In this quest to move past dualism, it may be useful to examine a few key revolutions that corrected erroneous and sometimes damaging perspectives in the past. I hope to cast dualism in a similar mold: eventually to be abandoned as an embarrassing, destructive, and self-centered phase of adolescent excess.

We’ll consider common elements of past beliefs (flat earth, geocentric, creationist) that most eventually moved beyond, and see that dualism shares many of the same traits of anthropocentrism and missing context.

Past Prevailing Paradigms

We’ll start with Flat Earth beliefs, as touched on in the previous post. In all likelihood, more than one human over the hundreds of thousands of years prior to the agricultural period imagined the sun and moon to be spheres (illumination of lunar phases as a pertinent clue), and assumed the same to be true for Earth. The Greeks convinced themselves that Earth was round, and even estimated its circumference based on shadow lengths at the summer solstice. Astute sailors knew something fishy was afloat well before the voyage of Columbus, based on how ships and land reliably sink below the horizon as distance increases. Yet Flat Earth belief prevailed until recently. Part of the point is that adoption is not monolithic or simultaneous. Most people still had no need for anything but a Flat Earth model. Restricted to a small locale, the larger truth was neither evident nor relevant. That’s what counts for effective mental models. A Flat Earth model is not at all inappropriate, in a limited context. All mental models are incomplete and wrong in some way(s), after all.

Copernicus led the charge in demoting Earth from its central status, which was a profound shock to a culture believing itself to be made in God’s image on an Earth that was the central focus of all creation. Again, the simplest default mental model supports a geocentric view. Never wandering off the planet, Earth is indeed the center of all our activity. The sun, moon and stars certainly appear to wheel around us. Limited context makes the geocentric model not just forgivable, but highly appropriate and perfectly functional. If it’s good enough for newts…

Darwin made huge waves in the world when pointing out that animals evolve into their present, temporary forms, and that humans are no different—as one of many members of the animal clan. Prior to this and since the dawn of agriculture, it seemed obvious that humans outranked all other beings and had little in common with them (somehow overlooking blatant and ubiquitous—even demeaning—anatomical similarities). Effectively operating in modern human cultures was facilitated by this attitude: one could thrive by embracing mastery and justifying any action—no matter how heinous to other life—on the basis of superiority and entitled dominion. It’s perfectly reasonable and logical to disbelieve evolution. The notion that humans were placed as-is in static form distinct from animals is a coherent mental model when applied to our snapshot-lives as long as one does not look too closely. Evolution has been a big adjustment that not everyone yet accepts, but again within a limited context, the shift is unnecessary.

It now galls us that humans are not exempt from the laws that govern the universe and other ecological beings. We bridle at any hint of limitations: speaking of inexhaustible ingenuity, endless growth, expansion into space, and even immortality. Modern mythology regards humans as transcendent beings: the pinnacle of evolution and the whole purpose of the universe—now able to contemplate itself. To be fair, evidence of humans breaking limits is not hard to find, so again this mental model is not illogical—just narrowly/incompletely contextualized.

Ultimate Authority

Countering notions of transcendence, we still must eat, drink, pee, poop, and die (I still need to get onto creating this T-shirt and opening a merch outlet!). Gravity grips all of us, without exception. It’s demeaning to be treated no differently than a rock if finding ourselves over a cliff edge. As an aside, use of the word “demeaning” carries a significant insight: many people derive meaning from the (ultimately erroneous) belief that humans are exempt from the rules of the universe as applied to “mere matter.”

Importantly, our minds (mental models) have no authority over physics. Perhaps that’s the sentence best encapsulating this series, in fact. Our mental models—as products of physics—are powerless over physics: unable to override physical consequences. Any clever actions we take must work within physics, because working against it is impossible. But, just as for the earlier examples of prevalent mental models that were fundamentally wrong, limiting context (including timescale of consideration) allows us to pretend that we (and our culture) are a special exception to the rules that apply everywhere else. One can see the appeal of dualism in this context: something sets us apart, so we concoct a new “substance” like mind or consciousness or soul as a brush-it-under-the-rug lazy “explanation.”

The Pattern

Can we identify some common elements to mental model failures as a way to help in detecting our own blind spots and vulnerabilities?

One adaptively-sensible tendency is to go with the simplest, most obvious model that fits experience—in an inherently limited context. Earth as a flat plane that extends farther than we will ever walk requires little thought and serves well enough. The sun (and stars) moving around Earth is apparent to any observer. Earth is obviously stationary, because surely we would feel motion—as suggested by the kinds of motions we typically experience, in practice (involving bumps and headwinds). Earth orbiting a “stationary” sun is prima facie absurd, given direct observation of the sun’s motion revealing the opposite “truth.” Man (and not woman, by the way) is obviously at the top of the pyramid, because just look around at the copious evidence. Cows don’t own and control us! The point is that all these models are reasonable and effective within limited contexts, even if wrong.

When a cherished model is challenged, we have a habit of applying band-aids before ditching the paradigm: elaborating the mental model to account for perplexing or even embarrassing discrepancies. Ptolemy had his epicycles to explain retrograde motions of planets that inconvenienced the “cleaner” geocentric theory. God made for a facile one-size-fits-all explanation for any anomaly that arose: “that’s just how God made it; far-be-it for us to question or object.”

We also notice a centering pattern to all these past models. Our own experience is centered on our bodies and sensations (ultimately a key motivator of dualistic beliefs). Extending this obvious truth, it is easy to get Earth and Man as the central focus of reality. It is likewise understandable that a toddler would imagine themselves to be the reason for the world. In the process of maturing, we go from the center of the universe to a state somewhat less self-centered, but the question is how far we are able to take this train (varies by individual). Because our window onto the world begins (or terminates?) in our bodies and via our personal experience, it is a struggle to recognize the validity of other experiences—extending far beyond humans or Earthly considerations. The further we get from ourselves (gender, race, age, nationality, species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain, elemental composition, planet, galaxy, or into a multiverse), the more difficult it is to relate.

Notice that the more we learn—the more context we take on—the less special humans become. Does anyone here think we’re done, or might additional demotions be in store? Can we imagine, for instance, that an experience we once attributed to a transcendent state in the magical province of “mind” turns out to be the result of enormously-complex material interactions shaped in feedback over times we do not have the mental capacity to truly appreciate? Food for thought.

Whatever the case, mental models form a crucial interface to the world: one with which we become intimately acquainted. They are familiar, reassuring, and easily mistaken for actual reality. Our direct experience becomes primary and the most trusted, reliable basis for assessing the world—even when the generated models are fundamentally flawed. To make matters more complicated, we model those models as “mind,” which to many becomes the most convincing reality imaginable: the map that makes the world. Our “mind” is almost like an imaginary best friend that no one else can see.

The Flaw

The main flaw in these (flat, geocentric, creationist) examples: missing context (or ignored, avoided context). It’s undetected relationships and dependencies, or ones that don’t easily fit into our limited/distorted mental models and are thus more readily shoved aside. But mostly, I would say that it’s stuff to which we’re oblivious. And that’s okay: it’s to be expected—couldn’t be any other way, really. Our senses and cognitive capacities are limited—as evolutionary products adapted for purposes other than mastering the universe—so that we can’t expect to capture the full context of complex situations. That’s impossible.

Overwhelming Complexity

The universe is hella complex! As an illustration, physics students learn to compute exact solutions to the two-body problem: orbits of two (spherical) bodies about their common center of mass—which turn out to follow perfect conic sections in a Newtonian context. Add a third body and all bets are off. Approximations in the form of perturbation theory are possible for many scenarios, but arbitrary situations have no closed-form mathematical solution, and thus call for numerical step-wise modeling (essentially how the actual universe also does it, by the way). It’s even impossible to predict in general terms whether any given body in a three-body dance will be ejected. Oh, and even the mathematically-exact two-body solution falls to pieces when admitting that General Relativity is the real story: the tidy, fixed conic sections no longer hold, precisely.

Similarly, we can exactly solve the hydrogen atom in a full quantum-mechanical treatment, nailing the energy levels and electron-cloud configuration to high precision. Now step up to helium (two electrons), and we’re lost. Again, approximations and/or numerical modeling can get close enough to confirm experimental results and validate the underlying theoretical framework. But exact solutions are not possible due to limitations in mental/symbolic representation. The only fully accurate representation is the thing itself, as expressed by the universe following its inviolate rules.

The exactly-calculable cases are the simplest of simple situations. We very quickly run out of steam in the face of complexity, often unable to leverage first principles to provide exact accounts even at the molecular level—let alone a cell, organism, or ecological community. Yet, each Herculean effort to build, say, a detailed—albeit necessarily approximate—model for how a protein folds under electromagnetic and quantum influences bears out and validates that the universe appears to obey physics without known exception.

Space Colonization

As I’ve written a number of posts on space fantasies lately (starting here), let’s use space colonization as an example of mental models gone wrong. Try the progression: walking, horseback, carts, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, Moon, space station, Mars, stars, galaxy. Isn’t that just obvious, and oh-so-easy to spell out as a series of words? The path seems clear, and its extrapolation obvious.

Bolstering the case further, men have indeed put footprints on the lunar surface. Individual humans have spent over a year in orbiting space stations. The international space station (ISS) recycles (some) oxygen and water. New space launch capabilities are being explored today, including the very nifty trick of the first stage landing itself back at the launch pad. And let’s not discount a powerfully-suggestive form of “evidence” that roots in our brains exerting a subliminal influence: movies and television shows have provided numerous visionary examples of “realized” space existence. The net effect is so convincing as to make denial of a space-colonizing future seem ludicrous in our twisted culture.

Dose of Reality

Allow more context into the picture and the fantasy becomes less appealing. Space stations barely skim Earth’s surface, enjoying frequent deliveries of air, water, food, fuel, and equipment as well as partial protection from cancer-causing cosmic radiation due to Earth’s magnetosphere (even then, visit duration is deliberately limited for health reasons). The surface of other bodies like the moon, Mars, or asteroids are far more difficult (costlier) to service, and experience more than a hundred-fold increase in harmful radiation compared to Earth’s surface: hello, cancer! Despite the best technology money can buy, only 42% of oxygen is recycled in the ISS, requiring a continuous supply of rocket delivery from the surface at a typical cost of $200M per launch. Thus, the ISS is still strongly tethered to Earth’s environment (to which we are explicitly adapted). Every hour a human spends in space incurs an environmental cost (on Earth!) matching that of about 2,000 hours of a global average citizen. The fastest way to wreck Earth would be to try to leave it. It would be marginally easier to believe space colonization if we first saw condominiums on Mount Everest or the ocean floor—both of which are far more accessible and hospitable than any place off-planet. For that matter, living on an airplane staying aloft 24/7 is cheaper and easier than space habitation, and has about as much point to it!

At the widest scale, modernity has initiated a sixth mass extinction based on rapid depletion of one-time non-renewable resources (primarily from direct activities and not greenhouse gas emission, although that’s plenty bad in itself). In all likelihood, this very recent phenomenon will prove to be a temporary blip rather than a prelude to space. Also on this broadest scale, and bringing us back to dualism: the core flaw in space-fantasy mental models is the conceit that we are separate from the rest of the universe, and therefore can be plopped anywhere and be okay. What this leaves out is, again, context. Earth is our context. We are so thoroughly woven into its ecology as to be inseparable, other than during temporary, expensive, damaging stunts.

Any of us can imagine swimming and breathing underwater indefinitely, or jumping off a skyscraper and into exhilarating flight (both are frequent personal accomplishments in my dreams), or living permanently in space. Yet we die if we try (sooner than we would otherwise). Imaginations are unconstrained by reality, and are thus unreliable. The same is true for mental models in general: the better ones don’t overtly violate physics and contextual constraint, but nothing much stops them from doing so.

Fighting the Urge

When it comes to dualism, just because the mentally-constructed “mind” is thoroughly-convincing and familiar doesn’t mean it’s a reality of its own. The belief shares many traits with previous self-centered “apparent” illusions of existing as physics-exempt, non-evolved, superior beings on a flat plate at the center of the universe. The real story is far more complex—and told by the universe, not fabricated by brains.

We essentially end up as captives of our own cognitive limitations, reluctant to admit anything outside our conceptual capabilities—like overwhelming complexity. Because we are constitutionally unable to imagine the complete story of how physics animates life, the reflexive (but baseless) tendency is to reject that it even can. But that’s on us as a human limitation. The universe is under no obligation to refrain from stacking up arbitrary levels of overwhelming complexity. It does not somehow restrict itself to simple ways we might intuitively grasp on a moment’s reflection. We need to get over ourselves.

A common reaction to this line of argument is to try throwing it back at me: maybe it’s me who lacks imagination or the right answers. Of course I lack sufficient capacity. I have the same model meat-brain as all other humans, after all. As an aside, my use of “meat” in this context offends the dualists (and idealists) by demoting “mind” to a (nutritious) form of matter.

Note that my own meat-brain is not claiming to know how the universe works so much as advocating that we admit our limitations and don’t concoct facile Flat-Earth explanations out of contextual ignorance that might satisfy our impatience, emotional needs, and insistence on arriving at an answer that more comfortably fits in our cramped brain-space. This tendency is especially dangerous when the constructed worldview privileges humans (and mind) in such a way to maintain justification for carrying out acts of superiority—which in fact may be the reason for its pernicious grip: a toxic addiction. The position I advocate is thus to humbly receive the minimal (experimentally validated) foundation that can plausibly account for everything we experience, even if we can’t ourselves connect all the dots. Trust the universe, not out brains. It appears that amazing things can result, even before we existed and even if we’ll never understand.

Next time, we’ll lay out the main metaphysical choices relating to dualism, and I’ll make the pitch for a non-dual materialism.

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