The 17th century was a period of amazing advances in mathematics, physics and astrophysics, from Galileo to Newton. Similarly quantitative degrees of insight were gained in chemistry roughly 150 years later with the atomic theory of chemical reactions, and another 150 years later biology reached the stage of quantitative insight in fundamental processes with the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.

The reasons for these successive lags, spanning several generations of scientists in each of those two jumps, were clearly instrumental. The technology for manufacturing a telescope existed once invented, but accurate measurements regarding the atomic nature of matter were only possible later in the eighteenth century. And the crystallographic technology needed to discover the double helix structure was not sufficiently mature until about 1950.

The big question in all this is: why did the natural philosophers of the 17th century not develop a science of mind?

When our mind is treated as a natural lab for studying mind itself, as we saw already in Part 1, Log Entry #004, there is no need to wait for progress in material instruments. All that needs to be done is to experiment with implementing all the other steps that got natural science going, such as open source, a self-governing community of scientists, no schisms, etc, as they were already invented in the 17th century, as we discussed in the previous Log Entry #024. All the novelties that the natural philosophers had discovered as a foundation for science as we now know it were already in place.

To add a few more: by the mid-17th century, in addition to the ones mentioned above, working hypotheses to be tested empirically, peer review by a self-governing body of scientists, open sharing of techniques and results, and most importantly, not trying to reinvent the wheel—they were all there! In the case of natural science, the wheel was the Ptolemaic model of the motion of the planets, without which Copernicus could not have conceived of a heliocentric variation of that model, which was the basis for all the progress after him. Exactly which “wheel” to use for a science of mind would still have been an open question, and a very interesting one.

It may simply be that the enormous success of using material tools to study the properties of matter distracted most natural philosophers from considering a mind-equivalent approach, especially after Newton seemed to have completely solved the properties of motion with his unified approach of describing motion in the “heavens” and “down on Earth” with the exact same formulas, in his Principia, published in 1687.

Two attempts to start a science of mind before 1687

Descartes tried to find a connection between matter and mind by proposing as a working hypothesis that the pineal gland in the brain was somehow involved. But his focus on the material structure of the brain was at least four centuries too early: even now, neuroscientists are only beginning to map correlations between brain structures and aspects of consciousness. And it is not at all clear whether they will be able to succeed where Descartes failed. As we saw in Part 3, Log Entry #014, the “hard problem of consciousness” may turn out to be not just hard but downright impossible, in the way it is currently conceived.

Spinoza, a generation younger, rejected the matter/mind dualism of Descartes. Instead, he saw matter and mind as two different aspects of the same Substance, as he called it, and used two different names for that Substance: God or Nature, names that he used interchangeably. In this way, he borrowed the theological term God and the natural philosophy term Nature to address the same ontological “what Is.” This implied that the one nondual reality, Nature, can show a Matter or a Mind side, and that it could equally be considered to stand in for God.

There were others who were neither dualists, like Descartes, nor nondualists, like Spinoza, but what set those two apart from the others was their attempt to develop a systematic scientific program. Descartes’ working hypothesis was that the pineal gland could turn out to be the point of intersection of the two parts of his duality. Spinoza’s working hypothesis was that he could use a geometrical model, which he developed in his magnum opus, Ethics, or Ethica in the original Latin, to describe the structure of reality, including matter and mind. It was a system of mathematical axioms, theorems and proofs of those theorems, using axioms and theorems that had already been proven earlier—just as was done in Euclidean geometry.

Although Descartes and Spinoza were spearheading the first attempts at a science of matter and mind, modeled on the very first stages of natural science, known as natural philosophy at the time, their working hypotheses were not further explored by their colleagues. Therefore neither of them set in motion a program of investigation of the connection between matter and mind, unlike Newton’s very successful program of using his mechanics as the foundation for all things material.

What happened with their attempts?

Looking back, we now know that Descartes’ fate was like that of Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched designs for a helicopter more than four centuries before they were actually manufactured. Descartes’ speculations about correlations between brain and consciousness similarly had to be put on hold for more than three centuries before they could finally be put to the test, using modern equipment in neuroscience laboratories.

And what about Spinoza? Unlike Descartes, he was not hampered by a lack of technological instruments. He used his “intuition” as an instrument, a personal resource, together with his logic, based on geometry, as a way to build a systematic theory. At first sight, for a modern reader, this doesn’t sound empirical at all, since the current usage of “intuition” means “a hunch,” a vague notion. However, for Spinoza and others in the 17th and 18th centuries, including Kant, intuition implied much more. It meant having direct, immediate knowledge that was so clearly obvious it didn’t require proof. For Spinoza, his third and highest kind of knowledge, Scientia Intuitiva (Intuitive Knowledge), was the direct, immediate perception of the essence of things.

This may sound strangely mystical—or mathematical: in both cases the evidence is not based on sense experience. Spinoza used geometry as an example: we draw pictures on paper, which are imperfect sketches of infinitely thin lines, and postulate angles between crossing lines that can be defined with infinite precision using logic, all of which are strictly speaking invisible. What we do ‘see’ instead, using ‘intuition’ as defined above, while working on solving a problem in geometry, are the relationships between perfect essences, not the imperfect drawings. We are using our mind as a laboratory in which we ‘perceive’ such relationships, more precisely than we can ever perceive with our eyes the positions of a needle of an instrument in a physical laboratory, or the finite number of digits of a digital readout for that matter.

And it seems clear that Spinoza’s empirical studies of the mind went beyond dry logic, but included mystical aspects. While his proofs were cast in geometrical terms, the intuition he used to arrive at such results could well be classified under the rubric of contemplation or mysticism. He would not have been the first: in fact, the first mathematician using deductive reasoning, Pythagoras, founded a whole school or community — either word would apply — that considered math and mysticism as inherently connected. An early work by Spinoza, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (On the Improvement of the Understanding; 1662, unfinished), points in that direction. And so does a recent book, The Influence of Abraham Cohen de Herrera’s Kabbalah on Spinoza’s Metaphysics (2016) by Miquel Beltran, in far more detail.

Seen in this light, the question of why the birth of a science of mind did not take place in the 17th century might have a surprising answer. Perhaps it did, with Spinoza, but if so, it went unrecognized.

A surprise, possible in principle

It is in principle possible that Spinoza, after finishing his Ethics, actually started to write a manuscript that might be modeled more on the vibrant developments made by Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch scientist who has been called the “first theoretical physicist” because he was the first to idealize physical problems using mathematical parameters and rigorous geometric demonstrations. He is also considered a forerunner for Newton, who paved the way by discovering several ingredients that Newton would soon use in his Principia. Importantly for our current speculations, Spinoza and Huygens were neighbors in Voorburg, a suburb of The Hague, in the mid-1660s. During that period, Spinoza regularly visited Huygens at his family estate, Hofwijck. There they discussed many scientific topics of their day. Therefore, even though Spinoza died before Newton published his Principia, he might have come close to Newton’s main ideas, as close as you could get, through conversations and letter exchanges with Huygens.

So it is certainly not impossible that Spinoza started writing a manuscript that was less formal than Ethics, and closer to the idea of exploring a science of mind, in parallel with Huygens’ physics and astrophysics (Huygens, like Galileo, was an observer as well; he discovered that the strange shape of Saturn, having “ears” next to the round body of the planet, was caused by rings of material circling around Saturn).

But if Spinoza did write about applying elements of physics, in addition to using elements of geometry, why would there be no trace left of it? It is quite plausible that such a manuscript was lost soon after his death. It might have been at too early a stage to show to his friends. In any case, he was already getting into increasing trouble with his unpublished “blasphemous” manuscript, Ethics, and the last thing he needed was to become more of a lightning rod. Agreed, the possibility that he had started writing such a manuscript may have been low, but it could have happened—and who knows what might still be discovered?

Two real surprises in real history

Before waving that idea away, consider the following two historical events that actually did happen. The first occurred almost two centuries after Spinoza’s death, in the middle of the 19th century, when a text by him was discovered that had not been included in the collection of books and manuscripts secretly printed right after his death. A recent English translation, titled “Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being,” was published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press. Here is the announcement of their latest publication:

The Korte Verhandeling, van God, de Mensch, en deszelvs Welstand [the title of the Dutch manuscript] probably dates from the early 1660s. According to Filippo Mignini’s reconstruction, which is generally accepted, Spinoza originally wrote the text in Latin and circulated it among his friends around late 1660. He continued to revise and add to the text in response to their feedback. At some point they produced a Dutch translation with notes and cross-references, which Spinoza probably also corrected and supplemented. By early 1662, however, he had abandoned the work in favor of the Ethics. Never published in his lifetime or in the Opera posthuma, the KV was essentially lost until two Dutch copies were discovered in the mid nineteenth century. The earlier of the two, known as Codex A, dates from the late seventeenth century and is treated as authoritative in the most recent critical edition, while Codex B, from the mid eighteenth century, is principally a revised copy of A.

These two handwritten copies of a Dutch translation of the original handwritten Latin version were a huge surprise, around the time when interest in Spinoza began to flourish again, after his work was largely neglected in the 18th and early 19th centuries. So what happened once can happen again, if someone browses through an old, almost-forgotten attic in Holland.

But there is a second, even more startling case, from as recent as 2010, and as far away from Holland as the Vatican. It was the discovery of an original manuscript of Ethics, for which till then, not a single manuscript was known to exist. Here is the announcement for the 2011 publication by the publisher Brill, as “The Vatican Manuscript of Spinoza’s Ethica” in the Series “Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, Volume: 205/11.”:

Brill authors Leen Spruit and Pina Totaro discovered the original manuscript of Spinoza’s “Ethica” in the Vatican library. This spectacular discovery attracted a lot of media attention.

The Vatican codex, which contains the complete text of Spinoza’s Ethics, is the only surviving manuscript of this work and constitutes a document of great importance. On 23 September 1677, it was handed over to the Roman Holy Office by Spinoza’s former friend Niels Stensen who had converted to Catholicism in 1667. Thus, it predates the publication of the Opera Posthuma, which is dated 1677, but which did not in fact appear until the first months of 1678. Recent research and fresh documentation allow us to determine the several stages of the manuscript’s life before it reached Rome, where it was kept in the Archive of the Holy Office, and subsequently, transferred to the Vatican Apostolic Library in 1922.

A possible surprise, early on in an alternate history

In 1677, Spinoza died at age 44, most likely from tuberculosis, which he may have contracted from the dust while grinding lenses for a living. Let us imagine that he had been among the few people in those days who recovered from an acute case of TB, and that he had lived twice as long, into his eighties, as Newton did. He would have been in his mid-fifties when Newton published his Principia, which was to be the foundation of physics for more than two centuries.

As we already saw above, it is in principle possible that Spinoza actually started to write a manuscript along those lines, extending Ethics, in a form inspired more by Newton’s Principia, rather than Descartes’ Meditations, which had heavily influenced him in some of his earlier unpublished writings, although in the end, Ethics was modeled after Euclid’s Elements.

Having finished his Ethics, in what would then have been the middle of his life, he would no doubt have continued his scientific as well as his philosophical interests. In real history, besides being a friend of Christiaan Huygens, he corresponded with the British chemist Robert Boyle. And on one occasion, Leibniz, a leading scientist and philosopher, spent several full days visiting Spinoza, less than a year before Spinoza’s death, no doubt discussing Spinoza’s Ethics, which made a lasting impression on him.

We have no way of knowing, of course, what would have happened had Spinoza lived to a ripe old age. But as a kind of thought experiment, let me take the liberty to construct an alternative history, a counterfactual narrative to produce a virtual history, different from what actually happened, but still close enough that it could have happened.

Imagine Spinoza had read some of the works of Meister Eckhart, which is not very likely, but certainly possible. Imagine, in addition, that he recognized a clear parallel in Eckhart’s description of the ultimate reality not as the God of the Christian trinity, but as what Eckhart called Gottheit in German, often translated by the old theological term Godhead (which is similar to Godness or Godhood in modern English). For Eckhart, the contemplation of Godhead goes far deeper than the contemplation of God. For him, Godhead is the Ground of reality, from which the Trinity emerges. It has no qualities, names, or attributes, and was often described by him as a “desert” or “nothingness,” with the implication that there was no difference there anymore between the mystic contemplating the Godhead and the Godhead itself: a total unity. For Eckhart, the Godhead is also the Ground of reality, for any and all of us.

Some quotes by Eckhart: “In the ground of the soul, the soul meets God where God is not yet God,” and “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.” Not only does this sound like a Buddhist form of nonduality, but the totality of his writing comes so close that many leading Buddhist philosophers, and especially those who actively practice Buddhism, have pointed out the similarities. Not surprisingly, toward the end of his life, he was accused of heresy. As a consequence, he had to face a 14th-century version of the Inquisition, from which he was spared by his death at age 68 while on his way to Avignon, at that time the seat of the pope, where he was to be interrogated.

Weaving a more elaborate alternate history

In Protestant Holland, there was no inquisition, but even so in real history, a year after Spinoza’s death, his books and manuscripts were banned. If it had not been for a few of his friends who quickly published a clandestine complete works edition of his writings, all his unpublished writings, including Ethics, might well have been lost for posterity—yet another alternate history, on the negative side, which fortunately did not happen.

As it was, while the ban would do enough harm to Spinoza’s works and ideas, they did continue to be discussed for a while, though mostly in a negative light. It was only a century and a half later that his ideas found a more positive reception. Hegel, for example, in his lectures around 1830, said: “Thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all philosophizing.” And a century after that, Einstein, when asked whether he believed in God, answered: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

And here we are, after yet another century, at a point in time where more and more scientists are beginning to wonder whether the dogma of materialism that they grew up with shouldn’t be treated more like a working hypothesis, one possible idea among others. Specifically, the notion of panpsychism, the suggestion that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the physical world and is present in some form in any type of matter, is being taken more seriously, though still in a very haphazard way. And even so, it is still leaning on materialism. While consciousness becomes one of the players, alongside matter, the stage on which it all plays out remains fundamentally part of the material world, embedded in physical spacetime.

Returning to our alternative history, imagine that Spinoza, inspired by Meister Eckhart, would have lived long enough to give more experimental detail to the ideas that he had published in his Ethics. He certainly would have waited to put anything in writing until he had enough clarity in his intuition to discuss something far more specific and balanced than our current ideas, presented at consciousness conferences, about “adding” some forms of consciousness to a materialistic worldview.

Given his evenhanded treatment of matter and mind, a logical conclusion for him would have been to try to develop an extended version of what Newton had presented for the material side of reality, by adding a mind side, based on the successful blueprint that Newton’s Principia offered. It would not have been a big jump for him, since the basic idea of treating mind and matter on equal footing was already present in Ethics. And unlike Descartes, who was looking for a kind of hinge between matter and mind, his view of reality was not a simple addition of the two. Rather, it was a grand vision of reality as a single, totally nondual “essence,” of which mind and matter were only two aspects, two projections as it were, of a potentially larger whole.

Spinoza versus Boyle

There was only one glitch, which may have made his vision less than attractive to the forerunners of natural science, the natural philosophers of his day. Let us return to Boyle, with whom, as we saw, Spinoza maintained a correspondence for a while. It was an indirect one, via Henry Oldenburg, a good friend of both Boyle and Spinoza.

It is tempting to describe the experiments that Boyle was involved in, and the different conclusions that Boyle and Spinoza drew from his experiments, (for background, cf. “Boyle, Glauber, and Newton: The Redintegration Experiment with Saltpeter,” by Filip Adolf A Buyse, ACS Omega. 2024 Mar 27;9(14):15727–15731) but that would be too much of a distraction. In summary, they both reached part of the truth, as we can judge from our current understanding. Resisting the temptation, let me only quote the one full paragraph of conclusions that were drawn in a recent paper by Filip Buyse, “Spinoza, Boyle, Galileo: Was Spinoza a Strict Mechanical Philosopher?“ (Intellectual History Review 23(1) March 2013: 45–64):

The fact that the difference in epistemology is a main point of controversy between Boyle and Spinoza seems to be confirmed by the conclusion of their intermediary, Oldenburg, who could follow the discussion from a privileged point of view. In the final paragraph of the Boyle/Spinoza correspondence, Oldenburg concludes that both philosophers are ‘both in agreement on the main point’, alluding to the mechanical doctrine in qualities of bodies which I discussed above. Oldenburg then closes the discussion and encourages Spinoza, with his ‘keen mathematical mind, to continue to establish basic principles’, and Boyle ‘to confirm and elucidate them by experiments and observations repeatedly and accurately made’. These admonitions refer to what Oldenburg apparently regarded as the main disagreement between the two parties: Spinoza’s deductive (geometrical) method versus Boyle’s inductive (experimental) method. Previously, in letter 11, Oldenburg had written to Spinoza that ‘Boyle belongs to the class of those who do not have much trust in their reason as not to want phenomena to agree with reason.’ Apparently, he subsequently realized that on this main point of disagreement, the water was too deep.

Spinoza versus Boyle and Newton

Boyle is recognized as a pioneer of modern chemistry for transforming alchemy into a rigorous, evidence-based scientific discipline. He pioneered the method of repeatable laboratory experiments, established Boyle’s Law, and developed an early atomic theory of matter. His approach was empirical, and his law, that the pressure of a gas is inversely proportional to the volume, was the first physical law to be expressed in the form of an equation describing the dependence of two variable quantities. Yet he also held on to the notion that God was free to play with the laws of nature after creating them and to allow miracles to occur.

Spinoza, in contrast, as we have seen, considered God and Nature to be identical: for him, the Universe is governed entirely by immutable, mathematical laws without divine interference. While Newton is seen as a pioneer of modern physics, in establishing the laws that govern classical mechanics, his view of God was even more removed from that of modern physics than Spinoza’s. Newton saw gravity as a sign of God’s active mediation in the void. No wonder that Einstein’s God was not Newton’s but rather Spinoza’s.

And this is one reason for me to set up a fictitious history: what if Spinoza had lived to study Newton’s Principia and had an exchange with Newton, as he did with Boyle? In the real history, we know that they never met, but we also know that Newton was very much aware of the ideas of Spinoza, as they spread in an underground kind of fashion, and that Newton viewed those as a lethal threat to both science and religion. So: back to “what if?”.

Putting it all together

Here is the cast of characters that I have used in a simple sketch of my alternate history of the early development of natural science. I chose as two bookends, for vantage points from far past and far future, both a few centuries removed, Meister Eckhart (c.1260–c.1328) and Einstein (1879–1955). For Spinoza (1632–1677) and three of his contemporaries, I chose Descartes (1596–1650), Boyle (1627–1691), and Newton (1643–1727). But then I changed the number 1677 to 1717, to let Spinoza live as long as Newton did.

This could plausibly have meant that Spinoza would have gone back to study natural science in greater detail, stimulated by the appearance of the Principia. And it may well have included an attempt by him to find a form of unification of Newton’s amazingly simple and powerful approach to the motion of matter and his own theories of matter and mind as expressions of the one single essence of Nature, i.e., of God, or Reality for that matter.

The last ingredient for my fiction was to let Spinoza find Eckhart’s writings about experiences of encountering the Godhead, the nondual essence of reality, which I interpret as the “A” (for Appearance) that I have used as a pointer to the deepest nondual contemplative experiences, first in the context of epistemology in Part 3, Log Entry #017 and onwards, and then in the context of ontology in Part 4, Log Entry #020 and onwards. In both cases, “A” functions as a shorthand for pointing to an empirical way of encountering reality as (sheer) Appearance, a notion that already appeared in Part 1, as early as Log Entry #003. Given Spinoza’s intuitive insight, early on, into the nonduality of reality, could Eckhart’s writings have given him a more directly empirical way to contact the nature of mind in its full nonduality, along the lines of Eckhart’s Godhead?

See also Dialogue #001 in the new FEST Dialogues series, running now in parallel with the FEST Log series, of which the current chapter is log entry #025. For that dialogue, I invited John Maraldo, a leading Western scholar of Japanese philosophy and Zen thought, to express his angle on “A.” A second dialogue with John will appear soon, including us talking about our own involvements with methods of contemplation, as experimental counterparts to the more theoretical discussions that have dominated Phase I of the FEST Log, including Parts 1 through 4 (the current log entry is the first one of Phase II, Part 5).

Introduction to FEST Dialogues

This is the first entry in a new FEST series, called the FEST Dialogues.

The FEST approach to extending current science is based on the following two working hypotheses: 1) it may make sense to explore the possibility of a science of mind and, if successful, 2) it may then be possible to find some form of unification with our science of matter, natural science.

The first FEST series, called the FEST Log, is written by Piet Hut and attempts to sketch the possibility of a science of mind, closely following the historical development of natural science.

The second FEST series, called the FEST Dialogues, will contain dialogues between Piet Hut and/or other(s), reflecting on and extending ideas presented in the FEST Log.

Introduction

Piet: It is my pleasure to introduce John Maraldo, widely recognized as a leading Western scholar of Japanese philosophy and Zen thought. He is also an old friend of mine, ever since we met in the summer of 1993 at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan, when we were both visiting there. Yet another reason to invite him is to shed his professional light on my amateur attempts to invoke the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida, whom I discussed early on in Part 1 of the FEST Log, Initial Explorations, in Log Entry #005. In that log entry I wrote about Nishida’s first book, An Inquiry into the Good:

A key point in this book was: we tend to say “I have an experience”, but it is more accurate to say “Experience has me”. This one sentence has the power to open a whole new door, with a vista more far-reaching than the door that Husserl provided to enter into his garden.

At the time I wrote that, I knew that many Nishida experts as well as Husserl experts would take issue with me for providing such a short and simple characterization of the relationship between the views of these two great pioneers, writing at the start of the twentieth century, both of whom aimed to transcend the legacy in Western philosophy of patterns of thinking laid down by Descartes and Kant.

So, John, it’s time to keep me more honest!

John: Thank you, Piet. I am delighted to join you on this quest! When we first met three decades ago, I was surprised to hear a physicist talk about Husserl and phenomenology, and even more, to learn that you had heard of Nishida. These philosophers had corresponded with some physicists in their time, but I think that very few physicists today would know anything about their work. Another reason our meeting was fortuitous is that I had been interested in astrophysics since my undergraduate years, when I actually majored in physics. I soon learned, despite earning a B.A. in the field, that I might make a much better philosopher than physicist. But I love reading popular books about quantum physics, relativity, and astronomy, and just two years ago, I learned that Nishida was one of the Japanese scholars who helped introduce current physics into Japan and got Einstein to visit Tokyo and Kyoto in 1922. So it is gratifying to see you recognize Nishida’s thought as highly relevant to your FEST project.

Piet: In Part 1 of the FEST log, I tried to talk in simple terms about nonduality, going beyond subject/object experience to a direct awareness of what appears. It was my first introductory step to “sheer appearance,” corresponding to ‘A’ in my epistemological diagram, which I called the “blackboard diagram”, Fig. 51 in Log Entry #017, where it was introduced in Part 3 to show the relationship between Husserl’s view of the world and Galileo’s view, centered on subject and object, respectively. But in Part 1, I had not yet introduced the notion of contemplation in any detail, and the role that A might play in a science of mind.

Therefore, I decided to introduce the notion of “sheer appearance” by borrowing an idea from Nishida, as the best example I could think of for its simplicity and directness. I quoted him as: “We tend to say ‘I have an experience,’ but it is more accurate to say ‘Experience has me.’” As a Nishida expert, do you think I came anywhere close to catching the spirit of his views?

John: Yes, in the sense that experiences make me who I am. Nishida’s starting point is his famous “pure experience” that is prior to the self or “I” that “has” experiences. In the Preface of his first book Inquiry into the Good, he writes, 「個人あって経験あるにあらず、経験あって個人あるのである。」This statement is somewhat ambiguous. The translation by Abe and Ives has “it is not that experience exists because there is an individual, but that an individual exists because there is experience.” This is one way to restate Nishida’s point. But rather than try to disambiguate the statement, I think it’s more fruitful to explore various ways to translate it, thereby taking advantage of its rich implications for our project.

For one thing, as you know, the Japanese does not have definite or indefinite articles like “a,” “an,” or “the,” and also does not have singulars or plurals built into its words. So the word keiken 経験, reasonably translated as the noun “experience,” does not specify whether Nishida meant “an experience” or “experiences”; and the same holds true for 個人, “individual person.” Therefore, another way to translate the statement would be: “It’s not that an individual has experiences, but experience has individual[ity].

Piet: Fascinating! The first translation is closer to what I wrote. The twist of choosing “experience has individuality” sounds quite different in English, of course. Also, the shift from “exists” or “is” to “has” is a third ambiguity that Japanese permits, besides the ambiguities between “a” and “the” and singular and plural. No wonder Japanese haiku poetry has so much poetic license!

Now I’m curious to see exactly how wide that freedom is. Having been familiar only with the first expression, I assumed it was a rather pure expression of nonduality, rising above the subject-object split. I had a picture in mind of subject and object as two ends of the same stick: trying to isolate either one by cutting it off doesn’t work; each new, shorter stick has a subject and an object component again. My question now is: can we still read your last translation as a form of nonduality when we take a translation like ‘individuality’?

John: That’s a great question. You rendered the basic insight more personally as <we tend to say “I have an experience”, but it is more accurate to say “Experience has me.”> Considering the wider context of Nishida’s book, I wondered whether his meaning might be more like “Experience, at times, has a ‘me’.” That qualifies experience: sometimes it’s individuated, sometimes not—namely when it is “pure experience.” But then Nishida makes it clear here that unqualified experience is more fundamental, and his book makes it clear that this fundamental experience develops into—qualifies or “determines” itself (in Nishida’s language)—individuated experiences that have experiencing subjects and experienced objects.

Piet: This would lead me to think that Nishida can still be interpreted dualistically. If experience ultimately dissolves into “sheer appearance(s),” there can still be the appearance of the experience of a person experiencing subjects and objects. Do you think we can effectively translate “pure experience” into “sheer appearance”?

John: Maybe we can, given your definition of “sheer appearance.” Two pointers come to mind. First, to stick with Nishida’s terms for the time being, the progression of chapters in Nishida’s early work makes it clear that “pure experience” is absolutely fundamental and prior to any individuated experience. But “prior to” also acknowledges that such “experience” moves on into thought and intuition and other forms, forms of reflection, for example, that constitute self-consciousness. The point here is that “pure experience” is dynamic—is “in act,” which allows for its evolution (or devolution?) into thinking back upon and differentiating its subsequent “factors,” of self-consciousness, or, to use a transitive verbal expression, of consciousing a self, we might say (thus, experience, at times, has a me.) The dynamic rooted in “pure experience” suggests an evolving diversity in unity that also allows us to avoid an unwanted duality: that between nondualism and dualism! Aren’t we trying to articulate a One that generates difference from itself? How to express nondualism in a nondual way—sounds like playing with Zen koans.

The second pointer comes from an analysis that Ueda Shizuteru (1926-2019) suggested. He puts the dynamic in three stages, using Nishida’s own words. The stages go like this: First, ‘pure experience.’ That expression itself is a primordial or proto-word (Urwort, Ueda sometimes writes in German) that gives way to the proposition, “pure experience is the sole reality,” which in turn leads to Nishida’s sentence that expresses his project: “to try to explain everything on the basis of pure experience as the sole reality.” “Sole reality” expresses nonduality. But this “sole reality” must also accommodate a reflection on it that allows for all the thinking we’re doing, as individuals, about “sole reality.” Maybe the progression also hints at how “sheer appearance” can become “appearance appears” in a way that avoids “appearance” as one thing and its “appearing” as another, as the activity of that thing.

Piet: As for Ueda, I had the great fortune to meet him in person, back in 1995, at a conference at IIAS, the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Keihanna, Japan. The institute had just been established, and it had invited me as a representative of my workplace, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which it modeled.

John: What was the topic on that occasion?

Piet: The title of the conference was “The cultural (social-political) background of the reception of the natural sciences in the non-European world”, of interest to me because it combined several of my interests. It was great to meet and talk with Ueda, just to see his bright eyes, and to feel his eagerness to explain and convey Nishida’s real sense of reality. He talked with the intensity of a Zen master.

John: He actually did study Zen, as did his teacher Nishitani Keiji, a student of Nishida, and as Nishida did himself, though he was hesitant to emphasize that as a major source of his worldview.

Piet: I’m not surprised. At the start of my career, I was equally hesitant. I think it is only relatively recently that, as a philosopher, or a physicist for that matter, being deeply involved with a non-Western contemplative form of practice would no longer risk raising eyebrows.

John: How about making that a topic for our next dialogue?

Piet: A great idea! Although today we are focusing on nonduality from more theoretical perspectives, without the empirical practice of meditation, there would be no theory. In that sense, contemplation mirrors natural science.

John: Returning to Ueda, did you get a chance to talk with him about your view of contemplation being close to that of physics?

Piet: Fortunately, yes. One afternoon, in the hallways, I had a brief talk with him, one-on-one. We spoke in German, in which he was more fluent than in English; not surprisingly, since his PhD thesis had been about the medieval German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart. We found an immediate connection there between Eckhart’s form of empiricism and Nishida’s. When the bell rang, I asked him his views about a possible experimental side of philosophy, bridging East and West. While he turned around to go back to the lecture room, he gave a very brief answer: “in daily life.” That, and the way he said it, made a deep impression on me.

John: Absolutely fascinating! That answer is just like Ueda as a Zen teacher. And this “daily life” as a form of experimentation—or perhaps the daily life of the experimenter— is another very pertinent theme. In what sense is experimenting non-dual, I wonder. I’m already thinking of an answer suggested by Nishida, which I can bring up in a somewhat wider context a bit later, connecting action and intuition.

Piet: For now, though, returning to Nishida’s attitude to Phenomenology, how much overlap was there between his views and those of Husserl, the two philosophers I used, in order to give a first glimpse of a possible path towards nonduality?

John: They both take pains to explain in great detail self-awareness as fundamental to all appearing, but in different senses. My close friend and Husserl scholar James G. Hart, in his 1200-page treatise Who One Is, makes a strong case for self-awareness as non-reflective and non-dual in the sense that it does not manifest as an object of reflection. I’ve made a case that Nishida’s self-awareness (jikaku 自覚) is intrinsically “reflexive,” in the sense that it functions as the world reflecting itself: “When the world becomes self-aware, the self becomes self-aware” and vice versa. I think one crucial point of difference with Husserl concerns the relation between self and world. Nishida implicitly poses a challenge to a fundamental axiom of Husserl’s phenomenology, as Robert Sokolowski puts it: if anything is experienced or is manifested, then there must be a prior “dative of manifestation,” a conscious being to whom something (something in the world as well as the world itself) is manifest. So far, this sounds like a duality. That axiom will be a topic we might want to discuss further. The important point right now is the connection you see with nonduality. Nishida’s originating “pure experience” is nondual: there is originally, at the genesis of its development, no division between an experiencing subject and an experienced object.

Piet: But Husserl was still a dualist, as I read him; a “transcendental” dualist perhaps, but his Cartesian Meditations seem to make that stance pretty clear. Interestingly, as Ron Bruzina told me at the 1996 conference in Florida (which we both attended) that Husserl moved closer to a nondualist position toward the end of his life. His assistant Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, which he wrote together with Husserl, came closer to what Fink in other places already called meontic, a Greek word combining me, not, with ontic, being (as in ontology), there ultimately being neither subject nor object. He probably avoided the use that word, knowing that Husserl didn’t approve of it. Did you ever get a chance to discuss Nishida and the Husserl / Fink positions with Ron?

John: I don’t remember talking to Ron then, but over the decades, I’ve been discussing Husserl with Jim Hart, who was also at that conference. Jim’s Who One Is has the subtitle “Meontology of the ‘I.” And just this past year, I had occasion to re-read some of Ron’s translations of Fink and Husserl, to try to understand whether Husserl’s method of reduction generates the “I” or rather presupposes it. This all gets very technical. The main thing, according to Jim, is that Husserl’s philosophy doesn’t reduce to dualism. There are at least two themes in Husserl that imply a sense of nonduality: 1) self-awareness, in the sense I just mentioned, and 2) the inseparability of mind and being. You’re probably familiar with Husserl’s use of two senses of difference, two kinds of parts-of-a-whole, that may play into senses of nonduality. We can distinguish between things that in our experience are inseparable, like extension and color. All together, Husserl’s position is very nuanced, very complex—isn’t it ironic that nonduality can seem so complex?

Ueda Shizuteru often invoked silence. Maybe he was pushing us to recognize how we are already in the process of thinking about pure experience, or sheer appearance, and when thought through, it stops thinking in its tracks and issues into silence!

Piet: Very Zen: “thinking about thinking” as a koan!

John: Another topic for our next dialogue.

Piet: Meanwhile, I hope we don’t lose our readers here, but if so, I presume they will skip over these technicalities. It has been my strategy to make this FEST Log both accessible and interesting for a wide range of readers, from those with initial curiosity about the nature of reality to the most seasoned philosophers . I called my blog a “log,” as in a ship log. The idea is that we moor in various harbors, from which different types of excursions can be made.

John: Well, in that case, we can talk about shifts that Nishida made later in life, not unlike Husserl.

Piet: How would you characterize Nishida’s later trajectory?

John: It’s interesting that Nishida later abandoned talk of “pure experience.” But something of that “idea” remained in—or developed into—other expressions of nonduality, like “seeing without a seer,” Nishida’s increasing attention to self-awareness or jikaku is a shift, too, and he deliberately takes advantage of the nuances of jikaku 自覚, especially 覚, which can refer to “awakening” in Buddhist traditions. So his readers might also think of “self-awakening,” though that, like his “pure experience,” would be nondual. In any case, Nishida’s jikaku broadly includes the way that we as aware selves know things, know world, via our actions that also make us who we are, in “daily life.” Nishida cites scientific experimentation as one example of this kind of action—“action-oriented intuiting” ( 行為的直観) he calls it, which again, reflexively, is also how world “enacts and intuits” itself, so this occurrence ultimately expresses a non-dual whole. The way Nishida integrates world and self (or what is postulated as an experiencing self and an experience world) into a nondual whole is what’s relevant to our project here.

I wonder what you think of J.A. Wheeler’s “participatory universe” or David Bohm’s idea that the universe is an undivided wholeness with an “implicate order,” which enfolds everything in an interacting totality. I was struck by Bohm’s statement in an interview that “the ‘Implicate Order is getting to know itself better’ due to human participation, and the individual is ‘the focus for something beyond mankind’.” Do you find hints of nonduality in their conceptions?

Piet: Oh, very much so. I unfortunately never got to meet David Bohm, and I am not very familiar with the details of his views, though they seem very compatible with what we are discussing here. However, I did get to talk with John Wheeler on occasion. He would have been considered a mystic, had he been born six centuries earlier. I’m sure he would have gotten along very well with somebody like Meister Eckhart, whom we mentioned earlier. They seemed to be aligned in both a rational, intellectual way and an intuitive, visionary way. Meister Eckhart’s via negativa (Latin for “the negative way”) sounds so similar, qua head and heart, to some of John’s favorite phrases. To mention just a few: “Mass without Mass” for gravitationally bound waves without rest mass; “Charge without Charge” for wormholes in spacetime; and most Eckhart-like, “Law without Law”, where physical laws emerged from fluctuations in the Big Bang.

John: Wheeler’s expression sounds very much like some we find in Nishida and Nishitani. Expressions like “standpointless standpoint,” or “the self that is not a self.” Now I’m wondering if these phrases, Wheeler’s too, imply the kind of dynamic nonduality I mentioned earlier. Could “mass without mass” mean a “limit” or nondual state of something that really exists only in motion? And “law without law”: an emergence of diversity from a nondual “state” of something (a quantum vacuum) that then undergoes fluctuations? You can see I’m groping here.

Piet: In nonduality, from what I have gleaned in studying various contemplative traditions, the two most “negative” characteristics are “no self, no time.” That would imply “no static standpoint”, or “no place to stand, no time to stand, and no self to take a stance.” Ultimately, no statics, no dynamics, no center.

What I still remember very clearly was one of his last lectures, John gave in the Physics Department of Princeton University in 2003, when he was 91. After the lectures, followed by the usual questions and answers period, just before the moderator was ready to close the session, John spoke softly, more as if talking to himself, “Could it be that all this is a magic show, not really real, but only existing in our consciousness?”

John: meaning that “consciousness” would be the one, sole reality? A reality that came to know itself?

Piet: Perhaps . . . but that leaves us circling back to what we mean by the concept of “consciousness”, a concept that I think John Wheeler used more as an evocative placeholder, or a direction to search in, in the hope of finding more clarity. Rather than speculating on an ontology, as a philosopher would, he used more evocative expressions, such as “The universe gives birth to consciousness, and consciousness gives meaning to the universe.”

With this log entry wrapping up Part 4 of the FEST Log, FEST now consists of:

Part 1: Initial Explorations

Part 2: Inspiration from the History of Physics

Part 3: Inspiration from the History of Contemplation

Part 4: A Unification of Sciences of Matter and Mind?

Together, these Parts now constitute:

Phase I: an Initial Articulation of a FEST foundation.

Looking ahead, the next stage of FEST will be:

Phase II: Toward a FEST Community,

starting with the introduction of multiple voices:

Part 5: Dialogues on Nonduality

We will start with the core claim of FEST: the FEST working hypothesis, which serves as a cornerstone in the foundation. This hypothesis is supported by five criteria for what a science of mind can be expected to have in common with a science of matter, before we can begin to think about a possible future unification of the two.

Note: in addition to this FEST Log, we now also have a FEST website.

Five criteria to characterize science

Central to the whole FEST program is the challenge of isolating from natural science the “working ingredients” that made it so successful, in order to find similar ingredients for a science of mind. If the choice is too strict, the attempt to construct a real science of mind will fail, collapsing into yet another naïve, reductionistic form of projecting physics onto domains beyond physics. If the choice is too lenient, it will no longer be a science. I expect that the FEST program will, over time, refine its choice of what counts as science.

Two preliminary remarks: first, this discussion is in no way meant to be a value judgment. To the extent that social science disciplines do not fit all of the criteria, it does not mean that I doubt the value of the activities as they are conducted in academia and beyond. This exercise is intended only as a practical way to make the initial leap from the current science of matter—and in particular from physics as the simplest form of natural science—to a science of mind. Second, while I am well aware of the many attempts by philosophers and historians to delineate what science is, most of those attempts, interesting and enriching as they have been in their very important details, have been too specific to take as a starting point.

Therefore, I am biting the bullet here, by listing five core criteria which I have distilled from my own experience as a working physicist. They represent what I see as the essence of science—specifically natural science as it has developed since the 17th century—describing its structure, dynamics, emergence, background, and results:

1) Natural science is a collective form of inquiry to understand the nature of matter by developing increasingly accurate theories constrained by empirical evidence, logical coherence, and maximal simplicity, as the basic structure of scientific explanation.

2) Scientists form a self-governing, open-source community that builds consensus from empirical evidence and requires competing theories to be shown equivalent where they apply, describing the intersubjective dynamics by which science progresses.

3) Science as we practice it today formed in the 17th century as an emergent phenomenon from the meeting of technology and mathematics—of Aristotelian engagement with phenomena and Platonic mathematical abstraction.

4) This emergence was made possible by an extended background of prior developments in mathematical theory and model building, beginning with Greek mathematics and Babylonian astronomical observations.

5) What sets science apart from earlier engineering is its category-changing results—such as walking on the Moon and bringing the fire of the Sun down to Earth—that, before science, belonged to the realm of mythology.

These criteria are offered as working characterizations: a conservative, historically grounded template against which the possibility of a similarly disciplined science of mind can be tested.

The FEST working hypothesis

Most natural scientists implicitly assume that mind or consciousness will eventually be explained as causally reducible to brain processes. FEST does not reject this view outright, but questions why it should be taken as the default starting point.

Every scientific inquiry begins with phenomena. At every moment of our lives, we deal simultaneously with matter and mind. There is no a priori reason to privilege one as more fundamental than the other. Epistemologically, our knowledge of the world resides in our mind; ontologically, our bodies reside in the world (cf. Log Entry #018: A Mind in a World in a Mind in Reality).

From this perspective, FEST adopts a working hypothesis: matter and mind are inseparable aspects of reality, which may ultimately be unified into a single science of reality.

Historically, unification hypotheses have been extraordinarily fruitful in science, combining, for example, celestial and terrestrial motion, electricity and magnetism, space and time. By analogy, developing a science of mind in parallel with natural science may open the way toward a future unification of the two, grounded in empirical tests and covering both domains appropriately.

Let us now take a closer look at how the five criteria listed above could be adapted to play similar roles in a science of mind.

Structure and intersubjective dynamics for a science of mind

The structural characterization of science carries over almost verbatim if “matter” is replaced by “mind”—with one crucial exception: what counts as empirical evidence?

In classical physics, empirical evidence is often equated with laboratory experiments producing objective results. FEST reframes this concept more generally as intersubjective agreement, which is a notion that remains applicable when the mind itself becomes a laboratory.

Physics itself has already stretched the classical notion of empiricism. Quantum theory dissolved clean separations between subject and object, yet remained scientific by refining—rather than abandoning—its evidential standards. This historical flexibility suggests that a potential science of mind can develop its own intersubjective standards.

The dynamics of doing science are even more revealing. Over centuries, natural science developed a self-governing, open and consensus-seeking community. Contemplative traditions, despite millennia of disciplined introspection, never formed such a unified community. Key elements were missing: broad self-governance, free public exchange, cross-tradition consensus, and systematic avoidance of schisms. Where disagreements arose, fragmentation often followed.

This contrast helps explain why a science of mind did not emerge historically, despite abundant contemplative expertise.

Emergence, background, and results for a science of mind

Science of matter emerged at a specific historical moment: the 17th-century meeting of technology and mathematics. There is no analogous origin for a science of mind. Neuroscience is a genuine natural science and has made remarkable progress, but it does not yet amount to a science of mind. Hopes that something like mind or consciousness will somehow “emerge” from brain science remain speculative, especially in light of persistent challenges such as the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

To be empirical, we have to start with phenomena. Where the science of matter began with observations of planetary motion in the heavens, a science of mind can begin by studying patterns of motion in our own minds which thereby can function as a laboratory or a field site.

Using “contemplation” as a neutral umbrella term for extensive and sustained forms of meditation practice, we can identify rough analogues of theory (“view”) and experiment (“practice”). Across cultures, these traditions have accumulated extensive experiential knowledge. Just as science of matter began with background knowledge from the theories and observations of the Greeks and the Babylonians, there is no reason to ignore similar background knowledge from the vast body of contemplative traditions offered by a diversity of cultures.

Within this broad contemplative landscape, the FEST focus is not on doctrinal differences but on reported experiences themselves, asking where intersubjective convergence appears most clearly.

Among this rich diversity, there is a striking pattern: nondual insights that transcend the subject-object split appear unusually convergent across cultures. Documented encounters between contemplatives from different traditions often report recognition of shared core insights. This suggests a possible empirical foothold for a science of mind, a central topic for Part 5.

The results of such a science are impossible to predict. But if it proved even remotely as transformative as the science of matter, the effort would be worthwhile. Moreover, unlike the science of matter, a science of mind would necessarily demand ethical clarity, since mental disturbances directly compromise the functioning of the laboratory itself. This is a vast and central topic, relevant in our day and age more than at any earlier time in history. Many of the Phase II dialogues will focus on such practical applications.

Having articulated the conceptual foundation of Phase I, we can step back for a moment to take a bird’s-eye view of the FEST trajectory from past to present to future.

History of FEST, 2024–2025

In the next entry, #025, we will begin Phase II, “Toward a FEST Community.” During Phase I, the goal was to provide an initial outline of a foundation for a science of mind. This was a conservative approach, minimizing speculative additions not clearly motivated by empirical considerations, as summarized in the five criteria above.

I am glad to have been able to build such a foundation in roughly two years while writing this FEST Log from scratch. This was possible because the questions underlying FEST had occupied me for more than half a century, during which I wrote many drafts and discussed them with friends, often in informal circles.

There is one question to which I do not yet know the answer. I have long suspected that there must have been earlier attempts to develop a science of mind by analogy with the science of matter, but I have not yet encountered one that comes close to the conservative core ideas of FEST. Some approaches lean too heavily on materialist assumptions; others are too closely tied to specific contemplative or spiritual motivations to function as a neutral counterpart to natural science. Many rely on single guiding intuitions—information, computation, holism, or ecological metaphors—but none, so far, seem to stay as close to the defining features of natural science as I understand and adapt them. If such forerunners exist, I would be very interested to learn about them.

Prehistory of FEST, 1970–2023

For roughly the first quarter-century of my explorations, in parallel to my study and research in physics and other fields of natural science, I also studied and practiced various contemplative traditions. Over time I grew encouraged by recognizing more and more similarities between both, from the roles played by empirical experiments and theories in both, to a very similar sense of awe that was shared especially by those who made the greatest breakthroughs in their own respective areas. I deeply sensed possibilities for greater contact, but did not come across any initiatives that seemed to directly connect both areas.

Around the turn of the century, I began to speak more openly about my unification intuition, forming small groups willing to think along with me. My role in leading the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies (PIDS) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton gave me an unusually broad mandate to engage with researchers across many fields, offering potential stepping stones toward connecting matter science and mind science, among many other areas of focus.

After my mandatory retirement in 2023, with fewer administrative responsibilities and even more time for research, I decided to proceed more directly by writing the FEST Log, entry by entry, largely without advance planning. In this way, the four Parts of that Log took shape organically. While writing Part 3, I realized that I had arrived at a core epistemological diagram; in Part 4, this was complemented by a core ontological diagram.

Future of FEST: the next Phase

The second FEST Phase, following the Foundation Phase, will focus on community formation. I have no particular plans, but I foresee a gradual process of encountering individuals and, later, groups with overlapping interests. Over the past two years, I have already begun to meet more people closely aligned with my way of thinking than ever before, likely reflecting both the increasing clarity of the FEST framework and a broadening shift in the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times.

Starting with the next entry, the fifth FEST Part will mark a transition from single-author foundation building to multi-voiced dialogue, bringing in contributors with backgrounds very different from my own. One important consequence of this shift is the possibility of addressing the experimental side of FEST more directly, alongside the theoretical work that led to its epistemology and ontology.

As in natural science, a science of mind ultimately depends on experiments—“practice” in contemplative terms—which alone can validate theories, or “views.” This is an area in which collaboration is essential. As a first indication of this direction, the initial dialogue will connect experientially with Log Entry #005, which introduced the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida.

For starters, let us pick up where we left off at the end of the previous log entry. Below, Fig. 70 combines what we saw in the last two log entries: #021 as a first attempt to sketch out a possible ontology for mind, and #022 a corresponding possible ontology for matter.

Fig. 70 presents a synthesis of the two main results presented in the previous log entry. On the mind side and the matter side, two similar forms of epoché reveal a deeper and at the same time more direct view of the world. On the mind side, it is direct experience on the subject side that presents the world to us. On the matter side, it is another form of direct experience on the object side, namely of the mathematical structure that presents the material world to us.

These two different but complementary worldviews are represented here, for simplicity, with Husserl's advocacy of phenomenology in the early part of the 20th century and Galileo's advocacy of science in the early part of the 17th century. Nishida's foreshadowing of a subsequent move on the mind side to nondualism is indicated by what he termed "pure experience," something we encountered in Log Entry #005 as "sheer appearance"—beyond subject/object duality.

In addition, Fig. 71 shows the epistemological version of the ontology described in Fig. 70. Instead of the material world, a reified concept of the place in which we (think we) live—the label O' is used to describe how that concept emerges in our experience. This kind of analysis is based on the purely epistemological Blackboard Diagram (Fig. 51 in Log Entry #017).

Note that Fig. 70 introduces a new concept: math as the language used, first in (astro)physics, and later to a large extent in all other branches of natural science. This contrasts with Fig. 71, where we use two different epistemological ways of contacting the world of mind and the world of matter. In both cases, we use a form of epoché to reach "beyond" the everyday world (called "the natural attitude" by Husserl) in a set of parallel moves that I compared to an escape *from* Plato's cave. What we escape *to* is the direct experience E as our epistemological way of contacting our mind S, via Husserl's route, and a (scientifically) objectified form of experience OE as our epistemological way of contacting the mathematics underlying the world in natural science, via Galileo's route.

To highlight the distinction between the two figures, we could say that in Fig. 71 we see *how* we know ourselves and the world, through Husserl's and Galileo's epochés, respectively, and in Fig. 70 we see *what* is shown in each case, namely experience as the "stuff" that is the foundation of our mind, and mathematics, as the "stuff" that is the foundation of the material world. Here, the "how" and the "what" correspond to the epistemological and the ontological forms of analysis, respectively.

At this point in our narrative, the summaries above are only crude approximations, meant to give a first sense of what we are dealing with. In due time, more details will be added and analyzed.

Two transcendental turns

In Fig. 72, we return to the base of the ontological analysis, but with a fast-forward of half a century, from Galileo to Newton. It was with Newton that the scientific revolution, peaking in the 17th century, was completed. Newton's discovery of the laws of classical mechanics, expressed in mathematics, would remain the basis of physics for almost two and a half centuries.

Fig. 72 presents a sketch for the completion of the foundation of a scientific analysis of the nature of matter. In contrast, Fig. 70 points to an earlier time when Galileo and others were in the process of formulating what a scientific analysis of the nature of matter could look like. In comparison, Fig. 70 combines the beginning of a parallel foundation for a transcendental study of the nature of mind by Husserl, with the publication of his "Ideas" in 1913, as well as a more mature version in 1936, in "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology."1

Why do I consider Galileo, Newton, and others in the 17th century as having produced a transcendental way of analyzing matter? Moreover, what does "transcendental" even mean? Nowadays the word is often confused with the word "transcendent," which literally means "going beyond." Strictly speaking, one would expect "transcendental" to mean something like "able to transcend," somewhat like "survival" being possible if you are "able to survive." Although the term itself has been used in somewhat different contexts with different meanings, it was the very influential philosopher Immanuel Kant who introduced the term "transcendental" to analyze the conditions of possibility for knowledge itself.

Beyond Galilean and Husserlian epochés

In Part 2 of this FEST Log, we examined in great detail how the epistemology of physics underwent a dramatic change with the advent of quantum mechanics in 1925. This change was as dramatic as the completion of the first scientific theory of motion by Newton.

Such a transformation raises the question of whether quantum physics should be placed on the same vertical level as Husserl's treatment of the transcendental subject, or whether it could be placed on a higher level, more akin to Nishida's attempt to go beyond a subject altogether, pointing towards a Zen-like nonduality.

Let us try and see what may happen when we adopt a working hypothesis (WH for short) that there may be a natural parallel between quantum physics, giving up the absoluteness of objects, and Nishida, giving up the essential role played by subjects. As with any WH, it is not a matter of testing whether a particular WH is right or wrong, but rather what kind of new vistas may appear, and how valuable and coherent those vistas will turn out to be. It is then up to each scientist to decide how much time to spend on various variants of such a WH, and whether to drop such a direction or continue with one or more variants. In the remainder of this log entry, I will share my findings so far, after several decades of probing and refining many aspects of this basic WH.

My first probe of the possibility for quantum physics as the first post-classical theory of physics to occupy a higher level is given in Fig. 73 below. Here I have defined the term post-classical as no longer allowing a description of the world in terms of objects for which all of their properties can be measured with arbitrary precision—something that was still implied in general relativity, starting in 1915, but no longer in quantum physics, starting in 1925.

Quantum Field Theory, QFT for short, is currently the most technically mature and most experimentally well-tested quantum theory. I have represented QFT in Fig. 73 by a smaller circle than the Classical Physics circle, to indicate that it may very well lie at an intermediate stage, above that of Classical Physics, but not yet reaching an entirely new level (where the quantitative notion of levels is of course something to be determined later, if our WH turns out to lead to interesting enough and consistent enough consequences).

Note that in both Figs. 72 and 73 I have added the term "pre-scientific," shown in red, as opposed to "scientific" in Fig. 72 and its two subareas, "Classical Science" and "Quantum Science" in Fig. 73. Applying the label "science" is only valid if there is a clear definition attached to that word. The need for clarity is why I showed my cards right at the start of this FEST Log in Log Entry #001. I did so by giving my definition of science: the experimental confirmation of a theory, validated by intersubjective agreement within a self-governing community of peers that is open to the outside and prioritizes resolving internal differences between incompatible theories.

Let me emphasize again that "pre-X" does not contain any value judgment. On the contrary, in any form of evolution, biological, cultural, technological, and otherwise, any X would not have been possible without a pre-X stage. Whether the early Pythagorean communities, or the later Greek mathematical developments, could be called scientific, is partly a matter of definition (my definitions can be found in Log Entry #001).

The location of QFT on the mind vs. matter axis

For simplicity, Fig. 73 showed QFT as directly above the Classical Physics circle which in turn lies directly above the Matter rectangle.

However, in principle, it might be necessary to position the QFT circle further to the right, as depicted in Fig. 74. After all, any form of quantum physics is more removed from the natural attitude with which we view the everyday world.

Finally, a third possibility would be to shift the QFT circle closer to the left, by placing its circle to the left of the center of Classical Physics, as in Fig. 75. A strong argument for this positioning would be the presence of the measurement problem. Our choice of how to measure a property of a quantum system—called an “observable”—implies that any decision we make using our mind influences the spectrum of possible outcomes when measuring that property. Given that we can no longer pretend to be able to perform a purely material Galilean epoché, it may seem that the first place to look is to follow a left-pointing arrow towards QFT as shown in Fig. 75.

So far, we have followed Newton in the circle of Classical Physics, in which we included Maxwell's electromagnetism as well as Einstein's special and general relativity. For the current state of the art, see Fig. 37 in Log Entry #012. As for future discoveries, we can only speculate—a move indicated by the question marks in Fig. 38, corresponding to the question marks in Fig. 75.

Future physics

We can only speculate about the nature of future developments in theoretical physics. Given the many surprises we have witnessed in the past, most dramatically the appearance of quantum physics on the scene, any attempt to guess as to the nature of the ontology corresponding to a future physics will almost certainly be way off in detail, and likely be even way off in the general outline.

What is more, one thing to be careful about is not to fall into the trap of wishful thinking. Even though the history of natural science reads like a string of triumphs of unification, that does not mean that we can predict the following type of unification, especially a type that might connect matter and mind.

Even so, what we can do is what scientists do, namely, play with different forms of working hypotheses. A good choice for a WH can lead to new ideas, and when we are lucky, that can in turn lead to more detailed working hypotheses that can open new doors to new fields of research.

Fig. 76 presents my WH as to how current physics, as shown in the QFT circle, may evolve through one, or more likely several, steps to make a clear connection with the A circle. In this view, the core of reality, insofar as we can still use language and concepts, will be described by a radical form of nondualism. Yes, this is a form of speculation, necessarily so. However, it is not a form of idle speculation. Unification of seemingly opposed, or at least seemingly unrelated notions, has been the hallmark of any radically new discovery in physics.

Looking back half a century

Ever since my high school years, when I first noticed striking parallels—both in theory and in experiment—between natural science and contemplation, I have felt that exploring these connections would be the most meaningful and engaging pursuit of my life. And the notion of unification seemed so natural.

From water and ice to H2O, to electricity and magnetism to electromagnetism, to space and time into dynamic forms of spacetime in general relativity, to quantum physics combining actuality and virtuality in the very building blocks of the nature of physical reality, unification of mind and matter did not seem unexpected.

I wasn't prepared, though, for the difficulty that I would encounter in my search for critical ways to explore a matter/mind unification WH.

Almost everyone I talked with dismissed my WH on at least four grounds: (1) some did not understand what I meant with "mind" and substituted it with "brain," while wondering what there was left to unify; (2) others asked me to show what a study of mind has given us in the past, in contrast with science as a study of matter; (3) yet others pointed to the large number of psychologists and philosophers who are trying to come up with new ideas from scratch; (4) and then there were those who pointed to religions as already doing what I wanted to do, mostly just by encouraging religious believers to both believe in science as well as in their chosen creed. Finally, there was a very different category: (5) those who were highly enthusiastic about my search for unification of matter and mind, but in a mostly uncritical way, already fully convinced that such a unification would "prove" what they intuitively felt in a vague, New Age kind of way.

Fast-forwarding half a century

I am referring to the situation in 1970, just before the influx of non-Western teachers and books that paved the way for far greater understanding and more informed curiosity. Yet only recently have I begun to run into individuals who either already share my desire to search for matter–mind unification in fully scientific terms, or who, upon hearing about the FEST program, start thinking about the feasibility of such an approach for the first time.

Returning to Fig. 76, my best guess for a next step beyond QFT would be a theory that is based on some form of the Holographic Principle, depicted by an even smaller circle with an H in it, above and left of the QFT circle. In the past, starting with a physically plausible principle has led to great leaps forward.

One example: the Galilean principle, that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames of reference, led to Newtonian mechanics. Another: Einstein's equivalence principle, that accelerated frames of reference give rise to the same phenomena as a frame with a gravitational field, led to the core idea of general relativity, that gravitational fields are expressions of the curvature of spacetime. A quick search on the internet can show many more, e.g. the least action principle in classical mechanics as well as in QFT, the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, Noether’s symmetry theorem in all of modern physics, locality in QFT, gauge invariance in the standard model of particle physics, and so on.

As for other steps, depicted in Fig. 76 with even smaller circles, I have no clue.

Steps toward nondualism

If the WH that unification of matter and mind may be possible turns out to be successful in giving us deeper insight into at least the relationships between matter and mind, it would be natural to expect similar progress from the mind side, as a mirror image to Fig. 76. This best guess is shown in Fig. 77.

Notice the adjustment of Nishida's role in comparison to Fig. 70, which reflects the simplified treatment that I gave in Log Entry #005 to indicate the route Nishida took to go beyond Husserl's analysis. Since Nishida was a philosopher, among the first in Japan trained in the Western tradition, he focused on rational and conceptual ways of dealing with experiences that go beyond duality. Therefore, Fig. 77 is more accurate than Fig. 70, showing Nishida's departure from Husserl, in pointing out his expression 純粋経験 (junsui keiken), pure experience (PE in the little circle above the larger circle E) for experience.

Here too, the steps from Nishida's writing to a more precise description of nonduality are symbolically indicated by a few smaller circles. There is one difference, though: In Fig. 77, the question marks, present in Fig. 76, are missing here. This is because we have many descriptions of how to approach A, in several different traditions, from mystic theologians like Meister Eckhart in Europe in the Middle Ages, to Zen masters in China and Japan, to the still living and blossoming lineages of Tibetan Buddhism, and many others.

As a result, if the WH of matter/mind unification turns out to be viable, A may be terra incognita from the side of physics, but not so from the side of contemplation.

Steps toward unification of mind and matter

Fig. 78 is the first "diamond diagram," connecting the ontological realm radiating out from its base in the Natural Attitude, aka the (Material) World, upwards in two directions to the transcendental realms of the mind based on experience, and of matter based on mathematics, with a possible unification at an even further removed level of pure appearance, A.

With Fig. 79 as a possible future simplification of a version of Fig. 78, we can now distinguish three areas, depicted in red. What counts today as scientific is what natural science, the study of material structures, covers. The birth of modern science, four centuries ago, was made possible because there was a legacy going back to the Greeks and even earlier to the Babylonians. How can we hope to set up a parallel science of mind? What can take the place of the equivalence of Greeks and Babylonians?

As an aside, note that there is a certain similarity between Fig. 79 here and the sequence of figures from Fig. 34 through 38 in Log Entry #012, where we discussed the history of physics during the last 400 years at a much finer level of detail.

The difference between pre- and not-yet

Even though there may be an underlying symmetry between matter and mind, according to the WH with which we are now operating, there is no reason to expect a symmetry between the historical developments on both sides. On the right side of the diagram, it makes sense to talk about an earlier pre-scientific phase covering millennia, and a subsequent scientific period that took only a few centuries to develop our profound and detailed state of knowledge of matter. Each stage was essential; without a pre-scientific phase, there would not have been the condition of possibility for a science to emerge.

On the left side of the diagram, according to our definition of science, philosophers like Husserl and Nishida were not scientists, nor did they consider themselves to be in that way. Also, the many contemplatives who have covered the whole trajectory up and down from the World circle to the Experience circle to the nondual Appearance circle and back typically do not expect to be seen as scientists. A global consensus has yet to be established on the nature of contemplative counterparts to theory and experiment—designated “view” and “practice,” respectively—in contrast to the consensus already achieved within the scientific community.

However, calling them simply pre-scientific would not be fair either. Metaphorically speaking, if mind studies and matter studies were like climbing a mountain from two sides, as our WH invites us to investigate, then there is a huge asymmetry. The simplest way to notice the asymmetry is to compare the "?" sign on the right-hand side with the "!" on the left-hand side. Physics, since the days of Galileo, has been moving forwards in a trek within terra incognita, after having exhausted what could be learned from pre-scientific investigations going back millennia. Hence the "?". In contrast, the FEST invitation to find a scientific version of established contemplative insights moves in a well-trodden, already-known terra cognita, where amazing insights lie waiting to be rediscovered, especially in the area of subject/object nonduality. Hence the "!”.

Even in the physics community, those familiar with contemplative practices often have no idea which kinds of physics might align with the nonduality views and practices on which many contemplative traditions have trained and reached consensus. In contrast, although studies of the mind have emerged across many times and places—each with its own distinctive practices and views of reality—there is strong evidence that they achieved a deep and consistent understanding of the A circle, recognizable across diverse cultures whose contemplatives came close enough to enter it.

Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions are among the oldest human organizations to have survived to the present. Today, with the advent of the internet, the World Wide Web, search engines, and now AI systems that can exploit the internet far more effectively than any earlier form of search, the treasures of major contemplative traditions have become abundantly available—low-hanging fruit ready to be picked.

The fact that most philosophers and psychologists still either start from scratch or limit themselves to studies of the mind no more than a century or two old, strikes me as just as unreasonable as imagining Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton ignoring the writings of the Greeks, themselves based on Babylonian records—as I have already hinted above.

A story of an exclamation mark and a question mark

To let it sink in how different the two sides of the mountain are, here is a short short story, sci-fi style.

Imagine that we discover an old book with an unknown script for an unknown language, which showed strings of symbols, most likely a kind of writing, offset by small heaps of different symbols occurring in small clusters, with occasionally a large part of a page dedicated to a two-dimensional set of lines, reminiscent of a picture or diagram. Nowadays, we would probably use an AI program to determine the meaning of such a book.

Further, imagine that the AI would be able to (more or less) decipher the one-dimensional written text, but would have difficulty making sense of the clusters of symbols. It might suggest that each cluster could represent an abstract set of symbols, forming a kind of mathematical notation. As for the diagrams, those seemed even more challenging to figure out, since without any further explanation those figures could stand for just about anything.

Continuing our little story, imagine that at some point, the AI flashes all its lights in what might suggest a form of excitement. It suddenly discovers a significant correlation between the information in that book and textbooks on quantum field theory and general relativity, as well as concepts with similar complexity that appear to suggest a bridge function between these two theories, something that current physics has yet to achieve.

Granted that, as far as we know, something like that is exceedingly unlikely to ever happen (on the other hand, the chance that some sci-fi writers have already written stories like this is exceedingly likely :-). But if it were to happen, the whole history of physics would have to be rewritten. The most straightforward conclusion is that there had been more than one pre-scientific period, followed by a fast-growing period of scientific development, somewhere, somewhen, somehow, that subsequently had been lost and forgotten.

Schematically, that would create a situation represented by another diamond diagram in the form of Fig. 79, with the same two red rectangles, but with a modification of the "?" in the rectangle labeled "scientific." It would not go so far as to replace it with a "!", but it would require a modification of Fig. 76. Specifically, the sequence from QFT, involving "H" and the next three successively smaller "?" signs, would each need to be replaced with "!" signs, after the AI’s finding was confirmed by new physics theories and experiments.

The encircled small "?" could then perhaps be replaced by a kind of "TOE," a Theory of Everything on the level of elements of fundamental physics. End of story.

A stumbling block

Again, I'm not betting on something like that ever happening in the form of discovering not only an alternative history of physics somewhere, but one more advanced than ours, on the right side of the diamond diagram.

But . . . now that we are beginning to explore the possibility of a science of mind, equally rigorous as our current science of matter, we have to take seriously that something like the above short short story *has* already happened, but on the left side of the diamond diagram.

Reading the current academic literature in philosophy and psychology, it may seem extremely unlikely that anything may already have happened, long ago, to warrant the "!" which I added to the left side of Fig. 79.

The apparent unlikelihood of any significant prior development in the science of mind has been the stumbling block that I have been dealing with throughout most of my life since high school. As I mentioned above, five stumbling blocks prevented me from presenting a convincing story behind my adoption of the WH that sciences of matter and of mind could be unified.

I did not have any illusion that I could convince my colleagues in natural science, without presenting a plausible route towards at least a rudimentary form of a science of mind. Without a plausibility argument, a WH has no meaning, since there is no reason for anyone else to engage in collaborative research.

Waiting for the appearance of the equivalents of a Galileo, a Kepler, or a Newton did not seem very promising. Even less promising was the idea that by myself I could set up any plausible framework for a science of mind, shadowing a century of work by some of the brightest minds of the 17th century for a science of matter.

What's a poor kid to do?

That was my burning question throughout my university years, from 1971 until I completed my PhD in Amsterdam in 1981. After that, I wrote half a dozen book manuscripts, none of which I published because I wanted to set a high bar for myself, comparable to what I used for my scientific publications. Finally, in 2024, I decided that I had reached a sufficiently high bar to start publishing, in the form of the FEST Log that you are reading here.

A challenge to avoid stumbling

What I did was not to lower my bar, but instead to lower my goal to a more modest level.

Rather than trying to be understood, I decided I would try to be understandable.

Like in the transition from classical to post-classical physics, where fixed properties were replaced by the more tentative notion of what you might hope to observe, "observables," I started looking for "understandables."

In short, I didn’t feel the need to be understood, but I did want to be understandable. Trained as a physicist, and later making it my profession, I developed a keen sense of what my colleagues could regard as at least a sensible working hypothesis.

Here are some examples of what was not understandable, certainly not in the seventies and the eighties, and for most of my colleagues not even in the current twenties while I am writing this:

• I want to explore setting up a science of mind ("Where is your laboratory?")

• I want to use my mind to study the mind ("That can only be subjective; science is objective")

• I want to start with the reports of contemplatives ("Of whom? what have they produced beyond superstition?")

You see, it was an uphill battle, given the near-total lack of historical awareness of the role and the depth of contemplative traditions, after the topic itself was nearly wiped out in mainstream academic culture in the Western world, for one thing, resulting in a myopic view of science as only fit for studying matter, and not (the atrophied view of) mind, for another.

Taking up the challenge

Of course, different variations on this theme can be told. For example, it may turn out that a science of mind could be developed far enough to show that each of the major contemplative lineages has reached only a situation like that in Fig. 78. In that case all those lineages have room for growth, and there will be additional "?" both at the left and the right.

The moral of the story is: as long as we are entertaining working hypotheses, we probably should not exclude the possibility that, at least from the mind side, cultures other than our currently visible Western culture may have probed deeper than we have, even though they never reached global agreements of the type natural science has managed to find.

A quick look ahead: descending to lower levels

In the remaining entries in the current Part 4 of this FEST Log, I will put all this in a wider context, together with more detailed analyses of specific points. But to get an idea of where we are going, let me quickly sketch how the diamond diagram in Fig. 79 can grow out to a more natural "double diamond diagram" if we include the possibility of descending from vertical levels, in addition to ascending, what we have done so far.

In Fig. 80, when we start at the natural attitude of just living in the world, instead of ascending to science, we can also descend to the kind of scientism, where people use words and expressions that stem from science, while lacking any deep insight into what they mean. This would be like concluding that relativity theory means that "all is relative" and that the uncertainty relation in quantum physics means that "everything is uncertain.” Note here that we have replaced the labels "Experience" and "Physics" in Fig. 79 with "Phenomenology" and "Science" to make the former more specific and the latter broader.

What would be the counterpart on the mind side? Well, let us invent a corresponding word that is even longer than phenomenology, namely phenomenologism, which can play the same role as scientism. Just as it is rather easy to sound like a scientist, after reading a few popular books, it is also relatively easy to start a new School of philosophy, or even easier to start a new sect in the form of a new religion with a particular style that binds people together in a group without much depth, as depicted in Fig. 81

The double diamond diagram

Finally, what would be the lowest state one could fall to? Fig. 82 presents the answer:: nihilism. Voila: the double diamond diagram.

To illustrate one application of this diagram, therapeutic intervention typically seeks to improve functioning in individuals whose capabilities have declined below the baseline observed in their social context. Starting at the bottom: if someone descends into a state of profound nihilism, one way of climbing out is to follow the arrow to phenomenologism, for example, by joining a strange sect or cult, with the idea that anything is better than nothing. Alternatively, taking an interest in science, even on a very shallow level at first, is also better than nothing.

Subsequently, further therapy may make it possible to drop that sect to climb up further to the natural attitude; or on the other side, to drop the naive ideas that one may have received from an organization that claims to be "scientific" in an attempt to get your money. Dropping that and rising to the level of the natural attitude could be a very good thing.

And then, once one is "back to normal," it is still possible to rise "above normal" by making a serious study of real science and of a real equivalent to a helpful approach to getting more in touch with one's own experience. Furthermore, if one is so lucky as to meet a reliable teacher and/or a reliable community that focuses on nonduality, all the better.

In subsequent entries, I will employ the double diamond diagram frequently. It will play a similar workhorse role for ontology as the blackboard diagram, introduced in Log Entry #017, has done for epistemology, in our quest for constructing a science of mind.

A new type of experimentation

In each of the last four entries, I have suggested various forms of subject/object reversal as a first step toward gaining some sense of what nonduality can feel like, beyond simply giving definitions.

Now I would like to propose another significant step—one you could work with for the rest of your life, if you were so inclined. Unlike the subject/object reversal exercise, which I learned from a book, this one occurred to me recently as a natural extension of the FEST program, in that it offers a direct, personal entry into a mindset conducive to exploring what a science of mind might be.

The recipe is remarkably simple.

Let us start with the notion of a thought experiment. In physics, it is a way to predict the outcome of an actual experiment that would be conducted in a laboratory. The recipe for a thought experiment in physics is straightforward: instead of doing it, you think about it.

More precisely: you think it through very carefully, looking at it from many directions and in many ways, until you are convinced—enough—that you have found the right outcome. At that point, you begin discussing it with colleagues. If they disagree, and you find merit in their objections, you refine your analysis. This process of convergence can take a long time, and it can always be reopened when new ideas emerge that seem worth reconsidering.

A thought experiment in a science of mind

What would be the equivalent of a thought experiment in a science of mind? Taking a hint from natural science, we might define it as an experiment you conduct in your own mind, using your mind as the laboratory.

But this is a bit odd. If you think about what the outcome would be when using your mind to study your mind in a specific way, does that add anything new? Or could it lead you into an endless loop?

Let us be more concrete. We can take any of the experiments I have suggested in the last four entries. For example, the very first one: let a tree look at you. It is easy to turn this into a thought experiment. You can simply imagine a tree in front of you—especially if you are indoors, especially if you are indoors somewhere, where there typically are not many trees. What would it feel like if you let that tree look at you?

Note that here you have a choice. You can imagine a tree and imagine yourself, and then let your imagined self decide to let that tree look at that imagined self. Alternatively, let the imagined tree look at you, as you are here right now.

In fact, you can explore both variants. Moreover, you can apply this to the other variations we have discussed in recent entries—sometimes involving an imagined self, sometimes involving the you that is present here and now.

A hint of what is to come

Earlier, I suggested that the relationship between theory and experiment in natural science might be comparable to the relationship between view and practice in contemplation. Following this analogy, we could translate “thought” (as in rational thinking in physics or mathematics) into “view,” and “experiment” into “practice.”

From this perspective, a “thought experiment” in contemplation might be closer to a form of “view practice.” Indeed, throughout millennia of Christian and Buddhist literature—as well as other traditions—contemplatives have experimented directly with the views inherent in their traditions, putting them to the test not so much through rational analysis as by allowing them to “stew” in increasingly non-conceptual ways.

I intend to experiment with specific "view practice" elements in ways that are minimally driven by tradition-specific elements, starting with the next log entry.

Notice to Substack readers

Frequent readers of the FEST Log may have wondered why my writing disappeared from their radar screens for a few months after a year of weekly to monthly contributions up to February. The main reason my attention turned elsewhere was the gradual appearance of a number of exciting extensions to the written words of the initial Log offerings. Here is a quick list:

• In March, I began giving talks and interviews. Two examples:

  • Talk about Science and Contemplation - The Best of Both Worlds

  • Talk about Unity & Simplicity in Science & Consciousness

• From April onwards, videos of these talks and interviews began to appear.

• In May preparations started for a full-blown FEST website.

• In June, I started organizing FEST round-table workshops.

• Meanwhile, I put out feelers toward starting FEST centers.

Stay tuned! Meanwhile, let us turn to our ongoing adventure in probing the ontology of reality.

Mind as the counterpart of matter

In our last log entry we introduced a new diagram to represent an ontological view of the relationship between matter and mind, complementing the epistemological diagrams developed in Part 3. Both viewpoints have their use.

It was natural to start a quest for a science of mind by insisting upon a fully empirical basis for our theories and experiments. Not surprisingly, we found that the most basic tools for a science of mind and for natural science—our science of matter—are the same: we use our mind to investigate both matter and mind.

However, that by itself does not imply that mind is in some ways more fundamental than matter. Let us be careful here and start with what we know.

The nature of matter

Beginning in 1925, quantum mechanics radically transformed the worldview of physics, replacing classical determinism with probability at its core. In classical mechanics, once an object's properties were observed, they were assumed to remain fixed and known—a view that held true at macroscopic scales but failed at atomic and subatomic levels. Quantum theory introduced a new framework in which objects no longer had fixed properties. And each quantum as such has no fixed properties until we observe that quantum. We can measure those properties, but whenever we make a measurement, it is as if we are participating in a lottery. In a given situation, we can compute the probability for a particular outcome to occur as the result of an observation. These possible outcomes are therefore called "observables," something that can be observed, but it has no specific properties until it has been observed.

This is very different from the classical mechanics picture that physicists assumed to hold true, during the two and a half centuries between Newton's discovery of his laws of motion and the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925. Deep down in the fabric of reality, at subatomic scales, the building blocks of our actual reality have the nature of a virtual reality.

In short, actuality is built up out of potentiality. At the heart of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle tells us that measuring one aspect of reality with greater accuracy necessarily introduces greater uncertainty in our knowledge of other aspects of reality.

In a high-quality virtual reality simulation, we can experience living in a simulated reality with no limits to what can happen. In our actual reality, there seem to be rather strict "laws of nature" that children must learn in order to navigate the world. For example, they quickly come to understand that solid objects cannot be passed through, or that dropped objects always fall down due to gravity. They develop this intuitive sense of the world—this feeling their way around—by combining observation with action: reaching, stumbling, testing, and adjusting. At the very basis of the actual physical structure of our world, though, virtuality and reality meet.

To sum up, threads of partial virtuality weave together the fabric of material reality. Or, to put it another way: partially virtual building blocks come together to form what we experience as the physical world.

While these are all metaphors, the mathematical descriptions in quantum field theory are very precise, and its predictions have been tested with remarkable accuracy.

The place of matter in our ontological diagram

In the previous log entry, we began to draw an ontological diagram by starting from the everyday way of looking at the world, using the term "natural attitude." On the left side, we made room for aspects of the mind side of reality, and on the right side, for aspects of the matter side.

We then started building up the left side by shifting our focus from physical matter to our minds that deal with that matter, through observation and action. We symbolically placed such a focus, or attitude, one step higher in the vertical direction.

Our next step moved beyond the subject/object split, inherent in experience, to sheer appearance.

At that point, we were left with an open question: having enriched the mind side of things, what can we do on the matter side? Should the science of matter stay on the same level as the unquestioned notions of "matter" and "mind"—the original baseline inherent in Husserl's natural attitude? This view remained Husserl's firm conviction throughout his life. Or should the understanding of matter be pushed further down, in the spirit of William Blake, who abhorred what he saw as a reduction of the world to mere mechanism? Or could there even be a third option?

Option 1: Science of matter next to the natural attitude

Let us start with the simplest choice, leaving Matter on the same line as the natural attitude. This will give us Fig. 65, below, to indicate the option of treating science on a par with prescientific knowledge, more advanced in important ways, but not ontologically different. Matter is still the same matter that we encounter in the world in the natural attitude, even though it is epistemologically subservient to mind S in which we experience all our knowledge of matter.

There is still an open question about how to apply an epistemological counterpart to the box "Matter." In the previous log entry we elevated Husserl's philosophical analysis, which he called phenomenology, to a higher level, to distinguish it from the level of the natural attitude. That decision was based on the epistemological difference between S and S'. The question we are now facing is whether we can find an epistemological difference between the "Matter box" directly attached to the natural attitude and a corresponding "Science of matter" circle, similar to the "E = S" circle in Fig. 65.

Option 1, note 1: The hybrid use of a "science filter"

In Log Entry #017, we introduced the notion of a "science filter" applied to physics, and in Log Entry #018, applied to cognitive science. Both figures are reproduced below. Together, they bracket the complexity of natural science. Physics starts at one end, focusing on the simplest non-sentient structures and processes in nature. Cognitive science, in contrast, focuses on cognition, the most complex and largely not yet understood phenomena directly connected to neural and other structures in living organisms.

Note how very different the two figures above are, compared to all other figures in Part 3, up to this point. Within the concentric shells, in the form of squares and circles, that constituted the earlier figures, we never saw a subdivision in terms of dashed lines.

The fully drawn lines indicate a "which contains which" relationship between "objective" and subjective shells, a distinction related to epistemological differences: any rectangular representation of the "objective" world takes place within a wider circular subjective mind S or representations of that mind in the form of S', S", etc. (Here quotation marks around the word objective indicate that that word is a misnomer; it should really be called intersubjective).

Option 1, note 2: Objectification and reification

In contrast, the dashed lines indicate a separation between two different forms of representing an "objective" realm of representations of the world. Within one shell, the outer part indicates the world as we experience it in a prescientific way. Inside the science filter, we encounter the world as seen through the lens of science, where different sciences use different lenses. The ontological status of the outer part is that it is the raw material we use in the natural attitude. The status of the inner part is that of abstractions produced by different disciplines of science for representing the outer part in a different reductionist way, specific to that discipline.

That essential difference was indicated in Log Entry #018, which explained the difference between S', the representation of our consciousness which we use in everyday life, and So, a streamlined scientific model of our consciousness. Similarly, Oo, the objectified version of O', is the area within the dashed-line box in Fig. 52 above.

With this preparation, we can depict option 1 for the science of matter in Fig. 66 below, where the original box labeled "Matter" is replaced by the OE label, short for Objectified Experience, in terms of Oo.

The tendency to objectify the world, and together with the world around us, to objectify the workings of our body and mind, has led to a culture of reification: of making everything into a thing. In the name of rationality, this thing-making has produced a shadow side of the whole trajectory from the Renaissance to humanism and Protestantism to natural science to the Western European Enlightenment.

We are still living in that shadow, even though natural science has started to climb out of that modern form of Plato's cave—already a century ago, when quantum mechanics told the physicists, to their great surprise, that quanta which form the core of matter and energy cannot be made into classical objects. The challenge of the 21st century is to preserve the outstanding achievements of rationality, including freedom of speech and democracy, while rejecting the reifying mindset that has led to the current environmental problems.

Option 2: Science of matter below the natural attitude

This reification led artists and poets like William Blake to fulminate against the cold and stifling nature of the natural science of his days, more than two centuries ago. If we could have asked him, no doubt he would have assigned a lower place for the objectified experience, not only lower than the real experience E, but also significantly lower than the more flattened representation experience in the natural attitude. Metaphorically speaking, I think Blake considered natural science an even lower version of Plato's cave than the ordinary world, as seen in the natural attitude.

In more recent times, the tendency to use "metrics" to quantify the productivity of workers, often does not catch human elements that are difficult to measure. Especially in areas such as health care, where patients keenly feel whether a doctor or nurse is mostly in the business of "measuring" numbers, or whether they actually "measure up" to the situation by genuinely showing interest in the patients themselves.

This tendency to quantization, enabling more and more automatization, especially with modern AI techniques, can associate science with cold and less human decision making. Even though much of that impression is connected with business or politics rather than humane interests, scientific thinking is easy to blame as lowering human standards, because it is seen as their tool. Fig. 67 depicts this more negative view of science as missing human elements like compassion, respect, and responsibility.

Option 3: Science of matter above the natural attitude

Yet, there are strong arguments that can be made for a position of natural science on a higher level, roughly on a par with Husserl's view of consciousness in his school of philosophy, which he called phenomenology.

In its simplest form the argument can be: starting with the natural attitude, if we want to focus on the mind, let us focus on the fact that every appearance of matter, empirically speaking, occurs within our mind. That way, we hide the role of matter, but view all of our experience in a way akin to what we experience in a dream or virtual reality environment. This emphasis on the primacy of mind over matter breaks the symmetry, since the role of the mind is elevated with respect to the role of matter.

Similarly, starting with the natural attitude, if we want to focus on matter, let us hide the role of the subject dealing with matter, like a photographer in the late nineteenth century, hiding under a black cape. This focus on matter, including our physical body, allows us to hide our mind "behind" our brain, believed by many to be the seat of consciousness. Viewing the mind as nothing more than an emergent property of matter, with matter being more "real", or at least more basic by providing the substratum needed for there to be a mind, can lead to putting not the mind, but rather matter on a pedestal, so to speak.

Combining both of these viewpoints, we are led to Fig. 68. In contrast to Fig. 67, the objectification inherent in the switch from O' to Oo is now seen as a good thing, a form of enrichment, by coming closer to the ultimate ground of reality, seen as its material substratum. Where in Fig. 67, the emphasis was on O' being more real in that objectification in Oo leaves something out and "flattens" the world of raw experience, in Fig. 68 the "rawness" of more immediate experience E, distilled from S', is seen as a distraction, leaving So as a "tamed" reified version of our mind.

Now that we have settled on the symmetric solution as given in our ontological diagram Fig. 68, at least as a working hypothesis, let us see what this symmetry will look like in the equivalent epistemological blackboard diagram we discussed in detail in Log Entry #018.

Option 3, note 1: Background

Here is a simple way of "reading" this diagram, without going through the many sections and figures of entry #018, by summarizing their key points:

1) A—the realm of nonduality—is the common ground for any of the major contemplative traditions that I have studied so far, in terms of both their theories (views) and their experiments (practice), as far as I can tell. That common ground, or with a better metaphor, that common ground water that contemplatives find when exploring the depth of the mind, is a natural place to start from, as a legacy of prescientific studies of the mind.

2) Notwithstanding the many differences in cultural concepts, images, and metaphors used, the shared agreement seems to be that ultimately there is only A, nonduality, and anything else is the product of a limited way of looking at A, in one dualistic way or another.

3) This means that each smaller area in the blackboard diagram retains the characteristics of whatever larger area it is part of. As an example: our representation of our own mind S' is part of what we think we find in the world O', which in turn is given as a representation within our mind S, the collection of all of our experiences, while S itself is given as a restriction of A, within A.

Option 3, note 2: From Nishida to Husserl to Galileo

Starting our journey with the outer nondualistic realm A, we first encounter S, our own mind. Going deeper into our mind, we encounter our empirical contact with the world, O', inside S, inside A. Our starting point A is closer to Nishida, whom we met in eLog Entry #005, and who started his career while pointing beyond the duality of experience. From there moving into S, we meet Husserl in a realm of pure experience, including a remaining subject-object relationship, as we saw in Log Entry #004. Next, entering O', we meet Galileo, who deemphasized the role of the subject, while seeing the world of material objects as existing in a realm of mathematics, pure Platonic forms. He understood matter as ultimately "thoughts of God" in connection with how God had created the world.

Later in his life, around the age of 60, Galileo published his book "Il Saggiatore" (The Assayer; 1623), where he claimed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Using the word "philosophy" for what we now call natural science, his most famous passage (translated from the original Italian) is:

"Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe—but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. This book is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth."

Option 3, note 3: The role of experiments

The Copernican revolution consisted in taking the Ptolemaic model of the heavens, and assigning the center of the orbits of the planets to the Sun, rather than to the Earth. This was a crucial theoretical step, paving the way for Galileo to improve experimentally upon the Aristotelian view of the nature of material reality. Important as Copernicus has been, you could say that he took the chessboard of Ptolemy and switched the position of two pieces on that board, those of the Sun and the Earth, without changing the nature of the chessboard, which was based on an Aristotelian world view. It was Galileo who, almost a century later, changed the board itself, locally and globally.

Locally, down here on Earth, Galileo introduced some extremely simple experiments in order to keep theory formation honest, part of the basis of the scientific methodology. He did so in the form of thought experiments, imagining what would happen when dropping balls of different weights from the tower of Pisa, and actual experiments, by rolling balls down inclined planes, in order to establish mathematical laws of motion, describing spatial position as a function of time.

Globally, after improving the first design for a telescope, he was the first to use it systematically for astronomical studies of the heavens, during which he observed that Jupiter had four moons, each moving around Jupiter in ways similar to how our Moon moves around the Earth. This similarity between the roles of the Earth and Jupiter seriously undermined the starting point of the Ptolemaic model, namely that everything in the sky revolved around the Earth.

It is interesting to note that Galileo used three of the four forms of experimentation I introduced in the first Log Entry #001, in the second section "What Is Science?" There I listed field observations, Lab experiments, thought experiments, and computer experiments. Surely Galileo would have used the last form too, had it been available to him.

Option 3, note 4: The mind studying the mind

A major challenge for establishing a science of mind is to come up with similarly simple experiments as those performed by Galileo, but aimed at studying the mind rather than matter. As an initial guess, I introduced two experiments in log entries #003 through #005. The first one, labeled experiment 1 in log entries #003 and #004, formed a simple invitation to move from realm O' in the blackboard diagram to realm S, the realm studied by Husserl. The second one, experiment 2 in Log Entry #005, continued with an invitation to move from S to A, the realm to which Nishida had pointed, beyond the subject/object split.

Given that those early entries, still within Part 1, had not yet introduced the NYT diagram or the blackboard diagram, both of which would appear in Part 3 of the current FEST Log, the description of those initial experiments had to remain quite sketchy. And only now, in Part 4, are we ready to compare Galileo's initial experiments and my first attempts to explore parallel experiments in a science of mind.

At this point an interesting question comes up. Were the two experiments that I introduced in those early entries "real" experiments or thought experiments? On the one hand, both were done in the mind, as is the case with thought experiments in natural science. On the other hand, what Nishida and Husserl did went way above what we can call (rational) thoughts. In natural science thought experiments are ways to understand more about aspects of material reality. In contrast, in a science of mind, experiments like those in log entries #003 to #004 are probing the mind itself, not only the thinking part of our mind, but the very awareness of what we ourselves are as part of the whole of reality.

We will come back to this crucial distinction later on. For now though, the main question of the current chain of arguments is whether option 3 is the best choice for placing natural science in our ontological diagram, and in particular how strong argument 2 is for validating option 3.

Option 3, note 5: How to escape from Plato's Cave

Husserl's treatment of our mind S was on a higher level than that of the natural attitude because his notion of a subject in his transcendental phenomenology was based on the transcendental structures of consciousness that make experience possible in the first place.

To fully unpack the above sentence would take too long here. In essence, it means that within the natural attitude, there is no room in principle to make sense of experience, given that the notion of experience itself is already assumed to exist by fiat, as an axiom or dogma. It is related to the hard problem of consciousness, which we encountered in Log Entry #014, in the next to last section.

One way of looking at what Husserl did, is to see it as an attempt to escape from Plato's Cave. Plato used a cave as an allegory for the human condition, namely, how people often mistake superficial impressions for reality, like prisoners seeing only shadows on a wall. In my opinion, what Galileo did, three centuries before Husserl, in his treatment of material objects, was as much transcendental as what Husserl did in his treatment of the role of the subject. I will come back to this claim in a later log entry.

Option 3, note 6: Two escape routes from Plato's Cave

Galileo's greatest contribution was to make a successful synthesis between Plato's and Aristotle's accomplishments. Starting with a scrutiny of Aristotle's mechanics, using his own experimental methods, he discovered serious flaws in Aristotle's theory of motion. To correct these flaws, he proposed new and more accurate mathematical models. These models, based as they were on idealized notions of geometry, carried the flavor of a Platonic form of philosophy, characterized by searching for ideal forms underlying the seemingly imperfect world we live in.

It was one of history's deepest ironies that Aristotle did not fully recognize the depth of insight of his teacher Plato, and thereby rejected the whole notion of ideal forms, blocking further progress in the study of motion for a period of two millennia. I am stating this partly tongue in cheek – after all Plato totally overlooked the experimental side of science, which Aristotle at least took quite seriously. It was only when Galileo combined the simplicity of Platonic, in the form of mathematical, reasoning with Aristotle's preference for experimentation, that the schism between the two great Greek philosophers could finally be overcome. History is often more interesting than fiction1.

I see a clear parallel between Husserl, applying his epoché to view material objects as (given in) experience, and Galileo viewing the reality of material objects in terms of their "primary qualities"—those that could be expressed in mathematical terms, for him the natural and only authentic language of nature, unlike subjective impressions, called "secondary qualities," like taste and color.

This kind of correspondence is expressed symbolically in Fig. 69, after renaming the "science filter" in Fig. 68 "Galileo's epoché." Where Husserl's epoché implies a suspension of judgment about the reality of the material world, by emphasizing the role of the subject, Galileo's epoché implies a suspension of judgment about the role of the human subject, by focusing on the mathematical constitution of objects as a more universal form of reality—in the language of his time, as a kind of divine language.

This is not the place to go much deeper in discussing differences and similarities between different Western European philosophers of the last few hundred years. Far more interesting would be to throw our net wider, and include philosophers of the last few thousand years in Europe and Asia, wherever written texts can be found, including institutions like Nalanda University in India, that were thriving for a thousand years, and were home to many creative philosophers.

My much more modest aim in this Part 4 of the FEST Log is to sketch the merest outline of an ontological diagram as a counterpart to the epistemological diagram in Fig. 51. Having arrived at this point, we can now compare Fig. 63 above with Fig. 69. There clearly is a missing link, literally so, between the Appearance circle in Fig. 63 and the adjacent OE circle, for objectified experience in natural science, in Fig. 69. Whether such a link is really missing or not, will be the main topic of our next log entry, #023.

The next step in experimentation

Towards the end of each of the last three entries, we have started to explore a more experimental approach in our attempts to build up a science of mind. After extended theoretical discussions concerning the Blackboard Diagram in Fig. 51, from Log Entry #019 onwards, we have been moving toward experimental verification of constructs such as A, a nondualistic realm of presence. A was posited as our best explanatory handle so far on the nature of reality, as described by mystics and contemplatives of all ages and places for which written sources exist.

The notion of nondualism posits the non-existence of subjects and objects, except as convenient grammatical constructs to be used in daily life. At face value, this flies in the face of what all of us have learned around age 1 in terms of the differences between self and others. How can we even picture such a realm, and most importantly, what would it feel like to live in such a realm where the knower and the known are not fundamentally different?

The very first step toward getting an experimental taste of nonduality was outlined in Log Entry #019, where we invited the readers of this Log to look at a tree for a while and then to reverse the direction by letting the tree look at the reader, simple as that, as a kind of thought experiment. With no further instructions, just letting a tree look at yourself, what happens? The result for most people has been that something more than reasoning occurred, more like an experience of a dimension of reality that we have, by and large, learned to ignore while we were infants.

Beyond concepts or ideas, clear feelings, often even physical feelings, became awakened, signs that could point to further exploration of forms of non-conceptual presence in the world that we all seem to share. We explored variations in Log Entry #020, in which we let the world around us look at us. Moreover, in Log Entry #021, we probed a modality different from seeing by letting sounds hear us.

Subject/Object reversal in time

All of these s/o reversal experiments took place in the space around us, but they all shared the same time with the person performing each experiment. Let us now try something more exotic.

Find a quiet place to sit, indoors or outdoors, and think about what you might be doing tomorrow, at around the same time as it is now for you. Picture yourself at work, or taking a walk, or taking a nap, whatever activity might be natural for you at that time. Again, spend a minute or more exploring what it feels like to watch a future version of yourself engaged in a natural activity 24 hours from now.

Then reverse the setup: let your future self remember who you are now, the one that has just been busy anticipating that future self. For extra fun, imagine your future self remembering how you, in the present, were imagining that future self you are remembering you. Of course, this meta loop isn’t necessary but it’s an amusing exploration.

You can do this a few times, with shorter or longer periods of time. You can imagine the future you, a few hours ahead, sitting down for a meal or going to bed, in each case remembering the current you. You can then register what it felt like, being remembered, being watched in some way, by various future versions of you.

You can even let a future version of yourself, just a minute ahead, remember the initial you, while you linger in the present, waiting to catch up. You have so many degrees of freedom! These kinds of experiments can easily unfold into countless variations.

Remember your past self anticipating your present self

In another session, you might reverse the direction of time between the present you and the imagined self. Instead of focusing on a future self, you can begin by remembering a past self. For example, you can recall who you were, and where you were, about 24 hours ago.

You might object that the real you of the past did not anticipate the current you. That is, of course, quite likely, and it makes the remembering version of this experiment more tricky than the anticipating version that we started with. However, given that all of these variations are built on imagining things, you might as well imagine that yesterday you were wondering about what you would be doing at the same time, around now.

And if you are cosmically inclined, you can even fan out your memory over multiple universes, to find one in which you actually were anticipating yourself now. The main point in all this is not just to reason in an intellectual, rational way, but to also try to really feel what it is like to *do* these experiments, physically and emotionally, in short, in your whole embodiment.

A teaser for the next installment

Having gotten our toes wet during these four entries, we will make a big jump in the next log entry toward embarking on a real quest toward nonduality. Again, stay tuned!

So far, we have seen that all that we can possibly know about the objective world O is available to us in a reconstruction O' inside our mind S. And in turn, if we talk about our mind, assuming that it is connected with our brain, we are dealing with a reconstruction S' of our mind. We then tend to assign S' to a place in or near our body, that is, within O'. The result has been the following "Russian doll" type nesting: S' within O' within S. In the mathematical notation of inclusions of sets within other sets, this reads S'⊂O'⊂S.

It was tempting to put all of that within the objective material world O, as O⊃S⊃O'⊃S'. However, early on in Log Entry #016, in Fig. 49, we concluded that O is a theoretical construct, strictly speaking the result of the application of an unfounded working hypothesis since, by definition, it is not empirically accessible. In contrast, S, our mind, is empirically accessible since we have defined it as the sum total of all our experiences. Therefore, O' and S', both parts of S, are also empirically accessible.

Given that every moment in our life is drenched in material and mental elements, or more than that, connected like the warp and the weft of a tapestry, there is no a priori reason to conclude that one of them underlies the other. If scientists conclude that matter underlies mind without mentioning it as a working hypothesis, then they are introducing a dogma, and while doing so, they are stepping outside the business of doing science, as I argued at the very start of this FEST Log, in Log Entry #000.

In Log Entry #017, I introduced an alternative working hypothesis, replacing O with A, a realm of nondual appearance. This was introduced as early as Log Entry #003 but worked out in more detail in log entries #018 and #019, the last log entry of Part 3. The conclusion of Part 3 was to provide a nesting that runs from outside to inside in a one-dimensional succession as A ⊃ S ⊃ O' ⊃ S'⊃ O" ⊃ S" ⊃ . . . This nesting was sketched in some detail in Fig. 51, reproduced below.

Materialism, idealism, and nondualism

So far, we have followed a strictly scientific way of analyzing our world. Specifically, we have allowed only the use of empirical input for our observations and experiments, in order to keep our theory honest. The immediate conclusion has been that we cannot rely on our intuition that we live in a material world. At first, this conclusion does not seem to make sense, because it does not correspond to the way we are raised in the modern world.

We all learn to view objects around us as placed outside of us, that is, outside our bodies, in the area O of Fig. 49. In other words, we have all been trained from a young age to adopt an attitude as if what we find in O' is actually "out there", in a fictitious O. We may go through a lifetime without ever considering O'; even though it becomes easy to grasp, and crystal clear, once we reflect on it. The philosopher Husserl, whom we met in Log Entry #004, introduced the word "natural attitude" for the habit we have developed to assume we, with both our body and our mind, are part of O, the Universe we assume that we live in. Indeed, this attitude feels natural, but only because we have been exposed to this doctrine from a very young age.

To sum up, this means that in our analysis, we are confronted with two views of material objects in a material world. Throughout Part 3, we argued that O' is where we empirically experience our world, namely within our mind. In philosophical terms, this conclusion may seem to point to a form of idealism. However, it would indeed be idealism if we stopped with fig. 49, after crossing out O and leaving S as the outermost realm. In this scenario, S would stretch beyond the sheet of paper if it were printed, rather than including O.

However, in Fig. 51 in Log Entry #017 we argued that there is a next layer or realm, A, of nondual cognition, one that goes beyond the realism of positing O and also above the idealism of postulating that S is the be-all and end-all of reality. Both are ultimately dogmas, putting an end to empirical investigation. In contrast, A is the result of a natural extension of empiricism, as we argued in the previous log entry #020—just as quantum mechanics is the natural extension of classical mechanics, while accommodating seemingly very non-classical elements.

As a result, realism, more accurately materialism, only recognizes the realm within the area O' as real, as forming the outside, the sheet of paper as such.

A wider view is offered by idealism, which also recognizes the realm within the area S as real.

A yet wider view is offered by nondualism, which only recognizes the realm A as real, although using the word "real" is a stretch. The notion "real" is a concept, and nondualism reaches beyond ordinary concepts, as illustrated in the previous log entry, #020, by the quote concerning the Sufi mystic Hamadani.

A burning question

This leaves us with a burning question: Is there a truly convincing way to bridge the everyday way of viewing the world we feel we live in with the scientific empirical picture that Part 3 of our FEST Log has painted—the seemingly "outer" material world O' as being given inside our mind S, and both of those arising as limited perspectives on an even wider nondual reality?

In other words: How can we reconcile—can we really reconcile—Husserl's "natural attitude" with the perspective of contemplatives across different ages, places and cultures, who testified about a reality more fundamental than what the subject-object split of the natural attitude can offer us?

Another way to formulate the burning question above is to ask: Can we construct a "two-truths" picture of reality, a conventional or relative truth that is useful for many practical purposes, while realizing that there is a deeper truth to which the relative truth is only an approximation?

This "two-truths" notion is often associated with descriptions of the nature of reality in Buddhism, explaining how our everyday world seems to be far from perfect, while the Buddhist belief (or working hypothesis, depending on the individual) describes reality as intrinsically perfect. This attitude, however, is not restricted to Buddhism. As we saw in Izutsu's quote about Hamadani, not only does Sufism talk about a similar distinction, but just about all mystics and contemplatives adhere to comparable views.

Following that discussion, we saw that the seeming contradiction between classical mechanics, so well tested in conventional every-day circumstances, and quantum mechanics, highly accurate everywhere, also where classical mechanics fails, can be reconciled as a kind of two-truths theory.

Two two-truths theories

Under circumstances where quantum effects are smaller than the size of the error bars of measurements that are taken, classical mechanics by and large gives "true" (enough) descriptions of what is going on, while under other circumstances quantum mechanics is really necessary to describe what is being measured.

What is more, quanta have a perfection very unlike classical objects. Matt Strassler, whose marvellous book "Waves in an Impossible Sea" I have already quoted in Log Entry #010, describes the "perfection" of electrons and other elementary particles as follows:

"This rigidity of form is why electrons and quarks and gluons, unlike rocks and stars and human beings, never get old. Age involves wear and tear, loss of integrity, damage. You can’t damage an electron; it doesn’t accumulate scuffs and scars from the buffeting that it may have experienced throughout its life of perhaps billions of years. It can’t. It remains, always, a single quantum of the electron field, period."

Isn't it fascinating? For two thousand years, Aristotle has taught us that in the realm below the Moon all is imperfect and decays, but that in the realm above the Moon everything moves in eternal harmony, without ever running out of steam. Then, for the next three centuries, from 1610, when Galileo discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter, till 1925, when quantum mechanics was discovered, all perfection was banned from our world view. But then it was reintroduced in the way the quote above described, but with a twist: in the microcosmos, rather than the macrocosmos! Who knows what will be discovered, in successive steps of deeper insight, in the remainder of this century, or later.

With this background in the sciences of mind as well as of matter, we can return to our original question, and the possibility that a "two-truths" view might help us. In Part 1 of our FEST log we had a brief encounter with experiments that showed us a way to move from seeing the world as matter, to seeing it as given in experience, to seeing it as appearing in "sheer appearance" beyond the subject-object split. In Part 2 we have discussed in some detail the two-truths aspects of physics forced upon us through quantum mechanics during the last hundred years. In Part 3, we have made contact with the two-truths aspects of contemplation. We are now ready to use the current Part 4 to address the burning question mentioned above, which will emerge in the interplay between the two philosophical concepts of epistemology and ontology.

Starting with the natural attitude in daily life

Before thinking about science or philosophy, the most natural way for us to look at the world is to recognize its material and mental aspects. If we pick up a stone, we consider the stone as material. If we recall that yesterday we picked up a stone, we can still consider yesterday's stone as material, but we can also realize that our memory of yesterday is a current mental event, the content of which is a memory of a material stone.

In philosophical terms, if we perform an ontological analysis, an analysis of what something is, we can call a stone material and a memory mental. In contrast, an epistemological analysis tells you how we can know something to be true, in our case by relying on empirical evidence.

In a simple abstract picture, Fig. 57 indicates how our normal way of looking at the world recognizes the two elements of mind and matter as making up our reality.

In contrast to the ontological Fig. 57, so far in Part 3 we have only dealt with epistemological figures, from Fig. 49 in Log Entry #016 onwards to Fig. 56 in Log Entry #018. We now take a new starting point. We stop asking "what contains what"; does the world contain the mind or does the mind contain the world, and which mind and which world in what way, as we have done at length in Part 3. Instead, we depart from our exercise in epistemology by returning to making simple statements like "the world contains matter and mind" in an uncritical everyday way, in Fig. 57.

As a matter of bookkeeping, we should refer to Part 3. In Fig. 58 we note that the world can be seen as given by the representation O', which is embedded in our mind, S, as indicated in Fig. 59.

Finally Fig. 60 reminds us that the naive ontology of the world that we seem to live in, given in Fig. 57, is the output of a particular attitude, when analyzed epistemologically—namely the natural attitude.

Climbing out of Plato's cave: Experiment 1

Our next task is to connect the two approaches. Can we translate the nesting scheme we used in Part 3 into a corresponding scheme in our new approach, now in Part 4? This will be our first cross-classification challenge, in our budding science of mind exploration.

Given that we are modeling a science of mind on the same principles as natural science, our science of matter, let us start with the first criterion that we listed back in Log Entry #001: "Experiments always win out over theories."

So, let us look at the very first experiment that we introduced in Part 1, in Log Entry #003. It was "Experiment 1): the nature of matter as experience." The instruction started with: "You may see a stone. Notice how you normally view it as a chunk of matter. Now try to see the stone as an experience."

In the following Log Entry, #004, we connected this with Husserl's epistemological method which he called the epoché. It was only in Figs. 49 above, and the far more elaborate Fig. 51 in Log Entry #017, that we made a theoretical interpretation of what happened while conducting Experiment 1. It meant moving from the realm O' to the wider realm S, containing our world O', a move akin to climbing out of Plato's cave to realize our mind's foundational role.

A balance between mind experiments and matter experiments

While laying the foundations for a science of mind, early on in our FEST Log, we naturally introduced an experiment that moves our attention from a stone as an object to the subject experiencing the presence of a stone. Given that we started with a kind of "equal rights" exercise, in providing the World equally with material and mental elements in Fig. 57, it would be natural to introduce additional experiments that move in the opposite direction. That would mean deemphasizing the presence of a subject and focusing more on the presence of an object instead. But that is exactly what natural science has been doing already from its very beginnings in the 17th century!

In Part 1 we introduced Experiment 1, already mentioned above, and Experiment 2, discussed further below. Both of these experiments were mind-based. The first one invited experimenters to shift their focus from material objects to the way in which those objects are empirically viewed in our mind. The second one invited them to go even further, in an extended version of the notion "empirical," related to "sheer appearance".

In the current log entry, we will try to fit those two mind-based experiments from Part 1 into the framework that starts with Fig. 57. In the next log entry, we will restore the balance and focus on experiments in natural science, which all seem to be matter-based, according to the lore. Of course there is an inconsistency involved in applying that label, without addressing how we do the "heavy lifting" of carrying the outcomes of those experiments into human minds, enabling us to write natural science reports. Ignoring that inconsistency, we will explore whether we can find a place for matter-based experiments as well as for the two mind-based Experiments 1 and 2.

As a sneak preview, one novelty is that we will soon be able to escape the asymmetry between a science of mind and our established science of matter. In Fig. 50, in Log Entry #017, the use of a science filter disrupted the natural nesting that we started to build up between alternating S and O symbols with increasing numbers of accents per symbol. Clearly, the sciences of mind and matter were not treated equally, with filters appearing for matter and not for mind.

The symmetry between matter and mind, which was broken in the epistemological series of diagrams in Part 3, will be restored in the current Part 4, starting in the next log entry. We will do that using the built-in left-right symmetry between matter and mind in Fig. 57, which is very different from the built-in asymmetry in the use of nesting, starting in Fig. 49 in Log Entry #017. End of preview, for now!

A translation exercise

Returning to Fig. 57, how are the three elements "World," "Mind," and "Matter" related to the earlier epistemological diagrams? Let us inspect them one at a time, starting with "World".

What is labeled "World" functions as a container for elements of the type "Mind" and elements of the type "Matter." This implies that mental events are nested within the larger realm labeled as World. There is only one way to translate "World" from the ontological Fig. 57 to an earlier epistemological figure. This is what Figs. 58 and 59 showed: "World" corresponds to O', not as something stand-alone but as a form of knowledge arising in the mind S.

Moving on to the box with the label "Matter" is straightforward: whatever we call material objects indeed can be found in O', in Fig. 49.

The only remaining question is how to handle the box labeled Mind. Since the elements from that box are located in "World," considered as O', the only representation we have available for Mind is S'. Our actual mind, encompassing the totality of all experiences, is not available in O'; rather O' is available in S. Therefore, we must conclude that we have no choice but to use the following translations from Fig. 57 to Fig. 49:

"World" -> O'

"Matter" -> O'

"Mind" -> S'

This means that our inclusion of S inside the World in Fig. 59 was premature. Yes, epistemologically S ⊃ O', but since epistemologically S ⊃ O' ⊃ S', it is S' that we are dealing with in O', the part of reality that can be experienced in the natural attitude.

This raises the question of what to do with our actual mind, S, since it just doesn't fit into the one-dimensional diagrams from Fig. 57 through Fig. 60.

A two-dimensional diagram: guidance from Experiment 1

Note that no translation is ever perfect. Since we started out with "World" as containing material as well as mental elements, it may seem odd to classify our "World" as material. Actually, that is not so much our problem. Rather, it is the problem of modern society as a whole which tends to consider matter as the basis for mind, as a kind of dogma, as already mentioned in the first section above.

We might guess that the only way to escape from that dogma is to jump out of it to a higher level in our new diagram, corresponding to what was shown as an outer level in the epistemological diagrams. This idea may sound whimsical, but let us not speculate. Instead, let us find guidance from Experiment 1, in constructing an ontological theory, following the methodology of science. This will lead us to a logical conclusion when we try to embed Experiment 1 into Fig. 57.

The instruction for Experiment 1 was to "try to see the stone as an experience", instead of a material object. This translates as: use your mind, as you find it in the realm S, rather than what you find in the realm S'. Since no room is left for anything like S horizontally, we may as well place it vertically above the "Mind, World, Matter" line. Moreover, since the "Mind" box, corresponding to S', is at the left, the natural place for experience is straight above "Mind" in Fig. 61.

In that figure we have shifted our perspective from the natural attitude, where a material object is just a piece of matter, to a perspective where we "see" that object as given in experience. As a result, we have transcended the limitations of the natural attitude, to explore a second dimension, above the confines of a materialistic world view.

But let us be careful, taking one step at a time. Experiment 1 showed that we can view a material object as given empirically as the experience of what we call a material object. Fig. 61 makes that explicit, as a move from living in the Natural Attitude as a habit to living in a "world of experience", a new way to view the world that in turn with some practice can become a new habit. This was discussed in Log Entry #004, in the section "Edmund Husserl."

In Fig. 62, below, Experience E is equated with S, a label for all experiences in a mind S, as E = S. And in turn, the World W is equated with the material world O'. This follows our earlier Fig. 49, the NYT diagram. Note that in the more detailed Fig. 51, the blackboard diagram, the realm S is also labeled "pure experience", and could have been labeled E as well in the alternative notation that we have introduced here. The "pure" in "pure experience" there indicates that it is not a representation of experience, which S' is, but the real deal, the mind S itself.

From experience to appearance: guidance from Experiment 2

Encouraged by the usefulness of Experiment 1 in extending the baseline of the ontological Fig. 57, let us see what we can do with the second experiment, which appeared back in Log Entry #005, associated with Nishida: "Experiment 2): the nature of experience as appearance." The instruction started with: "Even when you sit quietly, and your mind is relatively calm, every moment something appears: a distant sound, a fleeting thought, your breathing. Gently be aware of all those appearances appearing."

Immediately following, yet another experiment was introduced, as a two-step combination of Experiments 1 and 2, labeled as "Experiment 1+2: matter as experience as appearance." In both cases the endpoint was pure appearance, corresponding to what would much later be introduced as A in the blackboard diagram, Fig. 51, where it was labeled as "Nondualistic pure appearance."

Where should we put "Appearance" with respect to what we already built up in Fig. 61? Vertically, it probably should move upwards, given that we have made one more step outwards in the blackboard diagram. This suggests that we would expect to move up two steps from the baseline of the natural attitude. But what about the horizontal dimension? Should it move one more step to the left from "Experience" in Fig. 61 or "E=S" in Fig. 62, since it leaves both experience and subjective mind behind? Or would it be simpler to draw the line to A just straight upwards?

At this stage it is not yet fully clear what would provide the best fit, but in the next couple entries, after we add a few more nodes to the figure, it will become clear that the most natural position is the one indicated in Figs. 63 and 64, below. For now, the following motivation already gives us a strong hint. Since A is nondual, beyond subject-object duality, it should neither be placed above "Mind," nor above "Matter". The most logical place is in the middle, above "World."

The next step in theory

So far we have followed philosophy, one step up and above Husserl's natural attitude, leading to what he described as the result of his epoché. We have also followed Nishida's hybrid approach in which he was trying to forge new philosophical approaches, with inspiration from Zen Buddhism, an example of a nondualistic type of contemplative tradition in our terminology.

In our next log entry, we will pose the question: now that we have embellished the mind side of things with two arrows associated with two philosophers, what can we do on the matter side of things? Should the science of matter stay on the same level as the original baseline of Fig. 57, as Husserl strongly argued for, with complete conviction? Or should it be pushed even further down than the natural attitude, given the tendency of sometimes extreme reductionism expressed by many scientists, past and present? William Blake and Wolfgang von Goethe would agree with that move downward, in reaction to the clockwork picture of mainstream science in their days. Goethe went as far as trying to construct a whole new parallel science of matter. Or . . . is there a third option? Stay tuned! The next log entry will have more to say about all this.

Meanwhile, as promised, we will continue with an experimental corner in this log entry, as well as future entries in the FEST log.

The next step in experimentation

In Log Entry #019 the notion of subject-object reversal, s/o reversal for short, was introduced by letting a tree look at you. That was experiment 3a. In the previous log entry, #020, we introduced two new novel ways of experimenting with the idea of s/o reversal, experiments 3b and 3c. If you haven't had the opportunity to try those out yet, now would be a great time to do so before reading the text below. This will help you approach the new additions with a fresh perspective. Here is the first extension:

Experiment 3b: s/o reversal with our whole field of vision

The instruction in the previous log entry was: "Instead of letting one object look at you, let everything in your field of vision look at you, simultaneously." As before, the reports from different people differed significantly, but one common element jumped out for many people, though certainly not for all: an increased awareness of the front side of one's body, the side that "everything" in front of oneself was looking at. As for the second extension:

Experiment 3c: s/o reversal with everything behind you

The instruction here was: "Now let everything behind you, well outside your field of vision, look at you." In this case, as you might have guessed, a typical response was to become more aware of your back. We tend not to think much about our backs compared to, say, our feet or our hands or our necks, which are all more movable, and in the first two cases fully visible.

The shift in awareness from the front to the back of our body may not have been surprising. However, alongside that shift, many people reported experiencing an uncanny feeling and an urge to turn around, despite being instructed not to do so. Logically, it makes sense to want to glance back when we are told that a whole bunch of "lookers" are watching us from behind.

However, logic is not the point of the experiment. More important is to actually experience this physical reaction in our own embodiment, independent of whether or not it is easy to explain. Isn't it interesting that we can so easily induce vivid physical feelings, just by imagining that whatever is behind us is now looking at us? Now that is an example of studying the mind by using the mind.

Switching from sight to sound

How about doing a s/o reversal with sounds, instead of vision? Almost everywhere we find ourselves, there are sounds. And if you are in a very quiet environment, chances are you can feel or even hear your heartbeat. First, listen to the sounds you hear for a little while. Then reverse the relationship: let the sounds listen to you.

What do you experience, and how is the experience different from letting a visible object look at you?

After a while, you may notice that you have a choice. Let's say you are in a kitchen and you hear a kettle whistle. One option is to let the kettle listen to you instead. Another option is to let the sound of the kettle listen to you. Let's give those two different options different numbers:

Experiment 3d: let a sound-emitting object hear you

Experiment 3e: let a sound hear you

Note that, returning to the very first s/o reversal where you let a tree look at you, we had the same choice! We could let ourselves be seen by the tree. But we could also let ourselves be seen by the light that was painting the tree in our field of vision.

Almost certainly you chose the first option, as the more natural one. Isn't it interesting that with a sound it is less clear which option is more natural, to let a sound listen to you or to let the sound producing object listen to you?

In fact, when you are walking around in a city, you will hear many sounds for which it is not even clear what kind of object is emitting that sound. In that case your only option is to do s/o reversal with the sound.

Note also that it is hard to imagine that you can do s/o reversal with an image of an object without being able to do so with the object itself. There may be exceptions, like the occurrence of a rainbow, but in most cases the image belongs to a particular object. Or . . . to more than one object! Seeing the Moon reflected in a pond, you can choose to focus on the Moon or on the pond; or on the water in the pond if you want to be even more precise.

Let us end here, with a quote from Dogen, a famous 13th century Japanese Zen teacher, who started the Japanese Soto Zen School. When viewing the reflection of the Moon in a dewdrop, his response was:

The depth of the dewdrop is the height of the Moon.

Developing theories by tinkering with matter and mind

We encountered a bold experiment in the previous log entry, #019, where we were invited to explore what it might mean to go beyond subjectivity and objectivity as we know it. I called it "subject-object reversal", and I suggested we look at a tree, first, and then let the tree look at us. I will add more elements to this experiment toward the end of the current log entry.

This will be the approach we will take from now on: we will start each log entry with an attempt to extend the theory side of a science of mind, followed by an attempt to extend the experimental side. The terms theory and experiment are borrowed from natural science. They correspond to what in contemplative literature is often described as view and practice.

The current log entry of the FEST log is the first one in Part 4. The first Part contained a general overview of the idea of a science of mind rather than matter, with a few examples of what experiments could look like when studying our mind using our mind as a laboratory. The second Part gave an overview of the history of physics, with a number of hints of what we might learn from the meandering interactions between theory and experiment in that domain. The third Part plunged into the treasure trove of findings that were obtained in various prescientific contemplative traditions.

A quest for the unification of matter and mind

So far, all three Parts have been introductory. They have set the stage for developing a science of mind by contrasting natural science and contemplation: the currently most deeply developed sources of knowledge of the nature of matter and of the nature of mind. Having set the stage, we have no choice but to confront the central question of the nature of reality: how to approach a possible unification of the science of matter and a complementary science of mind.

The development of natural science, especially physics, initially involved disregarding the presence of the mind. For the first two centuries it seemed that physicists could get away with that omission, but one century ago quantum mechanics showed that the situation was more complex than it appeared. During that same century, biology transformed from a mainly descriptive field into a real science in its own right, with branches like neuroscience where the functions of the mind could no longer be ignored.

So let us embark on a quest for unification, that is, for finding a framework that invites developing both theories and experiments that can shed light on the way our world works—showing a material and mental side of whatever happens at any moment in our lives. We no longer have the luxury that previous generations had, up to Galileo's time, to posit a perfect heavenly realm moving by itself, in contrast to our earthly realm of imperfection and decay. Whatever we know, we know through our mind, while any mind we know comes with a body attached, so positing two separate realms is not an option.

Currently we have no clear idea how a unification of matter and mind might be realized. It could take the form of a relatively symmetric approach, similar to how electricity and magnetism were unified under the theory of electromagnetism. Or it could be that one of the two turns out to be more fundamental, with the other taking on a form of an emergent property based on the former.

Subjectivity and objectivity

We know that our sense impressions are subjective, even though we assume that there is an objective world, one that we know only through our sense impressions. Early in life, we learned how to discriminate between what we "see" subjectively and what we "see" objectively. For example, when we watch a car drive by and shrink in our view, we know the car is not really shrinking in reality. This realization is so ingrained in our daily lives that we don't pay any attention to it. We have learned not to "see" the shrinking. In fact, it would be quite a surprise if a car would pass us and then suddenly refuse to shrink. And when asked, we might say: "From my subjective point of view the car appears to shrink, but that is a mere appearance; objectively the car does not shrink."

Even though we have learned to "see" that objects don't shrink as they move away, the fact remains that empirically, "seeing" the objective fact that a car does not shrink is a two-step process. First, the visual image on our retina does shrink. Second, we then process that image in our brains to compensate for the apparent shrinkage. So the empirical evidence for the objective fact of no shrinkage is the result of two subjective operations from our side.

There is not, and there can never be, any direct empirical evidence that can assure us that the objective world, presented to us as processed forms of subjective observations and subjective interpretations, is really "out there," given that all the real evidence is ultimately "in our mind." We have discussed this conclusion in #016, where we found that what we call "objective" pertains to a special compartment O' in our mind, carefully walled off and maintained there, as indicated in Figs. 48 and 49 in Log Entry #016. Since it was published in the New York Times, we called it the NYT diagram to give it a name. There O, the postulated "objective world," was seen to be empirically inaccessible, unlike O', which we can actually use since it is part of our mind, one type of mental representation among others.

When we hear this kind of argument for the first time, we are likely to shrug and consider this as a typical philosophical argument, perhaps intellectually stimulating at best, but inconsequential for all practical purposes. We "all know" that the objective world exists, and as proof we can point to the fact that science gives us a lot of power about that objective reality. For completeness, let me summarize in just one paragraph what has been a leading argument throughout the first three Parts.

For many cultures the idea of an objective reality, described most fundamentally by physics and other fields within natural science, would seem to miss out the most important aspects of being human. For that reason alone, it makes sense to critically look at how and why we tend to be so sure that matter and energy, distributed in space and time, are the ultimately real components of reality. Why do we delegate mind to a kind of side effect of the play of interacting quanta of energy (up to a century ago, it was like a clockwork mechanism, and who knows what it will be in the future)? As we have seen, from Log Entry #000 onwards, there is plenty of reason to have a new critical look at the materialist dogmas of our time.

Replacing the mythological O with sheer appearance A

In Log Entry #017 we fast-forwarded 27 years, and we saw in the blackboard diagram in Fig. 51 a possible alternative to the NYT diagram, in which the objective world O was replaced by a realm of appearance A. More precisely, A is a placeholder for what may be underlying experience, a *sheer* appearance that we encountered as an idea already in Log Entry #003. Experience typically comes in a tripartite structure: there is a subject, connected through interactions with various objects.

In contrast, appearance is a more general notion, not requiring any such structure.

Simply put, appearance appears but experience doesn't experience. And central in many of the deeper insights from contemplative traditions is what is often called nonduality of subject and object, where neither of those two are considered ultimately real.

In both the NYT and the blackboard diagrams, S signifies our actual mind, while S' signifies what we generally mean when we talk about "our mind," as we have discussed at length, starting with Log Entry #016.

An example of a nondualistic interpretation in Islam

Buddhism is often associated with nonduality, as are various traditions within Hinduism. In Christianity, too, some contemplatives like Meister Eckhart are often considered to adhere to forms of nonduality; parallels with Zen Buddhism, for example, have been noted by the Japanese philosopher D.T. Suzuki. Since Christian theology has tended to deemphasize nonduality, and especially so in the last few centuries, I expect that a new generation of theologians will reinpret many of the older views of saints. The views of a contemplative like Saint Francis, for example, are now recognized as sharing many elements with nondual aspects of the way Taoists view Nature.

Within Islam, I recently found a very helpful quote about Sufism. Below I give a one-page long quote from the book "Creation and the Timeless Order of Things" by Toshihiko Izutsu, a Japanese scholar of Islamic studies and comparative religion. [As for Izutsu's scholarship as well as authenticity, here is an impression: https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/119].

When I started reading it over Christmas of 2024, I was amazed to see how close his description of an Islamic contemplative's view came to the interface between the regions S and A in Fig. 51. The name of the contemplative is Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadani [for a quick impression, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_al-Quzat_Hamadani].

Borderline experiences: tidal waters between A and S

[begin quote]

What characterizes Hamadání's pattern of thinking in a most striking manner is that his thought is structured in reference to two different levels of cognition at one and a same time. That is to say, the process of philosophic thinking in Hamadání is as a rule related to two levels of discourse, one referring to the domain of empirical experience based on sensation and rational interpretation, and the other referring to a totally different kind of understanding which is peculiar to the "domain beyond reason." There is admittedly nothing new in this distinction itself. For almost all mystics naturally tend to distinguish between what is accessible to sensation and reason and what lies beyond the grasp of all forms of empirical cognition. Otherwise they would not be worthy to be specifically called "mystics."

What is really characteristic of Hamadání is rather that everything -- i.e. every event, every state of affairs, or every concept which deserves being discussed in a philosophic way -- is spoken of in terms of these two essentially incompatible levels of discourse. All the major concepts that have been sanctioned by tradition as authentically Islamic, whether they be philosophic or theological, are to be discussed and elaborated on these two levels of discourse in such a manner that each of these concepts might be shown to have an entirely different inner structure as it is viewed in reference to either of the two levels.

It is noteworthy that Hamadání does not simply and lightly dispose of reason. He ascribes to reason whatever properly belongs to it. In human life reason has its important function to fulfill; it has its own proper domain in which it maintains its sovereignty. In fact, he visualizes the "domain of reason" (tawr al-`aql) and the "domain beyond reason" (tawr ward'a al-`aql) as two contiguous regions, the latter being directly consecutive to the former. This means that the last stage of the "domain of reason" is in itself the first of the "domain beyond reason". By having exhausted all the rational resources of thinking, [mystics] are able to step into the domain of trans-rational faculty of the mind.

[end quote]

[Note: In the last sentence I have added the word "mystics" which seems to have dropped out in the original typesetting, although I could also have added the word "we", which I'm sure Izutsu would have been equally happy with.]

Is it possible to go beyond empirical studies?

At first blush, Izutsu's descriptions of Hamadani's experiences don't seem to fall under the rubric of empirical studies. When Hamadani describes the transition from the "domain of reason" (S in our terminology) to the "domain beyond reason" (A in our terminology), one gets the impression that the two are not totally incompatible, like night and day. Rather, "the last stage of the "domain of reason" is in itself the first of the "domain beyond reason".

This way of speaking sounds rather familiar. Where have we encountered such descriptions before? We don't have to look very far. A large fraction of Part 2 of the FEST log you are currently reading describes the quandary that physics got into in 1925, and so far hasn't really gotten out of yet. Especially the question of how to connect the realm where classical physics dominates and the realm where quantum physics is necessary has a rather similar character.

At first it seemed that quantum physics was forced to throw overboard one keystone of classical physics after another, keystones that had been sacrosanct for more than two centuries after Newton. The biggest of those was the strict reproducibility of experiments. In quantum physics, a single experiment typically cannot be repeated, since the outcome of any quantum experiment has a large uncertainty. Only the average results from many identical experiments can be made arbitrarily small.

To put it succinctly: before 1925, empirical meant not only based on experience (as indicated by the etymology of the word), but also based on reason, on a rational interpretation that required literal and strict reproducibility of identical experiments. However, after 1925 physicists were forced to drop that extra clause required for empirical results, the classical dogma that seemed so reasonable (literally!), but that turned out to be incorrect. It definitely seemed unreasonable that identical experiments give different results. But given that experiments form the absolute foundation of science, physicists had no choice but to incorporate seemingly totally unreasonable ideas into their theories. In other words, to provide continuity in experimentation, it seems inescapable to redefine the word "empirical".

Changing the goalposts in physics

The upshot is that we still consider physics to be an empirical science. But in doing so, we were forced to change the goalposts: "strictly reproducible" became "statistically reproducible." While the quantum mechanics revolution was the most extreme case, during the few hundred years since Newton formulated his classical theory of mechanics, there have been other cases, not quite as dramatic, but still quite shocking.

Until Einstein formulated his theory of special relativity, classical physics was based on the conservation of mass and the conservation of energy, which were considered to be two separate conservation laws. Chemical reactions could change the nature of a piece of matter, but not the total mass of matter involved in such reactions. Similarly, heat energy in a steam engine could be partly changed into energy of motion, but the total amount of energy would remain the same.

Another example of changing the goalposts to make room for a new and more accurate theory occurred when Einstein found that energy and mass could be converted into each other. It was clear that neither mass nor energy was conserved. But when mass is transformed into energy, as happens in the core of the Sun, generating its heat, the *sum* of energy and mass (the latter multiplied by the squared of the velocity of light) *does* remain the same.

Changing the goalposts in a science of mind

Given the example of physics, it is only natural to look for places in a science of mind, where we could be similarly forced to shift its initial goalposts. And we don't have to look very far. There was a good reason to introduce the philosopher Husserl in Log Entry #004, and the philosopher Nishida in Log Entry #005, since Nishida changed the goalposts of Husserl's phenomenology.

Husserl was still empirical in what we might call a "classical" kind of way. For him experience was the foundation of phenomenology, where every experience had a subject pole and an object pole (for the cognoscenti: strictly speaking his transcendental subject plays the role of a "dative of manifestation", for whom phenomena appear, and as such is not a purely nondual appearance).

For Nishida that was no longer the case. As we saw in Log Entry #005, his view was: we tend to say "I have an experience", but it is more accurate to say "Experience has me". Let us look carefully at this short but pathbreaking sentence.

What Nishida called "experience" was not something that connects a subject with an object in the standard way. In giving up "I have an experience", a phrase in which a person is the subject, and instead adapting "Experience has me", a phrase in which that person is no longer the subject, what just happened? There is no new subject appearing on the scene. "Experience" cannot be seen as a subject, at least not in any standard way; it cannot play the role that already is assigned to the "experiencer". If experience is not the subject, the "me" above cannot be a proper object. Yet a sense of me appears. This can give a hint as to show how appearances can be seen as more fundamental than experiences.

In Log Entry #004, we revisited the concept of S, which represents the total sum of experiences within an individual mind, a la Husserl. In Log Entry #005, we introduced Nishida as a bridge that allows us to venture beyond S into A, which serves as the background "space" or "field" for the kind of nonduality that all major contemplative traditions talk about, in one way or another. By going beyond the European view of experience as centrally involving a subject, Nishida went beyond the classical definition of empirical research. Interestingly, in doing so he introduced a non-classical definition of "pure experience" in which there was no longer a central role for the subject. It was his way of changing the goalposts of European philosophy, up to and including Husserl.

Note that my interest in parallels with quantum mechanics has nothing to do with looking for quantum *effects* in the brain, but rather for quantum *analogies* in the mind. My comparisons above between the nature of the quantum revolution in matter and the nature of nondualism in the mind, are certainly not perfect analogies. My hope is that at least they may form a first step pointing to similarities between two equally painful processes. In the domain of matter, the painful process for physicists was having to give up their so successful classical mechanics as the Newtonian "deepest truth". In the domain of mind, the painful process for philosophers was having to give up their so successful Cartesian "deepest truth" of subject-object duality.

Quantum mechanics will undoubtedly play some role or other in the nano-scale processes in the brain, like it does on all processes of that size, but that's not my point. What quantum mechanics teaches us goes well beyond physics. In general, when scientists declare that they are "absolutely certain" of something, like the "fact" that the material world is like a clockwork, it would be better to read such statements as "until now, there has been overwhelming evidence that, on the scale and under the conditions of experiments so far, a model like a that of a clockwork has given us a very good approximation of phenomena that are encountered in reality". Such an authentic way of adhering to the principle of using working hypotheses, rather than dogmas, would have made the quantum transition in physics decidedly less painful.

Nishida's tidal waters at the A/S interface

Below I am providing one more rather lengthy quote to illuminate in a concrete way how Nishida handled the tidal waters between A and S. My quote is taken from a recent unpublished manuscript by John Maraldo. He is the author of a 3-volume series, "Japanese Philosophy in the Making" (Chisokudō Publications, 2023), the first volume of which is "Crossing Paths with Nishida." Here is the excerpt, with permission from John Maraldo.

[begin quote]

Nishida’s writings can be frustrating for their lack of concrete examples, and refreshing for their power of integration.

This self in act [the subject] cannot be grasped as an object. Our awareness is active even while we would try to grasp it as if it were some thing, some object, in the world. From this active center, each of us can assume a standpoint, take a position or have a perspective on things and take account of them. But then Nishida adds a remark that turns our head around: what we call the self has to be understood from the standpoint of the world; it is not a matter of proceeding from the self, but of proceeding from the world.

Practicing physicians can say of themselves, "I went to such and such a school, I’ve treated so and so many patients and contributed such and such to the field of medicine." This description represents the standpoint of the self. Now imagine another, more reciprocal description one could give. "The world of medicine has entered into me, shaped who I have become and what I have done, and my practices in turn have changed that world." This way of putting it represents a standpoint that "proceeds from a world."

Unlike Descartes, Nishida understands self as embodied, conditioned by the world but also creative of it; there’s no such thing as an "external world."

Nishida typically refuses to separate what modern philosophy posits as two-fold: the subjective side of experience and the objective side of reality, so the primary meaning of world for him is the lived, concrete whole that provides the context of experiential reality.

[end quote]

A next step for subject-object reversal

As a follow-up from the s/o reversal experiment in the previous log entry, #019, where I suggested to let a tree look at you, here is an extension. Instead of letting one object look at you, let everything in your field of vision look at you, simultaneously. It may be easiest to perform this experiment in a place without other people, who might actually happen to look at you. But after some practice, you may be able to do this equally well in a crowded place somewhere in a city. How does this feel? Is it qualitatively different from letting a tree look at you? Or is it similar but perhaps in a way such that the effect feels more strongly (or more weakly)?

Yet another follow-up is to let everything behind you, well outside your field of vision, look at you. Keep looking ahead of you, to make the experiment maximally different from the one you just did before. Does this feel different from letting everything in the whole scene in front of you look at you? How would you describe the difference?

In the next log entry I will discuss these variations, as well as other ones, in more detail, together with a few descriptions of some reported outcomes.

In order to watch your mind in operation, all you have to do is to open your eyes and watch how your mind displays for you a first-person view of the world around you. That is one way. Another way is to close your eyes and watch whatever your mind makes up in idling mode in terms of visuals, probably rather nondescript, but at least something. Or you can wait till you fall asleep and watch how your mind displays a dream. And if you can easily visualize images, you don't even have to wait, you can just do it.

So, where is your mind? Is it inside you, or outside you, or somehow "elsewhere"? At least visually, our mind's show includes a reasonably well defined spatial background, and so does our tactile sense and sense of hearing, though somewhat less precise. Do all those spaces occupy a location or are they completely disconnected from the material world in which our bodies are located?

It is not at all clear whether these questions are even meaningful. Yet we have a strongly ingrained sense of our mind being "inside" our body and the material world being mostly "outside" our body. This orientation is baked into our language. When trying to explore our mind, we typically use the word introspection. The word extrospection is less often used but can be found in dictionaries; it means exploring what is outside you, in the world around you.

This usage, however, is very misleading. It invites us to look through the wrong end of the body-mind telescope.

Our empirical view turned inside-out and outside-in

Already in Log Entry #016, we saw in the NYT diagram that, empirically speaking, our actual mind S contains the material world O', which in turn contains our *sense* of mind S' associated with brain and body. And in Log Entry #018, in Fig. 51, the blackboard diagram reproduced below, we saw that the map of our mind, S", which we use to communicate with others, is contained in the map of our world, O", which itself is contained in S'.

When we directly experience the world in a first-person way, we experience O'. When we talk about the world with someone else, each of us uses our own map O" as a communication device to describe what O' looks like to us. Therefore, when we experience how everything, including ourselves, is part of the Universe, it is O' that we "have in mind" as the Universe O', including the "ordinary" everyday world, labeled as such in Fig. 51. And when we locate our "ordinary" sense of mind, S', we do so in or near our body, which in turn is located within the "ordinary" world O'.

So far our first-person experience. When we *talk* with others, in second-person mode, we descend one more level toward the center of the diagram. There, our body representation on the map within O" is shown to the left and slightly upwards of the 'e' in extrospection. If we talk with our friend about our mind, we are dealing with S" as the representation of our mind. And if we describe that we are getting into meditation, we are likely to use the expression "introspection", since from the description of the world O" we move "inward" towards S". In contrast, the chair in front of us is something we find by extrospection, as indicated in the diagram.

The remarkable thing is that our actual mind S, the stage on which all dramas of our ordinary life play out, is the most "outward" of all the realms that we have been talking about so far, even though we call a study of the mind "introspection." This is the most dramatic way I can think of, to depict how we label the use of our life's empirical telescope the wrong way. We look inside our mind to the "outside" world in all its empirical stages; conversely, we look outside to what we consider to be our "inner" world.

Looking ahead

In the previous log entry, #018, we explored the logistics of the blackboard diagram, and now we are exploring the look-and-feel of the different realms. The current log entry is the last one in Part 3 of the FEST log. In Part 4 we will continue to explore this diagram, since there still is a lot to say about the nature of, and the relationships between, the outer three realms A, S, and O'. In parallel to that exploration, we will build up a very different type of diagram, which I have already announced as the double diamond diagram, one that is more abstract but covers essentially the same ground.

As for now, let me briefly sketch how I see the outer three realms from a contemplative point of view. How we can then make contact with a scientific point of view is still a wide-open question. Only after we start developing a science of mind, do we have a fighting chance to answer that question, with a double pronged attack. By using the phenomenology of matter and mind as a road toward developing a science based on those two empirical phenomenologies, we can follow the same path that natural science has explored: starting with observations, and carefully building and testing adequate theories to go with those (in contemplative terms: starting with practice and carefully developing a view).

Another quick sneak preview

Here is a bare summary, starting with a sneak preview of Part 4. S can be seen as Plato's cave, while A is the world outside the cave. Alternatively, A is a paradise from which humans risk being expelled, in an atemporal way, by a "fall" into a subject-object duality, moment to moment.

Inside that cave, a second "fall" can be made into a cage where the notion of "pure experience" is forgotten, and our sense of our own mind shrinks further from S to S'. Not only have we lost our sense of the openness of a nondual worldview, "pure appearance", but even the sense of "pure experience" has been lost.

The cage could be labeled "Galileo's cage", but that would not be fair since he saw the world as composed of mathematics, which he considered the language of God's thought. For him, the cage had an open door to God in a (neo-)Platonic way. Science gradually lost sight of that door, and in the last century found itself locked in that cage.

While continuing with our experiments in Log Entry #004, we will discover that Husserl's cave is a deluxe version of Plato's cave; as we will see, of a transcendental kind, but still a cave. And while continuing with our experiments in Log Entry #005, we will see how Nishida found a ladder leading out of the cave, but wasn't yet quite sure how to use it in the context of philosophy, though deeply inspired by Zen Buddhism.

A new experiment: subject-object reversal

Our last experiment was presented in Log Entry #005, "Experiment 1+2): matter as experience as appearance", the last log entry of Part 1. All of Part 2 was dedicated to comparing theories in the science of matter and the science of mind. So far, part 3 has followed the same pattern, but with the addition of contemplation, and especially nondual contemplation, as input material for theory formation.

But now, finally, we will get back to the lab, our own mind in the case of a science of mind. In Log Entry #005 our latest experiment was numbered 2), and after that we combined it with an earlier experiment, numbered 1), to make the combined experiment "1 + 2)". Continuing the numbering scheme, we proceed to get:

Experiment 3. Subject-object reversal

Here we will experiment with our ordinary attitude, in which we play the central role of a self or subject in a world in which everything else plays the role of objects. The instructions are very simple. Look at an object, perhaps a tree. First spend a minute or so watching the tree, while becoming aware of the way that you are actively doing the looking, whereas the tree is something that is looked at.

After a minute, switch roles. Let the tree look at you for the next minute or so. At first you may not know how to do that, but don't worry about details. Just let yourself be seen by the tree, in whatever way that feels natural. You simply give the tree an active role of a looker, and you yourself take on the more passive role of somebody being looked at by a tree.

I suggest you repeat this a few times, at different times and in different places, with different trees. You can also perform the s/o reversal experiment, to use an abbreviated term, with different objects. However, if you change all the aspects of an experiment all at once, it may be more difficult to notice a relationship between what you are changing and the way you experience the same experiment at different times and places.

Before reading any further, I strongly suggest that you try this experiment for yourself a few times. You have only one chance to explore this experiment afresh, approaching the experiment with minimal prejudice, before reading the following comments.

Many possible outcomes of this experiment

In my experience, and in that of many others whom I have suggested to do this experiment over the years and decades, in the vast majority of cases people very quickly notice surprisingly vivid reactions, which can take many forms. It is a bit unfortunate that I have to write this, because it is more natural to introduce a new experiment of this type without saying anything about what to expect, and let it all unfold in real time. Alas, that is difficult to do in book form.

One surprise for many is that putting yourself in the role of an object can easily change feelings in your own embodiment. We all know how a sense of being looked at can change our physical sensations of being present in a situation. What is unexpected is the extent to which this also happens, in a variety of ways, when playing with the notion of a tree looking at you.

And I have to add immediately: there is a minority of cases in which someone reports that there is nothing to report. Whenever that happens in a group, it is then an equally large surprise for those who did find some clear effects, as it is for the person who did not notice anything to report. And it has the extra advantage to challenge those who clearly felt something to find more precise ways to report what they found.

I will stop here, for now at least, and invite you to play with this experiment in various ways. If you can find one or more others to join you in a small group, to get more data and more angles on experience, so much the better, as I also suggested already for the earlier experiments in log entries #004 and #005.

I don't know the historical source of the s/o reversal experiment. It is quite likely that it goes back a long time, perhaps at first in oral traditions for contemplative training. I personally came across the suggestion when I read it in 1980 in the book "Time, Space and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality" by Tarthang Tulku (Dharma Publishing, 1977), where it was listed amidst several dozen other exercises as they were called. The book is also interesting for what I would call theory, in addition to the various experiments described therein.

It was this experiment that I found most useful, for myself and for many others, in that it had the most rapid effect in turning up new aspects of our own mind. At least for most of us, it seems completely novel, notwithstanding the simplicity of execution. Since I discovered this experiment, when I am asked how many weeks or months you have to practice meditation before you can see a clear effect, I give them this experiment, if possible in person. They then typically see an effect within minutes to their (and my original) surprise. As such, it is a good candidate for starting a short course in the experimental science of mind.

We all learn a bit of human anatomy in elementary school, like the fact that we have a heart and lungs and a brain. Well before elementary school, children can already sketch arms and legs, even if only in the most rudimentary way as stick figures (and some physicists don't even bother to grow out of that level, as you saw in my publication in Log Entry #016). But ask any adult to name parts of the mind, chances are that they won't get much further than half a dozen or so, such as those listed on the outer circumference of Fig. 50 in the previous log entry #017, reproduced here below.

It is immediately clear that many further divisions of regions such as S, O', or S' are possible. It is also clear that in our Western culture we do not have any generally agreed upon rules and systems for demarcating such divisions in the way, say, Linnaeus systematically named species of plants and animals. In contrast, a tradition such as Buddhism has developed, over almost two thousand years, its Abhidharma system, containing highly detailed inventories of reality, encompassing both matter and mind aspects. For a recent, very readable book introducing Abhidharma in the context of Yogachara, see "Making Sense of Mind Only" by William Waldron. 

Even so, my definition of science—whether focused on matter, mind, or both, as I sketched in Log Entry #001—includes universality, in particular the existence of a self-governing global community of peers. Currently there is no such global community. A system like Abhidharma may serve as the starting point for the crystallization of a universally recognized approach to a science of mind, just as Aristotelian mechanics grew out to a worldwide system of Newtonian physics. Or some other system may do so, or perhaps two or more systems will pool their insights together to form a globally accepted foundation for a science of mind.

And mind you, there is no danger whatsoever in starting with a limited framework for such a foundation. To make this very clear, I have dedicated five log entries, #008 through #012, to map out the twists and turns of what physicists, during different periods between 1600 and now, considered foundations—for a while giving the impression of bedrock, only to melt away rapidly during one of the physics revolutions of the last four centuries.

Many ways to refine the S, O', S' diagram

Returning to Fig. 50, note that all of the area within the outer circle is a symbolic representation S of our own subjective mind, which includes all that we experience. One part of that mind, depicted as a rectangle in the middle, is O', the place in our mind where we store our knowledge of what we call the objective outer world, since we imagine it to be outside us. But why this map, and not others? We have so many different ways to make maps of our knowledge of the world. Any ordinary atlas shows very different maps, highlighting geographical, political, and many other aspects that might be of interest.

In everyday life we can talk about a human body or a chair as objects in that outer world. But when we put on the hat of a scientist, let us say a physicist, we find that everything around us, as well as inside our body, exists as a collection of atoms and of molecules made of atoms. In the previous log entry, we saw how science provides a filter which lets through only those experiences that are relevant for a particular science, physics in our case.

Different people carry in their mind very different levels of knowledge about the nature of matter, about the richness of plants and animals populating the world, about the vastness of the Universe and the structures therein, and so on. Let us see whether we can start slowly and just go one step further in complexity.

From physics to biology and beyond

If we want to study biology for example, instead of physics, we have to apply a filter that lets through higher-level concepts, compared to atoms and molecules. In particular, we must be able to recognize cells, and more generally, we have to start with recognizing the difference between living and non-living systems. Where physicists see both of these systems as made of atoms, biologists see a sharp distinction between the two.

Fig. 52 indicates the way in which a neuroscientist may see the brain, and the way a cognitive psychologist may see the mind. The kind of information filtered out is rather different from what was filtered out in Fig. 50. As a result the scientific description of the world, the part of O' inside the rectangular dashes, no longer contains atoms as fundamental building blocks, but cells and in particular the network of neurons and other cells in the brain.

In Fig. 52 the outermost part of S, labeled in Fig. 50 as "inner experiences", is left out, to keep things simple. Only the "outer experience" is shown, both the "perspective" part outside O' and the "objective" part inside O'. The latter is labeled as "raw" outer experience, as opposed to what makes it through the filter of science, here labeled as "scientific input".

The role of the objectified mind So

In addition to a model of the brain, Fig. 52 points to a model of the Mind, labeled here as So. This corresponds to the S' part of the original NYT article depicted in Fig. 49 in Log Entry #016. There I introduced S' in the following paragraph:

Why don't we point in all directions away from ourselves, as "outer" as we can indicate, when asked to locate our mind? The answer is that while we are the users of our mind S, that use is so tacit and so fully transparent, that we are left no choice but to point to S', the objectified and thus reified image of S, that has been made into an object S' within the realm O' of all other experienced material objects.

In both log entries #016 and #017, I discussed at greater length the difference between our actual mind S and what we usually consider our mind to be, S'. In tandem we consider our body to be the one drawn inside O', while what we can actually see is the body drawn only partly, outside the rectangle O', but of course still inside S.

Why introduce an extra notation So? I wanted to make a sharp distinction between our everyday habit of pointing to our head and specifically to our brain as the seat of our mind S', as a modern habit, and the way neuroscientists talk about the brain while having very specific models in mind (models So in their own mind S!). Speaking of S' is more of a metaphorical habit. When people say "my brain is tired" they are talking about the "raw" outer experience in O' outside the dashed rectangle, not about a model of the mind, arrived at in cognitive science in So.

Back to the blackboard diagram

At the end of the previous log entry, #017, in Fig. 51 I introduced a picture that I had drawn on the blackboard in my office, half a year before I started my current FEST log. As soon as I could literally see in front of me a new direction towards creating a "map of reality", including room for matter as well as for mind, I saw that it might be possible to find a starting point for developing a science of mind.

Of course, a single picture is just a single picture, and I welcome the construction of many other inroads towards a science of mind, by others as well as myself. For example, within a few months I hope to introduce a complementary picture, what I call a "double diamond diagram", connecting Husserlian phenomenology, modern science, and contemplation. But it was my "blackboard diagram" that gave me the confidence to start writing this log in "open kitchen" style (or, for scientists, in arXiv style).

For me it served as a proof of concept. Could I return to the picture I had sketched late last century, that had been published with the implication of an exclamation mark and a question mark? An exclamation mark as a stop sign: we cannot use any empirical evidence in describing the reality of the world around us, O. And a question mark: can we say what, if anything, we could use to replace O?

As soon as I had sketched the new picture, one early morning in the fall last year, I was eager to see whether it would make any sense to others around me. As the Head of the Program in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for more than twenty years, many people were in the habit of stopping by in my office to inquire "what was new" or just to chat about new attempts at boundary crossing between established fields in science. I used that opportunity to see whether I could get across my main ideas in the time span of sipping a cup of coffee.

I soon found out that, yes, I could get some general idea across while the coffee was still warm, but it was also clear that in all cases many questions remained. Little did I know that I would feel obliged, a year later, to write 50,000 words, the size of a small book, just to get to the point of even showing the figure. It will probably take me another 50,000 words to go deeper into the theoretical ramifications as well as the challenge of designing corresponding experiments, of the type I started to discuss already in log entries #003 through #005.

The realm of appearance, A

In the original NYT article, Fig. 49, the background was labeled O, short for the objective reality which we normally assume to be the world we live in. It stretches out from the space near us to the edge of the observable Universe, and back in time to the Big Bang. In that figure, I had crossed out the area O, because it is not empirically accessible. So I was left with S, the mind of an individual person, within which there is room for a representation of the world, O'.

My intention was not to doubt or argue against the reality of the world as we know it. Rather, all our experiences of the world are real experiences, and as experiences they are part of our mind, S. Within S, they are stored in the rectangle labeled O', which is our own "view of the world" and as such is private. We cannot communicate our view by sharing it in a literal way, like a "mind meld" in science fiction. When we talk about "sharing" our view we really mean mapping our very rich and detailed personal mind content onto a reduced "map" that we can then pass on to others in the form of a description. That "map" lives also in O', but we consider it to be within our mind S', where it can be labeled as O", even further removed from O. This is spelled out in further detail towards the end of this log entry where we will come back to the O, O', O" conundrum in Fig. 18, which will be replaced by A, O', O".

The reason to suggest A, appearance, as a more accurate replacement for the material world O, was that I had started to play with the kinds of experiments that I reported already back in entries #003 through #005. There I described how we can train ourselves to see matter more empirically as our experience of matter. And following that, we can describe experience even more precisely as the appearance of the elements of experience, namely subject, object and their interplay. These are the three elements typically present in any experience: the experiencer, what is experienced and the experiencing that connects the two.

Starting with A, my best attempt to point to the nature of reality, is what led me to the title of the current log entry: "A Mind in a World in a Mind in Reality". Or a bit longer: "Our ordinary mind S’ in our ordinary world O', as seen in our actual mind S embedded in Reality A," an idea I tried to express in Fig. 51.

This is not the place to go into more detail. Several future entries will be needed to delve further into these matters. Instead, let me wrap up with a quick tour across the various nested domains in Fig. 51.

The realm of the mind, S

We will start at A, the background of the blackboard picture, marked at the outside of the picture. Note that in the nesting in the blackboard picture, like in the original NYT diagram, every realm includes all the subrealms that are shown within its perimeter. For example, S here includes O', S', O", etc. all the way in. Similarly O', too, includes S', O", etc.

Moving inwards from the outskirts of the picture, the first structure we encounter is S, the mind of a single person. Since each of us has a mind, it feels natural to write about "our mind", though I mean "for each of us, the mind that we happen to have". Fig. 53 shows a somewhat enlarged snapshot.

Most, if not all, of the time we are awake we focus on objects in our mind, either "inner" or "outer" experiences, without paying attention to our mind itself as the background space. As a result we fall back on our mental representation of "outer" objects within the world O', where we show up with a body, and similarly for "inner" objects within our mind S', the counterpart of our body in O'.

Realizing how much we tend to lead a life in the shadows while neglecting our own mind can be quite dramatic, especially the first time that we stumble onto that kind of insight. I have quoted Husserl in Log Entry #004 as describing the experience that we live in experience as a kind of conversion experience.

Not only is the world O literally speaking a fiction, an idea that we carry in our mind, also we tend to completely misplace it, outside rather than inside our mind, where it shows up as O'. And, what is more, our mind, S, which *is* empirically accessible, we ignore! Clinging to what is not accessible, and ignoring what is accessible, for most of our life, until it hits us, if this is not shocking, then what is??

The realm of the ordinary world, O'

Within our mind S, we encounter what we tend to call "inner" and "outer" experiences, with the "outermost" corresponding to what we take to be the objective world, the one we seem to have access to, O'.

When we think about the ordinary world, we think about the Universe we live in, with our body and mind somewhere in a small corner of a truly huge stage. Only after a shocking awareness, mentioned above, can we begin to realize that not only is "the ordinary world" enclosed in our mind, there is a lot more to our mind, with all its memories, aspirations, fleeting thoughts and feelings, than the world that is also contained in it.

And finally, once we dare to entertain the working hypothesis that I have suggested above, another shock might set in, although initially milder: the awareness that our mind *might* actually be enclosed in something else, but *not* in a world, but rather in a realm of appearances. Most likely, the shock will be milder because initially we have no way of guessing what it may look or feel like, to have our mind *enclosed* into something. And of course, every metaphor can easily be quite misleading, which is why theories have to go hand in hand with experiments, something we will focus on more, from now on.

It is quite likely that we can't resist the temptation to let our attention flip back like a stretched rubber band, back to the old "true and tried" and most importantly, familiar view. But in the more rare case where we remain curious, and want to explore further, we may experience an increasingly odd sense of, not so much disorientation, but rather non-orientation. If so, a whole new terrain lies open for exploration, as a follow-up from Log Entry #005.

The main reason for writing log entries #006 through #012, mostly about physics and the mind, and #014 through the current #018, mainly about theoretical constructs for a science of mind, is to prepare a firm stage. It is on this stage that we will now explore the various realms that have been introduced here with the main goal to get familiar with the background realm, A. Whether there may be sensible ways to think and talk, and most importantly, explore even more fundamental realms than A, that has to remain an open question, at least for the time being.

The realm of the ordinary mind, S'

We are now at the point that we can respond to the question posed earlier: how can I, with my "big mind" S, ever make contact with other people? If I normally consider O' my world, and S' my "small mind" which I use to operate in the world O', with all of that enclosed in my real mind S, there seems to be no communication possible with others. I can talk with someone in O', but given that O' is fully enclosed in my mind S, who will hear me?

The answer is quite simple. For this we have to go "further out", which in our diagram means "further inwards", "further down" towards the center, to representations of representations of our world and mind.

Sharing our ordinary world and mind: O" and S"

In order to tell others about our world and our mind, we have to communicate with them. To do so, we have to construct messages, such as narratives or simply gestures with mutually understood meanings. Above we already briefly discussed this question, in the section "The realm of appearance, A". But let us look at this situation in a bit more detail, using Fig. 56, an enlargement of the innermost part of the blackboard diagram, Fig. 51. In my experience the outermost part A in Fig. 51 and the innermost parts O", S" and O"' in Fig. 56 are the most difficult to familiarize oneself with. 

It all goes back to the NYT diagram, Fig. 49, which allowed us to convey something about what we consider to be our real world O', and our real mind S'. The reports we can share with others are representations, elements of O" and S", one further step removed from the way that O' and S' are representations of (what we think is) the real world O and what is (indeed) our real mind S.

In this way we can communicate with others around us, by comparing our private version of the world O' with private versions of others. The way we do that is by "mapping" what we think of as our reality O', into a "map" O", which we can then communicate to others, while comparing their O" maps with our O" maps.

O" functions as a kind of virtual world, in which we can show how we experience the world, standing as we do in that world with our virtual body, our avatar, the leftmost fully drawn stick figure in Fig. 56. S" is then the mind of the avatar, a descripion of our own mind, available for others as a communication device. In that way we can even tell others how we can use our consciousness S" to describe our "reality" as our "internal" map O"'!

As an aside: when virtual worlds were developed around the turn of the century, several people remarked that sitting around a fire and telling stories, long before the use of writing, must have been the oldest form of creating virtual worlds. It is language that allows us to enter O", S" and O"' in order to share our experiences with others.

Perhaps the central take-home message of the blackboard diagram is that the outermost background realm A is formed by contemplative nonduality, while the innermost parts form the realm of language, and therefore concepts.

A little dictionary of "objective worlds"

Just for completeness and clarity, here is the logic underlying the communication description above, with the role of four different "objective world" versions, and the role that S" plays in connection them.

• O is the postulated objective world, not accessible.

• O' is what we normally consider to be the world.

• O" is what we consider a description of the world, one that we can pass along to someone else

• S" is the corresponding description of our mind, again one that we can pass along to someone else

• O"' is part of the content of the mind we have just described, not the world O" that is the backdrop within the narrative, but part of the content of S" within that world, namely elements of a description of our consciousness S", if we want to communicate those to others.

Wrapping up

There are a number of other remarks written on the blackboard picture, Fig. 51, but those need to be discussed together with the continuation of the experiments that were started in log entries #003 through #005. This will be the topic of the next log entry, where we will start with a peek outside the realm of S to get our toes wet, so to speak, while wading into the realm of A, with an experiment called subject-object reversal.

In the previous log entry, #016, we saw how we do not have direct empirical access to the objective world (represented as O in Fig. 49). In fact, we use part of our subjective mind, S, to maintain a constructed three-dimensional picture, O', of our concept of O. This concept of the objective world coexists within our subjective mind alongside other parts outside O', where more subjective, perspectival impressions of the outer world reside, together with subjective feelings, thoughts, memories, etc. This simple sketch illustrates the mind/body problem. To be more precise: O' contains our subjective reconstruction of what we consider to be the objective structure of the world in O, outside S. These considerations take a while to get used to, so let us recapitulate in more detail what we saw in the last log entry.

The mind, S, is shorthand for all that we experience, at any given time. Most if not all of the time, when we see and touch a chair, we think and talk about the chair as being "out there", outside "me", outside the "body and mind" that together make up me. In the very simple sketch in Fig. 49, the body part of "me" would then be the outer stick figure in the box O that represents the world, and the mind part of "me" would be the thought bubble S, all very schematic of course.

Now where is the chair that we see? Not the chair in O. When we close our eyes briefly, the chair we see disappears. In fact, everything around us disappears, as far as we can see. When we open our eyes again, once more we see our legs and also the chair, right in front of our legs. Note that we can't see our own eyes, or our ears for that matter, no matter in which direction we look, unless we use a mirror, or a reflection on a body of water.

The chair that we see is also not in O', since O' is our interpretation of the world, what appears for us when we see and know the world, based on the input of our eyes, and more generally of all of our sense organs. In everyday life, the "look and feel" of the O' that we experience is exactly what we consider to be O, outside us in the world around us, outside our body and outside our mind. When we close our eyes, we are certain that the chair continues to exist in O, and therefore also in the O' that we habitually take for the outside world. Of the three chairs in Fig. 49, only the middle chair (the one which is in S but outside O') becomes invisible when we close our eyes.

Of course, we know that neither the chair nor our legs disappear when we close our eyes. When asked to describe the "real world" around us, we intend to give a description of the inventory of O. Yet both this description, and how we interpret it, happen within the confines of our mind, not somewhere outside our mind, so it cannot happen in O. Any description we can possibly give must be based on the inventory of O'.

While I may have a strong sense that the chair I am talking about is really outside "me", the "me" that I picture in my mind (the one that I quite literally “have in mind”) is not the "me" in O, outside my mind. It cannot be, because it is my mind that is doing the picturing, the painting. What is more, it is not the me that is drawn here in the outer part of S either. After all, I am not a headless person. Rather I identify with the objective-looking fully present person in O', present in the map I am constructing, moment by moment of what I habitually call the "outer" world, even thought it appears in my mind.

The roles of the three stick figures in O, S, O'

In summary, among the three stick figures in Fig. 49, the one I theoretically identify with is the outer figure in O, though I have no direct empirical access to it. In practice, however, I identify with the innermost figure in O', the one available in my mind. In contrast, the only stick figure that disappears when I close my eyes is the one inside S, but in the S part that lies outside O'.

Once we realize this, we can tell the following story: "What we see is the result of our brain processing the information given to us through our senses. The version of our body we perceive directly is the one inside S, but in the S part that lies outside O'. Meanwhile, we locate the presence of our body as the innermost body in our mental picture of the world O', as a stand-in for O, the outermost background part in Fig. 49. Under normal circumstances, the product of all that processing gives us a good enough understanding of the world we live in, including our own bodily presence in that world."

That may be true for all practical purposes in everyday life, at least for what we have learned to focus on. But the remaining question is: what else is true? This parallels what science of matter has shown us: natural science can give us detailed explanations for the behavior of that part of the physical world that we can see. Yet, to really understand how the physical world operates, it turned out that we had to learn what is going on in parts of that world that are not immediately accessible to everyday observations. We will return to that question later.

Moving in and out of O' while staying in S

Notice the consistency here. The chair inside O' is regarded as the "real" chair, existing in the tangible three-dimensional world. However, if I shift my attention to what I actually see at any given moment, I can notice that I only see the front side of the chair.

I am also, in some way, directly aware of the presence of the backside of the chair, but as a construction that is taking place in the O' part of my mind (within the limits of our very simple sketch). It will even take some effort to realize that my felt presence of the backside of the chair is something that my mind, S, "fills in" even thought it is not actually visible.

The scene outside O' with the actual seen objects is relatively static. Unless we walk around and change our view point, these objects stay visually in place. To make the scene more dynamic, we could introduce a cat or a bird, especially so if both are added together.

In contrast, the part of our mind called O' is hyper dynamic. At one moment we can use our mind to think about the room we are in, aided by our sensory impressions. The very next moment we may picture ourselves walking in a distant city which we have never visited, aided by our memory of having seen photos of that city, or heard accounts from someone having visited that place, while using our imagination to fill in the gaps. In our mind we travel faster than we can jump around in a Google map, and we can travel further too, well beyond the confines of planet Earth.

For example, if we are familiar with M31, the Andromeda galaxy, which is the sister galaxy of our own Milky Way galaxy, then M31 has a place in O' too. In fact there is a place for M31 in the space of S outside O' as well: it shows up as a faint smudge of light in the Andromeda constellation, even for the unaided eye, when we travel to an area where the night sky is still dark enough. Historically, before we knew it was a galaxy, it was known as the Andromeda nebula. The smudge corresponding to the nebula disappears when we close our eyes, indicating that we are outside O' while using our mind S to make direct observations of the "real" world. Yet we interpret the outcome of this experiment as proof that our mental map O' corresponds to what we consider to be objective reality.

Notice the big difference in "size" between O and O', in terms of what it contains. O as the objective reality contains all that humanity currently has knowledge about, and far more: in principle the "real" world includes the whole observable Universe, whatever information of the Universe has potentially been able to reach us within the limits of the speed of light, since the Big Bang. In contrast, the total amount of knowledge that humanity has gathered is a very tiny fraction of that. And for any individual human being, their corresponding O' again contains far less than all that humanity has learned about.

A short list of natural extensions

Given how simple the figure was that we started with, it is somewhat surprising that we have been able to discuss so many aspects of Fig. 49, without adding additional features, so far. One thing we will need to add, before too long, is the presence of more than one person. As in astrophysics, a single star can shine, but it takes two or more stars to interact, and the same is true for people. We have a list of things to do, and one of those tasks is to make a picture for the human two-body problem, how two people use their minds to communicate. We will come to that a bit later on.

Another item on our to-do list is to add existing scientific insights to Fig. 49. Before we make an attempt to add ideas about a science of mind, in the form of the working hypotheses that we presented in Log Entry #003, it would make sense to make room for results from the science of matter, of the type we have presented in Part 2. Fig. 50 presents a very simple initial sketch in that direction.

Seeing the World behind a Science of Matter Filter

In Fig. 50, below, two additional areas have been added to the mind section, S, of Fig. 49. Much of what we find in our mind can be roughly classified as thoughts and feelings, together with memories, fantasies, dreams, and other contents of the mind. We tend to call all those "inner" experiences, in contrast to "outer experiences", related to the sensory input from what we call our environment.

In Fig. 49 we labeled our experience of our physical environment O', in contrast to the area just outside the O' box, still "outer" but not part of what we experience as "objective reality". The area outside the box we tend to label as "subjective reality", as seen from our perspective. What is added in Fig. 50 even further to the outside, towards the edge of S, is a wider area that depicts "subjective inner experiences."

In Fig. 50, the experienced "objective" world, O', is divided into two parts: the outer part in the figure that contains any and all experiences that we associate with our physical existence in the world, and an inner part that describes what we have learned about the material world on the basis of natural science, our science of matter.

The way scientists have obtained knowledge of the physical world is by making measurements in their laboratories under carefully controlled conditions that filtered out unwanted effects. Only some effects can pass through the filters, depending on the type of laboratory. And since the whole of O' is part of our mind S, we can also describe the science filter as a filter of experiences.

Different fields of study allow for different experiences. For example, specific experiences are relevant in physics, while others are relevant in biology, and some may be meaningful in both. For example, cells are recognized in biology as fundamental units, while in physics cells are seen as collections of atoms and molecules, as such not intrinsically different from other aggregates. To indicate what a physics filter can let pass, I have added in Fig. 50 a rather outdated symbolic picture of an atom, presented by electrons whizzing around a nucleus, a far cry from an accurate model, but a recognizable picture that is still often used.

The World of Appearance before a Polarizing Filter

Finally, I will end here with a sneak preview of a different filter, one that I propose to use in a science of mind, depicted in Fig. 51. Unlike the case of the previous figure, I see no way to give even a rough description in just a couple paragraphs. Still, I don't feel like postponing an introduction to what I consider to be at the core of any advanced version of a science of mind.

So let me only hint here at what will become more clear in later entries in the current Part 3 of the FEST Log. My proposal in working with the working hypotheses introduced in Log Entry #003, that experiences are built up out of more primitive elements in the form of appearances, is to replace the outer objective reality O in Fig. 49 with an outer field of appearance A in Fig. 51. The word "field" is not a particularly good term, but I will use it as a placeholder for now, until we can introduce more appropriate terms.

The previous Log Entry #015, ended with a note announcing a rudimentary picture of the interplay between science of matter and science of mind, the top two quadrants of Fig. 47. Constructing such a picture is a challenge, akin to asking a fish to draw a picture of water. Any moment of our waking life is shot through with material and mental elements. Where to start?

Any experience we have seems connected to our material body, while it is experienced in our mind. Whether it is a sensory experience, like seeing a stone, or a thought, or a feeling, like that of joy, and often a hybrid, like enjoying the reflection of sunlight on a multicolored stone while thinking about which type of stone it could be. In short, life as we know it is made up of embodied experience in one way or another.

Fortunately, my training as a physicist has taught me to not hesitate simplifying anything down to a few strokes of a pen as a starting point, before filling in more detail where and when necessary. Any two concepts can be connected by labeling them A and B, and then drawing a line or an arrow between them, showing "what relates to what", or by drawing circles around them, showing "what includes what" in some way, to mention only some possibilities. Fig. 48 below provides such a picture, taken from the front page of the Science Section of the New York Times on April 29, 1997.

A week earlier I was interviewed by Jim Gorman, who had called me to see whether I would be interested in talking about my ideas concerning physics and consciousness. The trigger was that my friend and colleague Roger Shepard and I had given a presentation in the second Tucson conference in a series called "Toward a Science of Consciousness", less than a year before, which resulted in an article titled "Turning 'The Hard Problem' Upside Down & Sideways" in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, No. 4, 1996, pp. 313-329. The "Hard Problem" here refers to "The Hard Problem of Consciousness", mentioned in the caption of Fig. 42 in Log Entry #014, a concept introduced by David Chalmers during the first Tucson conference in 1994.

While the NYT article made the news only on 4/29, 1997, it is gratifying to see that our 1996 paper is still being discussed as having made a major contribution to the new wave of consciousness studies in the nineties. In "The Blind Spot, Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience", a book published earlier this year by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser & Evan Thompson, they start the section "A Science of Consciousness in Which Experience Really Matters" [pp.218-220] with:

Three decades ago, when David Chalmers first coined the term “the hard problem of consciousness” and called attention to its importance, a few scientists made the bold suggestion that the intractability of that problem within what we are calling the Blind Spot means that we need to reframe science in order to investigate consciousness. In two independent papers, published in the same issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies in 1996, astrophysicist Piet Hut and cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard, and neuroscientist Francisco Varela, made the case for a major overhaul of the science of consciousness based on recognizing the primacy of experience.

This was the context and the first topic Jim asked me about during our very amicable conversation over breakfast, around the corner from where I lived.

I had brought a notepad, since as a physicist I always prefer sketching out ideas on a blackboard, and a piece of paper is the next best thing. I'm glad I did. In my publication record of a couple hundred scientific articles, the picture that I drew that morning is still unique for me in that it got produced, submitted, accepted, and published, all within one week.

But seriously, this spontaneously drawn picture helped me too, to see more clearly what I had earlier been trying to express in words to Jim. It contains the central elements of how most of us in a Western culture view the world, and our place in the world, for our body as well as our mind.

Starting with matter O

To start with, we tend to consider ourselves as having a body and a mind, both of which are located in a very small corner within a huge Universe. That overarching Home of ours is well over a hundred trillion trillion times the size of our body. As for locating our mind, whether in our brain or in our body as a whole, or perhaps in an area around our body, most people would probably not imagine our mind being much larger than, say, one tenth of a trillionth of a trillionths of the size of the Universe that makes up our personal little corner of the world.

The outer rectangle in Fig. 48, labeled O, stands for the observable Universe (just imagine that it would be stretched by the large number mentioned above). The term "observable Universe" is what we astrophysicists use to indicate that part of the Universe that has become visible to us since the Big Bang. Anything further away is literally still terra incognita, an area from which neither light nor any other carrier of information has been able to reach us yet, given the finite speed of light.

Within our observable Universe, we consider the body of an individual person to be part of objective reality, hence the label O: the body as a material entity, objectively present in the material world. Here "objective" means: anyone one with a normally functioning body and mind would agree that the person depicted is standing there in front of an equally objectively present chair.

So far so good, but how can we depict the mind of that person? Would it even be correct to say that it has a physical location? Strictly speaking, perhaps not. Philosophers might want to call that a category mistake. But most physicists and biologists, viewing our minds as some kind of emergent property of the very complex systems that our bodies are, would almost by definition point to our bodies as, at least roughly, the location of our minds -- and so would most people, at least in our Western culture.

But to make room for a mind in our picture in a very simple way, I borrowed the device of a thought bubble, as used in cartoons, comics, and animations. The bubble depicted in the figure is labeled S, which stands for the subjective nature of one person's mind, which is not accessible to others. In addition, we cannot see our own head without using a mirror or taking a picture, which led me to draw only part of the person's body as visible in the S bubble.

Starting with mind S

Even though we started with the material world as the container of our bodies, and of any other physical object for that matter, we cannot as individuals be certain of the objective existence of matter. If I see a chair, I see an image of a chair, which makes me conclude that there must be an object looking like a chair, which is most likely objectively present in that location. Just by closing our eyes for a second, it is completely clear that the visual impression that we are aware of in our mind is not the material chair, but a mental awareness of visual aspects that I consider as an indication of the presence of a chair.

The same is true for sound, smell, taste or touch. We can lose or diminish the vividness of their presence. We can even replace them by going into a virtual reality in which we feel/sense that we are in a different reality altogether. Whatever we can ever experience are . . . experiences, stirrings in our mind. We simply cannot put a rock in our mind, though we can investigate a rock in great detail, and construct in our mind a very reliable understanding of many aspects of that rock as it is experienced.

The crucial point here is that we do not have empirical access to any form of matter, where empirical is defined as given in experience (see Log Entry #003 for a more detailed discussion). Of course, for all practical purposes, it makes sense to identify the physical presence of an object with the sense impressions we receive from that object. But strictly speaking, if we define our mind as the realm in which we experience anything, be it sense impressions or thoughts, feelings, memories, etc., then in terms of direct experiences, we can *never* leave the thought bubble S depicted in Fig. 48.

Where, then, are material objects located, from an empirical point of view, in our figure? Not in O, since each object in O that we want to empirically investigate only shows up as an experience in our mind, in S. This simple conclusion is illustrated in Figs. 48 and 49 in two ways.

First, even though the body and mind shown in the figure are located within the much larger realm of O, the one and *only* part of the figure to which we have direct access is the S bubble. As in the case of virtual reality, our feelings and any other experiences we may have are real feelings and real experiences. In contrast, the physical world that we think we directly experience as O, outside our mind S, does not have this kind of reality status. It is not empirically real. Instead, it is a constructed world, informed by our experiences, and constructed in our mind.

Since it is constructed by us, in that respect it is not different from the way the world in a novel is constructed. To indicate this lack of empirical accessibility, I symbolically used a few slanted lines to cross out O, as a realm we cannot obtain empirical cognition about. We can talk about it, we can decide to agree about its existence, and we can use our knowledge encoded in the theoretical structure O, but we cannot have direct access to it. It has the nature and function of a map. This of course raises the question of where that map is located. This is our second question.

Given that we do experience what we call physical objects, if those experiences are not located in O, they need to be located somewhere in S, symbolic for our whole mind. Where? Let's make an inventory of S, our mind. What do we find there? Fantasies, memories, expectations, thoughts, feelings of all kinds, moods, you name it; and of course in addition to all those "inner" experiences, in S we also find all of our "outer" experiences. While we consider the latter to be direct experiences of the outer world, nonetheless, they are still experiences so they have to take up some special quarters inside S. That "outer" realm of experiences is indicated by the rectangle O', lying fully within S, and corresponding closely, we think and we hope, to the postulated but totally inaccessible realm O.

Ending with mind S'

The only conclusion we can draw is that the chair we think we see is the chair inside O', and so is our body insofar as we consider it to be "in the world out there", inside O'. Of course, when we are hungry or cold or when we feel happy or relaxed, those feelings can directly occur outside O', as "inner" feelings, but still inside S. But as soon as we ask what the location is of our empty stomach, which we think causes our hunger, we switch to the "outer" realm O', located deep within S.

It may take quite a while to track all these arguments, allowing ourselves to become familiar with some of the unexpected implications. But when we follow the logical consequences of the definition of a mind as the space or realm in which experiences take place, we have no choice but to switch some of the polarities in our inner/outer dualities. What we normally consider to be an "outer" world in which we move around, is effectively "inner", as O' contained within our mind S as a whole. And what we normally consider to be "inner" feelings, memories, etc., don't have a place inside O', so we have to conclude that all those inner experiences must lie in the "outer" parts of S, outside O'.

But we are not finished yet. One final exploration has been left out so far. If we deal most directly with our bodies only within O', what happens when we consciously try to deal with our mind? Well . . . there *seems* to be only one logical conclusion: we will have to draw a thought bubble S' accompanying our body inside O'. [Note: as we have seen already above, there *is* a more logical conclusion, namely that S is the real mind, which is typically overlooked]. When we talk about "my mind" or "my consciousness" we talk about a mental companion of our empirically accessible body in O'. And the only place we can find in O' is . . . S', the objectified version of what S is within O -- objectified in that we have to give it the same status as other objects within O'.

In other words, we have empirical access to the chair that we tend to locate in O through our copy of the chair in O', which is part of a set of experiences in our mind S. Similarly, we have access to our own body located in O through the copy of our own body which we deal with in O'. And since we consider our mind S to be something that accompanies our body in O, we have to be consistent in dealing with our mind through the contents of our mind that we have to locate in S', the objectified mind that seems to accompany our experience of our body in O'.

But now we are reaching a very strange conclusion. We have to admit that there are *two* very different ways of talking about "our" mind. There is the "outer" mind S, the sum total of all of our experiences. And then there is the "inner" mind S', the one we point to if we talk about our mind, some of us pointing to our head, some to our heart, depending mostly on our culture.

What we actually are using, as our mind that contains all of our experiences, is S. In contrast, S' is a  projection of what we think is going on in our mind S. In that sense, S' is our map of S, just as O' is a map. The big difference is that O' is a purely constructed map, made up without any access to the imaginary O, whereas S' is a map that is produced based on our actual access to S.

Why don't we point in all directions away from ourselves, as "outer" as we can indicate, when asked to locate our mind? The answer is that while we are the users of our mind S, that use is so tacit and so fully transparent, that we are left no choice but to point to S', the objectified and thus reified image of S, that has been made into an object S' within the realm O' of all other experienced material objects.

Jim Gorman quoted me at the end of his figure caption as "Dr. Hut argues that when S and S' are conflated, confusion reigns." I am still grateful to Jim for his keen questioning, which forced me to show my cards and come up with a "creation myth" of an objective world O, a kind of inaccessible paradise. This in contrast to a "mundane reality" O', lurking in a personal copy of a posited reality, a tapestry densely woven from empirical "outer" data, and "inner" data that are at least partly personally and culturally determined. The latter are always tacitly present but for a large part never acknowledged.

Connections with our initial experiments

In entries #003 through #005, we first explored the realm of experiences S, which the German philosopher Husserl opened up in a systematic way through his choice of epoché. We then went beyond S, so see what remains when we drop the duality of subject/object polarization, following hints provided by the Japanese philosopher Nishida. In doing so, we caught our first glimpse of a nondual reality, as a realm of sheer appearance. Like O, it was postulated to enclose the realm of pure experience S, and like O, it went beyond subjectivity, but unlike O, it *also* went beyond objectivity. To make any sense of this will require a detailed analysis, which will take much of the current Part 3.

At the end of Log Entry #005, I decided to dedicate the following several entries to a semi-popular introduction of the way theories in physics have evolved during the four centuries of modern science. This would grow out to seven entries in total, more than I initially expected, in that way naturally forming Part 2. In each of those entries, I dedicated special sections to making explicit parallels between theory formation in the history of modern physics and possible theory formation in a new science of mind. My sole aim was to lay the foundations of theory formation for science as a whole, starting with many worked-out examples of natural science, as an inspiration for our still-to-be-worked-out examples of a science of mind.

While writing log entries #006 through #012, several friends and colleagues asked me why I did not write more about the so interesting and more juicy experiments that I had just started to sketch. My answer was always: we didn't have yet enough of a sound basis on which to erect theoretical towers. By now we have established enough of a foundation to move forward with the experiments introduced around the ideas of Husserl and Nishida.

In the rest of the current Part 3 we will explore in far more detail what we could only begin to see in log entries #003 through #005, namely two ways of "going beyond". First to go beyond matter, by seeing how all forms of matter are given in the mind. Second, to go beyond "my mind" as opposed to "external objects", to begin to explore a nondual realm of sheer appearance, in which both subjects and objects are forms of appearance, and as such deeply and fundamentally related.

As summarized already in Log Entry #000, in this FEST Log, of which you are now reading Log Entry #015, my proposal is to start a new form of science, not directly modeled on the way natural science studies matter, but rather starting from the same core methodology. As I wrote in the previous Log Entry #014, the three elements that I consider essential in science do not include many aspects that people think about immediately when hearing the word "science".

For a science of mind, key experiments do not involve any machines, or any other material tools. In the realm of mind studies, mind tools are called for. This stands in direct analogy to the study of the stars, which use telescopes as appropriate tools, and to the study of biological cells, for which tools are microscopes.

For a science of mind, theory may or may not involve forms of mathematics, that question is still to be decided, depending on what natural form theories will take in this new field, over time. However, three things are clear: working hypotheses will remain working hypotheses; a self-governing community of peers will remain a self-governing community of peers; and experiments will remain the ultimate judge over any theory, to deserve the label "science", in my opinion. This is implied in the label "science of mind" for the upper right quadrant in Fig. 43.

Science and contemplation

The foundational phase, Parts 1 and 2 in the FEST Log, was focused on a comparison between the established science of matter and a possible science of mind. The former got started by Galileo and his contemporaries. The latter, to the best of my knowledge, has not yet been attempted in its full generality. The comparison between the two implies comparing the top two quadrants depicted here in Fig. 43.

The main theme in the FEST Log, Part 3, of which this is the second log entry, will be a different comparison. Instead of taking two forms of science, one yet to be firmly established, I will now focus on two recognized human activities, both with roots reaching back through millennia of history, namely science and contemplation, as shown in Fig. 44.

Contemplation so far has not yet produced a shared global community, the way science has. Nor are its deepest insights shared in the open way as done in science, quite likely initially for good reasons, since unrestricted knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The science community, too, has developed structures that aim at preventing misuse. For example, publication of recipes for developing biological weapons of various kinds is excluded from the otherwise "open source" attitude of science. But the basic approach remains to share scientific results, with only some exceptions.

Historically there have been many esoteric forms of contemplation that have started from a basic approach of secrecy, not that different from engineering guilds with their trade secrets. But in these musings I am aware that I am stepping outside my area of expertise, and this kind of discussion is something I hope to see developing soon in a future community of peers for a science of mind.

No science of matter without a prehistory of engineering

As discussed at some length already in Log Entry #002, and further in Log Entry #006, there would be no science of matter, had there not been a flourishing history of activities, spanning millennia, before Galileo started to formulate the scientific method in its first outline. Now that we have given a name to all four squares in our 2x2 matrix, we can draw a few arrows between them, to illustrate their connections in Fig. 45.

No science of mind without a science of matter

From the start, I have found my main guidelines in the great success story of natural science, the science of matter. The main challenge has been to see how we can extract the core ingredients of its success as a guide toward starting a science of mind, without smuggling in elements that are only relevant for the study of matter.

I have been working on this challenge, on and off, ever since I came across some simple meditation instructions when I was 17. Almost immediately I was struck by the similarities with previous activities I had engaged in from age 12 onward, such as building my own telescope, performing chemical experiments, and modding older motorcycles, to name a few.  I noticed that, hey, meditation seemed no different from all those other activities, the only difference was the nature of the laboratory I was using, together with some friends.

Instead of the blacksmith shop of the father of a friend, where we tuned our motorcycles, or the shed in which we worked with chemicals, my lab now was . . .  my own mind. Other than that, the instructions were remarkably similar. Make sure you clean the space you are working in, having your tools at hand. Practice to make sure that you know how to use those tools. The only difference was that both workspace and tools were no longer material, but mental.

To my surprise, when I tried to share my discovery, nobody seemed to grok what it was that I was trying to express, while groping for words -- at that time I had zero vocabulary to express what it was, that I saw so clearly in my intuition. Fast forward 54 years: although my vocabulary improved, by and large reactions are still similar, although more and more people I talk with are now beginning to show some degree of cautious interest.

Let's return to the beginning of this section. How can we hope to extract the core ingredients of the success of science, to use as a guide toward starting a science of mind, without smuggling in elements that are only relevant for the study of matter?  After summarizing those ingredients in Log Entry #001, we got a quick preview, more like a teaser, in log entries #003 to #005 from the side of experiments, to get our feet wet, followed by a switch to theory building in Log Entry #006.

Finally, in order to start laying it all out, log entries #008 through #012 showed a picture book of theory formation in physics, the simplest and most fundamental branch of science of matter. Fig. 46 indicates my approach of trying to be as conservative as we possibly can, in trying to see what we can salvage from a science of matter, before plunging into the uncharted territory of a science of mind.

No science of mind without a prehistory of contemplation

Finally, to complete the connectivity of the four quadrants in our 2x2 matrix, we can add the last hinge, between contemplation and science of mind. Fig. 47 shows how a science of mind naturally should start with the resources offered by a hundred generations of written texts, from around 500 BC onward, in Europe as well as Asia.  This enormous treasure trove bears witness to the development of mind engineering, no less innovative and fascinating as the history of matter engineering.

Let me make clear that I am not directly comparing contemplation with engineering.  Each has their own goals and methods.  But in both cases there have been prescientific attempts, perhaps more properly called protoscientific, which have come close to fulfilling all three essential elements of the methodology of science. In engineering, Archimedes is an example of someone who came close to inventing and applying forms of calculus, before Newton and Leibniz did so.

Even more so in contemplation, working with what is sometimes called "view and practice" is very parallel to "theory and experiment", and indeed both go hand in hand with contemplative training as well. And the use of working hypotheses, dropping any trace of belief or disbelief is a standard practice in contemplation. To give just one reference, from medieval Christian mystics: The 14th century book "The Cloud of Unknowing", written by an anonymous author is a perfect example. The central idea of a working hypothesis, of dropping both belief and disbelief, to reach a state of unbelief combined with undisbelief, in short, of Un-knowing, is already present in the title, well before the start of modern science!

The one element that neither engineering before 1600, nor contemplation so far, has included is the presence of a world-wide self-governing community, whose members strive to find agreement among each other. In many if not most cultures, inquisitive young contemplatives who dared to challenge the existing status quo were met with a cold if not aggressive attitude, sometimes life threateningly so. I don't think there have been many self-governing long-lasting contemplative communities that avoided the development of a priest class that was trying to limit their freedom.

In addition to the problem of restrictions on self-government within contemplative circles, the general lack of collaboration between different brands of contemplation was another problem, placing them in a prescientific stage of development. Simply put, when scientists realize that there are different ways to approach the same problem, there is a centripetal tendency to sort things out. It is my impression that by and large among contemplatives the main tendency is centrifugal.

As I mentioned before, in making such statements I am stepping outside my area of expertise, and I very much look forward to discussing these problems in a future community of peers for a science of mind. For now, let me stick my neck out: when different contemplative cultures met each other, the general reaction was either avoidance or debates in which each side tried to prove that their opinions were "right", or at least closer to reality than that of the other. In contrast, it would be very odd to see different kinds of physics being developed in different places, without serious attempts to find ways to transform each one into the other.

Instead, as I mentioned in Log Entry #012 in the section titled "Mapping the structure of atoms", when quantum mechanics was discovered almost simultaneously in very different forms, immediately the search was on. The leading physicists set out to analyze the differences, with the result that in just one year they developed an understanding of how the two approaches could be transformed into each other without contradictions.

What next?

In our next Log Entry #016, we will start to sketch a most rudimentary picture of the interplay between science of matter and science of mind. And we will do so in a single map of the nature of reality -- so simple that only children, scientists, and contemplatives would dare to go there.

Science has given humanity enormous powers, for better and for worse. On the internet one can easily find many discussions about what the greatest applications of science are, the most helpful as well as the most harmful. But really, each of those choices are like Big Fish caught by a single fishing rod called Science. Science's biggest gift is the methodology of Science.

Science is based on a clever balance between inviting individuals to use their subjective freedom to come up with new theories, while making sure to then use intersubjective agreement to filter the products of that freedom. The results of this growing body of shared knowledge are passed on to future generations through a wide variety of summaries in the form of textbooks on many different levels of expertise.

The recipe for producing science

The methodology of science can be stated very simply:

Science is produced by a self-governing community of scientists, using increasingly detailed working hypotheses for developing theories that are tested at each next step in increasingly accurate experiments.

For more details, see Log Entry #001 in Part 1, in particular the use of what I called the "scientific ratchet": designing refined experiments to test improved theories, and in turn further improving theories, based on the results of more accurate experiments.

After each cycle of the scientific ratchet, experiment trumps theory in a *preliminary* judgment of whether the theory is adequate. And after intersubjective agreement is reached between different teams of experimentalists, the scientific community makes a *consensus* judgment as to what will be passed on to the next generation in terms of textbooks,

Note: many scientists tend to call the result of that form of consensus "objective reality", but that is a misnomer. There is no alien observer looking down at our Universe from the outside to tell us what is "really true". The best we can do is to improve the accuracy of our measurements, in a succession of intersubjective agreements.

Another central aspect of science, also discussed in #001, is the use of working hypotheses, based on *suspending* judgment. In short: don't believe and don't disbelieve any working hypothesis, but keep an open mind.

In short, science is all about judgment. Investigations start with suspending judgment, then moving on to preliminary judgments, followed by stages of reaching consensus, first locally and finally globally.

The key is knowing when to let go of judgment, how to invoke judgment with increasing degrees of certainty, and last but not least to always remain open for further refinement or even replacement of theories when new experiments force such a change. In other words, at any given time, scientists decide together upon a judicious choice.

Prescientific recipes

The old recipes, in use for millennia, were quite different. Let's call these recipes for engineering, to give them a very broad and general name. Using that name, some of our fellow mammals, like beavers, were pulling off engineering feats ten million years ago, while some insects, like bees, did so even a hundred million years earlier. In short, the methodology was one of trial and error, helped by biological evolution at first, and later by cultural evolution in which the recipes were handed down across the generations, as described earlier in entries #000 and #008.

Human engineers learned from experience, while working with material objects, using material tools. Their activities were local, from families to guilds to tribes or countries. They never reached the kind of global form of organization that science provided, from its beginnings in the 17th century.

Another essential difference between science and engineering was the "open source" nature of science, to use a term made popular in the nineteen eighties for freely available software, but one that already applied to scientific publications centuries earlier.

Mathematics and physics, as well as other branches of natural science, are openly accessible if, and that may be a big if, you speak and read the languages in which the "open knowledge" are presented. In principle, anyone is free to learn those languages. Everything is open and available, provided there is the interest from the side of the individual, combined with opportunities provided by education. See also the discussion in the section "From engineering to science" in the FEST ManiFESTo, Log Entry #000.

The relationships between science and engineering are expressed in the middle column of Fig. 39, in a high level bird's eye view of human knowledge production regarding the material side of reality.

Matter and mind: two aspects of reality

Even without any background in science or engineering we can easily see that every moment of our life we are dealing with two different aspects of whatever happens around us: a matter aspect, such as our body, operating in the physical realm, and a mind aspect, operating in a realm where thoughts, feelings, mental phenomena in general, constantly appear and disappear. Our body has a location in physical space, while what we call our mind seems to have space for whatever mental phenomena appear at any given moment.

In our culture, many people find it difficult to resist the temptation to immediately view our mental reality as some kind of illusion produced by our brain, useful for survival in a physical realm, the only realm that is really real, objectively present. But if we reflect on the fact that our empirical knowledge of anything material is given purely within experience, something that happens in our mind, and that our mind is clearly associated with our body, we see a pair of concepts that depend upon each other, body and mind, like two sides of the coin of reality.

A truly scientific start of investigations in the nature of our mind would accept the empirical fact that mind and matter are codependent on the level of everyday observations. Indeed, any culture on Earth has started from that observational fact, even though different cultures have drawn quite different implications from that dual nature of reality. Our largely shared belief that brains produce consciousness and thus in some way what we call our mind, is exactly that, a belief. We are still very far from an empirical understanding of how a brain can "produce" consciousness, if it does; this is a completely open question for now.

To be specific, the implicit working hypothesis of neuroscience is that mind is produced as some kind of emergent phenomenon of matter, which is a very reasonable working hypothesis to start with, since it is undeniable that there is a strong correlation between brain activity and mental activity. The problem is that generations of students were taught that the working hypothesis was more or less self obvious, throughout the twentieth century.  For most scientists and students alike, it became a belief, a dogma, rather than a working hypothesis. The result is depicted in Fig. 40.

The great success of neuroscience

In the last quarter century two important new trends have begun to soften the dogmatic stance reflected in Fig. 40.  One is the amazing speed of progress of neuroscience. For the first time in history we can begin to actually probe correlations between what someone sees or thinks with various techniques of studying brain activity. We are now at the point where material tools measuring material processes in the brain can begin to detect aspects of mental processes. A huge step forwards, and offering many applications -- as always for better and worse. But apart from applications, what are the implications?

On the one hand, this may seem to confirm the working hypothesis that brains produce minds. On the other hand, the more detailed our studies of microscopic connections of the hundred billion neurons and their more than a hundred trillion synapses become, the more we realize how very far we still are from a deep understanding of the nature of the correlations that have been found.

Actually, we really don't yet know what the nature of causal arrows may be between matter and mind.  In quantum mechanics any trace of mechanical causality has evaporated. This sent shock waves through the physics community, from which it still hasn't recovered given the plethora of competing interpretations. Wouldn't it be foolish to make the same mistake with respect to the mind/brain relationship, and have future generations shake their head in disbelief when coming across twentieth and twenty-first century writings in neuroscience?

Note that I am *not* arguing that consciousness is related to quantum effects in the brain; everything on small scales is related to quantum effects, that's not the point. The lesson I draw from quantum mechanics replacing classical mechanics around 1925 is far more general. For centuries scientists interpreted the validity of an approximately correct mechanical model of material reality as a dogmatic view that reality = mechanics, which turned out to be completely false. Shouldn't we be a bit more careful around 2025 when translating the validity of correlations between brain and mind/consciousness as a dogmatic view that reality = matter?

Fig. 41 gives a symbolic sketch of how neuroscience, as one of many branches of natural science, has its sights set on looking "under the hood" of the mind to see how it "works". It may some day, and it may then offer convincing arguments pro or con for the view that brains produce or cause minds in some way. But until we reach or come close to that level of insight, it would be a pity if the prejudice against there being room for a science of mind would continue.

The hard problem of consciousness

The mind-body problem in its modern form was defined by Descartes, and was taught as being a problem ever since to a dozen generations of students in philosophy, up to the present. Given the growing gap between philosophy and natural science (which used to be called natural philosophy!), in due time fewer and fewer scientists were even aware of the fact that historically there had been a perception of there being a problem.

It was the great merit of the philosopher David Chalmers to translate the presentation of Descartes' ideas into a completely modern form, in a way that not only was understandable to modern scientists, but appealing and inspiring. It did also help that five years later the movie "The Matrix" came out, making a big splash, and getting the idea of virtual reality across to a larger public, showing vividly the notion that "objective" reality may be quite different from experienced reality.

The success of David Chalmers' educational move was at least partly due to his choice of the gripping label "the hard problem of consciousness", which he chose for the question why information processing in the brain is accompanied with conscious experience of the person whose brain we are talking about. Wouldn't it be equally possible for us to live in the world without any conscious awareness, and be equally effective in all that we do?  There is of course the question "what is the nature of consciousness". But in addition there is the question "why is there consciousness" in the first place.

It is related to the question of machine consciousness. If an AI becomes better and better at emulating the behavior of humans, should we conclude that there is at least some budding form of consciousness that is accompanying such skills?  Chalmers posited that the whole question of studying the brain/mind connection, or more precisely the brain/consciousness connection, is intrinsically even more hard than the (already very hard) question of how the neuronal processes in the brain translate into behavior of the body, including anything that we tend to label "subjective".

Recasting in modern terms, with modern ramifications of the mind/body problem, added a new twist to the field of neuroscience. Having an outsider telling you in so many words that all the problems you are so busy working on are relatively easy with respect to the central question, of how a purely material system can generate in some way a conscious experience, was like a clarion call, if not a call to arms.

However, given that the earliest Buddhist literature already talked about the relationship between body and mind, and given that roughly around that time Greek philosophers took up such questions in somewhat similar ways, from Plato on if not earlier, the label "hard problem" in itself was nothing new. In fact, it was a very direct rekindling of an old puzzle.  Fig. 42 depicts the alternative conceptualization of the upper right corner in the two by two matrix comparing universal versus non-universal vertically and matter and mind horizontally.

The next step

In this log entry, we have taken four steps toward a science of mind, each depicted in one of the four figures above. The first step was to look at the history of natural science, the science of matter, in Fig. 39, to see whether we could draw a parallel for a future science of mind.

The second step was to begin to fill in the upper right quadrant, as shown in Fig. 40.  The vast majority of scientists working in any field of natural science immediately respond with "impossible!". Why this strong reaction?  For them hearing "science of mind", fully automatically translates into hearing "science of mind treating the mind as if it was some kind of matter". And of course, that *would* be impossible. This is why in Log Entry #001 I whittled down the core methodology of science to what could be applied to *either* matter or mind.

The third step became necessary when scientists began to understand more of the structure and processes within the human brain. At this point they could no longer ignore the fact that studying those material properties would only make sense by making correlations with mental processes. In Fig. 41 the first attempts at looking for correlations are shown as looking "under the hood" of the complex mechanism of the brain.

Finally, the fourth step is depicted in Fig. 42 where the question of taking a scientific methodology, designed for studies of matter, and applying that to studies of mind, is called into question. In attempts to set up detailed studies of consciousness, especially in the nineteen nineties when that field went through a period of exponential growth, the "hard problem" gave reason to pause.

We will take the next step in the next log entry, where we will start afresh in populating the two blank quadrants in Fig. 39. We have started to do that already in Log Entry #003, but we will now proceed more slowly and carefully.

I started this FEST log on leap day, five months ago, with Log Entry #000, a maniFESTo for the FEST program.

The name FEST can be read in two different ways, as Fully Engaged Science and Technology, as well as Fully Empirical Science and Technology. Here the words "science" and "technology" apply to science of matter, using technologies based on matter, as well as science of mind, using technologies based on mind. Both forms of science can use the very effective methodology developed for natural science, each in their own domain.

Rather than a project, FEST is a program, one that aims at initiating a full extension of natural science. To the best of my knowledge this has not yet been attempted in a fully consistent way. From the start my intention has been to be as conservative as I possibly can, while following the established core principles of science. I have tried to learn from the history of science about the ways research has often meandered, but typically in the end found novel ways to obtain deeper ways of understanding—of matter in the past few centuries, and perhaps of mind as well in the near future: an obvious opportunity, and worth a try.

While neuroscience has made enormous progress, with benefits for pure science as well as for medical applications, it is a hybrid discipline, driven mostly by deep investigations of the material properties of the brain and the nervous system in general. While the ultimate aim is to understand the nature of mind and consciousness, we are still far removed from that goal. A science of mind could serve as a complementary approach.

Leaving the mind/body question open for now

Whether a mind is a complex form of emergent properties arising from a brain, or whether consciousness in whatever form can be seen as more fundamental than matter, or whether the two are complementary aspects of reality, or whether their relation is of a type we cannot even guess, science in its current state cannot tell us. All we can do is keep an open mind, designing working hypotheses without believing or disbelieving in them, deepening our knowledge of the phenomena, matter phenomena and mind phenomena, while more pieces of the puzzle fall into place. This is the way science works.

A science of mind should avoid any premature choice among the four options listed above, since in any case, reality is likely to be far more interesting than anything we can imagine it to be, as the history of science has shown us over and over again. Therefore I would bet on the fourth possibility, based on the fact that the majority of genuinely novel results could not have been guessed, simply because too little was known yet about the types of possible outcomes.

The fact that by far most scientists take it for granted that matter is the sole basis of reality is a very interesting sociological or ethnographic fact in itself, worth more research than has been given to it yet. However, opinions as to what is real don't carry any weight. We have seen a large fraction of physicists being fully convinced that the natural world is structured like a clockwork mechanism following Newton's laws, while trying to convince others around them to accept it on their authority. Overinterpreting one's success is all too human.

The classical mechanics era lasted for two and a half centuries until quantum mechanics replaced its picture of matter with a far more interesting and far more fluid notion: matter at its core is based on a playful mixture of actual and potential elements. Nobody could have guessed. But when theory and experiment came into agreement, as judged by a self-governing community of peers, scientists accepted the new picture, even without understanding what it all meant. That is the incredible strength of the scientific method, and of the integrity of scientists following that method. They are willing to junk what had been established wisdom for centuries, in the light of new evidence. We may wish that more human endeavors would work that way.

An open kitchen

While considering writing one or more books about FEST, I decided to take a different route, inspired by the model of an open kitchen, where you can see exactly what is happening while a meal is being prepared. Choosing this route gave me two significant advantages.

First, it did not allow me to erase my original tracks, given that each entry of my log would be set in stone upon publication, two or three times per month. It instilled in me a discipline of carefulness and honesty, while building up FEST as a new program. Whenever I feel forced to change my mind because of new experimental or theoretical findings, or because I learned to see things in a deeper way, I make it a point to acknowledge this change. I refer back to earlier log entries for context but without modifying them. Instead, I add footnotes with a pointer to later entries for further clarification.

Second, it allowed me to share my insights immediately, rather than waiting for years until a book manuscript is accepted, reviewed, going into print, and reviewed in the literature. Essentially, this log acts as a collection of preliminary versions, similar to preprints commonly used in natural sciences, where its purpose is to facilitate early peer review before the articles are formally published.

To make it easier to browse through older ranges in the FEST log, I have decided to bundle the first 6 entries, #000 through #005, into one document, "FEST log, Part 1", and to bundle the next 8 entries, #006 through #013, into one document, "FEST log, Part 2". The original entries will remain where they are now in the log, so they can still be found there, when jumping from a later log entry to a particular place in the log.

Structure of Part 1

My aim for initiating the FEST program is twofold. First, to provide a worked-out example of what a science of mind could be like, something I have now started to explore in this current FEST log. Second, to provide a seed for a community, structured in a scientific way, as self-governing and peer-based. In Log Entry #001, I have outlined what I see as the basic elements of any form of science, regardless of the subject matter, whether physical matter or the human mind.

Following Log Entry #001, which lists an abstract summary, Log Entry #002 provides a concrete historical view of how natural science got consolidated in the 17th century. Log entries #003 through #005 very briefly touch upon experiments using our mind as a lab. I have singled out two, given by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl and the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida.

Structure of Part 2

After giving an initial taste of experimenting with our minds using our minds, I address the task of developing theories to guide further experimentation, starting in Log Entry #006. At any step along the way of developing a science of mind, I have tried to be as conservative as I could possibly be, by taking off from natural science as the only example we have, when defining science as I have done in Log Entry #001. It is tempting to come up with wild and unproven radical ideas as to what the structure and processes are of our minds. My choice, rather, is to take the simplest extrapolation of approaches that have already been taken. Only if they really don't work, I could be convinced to try something different. This is my understanding of how science works.

To illustrate this, in Log Entry #006 I began to provide examples of the conservative ways in which natural scientists have found themselves paradoxically forced to develop ever more radical theories, in the light of convincing experiments. In doing so, I have chosen to give a historical overview of theory formation and evolution in physics, the most elementary field of natural science. Entries #006 and #007 set the stage by sketching the trajectories from Newton through Maxwell to Einstein, spanning a period of two and a half centuries, while pointing out potential lessons to be learned for starting up a theory of mind.

Not satisfied that the sketches given so far could find enough traction to guide actual theory formation in a science of mind, I was looking for more concrete and precise ways to analyze theory formation in physics. Starting with Log Entry #008, following a time-honored tradition in physics, I designed a new type of diagram in order to keep track of what happened when and how. It was my attempt to trace the twists and turns of the reactions of theoretical physicists whenever radically new experiments told them to overhaul their ideas.

To the best of my knowledge these diagrams present a novel way to trace problems and solutions in the historical processes of diversification and unification in physics. It took me five entries, from #008 through #012, to reach the present. After starting with the prescientific mechanics of Aristotle, I discussed the first truly scientific theory of Newton, and via a series of further steps of increasing complexity I reached our current best theory of the structure and processes characterizing matter, as incorporated in the standard model of particle physics.

Follow-up

The current log entry, #013, forms the last log entry of Part 2 of the FEST log entries. As mentioned above, the original log will continue to grow, leaving all the previous entries in place.

My current plans are to provide at least two more Parts. Where Parts 1 and 2 were almost entirely preparatory in spirit, I want to let it all come alive in Parts 3 and 4. Returning to the very sketchy treatment of two types of experiments in log entries #003 through #005, I will provide more context as well as more guidelines for actual experimentation. Alongside, I will explore ways of theory formation to make sense of various outcomes of those experiments, following the inspiration that Part 2 can provide. Specifically, I will introduce several new diagrams as candidates for a science of mind, along the lines of what I presented in my "Picture book" of physics theories, starting in Log Entry #008.

Outlook

Finally, starting in Parts 3 and 4, I will address the one aspect mentioned in Log Entry #001 that I have not yet touched upon in describing the essential ingredients of science: the formation of a self-governing community of peers. I have postponed bringing that point up in order to give a sufficiently detailed description of what kind of seed it is that might possibly sprout a full-blown community around it. Let me end this log entry with one more characterization of what FEST is, in addition to how I described it at the start of the current log entry.

FEST is a program, aimed at starting a community that in turn can suggest and carry out many projects in an interdisciplinary way. As with any interdisciplinary project, it actually requires more discipline from the side of the participants compared to disciplinary projects, within any one of the usual academic disciplines. Because there are few established conventions in any new interdisciplinary field, there are neither training wheels nor guard rails for those setting up or joining such a new discipline. Hence, the additional discipline required when opening a new field of research.

The main challenges for FEST will be to encourage the development of a science of mind, and at the same time to discourage premature leaps of speculation—forms of speculation that cannot be tested with an agreed-upon methodology based on intersubjective peer review. In this I will try to follow the very successful example of natural science.

Toward the end of Log Entry #009, I introduced 1925 as the year that ended "classical physics", act 1 in the play of physics as the science of matter. That act started with the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687. During the subsequent 238 years, the accepted scientific worldview was that the material cosmos could be viewed as a mechanism. Not only that; any future state of the cosmos could in principle be derived from knowledge of the current state.

The opening of act 2 took place in 1925 with the discovery of quantum mechanics, which triggered a worldview in which matter did not behave at all like clockwork type deterministic mechanics. Instead, on atomic and subatomic scales, the best description was that matter and energy consist of discrete packages, quanta. Each such quantum exhibits a mysterious combination of potential and actual properties, rather than having only a potential or only an actual existence.

It is hard to overstate the shock that physicists experienced in 1925, when they were forced to accept the fact that their best model of material reality was now based on a kind of probabilistic mix of "real" and "possible" in ways not foreseen by anybody. I mentioned in Log Entry #010 that physicists knew, already in 1925, that they had entered a whole new era. What is more, it was an intermediate period, a kind of "Middle Ages" of an unusual type, where the people living in that period had already realized that it was a "middle" age.

I consider 1975 as marking the opening of yet another act of physics. Whereas the opening of act 2 ushered in a new period of bewilderment, 1975 marked the start of a much happier period. The enormous relief that came at the opening of act 3 stemmed from the fact that at last a new form of unification was possible: that of the standard model of particle physics. Almost overnight, a way was found to describe material reality as based on a set of related quantum fields, to be discussed below.

To put this in context, we can add a prescientific act 0, which opened with Aristotle's mechanics around 300 BC, an act that would last 2,000 years. It featured a split unification, one half of which described temporal motion in the Earthly realm, the other half eternal motion in the Heavens above the orbit of the Moon. After act 1, starting with Newton's unification of motion everywhere, and act 2, turning any notion of existence and motion upside down, act 3 resembled that of Aristotle: material reality was unified as governed by quantum fields, while spacetime remained the stage for gravity in its classic field form.

Material reality vs. reality of space and time

In quantum field theory, QFT, each elementary particle has its own field. There is an electron field, and each electron, as well as its antiparticle, the positron, can be viewed as a local excitation of the electron field. The electron field is present everywhere in the Universe. An approximate picture is to view that field as a kind of spacetime-filling ocean, with each electron a localized wave in that ocean. Similarly, each photon is an excitation of the electromagnetic field, also filling the whole Universe in space and time.

The interactions between electrons, as well as other electrically charged particles, and photons are described in quantum electrodynamics, QED. The best reference I know for getting a feel of what this all means, without using any mathematics, is the book "Waves in an impossible sea" by Matt Strassler, which I already referenced in Log Entry #010.

After 1975, any elementary particle that we know of, as well as its corresponding quantum field, forms part of the unification scheme of the standard model. The only exception is the gravitational field. The classical, pre-quantum description of that field is given by general relativity (GR) and we simply don't know what the quantum equivalent of GR is. One thing we *do* know about the gravitational field is that there is a medium in which the waves that can occur in that field propagate. It is the nothingness of empty spacetime. And when spacetime gets disturbed, its waves carry immaterial energy and momentum.

In contrast, for any of the quantum fields, each one corresponding to a particular elementary particle, we have no idea of what its medium "is". What is more, we don't even know whether it "exists", and what is more, we don't even know whether "existence" is an appropriate term.

If that sounds familiar, it should: we encountered the electromagnetic "aether" already in Log Entry #007, as the proposal by Maxwell to describe what the classical medium could be for his classical theory of electromagnetism. In Log Entry #009 we saw that roughly half a century later Einstein's special relativity ruled out any three-dimensional form of "aether" medium. And in Log Entry #011 the QED formalism gave us the mathematical medium of the QFT of electromagnetism, a new kind of four-dimensional spacetime-based "aether" with no clear physical interpretation except for it being the (non-existent?) carrier for photons.

After this prelude, we are ready to catch the meaning of the title of this section: "Material reality vs. reality of space and time". The first part refers to quantum field theories describing the dynamics of elementary particles. The second part describes gravity, operating in the dynamic medium of spacetime.

Disclaimer: what I have tried to summarize in simple terms is the established view in 2024. Before too long, deeper insight might arise that will describe space and time as side effects of a more fundamental theory than general relativity, and in that case the distinction between "material" and "immaterial" may disappear in the next unification.

Mining the history of physics, towards a science of mind

This log entry marks the conclusion of our "picture book" series, starting with Log Entry #008. We have made a series of five explorations, which together summarize the evolution of theory formation in physics, from Galileo's time to the present day. My intent was to map some of the twists and turns, disappointments and surprises, that have characterized the progress of natural science in all of its disciplines. Physics was a convenient place to start, being the oldest discipline, and the first to reach quantitative and accurate reproducible results.

The motivation for me to map fundamental progress in the most basic natural science, was to have at least one concrete example of how a branch of science has grown over time. In Log Entry #006 we started on a trek to search for candidate theories, to go with the two experiments discussed in Log Entry #005. Rather than coming up with ad hoc theories of what a theory of mind studying mind using only mind might look like, the most conservative approach I could think of was to try to find clues from the evolution of theories of matter, using material instruments, aided by the use of mathematics and thought experiments.

The narrative that unfolded in these five entries and the use of these kinds of diagrams are new, to the best of my knowledge. They form an example of what I have witnessed often during my work in interdisciplinary studies. While looking to find a path through the jungle of a whole new terrain, one can rely on inspecting various well-trodden paths in more familiar areas. In my experience, one can often discover new clues in the historical processes that led to older paths being constructed.

Down to details

Picture time! After the more than 1400 words used so far in this log entry, let's see whether a picture here can be worth more than a thousand words.

The first rays of light and hope after the 1925 shock of the discovery of the mystery of quantum mechanics, were symbolized in Log Entry #011 in Fig. 28, reproduced below. Around 1950 at least one of the known forces, electromagnetism, could be "quantized" to produce QED, quantum electrodynamics, as a relativistic quantum field theory, QFT. But the euphoria upon being able to make amazingly accurate calculations and predictions for electromagnetic interactions between charged particles and photons didn't last long. During the next twenty years, till 1970, neither the strong nor the weak interactions could be treated in the same way as QED, as a QFT.

In my attempt to propose a historical division in periods, always a haphazard enterprise, I proposed 1975 as the start of act 3, the discovery of the standard model of particle physics. During a short period spanning only a few years in the early seventies, the standard model was developed and tested as a model that unified all three non-gravitational forces into a single theory. The only field that could not be quantized yet, and therefore not be unified either, was the classical theory of general relativity. This is indicated in Fig. 30 with the three question marks.

Full Disclosure

In Fig. 30 I have glossed over a detail that is not important for the current level of exposition. For completeness, I could have replaced SI, for the strong interactions, with QCD, quantum chromodynamics as the name for the field theory version of SI. This would be following the same convention in which I replaced EM, for classical electromagnetism, with QED, for its field theoretical counterpart. The result is Fig. 31.

However, to be fully consistent I should also replace WI, for the weak interactions, with its field theoretical counterpart. The problem here is that while QCD corresponds to SI, there is no single QFT that corresponds to WI. Rather, the standard model is formed by a unification of QCD with another theory, modeling the electroweak interactions (EWI) that itself [https://phys.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/University_Physics/Radically_Modern_Introductory_Physics_Text_II_(Raymond)/20%3A_The_Standard_Model/20.03%3A_The_Electroweak_Theory] are a unification into one QFT, of EM and WI, the forces of electromagnetism and the weak interactions. I have depicted that situation in Fig. 32, for completeness, but in subsequent figures I will simplify things back to the style of Fig. 31.

Mapping the structure of atoms

Having sketched the theoretical background for the opening of act 3 of physics, followed by presenting a single picture, Fig. 32, it is time to ask "what does this buy me?" The answer is: for the first time in human history we not only know *that* matter around us consists of atoms, we also have arrived at a quantitatively accurate detailed picture of *what* is hiding inside atoms.

As often is the case, a terribly boring way of teaching what humanity has learned so far would be to provide a laundry list of the contents of atoms. This list would then have to be learned by heart by bored students at some time in their school days. Instead, let's take a quick walk through history, in order to see how this list was designed in steps, based on new discoveries at each step.

We can start our journey by traveling back in time to the beginning of the previous century. In 1904 the British physicist J.J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron, proposed a model for the contents of the atom, while wondering what to do with his electrons. It was called the "plum pudding model" of the atom in the popular press (Google tells me that plum pudding is an English dessert similar to a blueberry muffin). In that model the negatively charged electrons were embedded in an amorphous distribution of positive charge, surrounding the electrons like raisins in a plum pudding (or blueberries in a muffin).

Then, in 1911, Ernest Rutherford introduced a model that looked more like the solar system: it had a heavy nucleus in the center, with electrons orbiting around it. The motivation was the fact that electrons, when aimed with high speed at atoms, would occasionally scatter or even recoil at large angles from their original direction of motion, suggesting the presence of small heavy objects in the center of atoms.

Soon afterwards, in 1913, Niels Bohr proposed a model that featured some quantization aspects, in contrast to the previous two models that were purely classical. He posited that electrons circle the atomic nucleus, as in Rutherford's model, but only on specific orbits, like standing waves in a string, thereby introducing a discrete element in the model. Several other physicists proposed variations on this idea, in what later would be called the "old quantum theory", using "semi-quantum" approximations before 1925.

All of these models became obsolete in 1925 in one stroke, or more accurately, in two parallel strokes. That year saw the advent of two initially competing models, Heisenberg's matrix mechanics and Schrödinger's wave mechanics, that were quickly recognized as being equivalent, as we saw in Log Entry #010.

Immediately during and after 1925 the nature of the "electron cloud", filling the atom around the nucleus, was elucidated in detail. It took much longer to determine the nature of the nucleus itself. In 1932 neutrons were discovered, and it was realized that an atomic nucleus is built up of a tightly packed mix of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons, hence the name. Using the term tightly here is not an exaggeration: the size of a nucleus inside an atom can be compared to that of a flea inside a cathedral, spanning roughly one hundred thousandth of the width of an atom.

Soon afterwards, two new forces were discovered, both playing important roles inside atomic nuclei, simply called weak and strong interactions, respectively, in the order of their discoveries, as we saw in Log Entry #011. Their bland names indicated the surprise at their discovery and the initial uncertainty as to what they were. The uncertainty would last till 1970, and it was only when the standard model was completed that their roles in atomic nuclei were fully elucidated.

In short, and very much oversimplifying, since 1975 we know that protons and neutrons are each "blobs" of a mix of quarks and gluons. Quarks are components of protons and neutrons. They are much lighter than protons and neutrons, and gluons are massless: like photons, quanta of the electromagnetic field, gluons can be viewed as quanta of the strong interaction. Most of the mass of protons and neutrons is formed by the energy of relativistic motions of the quarks and gluons, confined inside the protons and neutrons. Its composition resembles a modern version of plum pudding or blueberry muffins, used 70 years earlier by Thomson, but on a scale one hundred thousand times smaller, and with inner turmoil moving close to the speed of light.

Not yet mapping the structure of the cosmos

Having sung the praises of the standard model, let me hasten to mention that act 3, like act 2, is still part of a kind of "middle ages" of physics, carrying in it the seeds of (a) very different period(s) to come. At the danger of pushing the analogy too far, perhaps act 3 can be seen as a renaissance, literally a rebirth, following the middle ages of act 2. As we saw above, 1975 brought a new stability in our understanding of the structure of atoms, from a-tomos, non-divisible and otherwise nondescript things, to a neat inventory of its components. Or with a longer view back, a rebirth of the prescientific model of atoms in four or five forms, in Greece, India, and China.

Whatever future theories will propose for the nature of material reality, the picture of atomic structure drawn using the standard model is here to stay. Any future theory that may replace quantum field theory as a more accurate description of matter of smaller and smaller scales, whatever its structure may be, has to agree with the same experiments that the standard model had to agree with -- just as general relativity had to agree with Newtonian gravity in the limit of weak forces and low speeds.

That said, physicists are certain that the standard model is only a way station on route to a much more filled-out future theory of material reality. For one thing, while doing an amazing job explaining the state of affairs inside the microcosmos of the atom, it utterly fails to give an equally rosy picture for the macrocosmos of the Universe.

In a nutshell: we astrophysicists don't know what we're talking about. More precisely, given that our task is to study the Universe, it is a sobering thought that we only know the nature of 1/20th of the inventory of the Universe. Of the remaining 95%, we have no idea what it is -- or equivalently, we have too many ideas, none of which we can be sure of with any measure.

Ordinary matter, made out of atoms, makes up only 5% of the content of the Universe. Another 25% of the matter in the Universe is invisible. It is there, and can be detected by its gravitational pull on visible matter, but we simply don't know what it is made of. It could be yet unknown types of elementary particles, it could be some type of black holes, it could be many other things sprinkled through the virtual universe of imagination that astrophysicists entertain.

What is even worse: we have no idea what the remaining more than 2/3 of the mass of the universe is made of. This "mass", being equivalent to energy, can be made of something more resembling energy, perhaps the energy inherent in the structure of the vacuum of our Universe. With that in mind, the 25% that is missing is called "dark matter", in that it does not seem to interact with electromagnetic radiation, and the rest that is missing, the bulk of the content of the cosmos, is called "dark energy", since it is not condensed in or around clusters of galaxies, the way "dark matter" is. The fact that it is spread out almost evenly hints at it moving at very high speed, meaning that its energy of motion is far higher that the equivalent rest mass it has, if any.

Apart from its inability to explain the contents of the Universe, there is much more that is still "missing" in the standard model. Shifting our view from space to time, to the start of our Universe in the Big Bang, the standard model has nothing to say about the Planck time, as it is called, a time at which the energy density of the Universe was so large that the force of gravity was as strong as that of the forces displayed in the standard model. The Planck time is very short: 5x10^-44 seconds or in the ballpark of a quadrillionth of a quadrillionth of a quadrillionth of a second.

To sum up: we astrophysicists don't know what we are talking about and we don't know where we're coming from. Such an exciting time to be an astrophysicist, given that we do have reason to believe that we are getting closer to the answers to both questions! "Any day now" would be an exaggeration, but "possibly in a decade (or two)" may not be unreasonable as a guess.

Anatomy of the standard model

Above I used the metaphor of mining the history of physics, in search of clues for theory formation, to apply those to our burgeoning science of mind. I will now switch to another metaphor: let's make an attempt to uncover the anatomy of the standard model. Which historical theories "fit into" later more expanded theories, how do they fit, and what does "fit" mean?

Let us return to Fig. 31, including QCD, quantum chromodynamics, in a slightly expanded version, which is given in Fig. 33. Here classical electricity and magnetism are added as E and M before they were unified into electromagnetism by Maxwell. To be precise, in Log Entry #011, Fig. 29 showed the genealogy of EM, with EM taking the place where Maxwell had put it, whereas the current place of EM, after Einstein's discovery of relativity, can be spotted in Figs. 28, 31, and 33 in this log entry.

Now that we are up-to-date regarding our best theories of the nature of matter, in terms of the smallest constituents we know and the interactions between them, let us step back and make some anatomical snapshots as to which parts of the theory "fit into" other parts. "Fitting in" is used here in the sense that Newton's theories "fit into" the wider theory of Einstein's general relativity by giving the same results in the limit of weak gravitational theory. Another way to express this is to say that Einstein's theory is "bigger" or "more accurate" than Newton's theory.

The simplest form of "fitting into" is a straightforward nesting of a series of theories, like Russian dolls. From Fig. 33, we can read off an example, in the way that classical mechanics, CM, fits into special relativity, SR, which in turn fits into general relativity, GR. Using the symbol "<" for "fitting into", we have CM < SR < GR. Another example is CM < QM < QFT, with QM for quantum mechanics, and QFT for quantum field theory.

These sets (CM < SR < GR and CM < QM < QFT) are examples of what mathematicians call a total ordering. More frequently, we encounter what is called a partial ordering. Fig. 33 shows the following four nesting relationships: CM < SR, CM < QM, SR < QFT and QM < QFT, but there is no nesting relationship between the two middle players, SR and QM. Neither of those two are included in the other. This is an example of a partial ordering.

Each of the pictures we have used up to now, starting in the first Picture book Log Entry, #008, shows fitting relationships, deepening when we move further to the right. One potentially confusing aspect of these figures is that moving to the right can also indicate "with examples of" instead of "fits into". Whenever moving to the right branches into more than one path, we are dealing with examples. In Fig. 33 we can see such a case: for QFT, quantum field theories, three branch examples are given, that of quantum electrodynamics, QED, and WI and QCD for the weak and strong interactions.

Fig. 34 shows the first anatomical picture, in the form of what was known a bit more than a century after Newton. A detailed study of electricity, E, and magnetism, M, had begun and the various theories, with increasing accuracy of detail, all neatly fit into the classical paradigm established by Newton.

Fig. 35 shows the anatomy of physics theories a bit more than a century later. Newton's classical theories are seen to fit into the extensions provided by Einstein, including Einstein's further extension of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.

Fig. 36 shows the state of anatomy in 1925, after the arrival of the shock of the discovery of quantum mechanics. It seemed that the parts of the body of physics no longer fit together! Following road signs pointing from classical mechanics to wider views would lead you to different hills, each with a sign pointing to the other hill reading "you can't get there from here".

Fig. 37 shows the next picture Rip van Winkle would have seen, had he slept for 50 years instead of 20. All would be well after the quantum field theory revolution had taken place. There was not even a need to change the hill signs: the two hills turned out to be different sides of the same hill.

Fig. 38 points to a future time when the spacetime based gravitational field and all other material fields will have been unified in an as yet unknown way. We currently have no idea what it will look like, nor do we know how long Rip van Winkle would need to sleep, were he to start his next nap today.

Wrapping up

This anatomy lesson, while lacking the elegance of Rembrandt's painting with the same name, I am planning to use in subsequent entries as comparison material. Specifically, I will introduce and explore hypotheses concerning relationships between matter, experience and appearance, beyond what I described initially in entries #003, #004 and #005.

These hypotheses I will develop using the working hypotheses, introduced in entries #003 and #008:

WH 1: there are primitive elements underlying experience

WH 2: appearances are primitives for any form of experience

WH 3: the shifts in perspectives between viewing objects as matter, experience, or appearance, might have analogies in the shifts of perspectives between subsequent theories in physics.

In particular, we will encounter situations that might be analogous to Fig. 34, where the boxed part could correspond to what Husserl called the natural attitude, as we saw in Log Entry #004. Fig. 35 could offer a simple model for what might happen when we zoom in on specific aspects of the natural attitude, say E and M in Fig. 35. Such inspection can hold clues as to the existence of a whole new sector beyond the natural attitude, necessary to show how elements like E and M can be unified into EM in ways for which there is no room in the boxed part of Fig. 34.

I will use Fig. 36 as inspiration for a comparison between the way Galileo introduced mathematics as a kind of "transcendental" probing of material processes and Husserl introduced his epoché to probe what he called the nature of the "transcendental" subject. Galileo's move and Husserl's move may seem completely incompatible, going beyond ordinary views at right angles, so to speak. However, in Fig. 36 we see a physics example, where the boxed part shows candidates for two different extensions of the same initial attitude that at first sight seem blatantly incompatible, only to be unified later through a wider perspective. Later we will encounter similar options for a unified approach to Galileo's and Husserl's innovations.

The boxed part in Fig. 37 can serve as inspiration, if nothing else, for persistence in dealing with unexpected discoveries that lead to dead ends for many decades. Such discoveries might suddenly offer equally unexpected and truly marvelous solutions to problems one didn't yet know were lying in wait.

To wit: quantum mechanics upset the apple cart of classical mechanics. But fifty years later, in just a few years, quantum field theories provided a coherent quantitatively accurate picture for material reality -- down to quarks and gluons, now seen as internal parts of protons and neutrons, which themselves are parts of the atomic nucleus, which in turn is the central part of each atom. What an amazing solution, especially since the whole construction is stable, something which no pre-quantum mechanical model could have provided!

Finally, Fig. 38 reminds us that a final near-miraculous solution to one persistent problem can highlight the next, even more persistent problem, and in doing so, can provide new clues for that next-in-line problem.

Note that in all this I make no claim, in fact not even a hypothesis, that any of the figures mentioned above have any direct relationship with the various possible analogies I just mentioned. Rather, what inspires me is the fact that in natural science very often mathematical models developed for one application have found quite different applications in seemingly totally unrelated areas. The most conservative guess for what will happen in a science of mind would be that such a pattern of discoveries will continue, and at least we should keep an open eye for such a possibility.

In our previous log entry, we have seen how in 1925 the worldview incorporated in physics was forever altered. Gone were any remaining notions of the world as a kind of mechanism, largely independent of human beings trying to make sense of it. Instead of determinism, probability appeared at the core of the new formalism of quantum mechanics.

In classical mechanics, before 1925, physics dealt with objects that had observable properties that could be measured, through observations with various kinds of apparatus. Once observed, if carefully done, those properties would no longer change. Whatever was observable, once observed, was known and remained known. And indeed, for objects on a human scale, and even those on a microscopic scale, these were reasonable conclusions, based on experience. However, this view turned out to be incorrect when investigated at atomic and subatomic scales.

Afterwards, in quantum mechanics, the understanding changed completely. Objects still had characteristics, but they were no longer called properties. Rather, they were given a new name, "observables", something that could be found as an outcome for any act of observation, but most of those outcomes would not be reproducible. There was nothing fixed beforehand that could be observed in its totality. Rather, there was a potential for making observations with different outcomes, each of which were in principle "observable". The only remaining certainty was that the probabilities for specific outcomes remained the same, when repeating an experiment many times, starting from the same initial conditions.

Quick unification of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics

The mathematical equations for determining the probabilities were discovered soon after 1925, but the interpretation of what was going on during a measurement remained completely unclear, as indicated in Fig. 20, reproduced here from Log Entry #010, below.

At first, the only successful equations describing quantum mechanical effects were of two types: Heisenberg's discovery of what would soon be called matrix mechanics, and Schrödinger's wave equation. Soon those were shown to be compatible, presenting two different ways of viewing the same reality. However, both were developed as variations of classical mechanics, and as such were incompatible with special relativity, let alone with general relativity.

The beauty of physics lies in its response to seemingly divergent approaches yielding the same results. Rather than engaging in hostile debates over which method is "truly correct" or settling for a polite compromise where each side sticks to their own view, physicists relentlessly pursue a deeper understanding. They won't rest until they uncover why two fundamentally different models can produce identical outcomes, even if it takes a year or more to figure it out.

Interestingly, this perfectionist approach is similar to that used by computer scientists when they debug a computer program, but in the sense of being exactly the opposite. When professional computer programmers test a new code and then find a small discrepancy in the output, compared to what was expected, they don't just assume that such a small difference doesn't matter. Rather, they realize that this could be a sign of a "bug", an error in a computer program that in some cases could give a slightly different output, but in other cases might give a huge and possibly even disastrously wrong result. For this reason, debugging, finding "bugs" in a computer program, is an essential aspect of software development.

Where computer programmers are alarmed upon finding slight differences, possibly pointing to a bug in their program, theoretical physicists are alarmed when they see no differences at all between two very different approaches. Getting to the bottom of why there is a lack of discrepancies is as important for them as it is for computer scientists to locate a hard-to-find bug. A nagging bug can be a golden opportunity to learn something new about the structure of the program. And a nagging correspondence similarly can be a golden opportunity to attain deeper insight into a theory.

Slow unification of quantum mechanics and special relativity

In fig. 20, the "???"indicate an incompatibility gap, separating special relativity (SR) and electromagnetism (EM) in the upper half and the non-relativistic treatments of electricity (E) and magnetism (M) in the lower half. Initially there was rapid progress toward unification across that gap. It would take only three years until at least a partial solution would be found, by Dirac in 1928. He was able to write an equation describing a relativistic generalization of Schrödinger's wave equation. The result was the configuration shown in Fig. 24.

Dirac's equations formed the first example of what is called a Quantum Field Theory (QFT) the name used for theories that unify quantum mechanics (QM) with the relativistic electromagnetic field, which is at the core of electromagnetism (EM). While various predictions were confirmed by experiment, there were still some serious questions about the validity of the mathematical structure of Dirac's equations, and that of subsequent versions of quantum field theories, as indicated in Fig. 25. It would take until 1950 to resolve these difficulties. It was only then that a real unification of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism achieved, under the name of QED, quantum electrodynamics.

New kids on the block: weak and strong interactions

The existence of gravity, by whatever name, has been obvious from time immemorial. Things fall down and don't flow up, unless emerged in some buoyant medium. In Log Entry #008 we saw a brief history of how electricity and magnetism entered the mainstream of physics around 1800, as two additional forces acting at a distance, beyond the force of gravity, depicted in Fig. 4. The forces were seen to be carried by fields, and the electric and magnetic fields were unified into a single electromagnetic field by Maxwell in 1865.

For quite a while that seemed to be it. In 1915 Einstein's theory of general relativity and Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism were completely compatible, and in that sense were unified in the classical sense. Even the shocking advent of quantum mechanics ten years later did not change the inventory of force fields.

However, in 1933 a completely unexpected new "interaction" was discovered. Not sure about its character, as a force or a field or something else, and because it seemed intrinsically quite weak, it was called the "weak interaction", WI, as shown in Fig. 26.

In addition, only two years later, yet another one was discovered, stronger than the weak interaction, and dubbed "the strong nuclear interaction", or "strong interaction" for short, SI, as shown in Fig. 27.

Unlike gravity and electromagnetism, the weak and the strong interactions have an extremely short range. They play important roles at a distance comparable to the size of a proton or neutron. Beyond that, their strengths decrease exponentially as a function of distance. In contrast, electromagnetism and gravity grow weaker as the inverse square of the distance. As a result, we can draw sparks from the hairs of a cat and we can play with magnets, but we need rather advanced specialized equipment to detect and study effects of the weak and strong interactions.

It would take forty years before the nature of the weak and the strong interactions was understood on a fundamental level. Rather than following the twists and turns of various theories and speculations, we will come back to these interactions in our next log entry, #012, to see their surprisingly beautiful unification with electromagnetism.

QED: the first successful renormalization of a QFT

The next major milestone, after the formulation of the first theories of quantum mechanics in 1925, was the renormalization of at least one quantum field theory, QFT. The bottom line of what is called "renormalization" is the invention of mathematical techniques to avoid spurious singularities, or infinities, that prevent us from making specific predictions from the first generation of quantum field theories. Physicists had extracted some results from QFTs, starting with Dirac's equations in 1928, but until 1950 these attempts had been rather haphazard and not systematic in any way.

Things changed within a short period of a few years, centered on 1950. Quantum electrodynamics, QED for short, was established as the unification of quantum mechanics, special relativity and electromagnetism, into one consistent quantum field theory. Until then, it had not been clear to what degree QFT could give reliable predictions for the outcome of experiments. Soon, however, calculations in QED became some of the most accurate ones in all of physics. Currently, experiments and calculations agree to an accuracy of one in one hundred million.

As was the case for the discovery of quantum mechanics around 1925, where there were several main players involved, the situation was no different around 1950. The most flamboyant and original of them was Richard Feynman, one of the three who shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of QED, while a fourth physicist, Freeman Dyson, was the one who showed how the theories of the other three could be translated into each other. Feynman gave a wonderful series of lectures on QED for a popular audience, 35 years later, which were published as "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter."

Another look at history: the genealogy of QED

In the two previous entries, #009 and #010, I have sketched a pictorial genealogy of general relativity and of quantum mechanics, in Figs. 16 and 17, and in Figs. 22 and 23, respectively. In both entries I showed in each picture the historical order of discoveries leading to further discoveries, when reading from left to right. The equivalent genealogical diagram is given below in Fig. 29. As before, special relativity (SR) here *follows* electromagnetism (EM) in historical order, even though we now consider EM a relativistic theory *based* on SR, according to Fig. 28.

A quick preview of the next quarter century

In the first quarter century of quantum mechanics, it only took three years till the first quantum field theory, QFT, was introduced by Dirac. But from then on progress slowed down, and it would take more than two decades until QED, quantum electrodynamics, would become the first reliable QFT.

In our next log entry, covering the second quarter since the discovery of quantum mechanics, we will see that the reverse would happen. For the first twenty years there was no real prospect that either the weak or the strong force could possibly be modeled as a QFT. More and more QED seemed like a unique success story, raising doubts as to wider applicability of QFTs in physics.

But then, in only a few years, from 1971 to 1975, just about everything fell into place, as we will see in the next log entry, our fifth and final log entry of our picture book of progress in physics series.

A comparison of natural science and contemplation

We have seen in Log Entry #002 how the science of matter could take off relatively quickly during the 17th century, given the millennia of written knowledge that provided necessary foundations for further progress. In our attempt to start a science of mind, the natural thing to do would be to similarly find inspiration in written knowledge, ideally with commentaries from individuals who are part of still living traditions based on that knowledge. The combination of both could then provide educated guesses for potentially useful working hypotheses -- stepping stones toward a scientific investigation of the human mind, using our mind as a laboratory, as we discussed in Log Entry #004.

The big stumbling block in this rather obvious approach is that contemplative traditions with a written history do not resemble each other very much, at least at first sight. There are monotheistic contemplative traditions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, between which comparisons are relatively easier, given that they share the same roots. But comparing any of them with Taoism, say, will be a far greater challenge.

We saw at the beginning of this log entry how matrix mechanics and wave mechanics seemed utterly different and incompatible at first. But within a year, they were shown to be not only compatible, but physicists had already started to develop a kind of dictionary to translate between those two theories. And using that approach, they demonstrated that the results for actual experiments were the same, where applicable.

It is my hope and expectation that similar developments will appear in a science of mind, once a community with a critical mass has grown around the idea of applying the scientific method to the area traditionally known as contemplation, as I have started to outline in a few preliminary contours in Log Entry #003. We will pick up that thread again in far more detail in Parts 3 and 4 of our series of log entries, to begin with in Log Entry #014. But for now, we can already point to an important hint that the first half century of quantum mechanics may offer us.

Another hint for a science of mind

At the start of our picture book of physics theories, in Log Entry #008, I listed several hints toward the end that might become handy later on in our search for a science of mind. The main hint that we can glean from the current log entry is that theories do not have to be internally consistent, let alone logically complete. As long as a new theory gives more accurate results than the previous best theory, by hook or by crook, the new theory is given pride of place. In that sense science is fully pragmatic and sometimes surprisingly opportunistic.

To wit: Dirac's theory was hailed as a breakthrough, because in some areas of application it was clearly successful, even though it failed in others. Two decades later QED was a major breakthrough because its predictions were far more accurate than any other theory in the first quarter century of quantum mechanics. Even so, it was still glaringly clear that at some higher energies its validity would break down. In short, in science you can't argue with success in applications, no matter how elegant or attractive less successful theories may seem to be.

Perhaps the main inspiration of all this for a science of mind is that very different views in contemplation, the equivalent of different theories in physics, may not be as incompatible as they may look at first sight. For contemplative traditions, the ultimate validity in terms of experiential depth of insight for a practitioner may not have an obvious relationship to the outer forms of the belief systems, used to introduce the practice. 

At the end of the previous log entry, #009, I described how the curtain dropped on physics, act 1: a classical world.  The second act of physics started in 1925 with the discovery of "quantum mechanics", a radical break from "classical mechanics", which was the name of the game of physics from Newton, via Maxwell, and through Einstein's theories of special relativity and general relativity.

Of course, physicists before 1925 didn't know they were doing research in classical physics, just as ancient Greek and Roman writers didn't know at the time that they were writing "classic" literature. Nor did Thomas Aquinas know that he was a "Medieval" writer.

Here the analogy breaks down, though. From the beginning of the era of quantum mechanics, it was clear that there were serious problems, which seemed to point to solutions that had to be more radical, whatever their nature was going to be. In that sense, physicists knew that they had entered a kind of "Middle Ages" that were likely to end, sooner or later, when deeper insight would be obtained.

In this and the next two entries I will sketch the state of the art of fundamental physics in 1925, 1950 and 1975, respectively. At each of those last two moments in time a major breakthrough was made in clearing up some of the fog that had descended in 1925.  But, with a spoiler alert: no comparable breakthrough has happened in 2000, nor is it obvious that it may happen in 2025 or anytime soon thereafter.

So it seems that we'll remain in the "Middle Ages" more than a century after the end of the "Classical Period". Even so, there are plenty of hopeful signs that fundamentally new insights will be reached, either through theoretical or experimental breakthroughs, or even better, through both.

A happy family and an unexpected new arrival

To prepare the stage for the events that shook physics in 1925, I am presenting here again Fig. 12 from Log Entry #009, the "family portrait" of all the interlocking parts of the four-dimensional machinery of physics in 1915.

In this figure, you can see that Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism (EM) was not only a unification of the various effects already known for the interplay between electricity (E) and magnetism (M).  Unbeknownst to Maxwell, Newtonian classical mechanics (CM) was not able to explain the observations of waves in the electromagnetic field until CM was replaced by the theory of special relativity (SR).  Without the combined help of SR and EM, there would have been no way to unify the theories of E and M, as depicted in Fig. 18.

I have presented Fig. 18 here as a first step toward introducing the new arrival "out of nowhere" who joined the happy family of Fig. 12. In Fig. 19 we fast forward to 1925, where quantum mechanics (QM) is introduced.

Quantum mechanics . . .

Where Newton had built a firm stage made of absolute space and time to let objects dance on, under the influence of gravity, Einstein had created a flexible stage. It was a stage that itself partook in the dance, more like a kind of trampoline, made of a dynamic spacetime, that could stretch and twist and turn. But a decade later, an even much more revolutionary theory was put forward. Quantum mechanics corresponded to a move to an altogether different theory -- through the looking glass into a world more like that of a fairy tale.

From a dance on a fixed stage with fixed rules, to a stage that was dancing with its players, but still with fixed rules, to a dreamlike world in which everything is possible -- but with fixed rules for the probability of anything to happen. The mathematical background spaces for quantum mechanics are altogether different from anything classical. The spaces used to calculate probabilities for any type of outcome are no longer given in terms of space and time, but rather in terms of abstract complex high-dimensional Hilbert spaces.

Instead of moving to a different stage, as physics had done twice, in 1905 and 1915, in 1925 physics moved into an altogether different theater building, if not into an altogether different world. This is not the place to present an introduction to quantum mechanics, but there are plenty of introductions available on the internet and in book form, on many different levels.

The bottom line is that from 1925 onwards, physical reality on its most fundamental level had no longer any clear meaning. Sure, twenty years earlier, already with the disappearance of an aether, there was no clear picture of how there could be waves in a field without there being a medium -- electromagnetic waves just seemed to be "waving" in a total vacuum. But at least there was a comfortably objective picture to describe those waves, one that everybody could agree on.

The momentous difference between classical and quantum physics is that it is no longer obvious whether there even is an objective world out there. More precisely, it questions whether an objective description of the world, independent of the observer, is even possible. Currently there are numerous different interpretations of quantum mechanics, some of them based on intersubjective agreements of measurements, without requiring, or even allowing, an objective background world.

I am hesitant to even begin selecting some pointers to the literature, among the hundreds of books that have been written on this topic. Fortunately, for the purpose of my narrative in this and the next two entries, I can strongly recommend the book "Waves in an impossible sea" by Matt Strassler which came out just one week after I started this Log. It gives the clearest description I have seen of the roles of fields and waves and many of the seeming paradoxes of quantum field theory (the topic of Log Entry #012), on a surprisingly clear non-technical level.

An unhappy family

In Log Entry #009, Figs. 13 and 15, I presented a comparison between three happy families: the Newtonian classical mechanics view of physics around 1700, the Maxwellian picture, still the best one around in 1900, and the Einsteinian picture arrived at in 1915. They all looked alike.

Following Tolstoy's observations at the start of his novel Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, the unhappy family, shown in Fig. 21, definitely looks very different from anything seen before.

To make another comparison with Log Entry #009, the genealogy figures, Figs. 16 and 17, now get enriched with quantum mechanics, to produce Figs. 22 and 23.

Early warning signals

The way I presented my very short summary of the advent of quantum mechanics has left out many important details. Yes, the full paradoxical nature of quantum mechanics was totally unexpected. Even so, during the 25 years running up to 1925 it already became increasingly clear that *something* was going on that was likely to shake the foundations of physics.

It started in 1900, when Max Planck coined the word "quantum".  He did so to give a name to an observation that he had made. He noticed that the behavior of some forms of radiation could be explained by an ad hoc postulate that this radiation could only be emitted in the form of discrete energy packets, which he called quanta. He realized that, using this strange and unnatural postulate, things fell into place that otherwise didn’t make any sense. But at first he had no idea how revolutionary the consequences of that first step would become.

Before 1925 at least a dozen scientists made significant contributions to the framework of what would become full fledged quantum mechanics in 1925, including Einstein, Bohr and de Broglie. And when finally quantum mechanics got off the ground, there were another dozen scientists who made significant contributions, right in the first two or three years. Most prominent were Heisenberg and Schrödinger, each of whom found a rather different approach to what would turn out to be the same underlying theory. But many others, like Born, Dirac and Pauli, made essential contributions as well.

A shift towards collaborative efforts

In that sense, the discovery of quantum mechanics as a theory was rather unlike the discoveries by Newton, Maxwell and Einstein. In each of those three cases, too, several other physicists had made very important breakthroughs that provided essential building blocks for the final discoveries. But still, there was this magical moment when one person managed to put everything together, showing that everything "clicked", as in finding the places for the last pieces of a puzzle.

Quantum mechanics was different, and indeed during the next hundred years after the discovery of quantum mechanics, there never was a particular insight of a single person that started a whole new approach to theory building in fundamental physics.

Finally one more aspect that I have left out: I have not mentioned in my history of physics the very important role of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, developed in the nineteenth century, which gave physicists experience in working with calculations involving probabilities. Such a discussion would deserve at least one more entry in this log.

What we have seen so far

Looking back to the beginning of this FEST Log, three months ago, the first five log entries, #001 through #005, have centered on a very brief initial exploration of the nature of experience.  Since the FEST program aims at establishing a science of mind, experience is an obvious place to start.  I suggested some possible directions for setting up an initial and very simple theory of experience.  In addition, I also provided some sketches for experimentation.

My aim was to show early on how to get the "ratchet of science" started, defined as developing new experiments to test the latest theory, followed by developing new theories more in line with the results from the latest experiments, and so on.  I described the "ratchet" in log entries #001, #003, and #006. And in order to make initial contact with recent literature, I found it helpful to mention two philosophers, Husserl in log entry #004, and Nishida in log entry #005, both of whom did their work in the early twentieth century.

However, already in log entry #002, I argued that it makes sense to turn to the treasure troves of prescientific studies of the mind, that have been preserved in oral and written form, in various contemplative traditions in many cultures. Following the example of astronomy, the foundations of which were laid by a millennium of Babylonian observations, I named a number of still living traditions that might give us inspiration as well as specific sets of observations.

The biggest problem in receiving inspiration for setting up theories and interpreting observations from ancient traditions is sectarianism. Imagine that scientists in different fields of physics would not talk to each other, and only or mostly discuss their specific field among themselves. That would be a similar situation as what prescientific engineers were limited to, keeping their knowledge within their own circles.

What we might learn from physics for a science of mind

Following our short initial exploration of the nature of experience, from Log Entry #006 onward we started to analyze the structure of theories of physics, in order to have at least one example of an evolving set of theories, all empirically based. Hopefully, this can give us some inspiration for setting up a tentative theory structure, based on observations gleaned from contemplative traditions.

To make this a bit more formal, starting with Log Entry #008, I introduced a new working hypothesis:

WH 3: the shifts in perspectives between viewing objects as matter, experience, or appearance, might have analogies in the shifts of perspectives between subsequent theories in physics.

One reason I think this might work to some extent, is that all contemplative traditions I am familiar with have a nested set of instructions for view and practice, from simple and practical for lay persons, to more and more refined forms within monasteries or other communities focused entirely or mostly on contemplation. If we translate view into theory, and practice into experiment and observation, the parallels with physics, as we have seen in our set of diagrams so far, are striking.

In order to go to the Moon, classical mechanics is good enough.  But in order to find our way in a city, when we use GPS, we are using software that is based on general relativity, since the accuracy required goes well beyond that of Newton's theory of universal gravity. To study the outlines of a living cell, and the ways cells are packed together, again classical mechanics can do a good job. But to model the details of small-scale processes within cells, sooner or later we have to take quantum mechanics into account. In fact, all of chemistry is based on quantum mechanics on the atomic level.

The similarity of nested structures of theories in physics and in contemplation, which became more and more clear to me, was my main motivation for delving into the nested structure of theories of physics, as they evolved over time. Before long we will start making specific comparisons between some contemplative traditions and their nested views and the structure of their physics counterparts. Let us see how far we can get, in making at least some initial progress in setting up a candidate for a foundation of theory building for a science of mind.

With that goal, we will visit the history of physics of the last century, from 1925 till now, in the next two entries. Following that, we will take a break and sum up what we have learned, thereby concluding Part 2 of this FEST log (the structure of Parts will be outlined at that point). My aim is to bundle together half a dozen or so entries in each Part, together with a postscript summarizing the structure and contents of that particular Part.

This log entry is a sequel to Log Entry #008, "A Picture Book of Physics Theories."  There we followed the history of science starting from its prescientific roots till 1865, when Maxwell published his equations of electromagnetism. This unification of the theories of electricity and magnetism led to an explanation of the nature of light, which in turn enabled wireless communication, from early radio and tv to the daily use of our cell phones.

Our last two diagrams were Fig. 5 and its more compact version, Fig. 6, reproduced here below.  As a reminder: AM was superseded by CM as the description of motion in space and time under the influence of UG; after a while extra force fields were measured and described, E and M; and in 1865 Maxwell unified the theories of E and M into one unified theory of EM.  The totality of these theories forms a skeleton summary of the state of the art of Physics in 1865.

Physics in 1900: the problem of the aether

By the turn of the century, in 1900, that same picture still held, but there was only one problem: efforts to determine the presence of an aether were unsuccessful. Whatever the characteristic of that medium might have been, the changing speed and direction of the motion of the Earth with respect to the aether, at different times of year, should have been measurable.  However, increasingly accurate measurements all gave the same null result: no difference was detected.

Maxwell's theory had convincingly explained that light is formed by electromagnetic waves.  A decade later Hertz had figured out how to generate and detect radio waves.  There was no doubt anymore that the electromagnetic field could exhibit waves, in a real and practical sense.  But how could there be waves without there being a medium, a "carrier" to "carry" the waves?  At first, this seemed like an annoying blemish question mark, as depicted by the question mark in Fig. 7, which otherwise is identical to Fig. 6, a snapshot taken 35 years earlier.

1905: The aether resolved; now the problem of gravity

Before long, in 1905 Einstein came up with an idea that seemed even more preposterous than waves without something to make waves in.  He proposed that space and time itself were not absolute, as Newton had assumed, but relative to the state of motion of individual observers. His theory of relativity changed not only the dynamical play of motion, performed by physical objects on the stage of space and time; it changed the stage itself!

Changes that dramatic had occurred only twice in the last 2200 years: first by Aristotle who described a stage with two layers, the Earthly and the Heavenly realm, below and above the orbit of the Moon; and then by Newton, whose unified synthesis introduced a single unified stage.

The third stage that Einstein introduced was of a completely new type: a 4-dimensional spacetime as a continuum that would allow different 3-dimensional ways of providing space and time axes for cutting up the 4-dimensional cake, different depending on the state of motion for each observer.  This is indicated in Fig. 8.

However, the "???" mark in Fig. 8 indicates that Fig. 6 no longer holds.  Maxwell's beautiful unification of electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism, EM, was no longer compatible with the other long-range field, that of universal gravity, UG, which was based on Newtonian absolute space and time. Even though EM was invented as a theory within classical mechanics, CM, it forced a new theory of space and time, SR, as a new home for EM to live in, superseding CM.

Fig. 9 shows this clash between CM and SR, indicated by the vertically placed question marks in "->?" and "?<-".

The search for an answer

A few years after discovering what later would be called the theory of *special* relativity, Einstein began to search for a more *general* theory, indicated in Fig. 10 with "??", in order to solve the problem of "???".  If only Newtonian gravity could be replaced by a theory of gravity that would be compatible with special relativity in the limit of weak gravitational fields (weak compared to that of black holes, as we would expressed it now), all would be well again.

Fig. 11 shows how such a new theory could be seen as a unification of UG and SR, somewhat similar to the unification of E and M into EM.

The answer, in the way it leads us back to 1865

In 1915, Einstein found the answer. As I already discussed in Log Entry #007, general relativity added curvature and elasticity to the 4-dimensional fabric of special relativity.  Gravity no longer was a force acting between players on an otherwise passive stage. It was the dynamics of the stage that completely explained the effects of the force of gravity, with no need for anything else: gravity without gravity.

General Relativity, GR in Fig. 12, restored physics as a consistent, and seemingly complete, theory for all of the long-range forces across space and time. By replacing "??" by GR, suddenly physics became as complete as it had been in Fig. 5.

To compare the state of completion of physics in 1865 and 50 years later, in 1915, we can plot the two in compact form in Fig. 13.  Both situations looked the same in diagram form.  In fact, the success of general relativity shows it was even more complete, since there was no longer the nagging question of what the aether was and how to detect it.

The answer, in the way it leads us back to 1700

An alternative way of depicting the revolutionary aspects of GR is given in Fig. 14.  So far, the central horizontal lines in our diagrams have depicted the changing role of the stage of space and time.  In contrast, the force fields acting across space and time were shown above and below that line, as players on that stage.  However, now that GR had become both a new field explaining the *force* of gravity as well as a new and more powerful description of the nature of *spacetime*, we can equally well put GR on the horizontal center line, as an increasingly more accurate way to represent space and time.  So let us adapt Fig. 12, to highlight the fundamental spacetime role of GR, to produce Fig. 14 instead.
 

At this point we can go even further back in time, to 1700, the time of Newton.  We have seen in Log Entry #008, in Fig. 3, how the state of the art of physics can be summarized with one stage, classical mechanics, and one long-range force, universal gravity.  Fig. 3 is reproduced in the top half of Fig. 15, while  Fig. 14 is reproduced in compact form in the bottom half of Fig. 15.

This single figure shows why and how Einstein was considered the "new Newton" in the nineteen twenties. When his general relativity theory was observationally confirmed through the measurements of the bending of starlight near the sun during an eclipse in 1919, physics regained a state of wholeness and simplicity, both, that had not been seen since Newton.
 

A glimpse of the future, from 1925 onwards

Alas, this happy state of affairs would only last a mere ten years . . . the only period, so far, that humanity has possessed a single consistent theory of space, time, gravity and electromagnetism. In the next log entry, #010, we will see what happened in 1925, when quantum mechanics appeared on the stage. Or, to stay with the previous metaphors, demolished the stage.
 

From family portraits to genealogy

But before going there, let me add the historical perspective of a genealogy of theories. In Figs. 12 and 14 we saw two family portraits taken in the period 1915 to 1925.  They were snapshots. If we want to trace the genealogy of ideas, from Newton to Einstein, we get a different picture, that of Fig. 16. To give GR a balanced place in this figure, starting from CM, I have given GR a place halfway the middle line of space and time and the upper line where gravity would be placed as a force. It really belongs to both.

As for SR, note the difference between its place in Figs. 12 and 14, where it directly follows Newton's GR, at the left, and in Fig. 16, where it is placed as the offspring of EM.  Even though SR is more fundamental, in retrospect, than EM, it was EM that historically led to SR.

And as a farewell to the classical period of physics, from 1687, when Newton's Principia was published, all the way to 1915, let me take stock of the developments during that period in Fig. 17, in the form of boxes superimposed on Fig. 16. Seven discoveries and unifications stand out.

There was Newton's unification of Aristotle's separate laws of motion in heavens and on Earth, in the first box. The second box shows the discovery of theories for gravity, electricity and magnetism. The third box shows three more successful unifications, of electricity and magnetism into electromagnetism, of space and time into spacetime, and of spacetime and gravity into a dynamic form of spacetime.

Note that of the seven highlights, more than half were made by Newton and Einstein, CM & UG and SR & GR, respectively, one by Maxwell, EM, and the remaining two, theories of E and M, electricity and magnetism, as well as aspects of their interactions, were the result of a number of different individuals. Of course, all of the seven milestones could only have been reached by building on the foundations laid by many others, whose contributions were crucial in clearing paths towards new insights.

The end of physics, act 1: the world as a mechanism

We have now reached the end of what is called "classical physics", the first Act in the Play of physics as the Science of matter. In the next log entry we will move on to physics, act 2, which is "quantum mechanics", an act that started in 1925. Quantum mechanics, QM in our abbreviated diagram notation, is really a misnomer. Yes, what is called quantum mechanics  lies at the basis of quantum physics, but in no way does it resemble a mechanism. It was only (Newtonian?) inertia that kept the term "mechanics" in use, since the quantum world is anything but a mechanism, as we will see.

The first mechanical model appeared with what is called Aristotelian mechanics (AM), around 300 BC, prescientific in being partly untestable speculation.  Science as we know it, using working hypotheses, got started in the 17th century with Newton's classical mechanics (CM).  Maxwell's electromagnetism (EM) was a further extension, still structured as a mechanism, but based on an almost immaterial medium, called the aether, an idea that was dropped when no longer needed in Einstein's special relativity (SR) theory.  It was only with Einstein's general relativity (GR) theory that a new fully consistent picture of the physical world had been developed.

General relativity could still be viewed as a kind of mechanical theory, but mechanical in a very different way that the term had been used so far. The reference "mechanical" did not point to the way or working of three-dimensional machines, existing in space and doing their work in time. Rather, the term "mechanics" applied to fully four-dimensional entities, existing in spacetime. However, the theory remained deterministic and in that sense it was still "mechanical".

Beyond mechanistic foundations of physics

The succession of updated physics theories of the physical world, illustrated by the four arrows in the sequence "AM -> CM -> EM -> GR -> QM", consisted of changes happening after ever shorter intervals in time of {2000, 200, 50, 10} years, respectively. The last number indicates the decade from the introduction of general relativity in 1915 to the first formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925.

The next shocking new discovery did not take place 2 or 3 years after 1925, as the above series might have suggested.  It still has not taken place, 100 years later. And what is more, unlike was the case after earlier shocks, how to interpret quantum physics is still an open debate. It remains a question about which hundreds of books have been written, and several conferences and workshops are organized each year.  That hasn't happened with any of the previous updates in a scientific theory of the physical world.

The main disagreement centers around the role of the observer in any experiment involving quantum physics. The end of mechanistic thinking was also the end of the unquestioned acceptance of an objective reality.  Seen in that way, the need for a science of mind is a logical outcome of progress in physics, made by physicists and made by their own lights.  We will now look at the state of physics in 1925, in our next log entry.

Many profound discoveries in physics and mathematics were initially presented in hard to understand jargon without clear illustrations of the key points. Only years or sometimes decades later, deeper insights would lead to simpler pictures, and vice versa: diagrams that were easy to interpret made it easier to get a sense of the deeper meaning of a theory.

Some profound illustrative figures in physics are Minkowski diagrams (1908) and  Penrose diagrams (1963) depicting relationships in space and time. A somewhat different type is formed by Feynman diagrams (1948). In mathematics the approach of category theory is altogether based on diagrams as its building blocks.

Each of the first three examples offered profound new perspectives on the physics underlying processes related to the behavior of matter. My goal in this and following entries will be to provide diagrams that similarly shed light on the way our minds are functioning.

My initial attempts will naturally be simpler than the physics examples mentioned above, given that I am starting from scratch. My hope is that soon we can nurture a community of scientists and scholars, each with a background in science and/or contemplation, which collectively will vastly improve upon the initial ideas that I will offer here. 

Matter, Experience, and Appearance

As a reminder, in Log Entry #006 I started a search for a theory, to go with the preliminary experiments 1 and 2, discussed in Log Entry #005. I used the history of physics as the most obvious example to start with in order to get some inspiration. In Log Entry #007 I made the prediction that whatever we find will likely be completely unexpected, and utterly different from the way we have learned to deal with our own minds in our culture.

That last suggestion is the most conservative way of extrapolating to a science of mind the way in which science of matter has shown a progression of ever more surprising discoveries. Another conservative extrapolation can be made from reading accounts of the most respected contemplatives in various traditions. The one thing they all have in common, whatever their particular tradition happened to be, is a sense of awe that is very reminiscent of the awe scientists expressed whenever they explored their own topics to greater and greater depth.

What has held back a straightforward comparison of insights in matter and mind, between scientists and contemplatives? It is that contemplatives have not yet reached agreement on any clear correspondence between their own tradition and quite different traditions. Like the prescientific state of engineering, with insights locked up within specific guilds working on specific topics, with very few exceptions no systematic attempts have been made to build real bridges, let alone to meet each other in the trenches or down into the canyons way below such bridges.

The miracle of the science of matter was the way that a more abstract non-physical ingredient, mathematics, added to the purely physical investigations, could open doors to completely unexpected insights. Could it be that a science of mind is also still waiting for a missing ingredient? At this point we are not yet in a position to even guess what that might be.  Rather than guessing, let us do some work. In other words, let's start with a working hypothesis, and take it from there.

From working hypotheses and theories to experiments

In Log Entry #003 I introduced two working hypotheses:

WH 1: there are primitive elements underlying experience

WH 2: appearances are primitives for any form of experience

In addition, I now propose a third one:

WH 3: the shifts in perspectives between viewing objects as matter, experience, or appearance, might have analogies in the shifts of perspectives between subsequent theories in physics.

WH 3 may or may not turn out to bring us closer to a useful theory to start with.  Either way, we will learn from the exercise. If it is helpful, and the analogy helps us to build such a theory, great!  And if not, by seeing where the analogy fails, we are likely to at least get some hints of where else to look.

The shifts in perspective that WH 3 points at are those described briefly in Log Entry #005, corresponding to:

experiment 1): the nature of matter as experience

experiment 2): the nature of experience as appearance

There we didn't really get underway with the experiments, which would have required a more detailed description of the setups, analyses and results, as well as discussions and conclusions.  We could not really do so yet, since we didn't have any theory to compare the outcomes of the experiments with. That was the reason that in the next Log Entry #006, we turned to physics for initial inspiration to set up a simple theory to guide the two experiments above. And now we're in a position to use WH 3 to provide a theory as a framework for performing experiments 1) and 2).

Figuring things out

Following our working hypothesis WH 3, I will present some diagrams, in a meta analogy to the three physics diagrams I mentioned at the start of this entry. Instead of mapping out physics *processes* in physical space and time, as those three diagrams did in different ways, I will present the progression of physics *perspectives* themselves diagrammatically in calendar time.

My first diagram is very simple: a straight line with two arrows. The first arrow indicates the inspiration that the Greeks received from the Babylonians, whose millennium's worth of observations of the motions of Sun, Moon and planets provided a valuable database that allowed them to construct models of the planetary system. The second arrow indicates the inspiration that Aristotle received from the Pre-Socratics, philosophers like Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Zeno and Democritus. I have added some indication of the time around which they were active.

The Second diagram introduces the first modern scientific model of motions of objects that exert forces on each other, Newton's classical mechanics, CM. In addition it includes the formula for the force of gravity, as derived by Newton, also called universal gravity, UG, since it described the effects of gravity from the smallest to the largest distances then known.

Adding an extra dimension

The plus sign between CM and UG in Fig. 2 is not very informative. The reason to mention mechanics and gravity separately is that classical mechanics alone is already sufficient to describe local forces. To predict the motion of billiard balls, for example, classical mechanics as such suffices to determine their trajectories on a pool table. Only when they touch each other or touch the edge of the pool table can their motions be changed from the straight lines on which they otherwise would move.

In contrast, gravity is a force that acts at a distance. Any motion of any object on or near Earth is affected by the gravitational pull that the Earth exerts on that object. To make Fig.2 into a real diagram, in Fig.3 a new dimension has been added in the vertical direction. AM -> CM now indicates how Aristotelian mechanics was replaced by Newton's classical mechanics, and how universal gravity UG added a separate embellishment, as the only force known to act at a distance. 

Between Newton's classical mechanics and his universal gravity, physics was thought to be complete.  This was the state of the art of physics around 1700.

Extra forces: electricity and magnetism

Physics seemed finished and self-contained, with Newton's three laws and Newton's law of gravity. During the next century, though, two more forces were discovered to act at a distance.  Not only that, they were similar in the way their forces fell off with distance, namely as the inverse square.

They were electricity and magnetism. Both were known since antiquity. Thales, one of the most prominent Pre-Socratics, described both of them, but without further detailed study. The earliest mention of the effects of electricity was already in an Egyptian text, a full two thousand years before Thales, describing how certain types of fish produced electric shocks.

The use of magnetism to build a compass was invented by the Chinese two thousand years ago, and came into use in Europe a thousand years later. William Gilbert, a contemporary of Galileo, published detailed studies of electricity and magnetism.  He concluded that the Earth itself was a giant magnet, creating the Earth's magnetic field.

It was only later, in 1819, through the work of Ørsted, that relationships between electricity and magnetism became known. Fig. 4 shows the state of the art of physics, a hundred years later than Fig. 3.  By then gravity had acquired two companions, also working through action at a distance, but without any clear connection between the two. Note that the simpler contact forces of CM, that are contributing to the physics of 1800, are left out for simplicity.

Maxwell's unification: electromagnetism

The more physicists understood the properties of electricity and magnetism and their relationships, the more it became clear that there was a strong parallel between both. There was only one glaring difference: we find electric charges in nature, but nobody has ever found magnetic "charges". Instead, a north pole and a south pole, the parallel between an electric positive and negative charge, always appear together; hence the name "poles", rather than "charges". So far, we have never found a single pole, even though we already have made up a name for one, if it were found: a magnetic monopole.

A major breakthrough was made by Maxwell's discovery of the equations of electromagnetism, a unified way to present the effects of electricity and magnetism. Apart from the absence of magnetic charges, electricity and magnetism played a very similar role in his equations. Fig. 5 shows the state of the art of physics after Maxwell's discovery.

One result of Maxwell's equations was the discovery that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, which suggested that there would be other forms, outside the narrow wavelength band of visible light. Indeed, besides infrared and ultraviolet light, at the much longer wavelength side were radio waves, discovered by Hertz in 1888, and at the much shorter wavelength side X-rays, discovered by Röntgen in 1895.

Maxwell postulated that space is filled everywhere by a very rarified medium, called aether.  It was thought that any type of waves would require a medium in which to form waves in, and that it would be just a matter of time to determine the properties of that medium.

A more compact version of Fig. 5 is presented in Fig. 6, which shows a parallel with the state of physics of Fig. 3, with the first action-at-a-distant force field of gravity receiving company by a similar but more complicated field, that of electromagnetism.

A First hint from physics for creating a science of mind

Coming back to our goal of setting up, and trying out, initial theories in a science of mind, so far we can already find three hints that might turn out to be useful -- or not, we don't know yet.  

First, when separate descriptions seem to be necessary for somewhat similar phenomena, there can be a payoff in terms of a simplification if we can construct a unification of two or more theories.

One example was the transition from Aristotelian to Newtonian mechanics. Where Aristotle's theory included two different realms, below and above the Moon, with completely different laws of motion, Newton's theory replaced both by a single theory.

A second example was the unification of electricity and magnetism into one single theory, showing unexpected symmetries between the two. A surprising result was that the stark difference between the presence of electric charges and the absence of magnetic monopoles turned out to be less fundamental than the way both forces played a completely symmetric role in Maxwell's equations.

A second hint

Apart from the economy and elegance of theoretical descriptions, there were more concrete payoffs as well.

In terms of the first example, the unification of gravity "up there" and "here below" immediately clarified the nature of comets, as well as the nature of tides.  And ultimately it allowed us to move into the "up there" ourselves, with the first moonwalk.

As for the second example, nobody could have guessed that unification of electricity and magnetism would give an enormous bonus in understanding the nature of light, which in turn enabled the discovery of radio waves.  The technological and social implications would cause a communication revolution in the early twentieth century.

A third hint

The third and last hint concerns the very nature of space and time, the stage on which physics plays out.

In the transition from Aristotle to Newton, the segregation of space into eternal motion "up there" and every motion running out of steam "down here" was abandoned.  There was nothing special about the space above the Moon.  Aristotle had introduced a subtle refined element, which he called aether, residing only in the heavenly realm and propelling Sun, Moon and planets in their circular orbits.  With Newton space became much simpler: a sheer emptiness as an extended vacuum, no further frills needed.

In the transition from Newton to Maxwell, it seemed necessary to go back to Aristotle in spirit, and posit a new space filling material.  Maxwell for convenience used the same Greek term aether.  After two thousand years of Aristotle's aether and two centuries of Newton's empty vacuum, a new type of aether was introduced.  We will see in the next log entry that this new version only held sway for a mere forty years, till Einstein's new views of space and time showed that there was no longer a need for an aether, at least not in three dimensions.  With Einstein the fundamental stage had become an altogether different one, a four dimensional spacetime, combining some space characteristics and some time characteristics into a whole new type of manifold.

More hints to come

In our picture book, we have progressed a few thousand years, up to 1865.  In our next log entry we will start our journey at 1900, and we will see that every 25 years from then on basic physics would go through a new and each time unexpected revolution.

However, we will also see that all that progress in theory building stopped after 1975, at least on the level of experimentally verified theory building. 2000 came and went.  And soon 2025 will come, without any sign that it will not come and go as well.

It may be that the main reason is that it has become harder and harder to build ever more powerful particle accelerators. Or perhaps the next level of surprise will be out of reach by so many orders of magnitude in energy that there is no hope to make experimental progress in the foreseeable future.

Or . . . perhaps the artificial split between a science of "objective" matter and "subjective" mind no longer holds when one or both of these are reaching a limit of validity of that artificial split.  We simply don't know.

For now, as a next step, let's enter the twentieth century in our next log entry, and in the process gather a few more hints.

In the previous log entry I presented a short narrative of the first three centuries of natural science, the science of matter. The two highlights of radically new theory formation were Newton's laws of motion and of universal gravity, and Einstein's special and general relativity theories. I described how Newton unified the dynamics of Aristotle's separate views of Earthly and celestial phenomena, and how Einstein unified space and time, as well as matter and energy, according to special relativity.

In addition, I mentioned how general relativity is even weirder and its results were even more unexpected.  It completely changed our view of what gravity *is*.  Let me repeat in more detail the fact-of-the-matter description I gave in Log Entry #006, to try and convey more of a sense of the enormity of the revolution implicit in general relativity.  In short: while gravity was seen and felt as a force by Newton, albeit as a mysterious force acting at a distance, suddenly it was no longer considered a force in its own right.  Rather, the status of gravity was relegated to a side effect.

A side effect of what?  Something even more powerful than the crushing forces of gravity that are everywhere and govern anything in the Universe?  What could that possibly be?

Spacetime, it turned out.

The mysteries of space and time

Long seen as non-physical and non-substantial, space as an ungraspable empty stage or container for anything physical, was discovered by Einstein as conspiring with time, the equally non-physical and non-substantial inexorable whatever-it-is that seems to let us age and that makes motion in space possible.

Both pure potential, three-dimensional space allows objects to be, and one-dimensional time allows objects to change.  Philosophically, the two can be classified as innocently sounding abstract concepts called "conditions of possibility".  Space and time are the two enabling somethings for anything to happen.  Or more accurately some-non-things enabling any-thing to happen.

When space and time present themselves as a carefully woven four-dimensional unity, mathematically defined as a differentiable four-dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifold, voilà, we can make an accurate representation of the world we live in.

When you live and move in a dynamical four-dimensional spacetime, its curvature prevents you from going in a straight line.  Why?  Well, you just can't draw a really straight line on a curved surface.

Gravity without gravity

Generalized to a 3-dimensional non-flat space or 4-dimensional non-flat spacetime, the same is true: there just aren't any straight lines.  The best you can do is move on a line that is as straight as possible, but still a minimally curved line.  That is the closest you can get to Newton's law of inertia in a space with no masses and hence no gravity.  In that case Newton tells you that you will move in a straight line if there are no other forces acting on you.

When there are masses, Einstein offers a precise description of how those masses curve spacetime. Having mapped out the bumpy terrain around you, it becomes possible to translate the side effects of traveling in that uneven environment as if there was a mysterious force called gravity, acting on you.

It is those side effects that toss and turn you as in a car on a bumpy road.  Moving in a spaceship through the solar system, for example, the Sun warps spacetime like a giant pothole, while each planet adds its own bump to the spacetime scenery —all in 4-D, mind you, the mathematics of it takes a while to get familiar with. Even so, gravity is benign, in that it still makes your journey as straight and undisturbed as can be, given the world you happen to live in.

As John Wheeler, the greatest popularizer of complex physics in simple terms of the second half of the 20th century, expressed it: the result is "gravity without gravity".  Just think about it. The gravity that you feel while reading this, sitting, standing, or lying down, is a constant reminder that you are traveling through space and time.  You came into this world inside a bumpy background of four dimensions, partly acting as a space-like container, partly acting like a time-like one-way conveyor belt.  Neither space-as-such nor time-as-such, but an extremely complex four-dimensional unification of space-like and time-like properties, producing gravity as a side effect.

Who could have thought?

However, gravity without gravity, while presenting itself as a deep mystery, was only one in a series of mysteries, unveiled by science during the last few centuries.  Each of those came as a complete surprise.

An early surprise: universal gravity

The whole history of physics, and of science in general, is one of discovering mysteries in ways that, time and again, no scientist had anticipated, or could have anticipated, given what they knew. But given that physics is the simplest, and hence also the oldest, of disciplines in modern science, let us start with physics.

Where did modern science start?  One milestone was reached by Copernicus, who placed the Sun in the center of the planetary system, rather than the Earth.  But he was not the first to do so. Aristarchus, some eighteen centuries earlier, had proposed the same swap on the chessboard of the solar system. The idea behind what is often called the Copernican revolution, was indeed revolutionary, but not in itself completely original.

In contrast, what was totally unanticipated was Newton's proposal that the laws of motion as well as the law of gravity applied exactly in the same way on Earth as well as among the heavenly bodies: the Moon, planets, moons of planets and comets. The idea of universal gravity was shockingly new: one concept governed by one simple equation, telling us that the strength of gravity falls off as the inverse square of distance.

A 19th century surprise: the role of atoms

Philosophers in different cultures had speculated that matter consists of atoms. This is not surprising, really, given that it was the most conservative choice. The alternative would have been to imagine that matter can be divided infinitely often, which is harder to imagine than the presence of a finite limit to divisibility.

What was really surprising, and could have hardly been guessed, is that real atoms turned out not to carry properties like earth, water, air, or fire, as had been generally assumed.  Unlike the lucky guesses of ancient philosophers, we learned that a single type of atom or molecule, like H2O, can behave as a solid, liquid, gas, or even plasma when ionized into H and O atoms, solely depending on pressure and density.  It was the 19th century theory of thermodynamics that made this clear.

Nobody had guessed that those four phases, as physicists call them, did not reflect built-in properties of atoms, but rather processes between large aggregates of atoms. And even more surprising, those starkly different phases can spontaneously appear whenever we turn up a single dial, for example, temperature.

More unpredictable surprises in the science of matter

We have just seen three surprises that for all intents and purposes can be classified as having been unpredictable: Newton's universal gravity, the atomic nature of matter as producing properties through processes between atoms rather than being intrinsic qualities of atoms themselves, and Einstein's gravity without gravity.

The list goes on.  Maxwell discovered that light is a wavelike phenomenon, and naturally he assumed that light would consist of waves in a medium, which he called aether. But he was wrong, as again Einstein showed, in his special theory of relativity.  No medium could possibly have the characteristics necessary to produce light or any electromagnetic radiation obeying Maxwell's equations.

Practically speaking nobody could have predicted that yes, light behaves like a wave, but no, not in any kind of medium to make waves in. Or, alternatively, if it were a medium, it was not any medium in space that showed waves happening in time.  And it would not have any mass.  It would literally be an empty medium, which is why it was dropped as unnecessary.

Other totally unanticipated surprises would follow in rapid succession, during the twentieth century. Quantum mechanics was and is the most mysterious of all, definitely not predicted or even conjectured in any way. That nuclear processes can provide a million times more energy than chemical processes in the same amount of fuel, similarly was unimaginable, until it was discovered and used, for better and for much worse.

Art and science: different goals, similar creativity

Artists desperately want to be original, adding to what has already been produced by humanity in new and ever more creative ways. Scientists, on the contrary, desperately want to avoid unnecessary originality. They want to discover more of the depths of the nature of reality. Peering deeper into how the world of matter works is the holy grail, and the simpler the theories and explanations, the better.

In science, flamboyant and highly original ideas as such are not valued at all. On the contrary, those will be either just ignored, or attacked in the most critical ways to see whether and where they fail. Only if a new theory holds up in a variety of experiments, will it become a candidate for acceptance over time.

Yet, against all their intentions, over the last few centuries scientists have been producing the most stunningly original and totally unanticipated ideas humanity has ever stumbled upon and verified in objective, more accurately intersubjective, ways.

Science as a multigenerational enterprise

The eighteenth century came and went, and so did the nineteenth century.  During all that time, while the world changed dramatically, for a large part through enormous advances in science and technology, one thing did not change: the dogmatic scientific belief in viewing the material world as a mechanism, and by extension the whole of reality.  How could that finally come to an end?  Protesting artists were ignored, as we saw in section "After Newton" in Log Entry #006 in this log. It was only when scientists were forced, kicking and screaming, to accept that, no, reality is not at all like a clockwork or whatever mechanism it was believed to be like.

The greatest thing about science is that they *did* eventually change their minds, by their own lights, in decisions made collectively as a self-governing group of peers.  In Log Entry #001, I listed this as the fourth and last characteristic of science, when I wrote: "The above four aspects, theory, experiment, working hypotheses and peer review, are absolutely essential for an area to deserve recognition as a field of science."

Science is a multigenerational enterprise.  Sometimes change comes slowly, but when it comes, and is finally generally accepted, there is no turning back.  In Log Entry #003 I have described the process as the essence of science being called empirical, within a given accuracy. Also, in Log Entry #006, in the section "Extending validity and accuracy", I have come back to this point while making a plea against hype in presenting novel theories.

In that same log entry, in the section "Using science of matter as inspiration", I explained why I was going to make a detour through the history of science of matter, before continuing with our attempt to start up a science of mind.  Having reached, for now at least, the end of the detour, in the form of a rich exhibition of mysteries, it is time to take stock of possible lessons that we may have learned, to inspire us in designing new theories and experiments for use in a science of mind.

We will do so in the next log entry, where we will return to the theme of Log Entry #005, where we started to experiment with shifts in perspectives on any material object, from seeing it as matter to seeing it as experience to seeing it as appearance.  There we will start to explore whether shifts in perspectives on gravity, from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein, may have anything in common with the shifts toward experience, first, and then toward appearance.