The Taboo of (Inter)Subjectivity. Part 2. Why Does Dirt Get Up and Start Writing Poetry?  
Alan Wallace
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Alan Wallace, a scholar, practitioner, and teacher of Buddhism for over three decades, devoted fourteen years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and was ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama. He earned a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford, and is the author of many books, including The Taboo of Subjectivity: Towards a New Science of Consciousness.

Alan and Ken begin by exploring some of the reasons why the subjective and intersubjective knowledge domains have become “taboo” in modern scientific and academic discourse. As they discuss, it’s a big mistake for scientists to think that they can reduce all of reality to merely exterior, observable entities, since that belief itself is an interior belief—which, Ken comments, “is just bad science, and it’s psychotic as a human being.”

Alan shares that part of what is so frightening about this limited perspective is that it all too often has become the unspoken creed or dogma of higher education. Ken goes on to explain that strict materialism isn’t the only kind of partial perspective that today’s students have to face. Just as modernism has permeated the “hard” sciences with an almost exclusive focus on exteriors, postmodernism has permeated the social sciences with an intense over-emphasis on the cultural relativity—and often meaninglessness—of human knowledge.

Regarding the “taboo of subjectivity,” modernism attacked phenomenology (the first-person study of first-person realities, e.g. meditation, introspection) by reducing all interior experience to gross matter. Postmodernism attacked phenomenology by pointing out that it couldn’t account for the structures in consciousness (discovered by the third-person study of first-person realities, e.g. structuralism, developmental studies) that determine so much of the content and meaning of our experience. A more integral theory of consciousness would therefore recognize the crucial importance of both subjective phenomena and the intersubjective structures in which they arise.

Alan steers the conversation towards the outer limits of integral theory by asking Ken to comment on a particularly difficult aspect of the mind/brain problem, namely: how can we answer the materialist critique that any non-physical influence on the brain is impossible because it would violate the law of the conservation of mass-energy (the “closure principle”)?

Ken outlines three possible (nonexclusive) ways that non-physical forces (such as consciousness, or “mind”) could influence the physical world (such as the brain):
  1. It’s an “inside job.” Some higher level of ontological complexity reaches into the physical world through small gaps in physics—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—and “moves things around.”

  2. The downward causation of “emergents.” Higher levels of organization have emergent structures that exert “downward causation” on lower structures. If I move my arm, 100% of my cells, molecules, and atoms get up and move—the closure principle can’t account for this.

  3. A spectrum of subtle energies. According to the great spiritual traditions, every state of consciousness (or mind) has an energetic support (or body) that exists in the physical world. And so, for example, perhaps the subtle body-mind (like thought or intention) can exert influence on the gross body-mind (like your brain or arm).
Indeed, this dialogue touches on some of the leading integral theories on the mind/brain relationship. Neither Alan nor Ken claims to have all the answers, but we invite you to listen in on this exciting dialogue exploring what very well may be the empirical discoveries of tomorrow….

(For an in-depth look at the relationship between the “two sciences of consciousness,” check out Part 1 of this dialogue….)
The Taboo of Subjectivity, UC Santa Barbara, the Four Quadrants: Upper Right (exterior individual), Upper Left (interior individual), Lower Left (interior collective), and Lower Right (exterior collective); “What Is Integral?,” James Mark Baldwin, Thought and Things, William James, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, levels of development, introspection, phenomenology, structuralism, postmodernism, modernism, Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Edward O. Wilson, China, India, Integral Methodological Pluralism, John Searle, Joan Halifax, Mind and Life Institute, quantum mechanics, Nagarjuna, David Bohm, Einstein, Anton Zeilinger, Evan Thompson, Vedanta, Vajrayana Buddhism, gross/subtle/causal bodies, waking/dreaming/deep-sleep states, vitalism, Dalai Lama, Integral University, Quantum Questions, A Theory of Everything.--->
transmission time: 32 minutes
most memorable moment: "If you look at evolution itself, why does it keep winding itself up into these higher orders of complexity? The closure principle doesn’t explain why dirt gets up and starts writing poetry at some point…."

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