Walkie-Talkie #11 ‘What Is Wrong With Our World View? Everything, Pretty Much!’
- filipvk
- 13 hours ago
- 3 min read
Dear friends,
During this walk, I will delve a little deeper into our current worldview and the reasons why our worldview is not really of great help us to be in a better relation to our living world, our biosphere.
In Walkie-Talkie #10, I gave a few examples of worldviews and their connection to underlying ideas about consciousness and ‘mind’.
I tried to clarify to what degree a worldview or paradigm can have a decisive influence on the relationship between a civilization and the natural world, something that has been emphasized repeatedly by people such as Donella Meadows.
Our current worldview or paradigm, at least in secular industrial societies, is defined by what is called ‘materialism’ in philosophy and science. Materialism is the proposition that the only things that truly exist in this universe are matter (electrons, protons, neutrons, etc.) and the observable and measurable elementary forces (strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, electromagnetic force).
From this point of view, everything else is just an illusion, something we project onto the world in order to make life in a meaningless universe bearable.
This idea of materialism permeates just about everything in our society, from mainstream science, education, economics, and theoretical frameworks for just about all of our cognitive interpretations of the world.
The ubiquity of this idea is one of the reasons we are barely aware of this paradigm: it is below the radar of our own consciousness.
I will return to this dogma of materialism often (because it has all the characteristics of a religious dogma), as well as to the reasons why this idea is not based on scientific method at all, contrary to what is commonly believed.
Our current materialistic worldview is extremely nihilistic, because it denies the reality of just about everything of value: first and foremost our consciousness itself, which is only an illusion within this paradigm, but also things like love, meaning, purpose, and value.
So it is not surprising that things are not going so well for us and for the world, and that we seek salvation in, for example, the accumulation of possessions and money, as a line of defense against the nihilism that defines our “civilization.”
Everything I experience during this walk is called ‘qualia’ in scientific terms: what it is like to experience anything (color, taste, emotion, beauty, etc.).
Materialism sees the qualia, the experience, as a meaningless epiphenomenon of purely material processes, thereby stripping the world of any possible meaning or sense. But what if it is the other way around: the material world as epiphenomenon of processes in consciousness?
This is a proposition that seems nonsensical at first glance, but which is being put forward by more and more philosophers and scientists as plausible and even probable.
Experience itself, consciousness itself, the qualia themselves, are actually the greatest mystery of all, and a possible portal to a different understanding of just about everything. At least if we let go of the idea that consciousness, those qualia, are merely a byproduct or epiphenomenon.
And that is also why so many remarkable scientists are increasingly engaged in the study of consciousness: they realize that we are on the verge of a major revolution in our understanding of what consciousness actually is.
Thank you for joining me on this walk, and until the next episode!
All the best,
Filip
