 14, 95, 210, 225, 252 perceived vs. imagined, 50, 82 physical, 14 raw, 7 social, 14 See also Mind; Parapsychological; Subjective experience Phenomenalistic connection, 106 Phenomenalistic garden, viii Phenomenalistic perception, 95, 106–108 See also Rational understanding Phenomenalistic perception of causality, 107 Phenomenalistic power, 104, 109, 127, 130 Phenomenal space, 90 Phenomenal time, 90 Phenomenal world, 6, 41, 83–110, 144, 145, 166, 169, 195, 201, 208, 212 See also Subjective experience Phenomenology, 207, 209 Philosophers, 4, 21, 24–28, 30, 32, 61, 119, 154, 202, 221, 222, 226, 244, 269–272, 274, 280, 349 Philosophical Bubbleverse, 269, 272 Philosophy, x, 5, 24–28, 45n1, 148, 221–223, 240, 269, 274, 281, 323, 331, 333 of science, viii Photon, 47–49

 Index 

Photosensitivity, 231 Photosynthesis, 227, 293 Physical causality, 87, 151 Physical constructs, 12 Physical eye, see Mental eye Physical matter, 19, 26, 27, 165, 277, 290, 350 See also Matter Physical multiverses, 19 Physical sciences, xiii, 11, 146, 148 See also Natural sciences Physical space, 32, 87, 142, 144, 210, 349 Physical time, 87, 144 Physics, x, 11, 25, 32, 43–50, 57–59, 76, 91, 96, 188, 198, 200, 240, 245, 275, 323 Physiology, 71, 76, 91 Piaget, Jean, 124, 196, 276 Picasso, Pablo, 208 PK, see Psychokinesis PKEN, see Potential knowledge entities Plato, 10, 24, 32, 323, 331 Plotinus, 21 Pointillism, 210 Polarisation circular, 48, 49, 197 diagonal, 48 Politics, 30, 31, 192 Polkinghorne, John, 238 Pollan, Michael, 173, 174 Pollock, Jackson, 208 Popper, Karl, 27 Possible pneomena, 96 Postmodernism, 148, 209, 281 Postmodernist writers, 209

373

Potential knowledge entities (PKEN), 85, 160, 166, 189, 198 Practical efficacy of knowledge, 100 Practical efficiency of perception, 102 See also Practical efficiency of knowledge Pragmatic morality, 322 Prayer, 178, 259 Predestination perspective, 279 Presenting phenomena, 97, 126, 153, 183 Priest counselling, see Magical healing Primordial phenomena, 145, 150 Principles of logic, 25 Private universe, 10, 43, 219 See also Bubbleverse Projection, 46, 73, 80, 92, 161, 162, 165 Prokaryotic cells, 292 Protagoras, 27 Protein synthesis, 290 Proust, Marcel, 209 Psi-effects, 151 Psilocybin mushrooms, 171 Psyche, x, xi, 26, 66, 98, 223, 255, 268, 269, 286, 288, 333 See also Perceptions; Qualia; Sensations Psychedelic drugs, 171 Psychedelic experiences, 171, 172, 174 Psychedelic journeys, 142, 171, 173 Psychedelic trance, 208 Psychedelic travellers, 171, 173 Psychic phenomena, ix See also Subjective experience Psychodynamic, accounts of dreams, 176, 177

374 Index

Psychokinesis (PK), 50 Psychokinetic effects, 59 See also Psychokinesis Psychological energy, 59 Psychological mechanisms, 25 Psychological multiverse, 5–6 Psychological perspective, xi Psychological phenomena, x Psychological research, 11, 32 Psychological studies, x, 280 Psychology, viii, x, 7, 66, 67, 223–226, 323 See also Parapsychology; Psyche Psychology as a cradle of science, 223–226 Psychotherapy, viii, 11 See also Magic; Psychology Pushkin, Alexander, 262 Pygmalion, 6, 7 See also Greek myth Pythagoras, 10 Q

Qualia, 23, 28, 45n1, 46, 67, 69, 71–78, 88, 92, 114, 124, 126, 145, 162, 163, 182, 187, 195, 202, 286, 287, 295, 349 Qualities primary vs. secondary, 93, 94, 277 Quantum computing, viii Quantum entanglement, 8, 96, 150, 151 See also Sympathetic magic Quantum eraser experiment, 49 Quantum objects, 11, 12, 48, 50, 98, 223, 277

Quantum particle, 46 Quantum processes, 19 Quarks, 245 Quasi-scientific explanation, 107 R

Radar, 232 Radioactive decay, 59 Rafael, 271 Random event, 58, 96 See also Random processes Random processes, 58, 59 See also Random event Rational Constructions, 78–80 Rationalisation, 148 Rationalism, 199 Raw phenomena, 88, 183, 188, 207, 210, 222 Rational constructions (RCs), xiii, xiv, 14, 33, 69, 78, 79, 81, 86–88, 91, 93–97, 101, 106, 109, 114, 117, 118, 141, 142, 145, 146, 150, 168, 171–173, 185–189, 197, 208, 210, 222, 223, 237, 241, 244, 253, 275 See also Knowledge; Scientific concepts Rational understanding, 108 Reality/realities, 25, 91, 140, 145, 146, 152, 153, 209 types of, xv, 4, 7, 18, 19, 23, 24, 31, 32, 34, 43, 45n1, 50, 59–61, 66, 68, 76, 79, 83, 92, 96, 98, 106, 114, 115, 118, 121, 129, 134, 141, 143–151, 165, 171,

 Index 

173–175, 184, 189, 191, 195, 198–200, 202, 208–210, 212, 223, 230, 238, 241, 244, 245, 253–255, 257–259, 274–277, 279, 281, 286, 288–290, 297, 300, 302, 303, 311, 313, 316, 319, 335, 343, 347, 349, 350, 353 Reductionism, 303 Reductionist ideologies, xii Reflection, 30, 46, 68, 169, 174–176, 224, 225, 239, 240, 273, 286, 288, 338 Reflective consciousness, 12 Reflective Self, 132 Reincarnations, 24, 255 See also Soul Relativity theory, 197, 199 Religions, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 28, 30, 80, 82, 145, 154, 178, 190, 226, 240, 251–265, 270, 280, 329, 330, 347 See also Religious Commonverse Religious beliefs, 5, 343 See also Faith Religious Commonverse, vi, 5, 6, 14, 24, 32, 43, 144, 151, 178, 235, 237–239, 255, 256, 258, 259, 267, 272, 274, 310, 312, 313, 323, 327, 328, 330, 339, 342, 344 Religious wars, 330 Rembrandt, 272 Renaissance, 211, 267, 271 Replicability, 7, 51 See also Sciences

375

Replicable, 52, 59 Representation, 79, 97, 168, 289, 299 Representing phenomena, 97, 124, 145, 212 Resistance to temptation, 100, 101 See also Addictions Responsibility, viii, xiv, 28, 31, 135, 136, 152, 272 See also Free will Retina, of an eye, 50, 71, 118, 161, 162, 165, 166 Retinal projection, 162, 166 Reutersvärd, Oskar, 210 The revolt of machines, 200–203 Rhine, Joseph Banks, 52 Ribosomes, ix, 148, 290 See also Anthropomorphism RNA, 148, 149, 228, 232, 279, 288–291 Rosetta stone, 22 Rotating mask of a human face, 174 Rubin figure, 39 Rule of thumb, xi Russian doll, 19, 140 Ryan, Adrian, 52 S

Scaffolding perspective, 279 Scaffoldings, 6 Scale of existence, 172, 187, 350 Schedrovitsky, Georgy, 17 School education, 73, 75, 276 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 274, 333 Schrödinger, Erwin, 289 Scienceblindness, perspective, 29

376 Index

Science generated objects, 33, 88, 188, 200, 202, 203, 223, 244 See also Scientific concepts Sciences, ix–xii, 3, 4, 7–11, 14, 18, 20, 23–25, 27–30, 33, 50, 55, 61, 69, 74, 76–80, 86–88, 91, 105, 146, 149, 154, 163, 172, 188, 200–203, 206, 209, 210, 212, 219–246, 255, 258, 271–275, 278, 279, 281, 294, 301, 313, 318, 323, 329, 342, 347, 354 Scientific concepts, ix, xiii, 13, 14, 23, 26, 33, 34, 70, 76, 79, 117, 223, 277 See also Rational constructions (RCs) Scientific education, 75, 94 Scientific exploration, ix, x, 14, 188 See also Experiments Scientific knowledge, ix limitations of, 8 See also Rational constructions (RC) Scientific method, 7 Scientific theories, xi, xiii, 5, 24, 148, 189 See also Rational constructions (RCs) Scientific universe, xiii–xv, 18 Scientific world outlook, 3 Scientism, 172, 347 Sculpturing phenomena, 207–209 Self, viii–xii, xiv, 4, 6, 7, 12, 17–22, 26, 28, 31, 32, 35, 42–44, 45n1, 58, 59, 69, 70, 73,

76, 78, 80, 83, 88–90, 92–93, 97, 110, 113–136, 144, 145, 152, 153, 159, 160, 165, 166, 169–175, 182, 186, 195–197, 202, 210, 220, 223, 237, 238, 242, 254, 261, 267, 268, 270, 274, 278, 281, 285–288, 309–311, 313, 316, 327, 328, 331, 333, 334, 339, 343, 344, 350, 352, 353 I, xi, 13, 17, 18, 20, 22, 42, 43, 58, 59, 78, 92, 97, 110, 114, 117–120, 123, 124, 126, 129, 132, 135, 136, 145, 153, 159, 160, 166, 170, 173, 174, 223, 237, 285, 287, 309, 310, 316, 328, 344, 350 Self-created phenomena, 92 Self-horizon, 195, 197 Selfish good, 327 Self-reflection, 224 Self-related phenomena, 92 Self-replicating molecule, 289 Self-reproducing molecules, 289 Selfridge, Oliver, 119 Selves, viii See also Self, I Semiconductors, 202 Sensations, viii, xi, 4–6, 12, 13, 33, 60, 67, 71–77, 80, 81, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 114, 126, 146, 169, 173, 223 See also Perceptions; Subjective experience Seurat, Georges, 210

 Index 

Shamans, 7 See also Magic Shapit’ko, Larisa, 331 Shereshevsky, 91 Sherrington, Charles, 201 Shestov, Lev, 27, 274 Shifted view, 196, 197 Siamese-twins, 42 Signac, Paul, 210 Signs, 89, 97–98, 125, 151, 225, 233, 275 Simple agentic mentality, 298 Simple non-reflective mentality, 298 Simple reflective mentality, 300 Simulating phenomena, 98 Simulation, 98, 151, 205, 232 Size constancy, 161 Skinner, B. F., 143 Smoking, 100–102, 109, 113 Soap bubble, ix, 21, 81, 350 See also Bubbleverse Social behaviour, xiv See also Moral behaviour Social customs, 5–6, 69, 144, 146 See also Traditions Social norms, 80 Social sciences, 7, 31, 91, 146 See also Sociocultural Commonverse Social Self, 114 Sociocultural Bubbleverse, vii, xiii, xiv, 6, 151, 192, 281, 319, 322, 344 Sociocultural Commonverse, 6, 14, 144, 150, 192, 209, 280, 281, 311, 319, 320, 322, 328, 344 Socrates, 24

377

Solipsism, xii, 26 Sonar, 230, 232 Soul, x, 9, 10, 22, 24, 27, 201, 255, 313, 344 immortal, 9 (see also Religious Commonverse) Soutine, Chaim, 72 Space, x, xi, xiv, 18, 32, 34, 41, 44, 47, 48, 60, 61, 69, 78, 79, 87, 90, 114, 142, 144, 151, 162, 163, 178, 187, 196–198, 208, 210, 219, 273, 276, 287, 288, 321, 335, 337, 339, 342, 349, 353 Spatial Self, 114 Species, see Evolution Speculation, 56, 221 Speed of light, 154, 198 Spinoza, Baruch, 258 Spirits, x, 178, 190, 225, 253–255, 259, 263, 268, 300, 316 Spiritual entities, 10 Spiritual perspective on the universe, 12 Spontaneous mutations, 229 Stabilizing function of RC, 79 Stable object, 32 See also Object permanence Stalin’s repressions, 338 Standard universe, 341 Stevenson, Robert Louise, 115 Stoics philosophy, 269 Stone Circle, 319 Strives, 66 Strong objects, 188, 202

378 Index

Subconscious, viii, xiv, 17, 21, 23, 24, 32, 39, 51, 60, 89, 101, 120, 122, 140, 142, 146, 159–170, 172–179, 182, 198, 199, 207, 209, 210, 274, 330, 350 Subconsciousness, xiv, 24, 56, 175 See also Unconscious events Subconscious processes, 89 Subconscious underbelly of perception, 166 Subhuman, vii Subjective causality, 143 Subjective experience, xi, xiii, xiv, 12, 25, 29, 31, 33, 35, 68, 171, 172, 196, 204–206, 210, 225, 244, 245, 255, 278, 286, 287, 291–295, 297, 300, 302 Subjective reality, vii, 45n1, 66, 98, 187, 202, 297, 302 Subjective space and time, 41, 142, 143 Subject matter of psychology, x, 11 Subliminal, 159 Substances, see Drugs Sun, 9, 13, 95, 189 Superhuman, viii Supernatural events, 4, 149, 150, 257, 260 Superstitions, 178 Superstitious behaviour, 260 Swarm intelligence, 230, 299 Symbolic structures, xiii Symbols, 5, 89, 97, 212, 223, 225, 349 See also Signs Sympathetic magic, x See also Magical thinking

Synaesthesia, 91 Synthesis, xi, 168, 175, 290 See also Thinking Synthetic theory of evolution, 237, 238 Systems with a negative feedback, 286 T

Tarkovsky, Andrey, 207 Taste buds, 72 See also Gustatory perception Taylor, Edward, 253 T-duplicates, 321, 322 Technology, 11, 149, 205, 232, 244 Teleology, x See also Agency Telescope, 44 See also Hubble’s telescope Temperamental characteristics, 25 Temporal Self, 114 Ten commandments, 80 Terrorism, 330 Tertullian, 312 Thales of Miletus, 221 Thanatos, 333 Theory of everything, xi Thermodynamics, 199, 289, 339 second law of, 199 Thing-in-itself, 45, 45n1, 46, 77, 86, 162, 163, 273 Things-in-themselves, 12, 46, 84, 92, 97, 114, 161–163, 165, 170, 182, 185, 207, 286, 323 See also Kant, Immanuel; Thing-in-itself Thinking

 Index 

logical, 13, 14, 23, 122, 151, 169, 177, 178, 198, 286, 314, 342 rational, 199 scientific, viii, x, xiii, 11, 13, 14, 17–19, 22–27, 30, 35, 44, 46, 52, 68, 73, 92, 122, 135, 136, 142, 146, 169, 175, 177, 178, 191, 199, 202, 204, 236, 241, 242, 245, 252, 256, 257, 276, 278, 286, 287, 300, 309, 316, 318, 319, 328, 336, 339, 342, 353 Third-person point of view, x See also Cosmic; Objectivity; View from space Time, vii, x, xiv, 5, 8, 9, 11, 22, 25, 32, 34, 40–42, 47, 51, 55, 58–60, 65, 68, 69, 72, 73, 77, 79, 82, 83, 87, 90–92, 113, 114, 116, 122, 123, 125, 132, 136, 139, 141–144, 146, 148, 151, 154, 159, 164, 176, 187, 192, 196–199, 208, 210, 211, 219, 220, 223, 225, 226, 233, 235–237, 241, 245, 251, 252, 254, 260, 261, 264, 267, 271–273, 276, 277, 282, 285, 288, 294, 295, 298, 310, 314, 315, 319, 320, 333, 335, 336, 338, 341–343, 349, 351, 353, 354 See also Causality; Space Timescale astronomical, vii geological, vii

379

Tipler, Frank, 274 Toilet training, 80 Tolstoy, Leo, 209 Totalitarian regimes, 327 Totalitarian theories, 31 Traditional cultures, 253 Traditions, 6, 17, 31, 69, 80, 101, 144 Transcendence, 318, 319, 332 Transcendental judgements, 26 Transcendental Self, 26 Transcendental subject, 28 Transcending, 309–324 Transcending Self, 132, 134 Translation, 228 Transmigration of souls, 24 Transparent phenomena, 98, 107, 124, 126, 164, 264 Transpersonal, see Transcendence True phenomena, 95 Truth/falsity division, xiv, 4, 10, 22, 26, 27, 30, 95–97, 154, 172, 181–183, 185, 191, 209, 222, 244, 273, 279, 321, 337, 343 See also Existentialisation Tunnelling effect, 46, 47 Typical objects, 79 U

Ultrasound, 72, 98 Unaccomplished dream, 203–207 Uncertainty principle, 46 Unconscious events, 166 Uncontrolled phenomena, 92 Unhappiness, 333–334

380 Index

Uninvolved level of Self ’s activity, 152, 153, 261 Universal explanatory concept, xii Universe, vii, ix, xi–xv, 3–5, 7–10, 12–14, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 28–30, 35, 43, 44, 60, 61, 78, 82, 141, 146, 148, 171–173, 188, 197–199, 203, 207, 210, 219, 220, 222, 226, 229, 236, 239, 241, 254, 255, 269, 272–274, 277, 278, 280, 281, 309, 311, 312, 314–316, 323, 331, 334, 341, 343, 348–354 Universities, 341 Unreplicable, 51 Utilisation behaviour disorder, 117 V

Valhalla, 255 Velasquez, 272 Verbal behaviour, 84 Vertebrates, 234 Vested interests, xi Vicious circle, xiii, 162, 303 View from an orbit, 124 View from nowhere, 26 View from the orbit, 40 See also Cosmic; View from nowhere; Vision

Virgin Mary, 271 Virtual realities, 13, 145 Vision, 71, 76, 145, 162, 166, 276 See also Sensations Visual cortex, 71, 118, 163 Vivaldi, Antonio, 72 Volta, Alessandro, 200 Voltaire, 258 Voluntary control, 51, 93, 278 Voluntary movements, 44, 58, 149 W

Watson, James, 233 Wavefunction collapse, 19 Wave–particle duality, 47 Weak objects, 189, 191 Weapon of mass destruction, viii Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 27 World of spirits, 5, 253 World ‘out of the box,’ 175 Y

Young infants, 275 Z

Zeno, 46, 150 See also Zeno’s arrow Zeno’s arrow, 46, 47 Zone of representation, 168, 169