We live in a thoroughly secular age. Some of us have religion added on top, but on the deepest level we’ve all absorbed the naturalist mindset. This book is for people who appreciate the merits of naturalism but also feel its deficiency as a worldview. They sense there is more to the world than the naturalist story can provide, but the modern sceptical malaise is so ingrained they struggle to trust their intuitions.
Our modern world takes it for granted that science provides us with truth about the world without any ideology attached. We rarely think of the scientific worldview as an ideology, but rather as what remains when ideology is removed: a neutral view of the world free of bias and dogma.
But this picture of neutrality often hides a slide from a method to a metaphysics. The scientific method is conflated with a naturalist metaphysics (the claim that nature is all that exists). No scientific evidence shows that science describes the whole of reality; that claim is a metaphysical interpretation of the data.
Because of this conflation, naturalism is often seen not as a worldview, but as the humble advancement of science, or even as the principles of rational enquiry itself. Consequently, anyone who wants to challenge it faces an unusual difficulty, they’re seen as rejecting science or departing from rationality itself, rather than questioning a metaphysical commitment.
One example of this is the idea that we should have evidence before believing in anything beyond what science describes. This seems like good intellectual hygiene, we should be cautious about believing things without evidence. But notice the hidden metaphysical assumption: that the scientific description is already complete.
A method gives a description of what it can reach, it’s silent on what lies beyond. If we were only following a method, we’d merely observe that we’re no longer working within its defined scope. But the demand for evidence doesn’t mention scope. It presents itself as caution: without evidence we can’t commit.
It shows up most often in the idea that we need evidence to believe in anything supernatural or beyond nature, such as souls and God. This puts an extra burden on religious or spiritual worldviews, they must provide evidence for their metaphysical interpretation while naturalism is presumed as the humble starting point.
But the question isn’t whether something extra exists beyond the physical as science describes it. The question at the heart of metaphysics is what the essential character of nature is.
This shows up most clearly when it comes to questions of consciousness.
The view from inside
Consider the scientific description of a human like you or me. It provides details about the structure and functions of the body, but nowhere in that description will it observe your consciousness. This is because science deals in third-person data, what we can publicly observe and measure. But consciousness doesn’t show up that way.
Think about how you know about your own consciousness, it’s just… there. Right now you’re experiencing things like the touch of the chair you’re sitting on and the noises in the background. You don’t need to infer your own consciousness exists, it’s presented directly. This first-person access means no one else can observe your consciousness. They can only infer it exists from the external signs. If someone is crying and taking pain medication, we infer they’re in pain because that’s how we act when we feel pain.
How we know about consciousness is different from how we know about everything else. There’s no mystery about whether other people have kidneys, even though we can’t see them directly. But even if you knew all the physical facts about someone’s body, you still couldn’t directly confirm whether they’re conscious. A brain scan can show you neurons, but it can’t show you consciousness, because it’s not a physical object.
This isn’t a limit of technology. Leaving out the inside view is a feature of the scientific method. It’s not a gap in current knowledge that more detail could close, because it’s the wrong kind of detail. The gap is a structural mismatch, the difference between knowing something from the inside and knowing it from the outside.
Most of the time we infer the inside from the external signs so smoothly we don’t notice we’re doing it. But with creatures that are unlike us, the inference relies on less familiar correlations and the strangeness becomes visible. Watch a spider spinning a web. It moves with a purpose, avoiding threats and carefully building its trap. But you can’t know if anything is going on inside. Is the spider feeling smug pleasure at its sneaky plan or anticipating the satisfaction of eating its meal?
Take a moment to think about how strange this is. The single most important fact about another person is the one thing you can never know directly. You can’t observe if they’re experiencing the world at all, or if their experience is like yours or radically different.
Philosophers call this the problem of other minds. There’s a boundary between you and other minds and it exists because of how you access consciousness. You know your own consciousness from the inside, by direct acquaintance, but everyone else’s you have to infer.
To see why this is a problem for naturalism, think about how explanation usually works in science. In most cases, how you know about something is irrelevant to what that thing actually is. You can know about a distant planet by looking through a telescope, but the planet exists independently of the telescope. The telescope is a tool, it doesn’t define what the planet is.
Some naturalist theories apply this same method to consciousness and retain that gap between how we know something and what it really is. They argue that although you know your consciousness by first-person access, consciousness is really just neurons firing.
But consciousness collapses the usual gap between how things appear to you and how reality actually is. If you’re in pain, you experience it directly, there’s no intermediate instrument. An unpleasant experience isn’t an object that can show up on a brain scan. When it comes to conscious experience, the appearance is the reality.
If no gap separates appearance and reality, then we can’t discard the mode in which consciousness appears as an accidental feature of access. It’s not like the telescope. A theory that explains the neurons without accounting for the first-person givenness hasn’t explained consciousness from a different angle; it’s left out the very feature that made it consciousness in the first place.
Reducing consciousness to a question of brain mechanisms quietly changes the subject. It assumes the scientific picture of the world is the whole metaphysical story and then directs our attention toward mechanism as the only open question.
Two sides of the boundary
The same fact, that consciousness is given only from the inside, means we encounter a structurally under-determined reality, one the evidence can’t settle. A boundary always has two sides, an inside and an outside.
From the outside, the boundary creates the problem of other minds: we can’t observe consciousness directly because it’s behind a screen. A brain scan tells you which networks are activated, but it can’t tell you whether what’s being activated is the self, or even whether there’s experience there at all.
From the inside, the boundary creates the problem that metaphysics is under-determined: we have no direct access to the world, only our experience of it. The bare fact that something is experienced is certain, but what that experience means about reality is always an interpretation.
This isn’t a problem confined to consciousness research, but a structural feature of reality itself. The question at the foundation of metaphysics, whether mind or matter is fundamental, is under-determined in principle, not just in practice. It’s not a limitation of our current methods, so more data and better science won’t fix it.
When empirical data alone can’t settle a question, the best option is to prefer the simplest explanation with fewest assumptions. Naturalism looks like the simplest option because it appears to assume nothing beyond what science can observe.
This is another place where the slide between method and metaphysics is misleading. The question here isn’t whether there’s the scientific description of nature with something extra added to it. You aren’t an immaterial ghost that floats inside a physical machine, you and your body form one seamless whole.
The question is what the essential character of that whole is, and whether the outside or the inside view is more fundamental. Saying the inside is produced by the outside, or is nothing more than it, isn’t a neutral starting point. It’s a metaphysical claim about what’s fundamental. The data shows how mind and body correlate, but it doesn’t show which way the dependency runs.
Naturalism often assumes the “real” world is something radically different from the world of our experience. This real world is the world science describes: a silent, colourless, and odourless world of particles and fields. It’s fundamentally non-experiential, but also the ultimate cause of our experiences. For many naturalists, our experiences are inaccurate pictures of the world constructed by our brains, not what’s really out there.
But notice how this moves from what we can know about reality, to what reality is like in its essential features. Science can only describe the outside view, but that doesn’t mean the outside view is the most fundamental feature of reality and the cause of the inside view. That’s only one interpretation of the data. The most we can say is science shows us the slice of reality its method can access.
Reality has no opt-out
If science only shows us a slice of reality, how we can discover anything beyond it? It’s tempting to respond to the under-determination of metaphysics by avoiding commitment. If we’re structurally limited with what we can access, we can never reach conclusions with confidence.
For that reason, many people reject the usual methods of metaphysics and turn to science as the only reliable option for telling us the nature of the world. The assumption is that if science can’t provide sufficient evidence for any question, we should remain neutral and not commit to any theory.
Staying neutral sounds good in theory, but metaphysics is an understanding of reality itself, not a purely theoretical discipline. We’re habituated to think scientifically and avoid committing to a theory unless it’s been experimentally confirmed. In the laboratory, the theory comes first and then we perform the experiment to test it.
But in life we’re already inside the experiment. There’s no option to leave the laboratory of life and go home to some other existence. We live moment to moment, and hunger forces us to act. The world comes to meet us and our participation is unavoidable. The idea we should remain neutral until our theory is confirmed is an intellectual abstraction that can’t be used in the real world.
No one is choosing between commitment and neutrality. Neutrality isn’t available. You can’t stand nowhere. The metaphysical commitment was there all along, but it’s invisible because it’s assumed to be the lack of one.
If metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality and inherently under-determined, the only practical option is to choose an orientation and continuously adapt it as we participate in life. This is actually what we already do. We must, because that’s the structure of the reality we live in.
Humans don’t first adopt metaphysical beliefs and then interpret reality. They find themselves immersed in a field of intelligibility, where questions about meaning, value, purpose and reality need to be answered to live their lives. Any explicit metaphysical theory is an articulation of this prior orientation. We never encounter a world devoid of significance, value, or perspective.
Your experience is evidence, not noise to be filtered out. That includes your sense that life has meaning and value and the longing for something more. We have more than third-person data. We also have first-person data, and any worldview has to account for it.
Think of the naturalist picture we’ve inherited. Our modern culture largely assumes that human beings are the unintended by-product of impersonal physical processes, yet we also experience ourselves as conscious agents oriented toward meaning and value. The two pull against each other creating a dissonance between our lived experience and the naturalist worldview. How should that dissonance be understood?
We can treat the dissonance as a psychological imbalance, or we can treat it as a perception that informs us about the true nature of reality. The experience of dissonance doesn’t tell us which is right. They’re both interpretations of what it means. The interpretation we choose matters, it affects our orientation to the world.
We’re constantly weighing our inner world against the outer world and inferring facts about one from the other. The question of metaphysics is the same operation. When we ask which is the more fundamental, the inner or the outer, we encounter the mystery at the heart of our existence. This is where the strangeness of the gap turns into the personal consequence we all must confront.
In the sense that matters to each of us personally, an explanation of consciousness doesn’t tell us what the brain does when we experience joy. It answers the deeper question of who you are. The conscious self is what we all call “me”. When we ask what consciousness is, we’re asking who we are, why we’re here and how we should live in this world to create a meaningful and worthwhile life.
Metaphysics has always aimed at these questions by studying existence itself. It’s an enquiry that we all must undertake in our own way.
Light as a model
The alternative interpretation this book presents starts with consciousness at the foundation and describes what follows from that starting point. It doesn’t tell you which neurons fire when you feel joy or gaze into the vastness of the night sky. Instead it describes what type of world we must inhabit for there to be creatures who experience such wonders. It’s a modern presentation of the philosophy of the Indian devotional tradition of Gaudiya Vedanta.
Every metaphysics eventually reaches the limits of literal description. Our ordinary concepts aren’t designed for describing the foundations of reality itself. They were built for tables and trees and navigating within the world. But the task of metaphysics is describing the foundations, and to do that we must leave the comfort of the familiar and use imaginative models. Every framework must do this. No one has ever seen a quantum field or the curvature of spacetime, yet we rely on them as models.
This book adopts light as its central model for consciousness for two reasons. First, it’s a familiar image. We say “I see” when we understand, and things “dawn on us” like the sun rising to illuminate the world. Second, light is the source which illuminates, not the contents that are illuminated, which is how consciousness is related to what it’s aware of. Using the image of light isn’t poetic whim.
The models used here are drawn from physics. They aren’t literal scientific claims, but they aren’t purely metaphorical either. They serve a dual purpose: they make an unfamiliar idea easier to picture, and they give a familiar example of how one underlying reality can take different forms as its movement becomes more constrained or differently organised.
But even this metaphor has limits. Although light is what shows us the world, consciousness is what the world is shown to. Since consciousness isn’t an object to be seen, even the best image can only point toward it but never completely capture it.
