1.1 Giants in a Deadlock
Since ancient times, thinkers were trying to answer fundamental questions about our universe and the role a person has in it: āWhy is the universe the way it is? How did it emerge? What is life? What is the origin of consciousness ? Do gods exist? Are conscious observers a necessary part of the universe, or are they a side effect of its development? What happens to our souls when we die?ā
The answers to these questions varied, but the common ground that united the answers was the assumption that the universe we live in is one and the same for all of us. The concept universe comes from Latin universumāmeaning literally āthe whole turned into oneā (from unusāāoneā), so it was logical to assume that, although the answers varied, all of them referred to the same thing. Myths and religions gave a number of answers to the aforementioned questions, and in the last centuries science joined the club. Not all of the answers that science gave are proven, many of them (e.g., on origins of the universe, origins of life , origins of consciousness and morality) are inaccessible for the empirical check, yet the answers had to fit the general tenet of scientific world outlook. As a result, the answers that science gave often are in direct contradiction to our intuitive understanding and look more like the āparty lineā, the ideological slogans of the āreligion of scienceā rather than the truth about reality.
The mainstream scientific theory of the origins of the universe, known as the āBig Bang theoryā, closely resembles an act of a creation, yet some scientists emphatically deny the existence of god. The emergence of life, let alone consciousness in the course of evolution of dead matter looks like an instance of magic, but science denounces magic as a false belief and rejects the idea that supernatural events exist. Intuitively every person believes that inside his or her mind there is a central agent called āSelfā; we know that we possess freedom of action and are individually responsible for our conscious deeds; in contrast, science cannot accept that our decisions are made without causal determination, and some scientists and philosophers deny the existence of the Self. Every one of us can see colours, hear sounds and experience sensations of taste; nevertheless, from the scientific point of view all these subjective experiences are nothing but epiphenomena which accompany physical processes: electromagnetic and air waves and molecular compositions of substances that we eat. These and other controversial views on the most important theoretical issues have been intensely debated for centuries, yet the common solutions seem to be as far away from us now as they were in the times of Descartes and Galileo.
So, what is going wrong? Why is it the case that the most brilliant minds, with all their efforts to find common ground, have been unable not only to come to agreed solutions, but even to reconcile their views? Might it not be that the discussions on the issues contain a fundamental epistemological flaw which brought the discussants into a deadlock?
In this book, I will make an attempt to show that such a flaw does indeed exist, and this flaw is the fundamental assumption that a human person lives in only one universe .
1.2 A Person in the Psychological Multiverse
Some cosmologists put forward the hypothesis that the Big Bang might not be a unique event. Instead, as our universe is expanding, Big Bangs happen here and there, giving birth to other independent universes, which the cosmologists called bubbles. As these bubbles are driven apart, other bubbles sprout out of them. We live in one of these bubbles [1].
In psychology, this mind-bending hypothesis finds its analogy in the fact of the psychological ābubble universes āāindividual human minds. When a child is born, a new little individual universe, which we call the Bubbleverse, appears in this world, with the unique sensations, feelings and dreams. At the moment, there are about 7.5 billion of such bubbleverses in the world, whereas, according to estimates by Population Reference Bureau (PRB), for the last 50,000 years, more than 108 billion members of our species have walked the Earth [2]. Importantly, most of all these people strongly believed that their private bubbleverses are parts of a much larger universeāthe Commonverse.
While the Bubbleverse is the universe we are born into, the Commonverse we build inside the Bubbleverse. Perhaps, there was a time when a human person, like an animal, lived only in his or her Bubbleverse. For such a person, the world was limited by the personās perceptual environment. An early human individual was encapsulated in the eggshell of his or her immediate perceptions and feelings, unable to pierce this barrier with the sparkle of creative imagination. But then, and rather suddenly, people discovered the idea of the invisible world of spirits, invented paintings, sculptures and other symbols to communicate with this invisible world, and the magnificent work of constructing the Commonverse began.
With the emergence of abstract languages people created mythology, and mythology laid the foundation for religious Commonverse. Later the language of mathematics and philosophy allowed people to create what would subsequently become a scientific Commonverse. This symbolic artificial Commonverses, consisting of religious beliefs and scientific theories, made it possible to drastically change the initial Bubbleverse, by adding to it what we call culture: buildings, machines, bridges, social customs and cultural traditions. As a result, the initial primordial Bubbleverse divided within itself: part of it remained as a private ācore Bubbleverse ā, which contains our sensations, dreams, feelings and desires, but other parts transformed into the religious, scientific and sociocultural Commonverses. And today we have no choice but to live in the psychological multiverseāour personal Bubbleverse containing enormous artificial āscaffoldingsā insideāthe Commonverses. Apart from these Commonverses within my own Bubbleverse, there are innumerable other bubbleverses each belonging to other people and any creature which is sentient (see Chap. 13 for more on that).
In this book we assume that the structure of the primordial Bubbleverse (both historically and in a new-born baby) is complex and disorderly. Speaking metaphorically, being born is like landing on a new planet: you see some familiar features, like rivers and mountains, but donāt really know whether you can drink the water or what kind of creatures might be inhabiting it. Not surprisingly, people invented Commonverses in order to make this chaotic Bubbleverse simpler and more comprehensible. But danger was lurking underneathāthe danger of going too far down the line of simplification, up to writing the Bubbleverse off altogether and along with the Bubbleverse giving up the personās Self and mind.
1.3 Turning the Tables
Like the character of the famous Greek myth, a sculptor named Pygmalion , who fell in love with his own creationāthe statue he named Galatea āwe fell in love with the Commonverses. First, the religious Commonverse became a subject of our devotion, for its remarkable ability of explaining everything in the world and giving us the hope for eternal life . Next, the scientific Commonverse took the stage. The scientific Commonverse is devoid of colours and tastes, it is nothing but a mental construction of enormous proportions, but for us it possesses a magical charm, because it allows us to understand, predict and control the chaotic phenomenal world of the Bubbleverse, diminishes the ever-present danger of famine and diseases and gives us the endless supply of useful toys in the form of cars and electronic gadgets.
But the Greek myth had a twist: the goddess of love, Aphrodite , took pity on Pygmalion and brought the statue to life. It appears that today this twist is coming true as well. Not only did we fall in love with the Commonverses, but we began to believe that the Commonversesāour own creationāhave a life of their own. We are missing the fact...