We need a philosophical and spiritual Copernican revolution

The Copernican Revolution in astronomy corrected the mistaken belief that our Earth was the center of the solar system. Instead, the Sun took its rightful place there in the minds of humans.

That was one step in understanding our correct place in the cosmos. Another came when astronomers realized that what seemed to be objects within our Milky Way galaxy actually were other galaxies, each containing tens or hundreds of billions of stars. Now we know there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe.

All that should make us feel very small in the grand scheme of things. But since almost everyone lives at a very human scale, paying attention almost entirely to what we encounter in everyday life, most people still feel that they are the center of things — because our sense of selfhood is minimally affected by knowledge of the vast expanse of the universe of which we are a minuscule part.

Which is why I believe we need a philosophical and spiritual Copernican Revolution that brings what I consider to be a couple of neuroscientific facts (or at least highly persuasive theories) into a much broader cultural understanding: (1) that we humans do not possess, or are, an enduring self or soul separate and district from physical reality, but rather are part and parcel of the natural world; (2) that we humans lack unfettered free will that allows us to act independently of causes and conditions, but rather are fully integrated into the deterministic laws of nature every other entity in the universe obeys.

If this sounds a lot like Buddhism, that isn’t surprising. While I’m not a Buddhist, and supernatural forms of Buddhism don’t appeal to me, I resonate with Buddhism when expressed as a secular philosophy, since the core of traditional Buddhist belief is closely aligned with modern neuroscience.

One reason I’m enjoying In Search of Now: The Science of the Present Moment by Jo Marchant, a book that I’ve been blogging about recently, is that in exploring Now from the perspectives of both neuroscience and physics, Marchant is attempting to find common ground between the subjective and objective aspects of human experience. Meaning, both from the inside out, and from the outside in.

We tend to think of subjectivity and objectivity as being polar opposites. There’s how we subjectively experience the world, and there’s how the world objectively actually is. The  two can be correlated — this is how we agree that a red light means “stop,” for example — but often they appear to be at odds. Our minds suffer from illusions, misconception, errors of many kinds.

These are seen as deviations from the world as it actually is, objective reality. However, I’ve become increasingly skeptical that subjectivity and objectivity can be so neatly divided. After all, even a scientist skilled at probing the secrets of the universe necessarily views things through the same personal subjective lens we all possess: a human mind, which arises from a human brain lacking any connection to the outside world other than what our senses indirectly provide.

I admire how Jo Marchant, being a skilled science writer, ably describes attempts by philosophers, neuroscientists, physicists, and others to go beyond, or integrate, the conventional way of looking upon subjectivity (mind) and objectivity (universe). This is hard to put into words, but I sense a something different entirely possibility running through the book, which I’ve almost finished.

Marchant obviously can better describe her perspective in her own words than I can in mine, so here’s some largely non-technical passages that illustrate what I’m talking about. For me, it’s a fresh way of looking upon reality. Akin to Buddhism, but grounded in some solid science. Marchant writes:

In fact, there’s a growing suspicion that what we perceive or experience in any moment is so personal, so utterly bound up in our individual history and biology, that it doesn’t make sense to speak of any ‘true’, definitive way of things outside that process. We’ve explored the view that our inner worlds — from feeling ownership of our bodies to experiencing emotions or recalling our life stories — are complex webs of probabilistic inferences, ever-changing depending on our circumstances, and recreated in each moment. There are no separate enduring ‘selves’ sitting behind.

What does this mean, then, for our external worlds — the objects and events that we perceive around us? This is more controversial, but for enactivists, at least, the same argument applies. My grey squishy sofa where I curl up to write — my cocoon and silent companion with woven fabric, misshapen cushions, wooden feet — is not an independent, stand-alone entity whose existence is transmitted to my skin and eyes.

Instead, it’s a here-and-now element of my experience, which in turn is a product of my biology and my life history. It is built out of all the interactions, all the sensations, associations and emotions — all the moments — that have brought me to this point, right now, and it is constantly being revised and remade.

In other words, it doesn’t make sense to say that ‘this’ sofa persists, in itself, outside my experience, outside each moment. In the next moment I will be slightly different and so will my world. If you come to visit me, you might perceive another sofa again, perhaps an ugly, old piece of furniture that needs to go to the tip. We can discuss our experiences and agree common features of what a sofa is.

But once you remove all the interactions, the histories, the life stories, it’s hard to pinpoint any concrete, definite thing, any universally existing truth that persists beyond all the perceptions. An organism with a distant enough perspective — a newborn baby, an Amondawan, a bacterium, a vast alien cloud — may perceive something quite different to a sofa or detect no trace of it at all.

OK, so maybe an alien won’t recognise my sofa. But the  basic object itself will still be sitting here, right? Surely there’s a ‘real’ core, a collection of fundamental particles and forces that will still exist in this sofa-shaped form, however we choose to describe it, regardless of what creature happens to wander past, or in the absence of any perceiver at all? Except that when we turn to physics, we find a similar picture.

When quantum physicists probe the lowest level of reality, try to pin down the particles that make up matter, they repeatedly fail to find anything solid there. The defining finding of physics over the last century has been that between our observations — when we blink or turn away — there is no certainty. Only a raw swirl of probability outlining the shape of what we may find when we look.

There’s fierce debate about what this means, or course. Whether we like it or not, the experiments firmly rule out a simple reality in which pre-existing particles move in physical space according to a linear progression of time. But many physicists are working hard to save the idea of a definite, external world — by drawing in impossible-to-detect guiding waves that travel faster than light or constructing vast parallel universes in which every possibility comes true.

As in cognitive science, though, other suggest that instead we need to shift our worldview. Perhaps the universe just isn’t made up of pre-existing building blocks. Perhaps for particles just like sofas and selves, there really is no certainty, no true and definitive way of things until the moment an agent chooses an action and experiences a result.

If so, then forget the familiar stable world of ‘stuff’, from protons to pianos to planets, that we perceive as sitting beyond us, still there when we turn our backs. These exist as dynamic, living patterns of personal experiences, not stand-alone things. There’s no external stage on which we’re acting, no pre-existing terrain into which we’ve been parachuted.

And, on the other hand, there’s no pre-existing ‘us’ either: no floating essences or souls ready to cast their gaze on the world.

This is a completely different way of thinking about who we are and what we’re made of: a screeching handbrake turn in worldview that philosopher Michel Bitbol likens to a Copernican revolution, equivalent to when sixteenth-century astronomers realised that Earth wasn’t the enduring centre of the universe but a rock flying around the sun.

What if instead of enduring entities — you and me, Earth and Sun — there are only the instants, the interactions? Only the burgeoning, interconnected, multilayered meshwork of creative sparks? From those sparks emerge selves and worlds — our private worlds of perception but also shared frameworks and structures: social, cultural, historical, scientific. Each instant, all of it is born and reborn.