The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge

"The basic idea of this book is that the usual scientific, materialistic paradigm— which says that there is nothing but matter—is inadequate, and is confounded whenever you look seriously at anything in the world, whether it’s an atom, poem or out-of-body experience. We know that mind is mattered, in the sense of having some relationship with brain tissue. But there is good reason to suppose, too, that matter is minded. The better we get at looking for consciousness, the more we find it. It seems ubiquitous, and doesn’t just inhabit brains, but also the atoms that compose the desk at which I’m sitting now, and the atoms on the other side of the universe. It is a fundamental characteristic of everything. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Kripal supports his argument with a mass of evidence from many different domains, including out-of-body experiences. A large proportion of us have had such experiences. I’ll tell you about one of my own. A little while ago, I leapt—I thought swashbucklingly—onto a stage, fell, and dislocated my shoulder. They took me off to hospital and they tried to put it back under nitrous oxide. ‘I’ floated out of ‘my’ body—and ‘I’ looked down on the nurse trying to put it back. ‘I’ could see the bald top of ‘my’ own head, and ‘I’ could see the nurse’s centre parting. ‘My’ mind’s eye, which was describing all this, could see the boundaries of ‘my’ own head. So ‘my’ mind was plainly not restricted by ‘my’ skull. It was in some sense outside the bone-box which it usually thinks of as its home. If it could hover six feet above that skull, what else might it do? Where else might it go? And all the inverted commas in my last paragraph are strange and interesting. Yes. Surprisingly little is really impossible in principle. Should you ever begin to think that this is a drab, workaday world, open any textbook of quantum physics . If one electron has been close to another, they will each affect the spin of the other for ever, however far apart they are, instantaneously . Every bit of matter in the universe was once very, very close to every other bit—at the moment of the Big Bang. And so everything in the universe is intimately related to and continues to affect, instantaneously, everything else in the universe. Everything is one. Individuation is still possible, but has to be accommodated within the overarching fact of one-ness, and most of our cherished divisions are illusory. The corollaries of that are astounding, aren’t they? On every single level. If we just take the political and the moral, this means I have no reason to boast about my status in relation to any other human being, or any other non-human being, or any other collection of atoms. And think about what it means for the birdwatcher; it means that the woodpecker is resonating with her! It’s impossible to talk about these things without sounding insane. But that’s the sort of thing I was thinking about when I suggested that this was a nature book—because it gives a pretty fundamental explanation of what it means to say, as we blithely and often unreflectively do, that we are part of nature, and nature is part of us. Everything’s bound to everything by an eternally unbreakable knot of agency. And this should impose on everyone a glorious but crushing responsibility to treat everything else right. I think panpsychism has been around at least since the advent of behaviourally modern humans! Nature writing traditionally has, for obvious reasons, tended to take its cue from biology, and biologists have lagged far behind the physicists in their openness to these, frankly, mystical ideas. So I’m excited—and Jeff Kripal is excited—about how the humanities might be affected if writers put their imaginations seriously to work on some of the basic insights of the quantum physicists. In the quantum world, matter is congealed energy. The division between space and time is an illusion. Dark energy constitutes most of the universe. You can go seamlessly from those observations to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus . Partial differential equations are a type of mystical literature. It seems from everything that we’ve just been discussing that the best books on consciousness are actually written by physicists. So if the physicists have stolen all the good stories, what are non-scientists—including most nature writers—supposed to do? And hasn’t the literary scholarship of the last century made literature redundant? Why should anybody listen respectfully to a discipline, literature, whose central arguments often boil down to the claim that the only truth is that there is no truth at all. “Partial differential equations are a type of mystical literature” But maybe there’s a way of rehabilitating literature—and in particular nature writing. The humanities have, at least notionally, had the nature of consciousness as their core subject. Perhaps they’ve got something to add to what the quantum physicists have to say about consciousness. But they’ve got to pull their socks up. Really interesting nature writing, I ought to say, is very explicitly about the nature of consciousness and the interplay of different loci of consciousness. It’s about the consciousness of the bird, and the way that the consciousness of the bird is affected by the consciousness of the human observer, and vice versa, and about the Mind that seeps out of the hill and into your socks."