This philosophical essay is original content for Steem based on recent philosophical discussions. In particular, it seeks to reconciliate the spiritual interpretation of reality as subjective consciousness, with an overall rational and scientific view of the world. Thinking philosophically we are sensitive to all concerns none to the exclusion of others.

Subjective Realism and Speculative Materialism

Dreams are felt as reality when we are dreaming. In the dream we feel that we are a character in an objective world, until we either fall into dreamless sleep, wake up inside the dream, or wake up out of the dream and realize that we are lying in our bed.

Reflection on this puts our waking reality into question. We can clearly fall back into sleep and unconsciousness when we are awake, but could it be possible to simply wake up while we are still awake (enlightenment) or perhaps even wake up out of this entire reality (matrix)?

As Descartes pointed out, even if we doubt the reality of our dream or waking existence, it is impossible to doubt that we are doubting it. If anything is real, our experience is. Awareness of this gives us access to at least one non-relative, absolute Truth: that we are aware of reality.

Idealism takes this position to its limit by holding that there is nothing more to reality than awareness of reality. In a weak sense reality external to our awareness is unknowable. In a strong sense there is no reality external to our awareness, because reality and awareness are always co-dependent.

After Kant, who held that the world in itself is unknowable, the rise of phenomenology (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger), philosophy of language, spirituality and new age thought has contributed to the inevitable rise of this kind of idealism that posits ultimate reality as always or necessarily mediated by, or consisting of, subjective elements like consciousness, concepts or language.

Far from being an outsider position, the claim that absolute reality is either subjective, unknowable or meaningless has become the mainstream position. Far from being innocuous, these claims breeds subjective dogmatism, debasing relativism, or positivist hubris. The conflict among these positions tend to mask their common cause and assumptions.

The claim that absolute reality is necessarily subjective breeds conflicts with science, as science gives mathematical explanations of events taking place before consciousness came into being. The claim that absolute reality is unknowable or meaningless stands in conflict not only with scientific success but our own awareness of our own absolute reality.

The idealist position of subjective reality is the most sincere idealist position, since it remains faithful to the fact that we have awareness of our own absolute reality. When we have a pain, this pain is clearly knowable and meaningful, regardless of what theories we think are correct.

However, Subjective Reality insists not only on Reality being potentially subjective, but that reality is necessarily subjective - that there is nothing more to it. This makes the position metaphysically dogmatic, like most religions, because it insists that reality necessarily has to be a certain way.

Why does reality have to be this way, subjective? One argument the subjective realist can give is that we could not know about it if it were otherwise. Such an argument would try to draw ontological conclusions (what is real?) from epistemological premises (what can we know?).

In general it is not clear why we should impose the limits of what we can know as limits on the world. But even beyond that it is not clear why we should accept that there is such a limit on what we can know. The position that absolute reality has to be subjective, unknown or meaningless is ultimately a pessimistic view of our capacity to understand absolute reality.

Can we do better?

If we take science on face value we should think so. After all, the goal of science is to explain the absolute nature of reality. As Meillassoux points out, science dates certain materials to have been around long before the advent of conscious beings on earth. If there is nothing else to reality than conscious reality, what are we to say about these materials?

To protect our idealism we might claim 1) that these materials have a tiny amount of consciousness (leading us to panpsychism), or 2) that these materials only have independent existence insofar as we conscious beings later came on to the scene.

Both of these options seem ad hoc to the original theory to account for the emergent problem. Regardless, we might question the ability of science to produce quantitative, mathematical explanations that strike to the very root of reality. We might consider that mathematics is just another language, another scheme or tool we use to pragmatically represent the total mystery.

Ever since Science began its quest to mathematically explain the nature of reality, we have progressed exponentially. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” continue to astonish researchers in all fundamental branches of science. Until quite recently however, the understanding of subjectivity and consciousness in humans was never aligned with this quest.

Now that we have mathematical theories of intelligence and consciousness, we might finally begin to resolve the epic tension between subjective realism and speculative materialism. I for one am neither willing to give up our infinite rationality that can understand the universe objectively, nor the conscious awareness of our fleeting existence and unity with absolute reality. In light of the progress humanity is making we should all feel empowered with optimism that a unified theory is possible.