Why today’s scientific worldview must undergo a sea-change

‘The future of physics — and of all science — is mind; not your or my individual mind alone, but mind as a transpersonal essence that gives matter its inner reality.’ Bernardo Kastrup

Mind and consciousness might well pervade the whole of nature, from the most basic to the most complex forms, the human psyche and the universe being boundless, each of us connected with, and an expression of, all existence.

If so, consciousness then ceases to be seen as a function of the brain, as in the prevailing materialist reductionist model favoured by psychology and neuroscience. Instead it becomes a unifying human experience rather than one only subjective to the individual, thus avoiding the need to explain how consciousness could have arisen from ‘inert’ matter, the so-called and misplaced ‘hard problem’ of neuroscience.

How did human consciousness originate, one might ask. It’s interesting to speculate. For if consciousness is thought of as the primal, fundamental and causal property of nature, indeed, as the very ground of existence, then its participatory nature becomes apparent: human evolution increasingly participated in it.

For phenomenal consciousness — what it’s like to undergo experience — cannot have evolved, says the philosopher-scientist Bernardo Kastrup, in his new…