Monthly Archives: November 2025

Ditching Dualism #1: Exaltation

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Image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay

By elevating human experience above the remainder of the universe, dualist beliefs can impede efforts to move past modernity—which I believe must end whether we wish it or not. Therefore, it seems important enough to devote some time to the matter. The first question one might ask is: “Am I a dualist?” A crude test involves answering the following questions:

  1. Is matter real (not a creation of mind), obeying physics independent of consciousness?
  2. Is mind/consciousness its own phenomenon, not a product of known matter and physics?

Here’s how I would label the results: Y/N is materialist (like me: mind is matter); N/Y is idealist (mind is everything); Y/Y is dualist (mind and matter separately real), and N/N is too bizarre for me to confront. “Maybe” answers are okay, too, but perhaps this series will result in greater clarity.

The topic of dualism is too important and too stealthily integrated into modern worldviews to be handled in a post of ordinary length. Maybe a book would be better, but I’m going to be lazy and parcel it out as a series of posts. I recognize that what I am attempting is very tricky, and probably insufficient to persuade anybody—we do get set in our beliefs (although I was once a default dualist, and still squirm at some of the implications of abandoning this comfortable, safe, and culturally reinforced position). All the same, I will try to anticipate failure modes and navigate around them before they seize the reader.

The larger effort here benefits from first establishing a starting position before even getting to the main topic of dualism. I hope it helps build a coherent framework, perhaps establishing deep resonance, connection, and trust before trying to extract the toxins. Of course, I may lose some people even in trying to establish a foundation, but I find I’m most interested in building something among those who start off with admiration for the universe we are lucky enough to inhabit. The others may be beyond reach.

The motivation for starting with an exaltation to the living world is mainly that I will ultimately be making the case that we find ourselves in a material universe, and that the only non-dualistic way to take this seriously is to have microbes, fungi, plants, and animals (including humans, of course) be entirely material beings. For many, this elicits distaste over the notion that humans and animals are “just machines,” and thus don’t deserve any more regard than a calculator. This hasty conclusion misses something enormous, and I thought it important to begin by expressing complete admiration for Life (which I even tend to capitalize, mimicking the convention for God). If being “only” material would seem to make a living being worthless, I hope by the end of the series the reader will understand this to be a failure of scope and not at all a necessary conclusion.

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Space Case

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Beyond infinity? (from Publicdomainpictures)

As a consequence of my dismissing human space futures as fantasy, I was contacted by an academic astrophysicist counterpart pushing back on my position—which is perfectly reasonable. But the nature of the conversation offered too many revealing insights for me to set it aside. I share the dialog here as a case study representing two extrema on the space question, quickly exposing foundational disconnects of staggering proportions in terms of how the universe works and what we might expect of the future.

The identity of my interlocutor is not revealed, here. Suffice it to say that they are an astrophysicist in a research/professorial position having an impressive list of publications to their name as well as a few books—often touching on the topic of space futures. In other words, the opinions you are about to see are from a serious professional engaged in the subject at hand—more so than I am, in fact.

Not every sentence from the thread is reproduced below (cut about 10% of material less germane to the issue), but whole sections are left intact with no editing or modified emphasis. For each of the four rounds in the exchange, I include the original verbiage, then elaborate a few points before moving to the next round. Each starts with Not Me (NM) followed by the response from me (TM).

A recurrent emerging phenomenon is one of apparent symmetry, in a number of facets. For example, a top-level assessment is that each appears to think the other’s position is bonkers, and I’m ineligible to judge.

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Space as a Window

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A reflected window on space camp (Wikimedia Commons).

I grew up as a space enthusiast before I grew up. Part of the maturation process involved work on a Space Shuttle project, two decades of uninterrupted funding from NASA, reviewing many dozens of NASA proposals for space/rocket investigations, and serving as Principal Investigator for a mission concept study centered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to put a laser transponder on Phobos. Oh, and the most significant chunk of my astrophysics career relied upon the reflectors placed on the lunar regolith by astronaut hands.

No single moment stands out as a crossing of the Rubicon in terms of my migration away from fantasy. But by October 2011 my faith had eroded sufficiently to put out a blog post titled Why Not Space—motivated by responses to the “growth can’t last on a finite planet” drive that initiated this blog. “We’ll just expand into space,” some countered. Note: always beware the word “just,” especially when attached to feats of unprecedented difficulty.

I reprised the theme in Chapter 4 of my textbook (out in 2021), and again a few weeks back. In the last five years, my journey has produced significantly new perspectives (for me) which only serve to make the space delusion more strikingly fascinating and revealing. At this point, it’s hard to identify a phenomenon that so completely captures the religion of the day and its unhinged basis.

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When Space Becomes Silly

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Transport transfer in 1925: we’ve all done this by now, right? (Wikimedia Commons)

Recent posts have compared belief in a space future to belief in Flat Earth, and also compared living in space to hijinks like keeping a crewed airplane flying for over two months straight. Indeed, a number of insights might be gained by comparing the quest for flight to the space ambitions that followed.

Long before fuel-powered flight was demonstrated in 1903, human-powered flight had been a perennial dream of early inventors. It wasn’t until decades later that the much harder task of human-powered flight became possible—aided by modern lightweight materials. Yes, it can be done, but only if you’re a world-class athlete and content to travel at running speed a meter or two off the surface (remaining in ground-effect). Likewise, supersonic commercial flight is possible but not practical enough to remain an option. And it is possible to keep two people up in an airplane for 65 days.

Just because something can be demonstrated as a stunt does not mean it is destined to become normal practice. In particular—as I pointed out in an earlier post—occupation of a space station shares a lot in common with sustaining people in continuous airplane flight, which was once quite the enterprise. But after 1959, people stopped even trying. The exercise had crossed the line from meaningful to a silly waste of effort.

In the first half of the 20th Century, few (in techno-industrial cultures) would question the merits of attempting to keep people airborne as long as possible. It was exciting—proof of man’s greatness and progress into the novel. Given some degree of technological development since that time, we could presumably beat the 65 day record by a large margin, perhaps even demonstrating indefinite airborne capability—if sufficiently driven and provided adequate funds. But the proposal would likely—and fittingly— elicit shrugs and questions as to what the point would be. From my perspective, similar responses should accompany proposals for living in space. The question, then, is: when will we collectively become comparably dismissive of proposals for humans in space?

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